I’m so terribly sick of sidebar widgets. Every time I’m pitched adding another I throw up in my mouth a little bit. There has to be a better way! That’s code for “there is a better way goofball - read on.” I saw an announcement from Kontera last week about their new in-line text advertising solution and then remembered how Miva and others have similar solutions. So, being the diligent Webbie and Netprenuer that I am, I looked for how to do the same on my WordPress blogs (without having to join Miva or Kontera of course) and you’ll be pleased with what I found. Well, I at least was pleased.

Disclaimer: This is really just a hack of an existing wordpress plugin that any blogger can use to turn the keywords within content into hyperlinks which bring up sponsored listings from 7Search. I used 7Search because I’m an affiliate (and a consultant for that ad network) and the revenue share on the bid amount is high so everybody is happy. Using the following plugin, you can also link to archived content, pages on gada.be or Amazon. Nice, huh?

First Step - Download the alink WordPress Plugin:
From the headzoo.com products page, “aLinks is a free WordPress plugin that takes a set of phrases you commonly use and turns them into links whenever you include them in a post, but really it’s much more than that! Since the plugin was first released in August 2005, it’s been downloaded over 10,000 times, and many successful bloggers are using aLinks to turn their blogs into money making machines. How? By using aLinks to effortlessly create affiliate links within their blog posts.”

Did you catch that? Create affiliate links (automatically) within your blog posts.

Second Step - Sign up for the 7Search affiliate program:
Once you are registered, create a “Pay-Per-Text” (you can read about how to do that within their affiliate administration area). You will be presented with some HTML code. Take the first link within the HTML code (not the impression tracking) and insert it into your alink program. Here’s how to do that: Assuming you’ve downloaded the plugin and installed it successfully, select the “aLinks” plugin from the menu bar in your WordPress administration area. Select “Keyphrases - Manage Your Keyphrases”. Scroll down to the section reading “General Keyphrases”, enter the keyword you want linked, any description you would like to provide (I chose ‘Sponsored Listing” in the examples below) and the URL you want to link to and click update. Any keyword within your content that you have added to the aLinks system will now be hyperlinked and sponsored.

Some examples: Advertising, Hosting (look within the content of the posts for the keywords advertising or hosting)

Should you Try It Out?
As the last of the bit of on page real estate left to monetize (unless of course you have exceptional content you can put behind a subscription wall) lots of bloggers and site owners should be looking at this hack/solution. Does it work, probably - I’m not really sure as I have no empirical data that I can share yet. Of course, it’s a user-experience and site usability nightmare (it’s confusing to some, sort of hokey and in my opinion already played out), but if you want or need the cold-hard cash (revenue baby!) and if you can stomach the inevitable end-user backlash that may come with it, then go ahead and give it a try. You have nothing to lose but those ridiculous widgets!

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