For some reason, we have always been a bit reluctant to add advertisements to our blogs…and when I say ‘advertisements’ I mean the square 125×125 ads that you normally see in the sidebar of most blogs.  But since we have just recently signed up with Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind and as he recommends it, we thought it was about time to do so.

I see it as another way of diversifying our income. We tend to make most of our money on affiliate links. It’s worked well for us but we’re kind of putting all our eggs in the one basket by doing this. So it’s time to start making money from a few more sources.

So Where Did We Start?

The first thing we needed to do was find a plugin that does all the work of receiving payments. In the Blog Mastermind course Yaro recommends using a free piece of software called OpenX. I had a quick look at it on their website and it looked okay but it wasn’t quite what we were looking for and in fact it looked like it required a bit of work to maintain. We wanted something that did everything from start to finish so all we really needed to do was approve the payment.

In the meantime Wanda had found a product called OIO Publisher. This wasn’t free but  as I was to find out later it was an absolute bargain. The piece of software has an enormous number of features and can be used on both blogs and regular websites. 

I loaded it up on this blog and you can see it to the right in the sidebar. It just loads as a plugin if you are using it on a blog or if you have a website then OIO has an automatic installer to make it real easy to upload.

Once installed it was simply a matter of editing the settings in the admin area and then dragging the widgets over to the sidebar.

Here are just some of the features:

• it allows you to use a nofollow tag on all your ads (or remove it if you prefer)
• the ability to add both banner and text links PLUS inline ads ie. ads within blog posts
• you can charge more for ads with the nofollow tag removed
• you can choose the size of your ads
• you can choose how many ads to display
• payment test mode option – to test if it is all working correctly without making a payment
• an inbuilt affiliate program which you can opt into in order to make money from referring people to OIO Publisher
• the ability to change the currency code for payments
• subscription payment option
• the ability to allow image uploads by the person buying the ad space
• the ability to redirect buyers to another page rather than the standard payment form
• you can choose to include your own banners and text links – this is a good way of filling up ad spaces that are empty
• a space to add purchase instructions for buyers
• a variety of payment methods – you can use one or more of the following Paypal, Google Checkout, EntreCard, Offline Payments, Authorize.net, 2Checkout
• you can change the email templates that are sent out automatically when a purchase submitted, approved or rejected. 
• there are 3 options to change the theme for the actual payment page and if you can also make your own custom changes to the theme if you like
• you can set your own ad prices and the number of days the ads will run for that price AND you can set multiple prices for different lengths of time
• you can choose to rotate ads ie. in the same ad spot you can have two ads rotating
• purchasers can reserve ad spots in advance
• you can set up ads to display in certain categories (Wordpress only)
• you can create a link exchange text links which will display a persons link as long as they are linking back to you
• you can choose the amount of spacing between ads
• you can choose to show ads in your RSS feed
• I also just noticed a Posts tab – this is supposed to enable you to sell posts or paid reviews directly through your website – I haven’t looked into that yet so can’t comment at this point in time but I like the idea
• lastly it has a Custom section which allows you to sell whatever you like – this is great if you have an ebook

I just love this piece of software! CLICK HERE to read more…

So How Do You Go About Getting Advertisers

Well you could just sit back and wait for them to come to you. This can work well if you have a high-traffic blog but if your traffic is limited then your next step is to go actively searching for advertisers. This is what we will be doing over the coming weeks to fill up our ad slots not only for this blog but some of our other niche blogs and websites.

One of the best ways of doing this is to find blogs that already have paid advertisers and email those advertisers to see if they want to advertise on your blog. If they are already putting their ads up on websites around the net then they are more open to the concept and therefore more likely to accept your offer.

Another way is to do a search in Google for your keyword. Then take a look at the Google ads that show up on the page. These advertisers obviously have some sort of advertising budget so would be in the right frame of mind to receive an email from you asking if they would like to advertise on your blog.

You can also just type a related keyword into Google and just trawl through the businesses that come up in your niche.

How Much Should I Charge for Ad Spaces?

Good question and one that is hard to answer. The reason being is that there are so many factors involved that can affect the price including:

• your blog/website topic
• how much traffic your site receives
• your sites pagerank
• your Alexa rank
• the size of the ad
• whether the ad is a text link, banner ad, inline ad
• whether the links are nofollow or not

For this blog we are going to start with $30 for a 125×125 ad for 30 days. That may be too much or it may be too little. We won’t really know until we get any bites. If nobody is interested in that sort of rate then we will reduce it. If instead we get a lot of interest then we may increase it.

For one of our other blogs which has very high traffic and good pagerank we are going to start at $80 for a 125×125 ad for 30 days. Again, we will see how it goes before adjusting the price if needed.

For some of the blogs that are getting low traffic volumes we might stick with around $10 a month.

