Theoretically, you can live without money. But in practice, you will need money at almost every aspect of your life. Looks like a bad thing, but it also gives our lives purpose, so it’s not that bad. Anyways… Do you feel you need to make money, but don’t know where to start? If you’re familiar with the inner workings of WordPress, which is not that easy and requires constant practice by the way, you can make a living inside the WordPress ecosystem. In this article, I’m going to show you how to make money with WordPress and achieve financial success.
Just to be clear: I’m not going to talk about opening an online store or selling online courses using the WordPress infrastructure. You can do those things using WordPress, but I’m going to focus on WordPress-related activities in this post.
Let’s begin!
Selling Themes and/or Plugins
Fuel Themes is a business, growing by making quality WordPress themes and selling them on ThemeForest. You’re reading this post, so you’re most likely an existing (or potential) customer of us. (If not, why not check out our portfolio?) If you’re good at making themes, ThemeForest is a great way to build a theme market on your own, without any hassle. CodeCanyon, on the other hand, is the equivalent of ThemeForest on WordPress plugins (and more).
Of course, you can build your theme/plugin shop in your own website as well. It requires more ground work and boring legal things, plus you’d start without a customer base (unlike ThemeForest), but you can make a hell of a lot more money if you push the right buttons. Elegant Themes and Gravity Forms are two of many great examples that came to my mind.
Selling WordPress Services
When you’re in the WordPress ecosystem, you don’t have to limit yourself by selling products–providing services are also a lucrative option if you want to make money. You can:
- Build an agency: One of my friends in Ankara (Turkey) has built his own little empire by opening up a web design agency where they only build websites using WordPress. In five years or so, the company’s yearly income passed a million dollars, and he employs around 20 people in it. Why not do the same, if you can?
- Sell WordPress-exclusive hosting: It’s a bit more risky and requires the highest capital, but hosting WordPress websites in servers specifically designed for WordPress installations is one of the best ways to make millions, potentially billions of dollars. Automattic, which is now valued over $1 billion makes most of its money off of WordPress.com, and WP Engine comes just after that with a $120 million valuation. You have to know what you’re doing, though.
- Offer various services: Offering services like maintenance or custom installations is an easy but very profitable way to make money using WordPress.
- Teach WordPress: By building your own web course or using Udemy, you can teach how to use WordPress or dive in a bit more specific issues.
Wrapping Everything Up
I’m pretty sure that there are more ways to earn money using WordPress–the things I mentioned are just a few ways to make a living in the WordPress ecosystem. Can you think of more ways? If you do, you can help extend this article by commenting down below.
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