Hello, and welcome to the third installment of Blogging for Dollars, in which I'll cover how to make money with your blog using Google's AdSense! In case you missed the previous two installments, they are:

• Part One: In this article, I introduced the idea of using Google AdSense to harness your blog to make a little extra money.


• Part Two: In this article, I covered how to sign up for Google AdSense and how to put AdSense into your Blogware-powered blog.

Where to Place Your AdSense Ads

In the previous article, I showed you how to create a component that held a Google AdSense ad unit. The Google AdSense term and conditions allow you to put up to three AdSense ad units per page. You should create a separate component for each ad unit -- create each one as I showed you, and give each one its own name.

Once you've created the components, you might be wondering where the best places for your ads are. In this case, by "best places", I mean the locations for your ads which make it more likely that they will be clicked on. Remember, more clicks on those ads means more money for you!

Google also makes money on those clicks, so this is a case where your interests and Google's interests are aligned. Simply put: money money for you also means more money for them. That's probably why they publish many useful articles for Google AdSense users that show how to maximize clicks on their ads.

One of the first articles on Google ad placement that you should read is Where Should I Place Google Ads on My Pages?. The main feature of this article is the "Google Heat Map", shown below:

The heat map corresponds to the layout of a web page and is color-coded with red being the hottest, orange being the second-most-hot, yellow being third-most-hot and white being cold. The hotter an area, the better a location it is for ads.

The Hottest Spots in the Sidebars, Header and Footer

Left Sidebar, Upper Portion

In this article, we'll consider the header, sidebars and footer as possible locations for ads. For these locations, the hottest part is the upper portion of the left sidebar. In the example from the previous article, this is the location where I placed the ad.

This makes sense for blogs written in languages where you read from left to right and from the top to the bottom of the page (such as English and European languages). For readers of these languages, their eyes typically start at the upper left-hand corner of the page.

To place an ad in the upper portion of the left sidebar, make sure you're on the Look & Feel section, Layout page, with the Columns tab selected:

Drag one of your ad unit components from the Inactive column to the top of the left column, then click the Save button at the bottom of the page. You'll now have an ad in the upper part of the left sidebar.

Left Sidebar, Lower Portion and Right Sidebar, Upper Portion

The next-best locations are the lower part of the left sidebar and the upper part of the right sidebar:

Header, Left and Center Portions

The left and center portions of the header are considered to be as hot as the lower part of the left column and the upper part of the right column.

To place an ad in the header, make sure you're on the Look & Feel section, Layout page, with the Header tab selected:

You can one of your ad unit components from the Inactive column to either the left or center column, then click the Save button at the bottom of the page. You'll now have an ad in the header.

Forget the Footer

As you can see, the bottom of the page is a bad location to place ads. Don't bother dragging one of your ad components into the footer.

But What About the Hottest Spot?

All these are good locations for ads, but none of them are as good as the spot just above the primary content. It's the reddest part of the heat map.

The problem is that Blogware doesn't let put components in the center column; it's strictly for blog content.

That doesn't mean that it's impossible to place ads above the primary content; it just means that there's more work involved. I'll cover it in the next article.

Welcome to the second part of Blogging for Dollars, a series of articles that cover how to make money with your Blogware-powered blog and Google's Adsense.

In the previous article, I wrote about the opportunities that AdSense provides to someone with a blog. With a few hundred pageviews a month, it's possible to cover the monthly charges for your blog and make it pay for itself. With a few thousand pageviews a month, you can harness your blogging and make it generate some decent spending money. With the right topics or themes, you might even be able to seriously supplement your income.

In this article, I say "enough with the theory, it's time to make some money!" I'll cover the process of getting an Adsense account and then inserting AdSense into your Blogware-powered blog.

Getting an AdSense Account

The first step is to get an AdSense account from Google. To do this, go to:

http://google.com/adsense

You'll be taken to a page that will look something like this:

To enter the sign-up process, click the Click Here to Apply button. You'll be taken to the sign-up form. It's divided into a number of sections, each one requiring a different type of information about you or your blog. We'll go through them one by one.

Website Information

The first section is pretty simple: you simply tell them where to find your blog and what language it's written in.

When you enter the URL (some people like to call it the "web address") of your blog into the field marked Website URL, don't add the "http://" part. For example, when I signed up for AdSense for my personal blog, I entered accordionguy.blogware.com there.

Contact Information

The second section is for contact information, so that Google know to whom they should address and send the check.