So there you have it. Adding advertisements to your site is not difficult especially if you use the right software that does everything for you.

Do you advertise on your blog? Let us know in the comments below…

Want to know where we learn to make money online? Head on over to Wealthy Affiliate University for all the latest info.

Just recently, Wanda and I have been discussing our blogs and which ones we want to work on. We have over 20 blogs/websites and even with the two of us, it is way too many to work on at the one time. So we decided to concentrate on just a couple over the next few months one of which is the blog you are now reading.

In the past, we haven’t really promoted this blog all that much – in fact, hardly at all. I just enjoy writing posts for it so wasn’t all that concerned that we weren’t getting much traffic. So now that we have had a change of mindset we have started looking at ways to increase traffic and comments to this blog.

We already know of quite a few different methods to do this but we are always on the look out for new ideas. To really succeed in this business you have to be prepared to be a continual student and learn as much as possible in order to stay ahead of the pack. So with this in mind, I went scouring the net for any new tips on how to increase blog comments.

I didn’t have to look far as one of the blogs I like to regularly drop in on is Zebida.com and on this blog I found a post about a Wordpress plugin called Comment Luv.  Comment Luv is a Wordpress plugin that extracts the url of the last blog post of the person leaving the comment. This assumes that they have a blog of course. It then posts the title of that blog post with a link below the comment they have left on your blog. This encourages people to leave comments as in return for the comment they get a link back to their website.

Now I’ve heard about this plugin before and in fact I was recommended it sometime back as a result of a post I wrote on the Top 20 Plugins to Increase Traffic to Your Blog.

The only problem I had with this plugin was the fact that I felt it would just encourage spammers. I had used a dofollow plugin in the past and had a similar problem so removed it. But from what Hesham was saying, it looked like it made a big increase in the number of comments he started receiving on his blog and they didn’t look like spammers to me.

So I have decided to give Comment Luv a go. I installed it yesterday so will give it a couple of months to see how it develops. It will be interesting to see if it does in fact make a difference.

Last week as I was leaving a comment on a blog I noticed a discussion between the owner and one of his readers about a Wordpress plugin he was using that automatically turns predefined keywords on his blog into affiliate links.

My first thought was that this was one of those programs you have to join where you get paid for each click from links on your site…you might have seen those blogs where ever second keyword is underlined twice in blue and you hover over the keyword and an annoying pop-up appears. But from looking at his blog posts I soon realized this wasn’t the case – the links were regular blue text links – nothing fancy or spammy looking.

So since I was a bit intrigued I clicked on the link in his comment and made my way over to the sales page for the Ninja Affiliate plugin. Once there, it really didn’t take me long to realize that I definitely needed to buy it. I even made a call to Wanda to see what she thought and she definitely agreed that this would save us a lot of time.

So How Does it Work?

The best way to describe how the plugin works is to use an example. So let’s  say for instance you are an affiliate for Amazon and your blog is all about fishing. And one of the products you promote regularly on your blog is a fishing rod called “The Prestige Fishing Rod”.

Now at the moment, in order to link to Amazon using that keyword phrase (ie. The Prestige Fishing Rod) you would have to grab the affiliate code from Amazon and manually pop it in to anywhere in your blog posts where you use that keyword phrase. We all know it’s not difficult to do but it is time consuming….this is where the Ninja Affiliate plugin comes into play.

With this plugin you will only ever have to grab your Amazon affiliate code once, place it in the back end admin area and from then on it will automatically add that affiliate link whenever it sees that keyword or keyword phrase (ie. The Prestige Fishing Rod)  in blog posts on your blog. This includes posts that you have created in the past as well as new posts.

You can also specify multiple keyword variations that link will apply to. For example,  ‘The Prestige Fishing Rod’, ‘Prestige Fishing Rod’, ‘Fishing Rod’ and so on.  If the plugin sees any of those keywords it will automatically convert them to links.

What I really like about this plugin is that you can specify how many links per post. You can have 1 or more, or just choose unlimited if you like.  Just be aware that too many links can make you look like a spammer. (I like to keep it at two or three.) And you don’t have to worry about all those links leaching your pagerank as there is an option to add a nofollow tag to each link.

You also don’t need to use this to link to affiliate links. You can link to other pages on your site if you like. This is a great way of getting more traffic to a particular post or page on your site.

