The Situation

You’ve installed the Advertwhirl ad management plugin for WordPress, perhaps using the installation instructions in this tutorial.  You powered through the campaigns, allocations and rules tutorial and setup your first campaign.  You modified your blogs theme to automatically insert advertisements from your campaign in your blog posts.

The world is good, you’re successfully monetizing your blog and getting ready to make a big push to expand your viewership.  And then a pesky guest blogger asks for a share of the ad slots for any posts she writes.  She’s made a compelling argument, and your only retort is “er…durrr… But, I don’t know how to do that.”

The Solution

Advertwhirl is quite flexible and lets you manage your advertising campaigns as simply or complexly as you require.  Ad sharing for guest bloggers is one of the easiest configurations you can do with Advertwhirl.

The Nuts and Bolts

The steps are pretty straight forward and not all that different then the “Simple Two Affiliate Ad Rotation” tutorial. Setup your ads, create a campaign with two allocations, one for posts written by your guest blogger and on for any other posts. Set the weights and ad a rule and you’re good to go.

Setup the Advertisements

Setting up the ads is only slightly more complicated then in the “Simple Two Affiliate Ad Rotation” tutorial. You need to ad your ads and your guest bloggers ad.

First lets setup your ads using adsense. If you don’t use adsense you can follow the steps for setting up a local ad source for your guest blogger to setup a local ad source for yourself.

Here is a recap of configuring Adsense from the “Simple Two Affiliate Ad Rotation” tutorial. All you will need is your Adsense username and your Adsense password.

1. Go to your WordPress blogs admin page
2. In the admin “Settings” menu go to the Advertwhirl entry
3. Go to the Advertwhirl Settings tab
4. Go to the “Adsense Settings” panel right below “General Settings” and fill in your username and password for Adsense and hit Update.
   • For security reasons your Adsense password will not be displayed and the field will remain blank if you come back to the settings page in the future.  Don’t worry it’s still there.
5. You can leave the other settings alone for now, they won’t effect anything you are doing in this tutorial.

Now that Adsense is setup lets get a local ad setup for you guest blogger.

Adding an advertisement for your guest blogger is just as easy as setting Advertwhirl up to use Ad Sense. There are two options at this time. If your guest blogger provided you with html or javascript code use option one, if she gave you a url option two is what you’ll want.

Option one to create a local ad from html or javascript code.

1. Go to the “Local Ads” tab next to the “Settings” tab on the left.
2. Click on the “Ad Source” Button
   
3. Fill in a name for your guest bloggers advertisement, this is what will appear in the dropdown list when you go to add it to your Allocation later.
4. Fill in any notes to yourself in the Description field.
5. Change the type from Ad Type from “URL” to “Inline Code”
6. Paste the html/javascript code your guest blogger gave you into the Inline Code textarea
7. Click “Add Source” to save your changes
   

Option two to create a local ad from a url.

1. Go to the “Local Ads” tab next to the “Settings” tab on the left.
2. Click on the “Ad Source” Button
   
3. Fill in a name for your guest bloggers advertisement, this is what will appear in the dropdown list when you go to add it to your Allocation later.
4. Fill in any notes to yourself in the Description field.
5. Leave the Ad Type set to “URL”
6. Check “wrap in iframe”
7. Paste the url your guest blogger gave you into the url textarea
8. Click “Add Source” to save your changes
   

That is it, your ads and your guest bloggers ads are now setup and you are ready to rock onto the next step.

Create the Campaign

Creating an ad campaign for guest bloggers takes only slightly longer then setting up“Simple Two Affiliate Ad Rotation” and is really no more difficult. You will need at least two allocations. One allocation for each of your guest bloggers and one allocation for all posts not written by a guest blogger.

1. Go to the “Campaigns” tab next to the “Local Ads” tab on the left.
2. Click on the “Ad Campaign” Button
3. Give the Campaign a name.  This is how you will identify which Campaign you wish to use to fill an Ad Slot.The name shouldn’t have any spaces or special characters.
4. Put any notes which will help you remember what the purpose of this Campaign is in the Description field
5. There is already an Allocation created for you, use this one for your guest blogger.
6. Fill in a Description for the Allocation if you want.  It’s just a way for you to keep track of what is what in complex configurations.  For this simple one it won’t really be helpful and you can leave it blank if you want.
7. Select the Adsense Ad unit that you wish to use for your share of the ads in any of your guest bloggers posts.
8. Click “Add Advertisement Source”
9. Select your guest bloggers ad.
10. Set your weights to match the agreement you have with your guest blogger.
11. Click “Add Rule Set”
12. Select “Match an author” and click “Add Rule”
13. In the newly added rule select the name of the guest blogger from the drop down list.
14. Click “Add Allocation”
15. Use this allocation for any posts not written by your guest bloggers.
16. Fill in a Description for the Allocation if you want.
17. Select the Adsense Ad unit that you wish to use for any posts not written by your guest bloggers.
18. Click “Save Campaign” and you are done

Thats it.  Any posts written by the guest blogger will rotate ads based on the weights you configured.  Any other post will serve only your ad unit.  If you have multiple guest bloggers the process is the same.  Just add an allocation for each that is configured the same as Allocation 1, just change the weights, the authors ad unit and who the author is.  Make sure to leave the Allocation with no rules and only your Ad Unit as the last allocation.

Download Advertwhirl

Download Advertwhirl

References

Mobile Sentience Advertwhirl page
Advertwhirl in the WordPress gallery
Tutorial with instructions for installing Advertwhirl Plugin
Automatic Insertion of Advertisements in WordPress Posts
Campaigns, Allocations and Rules oh my!