Doesn’t it seem as though there are never enough hours in the day to keep your business afloat? It’s challenging to believe there’s more you could be doing to increase your revenue stream when you’re actively working to complete projects and court new clients.
Diversifying your income is a surefire way to keep it positive. But if you’re already feeling exhausted, I’d advise you to look into monetizing your WordPress site as a (mostly) passive option for bringing in money for your company.
There are many ways to monetize your website, such as by writing and selling ebooks or plugins, but doing so takes time and active marketing effort on your part. Why not instead add advertisements to your WordPress website? They’re a great, largely hands-free way to supplement your income while keeping your attention on your primary endeavour: creating stunning websites.
Let’s look at 11 quick ways to add ads to your WordPress website so you can start generating passive income this year.
The Keys to Successfully Monetizing Your WordPress Site
The idea of passive income generation appeals to everyone, right? Even though it might not be enough to cover all of your annual expenses, it will probably be enough to help you pay off some of your ongoing business expenses.
Now, a lot of people who want to monetize their WordPress website go to Google AdSense first because it seems like the obvious choice. Google’s tools are crucial for helping websites be found in searches and, later, for assisting users in understanding what is happening with the influx of traffic. Having said that, not everyone will find AdSense to be the best ad generation tool.
So what choices do you have? Start with the one that most people are familiar with and rely on AdSense to deliver advertisements from arbitrary advertisers. Instead, you might decide to actively market ad space to sponsors, partners, and other visitors who are eager to place advertisements on your website. You could also just create your own ads.
When selecting an option, there are a number of other factors to take into account in addition to deciding where you want to source your ads from. For illustration:
Location
Where would you like to place advertisements on your WordPress website?
- In the header?
- In the footer?
- Before or after your blog post content?
- Within your blog posts?
- Before or after blog excerpts?
- In the sidebar?
- In some other widgetized area?
- In the WordPress admin dashboard? (Yes, that’s possible.)
Size & Shape
Advertisements don’t always have to be contained in a tiny box in the sidebar. As long as they make sense for the designated space within your site, you can choose from a variety of sizes, shapes, and orientations (horizontal vs. vertical) depending on the tool you use.
It’s important to keep in mind that even though you aren’t in charge of creating third-party advertisements, you should still take the time to choose the criteria that the advertisements will adhere to. You put a lot of effort into designing your website, so it would be a shame to let all of that work be wasted by allowing an inappropriate advertisement to be placed there.
Ad Content
Text-only ads, display (image) ads, and rich media ads (which include video) are the standard three choices.
Mobile-friendliness
This one is essential. If the ad-insertion tool you use for your WordPress website doesn’t support mobile compatibility, skip it or hide those ads for users on mobile devices. Once more, you never want a third party contribution to ruin the user’s experience.
Visitor Targeting
Finding a trustworthy ad plugin might be all you need to get started for some of you. But you’d be wise to use custom targeting settings once you start to see money coming in with each impression (view) or click. To get the best results, adjust demographic settings or use tools like geotargeting to deliver targeted ads to visitors based on their location.
Analytics
You should also look into the built-in analytical capabilities of your ad delivery system. Each tool will have a way to track clicks, but you might prefer one that easily imports stats into WordPress or that thoroughly monitors more ad-related activity than just clicks.
Google has a fantastic video on the significance of utilising analytics to optimise the placement and use of your on-site advertisements:
A/B Testing
Determining the best locations for ads on your website may take some time. When trying to access your content, you don’t want people to automatically skip over your ads or, worse yet, become so fed up with them that they leave your website altogether. As always, it’s important to strike a balance between sharing your content and not interfering with the user experience.
If you want more control over which ad sizes, locations, or content are displayed based on visitor behaviour, A/B testing is something to consider.
Even though each of these factors should be taken into account, not all of them will matter to you if all you’re looking for is a quick side gig. Just know that there is a lot you can do with ad revenue generation in WordPress when you’re ready.
