Advertising has proven to be the best way to is the largest of several online monetize a website. advertising networks to advertise Google Adsense one's website but practically it doesn't prove out to be enough replicable for all types of websites. The amount of space available for the content on a website will get reduced by using Google Adsense or other online advertising networks which the visitors might not like. Adsense can also get tricky to configure and also reduces the design appeal of the website.
A better option would be to cut out this middleman and start directly selling advertisements on one's website for big payouts. The control over what kinds of ads are displayed is also more in this case. To earn handsome amount of money, the ads need to be managed properly. Managing ads would sound simple but it isn't in reality. It will eat up a lot of time if one wants to do it manually. Luckily we have WordPress plugins to help us manage ads.
The new plugin that we talked about in the beginning, that is, the WPAdverts Classified Plugin is basically a commercial plugin costing from 39$ for a single website license. This plugin works with any theme and this review we will take a look at how to install and configure this plugin for classifieds.
PLUGIN CONFIGURATION
Once the plugin is uploaded and activated, a new menu in WordPress named "Classifieds" gets created and this plugin also creates some new pages on the site - Adverts, Manage and Add. If you visit "Classifieds" > "Options" some modules will be there which you can activate.
Below the "Core" settings, an option will appear to decide how long to display an advert for(default is for 30 days). Currency settings can also be configured to match one's local currency.
For post adverts if you wish to charge people, you can enable the module "Payments" and then either "PayPal IPN" or "Bank Transfer" modules to receive payments. Under the "Payments" module different options such as "Free" and "Premium" listings can be set up, and we can choose how much to charge and for how long etc.
The "PayPal IPN" module settings allows us to enter our PayPal email address and also allows us to choose whether the payments are in sandbox mode or live.
Any payments we receive via the website will then be listed under the "Payments" menu, along with other info such as whether the payments are "Pending", "Failed", "Refunded" etc.
SETTING UP CATEGORIES
The next stage in setting up the plugin is creating categories - these will be where the users will submit their listings. This part of setting up will depend on what sort of Classifieds site you are setting up. To add them, go to the "Categories" menu link and then create child categories and parent categories relevant for the website. Creating categories for a website is same as for creating categories for a blog. In the below-mentioned example, you can see that we have made a "Video Games" category with different genres of games for child categories:
SUBMITTING AN ADVERT
Once the categories are created, you can always visit the site and check the pages that the plugins have created. The main page "Adverts" will list the classifieds which will be empty:
For adding the first advert, open the "Add" page and there you can fill in the information about what you want to sell - title of the item, its description , images , price etc.
Click "Preview" and then "Publish" to finally add the item to the list on your site.
PRICING
Pricing is quite reasonable for WPAdverts, starting at 39$ for a single website which includes support(standard) and an entire year of updates which proves to be fairly enough for most of the people. One can also pay Rs. 6601 for 5 sites together with priority support and 1 year of updates or Rs. 13268 for unlimited number of sites with priority support and again 1 year of updates.
CONCLUSION
This plugin has proven out to be quite solid and highly easy to setup and configure. It works well with numerous themes which we tested it with - the backend is implemented to the point and the frontend uses the theme's styling and hence matches well with it. Not a huge number of features are provided at the moment because of the fact that this plugin has just launched. For example, the addon module section at the moment only contained payment modules.
Probably they plan to add more modules with time. Premium plugins are commonly run this way at the moment.
It's one click installation works fabulously. This plugin can be used on any new or old / already existing blog. It provides options to set up shortcodes as one sees fit and run there classifieds site like a pro.
Also read:WP Adverts is also bundled with multiple modules, and also provides mechanism to activate or deactivate them at any point the developer feels like to extend the site's capabilities.
Adverts plugin is developed keeping developers in mind. It is highly developer friendly and it uses the best WordPress coding practices, provides mechanism to extend the plugin with hooks and filters and is also nicely documented.
Adverts is also integrated with numerous third party plugins (Jetpack, SEO and many more). Free addons increase its functionality and allow to create unique user experience for the site visitors.