How to Monetize a WordPress Blog & Make Money

To monetize a WordPress blog you need two things: a method that suits your readers, and enough readers to make that method worth running. Most guides only cover the first. This one starts with the second, because it decides whether anything else works. Below you will find what each route actually costs, the entry bar on each, and which one to start with while you are still earning nothing.

The monetization routes that still work in 2026

Nine routes, what each one takes from you, and what it takes to get in the door. Details and sources are in the sections underneath.

Route	What the platform takes	Entry bar
Google AdSense	Publishers keep 80% of AdSense for Content revenue after the advertiser platform fee, about 68% on Google Ads demand	No published traffic floor. Earnings paid out at $100 in USD
Ad networks (Journey by Mediavine, Raptive, Ezoic)	Revenue share is not published on their public pages	Journey 1,000 monthly sessions; Raptive 25,000 monthly pageviews; Ezoic 250,000 monthly users
Affiliate links	The merchant sets the rate. Amazon pays 0% to 10% by category, 4% on most default categories	Amazon withdraws applications with fewer than three qualifying purchases in 180 days
Sponsored posts	Nothing, if you deal direct with the brand	Brand interest, which follows niche and trust more than pageviews
Memberships	MemberPress Launch $199.50 first year, $399 renewal, plus 4.9% per payment. Growth $349.50 first year, $699 renewal, no transaction fee	An audience that already reads you every week
Online courses	LearnDash Essentials $259 a year	The membership bar, plus a subject people pay to learn
Digital downloads	Easy Digital Downloads Lite free, Personal $99.50 first year and $199 renewal. Gumroad takes 10% plus $0.50 per sale	None
Services and consulting	Nothing on your own site	None. A contact form and proof of work
Tips and paid newsletters	Patreon 10% plus processing. Substack keeps 10%	None, but conversion is tiny without an email list

The number that decides everything: traffic

Here is the uncomfortable part. Ahrefs studied roughly 14 billion pages in its Content Explorer index and found that 96.55% of them get no traffic at all from Google. Most blogs earn very little, and it is almost never because the owner chose the wrong monetization method. It is because nobody is reading.

You can sanity-check the scale from a network’s own eligibility rules. Raptive accepts sites from 25,000 monthly pageviews, but its RPM guarantee is reserved for sites with 100,000+ monthly pageviews that have earned $12,000 or more in net ad revenue over the previous twelve months. Work the arithmetic yourself: 100,000 pageviews a month is 1.2 million a year, so $12,000 across that is roughly $10 per thousand pageviews. That is an eligibility bar for one program, not an average and not a promise, but it gives you an order of magnitude to plan against.

Apply it to a small blog. Ten thousand pageviews a month at that kind of rate is lunch money. That is the honest arithmetic behind every disappointed blogger who did everything the guides said. If you are at the beginning, the work that pays best is still optimizing your posts for search and publishing more of the ones that already rank. A capable SEO plugin such as Rank Math handles the mechanical half. If you have not launched yet, our guide to starting a blog covers the setup this article assumes you already have.

Display ads: easy to start, easy to overrate

Ads are the route everyone tries first because there is nothing to sell and nobody to email. Google publishes its split: for AdSense for Content, publishers keep 80% of the revenue after the advertiser platform takes its fee, dropping to about 68% when the demand comes through Google Ads. Money sits in your account until it reaches the payment threshold, which is $100 in USD and varies by currency.

Once you have real traffic, an ad management network usually beats raw AdSense because it sells your inventory through more demand sources. The entry bars moved sharply in the last two years, so check before you plan around them. Of the three networks in the table, Journey by Mediavine publishes the lowest bar at 1,000 monthly sessions, with graduation to the main Mediavine program once a site has earned $5,000 in ad revenue over twelve months. Raptive starts at 25,000 monthly pageviews. Ezoic now states 250,000 monthly users as its required minimum, which rules it out for most personal blogs.

The catch nobody mentions in the sign-up flow: ad scripts are the heaviest thing most blogs ever load. Layout shifts, delayed largest contentful paint, a mobile experience that jumps under the reader’s thumb. Budget time to speed optimize your WordPress site after the ads go live, not before. For the mechanics of getting the code onto the page, we have a step-by-step on showing Google Ads on a WordPress site.

