7 WordPress plug-ins for eBay Sellers #6 WP TagAds
By Garry HJ | October 15th, 2009 | Category: Web Site Resources | 1 Comment »So far in this series I’ve looked only at WordPress Plug-ins that pul your listings (or those of others) from eBay and display them on your WordPress-based website. Today, I start looking at plug-ins that will attack the problem of elevating your listings’ visibility and bids from a different angle.
Today and tomorrow I’m looking at tools that work on keywords (as all tools reviewed so far have done) but instead of setting the keywords manually within each page or post, these utilise keywords within the post or page text, rather than relying on you as text-author to assign keywords to the plug-in. This is a departure from the methodology of the first 5 plug-ins, and a step more towards the Google Adwords type of marketing philosophy and requirements.
Now, I know all the SEO gurus reading this will be saying, “But Gaz, we always preach that every page should be keyword rich”, and yes I know they’re right, but let’s be honest … the only “key” word relevant in the eBay world is the key to their Swiss security vault. They’ve continually diluted the relevancy of keywords and thoroughly trashed the performance of them with Best Match, TRS purple boxes, Diamond PowerSellerships and countless other disruptions to the once happy marketplace. That’s what this series hopes to address – providing information about tools that sellers can use to get buyers back onto their specific listings, or to get those listings off eBay once and for all.
eBay essential plug-in for WordPress #6 – WP TagAds
I have to confess that my only attempt at implementing WP-TagAds was a disaster. It was early in my WordPress site-building experience and I was using a non-widgetised theme that refused to place nice with this tidy little plug-in. The author provided heaps of help, quickly, each time, but I still abandoned it. I’ve got a couple of projects on the go that could make use of it, and am thinking of taking it up again now that I know a bit more about WordPress architecture and themes.
In essence WP TagAds is a new way to display ads on your WordPress blog and an advertising solution tailored for WordPress bloggers. Ads are displayed based on the post tags you assign to a post in your WordPress blog. This is different to Google Adsense where the page is crawled, then ads are displayed based on the findings.
With WP TagAds you are served eBay products based the keywords you assign to a post. If you don’t like the ads you’re seeing, just change the keywords around a little to get the ads you are looking for. This is similar in operation to WordBay and Free eBay Shop reviewed earlier this week. Unlike those two, with WP TagAds, you only input the tags once – as the post tags. This will also allow a degree of automation for “scraper” bloggers using WP-o-Matic or similar to pull RSS feed postings from other blogs, because WP TagAds with auto-fill the advert slots based on the imported tags … but expect some result-weirdness if you rely on the automation completely.
Ads are displayed via a sidebar widget that is included in the plug-in and you can place the widget anywhere you like inside your template. You will need an ePN Campaign ID if you want to use the plug-in to start making money. It goes without saying your WordPress theme must be widget-enabled, this was the cause of my problems last time around with this plug-in.
OK, first up, it’s not been upgraded since WordPress 2.7 and I’ve not tried it on a WP 2.8.x blog yet – it might not play happily with the newest WordPress architecture. However, it is an extremely useful widget when it works – simply add it to your sidebar via the WordPress Admin Widgets page, then remember it’s there when you’re assigning post tags to blog posts. Beware though that WordPress 2.8+ will alphabeticise your post tags for each post, and this will most likely produce undesirable results – you’ll need a big, and damned good, thesaurus to manipulate those tags at times.
The blog post tags are the key here (like with the automated Amazon plug-in showing results below, which we’ve been using on BuildaSkill for some time) use the wrong tags, though logical for the post, and the adverts displayed will be completely unrelated to the post content. I cannot stress this enough. It’s great if serendipity is one of your playmates, but not such fun if you like structured and related content on each part of your page.
The ads themselves are pretty simple affairs – a centred thumbnail with a hyper-linked listing title under it. I’m not sure if the number of ads is configurable, or if other fields such as price, and whether it’s auction, BIN, or Shop, can be added. As I plan to have another play with it during the winter, I’ll add a review later and update you on it. I suspect CSS programming skills will be needed again.
Gaz
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