Putting Advertising on Your Blog

If you've ever looked at a Web site, you're familiar with the most common Web advertising formats: banner ads, vertical skyscrapers, buttons, boxes, pop-up ads, and even animations that open over page content. The problem with all these formats? They haven't proven to be greatly successful. In fact, many consumers claim to be actively annoyed by this kind of advertising and less likely to use the services of the advertiser.

Even Web sites that offer generalized content, such as newspapers and magazines, encounter problems with advertising. Imagine how much less successful this kind of advertising would be in a niche publication like a blog! Some bloggers are experimenting with using targeted advertising instead of mass-market advertisements.

Imagine visiting your favorite blog about, say, knitting, and seeing ads for wool and knitting needles alongside a pattern you just love. The likelihood that you see these ads as valuable rather than intrusive and irrelevant changes dramatically. Blogs are in a great position to take advantage of targeted advertising of this kind, because the content of a blog is generally so focused and specific; readers are nearly guaranteed to be interested in the topic of the content (they wouldn't be at your blog otherwise) and much more likely to appreciate ads that are also on topic.

A number of enterprising businesses have sprung up to take advantage of this affinity and developed advertising programs specifically for blogs. Google is by far the largest organization to develop a program, and if you've spent any time visiting blogs recently, you have probably seen its contextual ads in action. Blogads also lets advertisers target your blog specifically and lets you choose whether to accept the advertising.

Advert/sing with Google AdSense

Google AdSense advertising is extremely common on any site with changing content — especially blogs. Google's service is free to use, easy to implement, and provides advertising based on the keywords Google finds on your pages: Write a post about fried chicken, and you might get Google AdSense ads for cooking supplies and restaurants. And these ads are contextual on a page-by-page basis, so every permalink page on your blog has its own set of topic-appropriate ads.

Each time a reader clicks a link in one of these ads, you earn money. You choose where the ads are on your pages, what they look like, and even what kinds of advertisers to display. You can see Google AdSense ads on the Apartment Therapy blog (www.apartmenttherapy.com) in Figure 14-1.

You can also include a Google search box on your blog. Users who use the search box from your blog get targeted Google ads in their search results — and you receive money from any ads they click.

Figure 14-1:

The Apartment Therapy Blog uses Google AdSense contextual ads to add value to its content and earn revenue at the same time.

Figure 14-1:

The Apartment Therapy Blog uses Google AdSense contextual ads to add value to its content and earn revenue at the same time.

You can sign up for Google AdSense by following these steps:

1. Open a Web browser, and go to www.google.com/adsense.

2. Click the Click Here to Apply button, shown in Figure 14-2.

3. If you're new to Google, fill out the New to Google form with your e-mail address and a password of your choice. Users of Google's AdWords or with a Google Print account can simply log in.

4. Select whether your AdSense account is an individual or business account and then click Continue.

Figure 14-2:

Sign up for Google AdSense advertising to place content-related ads on your blog.

Continue reading here: When youre sure everything is correct click Continue to complete the application process

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