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Lesson 9:
Monetizing Your Website
Chapter 1: Introduction This lesson is about monetization, making money from your WordPress website. I know this may not
be your primary goal, but as long as you've put in the time and effort to create an online presence,
there's no reason you shouldn't benefit from all that work. And even if your site isn't commercial, there
may come a time when you want to solicit donations or sell promotional goods.
Online selling has become more sophisticated in recent years. In the late '90s, many people migrated
their retail businesses from mail order to the Internet. In those days, websites and shopping carts often
were separate entities. Customers located what they wanted on your Web pages, but then placed their
order on a system that didn't look anything like the rest of the site. It was difficult to promote items on
one part of the website and link them to the other. From both an aesthetic and a technical standpoint,
it could be a mess!
Nowadays, these functions are well-integrated, and developers have created hundreds of themes,
plugins, and shopping carts specifically for monetizing WordPress websites. I'll show you how to select
the ones that best fit your needs.
Besides shopping carts, there are many other monetizing opportunities:
• Pay-per-click (PPC) programs
• Banner advertising
• Affiliate marketing
• Subscription or member websites
• Digital downloads, like e-books and music
We can divide these programs into two revenue making-strategies: referring your visitors to other
websites, and selling your own products.
One request: With our Water Garden practice site, please don't now actually sign up to open new
PayPal or merchant accounts, affiliate marketing, etc., to follow along with this chapter. Those
companies don't appreciate people practicing on their websites! So hold off on your personal
monetization activity until you're ready to start it on your own site. Please just save a copy of this
chapter for later reference.
Let's examine these strategies to see what would work best for you. We'll begin with visitor referrals in
Chapter 2.
Chapter 2: Getting Paid for Referrals Making money from visitor traffic is a passive activity. Unlike running an online store, you don't have to
carry or ship inventory, offer customer service, or handle transactions. Instead, you just insert ads for
other peoples' websites and earn money when your visitors go to those sites.
Pay-per-click (PPC) is the original visitor referral model. Companies like Google and Yahoo set it up to
sell ads on their search results pages.
The major pay-per-click players
Google's AdWords is the most popular PPC program. Advertisers bid on keywords, and the highest
bidders get top listings, next to the organic (non-paid) search results. Advertisers are charged only
when a visitor clicks their ad. This differs from the traditional advertising model, in which the number
of people exposed to an ad determines the cost.
So where do you fit into this? Well, Google runs a parallel program called AdSense, which pays
websites to display its customers' advertisements. If you sign up, Google will syndicate
contextual ads––ads geared to your site's content—on your pages. When your visitors click these ads,
Google pays you.
The other big search companies, MSN, Yahoo, and Bing, have merged their PPC programs into the
Microsoft adCenter.
We're going to examine how the Google program works because it's the largest. I'll demonstrate on my
own account and insert the ads into the water gardening website.
Getting Started With AdSense
Important: This is an explanation only. Please don't join AdSense yourself until your own site is up and
running.
The first step is to sign up for a Google account, if you don't already have one. Then you'll register with
AdSense. It takes about a week before they let you know if you've been approved. If you are, they'll
send you a publisher ID number.
You'll choose the ads' format. These range from banners that span pages to the vertical format you
often see in sidebars.
Google AdSense sample formats
In the form that follows, I've selected a small sidebar ad block, and I've named it according to its
dimensions.
Google ad creation form
Google lets me choose colors and style. When I click Save and Get Code, I can copy the HTML code.
Now I'll go to my Widgets page (Appearance > Widgets) in the WordPress back end to install the ad.
There are many WP custom widgets that accommodate PPC advertising, but for now, I'm going to use a
simple text widget.
AdSense Code in the text widget
I've given a title to the sidebar ad and pasted the Google code. Since you haven't yet joined Ad Words,
the screen shot below won't be on your site. But for illustrative purposes, here's what it would look like
on the Web page:
AdSense display ad
Google uses a proprietary system to match your page content to the ad subject, but it doesn't always
work. Since you're paid by the number of times visitors click the ad links, you want ads that appeal to
your target audience. That landscaping ad you see on water garden site above, for example, is too
local. It won't get too many clicks outside southwest Virginia. You can refine the ads you get by
downloading a plugin like Better AdSense Targeting to get closer matches.
When a visitor clicks an AdSense ad, Google credits your account. And when your credits reach a
certain threshold, you'll get a check in the mail. Unless your site attracts millions of visitors, accepting
PPC advertising won't make you rich. But it's an effective way to cover some of your costs without
much effort.
