Fifth Lesson - Publishing With Wordpress

Well, we have come to the final lesson in the Publishing With Wordpress crash course. I sure hope you have enjoyed your lessons and learned a lot about using WordPress to publish your content online.

Today we're going to talk about maintaining and monetizing your WordPress website. First let's talk a little bit about maintenance.

Since you've put so much time and effort into building your website with WordPress It is important that you take the time to maintain it regularly. While most of the systems that we have discussed throughout this course will not need any monitoring or updating there are some that will.

It is a good idea to check your WordPress dashboard for plugins that need updating and to ensure that your version of WordPress is current. You will usually receive a notice at the top of the page if WordPress needs to be updated and for your plugins, under the plugin on the Installed Plugins page. Simply click update and you're done. That is really all there is to it when it comes to maintaining your website. I wasn't kidding when I told you publishing with WordPress is extremely easy.

Now let's talk a little bit about monetizing your new website, so that you can start making money from it if you so choose. Just like anything else in WordPress The possibilities are virtually endless and monetizing your website can be extremely easy.

I'm sure you aren't surprised when I say "there are a wide variety of plugins and widgets that you can use". Just do a search online and you will find a multitude of handy gizmos that will allow you to set up advertising, sell products, promote affiliate programs and more.

Let's touch base on a few:

- There's selling advertising

One way is by selling banner ad space. You see banner ads on websites all of the time, and they often pay based on a CPM (cost per mille) model, which pays a set amount each time the ad is shown to a visitor.

Another option is using text block ads from Google AdSense. I'm sure you have seen these types of ads as well. They blend in with your content in a way that's usually less intrusive to your visitor, and generally pay based on the CPC (cost per click,) model, which means that you get paid every time someone clicks on the ad.

Google AdSense is best for blogs that have a lot of text-based content, and the ads should be put beside of text content to make sure your readers see them and have a chance to click on an ad they're interested in. You can also add the Infolinks Related tags to increase your CTR and earnings.

Both of these methods work best on websites that have a lot of pages and text-based content.

- Selling products

Another great way to make money from your new WordPress website is to sell products. You can sell your own products, promote other peoples products or do both. It is completely up to you.

One quick way that you can accomplish this is to use a company like ClickBank or Amazon to find products you would like to promote. With both of these sites you'll have the ability to choose the specific items you want to sell. They both provide you with a variety of tools that make adding them to your WordPress website quick and easy. Whenever one of your visitors makes the purchase you will receive a commission.

You can also use integrated affiliate links. If you've ever been to a webpage and viewed a link within the text of the article most of the time you will find that it is a link to a product or website. This is an integrated affiliate link. There are many services, like Slimlinks.com available that will automatically insert affiliate links into your webpage content. Most of the time these are set up based on the content of your post or according to keywords that you have specifically chosen.

- Offer a fee-based service

Offering services from your WordPress website is another great option. You can do this in the form of a membership site where people pay you a monthly fee to join or as a freelancer where they pay you specifically for a job that you do for them.

We have just touched base on a few of the more basic methods in this course. The truth is there are many ways that you can monetize your WordPress website, along with plenty of plugins and widgets that can help you get the job done effectively. all you have to do is do a quick search online and you will find a variety of options.

Before we close this final lesson I want to share a few of the plug-ins that I use to help monetize my WordPress website.

- Ad Injection

This plugin injects multiple types of ads into the existing content of your WordPress posts and pages. including Google AdSense, Amazon Associates, ClickBank, TradeDoubler, etc. You can control the number of advertisements based on the post length, and it can restrict who sees adverts by post age, visitor referrer and IP address.

- WP Affiliate Elite

This is a great plugin for affiliate marketers out there. It makes it easy to add your affiliate links to any keywords or keyword phrases in your posts and pages automatically.

- Ad Rotator

This is a great plugin for people who want to maximize the ad space on their blogs. It automatically rotates the ads you specify to appear in a particular space.

- WordPress Simple Paypal Shopping Cart

It allows you to add an 'Add to Cart' button on any posts or pages. It also allows you to add/display the shopping cart on any post or page or sidebar easily. The shopping cart shows the user what they currently have in the cart and allows them to remove items. It can be easily integrated with the NextGen Photo Gallery plugin that we talked about in your last lesson too.