WordPress blogs could be monetized in so many ways.
- Advertisement
- Sponsored posts
- Paid guest writing opportunities
- Personal branding (and consulting options)
- Affiliate marketing
- Email marketing
Are you asking about eCommerce since you want to charge straight through the website?
I’ll get to products, but before that, let’s review a few more revenue-generating opportunities like:
- Training courses (charging for courses)
- Donations
- Other memberships (gated content or additional features)
- Paid social media profiles
- A SaaS product billed monthly or per a given action
Each of them requires a different approach, and a standard eCommerce solution would be an overkill.
If you want to sell books, audio courses, other digital items or swag, an eCommerce plugin like WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads may be in order.
Nearly a dozen eCommerce solutions offer different shopping features (each with their own set of unique perks). Reviewing the alternatives may be a good starting point.
There are lightweight ones — tiny, simple shopping carts, especially helpful (not impacting performance too) if you simply want to charge for a couple of digital items.
What If You Sell at Scale?
If you sell hundreds of thousands of products (or even a thousand with a hundred variations for each), traditional solutions may not be ideal.
Or whenever you generate a ridiculous amount of sales monthly.
Yes, it’s a great problem to have and you’ll “figure it out” once the time comes.
But just in case you become an overnight success, there are three popular options here:
- Keep scaling WooCommerce/EDD. While not fully ideal, it is actually possible, though it requires some DevOps engineering behind the scenes and probably parallel ordering queues to avoid timeouts.
- Extract the shop to a separate, designated shopping platform like Magento, OpenCart, and a bunch of non-PHP commerce solutions.
- Offload shopping to a SaaS — Shopify Plus or BigCommerce, integrating through their APIs so the shopping experience is lightweight.
There you go, start simple at first and scale as your revenue keeps growing.