More WordPress Plugin Suggestions
Here are a couple of other plugins to consider if you're running pay-per-click advertising:
• Ad Injection: This is one of the most complete PPC plugins. It inserts AdSense or adCenter
advertising into your widgets or your content. It also lets you decide exactly where the ads should
appear and who to show them to.
• Better AdSense Targeting: This plugin lets you mark the content that you want Google to read when
it decides which ads will appear on your pages.
To find these plugins, type their names in the search bar on your Plugins > Add Plugins page.
Sell Your Own Advertising
If you're feeling entrepreneurial—and don't want a middleman between you and your visitors—try
selling ads and banners yourself. Ordinarily, you'll need to ring up some big visitor numbers to appeal
to advertisers. But here's where finding a niche can help. If your website is specialized and unique, it's
more likely to appeal to a particular kind of audience that some advertisers might also want to reach.
If there's any "standard" for Web display ads, it's a 125 x 125-pixel box. Using an image editing app, you
can create an "Advertise Here" ad that size and link it to a page describing your audience and your
rates.
Our Marina theme allows you to insert 125 x 125 ads into the sidebar without even using a widget.
Let's give it a try.
First, I'd like you to download four ads I created, along with some material for later in the lesson. Click
the icon below, unzip the folder, and save the files like you’ve done with media used in previous earlier
lessons.
Download Lesson 9 Material
1. Open the display ads folder. To upload the four images to your water garden website, go to
Media > Add New.
2. Click Select Files, and select all four ads (CTL+A). Then click Open.
3. After the files have been uploaded, go to Media > Library and click the one labeled 125 x
125 pond packages.
4. On the Edit Media screen, add this text to the Alternative Text field: Complete pond
packages from under $800.
5. Copy the entire link from the File URL field, and click the blue Update button.
Edit Media page with File URL circled
6. Next, go to Appearance > Marina Options.
7. Scroll down to the 125 x 125 banner settings area, and paste the File URL you just copied
into the Banner 1 Image field. (If we were going to link this ad to a real advertiser's website,
we'd enter that link in the Banner 1 URL field below.)
Image link entered on Marina Options screen
8. Scroll down and click Save Changes.
Repeat these steps with the other three ads: Copy each File URL from the Media
Library, paste each URL into the correct Banner Image field on the Appearance > Marina
Options page, and click the Save Changes button. Then take a look at the sidebar on the home
page.
Edit Media page with File URL circled
Good work! You've added our own ads to the water garden website.
More WordPress Plugin Suggestions
If you use a theme that doesn't have the ad display option, install the WP125 plugin. Not only does it place your ads in a widget, it also lets you decide how to display them and how long they should run.
Need a little help selling and booking advertising? Check out Komoona, a free plugin that lets you set prices for your ads, fields your inquiries, and even collects payments. For more information, visit Komoona Website. https://www.komoona.com/
Chapter 3: Affiliate Marketing WordPress is the platform of choice for affiliate marketing, the
practice of using your website to drive business to online
merchants. According to Jupiter Research, affiliate programs have
become a $3 billion-a-year business!
Here's how it works: Suppose you'd like to take advantage of the
popularity of those smart speaker devices. You could
create a website that compares the major players in this category—Amazon's Alexa, Google Home, and one or
two others. So you do the research, add charts and photographs, and set up a blog section where visitors can
ask questions and talk about voice-controlled speakers. If you've created useful content, your site will begin to
draw people who are in the market for the product.
Now you join the affiliate programs of Amazon, Google, and the other sellers. You put ads and links on
your site, directing visitors to the Alexa and Google Home websites. And every time one of your
referrals makes a purchase, you'll get a percentage of the sale.
There are usually four main participants in the affiliate model: the seller (sometimes called the
merchant); the network that represents the merchant; the publisher (the affiliate website owner); and
the customer. Some big merchants, like Amazon, run their own affiliate programs.
The system works best when the affiliate attracts visitors who are likely to end up buying the
merchant's products. One way to do this is to create a website (or operate an existing site) that
contains the kind of information a prospective buyer would search for. That's one of the goals of our
fictitious water garden site—to explain how to build a water garden and expose our visitors to
merchants that sell the items our visitors want. Niche sites (those that specialize in a very specific
subject) often are the most effective affiliates.
Unless you join a self-administered program—like eBay's or Amazon's—you'll need to sign up with an
affiliate network. The network will give you a list of the merchants they represent, along with their
commission schedules, and they'll submit your application to the sellers. When you're approved, the
network will provide display and text links, keep track of your sales, and send your commissions.
