Adding Google Adsense Into Your Blog
Adding Google Adsense Into Your Blog
This is just one article in a series of articles on how I make my living online by working from my RV anywhere I decide to park it. Read the entire series and you too could be well on your way to living any lifestyle you choose with complete financial independence.
Now it’s time to start adding Google Adsense and other ads for affiliate sales into your blog. This is known as “monetizing” your web site – getting it to make money online for you. Google Adsense is a great place to start. Personally, I’ve made more money from affiliate sales than from Adsense ads, but I don’t dismiss Adsense. It has made me plenty of money online as well.
Adding Adsense into your blog can take one or more of three forms. You can put ads into your header, put ads onto your side bar, or put ads into your blog posts themselves. Personally, I steer clear of the last one, but that’s really only a personal preference. I prefer to only include appropriate affiliate ads in my blog posts, when I advertise in them at all. Many times I don’t even put ads in the posts themselves. If you decide to place Adsense ads into your blog post there are several freely available Wordpress plugins that will do it for you automatically. My favorite is the All-In-One Adsense And YPN plugin. Search the plugins available on Wordpress.org for other Adsense plugins if you’d like different options.
Putting Adsense ads into your header can be a little more problematic. It usually requires editing the style sheet (style.css) and the header.php file for your selected theme. Since each theme is potentially different, it’s difficult to explain exactly how to do that in a blog article. Some theme make that easier than others. If you not a PHP programmer, and want Adsense ads in your header, look for a theme that has that capability built in.
Adding Adsense ads to your sidebar is easier than adding them to your header. There are several plugins and widgets available on Workpress.org that will do this for you. Widgets are a bit like plugins, but with more capabilities. One good plugin that allows Adsense ads to be added to your sidebar is WP Simple Adsense Insertion. It can be used along with, or even in place of All-In-One Adsense And YPN mentioned above.
My first choice for places to put Adsense ads is in the header. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve had much better results with affiliate ads than I have with PPC ads, but I still recommend using PPC. Usually, putting them in the header is enough, although I do sometimes add them to the sidebar – usually below everything else.
In the next few articles we’ll talk about using affiliate ads and talk more about how to incluse Adsense and affiliate ads in your blog.
Make Money Online - Making Your Blog Site Look Better
Make Money Online - Making Your Blog Site Look Better
This is just one article in a series on how I make my living online by working from my RV anywhere I decide to park it. Read the entire series and you too could be well on your way to living any lifestyle you choose with complete financial independence.
You’ve got your blog online. You’re posting articles to it regularly. You’ve signed up for Adsense and some affiliate programs. Now What? This is where the real fun begins! Now you’ve got some decisions to make.
Are you going to do this the inexpensive way and do most or all of the work yourself, or are you going to invest a little money into your online business and get it up and running faster?
The answers to these questions really depends on you, your budget, and your tolerance for risk vs. reward. Wordpress has everything you need and you can get most of it for little to no cost. The downside to this approach is the extra time it takes, not to mention the lost income due to trial and error. I’m going to give you many of these tips at no cost. Unfortunately, the information I’ll give you for nothing will require a lot of work on your part, and a lot of time to accomplish.
The first thing you need to do is make your blog look a little better, and more importantly – more authoritative. This doesn’t require fancy graphics only a professional artist could love, but it does require a little work. There are plenty of free Wordpress themes and plugins available. If you can find one of these that fits your blog well, great! But remember, your primary purpose here is not just a hobby – IT’S A BUSINESS! To that end, you might consider investing a small amount in your business to take it to that next level of professionalism.
One of the fastest and easiest ways to professionalize your blog site, and make it more authoritative looking, is to use one of the many commercial themes that are designed specifically for this purpose. The one I like is WP Remix by Premium Themes. WP Remix is a professional looking blogging theme that is one of the easiest to use I’ve tried. Most of its functionality is drag and drop. It works great and is ready for you to start adding your affiliate links and Adsense ads into right out of the box. I recommend you give it a look and see if it isn’t worth the small investment to save you hours of manual setup and configuration.
If you are the do-it-yourself type, or you’re just on a really tight budget, you can do all of this yourself with free to near-free resources. In the next few articles I’ll show you how to add your Google Adsense ads and affiliate links into your Wordpress theme.
In the meantime, here are a couple of videos that will show you how you can upload a new theme to your site using Filezilla, a free FTP program. You can download Filezilla at http://www.filezilla-project.org.
View the demonstration on installing a theme in Wordpress here.
View the Filezilla upload demonstration here.
