Making Money From Blogging - Part 1: Adsense

This is the start of a new series on making money by blogging. Today we'll start with probably the most obvious method for making money from a blog, AdSense. AdSense is a free service designed by Google that anyone can place on a webpage. AdSense then determines what the topic (or topics) of the webpage are and shows advertisements relevant to those topics. For example, on this blog, The Blogging Fool, the main topic covered is blogging and making money from blogging. So if you look at the ads on the right side of the page most likely some or all of the ads are in regard to blogging and/or making money from blogging. Simple enough.

Get AdSense

So if you don't already have an AdSense account I strongly suggest that you get one right now. It's totally free and will help you start to make money from your blog. If you're interested, click on this button to sign up: Ok you've signed up, now what?

Placing Your Ads

The next step is placing your ads on your website. Google's heat map is a huge help for this. Based on Google's research, the heat map shows you exactly what sections of a website tend to be most successful. Of course, every webpage is different so this should only be used as a guideline. In fact, no one knows your webpage as well as you do so take a minute and think of how people's eyes look at your page and go from there. One great resource that AdSense also provides is custom channel tracking which will allow you track the performance of each ad unit on your page. Make sure that you use custom channel tracking and check every few weeks or so to see which channels are performing best.

Color Choices For Your Ads

One other choice that you must make when placing AdSense ad units on your page is the color of the text in the ads. There are two schools of thought on how to best do this. One is to make the ads blend into your page so that they fit with the overall theme and appear somewhat as part of the content. The second is to make the ads stand out by using contrasting colors to draw visitors attention. As you can probably tell from the ads on this page I prefer the former, in which the ads are blended into the page. I think it makes the site more professional and avoids giving people the feeling that all you want to do is make a quick buck. Well that's all for now, if you have any further questions on AdSense please drop a comment and I'll either respond with my own comment or write another post to clarify. Best of luck with AdSense!