Tuesday, June 19, 2012

AdSense Options with Blogger: Part 1

Blogger offers some simple “out of the box” solutions for placing AdSense on our sites. We'll learn eventually that these aren't the only options, and that's what makes Blogger so incredibly flexibile (dare I say… sexy!). Today though, we're going to look at some of the simple built in options that Blogger provides so we can start making money with AdSense.
After you log into your Blogger account, head on over to the Layout screen and select the “Add a Page Element”. If you have no idea what I'm talking about (I get that look sometimes), you can easily catch up by heading over to my prior article: Placing AdSense on Your Blog.

Once you have the layout options open, go ahead and click on the “Add to Blog” under the Adsense section.

You're presented with the all-mighty AdSense Configuration screen.
When you pull down the Format list, we're given many AdSense options with all sorts of size configurations.
Out of the box, Blogger gives us three main AdSense options. In the Google AdSense world these are better known as: AdSense for Content. In a nutshell - they're ads that are text and link driven (There are actually images too. Those don't come out of the box but we'll see how we can do that in the near future). They allow us to put ads on our site that will target the content we have written about. (Don't know much about AdSense? No problem, check out: What is AdSense?)

Here's what a sample ad unit (300 x 250) looks like:

 And here is a sample link unit (160 x 90):
 It's important to note that Google's Program and Policy states we can put up to three ad units and three link units on any page. Besides, we wouldn't want to bombard our audience with ads everywhere. We want to make money from our blog but we also want to create an enjoyable experience with quality content.

Play around with the different format options. Get a feel for the different shapes and sizes that Blogger AdSense options have to offer. We'll take a closer look at the color options for our AdSense in the next article.