Tips and Tricks

How to Add Javascript in a WordPress Post or Page

admin — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:02:24 +0000

One of my readers asked me the following question:

“How can I run a JavaScript within a WordPress post?”

In this short post I have explained how I use Javascript in my WordPress posts.

Adding javascript in WordPress post is really simple. You just have to switch to the HTML view in the editor and paste the JavaScript code and that’s pretty much it.

If the JavaScript code is in an external file then you need to include it first. You will need to add a bit of code similar to the following in your “header.php” or “footer.php” file to include the external JavaScript file:

I prefer to add javascript in the footer for site performance factors. You can paste it in the HTML view of the post too if this file is only needed in that one post. Replace “http://www.your-domain-name.com/scripts/my-javascript.js” with the actual location of the JavaScript file.

After you have included the file you can use any functions that is defined in that file. Use something similar to the following:

Replace “custom_function();” with the actual name of the function.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Ad – Which One Should You Choose?

admin — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:18:22 +0000

Pay-Per-Click or PPC in short, is an effective marketing scheme for the Internet. If you have a personal blog/site that attracts moderate to high traffic, and you want to generate some revenue from it then PPC is a very good option for you. There are many companies, including the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo! etc. that offer PPC ad-serving applications for webmasters and publishers. After registering with the company, all you have to do is put some Javascript code or HTML in your pages and activate the advertisement. The company tracks how many times the ads have been viewed and clicked and makes your payment at the end of the month.

In this article we will take a look at some PPC ad serving applications and try to help you decide which one could be the best option for you.

Google Adsense

Google AdSense is the current leader in content-sensitive web-based marketing. Webmasters can place Google AdSense JavaScript code on their web pages in order to allow Google’s servers to show context sensitive advertisements (Google Adwords). Google uses their search engine ranking technology to decide what ads to show on your site, and on specific pages on your site. On a post about photography on your site, for example, Google might show ads for digital cameras. This type of targeting is very effective and results in good click-through rates in most circumstances. How much you can make with Google Adsense depends entirely upon the niche of your website. The more competitive is your niche, the higher the CPM. However, many web publishers have complained about Google’s terms and conditions of being too restrictive. As a Web site owner participating in AdSense, you are fully prevented from knowing which ads were clicked and how much each click brings to you. They have $100 payout policy, which means you’ll receive their payment only after the your revenue exceeds $100. Many publishers have found their Adsense account suspended by Google out of the blue, for reasons beyond their control. In spite all of these, for relative ease in use and targeting strategy, Adsense is the pioneer in PPC ad serving area.

If you have a WordPress blog then you can use the Simple Adsense Integration plugin that will make your ad management a little bit easier on your blog.

Microsoft PubCenter

Microsoft PubCenter is Microsoft’s answer to Google’s AdSense and Yahoo’s Publisher Network. I have heard that some users of PubCenter are receiving three times more in revenue from Microsoft than Google AdSense. PubCenter also allows the publishers to be able to set background images for ads.

Yahoo Publisher Network(YPN)

Yahoo!, in an attempt to catch up with its rival Google, has stepped into the contextual ad serving game with Yahoo Publisher Network. As of this writing, it’s in beta phase and only available to US-based sites. The best thing that can be said about YPN is that it allows other Yahoo! services to be integrated into your web site, including Add to My Yahoo! (RSS), Y!Q etc. They are as strict with terms and conditions as Adsense and very selective about who they accept to use the service.

AdBrite

AdBrite is considered one of the best alternative to Google Adsense. They offer most commonly use ad formats, including interstitial full page ads which offer an excellent way to monetize all your incoming traffic, not just traffic that clicks on your ads. Through a small snippet of HTML placed on your site, they handle serving, scheduling, billing, customer service, and sales. Their payouts are smaller($20) and revenue is typically split 75/25 in your favor. They have more relaxed terms and conditions than Adsense and are much more accepting of smaller publishers including bloggers. The weakness of AdBrite is it’s lack of variety in the ad formats offered.

Clicksor

Clicksor provides excellent context sensitive ad serving similar to Adsense, plus you have option to put in some keywords yourself. They have payouts upto a market leading 85% and unlike a number of alternatives the cost per click bid values are high enough that you can earn a decent income. They also allow you to add as many sites / domains as you want under a single account. In any pay period in which your earnings exceed $50($20.00 with PayPal), payments are made either by check or instantly through PayPal. Revenue totaling less than the minimum will be rolled into the next period.
Bidvertiser
The coolest thing about Bidvertiser, another contextual ad server, is that they let you design their ad formats. They offer a simple point-and-click tool to help you customize the layout of the ads to fit your site’s look and feel, in order to retain the quality of your website. It pays you either in $25.00 increments by check or $10.00 increments by PayPal. However, the ad pool seems a little limited and it can be picky with who they accept into its program.

Chitika

Chitika has an innovative ad serving application name ‘eMinimalls’, something they refer to as ‘impulse merchandising technique’. How it works? Let’s say you have written a review for a new digital camera in your blog. Chitika ad widgets will display ‘interactive’ ad boxes, showing links for this camera and other competitor cameras. If people purchase these cameras you get a paid a commission. It also allows you to display targeted products based on what people searched for to get to your page and you get paid for clicks. You are paid 60% of ad revenue generated. Payment is made to your PayPal account once the balance reaches $50.

WidgetBucks

WidgetBucks claim to be the Internet’s fastest growing ad network. Widgetbucks allows you to insert ‘dynamic’ ads that cycle through a handful of products in real-time. One thing to keep in mind is that the ads are very colorful so if you are looking for something that blends in with you site then Widgetbucks is probably not your best bet. WidgetBucks performs very good on a product review site.

