Tutorial: Basic Installation OIO Publisher
This tutorial will guide you through the process of installing OIO Publisher Direct. At the end of this tutorial you will have:
- successfully registered an account
- downloaded and installed the plugin
- configured basic and advanced settings
- implemented an ad zone on your blog
- tested the purchase and payment procedure
- applied for a listing in the marketplace
OIO Publisher currently only supports self-hosted WordPress as a blogging platform. Other platforms are in the development roadmap, but are not released yet.
Registering an account
First hop on over to the website of OIO Publisher Direct. When you’re there, click on the register button.
After clicking that button you get a straightforward form to register your account. I recommend you start using the Pro (full feature) plugin, but as you can see there’s an option to register for a free account. In this tutorial I’m going to assume you’re working with the paid Pro version.
After this you’re ready to go to the next step.
Downloading and installing the plugin
If you’re not logged in already, make sure to log in with your newly created account. You’ll be taken to the “My Account” overview. From there navigate to the download section of the website.
You’ll be taken to another form, where you can choose what parts of the plugin you can download. The easiest is to simply download all parts, but make sure you have the core files, the ad manager and the paypal module as a minimum.
After this, upload and activate the plugin as usual. If you need help installing a plugin, check out this page at the WordPress codex for instructions.
After you have installed and activated OIO Publisher Direct, you’ll notice a new tab in the dashboard.
You have now successfully installed the plugin. Next we’ll setup an ad zone.
Configuring the basic and advanced settings
First we’ll set all the relevant settings. When you open the settings page, you get another set of tabs beneath the previous ones:
In the General settings tab you see several sections:
- On / Off Switches
There are a total of four switches. Make sure the plugin is enabled, test pay mode and link test mode are disabled. And don’t touch the uninstall switch. - Global Password
Here you can set an additional (optional) password. - Basic Settings
The basic settings are pretty straightforward. Add your Paypal email address and select a currency (GBP, USD, EUR) for your ad prices.The option “Accept Family Friendly Purchases only?” gets a bit confusing, due to the explanation behind it. In short: select Yes if you want to be able to deny ads and tell your potential advertisers beforehand. Select No if you want to accept all ads.
The redirect page is left empty for now. You can make a dedicated page with a sales pitch, as a portal to your purchase form (like Scraping Pennies has done). How to set that up is going to be part of another tutorial.
- Advanced Settings
There are several options here.The “Pay after approval” setting lets you decide whether an advertiser can pay during pending approvals. Should you deny the listing, then you need to refund the money. You can also decide to let the advertiser pay after approval only. The plugin will take care of publishing the ad once the advertiser has paid for it. I prefer the “Yes” setting, delay payment until the purchase is approved.
The “Post Specific Purchase Links” ads links to advertisement options, specific for a certain post. This option is left to “No” for now.
The “Purchase Window Type” is an option for the way the purchase page is shown. Thickbox is fancy (it gives an overlay with the page, while fading out the background), but works only when used in a standard way. “New Window” is the best option.
“Allow Subscription Payments?” is an option to allow advertisers to subscribe to ad spots.
In the “Paid Post Disclosure” box you can add a line of text that gets published whenever a paid post is purchased. In this tutorial we will not work with paid posts.
The “Purchasing Guidelines to Advertisers” text area is where you can describe what you guidelines are. On the purchase page there’s a default line of text, indicating your earlier choice for family friendly ads or all ads. This is where you ad a small sales pitch, or add some relevant stats to convince potential advertisers.
You can also change the “Folder Name” for OIO Publisher. This can be tricky, so we’ll leave it exactly as we found it.
- Feedback
In this section you can add the address of your listing in the Marketplace, as soon as you’re listed there.
Setting up an ad zone
This section will guide you through the process of setting up one ad zone with banners. We will setup only one ad zone. When you want multiple ad zones with banners, you can’t use the widget anymore. It will only display the first ad zone. In that case you need to manually add some php code to your blog design. I will show how to do this in an upcoming tutorial. Come back later to check for it, or subscribe to the feed to be among the first to know.
First select the banners section a couple of spots to the right of the general settings tab:
You’ll instantly see that there’s one ad zone already. You can add more zones. The widget however only supports one zone, so for this tutorial we stick to one zone only. In another tutorial we’ll dive deeper into the matter and setup several zones and customize them.
