WordPress Revenue Opportunities
[00:00:00] Igor Benić
Hello and welcome to another episode. In this episode I'm talking about WordPress revenue opportunities. WordPress can't be ignored. At the time of recording this, WordPress is used by about 43 to 44% of all websites on the internet. And when it comes to content management systems, it's even more impressive. It's at 63%. That means that if a client uses a content management system, there is less than 40% chance they are not using WordPress. And as a freelancer or someone running a web-related business, WordPress is not something to ignore. And with that, there are multiple revenue opportunities.
[00:00:56] Igor Benić
The first one is custom development and that's an obvious choice. WordPress is a content management system built with HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript and MySQL. For this to be a viable option for you, you need to at least know some coding basics and have some experience with PHP and JavaScript. To earn from custom development, you can be a freelancer, a contractor or an employee. I started as a student, playing around with PHP and transforming HTML templates into WordPress themes and I also applied to various projects, even though I wasn't an expert. This is also, if you are a developer, by far the fastest way and maybe the easiest way to earn a lot of money. You can get a $100 per year salary as an employee or a remote contractor. You can also niche down and develop only certain types of sites. For example, I specialized in WooCommerce and I'll always take WooCommerce projects over some other WordPress projects.
[00:02:14] Igor Benić
And where to find custom development work? Well, you don't have to focus on one source of clients, and be sure to try various platforms and job boards. Some sites that I checked myself are Codable, Toptal, Upwork, Freelancer, and also the job board on the PostStatus site. I also got such work from emails and even Twitter DMs, so be sure to be an active member of the WordPress community. Another way that could get you a lot of work, but it might take a year or two before you see real effects, is blogging and writing tutorials. And how much can you actually earn for custom development? Well, it depends on a few factors, such as where you live, how much experience you have, how much confident you are, but it's possible to earn $100 per year or even more if you're a really good developer.
[00:03:25] Igor Benić
Second option is site building. This is a bit different than custom development. It's similar to other no-code tools that people use for building sites, such as Webflow, Wix and the like. It's a powerful way to create WordPress websites, configuring them and optimizing them without writing any code or really little code. Nowadays, a lot of people are using page builders to build sites and some, just from working with Elementor, earn over $200 per year. Usually, just building sites with page builders won't do as a standalone skill though. To get such big numbers, clients need to trust you, so you need to know how to sell such projects. In my opinion, site building is not only about transforming a design into a functioning site. Some agencies tend to include other services, such as SEO optimization, improving cost per click and similar. But if you know how to use popular page builders, configure complex flows, optimize sites and manage several plugins, you can make a lot of money here. Since it's closely related to custom development, the same sites I have mentioned before can be used to find such projects, clients or even a job.
[00:04:54] Igor Benić
The third option is a plugin or team business. This is something that I'm trying to do for several years now, but without much success actually. My own WordPress plugin business generated around $50,000 since 2016. So it's not something to ignore of course, but it's not enough to move me away from client work. Plugins and teams are a good way to earn money, especially if you build something that people really want. Some plugins generate millions of dollars per year. For example, Easy Digital Downloads, a free plugin with below $100,000 free active installs, generated over $1 million in revenue in 2019. And if I remember correctly, this same plugin generated about $20,000 per month before the owner, VPN, decided to hire their first employee or something like that. And I mean that amount of $20,000 per month is a life-changing amount for any freelancer. But this is a hard path and it's not suitable for everyone, even though stats like the ones from Easy Digital Downloads can be inspiring. As I said, I've tried and still trying to build one, but I still struggle to hit even $1,000 per month.
[00:06:44] Igor Benić
How to sell plugins and themes? There are different types you can sell. There is a free option with paid add-ons or paid support. You can also have a freemium one, so it's free but with paid features. And it's a premium one where you only have paid features. And you can use Easy Digital Downloads, WooCommerce, Lemon Squeeze, Gumroad or others to sell licenses to your products. Easy Digital Downloads is a popular choice among various plugin companies. My personal favorite is Freemius. Even though they take a cut after 5,000 in revenue or so, they take about 7% before they take a bit more. But I can be sure that everything is handled regarding version deployments, hosting the premium plugin and such. The strategy that worked for me, as I'm not doing any marketing, is to add the free version of the plugin to the plugin repository. Then after about 100 active installs, I would develop the premium version for it and slowly grow it like that.
[00:08:03] Igor Benić
Fourth option is the maintenance packages. As developers, freelancers, we are constantly online and probably more than others, but for regular people, for just having sites for their businesses, they don't want to think about updating the site, keeping it secure and such. Of course, they want their sites to be updated and secure, but they would rather delegate that to others. And that's where maintenance packages are a great thing to offer. You can offer multiple packages with different benefits. For example, Nat Miletic with his Clio agency offers various packages. And if his agency gets 100 clients on the lowest package, that's $8,000 per month.
