Yesterday I came across an interesting plug-in for WordPress – something that I had been wanting to write myself for a long time.  It is called the “MaxBlog Press Ninja Affiliate” plug-in.

The first thing you have to know about this plug-in is that it is not free – you have to buy it.  This is new territory for many bloggers, and has caused some discussion on the WordPress forum.  But I went ahead and bought it because, quite frankly, it does something rather special.

If you want to make money with a blog, one of the ways to do advertising – either affiliate advertising, or keyword advertising.

Affiliate advertising uses links in either blog posts, sidebars or banners to link to another company’s website.  You get paid per click or per sale.  But keyword advertising allows you to sell advertising on your website and embed it within the content.

Let’s say, for example, that I wanted to link the first instance of the word pizza to a pizza place in my area.  Theoretically this is possible, but having sold the link I would have do a search on all posts and add the link manually.  After the time is up, I would have to do the same thing again to remove the links.  Plus, I would not know how often the link has been clicked on to argue that the time period should be extended – maybe even for a higher price.

One of the items on my long list of things to do was to try and write a plug-in that had a list of keywords and a list of links, and when a particular post was displayed it would add the link to the keyword in the text.

But the price of the MaxBlog Press Ninja Affiliate made this almost unviable, especially since I don’t know when I would have got round to doing it myself.

So now I have started fitting out my blogs with this system, because the great thing is that it is a one-off payment – not per blog! I obviously don’t want to over-do things and make my blogs look like a lot of advertising links, but maybe it will help generate a little bit more income.

Anyway, I’d like to recommend the MaxBlog Press Ninja Affiliate plug-in to anyone with a self-hosted WordPress blog – it’s a great little tool that really adds power to your posts!

Tags: Affiliate links, Blogging, Plug-in, Wordpress

This entry was posted by Graham on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 at 11:49 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.