Whether it’s a side hustle supporting your other business activities or your main source of income, WordPress websites have huge potential as a source of passive income.

From premium content on the website itself to using your site as a platform to sell a variety of digital products, there’s countless effective methods that savvy entrepreneurs can use to turn their sites into money-making assets that run on autopilot.

If you’re looking to maximize the value of your WordPress site, but you’re not sure how to do this, then this guide is for you. Here’s five effective strategies for making passive income with WordPress.

Sell Online Courses

If you’re a photographer, graphic designer, or another kind of service-based entrepreneur, the lion’s share of your income is probably going to come from clients paying to utilize your skills and carry out projects on their behalf. However, this is only one possible way to monetize your skills.

By selling online courses, you can monetize your wealth of knowledge and experience through a different kind of audience: people who are looking to develop their own skills to further their careers or become entrepreneurs themselves.

Using course creation platforms like Thinkific, or simply by creating new, paywalled areas of your WordPress site, you can share exclusive video or written content allowing students to practice their existing skills, develop new ones, and gain from the professional experience you’ve accumulated over the years.

Thinkific

Once you’ve created the content, you can simply set up a payment system on your site that will allow potential students to access the course. This will ensure that your income stream remains passive, while avoiding the extra requirements of arranging one-to-one tutoring when both you and your student are available. 

Sell Software

If you’re a developer, it’s likely that you have a whole trove of software tools you worked on outside of “official” projects. 

Although these pieces of software may not be as bespoke as the tools you create for any specific client, they can still have a lot of potential value for a more general audience who will be happy to buy or subscribe to your most useful tools.

This method of making money with WordPress requires minimal active management on your part, aside from thoroughly testing your tools before you attempt to monetize them, and making sure you respond promptly to any support queries you receive. Even if you’re not a developer, selling software through your WordPress site is still a viable option, thanks to companies and individual developers who connect with private resellers to expand their tools’ marketplace.

Web hosting specialists 20i, for example, maintain a reseller hosting program, where you can provide your own white-label hosting solutions as an upsell attached to your other digital services. You’ll provide customer service for your clients, but the provider’s technical team is available to support you with any issues. This allows you to generate passive income through a platform that you own, without worrying about maintaining the product’s technical infrastructure. 

20i

Sell Fonts, Images, and Other Digital Assets

Many photographers and graphic designers get most of their income from bespoke assignments to deliver a specific result for a client’s specific needs. However, if you’re sitting on a lot of digital assets that have broader appeal, this could be your ticket to creating passive income from your website and supporting the revenues from your primary, (“active”) source of income.

If you work with visual assets, some of the best things you can sell as a route towards generating passive income with your WordPress site can include:

WooComemrce Product Gallery Demo
  • Design templates for things such as presentations, resumes, website themes, and business cards/brochures.
  • Selling physical merchandise featuring your best design work. Print-on-demand services such as Printful can be useful for producing this kind of product while keeping your operating costs to a minimum.
  • Selling custom tools for other designers to use, such as grids, UI kits, brushes, textures, and fonts.
  • Curating libraries of design assets and selling access to this through a subscription-based model.

By setting up these kinds of income streams, and promoting them effectively through social media, your WordPress blog, or other channels, you’ll be able to promote your unique skills while nurturing a source of income that doesn’t require you to lift a finger.

Create and Monetize a Podcast

Love talking about your industry, entrepreneurship, or anything else you’re passionate about? This could be the ideal route towards creating a passive income stream. Podcasts are not only an effective way to generate awareness of your personal brand and business, but can be great money-making assets themselves.

Building a decent audience for a podcast on any topic generally takes time. However, once you have a decent number of active listeners, there are a range of methods you can use to generate income through a podcast, including:

  • Selling sponsorships and ads to brands that are relevant to your audience.
  • Paywalling special episodes or your podcast’s backlog before a certain date.
  • Filming your podcast and syndicating it on YouTube.
  • Creating premium episodes, or parts of episodes, and selling access to these through your own site.
  • Joining an advertising network or using the monetization options of popular streaming platforms.

Podcasting and promoting your cast through your site is a “slow burn” when compared to many other ways to make money online with WordPress. However, once you’ve done the work of nurturing a community around this product, there are many different avenues for generating passive income from it.

Paywall Ultimate Guides and Premium Blog Posts

If you’re a consultant or coach, then selling software or design assets may not be the most naturally conducive way to achieve passive income through your WordPress site. But if you’ve found that your audience is much more likely to engage in written content, then using this as a jumping-off point to monetize your unique expertise could be the best way to go.

Using the same concept as premium podcast episodes, paywalling content involves withholding part or all of your most valuable written content, and requiring site visitors to pay to access these parts. For WordPress sites, you can use a plugin like Memberpress to do this.

Memberpress

Bear in mind that visitors won’t pay for information they can find elsewhere for free, so it’s important to strategize the content you’re going to paywall, and focus on pieces that have some clear, tangible value to your audience.

If you’re a management consultant, for example, some examples of paywalled content might include:

“Developing a Winning Risk Management Strategy (With Detailed Template)” – here, the free part of the content can emphasize the value of risk management strategy, and the template can be paywalled.

“How I Revolutionized Processes at 5 Small Businesses with Six Sigma” – in this example, the free part of the content will cover a more general explanation of Six Sigma, with a paywall withholding the detailed examples that readers can apply to their own situations.

Aside from knowing what to paywall, it’s also important to support this passive income model with some 100% free content that answers some of your audience’s other questions and provides plenty of value. This will effectively showcase your unique expertise, and convince your audience that the content behind the paywall really is worth it.

Making Money With WordPress

Whether you’re looking for something to supplement your main business activities, or you have a long-term plan to build a full-time income from your WordPress site, we hope these strategies have given you a good starting point for your future strategy.

For more support with maximizing the value of your website, check out or other popular blog posts or browse our range of WordPress plugins to build a better user experience!