AdToll

AdToll pays on CPC(Cost-per-Click) basis. It has introduced the innovative ‘Peel Away Ad’ technology that shows a peel on the top right hand side of a page. When the mouse moves over the peel it opens smoothly to reveal the advert within. This new ad format allows you to make use of the lesser used, yet highly visible top corners of websites, saving valuable space in the content area. Also it is very non intrusive to the visitor and most likely to draw her curious clicks! AdToll likes to boast their 75% payout, which is indeed more than the majority of ad networks pay. Payments are made via cheque, paypal, wire/bank transfer or to your AdToll Account Credit if you are also an advertiser. Cheques require a minimum of $40 in earnings, $20 for PayPal and $1,000 for wire transfers. Payments to your AdToll Account Credit have no minimum.

ExitJunction

ExitJunction offers a unique approach to advertising. They focus on showing ads to users as they leave your site rather than as they arrive. By adding a small piece of their code to the header section of your site, visitors are shown an ad as they hit the back button. If someone came to your site from a Google search and then immediately hit the back button to return, she would be shown an Exit Junction Ad in between your page and the Google search page, and you get paid for this impression. The ad is directly targeted to the search term that brought the visitor to your site in the first place. It’s an ideal way of complimenting your existing ad services and increasing your revenue without having to switch from your current ad provider. Also they cover all countries so you get paid for all traffic exiting you site regardless of its origin. They offer fee free payout via Check or PayPal with earnings of as little as $25 on a monthly basis.

ClickThruTraffic

Not the best option, but if nobody else picks your site, you can always rely on ClickThruTraffic. They claim to pay 6 to 20 cents each time a surfer clicks on the ad on your site. They offer textual links, buttons and banners.

There you go. We have covered 10 PPC ad serving options, from the big players to small timers. If you have any other suggestions, feel free to share in the comments section.

Is the RSS Feed of your WordPress Blog Working in all Major browsers?

admin — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 06:30:03 +0000

This morning one of my site visitors was kind enough to email me saying that the RSS Feed of my blog wasn’t working on Internet Explorer and Google Chrome browsers. Internet Explorer is well known for its issues so I wasn’t that alarmed but my hearth jumped as soon as I double checked the RSS feed on Chrome and found that it was complaining too. In this article I am going to explain what the error was and what I did to resolve it so you don’t panic if it ever happens to you.

The 1st RSS feed Error and Solution

Internet explorer was displaying the following error when I clicked the RSS feed link on my site:

The XML page cannot be displayed

Cannot view XML input using XSL style sheet. Please correct the error and then click the Refresh button, or try again later.

Chrome gave me the following which was a bit better as it was pointing out the line of the error rather than saying there is an error:

This page contains the following errors:

error on line 485 at column 330: Encoding error

At this stage my best option was to validate my RSS feed using the W3C Feed Validator

A quick validation check revealed that I had some special characters in one of my posts. I wrote an article earlier explaining how some of my posts started showing special characters after I transferred my blog to the new hosting and how I got rid of those character encoding issues but looks like I didn’t get rid of all of them. I manually edited the post and got rid of the special character which fixed this issue.

The 2nd RSS feed Issue and the Solution

After fixing the special character issue I checked my RSS feed again but this time it showed a different RSS feed validation error:

“Extra content at the end of the document”

The 1st error was easy to spot and I fixed it quickly but this 2nd error took me a while to figure out. I first opened the HTML source of my home page and I noticed that there was a block of junk after the tag:

Please see the Products page for more packaged product deals.

Become an Affiliate

Like WordPress Affiliate Platform plugin? Why not sign up for an affiliate account and promote it to make some money?

Feel free to leave a comment if you have any queries.

How to Fix the Character Encoding Problem in WordPress

admin — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:30:53 +0000

I recently changed my web hosting again in an attempt to speed up the page load time of my website. I had to do it as the former hosting’s page response time was horrible. It was taking 9 seconds for my home page to load with the former hosting. Now my home page loads under 4 seconds! It’s amazing the difference it makes… now I don’t get angry when browsing my own site (I wonder what my visitors were thinking while waiting for the page to load!).

Anyway, The transfer was smooth but I had a slight issue that I noticed after the transfer. There were special characters similar to the following scattered throughout my blog posts:

I was pretty sure that this was a character encoding mismatch problem. I got a little scared thinking it would take a long time to fix but then I found a really easy way to solve it.

Fixing the Character Encoding Mismatch Problem in WordPress

Open the ‘wp-config.php’ file in a text editor such as notepad (the wp-config.php file can be found on the directory where you installed WordPress).
Find the following two lines and comment them out:

define(’DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);

define(’DB_COLLATE’, ”);

They should look like the following after you comment them out:

//define(’DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);

//define(’DB_COLLATE’, ”);

Now upload the updated ‘wp-config.php’ file to your webhost.

This character encoding problem can happen after a database upgrade too so it doesn’t hurt to keep this trick in your mind just in case.

Tips and Tricks

How to Add Javascript in a WordPress Post or Page

Similar posts that you may like

Pay Per Click (PPC) Ad – Which One Should You Choose?

Google Adsense

Microsoft PubCenter

Yahoo Publisher Network(YPN)

AdBrite

Clicksor

Chitika

WidgetBucks

AdToll

ExitJunction

ClickThruTraffic

Similar posts that you may like

Is the RSS Feed of your WordPress Blog Working in all Major browsers?

The 1st RSS feed Error and Solution

The 2nd RSS feed Issue and the Solution

Become an Affiliate

Similar posts that you may like

How to Fix the Character Encoding Problem in WordPress

Fixing the Character Encoding Mismatch Problem in WordPress

Similar posts that you may like