Onward Struggle

After working hard on building up my blog, I have managed to fulfill the six month content requirement. Immediately, I tried to reapply for my adsense account to see if I can get it. (Note that on top of the six month content requirement, there is a need to place a privacy policy for your site too.)

Within hours of sending the application, I received an email confirmation of a partial account approval. After getting to this stage, I went into my blog account's monetize tab and went through the easy steps to place ad units to my blog.

Initially, these ad units are blank spaces which blend with my blog design. But because they were blank, I couldn't really tell whether I did the right thing. Did I place them correctly and will my account be fully approved? These sort of things went through my head.

Next I logged into the Adsense account to have a look and saw tons of options to click. Its pretty overwhelming to me as a newbie to this whole thing. Trying to understand what I am getting myself into, I started plowing through those articles in the Adsense Help section.

Reading the help section is actually a pretty good idea. It took my mind off the unnecessary thoughts about whether my account will get approved or not. In addition, it gave me some important information regarding ad units, link units, adsense for content, feed and search.

From what I read, each page can only hold 3 ad units, 3 link units and 2 customized searches. After some digging of articles and trying around with those ad units, link units and stuff, this is what I've learnt.

For blogspot bloggers, if for example, we placed 2 ad units on the home page (under design tab), no matter which page or post we go to, these 2 ad units will always be shown and therefore takes up 2 out of the 3 ad units limit.

And if you selected the option to show ad units within posts via the inline ads, then you will inevitably overshoot the 3 ad units limit in certain situations and on certain pages depending on how often an ad is shown in between posts. To avoid this, I personally feel it would be better to omit the inline ads option and then place them within your posts yourself. (Besides...using the inline ads option, it will place your ad unit at the very bottom of your post's page...which is a pretty lousy position for an ad anyway.)

If you choose to place the final ad unit in your posts, then you will have to make sure that on your home page, the ad unit won't show up in multiple posts and make you go over the 3 ad units limit on your home page. (I'm guessing that you will have to make use of the jump breaks.)

After deciding on the placement of ad units, I wanted to try out the link units. But as soon as I put a link unit onto the home page, I discovered that one of the ad units became blank. It doesn't show up even after refreshing. I only found out that this was due to the blogger system, while observing the adsense limits, somehow counts link units together with ad units towards the same limit.

Well...since placing 3 ad units & 3 link units onto a page would make it too crowded with ads (considering that I use some amazon banners too), I've decided to just settle with using 3 ad units plus perhaps some amazon banners. I guess I will probably play around with the positioning of amazon banners and ad unit within posts.

I've also managed to set up my customized search engine and feed with ads from adsense, but am not sure whether they are properly linked to my adsense account. Only time will tell me this I guess. (If you are having some problems with setting them up, please feel free to leave a comment and I'll try to guide you on how to redirect your feed to that from adsense for feed. Though I'm not sure how helpful I will be to you with my newbie knowledge...)

Anyway, roughly two days after I had placed ad units on my blog, I found that ads from google started to appear in those previously blank spaces. So I guess my adsense account finally got approved. Hurray... ^^;

Okay...I've got my Adsense account...now what?

Now that I've gotten my adsense account, things won't end here...I'll probably put in more effort and focus on filling up my blog with content and information that readers would want to know. Its gonna be one uphill climb from here.

- BuLaDiFu -