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I recently read a post on John Chow dot Com on a plugin for WordPress to sell your own text link ads without using the Text Link Ads service. I eventually want to use Text Link Ads, but I need to get more reciprocal links on other blogs before I’m accepted into their program. I have many more links on other web sites, but they only count links on blogs. I would imagine they check your link popularity on Technorati.
I’m determined to sell text link ads on my web sites, so until I qualify for the Text Link Ads service, I’ll make my own ads.
You can build text ads using the WP Text Ads plugin by Alex Choo. It comes in two versions. The free one supports a limited number of ads that can be placed on your site, and the $127 one gives you unlimited ads.
I really don’t want buy WP Text Ads to create these types of ads because I can create my own by modifying the PHP code in WordPress. The example I’ll use is for WordPress but you can use the same source code in any PHP blog or web site.
I added the ads in the sidebar of my blog. You can view the sidebar source code by logging into your blog as the administrator. Go to the Presentation tab and then go to Theme Editor. On the right side, you will see the pages that your theme is using. Select Sidebar and the source code will be displayed for editing.
Now you need to decide where you want to place your text ads. Your ads will be placed after the following PHP code:
<div id=”sidebar”>
<div align=”center”>

If you don’t know PHP, you can still find a position in the sidebar for your ads by entering the following bit of code.
<h1>test</h1>
The text, test, will appear in a large font in the sidebar. Test it in various places until you find the location where you want to place your ads.
After you’ve picked a spot, enter the following code:
<h2><?php _e(‘Featured Sites’); ?></h2>
<ul>
<li><a href=”
http://staging.cyprich.com/featuredsites/seobook/”>SEO Book</a></li>
<li><a href=”
http://staging.cyprich.com/featuredsites/1and1/”>Cheap Web Hosting</a></li>
<li><a href=”
http://staging.cyprich.com/featuredsites/babytv/”>Baby TV</a></li>
<br/>
<a href=”
http://staging.cyprich.com/advertise/”>Advertise Here</a>
</ul>

The text link ads will look like:

You can edit Feature Sites to any text you want, along with the Advertise Here text. The first two links, SEO Book and Cheap Web Hosting, are affiliate programs that I have joined. These affiliates gave me a URL which links to my account on their web site. I wanted to hide the URL, so I created a subfolder in my web site called featuredsites and each text ad has its own subfolder with a page linking to my account on the affiliate site. You can learn how to do this by reading Hiding Affiliate Links on my blog. If you don’t want to hide your links, you can use the URL given to you by your affiliate.
You add your links between the <ul></ul> tags with <li></li>. The href points to the URL for your affiliate, and the text before the </a> is what appears as the text link ad on your site.
As a side note, Baby TV isn’t an affiliate but after seeing it on John Chow dot Com, I thought it might be a good idea to share with other parents of babies.
Make sure that you create a Advertise page for the Advertise Here link. The Advertise Here link goes to a page on my blog which is a sales pitch page that gives excellent reasons why people should purchase advertising from me. ๐Ÿ™‚
The procedure here for making your text link ads may seem complicated for the non-programmer, but it really isn’t. I recommend you first back up your blog by downloading it by FTP to your hard drive before making these changes, or test it on another theme that you’ve installed.

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