Adsense for Wordpress: First Steps

Google Adsense is one of the best things to have appeared online as it allows small publishers like me and you to obtain a source of income for the content we put online. However, I have to remind you that like almost everything in the world, you have to work hard to get it.

Nevertheless, I believe that as long as your content is good, you will attract visitors and it is up to you to convert the traffic to revenue. So, how do you do that? Well, I hope this guide will be a good start for anyone new to Adsense. Although I have written it with Wordpress users in mind, most of it is applicable to other blogging platforms as well:

1. Sign up for the Adsense program. *Note that you will need to have site with quite a bit of content or your application might be rejected.
2. If your application goes through, you can start inserting ads into your website. Google has made this easy by including a wizard to guide you through the application. But if you need more clarification, I would recommend Google's own guide here - Link.
3. So now the question is - where do you position the ads? Google has identified a few key regions where readers are more likely to notice the ads:

As you can see, some locations are more successful than others. The colors fade from dark orange (strongest performance) to light yellow (weakest performance). But basically, you should add them to within your post and near navigational areas.

Also note that Google only allows a maximum of 3 regular ad units, 2 search boxes, 1 link unit and 1 referral button per product (up to 4 buttons)! Always refer to the Google TOS for more information.

4. Another important thing is to blend your ads to your blog template i.e. you make the colour scheme of your google ads to match that of your site. This allows the ads to look like it is part of your site and not stick out like a sore thumb.
5. For Wordpress users, I would recommend installing a plugin called, Adsense Deluxe. This plugin allows you to add ads very easily to anywhere in your blog and also limit where it should and should not display the ads.
6. With the above done, you should get on and write more great content for your readers.

Remember that Adsense are contextual ads i.e. they display ads that are relevant to your blog posts. So in order for Adsense to do so, you'll need to provide enough content such that it can detect the most relevant ads to your site and if it is very relevant, the more reason your readers will click on them!

Finally, I would like to stress that Adsense works differently for different people and for different themes. So, you should experiment with the positioning for it to achieve the best performance.

If you like this post, you might be interested in reading "Wordpress SEO: First Steps".

This entry was posted on Monday, May 15th, 2006 at 5:44 am and is filed under First Steps, Wordpress, Adsense. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.