Making Money – Page 3

Use OIOpublisher to monetize your wordpress blog and cut out the middlemen

WordPress users who want to monetize their blogs, but are tired of giving a percentage of their earnings to middlemen can rejoice. The OIOpublisher plugin is here and it makes it easy to monetize your site!

Even if you don’t have a WordPress blog you can still use their hosted platform. I’ll be discussing the plugin features below, but I believe you can do all of the same things that the plugin does on the OIOplublisher website in hosted mode.

I’ve been trying out a new WordPress Plugin on my Home and Garden blog for the last week or so and it’s called OIOpublisher direct. Perhaps you’ve heard of this innovative plugin?

All you need to get started is a WordPress blog on it’s own domain, the OIOpublisher direct plugin and hopefully a site with decent traffic that might be of interest to advertisers. Of course, as I said earlier you can also use the hosted mode if you have a non-wordpress blog.

Once the plugin is installed and activated all you need to do is add the widgets to your widgetized blogs sidebar or add some code to your sidebars manually and you’ll soon be able to sell banner ad space, text link ads, inline ads or contextual links within blog posts.

As you can see from the image on the right I’ve set my home and garden site up so that I am able to sell links, banner space, inline ads and post type advertising. The first banner takes you to the purchase page where an advertiser could select any of the types of advertising features that I’ve enabled. The second banner will take an advertiser just to the banner purchase section. Directly below both OIOpublisher banners I have the first link I sold with the OIOpublisher plugin.

Several of my sites frequently attract the attention of advertisers and instead of either directing them to purchase a link or post through one of the companies I work with, or dealing with them directly and hoping I get paid, I can now use the plugin to do much of the work for me. It can even be set up so that you must get paid before the purchased ad will show up on the site.

There’s even a marketplace at the OIOpublisher website where you can have your blog listed. By listing your blog in the marketplace interested advertisers will have one more way to find your site and possibly purchase an ad for their business.

The plugin is free to use and fairly easy to set up although it does take a bit of time.

When you first activate the plugin you’ll need to go and customize the plugins settings. You can easily do this through the plugins interface. Within your WordPress blog’s admin section you’ll have a tab marked Business. This is the OIOpublisher plugin’s interface.

Within the settings section you’ll be able to set prices for the links, posts, banners and inline ads that you wish to sell. If you don’t want to use one of the features simply keep the price at 0 and that feature will be turned off. If you’d like to sell a different type of ad space that is not listed you can customized your own sales feature. For example, OIOpublisher is set up to either sell links only on the homepage or site wide (not including the home page), but if you’d like to truly sell site wide links that include the home page you can set up a custom option.

In the settings section you’ll also be able to list your paypal address so that when someone wants to buy a post, a banner ad or a text link they can pay you immediately or you can set it up so that payment is not automatically requested by the widget until you’ve approved the request.

Other features within the setting section are the ability to set all purchased links so that they will be no-follow, request that links be family friendly, choose the currency in which the payment must be made (currently the options are USD, GBP, and EUR), pay before or after approval, and whether to allow subscription payments. I believe if an advertiser were to chose the subscription payments a reminder would be sent out to the advertiser near the end of each month reminding them that to continue their ad they will need to submit a payment.

The OIOpublisher site has demos and helpful instructions that should assist you in getting the plugin set up.

Give it a try if you want to monetize your site and keep all of your earnings. It only takes about half an hour at most to fully set up the plugin and you could begin to earn money almost immediately if you’ve already had advertisers expressing interest in your site.

As I said I’m only using it on one of my blogs at this time, but I hope to find the time to activate the plugin on all of my blogs sometime this week.

Earlier today, Simon from OIOpublisher, sent out an email to everyone that had registered at the OIOpublisher site stating that they were also creating a new feature called Social Blogging.

If you read a lot of the larger blogs, you will find that nearly all of them mention from time to time how important making connections is in blogging. As you might have guessed, that’s what the OIOpublisher Social Blogging module will be all about.

Instead of trying to make false connections through link exchanges, or even through advertising, maybe we should be concentrating more on our blog content doing the talking for us. What if you could participate in conversations through your own blog, without having to deviate from your existing blogging routine?

Yes, that’s right, I’ve been busy creating the world’s first purpose-built blogging conversation system, where you can join blogger groups, start new conversation topics, and reply to existing conversation posts right from your blog’s dashboard.

