Adsense isn’t the only way to make money online! There’s a growing trend at the moment to host your own ads and one of the best ways to do this is with the AdRotator plugin from Simple Thoughts that enables you to randomly rotate ad banners from your own preselected group.

For your non-Adsense ads and buttons, this is a great way to overcome ad blindness, increase your earnings and keep your site looking fresh and up-to-date.

Easy installation

The plugin is compatible with the latest version of Wordpress and is very easy to install. Simply download the AdRotator plugin, upload the adrotator.php file to your plugins directory and activate it via the Plugins menu. Once the plugin is installed:

• Create a .txt file. This file will contain your ad code so it should be named appropriately eg. banners.txt

• Add your different ad codes to each line in the .txt file. Codes can not be multi-line and must be contained on a single line. For example, you may want the first line in the file to be the code for a Text Link Ads banner and the second line to be the code for a PayPerPost banner. One line - one code. Save the file and upload it to your wp-content folder.

• Place the code: <?php echo getad(’Ad File Name’); ?> in your template where you want the ads to be displayed. The ‘Ad File Name‘ portion should be replaced with the name of your uploaded .txt file minus the .txt - For example, <?php echo getad(’banners’); ?>

• Done! Go to your site and hit “refresh” a few times to see your ads rotate!

If you want to give one banner more “weight” and see it displayed more often, simply add more lines of that banner’s code. For example, if you’ve got three lines of code and two of them are for BannerA then BannerA will be displayed 66% of the time.

But wait! There’s more!

You can use multiple .txt files to create multiple rotating ad positions on your site. An entirely different set of advertising on every pageview!

The plugin can also be used with Adsense which means that you can have a rotation of Adsense and other banners in the ad position. As the plugin requires the ad code to be one line and Adsense code is multi-lined, there’s a special hack from Simple Thoughts:

For AdSense keep the top portion of the code where settings are provided, as-is in your template. Compress the last three lines (includes a javascript file) of the code, which actually inserts the Ad, in a single line and insert it in your text file.

In case you are wondering it doesn’t violate any terms of service regarding competing ads because the final HTML (at that location) displays Ads from only one source, randomly selected.

I believe the plugin should be able to rotate any piece of code that you create.

Theoretically, you should be able to display a different header image/logo on every pageview and it could also be used to display randomly selected quotes or pieces of advice.

Keeping it fresh

I think the AdRotator plugin is quite underrated as it has a lot of potential to give your site “freshness” and to create something different on every pageview. That’s not only great for search engine spiders but also adds to the user experience on your site.

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