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SAN.com has launched its first advertising campaign using Google’s AdSense. Kevin and I figured that if we’re going to try and reach our goal laid out in our Expectations post, we better start trying to earn some money. This post will take you through what AdSense does, how to setup an account, and how we have implemented it on this site.

What is Google AdSense?

AdSense is a program run by Google that can help you make money with your blog, or any website for that matter. Google “crawls” the content of your website or blog, and gets a sense of what your website is all about. Then, once you have AdSense implemented on your page, it automatically displays ads that are relevant to your content. It’s actually very cool, because you don’t have to do anything but place the html for Google AdSense in your website’s files, and ads appear on your site that are appropriate for your content. The ads come from websites that want your readers to view their sites. You get paid when a reader clicks on an AdSense ad.

 

How can I get it?

Setting up an account is a very easy process. Just go to the Google AdSense site, and click on the “Sign Up Now” button. Then, you give Google some information about you and your website. Once Google checks out your information and your site, they’ll send you an email welcoming you to their program. In this email, you’ll find links to help you get started. Follow the links in the email, and you can start choosing what you want for your site, like text and image ads, AdSense search, and ads through YouTube and Google Video. Finally, you get the html code that you’ll use to embed Google AdSense onto your site.

 

Implementing Google AdSense onto your website

Embedding the html code of Google AdSense is the fun part, especially if you don’t really know what you’re doing (Umm, like us). So, I’m just going to tell you how we did it, because aside from that, I don’t know that I can be much help otherwise. So, first you go into whatever you use to edit your website’s files. We use FileZilla because it’s a free and easy FTP Client program. Then, we found the files that contain the programming information for the actual posts, themselves. In our case, it was in our index.php and single.php files. We knew we wanted the AdSense ads within the content because that’s where people were reading. So, in the index.php and single.php files, we found the places in the code that involved content, threw the html code in where it said content and hoped for the best. Luckily, it ended up being at the top of our article, below the title where we wanted it. But, the text didn’t wrap around it. It was title, AdSense, content, all separated.

 

So, we did the most noble thing we could think of…we copied off of someone else. We found another blog that had AdSense ads the way we wanted it, right-clicked on the site and clicked on “View Page Source.” This brings up the source code to whatever site you’re looking at. Then, we found in their code where the AdSense information was located. All we needed to do was add this little bit of code before the Google AdSense html: <div class=”post-content” style=”float: right; margin: 0px; margin-top: 20px; padding-right: 5px; padding-left: 8px” >. The most important part of this information is the “float: right” part because (correct me if I’m wrong) the word float allows the text to appear to the left of the AdSense box. So, by trial and error, we ended up with Google AdSense looking the way we wanted it to. If you have any questions or need help with your implementation of the code, please let me know and I’ll try to help you out however I can. People helping people, it’s powerful stuff.

 

So, that’s it. We’ll update you on how things are going after we give it some time. Hopefully, this ad campaign will help us toward our goal. If this article helped you at all, or if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment.

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