Blogger Tip #4 - Google AdSense

On Sunday morning, I actually got up at 6 and did the usual warm-up. Maybe it was because I had my Robitussin just in time to fight the cough better, or maybe it was my wife's Toisan hot soup, my cough wasn't as bad as past years'. Anyway, the minute I was out the door to the park for my broken 2K run, it started to drizzle. Another block away and the raindrops got bigger. I ended up going back to bed and slept till 10. However, I actually went running at 6 in the evening after the wife and the kid went to the in-laws for dinner.

And now time for yet another Blogger tip. If you can use a little money, and I really mean little, hook your blog up to Google's AdSense. Blogger itself is ad-free and you are in no way obligated to plaster ads on your site, but a little ad and a little money can be kinda fun. Thanks to Google's context-sensitive technology, the ads are relevant to what's in your blog. I get a chuckle every now and then on how relevant the ads are to my blog writings. I am tempted to write a blog entry that contains totally random text to confuse AdSense, but then again my blog may be misunderstood for splog and flagged for de-promotion. FYI, I signed up with AdSense last October so now, a year later, I have a whopping $20+ in my Google AdSense account. It's mostly because I only started to update my blog almost daily only recently. The more frequently your blog is updated, the more ads are rotated into place in your blog, which translates to more variety and money. One ad that was placed on my blog one day was for some guy who claimed he had the technique that got him thousands of dollars a month with Google AdSense. Sounds like B.S. to me. Or just pure spamming, making enemies out of everyone you know, burning every bridges after crossing them.

There are many ways to display ads. I've chosen the least intrusive way, yet most prominent for the advertisers. Two small ads at the top will do. I find it so distasteful that some blogs show the ads, some ten or so of them, right at the top of the screen. Blog readers would have to scroll down a page or two to get to the meaty stuff of the blog. Those bloggers probably don't expect repeat visitors and only want to make a few quick bucks. On the other hand, I still want to provide some original content and only make some beer money on the side.