How to publish a native ad in WordPress

If you sell advertising space on your publication, then you need to start selling native ads, or sponsored articles as we like to call them. They will become your most profitable ad placement on your publication. Period. So what exactly is a native ad? Well, it's really the old advertorial or what we call the sponsored article. And if you take a look at this fishing guide publication, we'll see a native ad. Right here we have a Fishing with Larry article that's flagged as sponsored. And if I click into it, you'll see that the sponsor flag is retained and Larry the fishing guide pays for this article on this publication. So why is it working? Well, the New York Times recently found that native advertising is their most profitable ad placement on their publication. It's now their number one ad tool. And it works because since the advertisement is an article, it feeds right into all devices and web platforms that your readers are already using. So on a phone, it won't sit as a tiny little banner ad at the bottom or top of the phone. It will actually be an article right in the middle of the article stream. It also has search engine values. So those that are looking for phishing guides for this publication might actually Google phishing guides and find Larry's phishing article, which is a sponsored article. So this creates a lot of value for the advertisers and you can charge up for this. Okay, one thing to note is that the reason why sponsored articles or native ads work is that they're transparent with the reader. In other words, you're being very obvious that this article is paid for by having this big block of sponsored text in front of it. And that's really important for the reader. And the readers appreciate that you're up front saying, hey, this is an ad. It might be an interesting article, but it is an ad. Okay, so how do you write a good sponsored article? This is a question I get all the time. There's two things. One is you have to make sure that the article provides true value for the reader first and then sells. Two, sells the service or product for that reader second. So for a phishing publication, if a fishing guide is telling you what's great about a fishing spot and then says, hey, hire me for my phishing guide services. That's a great sponsored article for a phishing publication. So think like that. Okay, how do we get this done? Alright, the first thing you want to do is download and install our sponsored article plugin. And here's how it works. When you're writing a post or an article and I'LL hop into the post here. All you have to do is check a box. So let's go find Fishing with Larry now this is just like any other post, but there's a new box. Once you install the plugin called Sponsored Article, all you have to do is check it. This is a Sponsored article. And then that big block of sponsored text will show up in front of the title and in the header on the on the post page. There are some settings that you can use to customize this. So let's head over into settings and dig up the Sponsored Article navigation and you'll see that you can control the text that goes in front of the title. So you could call it Sponsored or Sponsored Article or ad, whatever you want to call it. You can control the color of the text. The default is that reddish color. You can control the background color of the Sponsored text in the title, and you can control the background color of the excerpt text as well in your list of excerpts. So that's how you go about setting up a Sponsored article and profiting from it.