If you’ve been following my Start a money making blog series, together we have: set-up your blog, consistently published content, and worked to increase your traffic.  If you’re averaging more than 100 visits per day, it’s time to consider placing some advertising on your blog so you can begin earning that side income we’ve been talking about!

A great way to start monetizing your blog is with Google Adsense.  Adsense is an advertising network run by Google and allows publishers (that’s you) to display text, image, and rich media ads on your blog.  What makes Google Adsense so slick, is that the ads are automatically targeted at your site’s content.  Adding Adsense ads to your site is also easy: all you have to do is add some script where you want the ad to be shown or use one of the many available WordPress plugins.

Here’s the catch: Optimization and placement of your ads is key to how well your ads will perform.  One of the biggest mistakes new and inexperienced bloggers make is just slapping Adsense ads on their blog, without giving consideration to who should see them, where they should be placed, what size should be used and how they should look.  No need to be concerned, I’ll help you through all of that.

 How to make a Google Adsense Account

The first thing you’ll need to do is sign-up for Google Adsense.  To sign up:

1. Visit the Google Adsense Page.
2. Click on the Sign-up now button.
3. Complete all of the required information, paying particular attention to your website address.  Make sure this is correct.  This URL cannot contain anything that violates the program policies.  Press submit when you’re done.
4. Next you’ll either link your existing Google Account or you’ll create a new one.
5. The final page will display a summary of the information you’ve submitted and ask that you confirm.

Adsense Placement

One of the key factors to success with Adsense is the placement of ads.  The following diagram from the Google Help pages shows optimal placement using a heat map (dark orange – strongest performance, light yellow – weakest performance):

Note a few things:

• Adsense does better below your nav bar – not above
• The closer Adsense is to your content, the better it performs.  The best placement is right above your content
• If you have a 3 column theme with a left side column, Adsense does well placed in this left side column as well.

How to create your first Adsense ad

Assuming your account has been approved, let’s jump in and create your very first Adsense ad.  As I mentioned, for this article we’ll create an ad above your content.  More specifically, we’ll create a 336×280 (large square ad) and place it below your post title but before your content on each of your articles.  We’ll additionally only show this ad to search engine visitors.  I’ll explain why below.

To create your ad, do the following:

1. Login to your Adsense account.
2. Click on the My ads tab at the top.
3. Press the New ad unit button.  The new ad screen will appear prompting you for information about your new ad.
4. In the Name field, put a name for your ad.  I generally use the name of my blog, followed by the ad size.  For example: Side Income Blogging – Large Square.  The name really doesn’t matter, as long as it is meaningful to you.
5. In the Size field, select: 336 x 280 – Large Rectangle (this tends to be the best performing Adsense ad)
6. For Ad type, use the default: Text & Image / Rich Media Ads.  This will allow a combination of text, image and animated ads.
7. Custom Channels allow you to view and track detailed about your ads, so you’ll definitely want to use a channel.   To create a new custom channel, click on the Create new custom channel link.  In the pop-up, type a name for your channel and press Save.   The new channel will automatically be associated with your ad.
8. Ad style/color Palette will allow you to select the colors for your ad.  Proper color selection is critical to good performance.  The ad should blend with your content and specifically with your link colors.  Here’s how to select your colors: Border – Use the same color as your background.  Generally this will be #FFFFFF (white), you don’t want a border to show.  Title – Same as your link color.  Background – Same color as Border.  Text – #CCCCCC.  URL – #cccccc.  Use the defaults for the remainder of the settings.  These colors are based on testing I’ve done and the experience of other bloggers I’ve talked with.
9. Click Save and get code.
10. Copy the ad code, and save it somewhere handy, as we’ll be using it shortly to show the ad on your site.

Adsense performs very well for search engine visitors, and not well at all for normal visitors or readers of your site.  On my blogs, I focus on my readers as much as I can and I don’t generally like to show them ads, especially non-affiliate ads.  As a result, I only show Adsense ad to search engine visitors, meaning that only visitors coming from a search engine SERP (Search Engine Result Page) will see my Adsense ads.  Fortunately there is a really great plugin that takes care of this for us called: Ozh’ Who Sees Ads.