Because the networks also share a portion of the total sales, you pay nothing for these services.
There are hundreds of affiliate networks. To find niche merchants, search the Web for the niche
subject + "affiliate network" for example: water garden affiliate network. If you have a particular
merchant in mind, go to its website and look for an affiliate link.
The big players in this category are CJ Affiliate (formerly Commission Junction) and LinkShare. Amazon
and eBay are among the largest self-administrating merchants.
Creating an Online Shopping Site
When you want to sell products directly to your visitors, there's no better way than installing a
shopping cart and opening your own online store! There are dozens of WordPress plugins designed for
this purpose.
But before we start, it's important to understand what you'll be getting into: It might be more involved
than you think.
Online retailing requires product descriptions and photography, inventory control, collecting and
depositing taxes, setting up shipping systems and terms, and accepting customer payments. In
addition, you'll need to provide customer service, make sure transactions are secure, and effectively
market your products. Software capable of tracking this information is necessarily complex and will
require plenty of time and effort to set up.
So be prepared to put in a lot of effort to create and
operate your online store. And no matter which
shopping cart you select, plan on spending plenty
of time reading the documentation before you add
the first product.
No matter which cart you choose, the process is
similar:
• Organize your products and decide how
you want to present them. Each item
should have its own page, but you might
also want create shopping pages
displaying multiple products, sorted by category. In some cases, this
will require you to create your own page layouts or use the shopping
cart's short codes.
• Virtually all shopping carts have a large number of settings you'll have
to configure, so expect to spend lots of time in the back end making
decisions. Since only you know what your store requires, please
understand that neither I, nor anyone else, can make these choices.
It'll be all up to you!
In the next chapter, you'll practice building an online store for a few water garden items. I'll show you
the basics and point you to the documentation, but I'll expect you to refer to the software's
instructions if you want to expand the site. We don't have enough space or time to walk you through
every step. And even if we did, it wouldn't help you much once the course was over and you're on your
own.
I’ll say it again: Building an online shopping site requires a lot of work and the ability to think independently. I can't do that for you, but I can help you get started!
Chapter 4: Using PayPal to Sell Products and Services Online Before PayPal came along, it wasn't easy to collect money online. Internet sellers had to establish a
merchant account with a bank or other processor to handle credit card transactions. The processing
charges were high, and banks were very selective about the online sellers they'd work with.
PayPal has democratized online collections, becoming one of the world's largest payment processors.
Virtually anyone who has a bank account can sign up with PayPal, which will handle your customers'
credit card charges or bank debits for a fee that's competitive with the pickier financial institutions.
If you're planning to sell just a few things on your website—or if you want to solicit donations or
contributions for your blog or non-profit—PayPal is the way to go. You can also build a simple shopping
cart using PayPal's free tools, or simply add a payment link in a sidebar.
No matter what form of business you have—individual, sole proprietorship, partnership, or
corporation—it takes less than five minutes to create a PayPal account. Once you're signed up, PayPal
helps you configure a payment gateway for your customers. A simple link takes them to your PayPal
page to complete their transactions. And PayPal credits the payments to you within hours. So if it’s
simplicity you’re looking for, WordPress Ultra Simple PayPal Shopping Cart is the way to go.
More WordPress Plugin Suggestions
• PayPal Donations: This is a widget that lets visitors contribute to your PayPal account. You can also
explain who'll benefit from the donation.
• WordPress Ultra Simple Paypal Shopping Cart: This plugin lets you put an Add to Cart button
anywhere on your site and display a shopping cart on any page, post, or sidebar. PayPal handles the
credit card processing.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-ultra-simple-paypal-shopping-cart/
Shopping Carts You can always use PayPal as your credit card processor, but if you want to sell more than a few things
online, you'll probably want a more sophisticated e-commerce system.
Shopping cart is a simple enough term, but it refers to an enormous variety of online applications
designed to sell products. Because WordPress is one of the world's most popular content management
systems, developers have created scores of free and premium shopping cart systems and plugins.
Check the Supplementary Material section for links to some of the most popular carts.
Which to choose? Use the chart below to decide which features are most important to you:
When you're ready to choose your shopping cart, compare what you need to the available features of the
WordPress plugins. Check the Supplementary Material section for links to shopping cart developers.
Let's Go Shopping Now let's install a WordPress shopping cart plugin.
