November 3, 2009 Last week we released the first in a series about using WordPress MU as a platform for entrepreneurial endeavors. Today we’re going to give you some easily digestible information about advertising basics and introduce you to some of the best tools currently available for monetizing your WPMU site.
Advertising is not the best monetization strategy for everyone. It’s usually more effective to employ this option in tandem with other strategies such as upgraded memberships, affiliate programs, sponsorship, additional services or products, etc. This is by no means an exhaustive post on the subject but concerns mainly the quality and placement of your advertisements. Let’s get down to business:
Tips for Making Advertising Work:
- Keep it relevant- ads that are irrelevant to your users are annoying and will drive traffic away. Period. Even if you can sell the space , don’t let it go to something that will continually tax the users’ sense of purpose at your site.
- Don’t let it be ugly! People adopt a defensive attitude immediately when they see ads that are visually intrusive and unattractive. They will not click and they will not buy. They will probably leave your site.
- Map your site and its traffic for strategy – utilizing a heatmap for clicks and a statistics package will help you examine what content is bringing you traffic and will help you to be more strategic about ad placement.
Best Advertising Tools for Monetizing the MU:
Advertising Widget:Mind-blowingly simple widget for targeting your advertising to your users based on how they arrived at your site.
Supporter Advertising:Allows you to configure ads to show before or after post content without having to touch a line of code.
Author Advertising:Blog admins can use this plugin to create their own revenue sharing programs. It comes with three different widgets and has a number of easily configurable options for complete admin control.
Advertising Management:This plugin makes it possible for you to easily include ads virtually anywhere throughout your blogs: below titles, below content, below comments, etc.
Who Sees Ads for WPMU:Allows the admin to set any number of rules about who sees ads or any other piece of content.
If you’ve tried any of these with your WPMU site, let us know how they’re working for you.
Sarah Gooding on Google+
I hate to do it but these were both very bad articles. No usefull information and is only a plug for WPMU Premium Plugins. They are great plugins and you should for sure plug themn in the article, but you gave us absoltely no usefull information in either of these two posts. All fluff and nothing else. I expected more form something entitled “WPMU for Entreneurs Monetize that MU!”. You provided no usefull strategies for monetizing MU at all.