When you scroll down there are a lot of settings for the ad zone. Most of them are pretty straightforward as you will see. When deciding on the size of the banners, take the available space and commons sizes in consideration. 125 x 125 pixels is a very common ad size for blog sidebars.
Make sure the price tag is greater than zero. A price equal to zero will disable the ad zone altogether. Also decide on the rotation factor. A factor of 2 for instance will allow 2 ads in the same spot, dividing the page views among the two.
You can also decide on the length of the ad queue. If all spots are filled and an advertiser is interested anyway, they can purchase a spot. OIO Publisher will automatically promote an advertiser from the queue to a live spot when one becomes available.
This is also the place to decide upon the use of the rel=nofollow tag in the hyperlinks. You can choose between adding it to all links, adding it to no links at all, or only removing it at a surcharge. The removal of the nofollow link might hurt your search engine performance, as they (specifically Google) don’t like purchased links.
If there are no ads sold yet, there’s the possibility to either show a default image (see picture above) or configure default ads. The default ads might be ads for your own products (if you have them) or affiliate links to e-books and training programs like the SEO Book, or ad programs like LinkWorth. There are plenty of options.
You can choose to let them only fill empty spaces, or to rotate them alongside the purchased ads.
The ad zone is now setup properly. The next step is to add it to the sidebar using the widget. Navigate to the design section of your WordPress admin interface. Click on the “Add” link behind OIOpub Banner and decide where on the sidebar you want to show the ads.
Save the settings and your ad zone is now showing on your blog! Go check it out! But don’t forget to come back, because we’re not done yet. We still have to test if the payment process works.
Testing the purchase and payment process
The ad zone is now up, and is probably showing “Advertise here” links in the place holders. Before you click on any of them, hop on over to the general settings tab again. Find the section titled “On / Off Switches” and enable the “Test Pay Mode”. You will see a red line on top of the page warning you about it.
Now click one of those “Advertise here” links on your blog. You’re taken directly to the purchase page of OIO Publisher Direct. On that page you’ll find the pricing information, the purchase guidelines and a simple form to select what purchase to make. Everything an advertiser needs, no more, no less.
For the test purchase, select Banner Ad and click on “Continue with purchase”. You will see the following page. If you allow the removal of the nofollow link at a surcharge, it will be integrated into the form when the zone is selected.
There’s a built in check for validity, so even for a test purchase it’s necessary to use valid information. If you don’t have a banner available, I have one available for you on my server. Add this address (http://scrapingpennies.com/img/125×125sample.jpg) for the image and use http://scrapingpennies.com/ as the “Site URL”. That way you can test the entire process.
Once you followed through with the procedure, and hit the “Submit and make Payment” button, you will get a confirmation instantly. Real purchases will be redirected to Paypal to finish their payment, in case you accept payments before approval.
If you check your WordPress Admin page right now, you’ll find that there’s an alert on the “homepage” of the admin interface.
And if you click on the “1″ you’ll see the following screen with the ad details. This is where you review the ad. Check the image, check the link, edit typos if necessary and approve or reject the purchase. For now click on Approve, so the ad will show in the ad zone.
That concludes the test cycle. Now you’re almost done, remember that friendly reminder at the beginning of this test procedure? It’s time to disable “Test Pay Mode” now. After you did that, go back to the ad management section and delete the test ad. But feel free to keep it in place if you used the Scraping Pennies advertisement 
Applying to the Marketplace
The last thing to do is to apply to the Marketplace. This is optional, but it’s a feature that could become very powerful. To apply, head on over to the OIO Publisher page and login to your account.
After you submitted your blog, the folks of OIO Publisher will manually review your submission. You’ll get an answer in 24 to 48 hours. If approved you’ll get an API key, that you can enter in the API Services section of OIO Publisher at your blog.
All done!
That’s it. You have successfully installed your own blog monetization suite! And it looks pretty professional too, doesn’t it?
Should you have any questions or run into problems, don’t hesitate to drop them in the comments. I’m happy to help you out.
I’ll be publishing other tutorials related to OIO Publisher in the coming weeks. Subscribe to the feed to keep up to date, and improve your use of OIO Publisher even more.
2 Pennies' Worth Of Thoughts Here!
A Penny For Your Thoughts:
If you don't put your two cents in, how can you get change?
Incredibly helpful! Thanks so much for the great post. :>
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