I chose WooCommerce for several reasons. It’s free to try and many of you will likely never need to go
beyond the basic features which would require that you start paying. It was bought by WordPress
three years ago because they think it’s great (so it plays well with WordPress and you’ll find yourself
comfortable with the user interface). There must be a reason that over a third of all online stores are
based on WooCommerce. (Just as there’s a good reason that WordPress itself powers over a third of all
Internet sites.)
WooCommerce isn’t as dead simple to use as the WordPress Ultra Simple Paypal Shopping Cart plugin.
But if you plan (hope) to grow into a powerhouse of commercial activity, might as well start with a
plugin that can accommodate any acceleration in growth and pretty much any size as well.
Nothing’s perfect of course. The two primary drawbacks of the WooCommerce plugin at this time are that
it doesn’t support any multilingual shopping, and your choice of templates when using the free version are
limited, as would be expected. That said, if you’re interested in possibly using this plugin, let’s give it a
tryout now.
Instructions for downloading and installing WooCommerce:
1. Go to Plugins > Add New, and search for woocommerce.
2. You’ll see a bunch of hits because there are multiple aftermarket plugins (AKA extensions). But the one
you want is by Automatic and boasts over a million active installations.
3. Click Install Now, then click Activate.
4. This commerce system requires that a few new pages be added to your site. And there are some
additional settings—such as your tax gathering preference and weight calculation (ounces? pounds?
grams?)
Let’s have the Wizard walk us through the basics of setting up WooCommerce, so click Run the Setup
Wizard.
5. Fill in the form, then click Let’s Go.
6. When asked about payment preferences, let’s keep things simple for now and choose just PayPal (with the
option to let customers who have no PayPal account still make payments via their credit card). You can
always expand these options at a later date if you need to.
7. Click the Continue button to specify your shipping, weight, and measurement options.
You may also see this:
In which case, click the Add shipping method button:
8. Deselect the offer to switch to the Storefront theme. We want to keep on using Marina for now, but if you
wish, go ahead and explore Storefront. It’s easy enough to switch back later to Marina if you want to. The
tax option is useful and the Chimp can help increase your sales.
9. Click Continue. WooCommerce is now visible in your WordPress dashboard. Choose WooCommerce >
Settings. Then click Connect:
10. Take a little side-trip to Pages > All Pages. See if you can figure out how many new pages WooCommerce
added to your site:
WooCommerce Customizer This plugin does far more than I can explain here. So I'll get you started with the basics, and you can
explore all its features at your convenience. Now that WooCommerce is installed, let’s look at some of the
settings.
Note: If you run into any problems here, please check out this tutorial:
https://faculty.ed2go.com/LTI/LaunchIFrame.aspx?Tkn=0b40333f-5b77-461a-83a0-63626273466e
1. Go back to WooCommerce > Settings.
2. We want the visitor (AKA customer) to fully understand that this site has a store. So click the in the
Customizer link:
3. Several options open up.
The store notice allows you to place an ad that appears everywhere on your site:
• The Product Catalog section allows you to specify where and how to display your goods. • In the Product Images section you can specify image size and cropping.
• The Checkout section is where you decide what details the customer must provide, are optional, or aren’t
even listed on your checkout form. You also decide how to handle privacy notices and other legal info.
Add Your Products
Let's configure WooCommerce to display a product from the class project site.
1. Go to WooCommerce > Products > Add New.
Tip: WooCommerce has made an effort to parallel the standard WordPress user interface so you
should find it easy to work with. Notice how the term Add New is like what you’re already familiar
with in WordPress (Posts Add New and Pages Add New). Also the WooCommerce Products > All
Products resembles those areas with the Posts and Pages screens.
Tip: If you see a warning about an insecure connection, don’t worry about that now. We’ll cover this
topic at the end of this lesson. Just make a mental note that before you publish your real
ecommerce site, you will want to change to a HTTPS system:
https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/managing-products/
2. In the Product Name field type: American Pond Kits
3. Now find the Lesson 9 media folder you downloaded earlier in this lesson. The Shopping cart content
folder contains the written content in plain text format (water garden kits.txt) , along with a product
picture (.gif).
4. In the description (main text box) area, paste the water garden kits.txt information. So your new
product page looks like this:
5. Scroll down and fill in the price and short description. Leave the Virtual and Downloadable options
unchecked. These categories are for items like consultation via email or a game they would download—
items not in the physical world that have to be sent to them.
6. Finally let’s add our picture. Go back to the main text box and click to set your mouse cursor just to
the left of the second paragraph that starts with These American.
7. Click the Add Media button and in the Media Library, click the picture with the eagle.
8. Click the Insert Into Product button in the lower right corner. You’ll see your image located where you
put the cursor.
