Page 19: WordPress has no monetization abilities built-in
To make money from blogging you have to “monetize” your pages a bit and convert your visitors from just readers, to some kind of action – whether it be a click on an ad or purchasing something. While monetizing your blog will be a future series for me to write, for the purposes of this post I’m going to give you some WordPress Monetization Plugins to explore. In contrast to the last page, these monetization plugins focus on the ability to use Affiliate Programs to monetize your WordPress blog.
When I think about monetizing a blog, I usually go back to the first affiliate program I signed up for: Amazon. Many think that you can’t make money anymore from Amazon – and nothing could be further from the truth. I make money every month from Amazon. I suggest you read my posts How to Monetize Your Blog Part 1 – Adsense, Amazon Success on Any blog, and Amazon Machine Tags WordPress Plugin. If you want a cool search and drag and drop interface to use from your WP dashboard “Write” page to pull amazon items into post, use the WP-Amazon Reloaded plugin for WordPress 2.5+, and WP-Amazon for WordPress 2.3x and before.
Let’s say that you want to put a rotating “stripe ad” at the top of your blog like the one you see at the top of this page. Just read Stripe Ad: Great New Way to Monetize Your Blog.
Maybe you want to insert eBay auctions into your blog posts, which can be a VERY lucrative and easy way to make some extra cash. I recommend you read my full post How to Earn Money Using Affiliate Ebay WordPress Plugin BayRSS. I even show you examples of how easy it is to do.
If you want to insert your own affiliate ad codes into your posts and pages, rotate them and control who sees them (and when) – the Who Sees Ads plugin is a great choice for this as well.
You could even manage your own ad-serving system and sell links, reviews, banner ads, or just about anything in your site using OiOPublisher – The Best Blog Monetization Ad System I’ve Seen Yet.
You really hit the nail on the head with this post…or 20 nails…
The funny thing is that everything you talked about here – are all things that i use on every blog. The comment form, the 2 sitemaps, the search log, some kind of stats, super cache, etc.
I’ve often wondered why a lot of these things don’t get built in.
Looks like the feed notations on commentluv didn’t work. delete the other one please.
Great resource you have compiled here. I think most people are aware of about half of these problems and the plugins to fix them, but this lays it all out.
Thanks!
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On the breadcrumb thing, were you not tempted to put JTPratt or some keywords or something instead of ‘home’ …? Would this not be better from SEO point of view?
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looking for the same plugin for a long time…thanks alot
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no really, because navigation for users always trumps SEO….
Do you still recommend wpSEO? This post was some time ago and things change fast. Is it still better than All In One or PlatinumSEO. I’ve tried AIO and Plat. Haven’t tried wpSEO. I can’t see a whole lot of difference, but I don’t have enough experience to know which performs better.
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I use wpSEO on all the sites that I had it on, but now (the newer version) requires a paid license. So now I use All in one SEO on new sites I setup.
I just switched to platinum SEO because of the automatic 301 redirects when you change your links. I wanted to change the way I structured my links but thought it would be a pain to do it myself – well, I tried the platinum SEO plugin – changed the permalinks and checked my pages indexed in google and they all showed the new link structure. Don’t know how it did that but I’m sold.
I think from SEO standpoint, not having a sitemap means you aren’t realizing your full potential with search engine crawl and having maximum number of entries indexed.
Good tips on HTML tags and SEO for blogs! I have a WordPress blog bolted onto my “Plumbing” site and used an overlay template to make it look a little more unique. If you click on my name you will see the home page and can navigate to my blog by clicking on the “Comments” link at the bottom of the page.
Caution:
Do not get sucked into the SEO blog plug-in that Jeff Johnson promotes. It has a link back to his stuff in the footer of the blog. That link makes your blog look unprofessional I think. The best SEO overlay for WordPress is Semi-o-Logic. It’s an expensive upgrade, but worth the money if you’re serious about SEO for your blog.
I don’t know if WordPress reads your blog, but several of these have been added to the basic installation now.
Some really nice points.. WordPress comments are nofollowed by default and it doesn’t give us any option to turn them do follow. No built in advertising system and Statistics is a big hole.
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I’ve done two things: I wrote a php script to set a number of WordPress options — like my permalinks to the values I always use. Secondly, I have a checklist and always install the Comment Luv, Keyword Luv, Top Commenters and DoFollow every time I install WordPress on a domain.