As another contribution to Darren Rowse’s 31 Day Blogging Project, here’s my take and tips on how to make Google Adsense work for your blog. If you’re living under a rock, adsense is one of the more popular ways to monetize your blog. There are others, but if you’re new to blogging, start with adsense.

Let’s begin by answering the question: “WTF is adsense?”

Adsense ads are basically text or image ads that google puts in your blog. Depending on your blog content, advertisers pay google so that relevant topics, products, services and sites automatically appear on your blog or website. In turn, google pays you a reasonable commission based on the number of people who clicked and the number of hits on your site.

More after the jump

BASICS

Although adsense does have a help and FAQ page, very few actually browse or read it. Let me make things more simple with basics below

1. Account – to get started, you must register for a google adsense account. Be sure to put your real name and complete mailing info (and tax details in some states). Google will mail your check (snail mail).

2. The Adsense Code – contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to know HTML in order to make the codes and the ads work. But there’s no harm to try out HTML basics, either. Since blogger is owned by Google, it’s much more easier to put the codes there via WYSIWG editor. You basically just cut and paste the code on where you want it to appear. You may have to do a little coding and working in wordpress (hosted) blogs. Adsense also has several types of ad sizes which you can check out here.

3. How to make it work – For blogger.com blogs, you simply make an ad from your adsense account, choose the colors and, once done, paste the code into the built-in adsense widget. For other blogs, you might be doing some coding work in your sidebar or main page. I won’t be getting into the details of it in this post. But check out this string of resources.

4. Optimizing – From research and also from actual experience, here are the top “hotspots” in a blog. Be sure to put your adsense ads there. Text ads are more clicked than image ads, okay? Factor that into your plans.

• Box ads within the post
• Sidebar top right
• Just below your vertical navigation bar
• before the comments (text ads only)
• Below the post

5. Channels – this is the most confusing part of adsense. When I was a noob, it took me two months before I could figure it out. In a nutshell, channels are simply “categories” or “labels” that you put so that you can monitor your ads more effectively. In mine, I have separate channels for the box posts on my sidebar and also the ads inside my posts. The clicks are broken down into the channels and I see which are effective and which are not. Based on this information, I then revise my adsense plans and layout accordingly. Here’s the adsense channel help section.

6. Real Help – sometimes, reading through FAQs and help sections may not be enough. I suggest that you dive in and learn through experimenting. Experience is the best teacher. If you’re really stuck, try to I.M. a geek friend or someone who knows how to blog or code to help you with your first few ads. That’s what I did.

I hope these tips will help. Best of luck!

Thanks all for reading,

GM T