Two free plugins do the placement work. Ad Inserter drops ad code before or after a given paragraph, image or widget area, and is listed on WordPress.org with 300,000+ active installations.

Advanced Ads covers the same ground with scheduling and ad-blocker detection, and shows 100,000+ active installations on the same directory.

Best for: informational blogs with steady search traffic and nothing obvious to sell.
Skip it if: your posts answer buying questions. Those readers are worth more to an affiliate program than to an ad network.

Affiliate marketing: the best fit for most blogs

Affiliate income tracks intent rather than volume, which is why a small review blog can out-earn a much larger news blog. You recommend something you would recommend anyway, and the merchant pays you when someone buys.

Amazon Associates is where most people start, and it is worth reading the rate card before you build a site around it. Amazon’s standard commission income statement pays 4.50% on physical books, 4.00% on all other categories by default, 3.00% on toys, furniture and sports, 2.00% on televisions and video games, and 1.00% on grocery and health. Luxury beauty sits at 10.00%. Gift cards and alcohol pay nothing. There is also a deadline: Amazon withdraws your application if you have not referred enough qualifying sales within 180 days of applying, so do not sign up before you have posts that can carry links.

Independent programs, particularly software and hosting, pay considerably more than Amazon’s percentages. We are not quoting a figure here because commission rates vary per merchant and change without notice. Read the program terms before you write the post, not after.

Once you have more than a handful of links, a manager saves real work: one place to change a URL when a program migrates, and readable slugs instead of tracking strings. ThirstyAffiliates is the usual pick. Its pricing page lists Basic at $99.60 for the first year and $249 on renewal, Plus at $149.60 and $374, Advanced at $199.60 and $499, all USD.

Best for: review, comparison and how-to posts where the reader is already deciding what to buy.
Skip it if: your niche has no products worth recommending. Forcing it reads as forced, and readers notice faster than you think.

Sponsored posts and brand deals

A brand pays you to publish something. The economics are simple, the pricing is not: there is no public rate card anywhere, agencies quote wildly different numbers for identical sites, and any figure you read in a blog post is one person’s anecdote. Price it from what the post costs you in time and reputation, and expect to negotiate.

Two rules keep this route sustainable. Disclose the relationship plainly, above the content. And turn down anything you would not have written for free, because the traffic that makes sponsorships possible is the traffic that leaves when a blog starts reading like a brochure.

Best for: blogs with a defined niche and a recognizable name in it.
Skip it if: you are relying on it as a monthly number. Deals arrive in clumps and disappear for quarters at a time.

Memberships and paid communities

Recurring revenue is the nicest kind, and the hardest to start. A membership charges people monthly for content, tools or access to you, and it works only when readers already turn up without being reminded.

MemberPress is the common choice on WordPress. Its plans page lists Launch at $199.50 for the first year against a $399 regular price, Growth at $349.50 against $699, and Scale at $499.50 against $999, all USD and all renewing at full price. Read the small print on Launch: it carries a 4.9% transaction fee on every payment, which Growth and Scale remove. On $2,000 a month of subscriptions that fee is $98 a month, so the more expensive plan pays for itself quickly.

Alternatives differ mostly in content dripping, course structure and payment gateways, and our roundup of membership plugins for WordPress compares them properly. Whichever you pick, plan for churn from day one: a membership that is not adding something every month leaks faster than it fills.

Best for: blogs with a weekly readership and a subject that keeps producing new material.
Skip it if: your email list is under a few hundred engaged subscribers. Build the list first.

Selling an online course

A course is a membership with an ending. It suits blogs whose readers arrive stuck on a specific problem and want it solved in order rather than in a hundred scattered posts.

On WordPress the two mainstream engines are LearnDash and LifterLMS. LearnDash lists Essentials at $259 a year, Pro at $399 and Elite at $599, with unlimited courses and learners on every tier and no per-student fee. If you would rather compare options before committing, see our roundup of WordPress LMS plugins.

The real cost is not the license. It is the recording, editing and rewriting before anyone can buy, followed by support questions forever. Validate first: presell the outline to your list before you build anything.

Best for: practical, teachable skills where the outcome is easy to name.
Skip it if: you cannot describe the finished result in one sentence a stranger would pay for.

Digital and physical products you own

Templates, presets, ebooks, spreadsheets, printables. No approval queue, no traffic gate, and you keep the margin. It gets less attention than it deserves.

