What’s “Hide Sponsored Categories” used for?

The main use is to permit bloggers to place all sponsored posts in categories like “PPP”, “ReviewMe”, “Smorty”, “Sponsored Reviews”, “Loud Launch” and etc, but not display those labels publicly. Using these categories is convenient for bloggers, but displaying them violates Pay Per Post Best Practices.

So, by using the plugin, you can have convenience and still conform to best practices. You can create private “meta-categories” that don’t display but which are active for the purpose of:

• using the built-in WP search tool to find all “sponsored” posts when you, the blogger, are logged in and managing your blog.
• using “logic” to filter “sponsored” posts in some way. For example, you can use Kontera Control to keep Kontera ads out of sponsored posts while showing the ads in all other posts. You can use “No Old Spam Links” to “nofollow” all links in Sponsored Posts after your contractual obligation to follow has expired.

Due to changes in how WP handles categories, I had to make quite a few internal modifications. The new plugin should:

• Still work with WP 2.2, particularly when you call the categories using normally available template tags I checked the display with every default template provided by my installation of WP 2.2.



• Now work with widgeted sidebars; see the sidebar widget to the right? I only tested how widgets worked on two or three themes. (This should be enough, but if you have difficulties, let me know.)
• Works with WP 2.3. If you use WP 2.3 and widgets, use the widget to insert the custom functions. If you don’t use widgets, you must make replace the normal WP template tags found in sidebars with special purpose template tags. For your convenience, I described these in the user admin panel for the plugin.

From the user point of view, the plugin mostly works the way the original one does; the user instructions are found in Hide Sponsored Categories.. That page still has the link to the old version– which doesn’t work for WP 2.3, and doesn’t work with widgets.

To get the new version, download this:
Hide Sponsored Categories

After one or two people use the new version and give me feedback, I’ll describe the new options in better detail and update all documentation.

Ok, but now what are you going to do? After all, using the “search by category” function on the admin side of your blog helps you easily track of all your paid posts to make sure you got paid, delete if they are rejected, and edit if you are asked to do so.

But now, you can’t let the categories show on the outside of your blog.

Well, the answer is use Hide Sponsored Categories Plugin!

This plugin will:

1. Let you create and use WordPress categories for organizational purposes on the admin side of your blog while
2. Not having categories on the public visible side of your blog.

This should fulfill the PPP best practices rule because the purpose of that rule is to avoid public displaying of a category that contains a series of posts like this: Paid Post – Paid Post – Paid Post -….- Paid Post – Paid Post – Paid Post. Advertisers don’t like those.

As long as there is no such public category, no-one one cares if you have things conveniently organized on the admin side! To learn more and download the plugin, visit Hide Sponsored Categories Plugin.

• Get more blog traffic and improve SEO. How? I can easily make my articles appear in loads of Technorati tag searches. I can also inform search engines know this article is “about” a tagged topic.
• Tempt visitors to stay longer. How? By posting an auto-magically created “related articles” list at the bottom of each blog post.

Thank you to Tricia and Andy Beard who both told me of this plugin.

Is “The Ultimate Tag Warrior” compatible with “Hide Sponsored Categories” and “Kontera Control?”

When I was writing “Hide Sponsored Categories”, Tricia asked me how my plugin would interact with “The Ultimate Tag Warrior”.

Before I answer that, I bet some of you are wondering, what are “Hide Sponsored Categories” and “Kontera Control?” They are two complimentary tools I consider to be “Plugins for Posties!”
Kontera control lets posties keep Kontera Ads out of PPP articles — thus making you more money. To keep Kontera ads out, a postie needs to create a category, designate that the category for excluding Kontera ads and then place posts in that category. (Most people name this category “Sponsored” or “PPP” or something similar. Oh… and the plugin does about three or four more things.)

However, if you place a post in a “category” then, normally, the “name” of the category (for example, “Sponsored) will display in the list of categories at the bottom of posts and that post will end up in an archive full of sponsored posts.

Many sponsors hate seeing the word “Sponsored” appearing on their posts and the abhor having the post sit in a category full of sponsored posts! Many loyal posties also hate this. Some advertiser won’t pay you if you mention the ad is sponsored.

So, I wrote HideSponsoredCategories to “hide” that category and lets a blogger transform any category into an internal logical variable that never appears to blog visitors in any way, shape or form. (The plugin does more than this.)

Compatibility issues with “The Ultimate Tag Warrior?

So, the question is, if I hide a category with “Hide Sponsored Categories”, will they still be hidden when I use “The Ultimate Tag Warrior”.

Unfortunately, the answer is “sort of”; the full explanation is a bit involved.

What I’ve found so far is that “The Ultimate Tag Warrior” mostlyplays well with my HideSponsoredCategories plugin. It works in the sense that my HideSponsoredCategories plugin will hide every single “category” you want to hide.

