Making money blogging is a common dream to many bloggers. But sadly, only a few bloggers actually make money from blogging. The fact that you will make money depends of many factors, as such as your site traffic, the quality of your content, the power of your network, and many more.
Althought tools will not bring you results without any work, they can make your life easier or help you to optimize your online income.
In this article, I have selected the Top 10 WordPress plugins for monetizing your blog.
1. Advertising Manager
This plugin will manage and rotate your Google Adsense and other ads on your Wordpress blog. It automatically recognises many advertising networks including Google Adsense, AdBrite, Adify, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Adroll, Chitika, Commission Junction, CrispAds, OpenX, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN, and WidgetBucks. Unsupported ad networks can be used as well.
» Download
2. Ozh’ Who Sees Ads
Who Sees Ads is a must have for anyone using Adsense on his blog. It is an advanced ad management plugin that lets you decide who will see your ads depending on user defined conditions. You can manage ads in your templates (eg sidebar.php) or within posts and pages.
For instance, you could consider the following criteria: Is the visitor a regular reader? Does this visitor come from a search engine? Is the visitor currently reading an old post, or something fresh?
A very good way to fight against Adsense “Smart” Pricing.
» Download
3. AmazonSimpleAdmin
AmazonSimpleAdmin lets you easily integrate Amazon products into your WordPress posts and pages. By using the template feature, you can present the products in different styles.
The AmazonSimpleAdmin plugin work with WordPress shortcodes, which let you easily integrate it inside your blog posts, or pages.
» Download
4. AdRotate
When you display affiliate banners, it is very nice to be able to have your ads rotating so your readers will not always see the same banner every time he’ll visit your blog.
That’s exactly what the AdRotate plugin do: Automatically rotate your ads.
» Download
5. AFLinker – Affiliate Link Cloaker and SEO Links Redirect Manager
AFLinker is multi-functional plugin for affiliate marketing automation. It combines features of affiliate Link cloaker, SEO enhanced affiliate links generator, your own URL shortener service and redirect manager.
AFLinker converts predefined keywords within the text of your website pages into clickable clean (cloaked) links.
» Download
6. WP125
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.
» Download
7. iTunes Affiliate Link Maker (iTALM)
Do you link to the iTunes Store with or without an affiliate program? If you answered “yes” to the previous question, you’ll probably enjoy iTALM.
This plugin adds an itunes button to the visual editor which when clicked bring forward a jquery dialog containing a search for the iTunes store link maker.
Once you found what you were looking for, clicking on any link will ask for a title for the link and insert it into the content editor. iTALM also enables the ability to directly link to albums, something the standard link generator does not normally do.
» Download
8. ClickBank Hop Ad
If you monetize your websites, you probably already know Clickbank, one of the worldwide leaders of affiliate marketing. Clickbank also have text ads – quite similar to Google Adsense – that you can put on your site to make some money. With this ClickBank Hop Ad plugin, you’ll be able to insert these ads simply by using the dedicated widget.
» Download
9. DealDotCom Plugin
DealDotCom is a website that offer various products on a daily basis. They also have a quite cool affiliate program that allow you to arn up to 35% of the product price.
This plugin allow you to display the DealDotCom product of the day on your blog. Of course, with your affiliate link so you will make money.
» Download
10. Envato Recent Items
In a short amount of time, Envato managed to become a well known company in the blogging world, due to their excellent blogs as such as Freelance Switch or the Tuts+ network.
They also have a few marketplaces where you can buy various digital products as such as graphic files, WordPress themes, XHTML templates and a lot more.
What this plugin do is to let you display some Envato products of your choice, linked with your affiliate link. Simple, and extremely efficient.
» Download
Any more ideas? Don’t hesitate to leave us a comment below!
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Hello Jean Baptiste,
Nice list, There is also Kadom Ads Management : http://www.kadom.net/159/kadom-ads-management
And we will release a premium version soon.
@Thomas : Didn’t know that one, thanks for sharing it with us!
Hello from Russia!
Can I quote a post in your blog with the link to you?
@Polrav : Sure you can quote. Not reproduce, though
Thanks for this so informative post!