When you enter the information for Country or Territory and Payee Name (that's the person who should get the checks), make sure you don't make any mistakes. Those can't be changed once the application process has begun.

Product Selection

The third section is for choosing which AdSense products you'd like to have on your blog.

Check both. Right now, we're focusing solely on AdSense for Content, which are the context-sensitive ads. I'll cover AdSense for Search -- which puts on "Search" function on your site for which you get paid when it's used -- in a later article.

Policies

The fourth and final section is where you promise that you'll adhere to the terms and conditions of being an AdSense member.

You have to agree to all the terms to become a member, which means you have to check all those boxes. By checking all of them, you're making many promises, some of which are:

• That you won't click on the AdSense ads on your own blog.
• That you won't tell people to click on your ads.
• That you won't put porn (and other content forbidden by the terms and conditions -- see here) on your blog.
• That you won't disclose how much your blog makes via Adsense.

Once You've Filled Out the Form...

Click the Submit Information button. Then it's time to play the waiting game.

(Cue that line from The Simpsons: "The waiting game sucks. Let's play 'Hungry Hungry Hippos'.")

You won't have to wait too long. I've read on several sites that most acceptance/rejection emails from the AdSense screening people arrive within 1 or 2 days of your clicking the Submit Information button.

Once you've been accepted, you can proceed to the next step: inserting AdSense ads in your blog!

(If you've been rejected, cheer up, and I'll cover what to do in a later article.)

Putting AdSense on Your Blog

Now that you've been accepted, the next step is to put AdSense into your blog. Although there's going to be a lot of Blogware-specific material in this section, a lot of this is applicable to other blogging software or web pages in general.

Logging In

The first step is to go to the AdSense main page (http://google.com/adsense) and log in using the email address you provided when you signed up and the password emailed to you by AdSense.

Once You're In

Once you've logged in, you'll see that the site is divided into three major sections:

1. Reports: This section provides reports of your earnings. Since you haven't installed AdSense on your blog yet, this won't be useful to you right now.


2. AdSense Setup: This section generates you the code that you need to place in your blog in order for AdSense to work. We'll be working in this section today.


3. My Account: This section lets you review and change your account information, such as deatils about your blog, contact information and payment information.

Make sure that you're in the AdSense Setup section, which is shown below:

The page displays a number of AdSense services. Right now, we're only interested in the ads, so click on AdSense for Content.

The AdSense for Content page provides two choices of AdSense unit: as units and link units. For the time being, let's concentrate solely on ad units. I'll cover link units and the difference between them and ad units in a later article.

Select the Ad unit option and click the Continue button at the bottom of the page. You'll get taken to a page that looks like this:

This page lets you select a format and a color set for your AdSense ads. Once you've selected a color and a format, you'll be given a piece of JavaScript code that you insert into your blog's layout.

Now it's time to create an ad unit.

Making an Ad Unit

At its simplest, creating an ad unit requires only two sets of selections. The first is to select a format, which is done from the drop-down menu shown below:

If you need to see examples of the various formats available, click on the Ad Formats link.

For this example, I'm going to choose 160 x 600 Wide Skyscraper. A number of sites that cover AdSense suggest that ads in sidebars get more clicks than banner ads, and the Wide Skyscraper is the largest ads that will fit in a sidebar. Here's what the Wide Skyscraper looks like:

Once you've selected the format, the next step is to choose a color scheme. You do this in the Colors section, which is shown below:

There are two ways you can choose a color scheme. The simplest way is to choose one of the pre-defined color schemes from the drop-down menu:

The other way is to define your own color scheme using these controls. You can either type in the color code of the colors you want to use...

...or, if you're a more visual sort, you can click on the color boxes and choose from the palette that pops up:

No matter which way you choose your ad unit's colors, you can see a sample showing the color you chose. The sample appears near the bottom left of the Colors section and updates whenever you choose a new pre-defined color scheme or change a color yourself:

Feel free to pick whatever color scheme or colors for your ad. As a general rule, you should choose a color scheme or select colors that match those of your blog. In a later article, I'll write about effective color choices.

Once you've chosen the color scheme or colors, click the Continue button at the bottom of the page. You'll be taken to the final page, which contains the AdSense code:

This AdSense code needs to be inserted into the layout of your blog. If you click anywhere inside the textbox marked Your AdSense Code, you'll select all the code. Copy it (control-C on Windows and Linux, command-C on the Mac). If you like, you can open a text editor or word processor and paste the code there.

