Well Nick is in the army still doing his year long stint as a potato scraper extraordinare! While I have been engaged on a top secret project that only, myself and half the world have known about, but what is this top secret project well I can tell you this have you ever wanted a Wordpress Membership Site plugin that actually works?

Of course you do which is why you will run out and purchase Your Members in about 10 minutes time!

In the mean time I have managed to log back into PaymentBlogger so normal if somewhat erratic service will resume soon!

Cheers for the support and the emails asking about us, I can tell you as far as I know Nick is fine if a little bored thankfully the Greek Army is about as active as a sloth.

Before I forget Join the Cambridge New Media Affiliates scheme let me know you done so and I will let you in on some cool new ideas that will blow your minds.

Well when Google took over Feedburner we expected them to start integrating Adsense pretty quickly and so guess what happened we were right.

What’s more its not just being restricted to existing Feedburner users with advertising but everyone even me as seen above, so will I be enabling it?

urgh no

Feed readers are your loyal readers they regularly visit your site at least in theory so should I attempt to monetize them? Its an interesting question but actually irrelevant to my reason for not activating Adsense, my reason is simple if Adsense doesn’t work on most blogs why would it work on a blogs feed?

So cheers Google I know many people will want this but its not for me, but it is nice to see Feedburner development continuing and I’m hoping for big and better things.

Blogs are the hardest sites to monetize, but yet when it comes to wordpress there is always an automated solution for you In today’s post we will write about the top wordpress plugins that you may use in order to earn money from your wordpress blog.

Using adsense with your blog

Adsense never worked well for my blogs - as they are all tech related and people know how to avoid those ads - but for many bloggers adsense is the best earner. One of the best plugins for this task is the Adsense Deluxe plugin which gives you the ability to have different ad placements/colors on each post and decide what ads to run, etc.

Besides adsense deluxe there are other plugins for adsense too. Here are a few:

• AskApache Firefox Adsense will display Firefox adsense ads only to users that don’t have firefox
• Shylock Adsense Plugin gives you the ability to display more ads to the old posts and less to the new ones. This way you will not bother your regular readers
• If you are a refresh geek, then Adsense Earnings is the best plugin for you, as it will display your adsense earnings in your dashboard
• In case you want to share adsense revenue with your co-bloggers, then Author Adsense Plugin is exactly what you need.
• You can also use the Adsense Manager Plugin, which actually generates code automatically and allows positioning of ads with Widgets
• Who Sees Ads, will help you create some rules regarding who is viewing ads and who is not. This way you can display ads only to search engine visitors, or only to non registered users, etc.

More adsense earnings

If you want to earn even more, there is a great plugin from web 2.0 announcer which uses a unique revenue sharing system to help you make more from adsense. The web 2.0 announcer monetizer plugin will display links to the top stories from the web that are related to your blog, and in addition you’ll get half of the adsense pageviews in their site. This way you can earn money for giving cool content to your readers.

Amazon affiliate program plugins

Another cool income source for your blog could be Amazon. But if you are lazy like me you would like to have a plugin that will add those ads automatically, right? Well there are a few plugins that help you monetize your wordpress blog with Amazon. Here are a few I know :

1. Amazon links pro is a plugin that according to its author is a contextual solution for Amazon as it is displaying ads relevant to your content.
2. The Amazon Wishlist plugin will display your wish list at amazon to your blog. I know this is not actually a monetization method but a free book or cd is always cool, right?
3. TicTap Contextual Ads is probably the best plugin that I saw for Amazon (haven’t tested it yet) This plugin will display contextual ads to your blogs with Amazon products, and what I really like about them is their unique style (check the site to see what I mean)

Selling links: Do it yourself

If you followed the tips we gave you for selling links without the help of middle man companies, then it is probably the time to install the WP Text Ads plugin. I have never used this one, so if you want to read a review check this post from proBlogger.

Sponsored posts: Do it yourself

As you know there are plenty of services that act like a middleman for sponsored posts in your blog. Services like ReviewMe have marketplaces where advertisers search and order sponsored posts to your blog and they get a big cut of the sales.

If your blog has traffic maybe this is not required, so if you think you can do this yourself, you can use a plugin like WP BankRoll. The plugin is integrated with the Paypal IPN system, so it is a great solution, and the best is that there is a free version too.