Quick Ways to Insert Ads into Your WordPress Site
There are several methods you can use to quickly add advertisements to your WordPress website. Of them, AdSense is one. Another is leasing out ad space to outside parties. Additionally, you have two options for adding the AdSense code to WordPress: manually or with a plugin. Are you aware of what’s best for you?
Let’s look at your possibilities.
Manually Add Google AdSense Code
You can create a code within Google AdSense and then add it to WordPress if you don’t want to add another WordPress plugin to your website. Although implementation is simple enough, you may not have much control over the ads that are displayed on your website, and the information you learn about clicks and impressions will force you to return to Google rather than WordPress.
I’d advise you to check out this tutorial if you’re okay with that trade-off. It will demonstrate how to create your first Google AdSense ad, obtain the necessary code, and add it to WordPress.
10 Plugins to Help You Insert Ads
01: Ad Inserter Plugin
You’ve found the right place if you’re looking for a plugin with a tonne of options. This plugin offers users a variety of options for where to place ads in addition to a variety of options for how to insert them. The decision is yours, so you can use a PHP function call if that’s what you prefer, embeddable shortcodes if that’s what you prefer, or any combination of these.
02: Ad Widget Plugin
You should use a plugin like this one if you want to make your own advertisements and show them to different site visitors. It gives you complete control over choosing which ads are delivered to different users based on their status (logged in vs. not) or behaviour (visited from link, using certain browser, etc.), in addition to making it simple to insert ads directly from the Widgets section of WordPress.
03: Admin Ads Plugin
Another chance to promote your own ads, but this time they will be shown to your clients and other WordPress users from within the dashboard. This plugin is probably the tool for you if you’ve always wanted a simpler way to advertise your company or a hands-free way to upsell your services.
04: Ads Pro Plugin
As I said earlier, there might be a time when you want to step up your on-site marketing efforts. A premium plugin like this one can be useful in that situation. You can make ads, schedule them, offer translations, run A/B tests, and target people very precisely.
05: AdSense Plugin
Only those who want more control over their Google AdSense ads should use this plugin. You can choose how ads are placed within and around your content, make use of responsive ad layouts, and specify which devices you don’t want ads to appear on.
06: Advanced Ads Plugin
This straightforward plugin not only aims to make adding third-party ads from platforms like AdSense, Amazon, DoubleClick, and others simple, but it also has enough customization options to compete with expensive ad plugins. You can put advertisements on any page, pretty much anywhere you want. On particular pages or under other circumstances, you can also turn off ads. You can also enrol in their Selling Ads add-on and enable your users to buy ad space.
07: In Post Ads Plugin
Here is a plugin that makes it easier to insert ads inside of your blog posts. From within WordPress, you can adjust every criterion that matters to you. You can view and manage your ad’s analytics and A/B testing directly from within the same WordPress module, which is a nice little bonus.
08: Simple Ads Plugin
You want to display the same ads across a network of websites, right? This plugin will assist in distributing those premium brand advertisements across all websites and in locations above and below your content where visitors are most likely to see them.
09: WP Simple Adsense Insertion Plugin
Of all the ad plugin solutions on this list, I’d have to say that this one is the easiest. It only functions with Google Adsense and makes adding ads to your website simple through the use of a shortcode or by calling the PHP function from the file containing your theme. Therefore, start here if you’re new to this and want a hassle-free way to get started.
10: Ad Sharing Plugin
Would you like to request that users submit their ads for posting on your website? With the help of this plugin, you have the ability to set the proportion of profit users receive for each impression or click generated by their ad placement (while you keep the rest!).
Note: This plugin was created by WPMU DEV initially, but we no longer maintain it. If you want to improve the plugin further, feel free to download the source code from our GitHub repository.
Wrapping Up
What do you think, then? Are you prepared to start profiting passively from your WordPress website so you can keep your attention laser-focused on your work? That strikes me as a wise course of action.
