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.