Now that we have the code, it's time for the final step: putting it into your blog's layout.

Putting AdSense into Your Blog's Layout

(Note that this section is specific to Blogware and Blogware-powered blogs.)

The simplest way to place an AdSense ad unit into your blog is to place it in a custom component. As a component, it will be easy to move to different places in your layout once you've defined it. The ability to easily move ad units about is important because one of the keys to success with AdSense is experimenting with ad placement.

Log into your blog's control panel and go to the Look & Feel section by clicking the Look & Feel tab.

The page for editing components is in the Layout section, so click on the Layout below the Look & Feel tab:

Now click on the Components tab:

Here's the part of the resulting page that's most important to us at the moment: the Add Custom Component section. This is where we can create a new component, which is a piece of code that we can easily move around the blog's layout. The Add Custom Component section is shown below:

Give your component a name so that it's easy to identify. In this example, we'll give it the name "Skyscraper Ad" by entering it into the Name textbox:

Now the slightly harder part: to enter the code that defines the component. Enter the following into the Content textbox:

<div class="component"></div>

Which looks like this in the control panel:

Note that those two lines are separated by a blank line. The blank line doesn't really do anything except make the next step easier. The next step is to paste the AdSense code into that blank line:

Now that we've defined the component, it's time to save it. Click the Add Component button to save it. The page will reload and the component should appear in the Custom Components list:

With a component defined and saved, there's only one step remaining: it's time to add it to the layout. For this example, we'll add it to the top of the blog's left sidebar. To add components to sidebars, we need to click the Columns tab:

This will give you a view of the components as they are laid out in the blog's left and right columns. Since our new "Skyscraper Ad" component (in the page it appears as "Custom: Skyscraper Ad") isn't in use yet, it's in the Inactive column:

To place our skyscraper ad at the top of the left sidebar, drag it from the Inactive column to the top of the Left column. Here's what the page looks like while you're dragging the component to its destination:

And here's what the page looks like when you've dropped it:

Now click the Save button at the bottom of the page. Once you've done that, the ad unit will be in your layout at the top of the left sidebar. Take a look at your blog now: the Skyscraper ad unit should now be at the top of the left sidebar:

Congratulations!

You've just placed an AdSense ad on your blog. Now it's a matter and waiting to see how much money comes in.

To keep an eye on the action that your AdSense ad is getting, log into to the AdSense site (http://google.com/adsense) and click the Reports tab. You'll be take to a page that candisplay all sorts of reports showing how much money your AdSense ads have earned.

Next time: I'll talk about AdSense reports and ad placement.

Welcome to the return of The Blogware Mechanic, a regular series of articles in which I'll show you all sorts of tips and tricks to get the most out of your Blogware-based blog.

Since this is a return after a long hiatus, I thought I'd start with a fairly splashy topic; something nice and attention-getting. How 'bout this?:

That's right: what I'm going to do is show you how to make a little money off your blog.

But first, let me tell you a story...

The Cocktail Party Pitch (A True Story)

It all started at a cocktail party for nerds (yes, such things exist). I won't go into the details of the party, other than the fact that a large software corporation had hired a boutique PR company to throw the shindig. This meant that the snacks -- and more importantly, the drinks -- were free. This probably explains why my friend was a mite tipsy when he approached me.

"How come you're not blogging full-time?" he asked. "Your blog's good. You get lots of hits. You could make a killing!"

Oh wow, is he drunk, I thought. I figured it was the bloggy equivalent those druken moments when a buddy comes up to you and says "I love you, man." At least I was dealing with a happy drunk.

"I don't think so," I said. "Boing Boing -- I can see that making a lot of money, but not my blog."

"How many pageviews d'you get on your blog?"

"I average about 3,500, maybe 4,000 a day," I replied, "with the occasional spike on a good day."

"You can make money, then."

"Why? How much do you make off your blogs?"

"I make my living off my blogs, dude."

A living?

I should make it clear at this point that my friend does not live in a single-room apartment in a nearly-condemned tenement building, nor does he subsist on ramen noodles (the starving student's best friend). He's got a house, a wife and kids, a car and all the other stuff that you'd associate with suburban living.

"Just off the ads?" I asked. His were regular blogs; none of his pages were behind any kind of for-pay "firewall". I didn't remember seeing any kind of "tip jar" either, which left advertising as the most likely possibility.

"Yup, just off the ads," he replied.