Here’s how to set-up the Adsense ad we just created so that it is only shown to search engine visitors:

1. If not already installed, install the Ozh’ Who Sees Ads WordPress plugin and activate it.
2. Now let’s get it configured.   In your WordPress admin menu, navigate to Settings>>Who Sees Ads.  Who See Ads uses something called Contexts.  Context allow you to set-up rules around who will see your ads (or who won’t).  There are a number of rules available (in the Possible Rules section).
3. The first thing you’ll want to do is name the new context we’re creating.  Since we’re only showing our ads to search engine visitors, I’d suggest calling it something like search-engine-only.  Avoid using spaces, and use dashes instead, as it will make it easier to reference your name when we insert the Who Sees Ads code here in a bit.
4. Next, we’ll set-up the rule.  Drag the rule named: “If Visitor comes from a search engine display” to the Active Rules box.  This is generally the only rule I use, but you can add others.  For example, you may want to consider showing adsense on your older posts (usually your normal viewers won’t view older posts).  To do this, drag the rule named: “If Post is older than XX days then display”.  As you can see, there are many rules available, and I would encourage you to try out various rules to see what works best for you for earning revenue.
5. Remember earlier I told you to save off your Adsense code?  Time to pull it up, copy it and paste it into the box named “Ad Code”.
6. Click on Save Context.

If you’ll recall, we’ll be adding your Adsense ad below the post title, but before your post content.  To do this, we’ll insert some code into the Thesis hook named: thesis_hook_after_headline.  Open up your custom_functions.php file and insert the following code:

[code]

/**
 * Insert Adsense
 */
function show_adsense() {
     if (is_single()) {

             wp_ozh_wsa("search-engine-only");

     }
}
add_action('thesis_hook_after_headline', 'show_adsense');

[/code]
Save your changes.  If you are running a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache or Super Cache, you’ll need to delete/purge your cache as well.

At this point, your blog should be showing Adsense ads on your single post pages only if a visitor arrives on your site from a search engine.  Adsense generally takes a few hours to get working, so I would suggest stopping at this point and working on something else for a few hours before proceeding.  I’d suggest reading a few articles from the Side Income Blogging archives, but that’s just me.

Testing your Adsense code

Assuming you’ve waiting a few hours, it’s time to test your changes and make sure everything is working.  Pick your post that ranks highest in the search engines (often the one that gets the most search engine traffic).  You can use Google Analytics to determine this.  Make sure you are logged out of your WordPress administration console, then head over to Google, and search on the title of your post.  When you find it, click on it.  Since you came from a search engine, Who Sees Ads should recognize that, and at the top of your post you should see an Adsense Ad just below your post title and before your post content.

If you navigate to your blog then view the same post (without using Google), you should not see the ad.

If for some reason you don’t see an ad or see an error, double check the code above, and recheck your adsense ad settings.

Tweaking your Adsense ad

Let your adsense ad run for a few weeks and see how your performance does.  Make some notes, then try changing the colors or size of the ad.  To change the colors, all you have to do is go into your Adsense account, edit the ad and save it.  If you want to change sizes, you’ll need to edit the ad and re-paste the code into Who Sees Ads.

As I mentioned, I’ll discuss A/B testing in a future article, but it’s important to try different ad sizes and colors to see what performs the best for you.

—–

Long article, but hopefully it wasn’t too bad.  I do think a big congratulations are in order though for those of you following my Start a Money Making Blog series.  You started with a blank slate, built a website, wrote your content, grew your traffic and now took the first steps toward earning a side income.  That is a huge milestone!  So Congratulations!!  Don’t stop though, continue writing and doing everything you can to grow your traffic.  Remember, the more traffic you have, the more income you make.

Stay tuned, as I’ll be addressing affiliate and private advertising soon.

Photo by: borman818