For digital goods on your own site, Easy Digital Downloads Lite is free on WordPress.org with 40,000+ active installations, and the paid tiers run from Personal at $99.50 for the first year and $199 on renewal, up to All Access at $499.50 and $999. Hosting the file yourself means you keep everything except payment processing. Gumroad is the shortcut when you would rather not run a checkout: its pricing page states 10% plus $0.50 per transaction on your own links, rising to 30% on sales that come through its Discover marketplace.

For physical goods, WooCommerce is still the default. It is free, and WordPress.org lists it at 7+ million active installations, which matters mainly because every payment gateway and shipping service supports it.

A warning that costs people money: WooCommerce is heavier than a blog needs, and a store bolted onto a content site slows the content down. Keep the extension count low and see our list of WooCommerce plugins worth adding rather than installing everything that looks useful.

Best for: any blog where readers ask how you made something.
Skip it if: you would be selling a product you would not buy. That shows up in the refund rate.

Services: the route that works at zero traffic

Nobody wants to hear this, because it is work rather than income while you sleep. It is also the fastest money a new blog can make. A site with 300 monthly visitors cannot support ads, but it can absolutely produce one client a quarter if the posts demonstrate that you know the job.

The setup is a page describing what you do, a starting price, and a form. Put the form on your best-performing posts as well as the services page, since that is where the qualified readers already are. Our comparison of WordPress form plugins covers the free options that handle this well enough.

Best for: new blogs, technical niches, and anyone who already does the thing professionally.
Skip it if: you started blogging specifically to stop trading hours for money. It will not scale past your calendar.

Email is a multiplier, not a route

An email list does not pay on its own. It makes every other route on this page work better, because you can bring the same reader back instead of renting attention from Google each time.

Two practical pieces: something to send with, and something to capture with. Our roundup of newsletter plugins for WordPress covers sending from your own site, and our list of popup plugins covers capture without wrecking the reading experience. Keep the offer specific. A checklist tied to the post beats a generic subscribe box by a wide margin, and the same principle runs through our notes on improving conversion rate.

If you want the list itself to be the product, the hosted platforms take a defined cut. Substack states writers keep 90% of revenue minus credit card fees, and Patreon charges 10% of what you earn plus payment processing, currency conversion and payout fees. Both are cheaper to start than a self-hosted stack and more expensive over five years.

What most monetization guides get wrong

They sell the idea of many income streams. Running nine half-configured routes produces nine small numbers and no learning. One route, properly instrumented for ninety days, tells you something. Nine tell you nothing.

They ignore that ads and affiliate links compete. On a page where the reader is deciding what to buy, a display ad is a paid exit. Strip ads from your commercial posts, keep them on the informational ones, and compare the two after a month.

They quote income screenshots. Someone else’s dashboard describes their niche, their country mix and their year, none of which are yours. Any article promising you a monthly figure is guessing.

They treat entry bars as permanent. They are not. Ezoic’s public minimum now reads 250,000 monthly users, and Mediavine restructured its programs around annual ad revenue rather than a flat session count. Anything you read about network requirements, including this article, needs re-checking against the vendor page before you plan around it.

They skip the admin. Affiliate networks, ad networks and payment processors all report separately, in different currencies, on different schedules. Sort that out in month one while the numbers are still small enough to be boring.

Which route to start with

• Under 1,000 monthly sessions: services, plus an email capture. Do not apply to anything yet.
• 1,000 to 25,000 monthly sessions, commercial posts: affiliate links in your five best posts. Add AdSense only if you want a baseline to measure against.
• 1,000 to 25,000 monthly sessions, informational posts: AdSense now, Journey by Mediavine when the traffic is stable.
• 25,000+ monthly pageviews: apply to an ad network, and keep ads off your affiliate posts.
• An engaged list of a thousand or more: a digital product first, a membership or course only once the product sells.

Frequently Asked Questions

Our call

If you are starting today, do three things and ignore the rest of this page: put affiliate links in the five posts that already answer a buying question, add a services page with a form, and start collecting email addresses. Those three have no traffic gate and no license fee, and only the affiliate links need an application, which means you can run all of them this week.

Add display ads when you have posts that rank consistently. Add a membership or a course when your list is large enough to fill it, not before. And keep the split honest: four parts traffic, one part monetization. A blog that doubles its readers doubles every number on this page at once, which no plugin can do for you.