How to Manage Ads in the WordPress Sidebar

Anyone who owns a website may have thought about selling ads or advertising space on their website. The options  are endless. You can put adsense code on your site, add affiliate banners or even sell advertising space on your website to someone else. You may also need to consider if you want to display text ads or banner ads.  If you have been looking for some options to add ads here are some ideas.

Who Sees Ads

This plugin is smart. You can set it up so your regular readers don’t have to be confronted lots of ads but your new readers are. This assumes that returning visitors come to your site for content whilst first time visitors come from search engines and are looking for particular information. Now bear in mind that it takes about 7 points of communication to build a relationship, then this plugin may not be the best idea. Once you have built the relationship with your returning readers they may well be predisposed to buy from you.  So depending on your website, this plugin may be a great option but there are a few other ones.

WP125

A plugin that I recently found and quite enjoy is the WP125 plugin. If you want to get an idea of how it works, check out the banners to the right of this web page. You can probably see 6 small square banner ads that are 125 x 125 pixels wide. This plugin formats the banners nicely rather than if you just copied and pasted the html in the text widget. Even better you don’t even need to know how to create a link in html as this little plugin does everything for you. You can control how many of the little banners that appear and whether they appear in a one column or two column format. It is magic. But we warned – it can clash with the WP Super Cache plugin so you will need to edit some code so it doesn’t upset your website.

Random / Rotating Ads

This plugin allows to you show random or rotating ads anywhere in your template or by using widgets. You can show any ad – from affiliate ads, banners, flash, text or even Adsense. You can rotate any of them.

The Random Ads plugin which allows you to simply and easily show random / rotating ads anywhere in your template files or using widgets.

You can show ANY type of ad: Google Adsense, affiliate ads, banners, images, flash, text, etc… There’s no limit to the number of ads you can put into rotation for an ad spot.

Post Layout

This is a great little plugin that I use to put banner ads within my post. If you check out the bottom of this post you will notice that I have a banner ad displayed as well as an opt-in form. This is the work of this little plugin. The plugin lets you choose if you want the banner ads to appear at the start of your post, in the middle or even at the end of your post.  It does have some limitations. The pro version (paid) is better in that you can control what types of banner ads appear by category. This is great because you can tailor certain ads to appear for certain categories. Very cool.

Max Banner Ads

This is another plugin that you can get for free.  But I prefer the paid version for this as the free version includes a little link that says “powered by Max Blog Press” – personally I find this annoying and I would prefer not to distract my readers with unnecessary links. The key thing with this plugin is that you can control your advertising space by adding and rotating banners on your wordpress blog without touching codes or editing any themes. The great thing about this plugin is that is also tracks the banners on your wordpress blog so you can get a sense of which ones are working and which ones aren’t. You can’t measure what you don’t track so it is well worth investing.

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One Response to How to Manage Ads in the WordPress Sidebar

  1. Thomas August 6, 2012 at 5:41 am #

    Love it! I’m now using the wp125 plugin. Thanks for the great information

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