I tried to think of how often I clicked on an ad on a web page. Maybe once a week, maybe once a month. Not often anyway. I couldn't imagine making more than a few pennies a month off ad clicks.

We talked for a little bit longer, and my friend gave me a few extra suggestions on how to go about making money from my blog. After I left, I decided that I'd give it a try.

The idea of harnessing a hobby to make a little extra spending money isn't new to me. I play rock and pop tunes on the accordion as a hobby, and from time to time, I play on the street. With a hat tossed down for tips, many passers-by don't mind tossing me one- and two-dollar coins (I'm in Canada), and those coins add up. On a good night, I can make enough money to buy dinner for two  at a decent steakhouse. Maybe I could do something similar with my blog.

I decided that to follow the tried-and-true business strategy of taking a look at my friend's blogs and doing exactly what he did. I visited his blogs -- has has about a half dozen -- and they all relied exclusively on Google AdSense ads.

AdSense

Chances are that you're already familiar with Google AdSense ads. They're those ads that seems to be on every other other website and are marked with a text link that reads "Ads by Goooooooogle". They take on a number of forms, like the ones shown below.

Here's the "468 by 60" banner:

...here's the "120 by 240" vertical banner:

...and here's the "250 by 250" image ad:

How Adsense Works (The Quick and Dirty Version)

I used to work with at a company founded by an advertising executive, and I remember him always saying "It's not that people hate ads; it's that they hate ads that aren't relevant to them".

AdSense tries to provide relevant advertising by displaying ads that are related to the content of the page they are on. This is possible because AdSense, being owned by Google, has access to Google's data store, which has data on most of the publicly-accessible web pages in existence. AdSense uses the data that Google has on that page to determine what sort of ad to show. Here are a couple of quick examples: When I blogged about accordions, AdSense started displaying ads for accordion stores, accordion repair shops and accordion lessons. When I blogged about how silly people look on pocket bikes, AdSense showed advertisements for motorbikes (of both the regular and pocket variety) and helmets.

When you put AdSense on your blog, you make money based on the number of clicks the AdSense ads get and the number of people that visit your site. I'll go into the details in a later article, but in the meantime, it boils down to these rules:

• If people visit your site, you make some money.
• If people click on the ads on your site, you make more money.

Google will send you a check (or alternately, direct-deposits money into your bank account) at the end of the current month whenever you accumulate $100 or more.

How Much Money Can You Make?

It's hard to say. There are so many factors that enter into the equation.

I could cite my own earnings from the very short time I've used AdSense, but the terms and conditions of joining the AdSense program specifically prohibit you from announcing how much you've earned.

Luckily, there are a few people on the net who have provided examples without mentioning specific blog names. Darren Rowse at problogger.net has written about the AdSense earnings of three unnamed blogs with which he is involved:

                                                                                                                                       

Blog	Pageviews per month	Earnings from AdSense
Blog A	20,000	$790.91
Blog B	40,000	$99.08
Blog C	160,000	$515.12

As you can see, there isn't a direct correlation between pageviews and revenues from AdSense. Pageviews help, but clicks on ads are where the money's at.

A Washington Post article titled A New Model For Getting Rich Online cites several examples:

• PodcastDirectory.com grew from a site from 100 hits a month in 2004 to getting a million per month -- it earns about $30,000 to $40,000 a year, "the equivalent of an entry-level government worker's salary".


• Two 20-year-olds cashed in on the MySpace phenomenon by creating FreeWebLayouts.net, where people can download designs to customize their MySpace pages. Their AdSense revenues: $100,000 a month. Not bad for a year-old site.


• A guy who flies often created SeatGuru, a site provides information on various airlines' seats, such as which ones have the most legroom and recline, which ones provide audio and video in-flight entertainment, which ones have laptop power, and so on. He makes about $10,000 to $20,000 a month from AdSense.

While these stories are of exceptional cases, these people didn't do anything that most people couldn't do: create a list of podcast sites, create a bunch of templates for web pages and collect information about airline seats. Sometimes the simplest ideas are the most successful.

At the very least, a blog that gets a few hundred hits a month should be able to cover its own hosting expenses; a blog that gets a few thousand hits a month should be able to meet the threshold to get a Google check at the end of each month, which is enough to give yourself a new computer or plane tickets for a decent-haul trip every year for your birthday.

If at this point you're salivating at the thought of making a little extra money by harnessing your existing blog or starting one, tune in tomorrow for the second part in this series!

