WebDiggin.com: An Adventure to Make Money Online

EDITOR’S NOTE: We’ve since switched our webhost to BlueHost for a number of reasons, but mainly because they offered unlimited subdomains, and we could set up a WordPress.org Blog in under 5 minutes.

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WordPress is great, but you’re not allowed to place Adsense and other Ads on a free blog hosted by WordPress. You can’t get paid to do a sponsored post using PayPerPost or ReviewMe. WordPress won’t even allow you to include affiliate marketing links on the site (except for a “discreet link to your business in the sidebar or an About page.”) So how come I have a Google AdSense ad in this post? Why am I allowed to do sponsored posting with PayPerPost? I’m not paying their $600 setup fee and $300 a month hosting fee to have a VIP account with WordPress… just to experiment with different ways to make money. If you try to include affiliate links on a WordPress blog, you’ll find out that the links don’t work. Or worse, your site will get taken down. So… how do so many people publish ads and monetize their sites using WordPress?It’s simple. We use WordPress.org to self-publish our blogs on our own sites. All of the WordPress powered blogs that you see on the internet fall into two categories. Free Blogs that are hosted by WordPress.com and self published blogs that are set up on a separate web host. In other words, WordPress provides the same FREE state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform… but you have to do the work and install it on your site. (There are minimum requirements, so before you go out and buy a website plan, check out these requirements.)Transfering your WordPress Blog from the free WordPress.com hosted site to your own web host is quick and easy. Just click on the Export option under the Manage tab on your old site, and click on Import at your new location. Once you’ve set up your WordPress blog on your account at your own web host, inserting Google AdSense (and any other Ad code) is easy.We’re assuming you’ve already signed up for a free Google AdSense account. You could insert the AdSense code manually into your WordPress blog, or you could download this free plug-in: AdSense Manager. AdSense Manager is free, although there is an option where you can be nice and send a percentage of your clicks to the developer. (The default is to send off 3% of ad time to the developer, but you can change this option down to 0%.)The best part of this plug in is the Direct Code Ad / Code Converter option. You can cut-and-paste in code from Google AdSense or any other Ads that you might be interested in running. So it’s not limited to Google AdSense. You could place in ads from Commission Junction, or Yahoo, as well.

We’re giving AdSense Manager a test-run, but so far, we’re excited at how simple and easy it is to use. Create the ads, and then use the widget manager to slide in some ads in the sidebar. Create a post and then insert <!–adsense–> wherever you want the ad. Pretty basic stuff, but we’ll keep you posted.

It took us a couple of hours to figure out how to place ads on a WordPress blog. We almost gave up on WordPress when we first read this response in their Frequently Asked Questions, but eventually we found a way to post our ads and affiliate links. If you’re interested in monetizing your site, either use WordPress.org to power your own site, or sign up for a free blog at Blogger (which encourages AdSense as they’re part of the Google empire.)

Adsense and other Ads

Adsense, Yahoo, Chitika and other ads are not permitted to be added by users. Adverts that may be inserted when using an external blogging program will be blocked.

Sponsored / paid posts including PayPerPost and ReviewMe are not permitted.

Sponsored / paid links are not permitted.

Affiliate / referral links to the following domains are not permitted:

• usercash
• clickbank
• clickhop
• cashrocks
• payingcash

Text ads are not permitted.

A discreet link to your business in the sidebar or an About page is permitted.

One discreet link to Amazon per blog is okay, but if the primary purpose of the blog is to drive traffic to affiliate programs that’s not allowed. If you’re not sure, contact support.

Clicktrackers and any promotion of the “I made a million on the internet and so can you” type of advertising are expressly forbidden.

If you are in any doubt, ask.

We have a very low tolerance for blogs created purely for search engine optimization or commercial purposes, machine-generated blogs, and will continue to nuke them, so if that’s what you’re interested in WordPress.com is not for you.

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You may see some advertising on the domain.
1. VIP blogs are able to run ads.
2. We also run some ads sometimes and the reasons for that are explained here