Weird WordPress Experiment - I made my OWN AdSense

11 replies
Here's a thing I've been experimenting with on a few blogs with results ranging from improvement to "HOLY CRAP!" so I thought I'd share.

Not too long ago I talked about how I'd swapped out a lot of my AdSense stuff with affiliate ads. I'm lazy, so I was using ClickBank's HopAd builder at first, and it works well, but the ads are not really all that great, and they don't have ads for every product.

For the niches that did have good ads and lots of them, that was working awesome.

For the others, not so much.

So here's what I did.

I did a bunch of Google searches for my keywords and copied all the Google Ads that came up. I kept all the ones that would also apply to the affiliate products I wanted to promote, and rewrote and tweaked as necessary.

I bulk loaded the ads all into a non-public WordPress installation I use to remix and distribute content. Each ad was set as its own post, and all to the same category. The "headline" of the ad is the subject of the post, and the rest goes into the body.

Then I set up "Old Post Promoter" plugin to randomly move an old ad to the top every once in a while, so that the order of the ads change and they all get action in the RSS feed.

I then used a plugin called something like "Page Links To" and set each Ad Post to re-direct to my desired affiliate link.

So now what I can take that category-specific feed URL from my "feeder" WordPress and use it in RSS widgets on any of my other blogs, including Blogger ones (where they have worked particularly well).

Using a plugin called RSSImport, I'm currently tweaking a way to include that same ad content directly in the content of the posts as well using shortcodes.

Pros:

I control all the ads and their destinations
I get the advantage of using AdWords more successful ads to promote my own stuff
I can use the one RSS across my whole network

Cons:

Not as fully randomly displayed as AdSense
A little bit (but just a little bit) of setup required
Not actually contextual - I've had to make separate "ad channels" for each niche I'm doing this with.

Anyway, this has been one of my more successful recent experiments, and it's been a while since I'd posted (or even visited much) here.

Hope some people find this one useful.
#adsense #experiment #made #weird #wordpress
  • Profile picture of the author Linda Van Fleet
    Keith, that is interesting ... a little confusing, but interesting!

    As I understand it, you use the OPP and "page links to" plugins on your feeder blog and the RSSimporter on your destination blogs -- correct?

    I will try to duplicate it . Thanks a lot for sharing.

    Linda
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    • Profile picture of the author Keith Kogane
      Originally Posted by Linda Van Fleet View Post

      Keith, that is interesting ... a little confusing, but interesting!

      As I understand it, you use the OPP and "page links to" plugins on your feeder blog and the RSSimporter on your destination blogs -- correct?

      I will try to duplicate it . Thanks a lot for sharing.

      Linda
      Yes, that's correct. Sorry to be confusing, but you did correctly figure it out. The RSSImporter isn't vital - that's just if you want to embed these ads directly into your own post content on a blog that you're publishing. Mostly what I'm doing now is just using the Widget functionality of my own WordPress installs and the equivalent in Blogger.

      Basically, for now, I'm just using it to replace the AdSense ad display units with my own content.

      Both of those blog platforms have the ability to just provide an RSS feed and the widget will spit out a bulleted list of URLs for your ads. You can drag and drop those widgets into yout template the same way you would do to put AdSense in there.

      If you know a little HTML and CSS, you can tweak your templates and themes to make these look however you like. They don't NEED to look like adblocks necessarily.

      Pairing this with what I was already doing is proving to be very efficient and more profitable that using straight AdSense (and in most cases, YPN and AdBrite).

      Edit: I should point out that on blogger, all you will get is the headlines of the ads in your RSS widgets. Regardless, in my testing, this is not proving to be any kind of problem at all. There is a POSSIBLE workaround to this by making the author of each ad also match the same text as the content, since blogger WILL allow you to display that. Honestly haven't tried that though.

      This is why I was developing the ability to publish them inside post content, because that way I can just do that for my Blogger Blogs when I push my WordPress content over there. AND I have the benefit of ads being in my feed content as well if I do it that way.
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      • Profile picture of the author Mollysbrother
        I did a weird experiment, too...and I was able to find a way where I kept 100% of the profits instead of just a fraction of the profits pushing AdSense of affiliate links.

        It has turned out quite nicely for me.
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        • Profile picture of the author Keith Kogane
          Originally Posted by Mollysbrother View Post

          I did a weird experiment, too...and I was able to find a way where I kept 100% of the profits instead of just a fraction of the profits pushing AdSense of affiliate links.

          It has turned out quite nicely for me.
          Yeah, that's cool if it works for you. I rather get a share of the profits in exchange for an extremely small amount of work, and then make that one bit of work automate forever, so I can then just replicate the entire process again.

          Up to now, I've developed a very robust automated content and backlink generation system that makes self-building niche sites. Having an easy-to-implement advertising system like this is something I've been trying to do for a while, even resporting to trying some standalone software for ad management, but nothing was as simple as I wanted it to be.

          Then, it occurred to me to try this method of using an RSS feed just for the ads and POW. It all came together. I wonder if I can maybe figure out a way to do an ad sharing system, where if you use my ad feed, your affiliate URL gets mixed in to ads across the whole network.

          Run basically the same game as Google, except we're splitting the affiliate commission (or more specifically, alternating credit).

          But I digress, that's just idle future speculation. Thanks for the comment though!
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          • Profile picture of the author PeteHarrison
            Hi Keith,

            You could always just use OpenX as your ad server

            OpenX. Build your business here. | OpenX

            Pete

            Originally Posted by Keith Kogane View Post

            Yeah, that's cool if it works for you. I rather get a share of the profits in exchange for an extremely small amount of work, and then make that one bit of work automate forever, so I can then just replicate the entire process again.

            Up to now, I've developed a very robust automated content and backlink generation system that makes self-building niche sites. Having an easy-to-implement advertising system like this is something I've been trying to do for a while, even resporting to trying some standalone software for ad management, but nothing was as simple as I wanted it to be.

            Then, it occurred to me to try this method of using an RSS feed just for the ads and POW. It all came together. I wonder if I can maybe figure out a way to do an ad sharing system, where if you use my ad feed, your affiliate URL gets mixed in to ads across the whole network.

            Run basically the same game as Google, except we're splitting the affiliate commission (or more specifically, alternating credit).

            But I digress, that's just idle future speculation. Thanks for the comment though!
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  • Profile picture of the author Johnathan
    Hi Keith,

    Thanks -- if you are doing what I think you are doing, I did something similar to that a while back and it works nicely.

    Johnathan
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  • Profile picture of the author Steven Carl Kelly
    If I understand correctly, you're using the Adwords ad TEXT but not the links, correct? That is to say, these clicks are not going to Adwords but to your affiliate links, right?
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  • Profile picture of the author n7 Studios
    Another thumbs up for OpenX. You can either host it on your server, or they'll host it. No costs involved.
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  • Profile picture of the author Jesus Perez
    OpenX is IT. Superior ad-serving and tracking.
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