monetize

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.

Is Stumble traffic really good traffic?

by Tricia

In the last few months I’ve seen more and more bloggers getting excited about Stumbleupon and adding “stumble” buttons to their posts in order to encourage their visitors to stumble their latest entries.

While it’s nice to see your traffic stats go up I’ve often wondered if there’s any value to traffic from sites like Stumbleupon.

On Thursday evening I spent some time adding several of the recent posts on Odd Planet to Thoof. The posts that I’ve added to Thoof in the past have always brought in new traffic to my sites.

What’s more, the people who’ve decided to visit one of my sites after seeing the posts summary on Thoof have often taken the time to stop and leave a comment on the post. Some have also enjoyed the posts enough to add them to Digg, StumbleUpon and other social bookmark sites.

The great thing about Digg, Thoof and other social bookmark sites is that when people visit those sites they pick and choose what websites they visit. On the other hand when someone uses StumbleUpon they are taken to new sites, ones they may or may not want to visit. I suspect that most people quickly visit site to site when they stumble, not stopping to explore the site they are on at all.

To prove my point – some of the posts that I added to Thoof on Thursday night have turned out to be quite popular on Thoof. Popular enough to bring in about 500 new visitors in the last two days. Several of these new visitors added the posts to social bookmarking sites, dugg the post and yes a few stumbled the posts too.

The stumbles resulted in more than 4,500 stumbles for ONE Odd Planet post yesterday.

4,500 visits. That’s amazing isn’t it? Shouldn’t I be happy about that?

While it’s possible that some of the stumblers might have bookmarked the site yesterday for future visits or added it to their favorite social bookmarking site I suspect most looked at the funny picture that’s posted, had a little laugh and moved on.

None of the stumblers stopped to leave a comment. This particular post was published on October 3rd and the last comment left on the post is October 6th – well before all this stumbling occurred. Yet the posts that were very popular on Thoof got quite a few new comments and hopefully some of the new Thoof visitors will return.

I’ve monetized Odd Planet with Google Adsense. This site usually does ok with Google Adsense. It doesn’t make a lot of money each day, but I’d say it usually averages a dollar or two. Yesterday the site had more than 4,500 visitors. Do you know how much I made on Google Adsense on that site yesterday? 34 cents. Uh huh. Some of my other sites that only had 100 visitors on Saturday made quite a bit more than that.

This only re-enforces my opinion that StumbleUpon traffic is hit and run traffic.

My other worry is that Google, who doesn’t like sites that create “false impressions” of their ads, could see all this hit and run traffic as an effort to increase ad impressions and end up banning my account. I’m actually glad that there wasn’t a huge increase in Google Adsense clicks as it might have raised Google’s suspicion.

At this point I think I’d much rather have an extra hundred or so visitors to a post from a site like Thoof or Digg where people have chosen to visit the post on their own rather than thousands of empty hits from StumbleUpon.

Since I run several websites and blogs on my hosting account I worry about getting too much traffic too. I’ve had to change hosts twice so far this year and the next move will probably be an upgrade to VPS hosting. You can read about my hosting problems and CPU resource over usage on The WebFiles. A huge increase in extra traffic – sometimes 6 hits per minute on the post I’ve been discussing could be the final straw that causes my host to shut my account down. If it was real traffic I’d deal with it ok, but to worry about my hosting account over empty traffic – no way.

The stumbling is still going strong. Looking at the Statcounter Stats for Odd Planet there’s been 1,304 page loads in the last 3 hours and forty five minutes (yes it’s 3:45 am) and the majority of those page loads were StumbleUpon visitors.

Once all the stumbling stops I’ll keep an eye on the site to see if the traffic has increased a little bit over it’s past daily average. Of course since a few posts were popular on several of the sites I’ve mentioned in the last few days I may have trouble deciding which site caused a slight increase (return visitors) in the average traffic once all of this dies down.

Have you had some of your posts become popular on StumbleUpon, Digg, Thoof or a social bookmarking site? If you have, have you analyzed the traffic from those sites to see if you gained any benefit from the increase in visitors at all?

12 Blog design tips to keep your visitors and advertisers happy

by Tricia

One of the forums I’m on has a discussion about best blogging practices. Here’s a few tips that I just added to the thread that you might consider for your own blog design. I’ve written these suggestions mainly with bloggers who write posts for which they get compensation by advertisers in mind, but I think these suggestions are good guidelines for most bloggers.

It’s nice when a blog design reflects your personal style or co-ordinates well with your niche topic.

If you are writing posts for compensation or selling ad space in you sidebar your blog should probably have a professional image. This doesn’t mean plain and boring.

1. If you are using a standard template that 1000’s of other bloggers are using personalize it in some way to reflect your blogs style. If you aren’t sure how to do this ask people on a web forum or hire someone to spruce up your site.

2. Avoid flashing buttons and images.

3. For the most part write your posts in one color of text and one font size. (There are some blogs with multicolored posts and I find them hard to read.)

4. Make sure that the font that you’ve chosen for your blog is easy to read and is of a color that can be read easily against the background color of your blog. Bright white text on dark or black backgrounds tires the eye quickly and is hard to read. If your blog has a dark background a light gray text seems to work best.

* In general I think dark blog backgrounds are frowned upon by quite a few bloggers (and possibly advertisers). Why? I’m not sure, but I think it’s mainly because they are often harder to read and as a result are thought of as not being well designed.

5. Avoid autoplay music! I think the majority of bloggers dislike autoplay music on blogs. If you want to have music on your site please have it in the off mode and let your visitors turn it on if they want to hear it.

You want your visitors to read your posts. It’s hard to concentrate sometimes when music is blaring at you, particularly if the visitor doesn’t like that style of music.

6. Avoid autoplay video. See above. Let your visitors turn the videos on if they want to view them. Anything autoplay is distracting.

7. Try to make sure that your visitors can navigate your site easily. You may actually see your traffic or page views increase if you follow some of these suggestions:

– Think about making your post titles clickable so visitors can easily read the comments that have been left on the post and possibly add their own.

– Likewise be sure that your visitors can see the comment link easily so that they can leave a comment if they want to.

– I’m sure advertisers love to see comments on posts, I know regular site visitors do, so do everything possible to make it easier for your visitors to leave you a comment. That includes not making your visitors register to your site just to leave a comment.

8. At the end of your main page, and possibly on your single posts, have navigation tags so that your visitors can easily move to the next page or next post.

9. If you like buttons or if you have very long blogrolls, categories, or archives think about moving them to pages rather than keeping them in your sidebar, or try drop down menus. Your sidebar will look less cluttered and your page might load faster.

10. Sites with only one post on the main page or dozens can be frustrating for visitors. If you have too many posts the site will load very slowly. If you only have one post your visitor might not click through to the next page to see what other fabulous posts you’ve written. New posts should probably be on your main page for a day or two, so gauge how many posts to include on the front page by how many you normally write on the average day. I think five to ten posts is probably a good amount to have on the main index page.

11. Using slang in your posts can be fun or even funny sometimes, but don’t over do it. It can make your posts harder to read and even understand, and if you are creating blog posts for advertisers they probably want you to use proper words. On that note, if you are writing a post in English don’t mix your native language into the post. It just makes it harder for English readers to follow and understand.

12. It’s also a good idea to spell and grammar check your posts before publishing. Most browsers have plugins or extensions that can be added to help you check spelling and grammar as you type.

Practicing some or all of these tips should keep your visitors happy and you might even start to see an increase in your traffic. Remember an increase in the quality of your site and in your traffic could enhance your ability to monetize your blog.

Good Luck!

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