You can read more about Social Blogging at the OIOpublisher website. It appears that social groups haven’t been enabled yet, but if you want to learn all about it read the site and be ready to sign up when this new feature is enabled.

Triggit allows you to add links to Amazon, photos and video on the fly

by Tricia

Well I’m back from visiting Vegas.

I was really sick while I was in Vegas so I must say that I only went to Bl0gworld for two hours! However I did take in quite a bit of information during that time. I also attended part of P0stiecon (I was still sick and even missed my speaking engagement there!) and I learned quite a bit there as well.

At Blogworld I learned about a cool application/widget called Triggit. The site is in Beta right now and is only accepting people who are lucky enough to have an invitation a key. Of course I managed to get and I’m currently trying the system out.

Once you log into Triggit your given a code to put in your sites template just under the body tag. They’ve automated the system for Blogger and Typepad users, but as a WordPress user I had to manually add the coding to my site.

Once the code has been added to your site you can easily use the Triggit bookmark that can be dragged into your Firefox browsers tool bar to quickly add links to Amazon products, Commission Junction or add photos from Flickr, videos from Youtube or wine links from Wine Zap and Wine searcher directly into your posts.

As you know images often make a post a little more interesting so you can use the Triggit bookmarklet to add photos to your existing posts on the fly. Like any of the features all you have to do is click on the drop down list in the toolbar that is activated across the top of your page whenever you click on the Triggit bookmark when you are on a page with the Triggit coding and a list will appear which will allow you to pick which kind of link, image or video you’d like to add to your post.

In this case I tried adding a Flickr image. I clicked the Triggit drop down list and a Flicker search bar appeared. I typed in laptop computer and I was shown a number of thumbnails that had been tagged on Flickr with the word laptop. Once I picked a photo I clicked preview and I was then able to place the photo where I wanted it within the post. Once the photo is in the post you can move it around to align it as you wish.

I’ve mainly worked with Triggit adding Amazon links to some of my sites. All you need to do is pick Amazon from the drop down list, choose a word or phrase within your post that you’d like to create an Amazon link for and click search. Often a list of about 5 to 7 choices comes up and if I’m not totally satisfied with the choices I can always change the term to find a more appropriate link. Once I’ve found an Amazon item that I’d like to link to the word or phrase I select it and hit save. The next time I load the page the link is present within the post.

For example to link to an Amazon item for the word Ipod I followed the steps I’ve listed above and you should now see the word Ipod linked to an Amazon item. I also linked to a cool notebook accessory when I used the word laptop computer. Check it out.

I’m certain that you’ll enjoy Triggit.

I don’t have an invitations, but if you like the idea of the Triggit Tool, which is free to use BTW, go to the site and request and invite.

UPDATE: The folks at Triggit liked my post and the feedback I’ve been giving them and they granted me an access key to give you folks so you too can become Alpha testers of this great application:

I’ll tell you more about other interesting applications and companies that I discovered shortly!

So how many of you got hit by Google?

by Tricia

The other day when I saw sites across the board having their page rank lowered by Google I started to not feel quite as bad about losing some of my page rank. Hey, after all, it seems just about everyone’s in the same boat!

There’s been a lot of speculation as to what caused Google to hit so many sites by lowering their page ranks. Everything from speculation as to whether it was caused by paid links or networking too many sites and so on.

I run one of the Do follow blogrolls. Well, I think the only do follow blogroll and I’ve had a few people decide to drop off the list as a result of the google hits. Personally I don’t think being do follow has anything to do with all of our PR loses. I mean, I’ve been a do follow blogger for almost two years and this is the first time I’ve ever taken a google hit!

Well, ok, the last update my html based website went from a PR5 to a PR4 but I believe that was mostly because I hadn’t updated the site with any new articles for a long while. Hey … it’s got about 1000 pages – how much more can I write about exotic pet keeping on the site anyway? Really!

But this time around? Every single site I own, even ones that I do not sell links of any kind on have been hit!

Oh well, like I said, it looks like we’re all in the same boat. It will be interesting to see what happens if Google ever gets around to doing a proper page rank update.

The trouble is, if they really are upset with those that sell links or who have committed some other kind of infraction against Google … well that’s just going to make people get better at hiding what they are doing. I can see people starting to use code or cipher to encrypt their links to mask what they are doing.

Don’t you see something like that happening too? I mean, no one’s just going to give in and stop making the money that they have been just because of Google are they?

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