I’ve decided to put some subtle adverts back on On Blogging Australia and this blog. This article covers why I did it, and how.
The history: why the ads went away
I gave up on advertising on my main blogs after Meg’s megarant. At the time I decided that I didn’t want to be anything like John Chow. I still don’t. While his “make money at any price” philosophy is offensive, it also isn’t as sustainable as being a decent human being (like Yaro and Darren).
Why they are back
The ads are back because I promised Lightening that I’d write an article on how she could make a little bit of money with her blog. Advertising is part of this simple plan - and I didn’t feel right talking about it but not doing it myself.
How I put them back
The ads are in the post footer between the post text and the comment block - they look like this:
It is a fairly simple job to add advertising like this to the page footer in a self-hosted WordPress (also known as WordPress Multi User or MU) blog.
- In the Dashboard, go to Presentation > Theme Editor
- Select the Single Post template.
- Insert the code you want displayed between the <?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/theloop.php’); ?> and <?php comments_template(); ?> lines.
- Have a look at the result by selecting Update file then click on the View site link - and note that it will only show up when a single post is selected. If there isn’t enough space between the text and the ads, or the ads and the comments, put a few break <br> tags in and look at a single post.
That is all there is to it.
Time will tell if I do make much money from this strategy or not - I know that it does make a small amount fairly consistently. I’ll let you know 
I’m excited about the prospect of BuddyPress. What is it? Here’s what they have to say:
BuddyPress will completely transform a vanilla installation of Wordpress MU into a fully functional social network platform.
When I wrote about turning Wordpress MU into a social networking platform a little while back I never could have imagined the amount of interest it would generate. BuddyPress is my answer to that interest.
BuddyPress is not yet released. I’ll put that out there right now. It is in active development however, and this blog acts as a window into the decision making process and the status of BuddyPress development.
BuddyPress will come as a suite of Wordpress MU plugins that will work seamlessly together. Each plugin handles a separate BuddyPress feature, meaning you can pick and choose which features you want to include.
The proposed features are fairly awesome - it is basically turning WordPress into a full interaction-centric CMS - a bit like Drupal or Plone with all the plugins and trimmings.
Why do we need a replacement for Drupal and Plone? Why replicate what already exists? The answer is simple - WordPress is just about everywhere, and BuddyPress will allow a lot of people that want to build social communities on the web to do so (and fingers crossed, with relative ease).
If you’re interested, subscribe to notifications on the BuddyPress website.
UPDATE: The BuddyPress site is now a one page “coming soon” teaser. A missed opportunity there to use the email addresses that they gathered when asking people to subscribe to notifications - I would have let those people know that things (like the sponsorship/takeover/who knows because they aren’t saying by Automattic) had changed.
Darren Rowse has invited bloggers to a group writing project - writing about our top 5 things within our area of interest. For me, right this minute, I’d have to say that this was blogging, and my favourite blogging platform, WordPress. Here are my Top 5 WordPress tips:
- If you can afford it, go for a hosted solution on your own domain: Apart from increasing your google and technorati rankings, having your own hosted solution means that you can access the full power of WordPress. It is not as easy as the out-of-the-box solution from wordpress.com, but is infinitely more enjoyable.
- Learn to use plugins wisely: You can do a lot with WordPress - I like fooling with tags and tagclouds, and for that there is nothing better I’ve found than K2 and UTW. That said, plugins must be used wisely - some are not that useful, some do not play nicely with one another, and some will make your blog totally unavailable. Research plugins before using them (and/or keep a fairly strict database backup regime).
- Look at what others have done: periodically do a technorati search on tag “wordpress” to see what is happening. There are a lot of really amazing WordPress-driven blogs - there is a list of them at bloghelper. People are using it for eCommerce sites, art galleries, magazine sites, libraries, you name it. Talk to other WordPress users, read the official development blog, and read the support forum.
- Don’t forget the reason you started: Why are you using WordPress? What is it that you are hoping to achieve? While for some people it might be setting up a cool set of functionality, chances are that you are interested in blogging because you have a message that you want to get across. Don’t get caught up in the coolness and forget the reason you started - there are a lot of resources around to help you get the message out there.
- Enjoy it. There is enough scope (and bandwidth) out there for you to be blogging about whatever your heart desires - write about what you can be passionate about. WordPress can help you do that - whether it is supporting a book project, promoting your offline business, or pushing a political point. Enjoy it, and whatever you do, don’t forget to breathe.
Note: if you liked this post, you might like to read about my Top 5 Blogging Gurus.
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