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How to Monetize Your Blog Without Selling Your Soul

Lior Levin — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 16:11:12 +0000

Sellout….It is the ugliest word that’s routinely hurled at creative individuals of all types. This goes for writers, artists, musicians and anyone else who makes a living (in part or in whole) on the back of their creative endeavors.

That being said, money and art have to mix at some point. You need your money to support your art, whatever it may be, and that is equally true for bloggers and other authors online.

So how do you make money from your WordPress blog without selling your soul? There are many different ways you do that, but it’s important to find the right model that works for you, your niche and your site.

1. Advertising and Sponsorships

For many, advertising is a foul word. However, it doesn’t have to be if done well. Advertising that isn’t intrusive and doesn’t get mixed in with the content can be a very simple and safe way to earn money from your site. However, this means keeping your ads away from your editorial content physically and figuratively, ensuring a total separation of the paid message from your creative one.

This can be tricky if you find yourself writing about the companies that advertise on your site (it might be wise to favor sponsorships as you can control who advertises better), but with proper disclosure this doesn’t have to be a major problem.

All in all, if you don’t intrude on your readers needlessly and don’t let your advertisers influence your work, you can host ads on your site without worrying sacrificing your integrity.(...)
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Alex Denning: A New Contributor to WordPress Hacks

Alex Denning — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 11:49:02 +0000

Editor’s Note: Although Alex has published a few posts here in the past, he is going to ramp up his submissions over the coming weeks, so we decided he would do an introduction post. If you’d like to write for WordPress Hacks, you can get more information here, then contact us.

After Kyle announced in his last post that he would not be able to resume WPHacks’ regular posting schedule for awhile, I volunteered to step up to the plate; for the next fortnight I’ll be taking Kyle’s place and plan to be posting at least once every other day!

Me.

For those of you who don’t know, I’m Alex Denning. I’ve written the odd post here on WordPress Hacks, as well as occasionally writing posts for CatsWhoCode and ProBlogDesign. Recently I started my own WordPress blog, WPShout.com, and I also am the editor of Nometet.com. I’m on Twitter too!

What I’ll be posting

As I said, I’ll be posting at least once every other day with a bit of discussion, some nice WordPress hacks, some WordPress news, etc. However, I haven’t got enough post ideas for the entire two weeks; any suggestions for posts would be greatly appreciated in the comments.

A quick plug

As with everything in life, my posting here does too have an ulterior motive; I’ve briefly mentioned my blog already, but I’ll expand: my blog has just (I say just, ie today!) changed its name from Nometech.com to WPShout.com and it has also got an exciting new design. As you’re reading WordPress Hacks, that implies you’re a WordPress fan, so I’ll make a quick prod in the direction of the WPShout RSS feed; a couple of times a week I publish in depth posts related to WordPress. I’d hope the content speaks for itself, so go take a look!

Wrapping up

I think that’s everything! As I said, any post suggestions or questions? Please do leave a comment below, and here’s to an excellent next two weeks!

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“WP” WordPress Domain Name for Sale: WPTavern.com

Kyle Eslick — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:41:29 +0000

Over the past year the WordPress blogging niche has really grown and there has been a number of great people contributing to the WordPress community with their blog. Unfortunately, the popularity of the niche has resulted in every decent “WP” domain to get registered, leaving someone who wants to launch a WordPress blog without many options for quality domain names to use.

While digging through my domain portfolio yesterday, I discovered that I actually have a quality “WP” domain which I will not end up needing, so I’ve decided to sell it. The domain is WPTavern.com which stands for WordPress Tavern. Taverns are known for being great places for discussions, so I originally registered the name with the idea of either building a forum or some sort of place to discuss WordPress thoughts and ideas. In the time since that domain was registered, I actually acquired WPForums.com and a couple weeks ago launched a WordPress Forums with that domain name. I also think that this domain would also make for a great domain for a WordPress niche blog.

Long story short, if you’d like to own and develop WPTavern.com, please contact me with your offer. It is registered with GoDaddy and is trademark free. I will collect offers for 48 hours and then sell the domain.

If you have any questions about the domain or about how to acquire a domain name, please let me know.

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What Can I Do To Help WordPress?

Kyle Eslick — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 08:00:08 +0000

I think there are a number of things we bloggers all have in common, and for the readers of this website, I hope that a love for WordPress is probably the biggest one. Have you ever wondered what you can do to help WordPress grow?

Here are a few ideas of things that just about anyone can do to help:

WordPress Plugin – This one requires you to be pretty fluent with PHP. If you know coding well, though, this is probably the best thing you can do to improve WordPress.
WordPress Theme – Releasing a theme for the WordPress community to use is another great thing most people can do for WordPress. If you look around, many of the more popular themes are fairly simplistic and don’t require an advanced design or a lot of features to be popular.
WordPress Blog – Building a WordPress niche blog seems to be the popular thing to do these days. It is a lot of hard work, but if your passion runs deep the interaction with the WordPress community can be very rewarding.
WordPress Forums - Lorelle recently wrote a great post over at Blog Herald about helping out at the WordPress forums and how rewarding this can be. If you don’t want to do any of the three above, give this one a shot. I can quickly become addictive!

Anything else you would add to the list?

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