0The WordPress Guide

3.2 Monetise

You’ve done the hard work so why not make a little bit of money

3.2.1 Accept donations

Add a payp­al donate but­ton some­where. I advise set­ting the dona­tion amount quite low, people can always con­trib­ute more.  We also recom­mend put­ting this on a page some­where, and not on your home page.  New vis­it­ors are highly unlikely to donate, where­as your reg­u­lar read­ers will find the donate but­ton on their return vis­its.  We recom­mend put­ting it on your about page, where it’s easy to find but not obtrus­ive.  You can use a plu­gin to do this for you, for example donate plus

3.2.2 Use Google Adsense

Simple and easy way to show con­tex­tu­al ads from google adsense. Don’t go over­board though, it will repel vis­it­ors.  Use your ana­lyt­ics to work out where ad place­ment is most effect­ive.  There are plenty of plu­gins for this, but we place ads ourselves by adding the google adsense code to single.php and dir­ectly into a spe­cif­ic places in each page.

3.2.3 Show ads on feeds

If you’ve registered for feed­burn­er (see sec­tion 2.2.2), you can eas­ily enable adsense ads on the feed.
[google_adsense]

3.2.4 Ask visitors to disable their adblocker

Some users will block your ads with the browser plu­gin adb­lock.  It is easy to add a bit of code to show them a polite mes­sage in place of the ads, request­ing that they dis­able the block­er on your site to sup­port you.  We have adap­ted our own code based on the art­icle on Joe Riggs Bloggs.

3.2.5 Use amazon associates

If you reg­u­larly dis­cuss any products you can link to them on Amazon and if your vis­it­ors fol­low the link and pur­chase the item you will get a small com­mis­sion.  This is obvi­ously good for you, but it is also bene­fi­cial for your read­ers even if they have no interest in buy­ing as they can quickly and eas­ily get an idea what the item you are talk­ing about looks like, costs, and is sup­posed to do.

3.2.6 Catch other potential affiliated links

Sign up for VigLink and install their plu­gin which will auto­mat­ic­ally affil­i­ate links you haven’t already affil­i­ated.  It can also auto­mat­ic­ally add links to unlinked con­tent if you choose to enable the fea­ture.  It just might gain you a little extra income for next-to-no work.