Effective Ways to Monetize WordPress to Build a Profitable Website - PDF

COVER PAGE

Introduction
The production phase involves hosting the website on the specified platform and identifying through
which the website can get traffic. Traffic to a website is considered to as visits to the website and helps
the website designer to get an approximate of how many people re visiting the website. This will require
setting up an analytics functionality which will monitor the number of people accessing the website.
After getting the traffic it’s important to think of how the website can make money. This report discusses
various steps that will be added to monetize the website.
To achieve traffic, the production phase must involve search engine optimization. Search Engine
Optimization involves making it easy for search engines to index the website such that when a prospect
visitor searches the website on a search Engine like Google or Bing, the search engine is able to index
the website and return results based on the search phrase of the visitor. A website that can be searched
in a search engine easily is referred to as search engine friendly.
By default, websites designed and deployed using Wordpress are search engine friendly because
Wordpress structures the code in a form that is easy to index by search engines. This reduced the
amount of time that would have been spent designing all the webpages in a way that is search engine
friendly. After deploying the website using Wordpress, the only step that is required is to make the
website public and to check the allow pages to be indexed by search engines option. After making the
website and checking that option, the website search engine friendly. There are other measures that can
be done to make the website more search Engine friendly. For example while using Google, the sitemap
of the website can be uploaded in Google to facilitate easier indexing of the website.
When the website is searched on a search engine for example Google, the website appears in search
results. However, the website is not very highly ranked. This can be improved using social media where
by pages related to the website can be created. Another option is using premium SEO services by
purchasing SEO packages that help the website to get a better rank when it is searched on a search
engine. SEO considerations affected my design decisions because I had to make sure that every page
was search engine friendly by use of tags like headings.
Monetization
There are two common owners of websites; owners who just want to share the ideas and views without
expecting any money and owners who want to earn money from the website. The proposed website a
good potential of making money through various monetization methods but it’s important to discuss
various ways of monetization that are available for its chosen platform which is Wordpress. The various
ways in which the website can make money are;
 Google AdSense- this method of monetization is also called PPC (Pay per Click) advertisements.
This is the easiest method of making money for the website since it does not require a lot of
work to set up and kick start to earning (Orr, 2018). Pay per Click companies run adds on
different platforms. Advertisers who post ads are only charged when the ad is clicked. Although
there are many PPC companies, for the EvoClub website, the preferred company is Google
AdSense. To use Google AdSense I will have to make an application which will be reviewed and if
the review is approved then the next step is to place the AdSense Code in my website. To help

with placing ads I will use existing plugins like Ad Inserter which are available for WordPress.
This method is easy and effective but has one major drawback. A lot of people use Ad Blockers
which blocks ads from running in a website. By using Ad Blockers, when the visitor visits my
website which is AdSense enabled, there will be no ads generated because they will be blocked
by different Ads Blockers used by the user. This can hinder the website from making money
through potential clicks on ads by visitors.
 Sponsored posts- For the EvoClub this is probably the best method to earn money through the
website. Although AdSense requires no effort after setting up sponsored posts have a potential
to get more money for the website considering the type of content that EvoClub will contain.
Sponsored posts involves writing articles reviewing products or services that are related to the
specific niche and companies pay for those articles (Jaiswal, 2017). They key thing to reviewing a
product or service is to do a honest review giving your honest opinions to the audience. This
ensures that you stay truthful to the target audience despite advertising for companies.
Considering that EvoClub deals with cars and show casing cars, sponsored links have a huge
potential for advertisers ranging from car makes, car dealerships and spare parts sellers. With
the right quantity of audience potential advertisers will advertise on the website and the best
thing is that the rate of payment will be agreed upon depending on the type of advert that the
customer wants.
The methods of monetization discussed above are not supported on the free version of Wordpress so to
implement them I will have to upgrade to the premium to start earning from the website.
Copyright issues
Issues of copyright is a burning issue considering this era of the internet where redistribution of content
is very easy. A lot of internet users want to make easy money from content that they do not own thus
copyrighting is becoming very common. Since EvoClub will deal with showcasing a lot of images taken
professionally, there is need to define copyright issues. This will involve coming up with legal documents
that specify who is the owner of the images. All members of the club will have to sign this document so
that if images of their cars are uploaded on the website, there are copyright issues brought forward. By
ensuring that all members sign this agreement, then the website will be at liberty to post pictures of the
cars of the members taken at different events. Another copyright infringement that might happen is
people copying images from the website. To deal with this, the website will have to display a page
containing the copyright information. All the images will contain a watermark at the bottom with the
logo of the website to show ownership of the website.
Web Analytics
Web analytics is the collection, measurement and analysis of data so as to understand a website so as to
improve it (Ewer, 2018). The data usually involves the number of visitors over a period of time and
where those visitors are viewing the website from. WordPress as a platform offers basic analytics which I
utilized to analyze the traffic of my website. To promote the website so as to get traffic, I mostly used
social media and this got me a relative large amount of view as shown in the screenshot below.

Figure 1: EvoClub All time analytics
As expected, most of the traffic was from Australia. Some odd data as shown in the screenshot in figure
1 shows that there are views from Kenya. This was possible because of using social media to promote
the website.

Reflection
Based on my experience developing the website its right to say that the website achieved its goal. This
was possible because of selecting the right platform to develop the website. Wordpress enabled me to
design and develop the website using the least amount of time and I was able to achieve so much more
because of the many plugins and features available on the platform. By using different plugins I was able
to achieve so much interactivity and features on the website like social media integration. Promoting the
website on social media also enabled me to get a significant number of followers thus this proofed to be
a good way of promoting the website to get more traffic in the website. Generally I am happy with the
results. However, there are few things I could have done better and based on my experience I would
advise any student developing a website next year, if the student chooses Wordpress as his or her
desired platform, the student should go for the premium version of the platform as the free version has
very limited functionalities and there is not much one can do with it.
References
Ewer, T. (2018). 7 Copyright Issues (And How to Deal With Them). Retrieved from
https://www.bidsketch.com/blog/everything-else/copyright-issues/
Jaiswal, R. (2017). 5 Ways to Monetize a WordPress Blog for Free. Retrieved from
https://raratheme.com/blog/monetize-a-wordpress-blog/
Orr, N. (2017). 4 Effective Ways to Monetize WordPress to Build a Profitable Website. Retrieved from
https://www.cminds.com/how-to-monetize-wordpress/