Making Money from Your Blog

Here's something cooland potentially profitableabout Blogger. Google lets you insert context-sensitive text advertisements into your blog, which (in theory) could generate a bit of income for you. Every time a visitor clicks on one of the ad links, you earn a small commission. Just how much of a commission you earn, however, is not disclosed by Googlewhich is a bit of an odd way to attract participants to their program, if you ask me.

These Blogger ads are served by Google's AdSense division. This is one of the key revenue-generating parts of the Google empire. It's to Google's benefit for you to add ads to your blog; the fact that you participate in the revenues is the carrot to get you to sign up.

To add AdSense ads to your blog, follow these steps:

1.	From the Blogger Dashboard, click the Change Settings icon next to your blog name.
2.	When the Settings page appears, select the Template tab and click the AdSense link.
3.	When the AdSense page appears, as shown in Figure 23.17, pull down the Select Ad Format list and select an ad format. You can choose from various sizes and shapes of ads; the ad you select is previewed on the page below the pull-down list. Figure 23.17. Adding AdSense ads to your blog. [View full size image]
4.	Pull down the Select Colors list and select a color scheme for your ad.
5.	Click the Save button.

After you've activated AdSense for your blog, you can view your ad activity in the AdSense console (www.google.com/adsense/). As you can see in Figure 23.18, the console tracks your click-through activity; you can also select the AdSense Setup and My Account tabs to manage the details of your account and ads.

Figure 23.18. Managing your ads from the AdSense console.

[View full size image]