Quick Tip: Stop Manually Inserting Ads Into Blog Posts

If you run a blog as an income stream, chances are that you've at least tried to earn some advertising revenue. But managing ads on your blog can involve a big time investment. Fortunately you don't have to manually insert ad code in every blog post.

Occasionally this makes sense, like when you want to insert an affiliate ad that's relevant only to a specific post. But when it comes to wider promotions or ad network code (where ads can change based on the content of each page), that's unnecessary.

One option to get around it is to insert your ad code in your template files. Not all bloggers feel comfortable messing around with code and child themes though. If that sounds like you, the Ad Inserter WordPress plugin might be exactly what you need. I use it on several of my blogs, including this one.

What the Ad Inserter Plugin Does

In its most basic sense, the Ad Inserter plugin places your ads in blog posts exactly where you want them. And it does so automatically whenever you publish a new post. If you want to change those ads later, but keep the ad placement, you can do that without editing individual posts too.

More specifically, the plugin lets you set up multiple ad blocks. For example, you might have a large rectangle Adsense ad block and another ad block with a typical banner promoting an affiliate offer. You can set the banner up to automatically display below each blog post. And you might set the other ad block to show up after the fifth paragraph of each post.

ad inserter plugin for wordpress

You can tell the plugin to insert an ad either before or after a specific paragraph number, or based on a percentage of a post's length. It lets you count paragraphs either from the top or bottom of your post. And if you want to override those settings and manually place (or remove) ads on a particular post, you can do that too.

If your blog is tied to a membership site, you also have the option to hide ads for members who are logged in. Or, you can do the reverse, showing the ad block only to logged-in members. Why would you want to do that? Well, with an actual ad, you probably wouldn't. But you can insert other content into the ad blocks. So, for example, if you're offering a special discount on your latest e-book to members only, you might have those promotions display only if a visitor is logged in.

You can even choose to hide ad blocks when your site is viewed on mobile devices if you find that an ad doesn't play nicely with smaller screens. Or, better yet, substitute it with another mobile-friendly ad block instead.

The plugin does even more. For example, you can choose to only show ads in content when it's new, having the ads disappear when the post has been live for two weeks (or however long you want). You can include a paragraph limit so the plugin doesn't insert ads into very short posts. And you can filter which posts should, and should not, have ads inserted based on categories and tags.

The Ad Inserter plugin is incredibly flexible. I've been using it for well over a year, and I still haven't played with all of its features and filters yet.

If you run an ad-supported blog, or you simply want to run tests on different ad placements in your posts, this is a must-have WordPress plugin.

Have you ever used this plugin? If so, what did you think about it? Do you use a similar plugin? If so, which one? How is it similar and different to this one?

Profile image for Jennifer Mattern

Jennifer Mattern is a professional blogger, freelance business writer, consultant, and indie author. She runs numerous websites & blogs including All Freelance Writing, Freelance Writing Pros, NakedPR, and Kiss My Biz.

Jenn has 25 years' experience as a professional writer and editor and over 20 years' experience in marketing and PR (working heavily in digital PR, online marketing, social media, SEO, new media, and thought leadership publication). She also has 19 years' professional blogging and web publishing experience (including web development) and around 18 years of experience as an indie author / publisher.

Jenn also writes fiction under multiple pen names and is an Active member of the Horror Writers Association.

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5 thoughts on “Quick Tip: Stop Manually Inserting Ads Into Blog Posts”

  1. Thanks for the link, Jenn. I used to use an ad plugin, and stopped — can’t remember why. It was a few years back.

    I’ll definitely give this a try; I’d forgotten about using a plugin for ads.

    BTW — you give top recommendations for plugins. I adore the Thin Out Revisions plugin you recommended a while ago. I’ve added it to several blogs. Works really well. 🙂

    Reply
    • That’s awesome. I’m glad you’ve found that helpful. 🙂 My database was getting overwhelmed by revisions, so it was a big help for me too when I found it.

      I hope this ad plugin proves equally useful. 🙂

      Reply
  2. This is so awesome Jennifer,
    We all know how tedious and time consuming it can be when you try to do all the things about internet marketing manually including inserting affiliate links.

    There are already so many plugins out there today that can really automate some of this things including the paid and free ones but, I’ve never heard of ad inserter and it seems to be a very handy tool.

    Will have to check it out.

    Thanks for sharing.

    Reply

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