I’m interested in Amazon ads, and possibly Google Ads. I tried using Max Banner Ads plugin for WordPress. It installed easily, and is infinitely configurable/customizable. I like that.

I even set up a custom “zone” for my ads. Download the plug-in and use it, then you’ll know what I’m talking about. For overall ease of use, and for max-coolness, I give Max Banner Ads four stars out of five.

Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to do the only thing I’m really interested in doing:

Show text/javascript Ads in post bodies, in RSS feeds. Even when I use a linked banner, not a dynamic script, the Max Banner Ads <em>do not appear</em> in RSS feeds. Maybe I didn’t wait long enough, but I refreshed my feed several times.

I know it can be done, because I see it in Google Reader all the time now.

Figure out how (or explain to me — I might be missing something!) to show javascript ads in RSS, and MBA gets five out of five stars.

I’ve got another round-trip to the Left Coast this week, so expect more substantial posts as a result of 10 hours of Airplane-blogging.  It’s like the internet, only you’re not connected.

Still experimenting with ad stuff.

I had google ads on the single-page view, but my conversion rate was something like 0.22%. I can’t get ads to show up in my RSS feed. Most of my traffic comes from RSS feeds. People who use RSS readers are less inclined to click-through the ads, anyways. Many people are vehemently opposed to ads in feeds. I could go either way. I’m not entirely convinced that I want them to show ads in RSS feeds, but it would be an interesting experiment.

This is what I was using to define a function to concatenate the advertisement with the post body (content).

<?php
function insertAds($content) {
$content = $content.'<hr /> <a href=”http://####”>YOUR AD HERE?</a><hr />’;
return $content;
}
add_filter(‘the_excerpt_rss’, ‘insertAds’);
add_filter(‘the_content_rss’, ‘insertAds’);
?>

Instead of “Your Ad Here” in an <a> tag, Amazon’s banners are javascript (below).The <A> tagged test ad shows up fine in Google Reader, but the javascript doesn’t show up in Reader or on the site in single-page view.

Amazon code:

<script type=”text/javascript”><!–
amazon_ad_tag = “#######”; amazon_ad_width = “468”; amazon_ad_height = “60”; amazon_ad_link_target = “new”; amazon_ad_include = “libertarian;economics;

I suppose I could simply copy the Amazon script into individual posts, but it’s still not displaying the Javascript.  Even if it could, I would prefer to do this by by coding it into the page templates and functions or if possible, through a WordPress plugin.  I’ve downloaded two plugins for Amazon, I’ll test them tonight.

I’m playing around with a few different advert options. This is a test & only a test.