Different Ways To Insert Ads Into Your WordPress Blog

Today's contribution will be on how to insert ads into your self-hosted WordPress blog. A self-hosted WordPress is not the same as WordPress.com. Basically the former gives you so much more room in monetization and flexibility.

There are different ways to insert ads, some easier than the others.

1. Inserting it into text widgets

The easiest way is to perhaps get a text widget that allows html codes. It normally comes together with your WordPress CMS and you can find it in the widget section as "text".

Most new users will use this way, but it's limited because the widgets are confined to where the developers have fixed it, for e.g. it's only in the sidebar, header, etc. If you want to put it into the content of your articles, you probably can't use that method.

If you're interested, this is how you should do it:

Go to your live preview and look for widgets. Click on it and you'll see a few options as to where to put your widgets, e.g. header, footer and sidebar.

For this case, i chose the primary sidebar and I looked for the "Text" widget. You can basically type anything in it, including html. The advertisement code is usually given by the advertising network, so you just have to copy and paste.

Open the Text widget and choose "Text" rather than "Visual". Text is where the coding happens and visual is what you see.

Paste the advertisement code in the box as highlighted.

And that's it! It's definitely the most user-friendly way I suppose, but it's limited.

2. Using the editor

Another way is to go to "Appearance" on your WordPress backend dashboard.

Go to Appearance and click "Editor". Editor is basically all of the coding that goes into your WordPress theme. If you mess it up, there's a potential that your website will crash. So if you're a tech noob like myself, try to avoid using this method.

Basically you have to look for the <head'> or the <body'> tags and insert the ads somewhere in between. I'm not too familiar with this method as well.

Which brings me to my favorite method number 3.

3. Download and install a free plugin called "Ad Inserter"

This plugin allows you to customize the ad position. You can insert the ads automatically on every article, after the first paragraph or somewhere in the middle or anywhere else, only have it displayed if your article is above 500 words and so on.

There are so many customizations you can do with it and it helps you to optimize your ad placements. Ads are annoying to readers so we have to find a balance between user experience and ad income.

I'm currently with Mediavine right now and they are an exclusive ad network, which means they are the ones inserting the ads for me. So if you're the type who hates to do the ad placements yourself, you can try signing up for one of these companies. The income is better than Adsense as well.

Hopefully this helps you.

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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