I’m using the Thesis theme for this blog and decided to provide advertising in the big box on the upper right-hand side of this page. The Thesis theme has a few custom keys that you can use by providing values to those keys in your blog posts. Why would you want to do this? Good question.
By using custom key fields in a blog post in WordPress you can make something different happen with individual blog posts or category of posts.
For this blog post I want to esplain how you can provide different ads depending on what blog post your reader is on. This provides a more pointed way of advertising as a reader at your blog might be reading different topics in different blog posts, you can provide advertising of products that are related to that blog post.
Instead of this blog having the big yellow Thesis theme ad show up in the upper right-hand corner of this blog all the time no matter what page your on, I can use the built in keyword custom that Thesis provides me to show something different in that box.
Built-In Custom Keys
The image below shows the keys that are built into the Thesis theme. They are found under the Design -> Thesis Options in the Multimedia Box panel.
So if there’s an article written in the category WordPress Themes, I’ll provide a link to one paid for theme that I’m an affiliate for or maybe a few 25×25 ads that have to do with WordPress Themes. Again, by doing this I can provide more pointed advertising to each blog post.
eBook Example
So let’s take my article 8 Pointers To Keep In Mind When Creating eBooks that talks about creating eBooks. I would then add the keyword custom because that is what the Thesis theme controls – the upper right-hand corner of information on this blog. The value would be my affiliate link to eJunkie. Now, this is an example to one link but I could provide multiple links for multiple ads in the value box.
Resulting in the advertising (or image) box to display the following.
(click image for larger view – 800px)
Automating The Ads
The next step when I get there, would be to provide a more automatic way to do this, say a check box that would allow me to turn this on for every blog post instead of providing a custom key for each blog post. That might be there already in the Thesis theme or WordPress but I still need to do some digging.
I’m sure I could hand code it but I’m going to be careful not to hand code too much because when updates to the Thesis theme come out, extra attention will need to be applied as I don’t want to lose any custom functionality that I have created.
Advertising by Category
Advertising by category would be very cool and would give me a few different ads to put up when people are browsing my content. If there looking in one category then the same ads will be displayed unless there is a blog post that displays a different ad for a particular reason.
No matter what, there will always be a default ad that displays x ads covering the various topics of my blog.
Now all I have to do is find a bunch of ads with affiliate links. However, a more better idea would be to create my own products to display. Now that’s the ticket. 🙂
Testing comment2tweet plugin.