How To Configure OIO Publisher

I have highly recommended OIO Publisher to my readers in the past. It is a powerful ad management platform for WordPress. It is so powerful, in fact, that some of my readers have expressed confusion on how to use it. Well, I’m here to help!

First of all, once you have downloaded OIO Publisher, you need to install it just as you would any other WordPress plug-in. Upload it to the plug-ins folder, activate it and you’re good to go. But, then what?

OIO Publisher Settings

Click on the Settings option and you’re going to have several sub-sections to OIO. Enter the name of your site and your email address. Set your currency to whatever is appropriate. For the payment system, I used Paypal in which case you will enable the option and enter your Paypal email address.

For Advanced Settings, you will select whatever is appropriate. See, the idea behind OIO is that advertisers can actually upload their own ad and pay you automatically from your site. So, you’re specifying here the capabilities they have, such as whether they can upload images, purchase ads on specific posts, set up a subscription (in which case your sponsors will be auto-billed until they cancel), etc.

The Rewrite rules is important because this is the page which will act as your advertising catalog for your blog. I recommend you use your blog’s root URL and then something like “advertise”. So, enter “[blog url]/advertise”.

Save your settings. Then, you will need to copy the .htaccess rewrite code that OIO gives you and include it in your .htaccess file. Chances are you already have re-write code in your .htaccess file for the WordPress permalinks. If so, just take the last line from the code OIO gives you (the “RewriteRule” command” and include it in your .htaccess file somewhere directly beneath the “RewriteEngine On” command.

Setting Up Ad Zones

OIO supports several different ad types, including text ads, banner ads, inline ads, ads specific to posts, and custom ads (which allow you to use OIO to charge for pretty much anything you want). The system has settings sub-sections for each ad type.

So, to set this up, you have to first look at your blog and decide where you want ads to show up. From there, you plan out your ad zones. For example, you might have an ad zone for your sidebar, another for the top header area, and another for your footer. If this is how you’re doing it, then you would have a total of 3 different banner ad zones.

Under “Banner Ads”, you tell OIO that you have 3 zones. Once you’ve done that, you’ll have links to configure settings for each zone. You specify the name of the zone, the price tag you want, the banner sizes, how many ads you want in each zone, etc.

The “Default Ad” is simply an ad to display if no paying customer is using the ad slot. You can specify any code you want in here, whether it be an affiliate banner, Adsense, or anything else.

Repeat the same setup process for each ad zone. You will see, too, that OIO gives you both PHP and Javascript code to include the banner zone into your blog theme. You can choose either version you want, but you will need to manually include the ad code into your blog theme so that the banners managed by OIO Publisher are actually displayed.

Text ads will be just that – text ads (with no images). You can set up as many text ad zones as you want. Inline ads will allow your customers to buy ads which are automatically inserted into your posts. The “Posts” ad type allows you to sell your own paid reviews via OIO (rather than go through a middle-man like ReviewMe).

The “Custom” ad type allows OIO to act as a payment system for anything you wish to sell on your blog. For example, you could use OIO to process payments for an information product that you sell.

Setting Up Your Templates

With your ad zones set up and the various zone ad codes included in your blog’s theme, you should now be seeing OIO-managed ads in your blog. The final step is to customize the template files that come with OIO so that the actual purchase pages managed by OIO look like they are part of your blog.

The OIO Publisher file structure has a sub-directory called “templates”. Within that folder, you will see sub-folders, each corresponding to a theme. See, OIO allows you to have several different themes to choose from.

Now, you can edit your theme files directly from OIO Publisher if you have granted write access to those files. In this case, you can edit your OIO theme from your control panel. Otherwise, you will need to modify the templates locally and upload via FTP.

The most important files to them theme are styles.css, header.tpl and footer.tpl. Most likely, you’ll want to modify these files so that they more or less match the theme of your main blog. You can use the default files as a basis for comparison, but overall you should be copying code from your main blog theme into the OIO theme that way the advertising section of your site looks appropriate to your blog.

The “Core Templates” are output templates for the core functions of OIO Publisher, including the ad types, the purchase pages, etc. You do not need to modify these templates for OIO to function properly. You should only modify them if you must to ensure the aesthetic appeal of your pages.

Linking To Your Purchase Page

Back in your OIO Settings, you configured the URL path to your OIO pages. In this post, I specified to make it use an “advertise” path off your main URL. In this case, just add “purchase.php” to the path to get your purchase page.

To illustrate, you can see the OIO-powered purchase page over at PCMech at this URL:

http://www.pcmech.com/advertise/purchase.php

So, just change your URL to suit your blog and you should see your OIO powered purchase page.

At this point, just set up a WordPress page which acts as your sales page for advertising on your blog. Then, direct the “Buy” link into your purchase page where the advertiser can then purchase ads on your blog easily.

Hope That Helps

OIO Publisher is a powerful plug-in that can really help you generate good revenue from your blog. But, it is so powerful that it might be a bit hard to figure out. Hopefully this post helps you.

If you are not already an OIO user, there is a discount code available where you can save $10, but only if you order before February comes to an end! That discount code is” “Feb-10”.

Now, go make some money.