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.