Day 10: How to integrate money methods…

Well after all that work getting signed up to different networks yesterday I guess you all are excited to learn how we are going use them through the challenge. So many people signed up yesterday that Val couldn’t deal with them all and roped in the other Affiliate Managers to help! If you have not yet applied, please follow Day 9 and email the affiliate manager that is assigned to you in email… They all know about the Crashed Challenge and so long as you have followed all the day’s so far will approve you.

Now today we will be going back to our normal video format, as there are so many different ways to moneytize I will be splitting these over the next 3 days. Today I will cover the basics needed to get you started…

How to add Ad’s into Simple Ads Manager

Well now the moment you’ve all be waiting for, we’ll look at how to create and manage ad’s here. This requires that you have done Day 4. Then I will cover special cases such as Clickbank later on…

Previously we created two Ad Places and assigned them to show our default Advertise Here adverts and to be automatically shown at the top and bottom of content areas. Now that we have access to ad’s that may earn us more money we can add these to the site.

The Simple Ads Manager software allows to us to ad multiple Advertisements to each Ad Place, and will then automatically rotate between them based on a priority that you set. We can also configure which Ad Places are shown on which pages, so that if you want you can have even more control!

UPDATE: An important update to the Simple Ads Manager plugin has been released today! This fixes a big bug which is crucial to todays task, please back up your wordpress and then goto the plugins page. Find the Simple Ads Manager in the list, and click the Update automatically link.

Lets start by working out where and what Ad Places we want to use on different pages. For bestfootball goals I am going try the following configuration:

  • A square ad place at the top of the right sidebar above the menu -  On every page.
  • A wide-tower ad in the right sidebar below the menu’s – On every page.
  • A square content block in the top of the content area – Only on blog posts.
  • A banner at the bottom of all content areas – Only on blog posts

The first step here is to add the Ad Places into the Simple Ads Manager.

  1. Click Ads on the Menu, then click Add New Place
  2. Enter the name, and select the size of the ad place.
  3. Enter a default ad to be shown if no other ad’s are linked to the zone.
  4. Click Save to add the Ad Place to the database.
  5. Do this for all the ad places you want for your site.
  6. Go to the Ad Places list, and delete the places that you are not using to keep the list clean.

To get the alignment of the BlogContentAreaSquare you need to use the code before <div style=”float: right; margin: 4px;”> and the code after </div> to align the ad in the blog content.

To get the alignment of the SidebarBottomTower you need to use the code before <center> and the code after </center>.

We then need to rearrange our sidebar to include our two sidebar ad’s. The easiest way to do this is to use Widgets.

  1. Goto Appearance on the menu and click Widgets.
  2. Drag the Ad Place widget onto the Sidebar area, select the SidebarTop Ad Place in the list.
  3. Then drag the Recent Posts, the Categories, and the Archive plugins onto the sidebar. Add another Ad Place to the sidebar, and then select it to show the SidebarBottomTower from the list.
  4. Check your page to make sure that everything is showing properly.

Update our settings to show our new ad places.

  1.  Goto Ads-> Settings
  2. Select our BlogContentAreaSquare to show at the top of the content areas, and the BottomContentBanner to show at the bottom
  3. Click Save.

This is all shown here…

Note: The full guide to Simple Ads Manager written by it’s developer is here http://www.simplelib.com/?p=480 for if ya wanna go further into it’s functionality. I’ve not included how to use Ad Zones as I believe this is overkill for the moment. I will instead do a Bonus post later on how you can use Ad Zones to determine which Ad Places are used on each page type.

How to choose the Ad’s to show on your blog

Generally this is where you either make, or lose money. As tempting as it may be randomly selecting adverts, putting them on your blog and then expecting readers to just click them no longer works. I’ve given you a good selection of different affiliate network types and products to choose from, and I know it can be a daunting task.


However we have got something to help us. If you remember back in Day 3 we played Guess Who, now we can put that information to use.

If you remember I split my users into two groups, the ones with no money that want to become better footballers. And the ones with money that may or may not play football that will watch it or spend money on it. Now you should have made a list of products in Day 9 that you thought may work for your blog, now is where we take that list and grab the ads for them.

Now we need to add our adverts to the Simple Ads Manager to show them on the site, in addition to controlling the priority we can also see which are being clicked on the most. I am going use a mixture of Adsense, MaxBounty CPA, and Clickbank/Plimus to deliver products that I feel my users will be interested in.

First of all Adsense…

I plan to include adsense in only a single area of the site for maximum click through rates. This area is the BlogContentAreaSquare ad place within the content and so is right in the users vision when they are reading.

  1. Log into your adsense account (http://rfurl.net/as), and goto the Adsense Setup menu.
  2. Click on Adsense for Content, select the ad size you want (I used 250×250 Square). Customize the colours if you really want to…
  3. Click continue, choose a channel (which helps you track which sites perform best) and click Continue…
  4. Click Create Ad and Get Code, select and copy this code.
  5. Go back to your Ad Places, and then click on the BlogContentAreaSquare ad place in the list.
  6. Click Add New Ad, enter a name, select Code Mode, and paste the code from Google in the Ad Code box.
  7. Set the priority to 10 as this is the only ad we will show in this area. Click Save.
  8. Click on any post or page on your site to activate the adsense code with google. For the first few times the page is shown it may show a Page cannot be Displayed error as Google will crawl your site before it enables the adsense code to run.

The video is here…

Now we want to include any Plimus/Clickbank ad’s that we have found for our site, I’ve found a really targetted product on Plimus that allows the user to watch live football games online. One of the differences of Plimus compared to other Affiliate Networks is that we have to request permission from the producer to sell any products. We will request permission for these products now.

  1. Goto http://rfurl.net/p and login.
  2. Click on Marketplace on the menu, enter your keyword and click Search.
  3. Browse the list and find the product you are interested in, click the Sellable items button to see how much it sells for, how much commission you get.
  4. Click the Grey square with the arrow next to the product title to have a look at the site and see if you would buy from it.
  5. If you are happy click the Sell Now button, and click Submit in the box that comes up.
  6. Wait. You will be emailed to be told if you been accepted or not.

The video is here…

Now lets look at if we can include any MaxBounty CPA ad’s on our site. I like CPA as its usually free to the user which means I can target nearly anyone!

  1. Goto MaxBounty and log in.
  2. Click Search Campaigns, enter a keyword and click Search.
  3. If you like the title, click on it. In the Preview Landing Page click the link to view the website that it will open. Generally if I wouldn’t buy or sign up to it I won’t add that offer to my website.
  4. If you are happy with the landing page in the Select Creative Type box select Banners. Look for banners that are the size of your Ad Places and that are attractive. Click get tracking code for the banners you want to use and copy the advert code from the window that opens.
  5. Goto Ad Places, and click the Ad Place you want to add the banner to.  Click Add New Ad, enter the campaign name as the ad name, and then paste the code for the banner you copied. Click Save
  6. Repeat this for each campaign/banner you want to add to your site.

The video is here…

 

Summary

Today’s post has been very difficult for me to write as it is a delicate topic to get the balance right. What I wanted to do was to give you the ability to earn money, yet I want to leave you with an open mind so that you can adapt the techniques for yourself. I hope that today I have achieved that, I am however concerned that covering more techniques in Day 11 may cause information overload. To that end Day 11 will look  at stuff other than Moneytization, and I will then be introducing at most 1 new moneytization method per day in future.