That’s it! Click the Publish button and when it stops revolving, click the View Product link up top.
Well done! You have the start of an online store.
Tip: Various additional customizations can of course be made to your product pages. Think of them as
similar to posts. Remember, the way that you modified pages and posts is much the same as the way
you deal with products. For example, if you want to change the category from uncategorized to kits,
just start by clicking Products > Categories, then making changes as shown here and clicking the Update
button.
But there's more. Open Appearance > Widgets, and you'll see that WooCommerce has also loaded its
own widgets. The key word is products which to WooCommerce is their version of WordPress pages or
posts. Here’s where you can get creative with your theme’s sidebar.
As you’ve likely noticed WooCommerce is a pretty full-featured ecommerce toolkit. Online sales
employ quite a few different configurations, but whatever you’re selling I’m confident you’ll find that
WooCommerce will be able to handle it. And if you don’t see what you need in the default installation, take
a look at WooCommerce > Extensions of which there are currently exactly 100 available.
Tip: If you want a theme that’s ecommerce focused and totally friendly with WooCommerce, check out
Storefront, WordPress’s official WooCommerce theme.
If selling online is your goal, and you want to make the most of WooCommerce--you will want to take
the time to explore these well-done tutorials and other documentation for this powerful system:
https://docs.woocommerce.com/documentation/plugins/woocommerce/getting-started/
Protecting Your Customers With SSL You've no doubt heard the horror stories of what happens when thieves steal
online shoppers' personal information. Despite huge improvements in Internet
security, the bad guys always seem to be one step ahead. Put another way,
cryptology and other security efforts are a kind of back-and-forth game. Every time
the good guys plug a security hole, the bad guys make a new move and open
a new hole.
Even the largest retailers fall victim to data theft. While there are no guarantees your store won't wind
up in the same situation, it seems that criminals are more interested in companies like Target and
Amazon. Bigger fields to harvest.
Still, even the smallest online merchants need to take basic precautions. The best way to protect
yourself and your customers from online theft is to make sure their information is encrypted.
Encryption is the process of disguising information so that only authorized people can use it. The word
time could be encrypted as n1ujnfa%. The four letters are in there, but disguised. This is a pretty easy
one to decrypt. Toss out the first two and last two meaningless filler characters, then lower by one
each remaining letter in its alphabetical order number. u becomes t, j becomes i, and so on: time.
Fortunately online (SSL) encryption is far more complex and thus more secure.
On the Web encryption most often employs technology known as SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). I'm sure
you've seen sites that use SSL: Their URLs begin with https://, instead of http://. And when you're
visiting an SSL page, browsers display a lock icon on the address field.
SSL allows customers to securely send information like credit card and Social Security numbers to the
merchant. Should you install SSL for your own online shopping site? The answer is an absolute yes,
unless a third party's website processes the transactions for you, as in the case of PayPal or on an
affiliate website.
To use this security technology, you'll install an SSL certificate from your host or a company that
specializes in selling them. There are both paid and free SSL certificates. Depending on the level of
security encryption you choose, the price can run from nothing to well into the thousands of dollars.
If you use SiteGround as your host (among others) it's free to get your site an SSL certificate. Here's how:
https://www.siteground.com/tutorials/cpanel/lets-encrypt/
Then after that, I'd suggest using the Really Simple SSL plugin to add your new certification to your WordPress site.
SSL Plugin Suggestion
If you run into problems trying to display insecure elements on your SSL page, install the SSL Insecure
Content Fixer: .SSL Insecure Content Fixer.
For more information on SSL, check this lesson's Supplementary Material section!
Well, that wraps up our lesson on monetizing your WordPress website. Join me in Chapter 5 to review
what we've covered.
Chapter 5: Summary While it's not everyone's goal to benefit financially from a website, at some point in the future you
might need a system for collecting money or selling products. Once again, WordPress is there to help,
with hundreds of plugins that will turn your site into an efficient online store or affiliate.
The easiest way to make money from a blog or website is to run pay-per-click ads and banners. You can
sell them yourself or get hooked up with a program like AdSense, which will pay you for visitors you
refer to its advertisers.
On a slightly larger scale, you could become an affiliate of a large or specialized online merchant,
sending them potential customers in return for a percentage of their sales.
Or if you want to sell your own products or services, WordPress is compatible with free and premium
shopping cart plugins. Some, like the WooCommerce app we installed, can handle every aspect of running an
online store.
In our next lesson, we'll spend some time polishing up our class project website and talk about blogging
and social networking. I look forward to seeing you there!
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