There are a host of other features that come with this great little plugin including:

• the ability to cloak the links so instead of the reader seeing an affiliate link when they hover over the link they will instead see a keyword or whatever you choose to use.
• the ability to overide global settings for each individual post. So say you have set up your global settings to add a nofollow tag to each link but for one particular post you want the nofollow tag to be removed then this feature allows you to do this.
• the  facility to create groups so you can easily track the links you have created
• stats so you can see the number of clicks on each of the links you have created
• the ability to have each link open in a new window
• the ability to change the formatting of each link ie. link color, underline, bold, italics, font size and family
• the ability to exclude Pages from automatic linking
• the ability to exclude specific Categories from automatic linking

Final Conclusion…

This is a brilliant tool and we wonder how we ever did without it. Today we spent less than an hour creating links in the back-end which  resulted in literally hundreds of links on one of our niche blogs.  If we were to do this ourselves if would have taken us hours, if not days to accomplish.

Plus if we ever get the problem of a merchant closing down their affiliate program or going out of business then we don’t have to spend hours changing hundreds of links – all we need to do is change it once in the admin area and all the links will  change automatically.

We give the Ninja Affiliate plugin a big thumbs up. Highly recommended.

Further Reading

• Read more about the Ninja Affiliate plugin.
  

We are going to be holding a contest on one of our blogs and have been looking for a Wordpress plugin that will give our visitors the ability to vote for their favorite blog. My initial thought was that I would have no problem finding something suitable and I was even willing to pay for it! But unfortunately the options were limited and very disappointing.

However, I did end up finding a Wordpress plugin called WP-Polls which as the name suggests provides the ability to add a poll to your blog. The only problem was that I was looking for something that would allow me to add an image of each blog so that our visitors could see exactly who they were voting for. My initial assumption was that this plugin wasn’t capable of doing that so I kept looking for something that did.

During my search I came along a blog post at the zebida.com website written by Hesham. It describes how to add thumbnails and links using the WP-Polls plugin.

YES!…now I had the answer I was looking for. So my initial assumption that I couldn’t add images was wrong but I didn’t care as I now had everything I needed to create the blog contest.

How to Use WP-Polls

If you want to create your own blog contest using WP-Polls then this is what you need to do:

Step 1: Upload the WP-Polls plugin to your blog and activate it.

Step 2: Click on the Polls option on the left hand menu on your blog Dashboard and select Manage Polls. It will most likely be at the very bottom of the screen.

Step 3: You should already see a Poll listed. This is just an example poll but you can use this one instead of creating a new one. So go ahead and click the Edit link next to that poll.

Step 4: On the Edit Poll screen you will be able to enter the details of your contest so just overtype the information in the Poll Question and Poll Answer sections and select the options that suit you in the remaining fields. In the Poll Answer fields you will be able to add html in order to add an image but we will get into that in a little more detail below. For the moment just enter text into these fields.

Step 5: Click Edit Poll to save the changes.

Step 6: Add a new post and in the html part of the post add the following code: [poll id="1"]where ‘1′ is your poll ID. You can find the poll id in the Polls list on the Manage Polls page.

Step 7: Now save your post and preview it and you should now see your poll on the page.

Now for the Good Stuff…

So if you are like me you are probably wanting to add some images to each option. The code  below is what I used for my blog competiton. It displays the radio button above the image, provides a link to the website and also includes a horizontal line under each image.

To use this code you just need to paste it into the ’Poll Answer’ fields in the Manage Polls section. Obviously you will need to replace the links to correspond to the correct urls and image sources that you will be using. You can also play around with this if you know a bit of html – bold the text etc. I did notice that these fields were limited to only so many characters so you won’t be able to go too crazy here.

<a href="http://www.websitelink.com/"><b>Title of Blog Here</b></a><br>&nbsp;<img src="wp-content/uploads/2009/10/imageofblog.JPG" ><hr>

You can see in the image below exactly where to insert this code. Once the html has been entered just click the Edit Poll link to save your changes.

So now  if you have done everything right you should see something like this on your blog post.

Now if you’ve read my previous post you are probably thinking that this relates in some way to that but actually it is a completely different issue – it’s a totally different website for one thing but also a totally different problem. Today I woke up and went into this blog to update a blog post. For some reason I couldn’t do it and it kept saving as the previous version.

Thinking it was just a glitch I went and did other things and came back a couple of hours later to find that all of our blog posts had disappeared completely from the blog. It was showing zero blog posts on the Wordpress Dashboard and when I looked at the site in my browser the site was there but no posts were showing up.

I went in to the online chat with my hosting company and they said they could see the site and the posts. So I rang Wanda to get her to check and she could see it too. So thinking it was just me I went and tried using the Firefox browser and sure enough the blog posts were there when I viewed the site. But when I logged into wp-admin using Firefox it showed no blog posts. So I refreshed the browser to view the site again and the posts were no longer showing. So it was obviously a caching thing that was allowing others to see the posts….but they were definitely gone.

So back on to my hosting company to see if they could restore the site. Yes they could but it would cost $15. Fair enough, I was silly enough not to back it up so I should pay the price.