[00:08:57] Igor Benić
And how to manage such sites? Well, first define what you want to do. Popular options are backups, updates, testing updates, monitoring, and stuff like that. You can then easily add more stuff like reporting for higher packages with actionable steps and such. You can use white label services, such as the WP Buffs. They can then do everything for you. For example, you charge $50 or more on top of their prices and then you can actually easily earn $50 per month per each site without actually doing anything. They do everything for you. And if you do want to work yourself with that, you can help yourself with services such as the Manage WP.
[00:09:52] Igor Benić
Fifth option can be marketing and copywriting. Even though marketing and copywriting is not related just to WordPress, you can use that to increase revenue just in the WordPress space. If you are good at marketing, you can offer packages to help WordPress-related businesses to create and increase their traffic, sales and such. Something like that is suitable for plugin and team businesses, freelancers and other WordPress businesses. For example, Alex Denning from the getellipsis.com, they are focused on WordPress and WooCommerce businesses. They offer various services and the interesting ones are audits. With audits, they let you know what you should be working on. Then you can actually hire them instead so they already do that for you so you don't have to think about it. It's an easy upsell tactic. Copywriting is also an interesting path and you can niche down to only WordPress-related businesses. Maddy Osman and her theblogsmith.com are a great example of how you can build a great business around content that's only focused on WordPress companies. I even hired her for simple giveaways and the content is great. In both marketing and copywriting spaces, you can always charge per project or per article or even offer a monthly retainer that will include such services in it.
[00:11:36] Igor Benić
The sixth option would be education or mentoring. This is one of the hardest thing to monetize, at least in my experience. Education can be done with courses, ebooks, tutorials and such. And I've been blogging for years, yet people are reluctant to buy courses from me. When you have enough experience, you should still try to educate and help others. WordPress, with so many sites, is a great category to cover. You can write just about what you did a few days ago and it will help others in years to come. The whole educational part of my products brought in in total around 10-20k. And that's not bad for something that's done once and still brings revenue. And how to monetize knowledge? Well, there are several ways. You can create courses, ebooks, paid tutorials and you can also offer mentoring. For paid tutorials, I'm using Restrict Content Pro plugin and my blog regularly brings around $1000 per year. That's enough to pay for all the premium plugins I use and the hosting. As for mentoring, I tried Mentor Cruise. It's a great site with great experience and people did actually apply to me. I had a $150 per month price that included one call every week or so and text communication. I had to pause my account as I couldn't handle that with my work schedule, but definitely it's something to reconsider. If you are interested in that, note down how you want to work and don't overpromise. You can set $100-$150 a month or even more that includes only text communication. You could expand everything. Courses, ebooks, tutorials and even mentoring into one single product. You could create a community with software such as Circle.so and host a community in your WordPress niche and charge that for $20 per month or so. It's also a viable option.
[00:14:04] Igor Benić
The last tab that I want to talk about, the last opportunity, is podcasting. Since WordPress is everywhere, if you look into podcasting you'll soon realize that there are a lot of podcasts related only to WordPress. Some are reviewing WordPress plugins, some talk only about WooCommerce and interview people in that space, and others have podcasts as another marketing channel for their plugin business or similar. For example, Joe Cazabona, a known podcaster in the WordPress space, earns a nice five figure per year just from podcast sponsors. And last time I checked I think it was about $50,000 per year. Probably he is doing even more now. Sponsorships are the most popular way of monetizing a podcast. I'm still too early in this type of content creation so I can't talk about how to do that as I don't have any paid sponsors. But usually they have three spots. It's a pre-roll where they introduce the sponsors at the beginning of the podcast, mid-roll where they talk about them somewhere in the middle of the episode, and post-roll where they talk about sponsors at the end. Each has different weight to it so I guess the post-roll where people could just end listening to it is the cheapest option, where the pre-roll and mid-roll are higher priced.
[00:15:42] Igor Benić
Those are the opportunities that I have tried or consider trying as a way to still be inside of WordPress but have multiple baskets of income stream. There are probably a lot more opportunities that I have yet to discover but usually all are a version of these few opportunities that I have mentioned. Such can be a productized package that is closely related to custom development where you offer a package of ours as a monthly retainer. Well let me know what you think about WordPress opportunities and if you tried some of the mentioned ones in this episode or if you would like to introduce another one to me. Until the next episode stay happy, stay safe, don't overwork and just enjoy your time here.
