Implementing Google AdSense on Blogger – A Real Experience
It is a great addition to your blog to include ads. The benefit to you is that is will help support your writing obsession. But is it easy ? That's a matter of opinion.
I have been using Blogger for my blogs. Since Google owns both Blogger and AdSense, they have been very considerate and made it fairly easy to link the two together. Even then you have to poke around a bit to figure out what you should do. So here I will cover the steps I followed to get things working.
1. Get your blog in place. Blogger is pretty easy. So go to www.blogger.com and click on get started. You will be asked for your blog title, blog address and to choose a template. Don't worry too much about the title and template – both can be changed. The address is a very different thing. Once you have started blogging, you shouldn't really change it. So consider carefully what name you want and be prepared to try out alternates if your preference is taken. The tool Google Adwords will help you look at how popular your chosen keywords are.
2. Once your blog is created you can play around with how it looks very easily. Click on templates and then on Customize and you will find many things you can try out just by clicking. Only the more techie amongst us should play with HTML. That's not me. I have the philosophy that folks will come to my blog for what I write, and I should keep the rest pretty simple. So I just chose a template I liked, played around slightly with sizing and uploaded a picture. This took me a morning, mostly playing looking at templates I did not like.
3. Blog. Write some blog entries and publish them. Blog regularly. Do not be discouraged if you do not have hundreds of readers right away. It takes time. Here is an article to read about starting to blog.
4. Sign up for AdSense. This is done at www.google.com/adsense. You will need to have a Google email account as well as your usual account and tell them about your blog. Once you apply an email will be sent to your usual email account letting you know what to do to get started.
5. At this point you need to put AdSense on your blog. The final approval (and making money) does not happen until you have done this.
6. First check that your blog has AdSense enabled. Log into Blogger and click on the "Earnings" option on the left on your blogger menu. Make sure that where it says "AdSense on blogs – Show ads” that the selection is 'Yes'.
7. Now click on "layout." This gives you a view of your blog that just looks like boxes arranged on your screen. Each represents an item on your web page – the blog posts, followers, your profile, whatever. Click on 'Add a widget' in the area where you would like the ads to go. I chose the right column on mine. In the widget menu you will find a widget called AdSense. Just open that and make your selections. Select, save and take a look at the results.
8. It should only be a couple of days, and ads will appear on your blog.
9. If you have trouble on any of this, both Blogger and AdSense have a lot of info on how to get going.
At this point, I suppose one should say – Now watch the money roll in. Well, nothing is that simple. You will attract readers over time. Here is an article on how to advertise your own blog. It is your readership that will click on the ads and make you money.
You can also take some time and read about search engine optimization. Knowing a little about SEO will help you write blog posts that get you higher ratings in search engines. But the key is to write and to enjoy what you write about. Blogs that are written by someone who has a real interest in the topic and writes regularly – those are the ones that get read.
