Tag: affiliate

Getting started with advertising in 2023

Getting started with advertising in 2023

Ads run the internet, like it or not, adverts are everywhere and make the world go round in the digital space. If you have a WordPress or ClassicPress website and are looking to increase revenue, or make earning it easier then you’ll probably want a good and efficient advertising manager on your website.

AdRotate Banner Manager is such an advertisement plugin. With AdRotate you can create and place advertisements anywhere on your website using a variety of methods. You are in control of every advert your visitors see on the front end of your website or blog.

What can AdRotate do for you

What is AdRotate Banner Manager, or AdRotate for short? AdRotate is a plugin for WordPress and ClassicPress websites. Plugins extend the function of a website with new features and options. With AdRotate the added functions are aimed at managing adverts or banners in a easy to understand way. But also to make them visible to your website visitors.

In doing so AdRotate Banner Manager helps you earn money from your blog. Not because you’ll get revenue from AdRotate itself, but because the plugin makes it easy to manage the adverts. AdRotate Banner Manager includes many features like scheduling, advert grouping (So you can rotate different ads in one spot) and a lot of granular control of how the adverts should behave.

Many plugins push you to use a certain network, or only work with Adsense. Others only allow strict templates or restrict how you place them. With AdRotate Banner Manager none of those restrictions exist.

All these ads can be easily placed using a variety of ways – Almost everywhere on your website. The most common and easy option is to use a Widget in your sidebar. More recently AdRotate also includes Blocks for the WordPress Block Editor (Gutenberg). The blocks work exactly like the widget but can be placed inside posts and pages as well. You can also use Shortcodes in any field that supports shortcodes. And there is an option called Post Injection that lets you insert adverts in posts and pages automagically with a few clicks. Or if you’re a more advanced user you can use PHP snippets in your theme directly, too.

This means that monetizing your website and blog is easier than ever if you use AdRotate Banner Manager.

What AdRotate is not

AdRotate Banner Manager does not automatically ads for you. You’ll have to get those from your advertisers or advertising networks. Companies like Amazon Affiliates, Google Adsense, Impact Radius, Media.net, Agoda, Booking.com and hundreds of other affiliate and advertising networks. Take your pick and work with whoever you think is best.

You can also create your own banners, making it attractive to sell ad space yourself. Commonly the advertiser will then send a banner image and a website url for you to make an advert of. This can be done in a few minutes in the AdRotate Banner Manager dashboard.

The most easy option usually is to use something like Google Adsense but there are hundreds of advertising networks to choose from. Thousands of websites that offer affiliate programs. All have ads that you can place on your website.

Conclusion

The TLDR; is that making money with your website is a kind of a must. You’re putting in a lot of effort into making it, why not get something in return… It’s proven time and time again that placing ads can be very lucrative. Sometimes even easy. Let’s make it easier with the right tools. Those tools being AdRotate Banner Manager and AdRotate Professional.

The focus of this article is to get you started with advertising on your website without breaking the bank. AdRotate Banner Manager is the best option for that. The plugin is FREE and takes little time to set up. All dashboards have been carefully designed to be compact and easy to use. This makes AdRotate Banner Manager the best option to get started with ads on your website. If you then decide you want even more features and more options to control the user experience you can upgrade to AdRotate Pro!

Get started today

If you have WordPress 4.9 or newer, and you probably do, you can simply look for the plugin through your Plugins Page in your WordPress Dashboard. Search for “AdRotate” or “Arnan AdRotate” to get the best hit. Below you’ll find the links to the relevant product pages where you can read more about the plugin, what it does and how it works. And of-course, if you feel you’re ready to make the plunge – Buy AdRotate Pro as well.

Use an advertising network or sell ad space yourself?

Header Sell your own adverts

It’s easy, lazy and super convenient to join an advertising network such as Google AdSense or Media.net or something similar. You can create an account in minutes, get ads immediately and see earnings within a week or so. It’s boring and anyone can do it. But if your site is big enough from the get-go it may be easy money and work fine for your purposes.

The real fun starts when you sell your own ad spaces. That leaves you in control and with AdRotate and AdRotate Pro you can easily manage which advert goes where and for how long. You make the rules and, within reason, you decide what happens. And that’s not a bad thing at all.

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Why switching to Matomo for website analytics is a good thing

Matomo Tracker header

For years I have wondered why the world so blindly got hooked up with Google services and why almost nobody seems to question if that’s a good thing. Nobody I know has any doubts. Reviews everywhere on the internet tell people Google is the best, or at least it’s very good. And if you search for “best way to sync your android phone” or “alternative for iCloud calendars” or something similar, everyone seems to blindly recommend the Google sync stuff – Which also quietly has you use their services afterwards.

