If you’ve given up the low-paying and slightly obtrusive ad networks used by many new bloggers, in favor of selling ads directly, you may have been frustrated with the excessive time involved managing your ads. Not only do you have to find advertisers to sponsor your blog, you have to manually edit your template to put the ad in, and then head over to your favorite calendar app to set an alert to remind you when to take the ad down.
Time consuming practices like those are a thing of the past. The WP125 plugin can help you manage your ads more efficiently, leaving you with more time to write new posts. The plugin adds a new “Ads” menu to the WordPress admin, featuring submenus for tweaking display settings and adding and removing ads.
Features include:
- One or two column ad display, and support through template tags to implement your own unconventional design.
- Show as many ads as you want, and in either manual or random order
- Keep track of how many times an ad is clicked
- When creating a new ad, you don’t have to calculate the end date yourself. Just input how many days you wish the ad to run for, and the correct date will be applied. The ad will be automatically taken down when the time comes.
- When an ad run is over, the record is archived on the Inactive ads screen, so you can check on the final click count, or revive the ad for another run.
- When an ad slot is empty, a placeholder ad of your choice will be displayed. This could be a “Your Ad Here” image linking to a page with statistics and pricing, or an affiliate link.
- Optionally recieve email notifications when an ad expires. Useful if you send follow-up messages to advertisers, or if you just want to stay in the know.
Upgrading
You may upgrade the plugin via the automated system in WordPress 2.5 or greater, or “old-style” by downloading the new one and then
1. Deactivating plugin
2. Uploading the updated files
3. Reactivating plugin
Known Issues
- If you have WP Super Cache installed on your blog, it may conflict with WP125’s click tracking feature. To fix this, add “index.php” on a new line in the “Rejected URLs” field of the WP Super Cache options page. This will disable caching for yourblog.com/index.php. If someone goes to yourblog.com, they will still get the cached version, but since WP125’s click tracker URLs look like “/index.php?adclick=1,” they will avoid the cache.
Support
If you’re having a problem with the plugin, try posting on the official WordPress forum at https://wordpress.org/support/ (be sure to use the tag “WP125”!). I, or another user of the plugin, will hopefully be able to answer your questions. Or send me an email via the contact form on Webmaster-Source.com.
Translation Credits
- Danish Translation: Georg S. Adamsen
- French Translation: Alexandre Cloquet
- Italian Translation: Gianni Diurno
- Russian Translation: M. Comfi
- Simplified Chinese Translation: Sam Zuo
- Dutch Translation: Jackey van Melis
- Brasilian Portuguese Translation: Jos� de Menezes Filho
- German Translation: Simon Kraft
- Romanian Translation: Web Hosting Geeks
- Slovak Translation: Branco Radenovich, Web Hosting Geeks
- Ukrainian Translation: Michael Yunat, GetVOIP.com