Easy Text Links

Easy Text Links is a modern plugin to help you make extra revenue from your blog by selling text links. Text link advertising can be significantly more lucrative than contextual ads. This plugin automates the insertion and expiration of the links, and helps you with quick reminder emails to your advertisers.

Other plugins that do similar text link advertising do exist in the repository, but they are typically front ends to services that provide such links (such as Text Link Ads, for instance.) They take a significant cut of your advertising revenue (50% in the case of Text Link Ads) acting as the middlemen between you and your advertisers. Easy Text Links, on the other hand, is for those who want to interact directly with their advertisers, and keep the whole revenue for themselves, cutting the middlemen.

Easy Text Links keeps track of the expiry dates of the text links on your page, and removes them when expired. It also gives you easy means of sending a reminder email to the advertiser, block or delete the links all from your blog page itself, without having to go to the admin page. Of course, it is smart and secure so that only the blog admin with the right privileges will ever see the options to modify the links. It does all this magic using a modern AJAX/jQuery framework with an attractive lightbox effect.

If you have a popular blog, text links can potentially bring in much more revenue than any contextual advertising. In my case, the difference was easily a factor of 100. Keep in mind, however, that most contextual ad providers (such as AdSense) do not like paid link placement, for obvious reasons. Your blog may get penalized in terms of page rank or search listing placement. Please weigh the pros and cons carefully before embarking on text link advertising. If you do decide to go for it, this plugin will be able to help.

Features

1. Automatic removal of your text links upon expiry.
2. Ability to send a reminder email to your advertiser with one click.
3. Ability to delete and block your links and modify their expiries.
4. Convenience of managing your links (delete, block, set expiry, email advertiser etc.) right from your blog post where the link appears, without going to the plugin admin page.
5. Attractive and modern interface with lightbox effect.
6. Highly secure and robust against potential hacker attacks and attempts to manipulate links.
7. Now available in your own language using machine translation curtsey of Google and Microsoft.

Pro Version

A pro version of this plugin is available with the following added features:

1. Fully automated link sales and expiry (with the help of the EZ PayPal plugin available at WordPress.)
2. Your advertisers will see “Buy Now” buttons to purchase links.
3. Ability to approve links before they show on your blog.
4. Basic widget support.
5. Automatic email reminders to you and your advertiser when the links are about to expire. (WIP)
6. Choice of several attractive “Advertise Here” images. (WIP)
7. Advanced widget support with a dedicated widget. (WIP)