Weblogs are different than webpages, we are all aware of that. But there are some basic usability improvements that can be made to blogs in order to make the visitor experience much more pleasant. Over at useit.com they have created a great article outlining some of the biggest issues with blogs today and what can be done to easily improve the usability of a blog. Please take a read! Read the article 

Suppose you've got a blog with your standard text title, like the one below:



Now let's suppose that you've got an image file that you'd love to use in the place of your blog title, say this one:



...so that your blog looks like this:



This article will show you how. Read the article 

Blogware comes with a number of built-in "themes" which define the font and color scheme of your blog. Some of them are quite nice. Others don't really appeal to me.

If you're a do-it-yourself type of person who also has a Blogware blog, you'll eventually want to create your own custom "look" for your blog. That's what the next few Blogware Mechanic articles will be about. By the end of this series, you should be quite comfortable with making changes to the look and feel of your blog by making changes to the style template. Read the article 

This is the second of a set of installments of The Blogware Mechanic that cover the use of the filesystem -- which we introduced in the last article -- to liven up your blog.

In this article, we'll look at using your blog's filesystem to include multiple pictures in your blog entries.

Read the article 

The next couple of installments of The Blogware mechanic will cover the use of the filesystem -- which we introduced in the last article -- to liven up your blog.

In this article, we'll look at using your blog's filesystem to include pictures in your blog entries.

Read the article 

The EFF -- Electronic Frontier Foundation -- is, in their own words, "a donor-supported membership organization working to protect our fundamental rights regardless of technology; to educate the press, policymakers and the general public about civil liberties issues related to technology; and to act as a defender of those liberties". They fight the good fight in those cases where the law and technology collide.

They recently published a guide to "safe blogging" titled How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else). It's got some good, common-sense advice that you might want to follow. Here's the introduction:

Blogs are like personal telephone calls crossed with newspapers. They're the perfect tool for sharing your favorite chocolate mousse recipe with friends--or for upholding the basic tenets of democracy by letting the public know that a corrupt government official has been paying off your boss.

If you blog, there are no guarantees you'll attract a readership of thousands. But at least a few readers will find your blog, and they may be the people you'd least want or expect. These include potential or current employers, coworkers, and professional colleagues; your neighbors; your spouse or partner; your family; and anyone else curious enough to type your name, email address or screen name into Google or Feedster and click a few links.

The point is that anyone can eventually find your blog if your real identity is tied to it in some way. And there may be consequences. Family members may be shocked or upset when they read your uncensored thoughts. A potential boss may think twice about hiring you. But these concerns shouldn't stop you from writing. Instead, they should inspire you to keep your blog private, or accessible only to certain trusted people.

Here we offer a few simple precautions to help you maintain control of your personal privacy so that you can express yourself without facing unjust retaliation. If followed correctly, these protections can save you from embarrassment or just plain weirdness in front of your friends and coworkers.

One of the tips they provide is "Limit Your Audience". You can do this in Blogware by setting up restricted categories and photo albums. You can set these up so that only specified, logged-in readers can actually see the posts made under those categories; they're effectively invisible to all other readers.

I'll post a tutorial on restricted categories next week; in the meantime, you can check out the Publisher Control Panel Manual's chapter on restricted categories and photo albums.

National Post Business, a monthly magazine included with issues of Canada's National Post newspaper, featured a cover story on the perils about blogging about work in its April edition.

While I would be quick to remind you my own blog played a major role in my landing a job here, a few foolishly or rashly-written words posted to a globally-accessible medium where information flows freely and is easily copied can suddenly make you unemployed. I'm not trying to scare you away from blogging; I'm just asking you to exercise some good judgement.

One Solution: Restricted Categories and Photo Albums

If you feel that you share something with your online friends that might jeopardize your job, Blogware offers restricted categories and restricted photo albums. These are categories and photo albums that are accessible only by users who are logged in and who have permission to view them. You can grant access to restricted categories and restricted photo albums on a person-by-person basis, so you can set up your blog so that:

• Your best friend Alice can see any article or photo posted in any category or photo album in your blog.
  
  
• Your brother Bob can see any article or photo in the "Main Page" and "Family" categories, but not the "Deep Dark Secrets" category.
  
  
• Anyone else -- your boss included -- can see only what you've posted to the "Main Page" category.

I'll post a tutorial with examples on how to set up your blog with restricted categories and restricted photo albums soon. In the meantime, you can consult the Restricted Categories and Photo Albums page of the Blogware Publisher Control Panel Manual.