If you’ve like me to start selling ads on your WordPress blog, you either signup for an advertising network like Google Adsense or sell ads directly on your own. You know 125 x 125 button advertising has become a rage with almost every blog / site selling advertisement.
The WP125 plugin is designed to make it easy to manage 125×125 banner ads on your blog. The plugin adds a new “Ads” menu to the WordPress admin, featuring submenus for tweaking display settings and adding and removing ads. It’s very customizable, allowing you plenty of options for displaying the ads. It can optionally track the number of times the ads are clicked. The best part is you don’t have to count forward on your calendar anymore. You can just set how long an ad should run, and it will figure out the end date for you, and it will take the ad down automatically. The plugin does a lot to make it easy for you to manage your 125×125 ads quickly so you can get back to what’s really important: Blogging.
Features:
- 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 receive 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.
Our Review:
Getting started with WP125 is easy. Download the plugin from the repository and install it on your WordPress blog.
The plugin creates a new Ads menu that you can use to configure all settings. You can select the number of ads you want to sell as well as if you want to stack them in one or two columns.
The next step is to integrate them into your blog template. You have two options for this. One is to use <?php wp125_write_ads(); ?> where you want to display the ads. I suggest putting this into your sidebar.
If you don’t like the one or two column setting, you can choose to custom layout your advertisements. Use <?php wp125_single_ad(num); ?> where num is the number of the ad you wish to display.
Overall this is a really good plugin that will get you started with selling adverting on your blog. There are several features that can be added to this.
One more option that can be added is the creation of ad slots. This will ensure you don’t need to use the code for displaying single ads all over but instead use a code for ad slots.
I know the plugin is called WP125, but it would be great to see added support for other banner sizes including the popular 468×60 etc.
