Blogging With AdSense - WordPress
As it becomes obvious that I have changed the way to put my Google AdSense Ads on my blog as part of the thing I have learnt from my Thirty Day Challenge, If you don’t know what is that, I urge you to take a look on the web site or read my previous post about this Thirty Days Challenge .
Well today I am talking about Blogging With Adsense, actually there is a lot to be said for Google’s AdSense advertising program. There’s the way they match the ads to the content of your website. That gives you maximum clicks without annoying your users. There’s the flexibility of changing the way the ads look. That makes your ads attract attention without turning your site into billboard.
Many people have heard of Blogger, But there are other options too. WordPress is another popular blog site that can get you up and running in on time at all.
All you have to do is choose your username, which will also be your URL, pick a name and wait for your activation email and password. You ll have a blog in about fifteen seconds. Or Ed has mentioned in his 30 Day Challenge this web service company offering free WordPress Install and Hosting. Check out this wordpressdirect at http://30dc.wordpressdirect.com/
Once you’re up and running, you’ll be able to change your template (there are about thirty available on the site and more available all over the Web; there are some nice ones here:
http://chris.lineages.co.uk/Wordpress_template_index.php or here
http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/ and get writing.
Adding Ad Units To Your Wordpress Blog
So getting up and running with Wordpress is a breeze. Where things get a little tricky is adding AdSense to your blog. At the moment, Wordpress take a bit of a snotty attitude to ads and are suspicious of blogs created just to score high on search engines and turn a buck for the owner. That’s fair enough, but there’s no reason why a good blog shouldn’t also generate a good income. Wordpress are coming round and do seem to have plans to allow AdSense, Chitika and YPN ads in the future, but in the meantime you have to be a little clever. Or rather, you have to rely on the cleverness of other people who wanted to put ads on their Wordpress blogs and figured out how to do it.
There are a couple of options out there:
Phil Hord’s AdSense Inline
The first is to use Phil Hord’s plugin, AdSense Inline. You can download it for free from http://philhord.com/wp-hacks/adsense.zip. Phil did a great job with this. There were a few problems with some early installations, but users, and in particular, the people at Aoteatech
(http://blog.aoteatech.com/) have since worked out how to fix those pesky little bugs. Here’s what you have to do…
First, you’ll need to open an AdSense account of course, pick the format you want for your first ad unit and download the plugin. Once you’ve expanded the plugin, you’ll need to add a few lines to the code.
Don’t worry, that’s not as hard as it sounds.
Scroll down the page of code until you reach this section:
Replace this HTML code with your own customized Google Adsense
code.
/ * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
**
** Replace this HTML code with your own customized Google Adsense
code. **
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
*/
$adsense_code =
<script type= ¡°text/javascript> < !–
google_ad_client = ¡°pub-6439393840838593;
google_ad_width = 468;
google_ad_height = 60;
google_ad_format = ¡°468×60_as’;
google_ad_type = ¡°text_image;
google_ad_channel =
II–><Iscript>
<script type= ¡°text/javascript¡±
src= ¡°http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ show_ads.js> </script>
Copy your AdSense code, paste it here in your inline code, then add the following lines immediately afterwards:
if( is_single() )
{
return str_replace( $tag, $adsense_code, $data );
}
elseif ( is_home() )
{
if ( get_option(‘firstPost) )
{
update_option( ¡°firstPost, FALSE);
return str_replace( $tag, $adsense_code, $data );
}
else
{
return str_replace( $tag, ¡°¡®, $data );
}
}
else
{
return str_replace( $tag, $adsense_code, $data );
}
and delete this line:
return str_replace( $tag, $adsense_code, $data );
Next, open the file marked index.php, scroll down to the first div and add the following line:
<?php update_option(‘firstPost, TRUE); ?>
That’s most of the hard work done. All that’s left is to open your Wordpress dashboard and run your plugin. You should find an AdSense button on your writing dashboard that automatically adds
your Ad Sense ad units to your posts. Don’t forget to optimize your ads by making sure that they match your site before you add them though. If you’ve done all this to put ads on your Wordpress blog, you should be making the largest amount of money possible from them!
The AdSense-Deluxe Wordpress Plug-in
A good alternative to Phil Hord’s plugin is AdSense-Deluxe. THIS IS ALSO MY FAVORITE!!!
This is an excellent program which has the advantage of letting you track the results of the ads you post. That’s very important. I’ve already said that blending your ads into the page will define your success as an AdSense publisher. But that’s only half the story. The other half is keeping track of what your ads are doing so that you can always be sure that you’ve got the best ads in the best places.
With Wordpress-Deluxe, you can create a number of different ad units with different names and put each one in an appropriate place in your blog. You can also use AdSense’s custom channels to follow how many clicks each type of ad is receiving.
So if you had a blog which talked about your love of origami, your digital photography and your family, you could create different ad units for each subject and follow which was making you the most money. You could then focus your attention on those areas to maximize your income.
You can download Wordpress-Deluxe at
www.acmetech.com/blog/adsense-deluxe/ and follow the instructions in the readme to install it. You’ll then need to open your AdSense account and choose an ad format to generate a piece of code. So if you wanted to place an ad at the end of a post, you might choose a banner or half-banner with colors that blend in.
Copy the code and open your Wordpress account. On the admin page, click
Options > AdSense
paste the code into the form and name it. And here’s where it gets really good. You can then go back to AdSense, create another type of ad in a different format, build a custom channel to track it, and copy that code into Wordpress with a different name. You can repeat this process as many times as you wish to give yourself a complete toolkit of different types of ads to play with.
To bring up a particular type of ad in a post simply insert the line
< !–adsense# name– >
into the text. Very easy.
You can refine the way your ads appear on the page by wrapping HTML or CSS styles around the HTML code and, most importantly, AdSense-Deluxe also comes with an AdSense Sandbox that lets you see right away which types of ads you’ll be served.
Why is that important? Because sometimes Google’s contextualizing software misses the mark and instead of serving up ads about the topic in your blog, it serves ads about blogs in general. Those aren’t likely to get you many clicks and you don’t want to wait until it happens before you start making changes.
The Sandbox will show you right away which ads you’re going to get so that you can tweak your post until you get some good ones. To use it, you’ll first need to publish your post without any ads before you test it.
So that’s Wordpress. You can be up and running very fast and with the help of these little tools, be experimenting with your ads in no time at all!
Popularity: 32% [?]
Leave a Reply