Actually talking about ads, what annoys me the most is the existence of Firefox Adblock Plus plugin. The more the web surfer in me loves it , the more the ad seller in me hates it. Yet it seems there’s no way to prevent it from hiding the ads – or at least I’ve never heard of none.
@Phoenixheart: I think that “AdBlock” plugin is killing blogs and free tutorials/informations websites.
When a blogger take 3 hours to write an interesting post, if you do block his ads – which are sometimes his only revenue – you’re not only lacking respect to his work, but you’re also make his blog dying.
If the blogger don’t make enought revenue from his blog, he’ll stop because he’ll have to go work for a company. That’s simple as that.
I have heard about some codes to detect AdBlock but I don’t think it is efficient, sadly.
Lovely, informative site, thanks
Awesome blog!
I thought about starting my own blog too but I’m just too lazy so, I guess I‘ll just have to keep checking yours out.
LOL,
Can’t agree with you more, Jean. Sometimes I even hope that my potential advertisers would use IE (what a shame) to view my site, as it doesn’t have ABP… As Firefox is rapidly expanding, bloggers really have a big reason to worry about ads.
@Phoenixheart : Happilly, lots of advertisers don’t know about AdBlock, and most blog readers don’t use it.
Though, I though AdBlock only blocked Adsense ads…Do it block other ads as such as BSA too?
@Jean-Baptiste Jung : Adblock can import different lists for ad-blocking. These Lists are updated automatically and block a lot of ads – not only adsense. You even can make your own rules …
and your new blog is added to my feedreader!
I think adblock could be a problem for bloggers, but would the average adblock user click on ads – if he is sneaky enough to use adblock, i think not…
However – nice list Jean-Baptist
First, your blog looks great. Second, thanks for the plugin list. Perhaps a little tip: did you think about to use the Subscribe to Comments plugin? With its help, your reader that commented a post gets a notification about a new comment. It helps to increase visits/pageviews.
@Hires Squad : Quite true…But sad too. Bloggers work should be encouraged by readers in a way or another.
@BlogInterface.net : Thanks for the subscribe to comments idea! I’m going to install it
@Jean, @Hires Squad: Yeah right. Sadly, ABP blocks just almost everything, and it’s quite easy to add rules to get rid of the remaining. In fact in my case “Most Active Filter” is actually s3.buysellads.com^ – darn it.
People who have this plugin installed really sucks.
Nice roundup! Good to have a jumping off point for this sort of thing. researching plugins can be such a hassle.
Thanks for mentioning Wp125.
And on the subject of AdBlock, most of the people running it use a set of filters called EasyList, which removes 80% of ads, including BSA. I’ve written quite a few posts ranting about it, which you’ll find if you search my blog.
Hi, good overview..
Here is another method that works well, selling text links to content related advertisers.
Have you heard about LinkLift? They have just launched in the UK (www.linklift.co.uk) and provide plug-ins that support Wordpress.
Unlike other text link brokers they pay in pounds and on a fixed monthly basis.
For more info check out blog.linklift.co.uk/
Cheers
Guy
I think adblock could be a real nasty problem for bloggers. Don’t us it.
Hi!
I have a small, new blog (around 30000 visits/month) growing fast. And I’m looking for a good advertising network.
I’m still too small for BSA, and Google doesn’t have 125×125 ads (they have text ads only for this size). And I have little to know knowledge in advertising…
So, do you know a good ad network?
Thanks Jean for this review, as I am just looking for adsense alternatives – don’t like that big square text ad they have, although it is most effective, but it doesn’t look nice.
@Tsedaka : If you don’t want to join BSA, I suggest you to directly sell 125px ads on your blog. I’ll write a post about that very soon, so grab our RSS feed if you don’t already have it in your reader
I have tried all of these except AFLinker. Thanks
great list! thanks for share
I find that managing ads is the easy part—tracking click throughs seems to be the hard part. Do you have any advice on this? Tips, hacks?
@bcarter : The “redirection” plugin for WP track clicks.
It’s useful for me. Especially the plugin to filter in showing for non search engine traffic. Thanks Jean! Keep rockin! Greetz, Azis @ BloggerSpeed.com
Great info. Thanks for sharing