However, if you run “The Ultimate Tag Warrior” and also use Hide Sponsored Categories, you will need to be careful about checking “The Ultimate Tag Warrior” box that automatically ads “categories” to your “tag” list.

Why?! Because “categories” ≠ “tags”! “The Ultimate Tag Warrior” creates “tags” which resemble “categories”, but Wordpress considers them different things. They are different “things” even if both are called the same name– like “Sponsored”. So, basically, when you tag, Wordpress will store a list of “tags” and another list of “categories”.

It’s possible for the same “name” or “word” to appear on both lists!

So, if the word (or name) “Sponsored” is on both a “tag” and a “category” lists, and you tell “The Ulitimate Tag Warrior” to display your tags in your individual posts, the “Sponsored” tag will appear in the list created by “The Ultimate Tag Warrior”.

So, for now, if you want to hide the word and/or name “Sponsored” using “HideSponsoredCategories” “ do not check the box that automatically puts every matching “category” into the “tag” list. (For what it’s worth, you can always add any word to the tag list manually. )

Can the minor issue be fixed?

Eventually, I’ll look into ways to prevent any “tags” using the same words as a category you want to hide from displaying in the post. I want to see if people want to use “HideSponsoredCategories” at all before coding more features.

Meanwhile, I’m using both and I’m going to automatically add categories to tags because this blog is too new to qualify for Pay Per Post!

The plugin is called “Hide Sponsored Categories”, and the main way this plugin helps you make money is as follows:

It permits you to hide your “sponsored” category, so that you can take Pay Per Post Opps from advertisers whow don’t want you to display any in post sponsorship. Meanwhile, you can still use the “sponsored” category to control Kontera ads using Kontera Control.

To use this plugin, you’ll need to download the HideSponsoredCategories Plugin, upload and install it in your plugins directory. Activate.

Next, visit your Wordpress management area, and click “Options” and then click “HideSponsoredCategories”. You’ll see a user interface that looks like this, but showing your categories:

Next to each category, you will find three check boxes that let you prevent the category from appearing in one of three areas on your blog. These areas are: 1) The category tags, 2) The category list and 3) The category archives.

Let me explain what clicking each box does.

Tag:

Most wordpress templates are designed to display every category associated with a post somewhere inside the post content. On mine, you’ll see the tags in a list sort of like this:

The words “Monetize” and “Clickbank” act as “tags” telling social networking services like Technorati this post has something to do with “Monetize” and “Clickbank”. I often see visitors arriving at my site after searching for specific tags at Technorati. For that reason, it’s useful to create and use lots of descriptive tags.

Now, the problem: As a postie, I put my sponsored posts in a “Sponsored” category. Some advertisers won’t let me take the ads if the word “Sponsored” appears in the post.

Now, of course, I could just not create a sponsored category, but if I didn’t I wouldn’t be able to use neat tools like “Kontera Control” to keep the Kontera ads out of my post! And I make money with Kontera ads.

So, the more profitable solution is to create the category but prevent it from displaying.

So, to fix that, I write “HideSponsoredCategories”, installed and activated. Now I check the “tag” box next to “Sponsored”, and the word “Sponsored” will no longer appear in the list of tags in any of my sponsored post.

Archives

Now, some advertisers go further. They don’t want their ad to appear in a “sponsored” archive. Basically, they don’t want Google to see this post sitting on a page chock full of sponsored posts. They figure this will hurt their SEO (and they are probably right.) You may also hurt your own Googlerank by creating a paid-for-post full archive the search engines can spider!

So, both for the benefit of all your sponsors and yourself, you’ll want to make that archive disappear. To do that, check the box for “Archive”. That will make your archives for “Sponsored” post vanish! If someone tries to guess this archive’s url and enters it, Wordpress will find nothing. Sort of like this:

In principle, checking those two boxes is enough to ensure you can take an Opp that specifies “no in post sponsorship”. However, you’ll also want to check the “list” box. That will cause the “Sponsored category to disappear from your list of categories. Why display it if clicking just results in a a “Sorry no posts” message?

List

As long as I was writing this plugin, I added another convenient feature. As I mentioned, it’s wise to tag your posts. I tag them with nearly any interesting feature a reader might want to read about. The words “kontera”, “adsense”, “pay per post” tend to draw in visitors. So, if my post touches on those topics, I tag them.

However, because I’ve created so many categories, my blog sidebar has become cluttered with a zillion categories. But, by checking the “list” box, I was able to make these categories vanish from the side bar. Compare the list to the left– as it appeared before I checked a bunch of “list” boxes, to the one on the right:

Now, that I’ve checked a whole bunch of “list” checkboxes, I can “tag” my articles with SEO rich descriptive terms words like “Kontera” or “Adsense”, there by communicating the tag to Technorati. I can also maintain the “Kontera” archive– thereby letting visitors and search engine spiders find all the articles on Kontera. But, I don’t need to maintain a super cluttered sidebar.

I bet you want to download this plugin and use it, right? Here you go:

Now install it and make some money!