Why? It makes no sense… Oh wait, it does. The Google services as a whole work quite well and they work on pretty much every platform and system. Sure, but so do many others. So why choose, and trust, Google?

Like so many others, I recently started to resent companies like Google and Facebook who seemingly just do whatever they want. Dancing around laws and regulations like they don’t exist or matter and the endless lying to their users. I wrote a bit about that in a previous blog post.

Need stats? Get Google Analytics. Need calendars? Get Google Calendar (or whatever they call it). Need email? Get Gmail. And the list goes on. The internet is larger than Google you know… There are alternatives!

Meet Matomo

Recently I switched my statistics away from Google Analytics. I now use Matomo and I’m a happier guy because of it. I’ve used both for a week or two to see if Matomo can match Google. This quickly changed from “We’ll see if this works” to “Damn, Google makes even less sense now”.

I now can see stats that I understand. I now can quickly see what’s going on on my websites. I now can track links and actually see what’s going on without needing a PhD. I now can track goals in a way that makes sense to me. And I get to keep my data! Nobody is looking over my shoulder.

This is of-course because I host my own server with Matomo installed on it. If you get Matomo their cloud service your data is still yours, but it’s stored in the Matomo cloud. So, might as well use Google Analytics then, right? Wrong.

Unlike Google, Matomo is unlikely to spy on you, simply because they have nothing to gain from it. Their mission is to provide accurate stats. Google their mission is to sell adverts. And to know which advert they can show you they need to spy on you so they know what you may want and show you adverts for it.

To me that’s an important difference.

Why I choose Matomo to replace Google Analytics

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t disapprove of the adverts. Hell, I make advertising software myself. But it’s how the advert is chosen that rubs me the wrong way.

So, Matomo it is then. But why Matomo and not something else? Because Matomo is accessible to most people. You can host your own server for it, like I do, or use their cloud service for a fee. This means that pretty much everyone can use it. Many of the others, I found, use less mainstream tech like Ruby on Rails or Redis or have strange requirements like NodeJS. Things that often aren’t available on many hosting platforms. Or aren’t as well known.

Matomo uses PHP, MySQL and a bunch of more mainstream technologies that work pretty much everywhere. That and the easier to use dashboard makes it very accessible.

It took me a few days to figure that out and make up my mind about it though. I looked at a bunch of the alternatives, considering where to host my data and such. Finally I settled on hosting it myself on a VPS I got from Inmotion Hosting and installed Matomo on it, simple as that.

Matomo seems at least as accurate as Google Analytics, but the ease of use of Matomo is far greater, for me at least. As I mentioned earlier, I now actually understand what’s going on on my site. The terminology is more clear. The dashboard is easier to use – It kinda just works…

Tracking your stats with Matomo

Tracking stats can of-course be done with their Tracking code, this works very similar to Google Analytics. Just stick a piece of code in your websites footer. Nothing all that special. But you need to edit your theme or website to insert that code.

Fortunately if you’re using WordPress you can do this with a plugin. I have developed Matomo Analytics for WordPress to make this super easy. The plugin adds a little dashboard and a few easy to use and understand settings. And you’ll be tracking stats within 5 minutes without editing your theme or adding any code. You can download Matomo Analytics for WordPress for free here – Get Matomo Tracker for WordPress.

Summer sale 2019 – Get AdRotate Pro on the cheap!

It’s summer time, but it’s also time to get AdRotate Pro and a HTML5 website first! Don’t enjoy the sun too much just yet. Get AdRotate Pro first. Set it up, see the money come in and then go and enjoy the sun with all the time you save by using AdRotate Pro!

Or, if you’re not looking for advertising managers, consider getting your own website. A pretty looking HTML5 website to support your social presence online or impress your recruiter at your next job interview! Get it done with a modern and professional looking website.

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AdRotate Free v5.0 – Polish and shine

This update brings many small improvements and updates to the dashboard. A few minor improvements to the underlying code. But mainly visuals. Over time the dashboard got a bit out of balance and looked untidy in a few places. This has all been fixed and updated.

Not immediately noticeable for many people but a lot of little irritation points have been ironed out and the plugin looks much better now. I’m still working on some new features but haven’t really decided where in AdRotate (Pro) they belong, if at all.

If you find quirks with the dashboard, anything at all, let me know.

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