How (and why) to change TextLinkAds from “sitewide” to “single page”

I’ve got TextLinkAds on most of my sites (and no, Google hasn’t scared me off from them). On the TLA website, I noticed it now says that advertisers prefer single page ads to sitewide ones. When I first started using TLA, I just set them all to sitewide - thinking "more = better", I guess.

I wrote to TLA and asked them if I could change this in midstream. I was told sure - no need to change price or anything, and I guess they don’t anticipate advertisers minding.

If you use WordPress, all you need to do is:

• Make the changes in the TLA administration panel
• Re-download the plugin and upload it over the old one on your site.

The process should be the same on non-WP solutions, too. Once you make the change in TLA’s admin panel, you just need to update the TLA code on your site.

If you use the TLA WordPress Sidebar Widget, your secondary pages will end up with an annoying bit of blank stuff where the TLA ad would have been - basically it’ll have the title you put in the widget ("Sponsors" or whatever) and the "Your Link Here" link - which is misleading because you aren’t selling ads on that particular page anymore.. The way around this is to get the Widgetize Anything plugin (a must-have if you use widgets) and put the original TLA code in there (the way WA works, you’ll actually just need to stick the following in the box, without the quotes: "tla_ads();"). You can give it a title or not. I did give one of mine a title because I have other ads right below TLA, so a "Sponsors" header looks right.

Why - aside from TLA’s recommendation - would you want to go from sitewide to single page? Because those ads become clutter to your visitors as they move from page to page and see them over and over again. Anytime you can accommodate your visitors and your advertisers all at once, that’s great.