A bit more redesign of the Blog Layout

The blog is a bit tight on the real estate side, in that a lot of content and/or navigation stuff is buried down the right side bar. So I will interrupting my planned development of the blog, specifically adding a menu bar until after I modify the 2-column format to a 3-column format. While I am going to the 3-column format I will also increase the width of the blog.

Stay tuned... I hope to start that next week.

NOTE: I am moving primary residences this weekend so posting is on the back burner....

Online Blogger Resources

Posts will be a bit thin over the next week of so as I am in the middle of a house move. But I will try to provide a few interesting snipnets...

The internet is a great source of "How to" and "Help". This is very true for the Blogger community. There are four blogs which I have found very helpful in providing helpful tips and ways to do things. These websites cover topics from the management of content to how to customize your Blogger layout.

The 'Art' and Science of Blogging: The following sites and blogs provide great tips and background on how to manage a blog including SEO, writing, structure, advertising, and making money. Basically everything except the technical part.

http://www.problogger.net

The following sites and blogs provide tip and trick on how to customize your blog. mostly using Blogger as the blogging platform. While they provide some background on the management they mostly focus on the technical issues.

http://blogger-faq.blogspot.com

http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com

http://blogger-tricks.blogspot.com & http://bloggerfordummies.blogspot.com

http://betabloggerfordummies.blogspot.com

http://blogger-faq.blogspot.com

Much of the blogger oriented customizations I have or will be implementing on this blog have been at least inspired by solutions described in one or more of the above blogs

Again, I apologize to those of you that were waiting for the next installment of the building of this 'free' website, but rest assured that I will be hard at it again in about 10 days.

Adding Adsense - on the Sidebar

The holy grail for bloggers is to make money... and the typical way to do this is to sell advertising on your blog. The trick is to do this in a way that:

• intrudes as little as possible on your reader's experience yet but provides good exposure for your advertisers
• recruits advertisers as inexpensively as possible
• the advertisements are matched to your blog's content
• the revenue collection is simple

The best way to accomplish all of these criteria is to use one of the web advertisement middlemen. The best known of the advertisement middlemen is call AdSense delivered by Goggle.

Goggle AdSense delivery on all of the above criteria:

• You can decide the placement and size of the advertisement
• Goggle finds and sells the advertisements for you - for free
• Google through its various web crawling technologies reads your blog and determines what advertisers would have the closest affinity to the readers of the content in your blog
• Google collects the revenue from the advertisers and shares a portion with you
• and, in terms of collecting the revenue, you can use other eCommerce players on the web like PayPal - when paired up with Google AdSense will place your hard earned advertising dollars right into your bank account.

In this post I will add AdSense to the top of the sidebar of the Blog. I think a smaller advertisement at the top left meets the criteria of fitting nicely into the look and feel of the blog page yet having a solid visibility. There are other places AdSense can be added in a Blogger page including:

• Any where in the sidebar
• at the end of each post (lots of visibility for the advertiser but can be a bit intrusive - which is Ok if the adverts match nicely with your content)
  
• in the footer (not a great place from the perspective of the advertiser)

So here is how to do it:

Login and navigate to the Layout tab of your blog:

Click on the 'Add a Page Element' link on the top of the sidebar area.

Find the AdSense New Page Element in the pop-up and click on 'ADD TO BLOG'. The following 'Configure AdSense' dialog window will appear. Here you can choose:

• The size of the advertisement ( the default 180 x 150 work very nicely in the sidebar)
• The colors used in the advertisement. I think the 'Blend Template' works the best but experiment clicking through the choices and looking at the results in the Preview
• Indicate your AdSense publisher ID - this is so you can get paid --I already have one but if you don't have a Google AdSense account follow the steps given way below... (Look for "HOW TO CREATE A NEW ADSENSE ACCOUNT")
  

Click on 'SAVE CHANGES' and you have added an AdSense element to your layout,

...that looks something like:

HOW TO CREATE A NEW ADSENSE ACCOUNT
If you don't already have a Google AdSense account the process will look a bit different, starting with the 'Sign up for an AdSense Account':


Google is really security conscious (a good thing!) so you will have to go through the process of visiting your email to confirm who you are and then....


...fill out a form to give all your contact information and where to pay you:
It is a bit much but Google leads you through the process, and getting that first ad revenue cheque makes it all forth it!

In the next post we are going to try something a bit more adventurous... adding a menu bar to the top of the blog.