In the process of filling out the online form for Hostgator to get it restored I had to find out the actual files I wanted restored. Since I don’t know too much about where posts are stored in Wordpress I had to do a bit of research and I also thought that maybe I could figure out what the problem was first before having to hand over $15.

Eventually I found that Wordpress posts are stored in a separate database which you can find in your hosting companies admin area which in my case is CPanel on Hostgator. So in I went and found the area called MySQL Databases where the databases are held. That was easy but once in there I couldn’t figure out which database related to this blog. There are about 10-15 databases in there and all named something obscure which in no way resemble the name of this blog. So again I had to go and figure out how to find out which of those databases belonged to this blog.

I eventually found the answer on a forum post where someone had the same problem. So what I had to do was go into the blog files and find wp-config.php using Filezilla (which is the software I use to transfer files from my computer to the internet and vice versa). I had to transfer that file over to my computer and then open it up in Notepad so I could read the contents. At the top of the file it told me the name of the database.

Okay, so I was getting closer to figuring this out so I continued researching. I found another site that spoke about PhPMyAdmin in relation to Wordpress databases. I had no idea what that was but there was an icon called PHPMyAdmin on my CPanel so I clicked on that and on the page that opened up was an item listed called ‘Databases’ so I clicked on that and up came my list of databases.

I clicked on the one for my blog and on the next page was a list of tables one of which was called wp_posts. Aha, I thought…this has to be where the blog posts are stored. So I clicked on that and lo and behold I got an error message saying that it had crashed.

So back to Hostgator I went and told them about the error message. They told me I simply needed to select ‘Repair’ from the drop-down box and the database would be fixed. I did just that and sure enough it brought all of the blog posts back.

Woohoo!! So today I have been lucky but I am not going to take any chances in the future and have downloaded and installed a Wordpress database plugin that will backup the Wordpress database and allow for restores if required.

In the past few days, we moved from our old blogging platform to Wordpress and have been busily uploading plugins that will benefit our blogging experience and help in terms of SEO.

Although we have used Wordpress extensively in the past, we haven’t really used plugins to their full advantage. It has been pretty much trial and error and in fact, more often than not we would just upload a plugin because it looked pretty cool.

So prior to moving this blog over to Wordpress, I did some extensive research to find out what are the ‘must have’ plugins for Wordpress, and as a result of my research, here are the top 5 best Wordpress plugins:

1. All-In-One-SEO Pack

This in my opinion is one of the best plugins to improve Wordpress SEO. It ensures that your blog posts have better titles, better descriptions and it also helps to reduce problems associated with duplicate content.

Once activated you only need to change the main options once. Then for each individual post, you can change the title tag, description and keywords, although this is not required as the SEO Pack determines what needs to be included in these fields automatically by your original settings.

Download Here

2. What Would Seth Godin Do?

Believe it or not, ‘What Would Seth Godin Do? is the name of the plugin. Who is Seth Godin? - He is probably best known as the creator of Squidoo but is also the writer of a number of books and has probably one of the most popular blogs on the internet.

The reason the plugin got it’s name is because of something Seth Godin mentioned on his blog:

One opportunity that’s underused is the idea of using cookies to treat returning visitors differently than newbies. It’s more work at first, but it can offer two experiences to two different sorts of people.

This got Richard Millar working on a Wordpress plugin that would do just that…hence the ‘What Would Seth Godin Do’ plugin.

What this plugin does is place a small box of text either at the top or the bottom of each post depending on the number of times a visitor comes to your blog. So for instance, the first three times a visitor comes to your blog they could see one message and then anytime after that they could see a different message.

You can change the message to say whatever you like and you can also add a url.

This is a very cool plug-in and a definite must have.

Download Here

3. Subscribe to Comments

If you’ve ever left a comment on a blog you might have seen a small tick box under the comment field that allows you to subscribe to the post. If you ticked this checkbox then you would receive an email notification when further comments are left by other visitors on that particular blog post.

This is a great way to get readers to return to your blog as they follow up on responses left in response to their comments.

To get this option on your blog you will need to download the Subscribe to Comments plugin.

Download Here

4. Google Sitemap Generator for Wordpress

A sitemap is, in its most basic terms, a map of your site. It lets the search engine robots know how to find pages on your site and this means your pages are more likely to be indexed.

This plugin creates a sitemap for your blog and it also pings the major search engines when you have made changes to your blog.

Download Here

5. Share This

This handy plugin allows your visitors to share your posts with some of the top social bookmarking or networking sites.

Once activated, the plugin places a link at the end of each of your posts so that when it is clicked a pop-up is displayed that allows the reader to select the social networking or bookmarking site they want to submit your post to.

You do have to register to get this to work.

Download Here

So there you have it – the top 5 Wordpress plugins. I have uploaded each to this blog and they are all working perfectly.

If you have any plugin suggestions then please leave a comment.