Making Sense of Adsense for Blogs

One of the advantages I mentioned in "Writer's Blog: A Newbies Primer on Blogging" is the opportunity to earn money through your blog site. Most likely this is the reason that best resonates for many, motivating them to start and maintain a blogging account.

Over the years, the proven way to generate income for blogs is through legitimate implementation of advertising or sponsorship programs. One such advertising program is Google Adsense.

Adsense became Google's main advertising program after its purchase of a then up and coming search engine company known as Applied Semantics in 2003. Since then, it has become the ad server system of choice for many who wish to monetize their respective sites, blog sites included.

If you were to run your own industry standard online advertising program, you will have to figure out which of your website pages would most likely be read by the appropriate audience targeted by your advertisers. You would then have to encode the ad in full layout on the webpage.

In addition, you will have to monitor your ad impressions - defined as a measure of the the visibility of the ads as determined by its size and placement on the page as well as the number of times the webpage has been accessed. Take note that ad impressions is not the same as page impressions or page hits.

You will also have to take into account your click-throughs which essentially is what will make money for you. Your CTR or Click-Through Rate is the percentage of clicks made by your visitors on the ads on your site for each one hundred ad impressions.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more to deal with in online advertising than this article would allow. Unless you really want to be an e-marketing professional knowing all these complex terminologies, as an alternative you can just simply link up with a number of establishments and introduce a monthly or annual site sponsorship program in exchange for ad spots and being featured on your blog.

Nevertheless, Google Adsense simplifies the ad process with a packaged system for website owners. Whether with a full-fledged commercial website or a personal blog, Adsense participants are referred to collectively as web publishers or simply "Publishers". It's free to join the Adsense program.

Incidentally, if you have a Google account via Gmail, Blogger or its other services, you can easily tie up your Adsense account with your existing Google account for easy single-sign-on access.

Adsense will provide you with a backend site accessible at http://www.google.com/adsense. Here you can setup which Adsense ad units you can place in your blog. There are numerous layouts to choose from, the techniques to determining which we will reserve for another time. You can select among three existing programs namely, Adsense for Content, Adsense for Search, and recently their Referrals program.

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This is the first part of a series. Part 2 of "Making Sense of Adsense for Blogs" will follow shortly.