Affiliate Starter

When it comes to monetizing a site, Google Adsense is king. Nobody can beat the vast amount of advertisers Google holds. Nobody can beat the quality of Google’s context based ad system, or the ease of inserting ad blocks onto a site.

Many people try to slap 10 Adsense blocks and Amazon ads all over their blog, before even having a solid user base. Any reader would be quick to leave a site full of advertising, without getting anything in return. We recommend that you do not attempt to monetize a blog until you have about 100 RSS readers, or a good amount of traffic.

If you are using the free Blogger (owned by Google) platform, then it only takes a few clicks to add a block of Google Adsense onto your blog.

When you insert a block onto your page (it will look similar to below), you earn money every time a reader clicks on the ads. Do not click your own ads, you will be banned from Adsense for life, Google is not stupid.

The type of block you add to your site depends on the layout of it. Try to change the colours around so the block fits nicely into your site without looking obtrusive.

Getting the most out of Adsense:

You could leave your blocks to earn you money to cover your hosting costs, but if you really want to make money from Adsense, then you will need to do more work.

1) Increase traffic – more traffic results in more people reading your blog which results in more clicks on your Google ads = more money earned.

2) Increase quality – Your click through rate (users clicked/users viewed) will increase if you have higher quality content that yields more expensive ads to be shown which means you earn more money per click.

3) Optimised ads – Don’t but black ads on a light blue page. Make your blocks blend into your page, so it looks like part of your site. This will result in more clicks.

Installing Adsense on your blog:

First of all you should get an Adsense account. You need a working site/blog (no “Under Construction”) to be accepted onto the program. Depending on your blogging platform, there are a few differences to getting Adsense on your page.

Blogger:
Go to the Template tab in your admin panel.
Go to > Add a Page Element > Choose a New Page Element
Sign in with your account
Configure and optimise ad!
Click for a more in-depth tutorial

Wordpress:
With wordpress there are several popular plugins to input Adsense blogs onto your site. We have chosen the “Adsense Manager” script, available here to download.

Download the file from the above link and extract it.
Copy the /adsense-manager to /wp-content/plugins/
Activate plugin by going to “Plugins” on your Wordpress dashboard and pressing Activate.
Configure and optimise ad!

Drupal
Again, many choices when choosing a module, but we thought that the “Advertisement” script was most effective and had the best tracking. Go here to download.

Download file from above link and extract it.
Copy /ad directory to your /modules/ directory.
Login to dashboard and enable modules.
Configure ads at Administer > Modules > Settings > Embedded Ads
Configure and optimise ad!