When I wrote the tutorial the plugin was available for a one-off payment of $37. In the meantime the price has gone up to $47, which is still a very good deal! But it gets even better! For a limited time (only this month!) the plugin is available for as little as $25! Still a one-off payment, and you can use it across all blogs and websites that you own.

To get your discount, simply click on this image and use the coupon code Jan90-25. You’ll get the package at a nice discount for just $25, no strings attached. We can all use a discount in these financially challenging times, can’t we? So click that image and get the stuff (remember it’s a limited offer for January only).

P.S. Full disclosure: You can also use Jan90-30 to get it for $30 or Jan90-35 to get it for $35 bucks if you’re so inclined to Since these are obviously affiliate links, I would be very grateful for the extra bucks. But I’d go for the full discount if I were you!

P.S.S. I’ve been away from blogging on Scraping Pennies for quite a while again. I have not abandoned this blog, nor have I abandoned my other blog How to be an Original. Over the past couple of months I have been mostly offline due to the difficult pregnancy my wife is having. She’s been very sick (and slowly recovering now), but the baby is doing very well. Our little girl is due in May. Anyway, I’m back at blogging.

• 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.

Full Control from the WordPress Admin interface

OIO Publisher is a blog monetization suite, but they most notable part is the WordPress plugin. The plugin in is a full option ad manager for banners, text links, in post ads and more and comes with full PayPal integration.

OIO Publisher lets you manage all your ads right from the WordPress admin interface. And payments for the ads are integrated. Your advertisers can pay directly from your blog using PayPal. Directly on your PayPal account (no waiting for money, or waiting to hit a payout threshold) and on your terms. That’s pretty cool huh?

Of course OIO Publisher is not entirely free. To get full access to all features you have to pay a one time payment of $37. Yes, one time. And after you paid for it, you can use it on as many of your blogs as you want. Considering all the advantages OIO Publisher gives you, it’s really a steal!

Deciding to spend the money

Okay, so the cost is obvious: a one-off fee of $37 with an unlimited domain licence. For that price I get the following potential revenue streams:

• Private advertisement sales (banners, text link ads)
• Private paid review sales
• Viral Blog Ads (once launched)
• Affiliate program for OIO Publisher (50%)

That’s convincing anough for me. The fact that I have 100% control, get 100% of the revenue and get my income directly on my PayPal account are very motivating aspects. And a full integration with WordPress is a very nice feature as well. I’m convinced!

Wait there’s even more!

Not convinced yet? Well I said before that OIO is really a blog monetization suite, much more than just a plugin. To name some more options:

• Unsold ad places can be filled with default ads you can configure. You can use affiliate links on these for instance. Sign up for an account at e-junkie and browse their catalog, there are loads of great products there. Sign up as affiliate for the product, copy and paste the code and your first banner ad is up.
• Or you can let those empty spaces be filled by ViralBlogAds, an ad network associated with OIO. ViralBlogAds is in alpha testing as I write this, so that’s more of a promise than a given at this time.
• There’s a marketplace where you can list your blog. Direct advertisers to your blog to buy ads or paid posts, or let them buy directly from the marketplace.
• There’s also an affiliate manager available, so you can manage your affiliates that sell your products. OIO managed to find a solution to do that as well. This looks promising!

There’s probably more that I haven’t discovered yet, but I’ll sure be looking into the various options this program has to offer.

Take a test drive

If you still feel uneasy about it, go ahead and download the free light version of the plugin. It’s functional, but lacks support for the most popular advertisement forms. Or hop on over to the OIO Publisher site and take a look at the live demo. Both are a great way to do a test drive, but if you like it you’re going to want the real deal.

I’ll post an installation tutorial for the plugin, including the setup process for the PayPal integration later this week. So stay tuned! Subscribe to the feed to make sure you don’t miss out!

Reason 1: Protecting affiliate links

Not all the links are affiliate links, but some are. Affiliate links are often formed in a way that the affiliate information is easy to derive from the address. These parts can easily be stripped if someone doesn’t want you to receive the commissions that are associated with that. While I don’t like it when people do that (it won’t make it cheaper for you in any way), I don’t care about the people who do it. I care about the software that does that.

There is malicious software out there that hijacks affiliate links, stripping my affiliate-id and replacing it with the id of someone else. This is what I really don’t like, because the intentions of the visitor are good, but they and I are harmed by someone with malicious intent.

As far as I’ve been able to find this happens by software on the visitors pc. But there are also reports about hacked websites, where files and links have been replaced. Serious stuff!

Reason 2: Central Link Management

The outbound (affiliate) links are all placed inside a nice little folder on my server. If a program decides to change the structure of their affiliate link (I know TLA did this once) I can simply go to that folder, modify the appropriate file and all my links are okay again.

