It was surprisingly difficult to find a WordPress plugin that could be used to rotate ads via a MYSQL database (didn’t want to use text files). I tried over a dozen scripts (not all WordPress plugins) and none of them came close to what I wanted!!!

Eventually found a WordPress plugin called “Nice Quotes Rotator” which was created to add rotating quotes to WordPress blogs, it was apparently inspired by the Hello Dolly plugin that comes with WordPress by default.

Since I was looking to create an affiliate random ad rotating plugin for the jokes site it needed a fair amount of code changes.

After editing the plugin to work as I wanted, downloaded a CSV format Shareasale datafeed that was for an affiliate that offers stupid prank gifts.

Downloaded and partially renamed the images (for SEO reasons) associated with the datafeed, using MS Excel took the name of each product and added Stupid Prank Gifts to the end of it (for SEO and marketing reasons).

Used some nifty javascript/CSS coding so the affiliate links won’t be recognised by Google etc… as links (mo wasted PR/link benefit), but Google can still get to the name of the product and the image that’s uploaded onto my server so potential to gain some prank related SERPs.

Edited my Talian 05 theme (that was pretty easy to do) to use a WordPress shortcode for the new plugin to generate several ads: what you see when you visit the jokes site.

Pretty cool result if I do say so myself

Will be interesting to see how much money it makes, before today had Chitika ads running on the site and their performance was RUBBISH: last 30 days just $76.69 from 1,087,247 impressions (I think Chitika reports an impression each ad loaded, I had two ad units per page so that’s from half a million page loads!).

If I can’t make more than $76 a month from half a million page loads linked to an affiliate I give up!

David

Interestingly the top traffic SERP is now Funny Jokes, not bad for number 5 in Google for that SERP (that’s a lot of traffic for that SERP to do well at number 5).

I’ve found a pranks product affiliate that offers a reasonable % and a datafeed, plan to use the datafeed to create my own ad system that runs as a replacement to the ad system I’ve added to my Talian 05 theme (replace AdSense/Clickbank).

Basically will generate ads with X number of products on the sidebar and a single product on the main content ad unit, will have a small thumbnail of each product and excerpt type description (maybe just the title of the product + price) all linking to the affiliate sales page.

Was going to use a random quotes script as a starting point, but all the ones I’ve downloaded (half a dozen) aren’t working in PHP 5! Come to think of it, why didn’t I just search for a PHP script that serves ads I was also looking for a quotes script to add an automated joke a day section to the site, looks like I got caught up on one solution for both problems!

David

Guess people looking for tasteless stuff are alone… go figure. I kinda gave up on ever making great money off it. My more mainstream sites make thousands monthly off a fraction of the traffic.

The other thing that would work is the schemes and scams, penny auctions, work at home, etc. I will not use those because I like to sleep at night, but others have no issue and it does work with that type of traffic. Also try lead gen. Add a email squeeze as a flash ad or HTML of some kind. Those actually do well when you offer up something they want in the end and you can sell the leads, have them go to a affiliate program or use them yourself to promote other sites.

What I know for a fact is that products do not work well. That type of traffic does not want to spend any money so look for “free” offers, surveys, what not. CJ, Clickbank, etc. have tons.

I left you my CORRECT email, if you ever wanna trade ideas or links… let me know

my 2 cents
Erica

1. With such a massive audience I’d pay to have a simple iPhones App created that has the Top 100 jokes. You could do this for several categories. And charge $1 per download or 50c. Might be cheap enough to encourage $20-$30/day or more ;o)

2. Or another option is to encourage people to have a tee-shirt printed with a funny joke. You could get the top 5 jokes from each category and use a service like cafepress.com or fibres.com to let people buy the T-shirt.

3. Another option is to put together a Free PDF with the top 100 Jokes. And within the PDF have a few affiliate links to some of the online Joke Shops.

Some food for thought.

The responses don’t give any solutions per se, but does sum up the problem, humor/joke sites suck for making money! You don’t go to a joke site to buy a product or find a solution to a problem etc… you visit to have a laugh or kill time while bored at work. On my jokes site most of the visitors are looking for racist jokes and those who comment (3,000+ comments on one jokes page for example) are mostly trashing one another!!!

When I had AdSense on the joke site (before the AdSense ban) it averaged around £1 (~$1.50) eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions). In comparison my sites about making money have eCPMs of over £6 and my SEO sites around £5. I have another site about classic literature that received around 2,000,000 impressions last year and it’s eCPM is even lower that the jokes site, so it could be worse

I’m thinking about adding links to affiliates that sell prank products, but I’m not expecting many sales despite regularly breaking 10,000 unique visitors a day, so no rush.

David

Thread: ” 100,180 hits today and not enough cash to pay for the electric used by my mouse”

Quite some time ago I raised the above question on a bulletin board and got some ideas from some experienced and knowledgeable posters:

http://www.abestweb.com/forums/showthread.php?t=116590

Why dont you try some CPA zip submit in the site.Since this is an entertainment site you can easily find entertainment related CPA Zip Submits and give it a try.You can sign up for Neverblueads and give it a try..