How to Monetize your Wordpress Blog with Google Adsense

Wordpress is a free blog application that is very popular among bloggers. It is small, runs fast and best of all, quite compatible with the Major Search Engines.
Google Adsense is one of the most popular advertisement applications available on the internet for making money. It is easy to set up, and you can watch your income build on an hourly basis.

Using the two in conjunction yields a very powerful marriage of applications which, in many cases, serve a primary purpose of making money without the owners involvement past the initial setup and maintenance. This method of making money is called "Passive Residual Income".

Passive Residual Income is money that you receive over and over every day, week, month or year that you do not have to work for past the initial setup and some basic maintenance.

Blogs can be a "journal" of someone's life, updates from a company to its employees and customers, but the type of blog that is most common when it comes down to making money online, are informational blogs. These blogs usually cater to a "Niche", or a group of people with a specific interest. An example of a Niche would be people who are not just into trading baseball cards, but ones that have a very big interest in the Boston Red Sox, and perhaps, only the Red Sox cards from 1968.

In this "How To" article, I am making the assumption that you know the basics, and have set up both the Wordpress and Adsense Accounts, and as the title states, this article only addresses placement for maximum returns.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Wordpress blog account - free sign up
• Google Adsense account - free sign up

1. 
    
   Adsense Ads on your blog are essential to making money through passive residual income

   Before you get "Ad Happy" and start placing ads all over the place, take a look at your blog layout. Keep in mind, one well placed ad may make more money by people clicking on it than a host of ads all over the page. The reason is that people get desensitized to advertisements. If you have 10 ads on a page, people will most likely skim over them all in an effort to read the main content, or worse, just leave the page if they don't want to bother.
   
   One ad that is midway through the text is much more likely to get noticed. The reader must scroll and read through the ad to finish reading your article. If something on the ad catches their eye, they will be much more likely to click on it as they have not been desensitized.

2. 
    
   Choose your niche, and hit it hard!

   Consider the content of your blog. Is the blog itself about something that is well advertised? Here's a great example. Someone who writes about Criminal Law will most likely get Adsense Ads that promote attorneys. The problem is that many of these attorneys are not even in the reader's area! What would be the point of clicking on the link?
   
   If you review spy gadgets on your blog, your Google Adsense banner will be full of spy gadget products. If one article is about setting up a hidden camera, someone who reads the article might decide that they really need a hidden cam, click an ad, and buy - You'll get the money for the click, but you may also receive a portion of the sale in commission too!

3. Ads near the middle do the best. The reader is already interested in your article, and have a higher probability of clicking a pertinant advertisement.
   
   Ads that are near the top can make someone leave the page immediately because your page may look like a sales and spam type web page with no real content worth reading.
   
   Ads that are near the end may get overlooked because the reader is done reading. They got the info that they needed. Why should they click an ad if they got what they wanted?

4. Track your visitors. You can use StatCounter, Google Analytics, or Alexa to take care of your visitor tracking needs. You will see how many visit, for how long, who referred them and where they came from.

5. 
    
   Track your visitors and use plugins to make the job easier!

   Use Plugins to make your job easy! The nice thing about wordpress is that there are hundreds of plugins (a plug in is a small script that you install into your WordPress blog throught the integrated installer). Some of the ones that really can help you are the following:
   1. Google Sitemap - Sitemap automatically creates and submits a sitemap to the search engines for better indexing and listing.
   2. Adsense - This plugin will insert the Adsense Ad Box into your blog automatically -- Saves lots of time as you can have it insert your ads directly into the middle of the article as was recommended above.
   3. Analytics - Automatically sends the tracking information to Google Analytics.

6. 
    
   Blog Promotion is essential to making money with Adsense

   Remember this: If no one sees your blog, you will not make money. The more publicity you give your WordPress blog, the better. There are whole articles about blog promotion on the internet, and it is highly suggested that you learn a little about website promotion, and promote your blog as much as possible.

Resources

• Link to Official Wordpress Plugins

[ViktoryaHale]

on 11/12/2009 Where's the Adsense Ad Box - it seems that there are a million adsense plugs. Thanks

[mdue]

on 9/14/2009 Thanks for the great article! 5*