CPM/CPC ads: Do it yourself

Now if you think you can sell CPM or CPC ads yourself, the first thing you need is a great piece of software to automate the process and have your clients confident that everything is working well. To have this result I would definitely suggest you to install OpenAds (formerly known as phpAdsNew) and then use WP OpenAds Plugin

PayPal Donations

Another way to make some extra money with your blog is offer paypal donations. If you think this monetization method can work for you, you can try the above plugins:

1. EasyPayPal Wordpress Plugin
2. Buy Me a Beer - PayPal Donation WordPress Plugin
3. Paypal Donate

Monetizing your feeds

Personally I am not a fan of this monetization technique - as feeds are supposed to used in order to get visitors back to our site - but if you are, here are two plugins you can use:

1. Feedvertising by text link ads has a plugin for feed ads for wordpress
2. The PostPost plugin helps you display CJ ads to your feeds

More monetization options

Do you want more ways to make money? Bellow are the rest plugins that you can use to make money from your wordpress site:

1. The DealDotCom plugin will help you earn more from this new - and promising affiliate program.
2. If you are registered with Chitika’s affiliate program - which by the way is great for sites that have product reviews - you can use [CA] Chitika, a plugin that will automate the whole process
3. On the other hand if you prefer to display BidVertiser ads, you can use the Bidvertiser wordpress plugin. Bidvertiser for me was the one of the worst cpc programs I ever used, but that doesn’t mean that it wont work for you too.
4. If you want are affiliated with CafePress then you definitely have to install the CafePress WP plugin

With Nicks great post on selling links I thought I would follow up with a quick how to setup OpenAds and how to integrate it into your Wordpress or Drupal sites.

What’s OpenAds

Openads is a free open source advert management system, it allows us as site owners to provide advertisers with a means to run and monitor adverts on our site. Openads is the merger of phpAdsNew, phpPgAds and Max Media Manager into one package.

Setting up OpenAds

Go head to the downloads section for this tutorial we are using the latest stable build 2.0.11 a Beta version of the next version is available at the time of writing which offers several bug fixes and a combined install script. However for this tutorial we will be using the old version and mysql though postresql is available as well.

1)Unpack and move the files to the location on the server

2)Setup your MySQL database, each host has a different way of doing this so check your hosts documentation for how. While for performance reasons its best if Openads has its own database, it does allow user defined prefixes to its tables allowing it to be setup in a single database.

3)openads has a graphical wizard for installing visit in a browser the location of your new adserver for example www.example.com/adserver
Hopefully you are presented with a screen similar to this…

4)Proceed and Accept the license agreement.

5)Fill in the relevant details, notice the URL prefix this should be your server location in my case its running of the local intranet which is why their is no www.

6)Put in the location and information about the mysql db, notice you can change the prefix and table type (unless you have a reason to avoid this section and just leave it alone).

7)Your server is installed woot go get a coffee!

Integrating with Wordpress

Thankfully their is an Openad plugin for wordpress that makes installing it a breeze so rather then taking you step by step through the process I will simply point you to the WP OpenAds plugin home page

Integrating with Drupal

Again integrating with Drupal is easy thanks to the OpenAd module which takes care of theme integration, download the module and setup as normal.

Other systems?

While I principally use Openads with Drupal their are plenty of other content management systems out there. The good news is if they allow you to place javascript in a page then you can use Openads as well!.

Just to be clear we are not recommending you use the worm to patch your sites, rather providing information on how the Worm works, as always you should get patches from a known authority such as wordpress.org, that said this vulnerability is out there and the official patch is not.

Just a quick post about mybeni latest idea, its as far as I know the first dedicated XSS worm for wordpress, basically it means that his proof of concept can edit PHP files on your server as well as a range of other nefarious things. But don’t panic to much as his current worm does nothing more then fix the security hole in Wordpress 2.2.1 the irony being it fixes the hole its using.

Might I suggest its probably time to get patching

Now if you want to use his worm then follow the following steps (Payment Blogger is not responsible for what happens next )

How can I start the Worm?

• Go to your blog and login to your Wordpress Adminstration Panel
• Post a Comment to your own Blog containing a link to this blog, that means http://mybeni.rootzilla.de/mybeNi/
• Go into your admin Panel -> Moderate Comments and click the freaking link :o)
• The friendly worm will guide you through everything and your blog is secure again.

Source:http://mybeni.rootzilla.de/mybeNi/2007/this_is_the_first_weblog_xss_worm/

It won’t be long be for new worms start appearing so patch quickly and early to save yourself from bother.
For more details on the 7 known problems see the full list.