5 Free Wordpress Plugins to help you Monetize your Blog

April 21, 2007 | Comments (29) | Filed under: Advertising

Depending on the type of blog you run, there might come a point where you decide to try and earn some revenue from your traffic. Determining exactly when that time is, however, can be difficult. Some bloggers advocate that you wait until your userbase is solid before trying to monetize your articles while others recommend monetizing right away, so you don’t alienate your readers while trying to do it down the road. It’s a tough decision to make and can literally make or break a young blog…

I generally tend to fall on the side of the latter category. While I definitely see the logic behind waiting for your readership to solidify, as a reader myself of many blogs, I would personally rather see the site the author intends from the first day. Readers are creatures of habit. The way your site looks the first day they visit is what they expect for the most part every day. If your site has ads then, they won’t be put off as you tinker around and find what works best.

Previously at Bookmark Bliss, we’ve talked about some of the Wordpress plugins in use on our site and even some of the changes we’ve made to our plugin lineup. As we’ve progressed the last few months, I’ve also been looking at a lot of tools to help monetize a site and basically make the job easy on our end to test out exactly what works best.

Here are 5 Wordpress Plugins we’ve come across that can help you to monetize your blog:

Adsense-Deluxe
If your site makes use of Google’s Adsense advertising, Adsense-Deluxe is the perfect plugin to help you manage things easily. In fact, it works well with almost any advertising package including Yahoo Ads. The Adsense-Deluxe plugin is smart and knows the rules of Google’s terms of service which helps you ensure your site is always compliant. Adsense-Deluxe will even limit the number of ads shown on a single page at one time to make sure you never exceed Google’s limit of 3. All Adsense ads here on our site are displayed using this plugin.

WP-Ads
WP-Ads is a simple little plugin that allows you to create regions on your site and display ads in those regions with a simple PHP call. Bookmark Bliss currently uses this plugin to display our graphical banner at the top of the page, as well as the square graphic at the top of the black sidebar. It tracks how many times your ad has been displayed and even offers the ability to rotate ads with different frequency. A great, simple tool that can make changing your ads a simple task.

Text-Link-Ads Widget (download after signing up)
Text-Link-Ads is one of the newest up and coming companies trying to compete with the likes of Google and Yahoo for text based advertising. Just recently, Bookmark Bliss was accepted into Text-Link-Ads and as a test, we’ve been playing around with their system. You can see the results in our green toolbar under “Featured Links.” As of this writing, these ads have only been up for a day or so and we currently have no links. The Text-Link-Ads Widget allows you to simply setup in your sidebar a block that is synchronized with the changes you make to your profile at the TLA website. Very convenient and very easy to use for anyone thinking of working with Text-Link-Ads for their site.

WP-Amazon
If your blog deals a lot with products a great source of revenue can come from becoming an Amazon partner and directly marketing Amazon products that you talk about. Users are generally more inclined to make purchases after reading about a particular item and with the WP-Amazon plugin, you can set yourself up for a piece of the commission. What I really like about this plugin is that it integrates entirely into your Wordpress admin tools allowing you to very easily incorporate images, descriptions, and Amazon links directly into posts. WP-Amazon makes it very easy to show your readers exactly what you’re talking about and maximize your potential of converting a sale.

WP-OpenAds
OpenAds is a great tool to help you manage private ad sales entirely on your own. It provides many of the tools made available by large advertising companies and is completely free to download and install. In addition, it’s also really easy to start using right away. If you figured out how to get Wordpress running, you can figure out how to install OpenAds. Although Bookmark Bliss is not currently using OpenAds to manage our private ads, I’ve used OpenAds (aka phpAdsNew) dozens of times for both clients and personal projects and I highly recommend it. Wp-OpenAds is a great little plugin that I’ve tested a few times that allows you to easily configure your blog to run ads generated by the OpenAds system. For more information on OpenAds check out this great summary by Matt over at NetBusinessBlog. 

Well, I hope this short summary has introduced you to some new plugins you might not have considered previously. What other monetizing plugins have you guys used on your blogs?

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 21st, 2007 and is filed under Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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