This is also a benefit in case you might want to sell you blog at one point. Not all affiliate accounts are transferrable, and for the ones that aren’t you (or the new owner) can simple replace the affiliate links in the redirects and the entire archive of posts links to the new affiliate id. Easy as pie!

Reason 3: Easy Opt-Out

It’s feasible that I change my mind about a program, or have other reasons to not wanting to link out to a program any longer. In that case I can easily replace the redirect page, with another page with the same name, explaining all the reasons why I don’t promote that program anymore.

It’s the easy opt-out. I want out, but I don’t want to go back through all my articles to find where I linked to that particular program (would take hours). I simply replace it with another page (which would take minutes).

How to create a redirect

There are several methods to choose from, but there are two methods that I will describe here:

• Meta refresh
  This method uses the meta-tag in the header of the HTML file to redirect to another page. It uses client-side redirects (in other words, the internet browser does the work). This method has been abused with malicious intent by spammers and is discouraged by search engines. But it works.
• .htaccess redirect
  This method uses the .htaccess file on the server to redirect pages to another address. This method uses server-side redirects, which means that the internet browser doesn’t even notice it. This method is pretty safe, but only works on Apache servers.

Meta Refresh

This is not really hard to do. What you need is a simple text editor and FTP access to your server.

Step 1: Open the text editor, and copy paste the following template in there.

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us">
<title>[INSERT PAGE TITLE HERE]</title>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
<script>window.location="[INSERT AFFILIATE URL HERE]";</script>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1; url=[INSERT AFFILIATE URL HERE]">
</head>
<body>
<p align="center">You are being taken to the correct page.
<br>If the page does load after 5 seconds,
<a href="[INSERT AFFILIATE URL HERE]">click here</a>.</p>
</body>
</html>

Step 2: Insert the correct links and save.
Replace the [INSERT ... HERE] placeholders with the appropriate content. After that save the document as a .html or .php file.

Step 3: Upload the file to the server
Start your FTP-program (I use FileZilla) and upload the file to your server.

Step 4: Link to it.
That’s it, now use that link instead of the original link. You could even add the rel=nofollow attribute to the link to tell search engines that they need not follow the link (but a lot of them do it anyway).

.htaccess redirect

Editing the .htaccess file can make your website inaccessible if done incorrectly. Always make sure you have a back-up of the current version of the .htaccess file, to go back to a working version.

.htaccess is a file on Apache servers. It’s a very powerful tool, but often requires rather detailed technical knowledge to edit. Thankfully it’s not that difficult for the purpose of redirecting pages on server level.

Step 1: Check for existing .htaccess
First you need to find out whether you have a .htaccess file already. Start your FTP-program (make sure your program shows the .htaccess file), browse to the root of your domain and look for it (it’s usually on top of the list). If it’s there, download it. Make sure to make a back-up of the current file!

Step 2: Edit it to add redirects
Open the .htaccess file in a text editor and add the following lines to the file.

# Temporary redirects for affiliate links
Redirect 302 /[subdir]/[filename] http://example.com/?id=12345
Redirect 302 /[subdir]/[filename] http://example.com/?id=34567
# End of affiliate redirects


Now replace /[subdir]/[filename] with the right link, and replace http://example.com/?id=12345 with the address you want to send your visitors to when they click the link.

Make sure you use a temporary redirect. The status code 302 tells the other server that the page is redirected temporary, and that they should not update their addresses to the new address.

For example, for my e-junkie affiliate link this looks like this:

Redirect 302 /go/e-junkie.php http://www.e-junkie.com/?r=11261


Step 3: Save and upload
Upload and overwrite the old .htaccess file on the server.
Again make sure you have a back-up of the old version before you do this!

Step 4: Link to it.
That’s it, now use that link instead of the original link. It doesn’t even matter if there’s a file or not on the original location.

If you’re using WordPress as your (self-hosted) blogging platform, you could also use Joost de Valk’s plugin Robots Meta to edit the .htaccess file from within the WordPress admin interface.

Again, use caution with this file. Make sure you have a copy of a working version and ftp-access to your server in case things go wrong. An error in the .htaccess file could effectively deny you access to the WordPress Admin interface. In which case you’ll have to replace the erroneous file with the back-up through FTP.

Recap

Redirecting your affiliate links is not a sneaky trick, it’s a legitimate way to protect yourself and your visitors from the effects of malicious software that targets those links. Using the .htaccess method is preferred, because it’s not discouraged by search engines.

Nothing is entirely safe, because there are always ways to hack a site. But using this method, you’ll eliminate that 80-90% of causes. If you make sure you protect your .htaccess file properly too, you’re well on your way to being safe.

While I may be hiding protecting my affiliate codes, Scraping Pennies still gives full transparency about it. That’s what this blog is all about, making money online and showing how I do it. Subscribe now, to stay on top of tricks and tips like these. It might just make you a couple of pennies, heck a dime even!