Wordpress is massive and over 75 Million websites worldwide depend on wordpress. WordPress offers a simple and cheap way to create a website with a good CMS (content management system) and millions of wordpress themes. On top of this, wordpress offers developpers the possibility to develop custom wordpress plugins for millions of functionalities, which make it ideal for non-technical users. We know lots of Publishers use WordPress to start blogs or content-websites and their main source of income on these websites is usually advertising as no product is being sold on the site.
As the revenues of Advertising are directly related to the amount of site visitors, the main focus should be on attracting as much people to your wordpress website and afterwards make sure you have the right advertising strategy being setup on your site so you can actually make money of those visitors.
How to grow the amount of visitors on a wordpress site:
Before we start we want to make an important point regarding the two ways of growing traffic to your site:
Paid traffic: not often used for blog or content sites as the only source of income is advertising you can only spend very limited amounts on buying traffic. Imagine you make $4 CPM (the amount you make per 1.000 visitors on your site (CPM = Cost-per-Mille) you can only spend $4/1000 = $0,004 on each visitor to break even. Most traffic sources will charge you between $0,10 and $0,40 per visitor so the maths show quickly it will be difficult to not lose money on a paid advertisement strategy if you do not sell anything on your wordpress site. However if you are considering buying paid traffic to ramp up the amount of visitors very quickly the most common ways are:
Google Adwords
Display traffic on other blogs
Email marketing by advertising in other newsletters
Affiliate Marketing
Organic (free) traffic: In general, this is the most common way for blogs and content-related wordpress sites to generate traffic. Basically it is free (if you do not count the hours of workJ), takes a while before you see the results and it is rather difficult to influence compared to paid traffic. However it can bring considerable amount of traffic and is therefore definitely worth investing time in. Below we have summarized the most common ways to attract organic traffic.
The first thing to realize is that your traffic will come from different sources and although they are all somehow interrelated, it’s best to have specific strategies for all of them.
Google: this is the main source of traffic for most wordpress sites, so it should be your logical starting point to focus on
SEO strategy: optimize your site structure, title, images, headers and content for SEO purposes. We advise to download the ‘All-in-one SEO’ plugin and check out one of the plenty of articles/tutorials you can find on the internet (one good example: http://semperplugins.com/documentati...d-on-page-seo/)
Keyword strategy: before describing this point you should never forget you are writing your articles for humans and not for Mr. Google. So just putting a bunch of keywords in your article in order to rank higher should never affect the content and ‘readability’ of your site. Having said that, you should first determine what topics you want to write about and afterwards look within the topics what are frequently used keywords (words that people search for in Google) using this free tool: http://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner Check your Google Analytics what is happening. Check out from what sources visitors come, the locations, time, mobile/desktop and other variables and try to make conclusions from this information.
Social Media and other blogs/communities: this is your best way to increase traffic by actively writing content and creating a community around your page. You can use all the main Social Media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Linkedin and all the others.
Publish all your updates on your Social Media pages; each time you have an update you should share this information with your community. Both your followers as friends-of-friends will see your updates and this creates traffic to your site.
Focus on an audience that likes to share; your best visitors are the ones that actually re-share your content, so you should pay special attention to those users in order to get them involved.
Be active in communities related to your blog; a good way to increase traffic to your wordpress site is by posting your new articles on community group pages of Social Media or Blogs. Depending on your topic you can visit Facebook pages or specialized blogs where your target group is active.
Email communication
Build an Email list; a very good way to keep your user base active and coming back to your website (yes also retaining users is a way to increase visitors) is to have frequent communication with your users through email. Depending on the amount of content you have on your site and how often you publish new content you can adapt the frequency of the mailings. Two mailing platforms we like are: http://mailchimp.com and http://www.getresponse.com that have very similar features and will work great on your wordpress.
General tips and advice:
Use images to make it more alive; it is shown that visitors are more engaged with your site when you use images in your articles. Obviously it depends on the topic you are writing about (baby products are more image-appealing then mathematical formulas), but in general it is recommended to have a good relation of images and text. Search engines also look at this relation so an additional reason to put images in your articles.
Create offline awareness. All being said above is to engage online users with your site and attract more visitors. However, online users are also active offline and if you have the chance to participate in offline groups or meet visitors of your site in real-life this will increase engagement with your site and helps to spread-the-word.
Really add value on specific conversations. Last and most important thing to keep in mind is the reason why people should actually visit your site. With millions of sites out there and most likely thousands that have a similar subject to yours, why should visitors come to your site? Best is to really pick a niche topic and become an expert about that or focus on topics that are no well described in other sites and that you know a lot about. Eventually, if your site deals with a topic that is unique and you really provide quality content, the users will find you!
And last – never give up! Most sites need time in order to attract the right visitors. You only read about the <1% success stories in the papers that attract millions of visitors, but the majority of sites grows slowly over time. Try a lot of things and see what works and keep on improving your strategy on the points above.
How to monetize your wordpress site:
For the majority of wordpress sites advertising is the main (or only) source of income as visitors do not pay to see your content and you don’t sell anything on the website. Therefore it is the second most urgent thing to do after growing your amount of visitors.
The 3 main ways to generate revenue from your wordpress site by using advertising are:
Add Google Adsense or another display network to your site to display banner ads on your site. They will pay you on a CPC basis for each click you generate and an average CPM (RPM) you will make is depending on your site between $1 – $6 with an average around $2,5. So just to be clear on the expectations, if you have 10.000 visitors you will make on average $25 through this type of advertising.
Add text links to your site with tools that replace keywords. This type of advertising is contextual and integrates text links in your articles. So imagine you are writing about sport shoes and you mention Nike in your article, the word Nike will get replaced by a text link a link to the website of Nike and at the moment somebody buys shoes on their site you get a commission. There are several companies that provide this service and the main ones are http://skimlinks.com or http://www.viglink.com
Use Affiliate platforms to select campaigns from advertisers. Affiliate Marketing has been one of the oldest ways to generate revenue from your site. You can basically take campaigns that you believe will match well with your audience and display them on your site. For example, if you have a page about cybersecurity you could decide to put a McAfee banner on your site or if you talk about shoes you could put Zalando or Zappos there or if you have a page about exotic travel destinations you could put a banner of an Airline that flies to that destination. Usually you get paid when you realize a sale, your visitor subscribes to a newsletter or downloads the app. Conditions regarding each campaign are different, but when implemented correctly it can generate very good results (better then option 1 and 2!).