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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.

Removing widgets to speed up site load

by Tricia

Earlier this evening I discovered that my sites were hanging. I could see that it was the blogcatalog widget that was hanging. I guess they had a problem with their site late in the evening.

That’s the trouble with widgets and badges and banners that have to pull data from another site. If the site is overloaded with visitors or is having a problem it can affect how your own site loads.

I’ve noticed many times that the mybloglog and the blogcatalog widgets have slowed my sites and others that I’ve visited, but it was the worst I’ve ever seen it tonight. So I took both widgets off of all my and my husbands blogs.

The sites seem to load much faster to me now. Well unless something else causes it to slow down. I’ve noticed that in the early morning hours Adbrite, Technorati, and the Truth Laid Bare codes can cause a bit of slow down in loading.

Have you removed your widgets or any other links to speed up the loading of your site? If so, which ones did you remove?

Make money using Text Link Ads

by Tricia

Every once in a while I plan to talk about services or affiliate related companies that I use to monetize this site or my other websites and blogs. One of the companies that I’ve been working with for at least the last 8 months is Text Link Ads.

Text Link Ads is a service that helps you monetize your site by helping you get advertisers to purchase link space – usually in your sites sidebar – for a week or a month at a time.

I know they base which sites are accepted by a mix of stats which include page rank, Alexa rank and I believe how many RSS subscribers the site has at the time of submission.

I went to test my theory. I’ve got two sites that haven’t been accepted yet so I resubmitted them and got the same results – well let you know when your site is accepted. Then I decided to try adding my husbands site Guitar Licks and it was accepted right away.

The only major difference between my husbands site that was accepted and the two of mine that are still waiting is that his has 8 more RSS subscribers … yet it’s a PR 3 and the site of mine that’s been waiting the longest (6 months) is a PR 4. I wrote to them to ask them to re-evaluate the two sites that I’ve had waiting for months manual. Hopefully they will do that for me because frankly I don’t see much difference in the stats of the site that was just accepted and the two that are waiting.

My advice is to not try to add a site until it’s at least a PR3, had a decent ALexa rank and hopefully at least 40 to 50 RSS subscribers.

BTW if anyone wants to subscribe to this sites RSS feed I’ll be happy to take a look at your site and return the favor.

Once you’ve added your site and it’s been accepted you must add a blank xml file to the root of that site. This is where any text ad info will be placed when Text Link Ads sells some links for your site.

Then you’ll be asked to set up how you’d like the links to appear once you have some. You can decide how many link spaces to sell. I think generally starting at 6 or 8 is good. You can also decide if you’d like the text links to be outlined in a box, if there should be a background color behind the text links and what the link color should be. I generally only use the text link color.

Oh there is a wordpress plugin that you can download and use on your site if you have a wordpress blog. I have a few blogs on the same domain. The plugin can only be activated for one site per domain.

Once you’ve set everything up properly and added the code that’s been created for your site to your sidebar you’ll see the words “Text Link Ad” in that space for approximately 6 hours. This will tell you that you did everything correctly.

After that there’s nothing else to do but sit back and wait for an advertiser to purchase a link on your site.

Some people have success almost right away, while others wait months before getting their first text link ad. Just keep working on your site, maintaining it’s current quality or improving it and I’m sure you’ll eventually get some links.

Advertisers might also be interested in purchasing Post links. These links are placed underneath a post. You can only use this feature with the wordpress plugin. I use the plugin on my main blog Tricia’s Musings and I’ve sold a number of post links.

You can approve or deny any text link or post link offers that are made. I believe you have three days to accept. If you don’t come to the TLA site and mark the offers as approved or denied I believe the links are automatically added.

I’ve never had a link offer that I’ve denied. They’ve all fit with the sites that they have been requested on.

I’ve done well with Text Link Ads. I make several hundred dollars each month with them and as I said I’ve still got sites to add (this is one of the sites waiting to be accepted) and empty link spaces to fill.

There’s certainly nothing to lose in trying the program.

Click this button to sign up now:

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