Website - Do It Yourself - Add Advertisements to Wordpress

Add Advertisements to Wordpress

Written by Administrator
Friday, 26 January 2007
Make your blog pay for itself and more. If you don't mind advertisements on the edge of your blog, there is little reason to avoid putting either Adsense ads or afffiliate ads along the side, sprinkled into the posts, between the posts or as banners at the top. The number of ads should be kept low if you want to preserve the clarity and order of a page. Some sites try to cram as many ads as possible on every square inch and it produces a certain kind of "busy" site but may not be one you or your visitors will enjoy. The advice I hear is to make the ads blend into the context of the blog, that is, choose colors that match your context, avoid boarders that separate the ads from the context and put them where the eye most naturally goes. This site puts ads along the right side to keep them together but not cut away from the text. I left off a dividing line between the sidebars and the center. The ads mainly are colorful things that stand out, rather than text ads. In that sense they do not blend in. But this site is about building sites and the ads are the tools. So the interest of the viewer should be served by having the ads stand out a bit. To more blend them in, stay with the text ads you see in AdSense. Or mix more photos and color into your context to balance out the color in the ads. Location. They say most people's eyes go to the left top first, and then spend the next level of time on the upper left side and across the top center. Then down the center and down the right side. You want to put ads in those places starting out at top left. A strip of ads down the left side, starting at the top sounds good. Or a banner across the top center. But use your own judgement and then test the different choices and see which one works best. The first and most common type of ad is the Google AdSense ads. They are free to use, just go register to be an AdSense publisher. Put the code they give you into the site and the ads show up immediately. If any one clicks on the ads, Google will pay you a small fee. Usually between 10 cents to a few dollars per click. Affiliate sales pay you a commission on every sale that results from someone clicking on your ads, going to the store and buying something. The commission can be much larger than the Google AdSense payments but is based on actual purchases rather than the click through. It is easy to get into most affiliate programs even when your traffic is low. It depends on their evaluation of the potential for your site to create traffic that is interested in their products. Amazon is a good program that sells many different things. Since there are books on almost any subject, almost any site can sell books from Amazon that applies to their content. Let's go through an example of adding AdSense to a Wordpress blog. First we will put banner size text ads at the top of content in each page. This way no matter what is shown on the page, we will have ads above it in a very good place to catch a viewer's eye. Here is the page we are going to create on my blog at Nano Future 2030: Click on this small image to get the entire page. The two text ads appear above the main content. You can see that the content is nanotechnology, AI and discusses dreams. One ad is on target but the other pulled in an off target ad on beds and bedding. Sometimes they get it right, and sometimes not. So how do we get the text ads to appear here? I used a plugin called AdSense-Deluxe . Get it, upload it to wp-content/plugins and Activate it in "Plugins". Then go to options and set up the ad. You need an account at Google AdSense and you need the ID word that identifies your ads. All you have to do is insert one line of code into your posts or into your Theme files to have the ads appear. Here is a copy of the code page where I inserted the AD code to generate the ads. You can find it by going to Presentation then to Theme Editor and clicking on the main page template, in this case called index.php A "div" is just a block of any code. ( div ) starts a block and (/div) closes it. The "main" div contains the "content" div and at the very top of content, I put the one line of code from Adsense_deluxe. The two br are to provide a bit of space between the blocks. Click on the image to see the entire page of code. Latest Module for Amazon Affiliates. They have a new plugin for Wordpress that allows you to search the Amazon catalog for products as you write your blog and drop product ads into the blog post on the spot. Go to www.maalang.commaalang.com to see a demo and download the module.