As we all know, we can’t advertise on our wordpress.com blogs, which is rather annoying as many of you have found out over time that adverts ‘do’ appear on your wordpress site. WordPress do place their own Google ads on your site, but the chances are you will never have seen them as they are only displayed to users who are not logged in to the service. This is all covered by their Terms of Service.
9: Advertisements. Automattic reserves the right to display advertisements on your blog unless you have purchased an Ad-free Upgrade or a VIP Services account.
Anyway that is changing, you can now display adverts on your wordpress site and urn revenue from them. Before you go dashing off to sign up Bill the butcher for a £5 a week ad on your site, I should make it a bit more clear..
WordPress have announced that they are launching WordAds, with their partners Federated Media. This deal will allow WordPress site owners to sign up to show brand ads from Federated Media on their own sites and earn revenue.
So you can’t go and get local ads which are relevant to your site but you at least will be able to earn a small return for the ads on your site.
You need to have a custom domain on your site and not the standard my site.wordpress.com URL. Buying a domain and having it mapped to your wordpress site currently costs £10 ($17) if you do it all within WordPress.
I can’t see what the rates are for site owners, so it isn’t possible to say if you would cover your £10 investment or make any income from the adverts but if you have a popular blog hosted on wordpress.com, already with a custom domain it might be worth a punt.
Signing up isn’t a guarantee that you will be accepted according to this statement on the sign up page.
Selection will be based on level of traffic and engagement, type of content, and language used on a blog. Some blogs may not be accepted. Entering the form below does not commit you to the advertising program. It just signals your interest in learning more.
It also doesn’t make it clear if when you sign up to WordAds if it replaces the Google Ads or is additional to them. If you do sign up, please let us know your experiences and what the revenue rates are.
Last Friday Nicky and myself attended Better CIC in Hillfields in Coventry, another of the Community Capacity Builder UK online centres we are currently working with. We held a workshop with some of the Digital Champions and members of the local community.
We showed them the benefits of a community website; how it can be used to publicise what’s happening the in area, how to use it for campaigns and highlighting local issues, and how and why a hyperlocal blog can garner participation from members of the community.
We then went through the practical steps taken to get up and running such as how to set up a wordpress account and also how to add contributers to it, and in one instance we helped a lady set up her first email address. Here is Better CIC’s new site!
After the training I did some video interviews and asked a few of the participants what they thought about their new community website and how they found using the WordPress platform as well as asking them what benefits they thought having this new hyperlocal platform would give them and their community.
If you would like our help, then please get in touch.
Last week Michael and I headed North to Penrith, Cumbria to deliver training at Impact Housing’s Eden Rural Foyer, another of the many Community Capacity Builder UK online centres Talk About Local are currently working with. The group of 10 local Digital Champions and residents were interested in getting to grips with WordPress and all of them had created a new WordPress.com website and published a few posts by the end of the day. Just before we left, I asked the Eden Rural Foyer’s Community IT Support Officer about how he and the others might use their new skills:
Here at Talk About Local we find many people we’re helping to develop community websites using WordPress ask about inviting new contributors to their site to lighten their load, get more local people involved and give their website a variety of voice. Here’s a guide to help you add those new to Worpress to your website as contributors and overcome an issue we have encountered numerous times over recent months that has made this process a little less straightforward than it should be.
Your new user will be sent an email them inviting them to WordPress and should go through the following steps to create a new WordPress username and login to your website (they can of course register their own blog at a later point if they wish).
Creating a WordPress Username
You will receive an email from WordPress which tells you to accept the invitation by clicking on the link URL within. If clicking on the link URL does not work, copy the URL and paste it into the navigation bar of your internet browser.
You will be taken to a WordPress signup page that invites you to ‘Get your own WordPress.com account in seconds’. The first section of the form gives you the option to create a new WordPress.com blog of your own. To avoid confusion, just create a WordPress.com username to log into the website for now, by selecting the option to ‘Sign up for just a Username’ under the second Username box in the form. You can register your own blog later if you wish.
Once you have opted to sign up for just a Username, the Blog Address box will disappear. Complete the rest of the form by creating a unique WordPress username (WordPress will alert you if your fist choice is already taken), a password and enter the email address the initial WordPress invitation was sent to.
Upon pressing the orange ‘Sign up’ button, WordPress will inform you that an email has been sent to your inbox. Check your inbox for the email, checking your spam folder if you cannot find it.
An email should arrive quickly in your inbox, but sometimes it takes a few hours. If it does not arrive go back to the WordPress page prompting you to check your email to complete registration. At the bottom of the page there are a number of options for what to do if you have not received your activation email, including updating your email address if you had entered it incorrectly.
When you receive and open the new email, it tells you to click on the link URL within to activate your new WordPress account. If clicking on the link URL does not work, copy the URL and paste it into the navigation bar of your internet browser.
You will be taken to the WordPress Login page. Sign in with your new WordPress username and password.
You will be taken to your WordPress Personal Profile page. In the left hand menu, select Dashboard and My Blogs to display the website you’ve been added to on the right-hand side of the screen. Click on the title of the website on the right-hand side of the screen to be taken to its Dashboard, where you can get started with creating your first post!
Current issues with adding Contributors new to WordPress
If all goes according to plan, your new contributor should be able to follow these simple steps to create a new WordPress username and log into your website. You can then decide if you want them to remain as a contributor or change their user role to author, editor or administrator.
However, over recent months we have found that WordPress does not always add the new user to the blog they have been invited to. This means that when your new contributor logs into WordPress with their username and password, they will see no websites listed when they select Dashboard and My Blogs. Looking at the WordPress support forum, we’re not the only ones to have encountered this problem. The issue presents a slight glitch but is very easy to get around.
First and foremost, ensure that the person you’ve invited has gone through the sign-up process and created a WordPress username. If so, they will have received a confirmation email from WordPress telling them that their account is now active.
You may also see their new username in your dashboard under Users > Invites under the Already Invited list at the bottom of the screen.
Once you are certain your new contributor has a created a WordPress username, simply go to Users in the left-hand menu and follow the simple steps to Add User From Community, being sure to use the same email address that they created their WordPress username with.
Once you have done this, your new contributor should be able to see your website when they enter the My Blogs section of their dashboard and get cracking with writing the first of many posts!
How many times have you seen something on Twitter that you wanted to add to a blog post and had to spend 5 minutes doign a screen grab of the tweet to add to your post as an image like this?
Well you might not know it but you can actually embed a tweet directly in to your post. A while back the nice people at WordPress.com baked Twitter Blackbird Pie in to the platform, so if you want to add a tweet to your post all you need to do is get the URL of the tweet, a paste it on to a single line in your post and it will appear like this,
Latest on #TAL: More new stuff from WordPress - A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the new themes that WordPress.co... http://t.co/6P7WQh9G
