One of the main reasons that WordPress is so popular, is it’s vast plugin library. The WordPress plugin directory has close to 50000 plugins. Besides, there are thousands of free and premium third party plugins. With little or no coding skills, you can get a plugin to add a function to your website easily.

There are many reasons why you may want to add a plugin – to speed up your website, to optimize performance, to help with backup or security and more. In this post, we’ll take a look at WordPress plugins that help you make money and contribute in some way to revenue generation. For instance, eCommerce plugins can help you set up an online store to sell products and services. Similarly, there are plugins that help with advertisements, collecting donations, marketing or subscriptions.

AdRotate

Ads on your website are a double edged weapon. They not only divert attention of readers away from your page, they also make you look less than classy. You’ll also find ad blockers working against you. However, for some websites ads are a major stream of revenue. To be able to keep all the money you earn from ads and not share it with any third party, you need to take ad management into your own hands. And that’s where ad management plugins can help you.

If all that you need is a simple ad in the sidebar, the default setting in WordPress will do the job. For anything more than that, plugins can take on the task of managing ads on your website. These plugins save time and put you in control of your ad space. Remember that ad management plugins will only help to maximize ad space utilization. You still have to do a load of work to get advertisers to flock to your site.

As with most plugins, AdRotate is available both as a free and a premium plugin. It creates ad zones on your websites where advertisers can choose to display their advertisements. But that’s not all, you can manage the size of the advertisements and the display period by adjusting the settings in the plugins. Payment by the advertisers can be tracked and you can keep tabs on how the ads are performing. You can use ads from referral sites like AdSense, DFP or Double Click or create your own ads ads using basic HTML or JavaScript. With the help of widgets, PHP and shortcode, make banners of any size and place them anywhere.

With the premium plugin, purchasers can mask ads to evade ad blockers and also receive notifications by email or mobile. Many more features like live preview, device detection, Geo Targeting, scheduling ads for specific date/ hours, advanced analytics (including Google Analytics), network activated cross site adverts are included in the premium version, which starts at $29.

Affiliate WP

One of the most common ways in which websites earn revenues is affiliate marketing. Affiliate WP, a favorite in this category, allows any person to sign up as an affiliate on your website and instantly begin to refer customers to your site. When a customer makes a purchase using the affiliate link, the affiliate website earns a commission.

Easy to setup, the plugin tracks referrals accurately. You can add any number of affiliates and allow them to access resources on your website. It allows you to manage affiliates, track coupons and view payment logs. It’s also possible to send customized emails and export data to a CSV file to streamline your affiliate marketing program. Affiliates can set cookie expiration, generate their own referral link and have their own dashboards to track and manage their performance.

The annual payment for Affiliate WP depends on the plan you pick and can vary between  $99 to $499. While that may appear steep at first, weigh it against the fact that a single sale of any medium or high end product can return the investment to you. Moreover, activating the plugin serves as an incentive to sellers to link to your website and promote your products and services. To put it another way, even if you do not make any sale, the links that it establishes for your website can improve SEO and may work out to be worth the investment.

Sumo

There’s a whole lot of truth when digital marketers insist that it’s all in the list. Collecting emails is a first step towards increasing conversions. Email marketing is cheap, easy to setup and there are a great many WordPress plugins that help you grow your subscription list. Further, it helps to segment your audience and target them precisely.

Sumo is available in both the free and paid version, and currently has over half a million users. The plugin helps you capture leads and increase conversions. A welcome mat to create a great first impression, a scroll box that adds a popup in the least intrusive manner and a sticky reminder can all help bring in more inquiries. Social shares and image sharing features can draw in more traffic. That’s not all, heat maps help to analyse traffic and understand your visitors’ interests.

The free version offers almost the full range of features, however it comes with branding. To benefit from the full potential of each feature, it’ll be necessary to sign up for the premium options that come in the range of $29 to $119 (per month) and more. You can read up more about Sumo in this post.

Give

Receiving donations is yet another way to collect money on your WordPress site. Many generous readers are willing to support quality blogs or websites with their contribution. Besides, many non-profit organizations rely totally on voluntary contributions from donors. Fundraising plugins can lend a hand and help collect funds for any good cause.

Give is a highly rated fund raising plugin that can optimize voluntary giving on your website. Preparing featured reports to provide an overview of the projects and viewing statistics and reports is possible with Give. Customizable donation forms are also included. The plugin integrates well with many third party gateways and services.

In any fund raising campaign, donors need to be handled with sensitivity. Managing donors is easier with Give customization options. While there’s no charge for the core plugin functions, add-ons come at a premium.

OptimizePress

Sometimes, it helps to create specific landing pages for specific campaigns. It’s a place where you can capture a lead and convert it into a profit. A landing page is a single webpage intended for a single purpose – to get your visitor to do something you want. Every bit of content on this page is geared to interest the visitor to take a particular course of action. This can be anything, right from filling in subscription forms or providing contact details to purchasing a product or introducing a friend.

As is the case with most functions, there are many quality WordPress plugins that can create beautiful and effective landing pages for your website.

OptimizePress will help to establish, grow and convert an online audience. It does not merely help in building landing pages. It also helps to secure content for subscription members, create sales or marketing pages or operate authority blog sites. It’s helps create sales funnels and a whole set of tools designed to increase conversion. It’s a great option for website owners with little technical knowledge who want to improve conversion rates.

Restrict Content Pro

A website that creates great content can make money by allowing access to the content in exchange for a fee. Authority blogs, online libraries and similar subscription based websites can generate revenues in this fashion. By making excerpts or summaries accessible to all readers, you can interest them sufficiently to sign up and pay for premium content on the website.

Restrict Content Pro (affiliate link) helps you build membership sites where only paying members can unlock premium content. It’s simple to set up and create any number of membership packages, including free and trial subscriptions. You can easily manage members and send out mails to them. Flat rate or percentage based discounts are possible. Not only that, it allows you to generate reports that keep tab on performance and generate and export CSV files.

In a Nutshell

There are other plugins as well which help to monetize your website in other ways. For instance, you can create business directories, or job boards, setup review sites or send out newsletters. And there are plugins that can help with each of these functions. These plugins are not indispensable, but they can make your work a whole lot easier. Paying up for a premium plugin may not make sense if you view the cost of the plugin in isolation. Instead, you need to view it more as an investment which has a fair chance of adding to your revenue down the line.