Next up in the “Five” series for plugins is a snapshot of five advertisement related plugins for your WordPress site.

Once you have done the work to build your site, create the content and get the visitors streaming in it may then be time to monetize your site and maybe create a little income stream.  Now I am not talking get rich schemes here – just simple and easy ways to place ads in and around your site.  They may never make you a ton of money but they might create just enough of an income stream to make you a few bucks in the process.  I have a day job for paying the bills so the trickle I get from my site is mad money for tech stuff. How do you spend yours?

So on to the “five”.

WP125 – This is a great plugin that can be used in two manners.  One is for selling your own ad space for 125 x 125 graphic ads or you can use it as I do and link to affiliate sites you are a member of. I use it to link to my Amazon.com Associates account and my Xbox360 Game Exchange website (using 125 x 125 ads as well).  The other slot tends to get used in ad exchanges with other sites. This comes with a Ads Widget that you can include in your sidebar or you can place code into your template tag wherever you want to place the ads. IT is highly configurable and can be set up in one or two column displays, show as many ads as you want, keep track of clicks and automatically removing the ad from circulation when its end date comes up. 25,468 downloads to date.

Advertising Manager – This is the plugin previously known Adsense Manager.  This one will manage and rotate ads from Google Adsense as well as Adbrite, Adify, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Chitika, Commission Junction, CrispAds, OpenX, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN and Widgetbucks.  It will even accept the code for unsupported ad networks.  Some of its key features is that it imports ad codes automatically, is compatible with widgets and sidebars, and it automatically limits the display of ads on a page to meet the ad networks rules (such as Google Adsense only allowing 3 ads per page). 24,476 downloads to date.

Smart Ads – This simple plugin inserts advertisements at the beginning and end of your blog entries based on how many words the post is, when it was written and its category.  You can also insert your ads anywhere in a post or page by using the Smart Ads shortcode.  This plugin even cleans itself out of your mySQL database if your using WordPress version 2.7 or higher. The development of this plugin is quite fresh – in fact it was just updated today and has been downloaded 8,652 times.

WP Tag Ads – This is a unique plugin that uses the tags on your blog entries to display eBay products based on those keywords on your post.  Where Google Adsense scans your page and the words on it to get contextual ads this one just scans the tags.  Ads are then displayed either within your page template or in a sidebar widget that comes with the plugin.  You must have a Campain ID from eBay and they are free to get through the eBay Partner Network. Only 3,153 downloads to date but that makes sense this is a niche area for only eBay program users.

All in One Adsense and YPN – This is an open source plugin and it automatically inserts either Google Adsense of Yahoo Publisher Network ads into your posts. It has settings to be able to customize the ads position, colors and how it looks when displayed.  If your handy with CSS and HTML you can customize things even further. This one appears to be quite popular as it has been downloaded 54,863 times to date. 

Looking forward to hearing from you all on what you might use to manage your ads and what methods you have found successful for displaying them.

If you have ideas for “five” posts please feel free to send me a quick note at @WinObs on Twitter – thanks!

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

Five Ad Manager Plugins for WordPress