Make Money from Blogs » Newbie

Ad Review Center in Adsense

ashish — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 18:34:14 +0000

Adsense recently came out with a Ad Review Center. For a lot of people who are starting out with Adsense, or are not comfortable doing a lot of tweaking of the settings, using more such features such as the Ad Review Center only ends up complicating things. However, the Ad Review Center is actually a feature that ends up giving more options to the user who wants to have this option; for those who do not, not doing anything which is Ad Review related means that you do not have to any change at all.
Let’s read a bit more about the Ad Review Center at the following link:
The Ad Review Center is a new publisher tool that enables you to review placement-targeted ads that may appear on your pages. The Ad Review Center provides publishers with more transparency and control over placement-targeted ads appearing on their sites. You can allow or block individual ad groups and advertisers, as well as filter ads by type: text or image.
If you choose to block ads in the Ad Review Center, you’ll need to provide your reason for blocking the ad group or advertiser. This feedback, which we provide to advertisers, gives the advertisers more insight on how to adjust their ad quality, content, and relevance in order to appear on more sites.

To enable the Ad Review Center, follow these steps:
Sign in to your AdSense account.
Under the AdSense Setup tab, visit the Competitive Ad Filter page.
On that page, you’ll see a green notification box. Click the Ad Review Center link.
Read through the information about using the Ad Review Center, and continue if you’re ready to start using the feature.
Once you’ve opted in, you’ll see the Ad Review Center page appear permanently as a link under your AdSense Setup tab.
The Ad Review Center is automatically set to allow all placement-targeted ads to run on your site.
If you’d like to manually review all ads placement-targeted to your site, you may do so by clicking the update settings link toward the top of the page.
Before doing so, you may wish to learn more about manually reviewing ads.

Adsense payment information

ashish — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:51:13 +0000

So you have signed up for an Adsense account, and have got your address verified from the Google Adsense program, and Google can now give you money for your ads. You must be eagerly awaiting your first income from the Google Adsense program, but are not clear as to what you must do in order to receive the money, as well as what format you get the money in. Further, the time period which the Adsense program considers for calculating the amount of money due, and the monthly (or some other period) payment cycle is something that you should read a bit more about.
Well, Google explains these issues very well, both on the Adsense account page, as well as on the Help.

Once you Log in, click on the ‘My Account’ tab, and you will be able to find more information relevant to you.

With regard to the help pages, these links should provide a lot of help:
Payment Guide page Help link. . From this page -
5 Steps to getting paid
1. Check your address
2. Provide your tax information
3. Select your form of payment
4. Enter your PIN and phone verification number
5. Generate $100 in earnings

The page also explains how to track your earnings, as well as how to calculate as to when you will get your payment.
Payment arrives: The time it takes for your payment to arrive depends on form of payment you have selected.
- Standard delivery checks: generally arrive within 1-2 weeks of the mailing date in the U.S.; outside of the U.S. typically arrive in 2-3 weeks.
- Secure Delivery checks: generally arrive in 5-7 days.
- EFT payments: should arrive in your bank account within 2-4 days.
- Western Union Quick Cash payments: available for pick-up at a local agent the following day

You can also Hold your payments. You may not want to receive payments only when you have made $100, or do not need money right now, or are shifting your address and do not desire to receive the payment during the inbetween period. You can do that after logging in to your Adsense account -> My Account -> Account Settings -> Payment Holding

Some Helpful Videos for Adsense Users

ashish — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:00:38 +0000

Many times, just reading the tips and process for using Adsense does not help. There is still doubts, and even just viewing the screenshots does not help. What a publisher who is new to Adsense would want is to have either somebody helping the publisher in the process of implementing Adsense, or if direct support is not available, then to have a demo / video of many of the common steps involved in using Adsense. Thankfully, Youtube is a great location to have many videos where the many steps, optimization techniques, etc, are all displayed on a video.
The Adsense Inside team has also published several videos about Adsense techniques on Youtube, such as how to implement Adsense for Search, Success stories, Generating Adsense Code, Adsense Ad Manager, etc. Here are some of these videos:

Google’s Adsense tips to success:

Generating Adsense code through your Adsense account:

Adsense for Search (including using Custom Search):

Managing Ads through your Adsense account:

User experience of CleverMedia with Adsense:

How to add / upload an image to a WordPress Blog

ashish — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 19:45:09 +0000

In the previous post, I had described how to add an image to a blog hosted on Google’s Blogger platform. However, there are a number of people who prefer to have their own domain names and also host the domain names on their own (by that, I don’t mean that they own the server, I instead mean that they sign to any of the good commercially available hosting service, and host their blog on that; see this post for a list of the better hosting services).
Wordpress gives a way to directly upload a photo when creating a post, but last I used it, I found it a bit unwieldy, and now I use a somewhat better way to do post. Other posts recommend the use of some free sites that allow posting of images, me, I use Google for this purpose. Let me review the steps from the previous post with a few modifications, and you will understand how do this:

—-Copied from the previous post from this point——
Let me take an example, consider the case of a photoblog such as http://snapsfun.blogspot.com/ (a collection of unedited photos with some description and a photography tip that is related to the photo).
Now I want to add a new photo to the blog in the form of an new post. So what should I do next ?
1. I find the location of the photo (either on my local machine or on a URL located somewhere on the web)
2. I go to create a new post, and there click on the photo button

3. Clicking the button launches a new screen where I can either select the location of the photo or enter a URL for the photo (in case the photo is available elsewhere on the internet)

When the upload is in progress, and not yet completed

The upload is complete

4. Once this dialog comes, click on ‘Done’ and go back to your post. The image will have been uploaded and will be at the top position of the post. Add some ‘Alt’ text to the image (for better search purposes), and move the image to the desired location. Congrats, you are all set.
5. This image is also available at the following location (also owned by Google): http://picasaweb.google.com; login in with the same user ID and password that you use to log onto Blogger.

———-copying ends——-

This was applicable if you were doing a post to Blogger. But you are using WordPress, so how do you do this ? Well, the key is, once the image is added to a Blogger post, it automatically gets added to Picasaweb, and is available for you to use elsewhere. So, you need to do something very simple. Create a Google account by going to Blogger.com and creating a new account with a blog. This will be your shell for the purpose of image hosting. Next, there are 2 ways to proceed:

1. Either you can get the location of the image from your picasaweb account (after step 5), and directly use the Image URL from there
OR,
2. You can copy the entire Image code (from the HTML tab of the Blogger post window) just before step 5, and add this code to your WordPress post. It will fetch the required image from Picasaweb, and do the job for you.

How to add an image to a blog on Blogger ?

ashish — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 19:45:41 +0000

Adding an appropriate image to a blog can make a lot of different to the contents of a blog. There is an old saying, ‘A picture can speak a thousand words’, and it is literally true in the world of blogs. Think of the many cases:
- If you are trying to setup a photoblog on Blogger makes it necessary that you know how to upload a photo to Blogger
- You have a general blog about your travels; being able to add photos of the different locations makes the blog content seem richer
- You have a blog about some technical matter, then being able to add a flow digram or a chart or some other image is essential
- There are many other cases where you would need to add a photo to the blog, so let’s get started with the process
Google’s Blogger service has made it extremely easy to add a photo to your photo. The ability to do is right there in the blog itself, in a button that seems to have a small landscape as part of the picture. Let me take an example, consider the case of a photoblog such as http://snapsfun.blogspot.com/ (a collection of unedited photos with some description and a photography tip that is related to the photo).
Now I want to add a new photo to the blog in the form of an new post. So what should I do next ?
- I find the location of the photo (either on my local machine or on a URL located somewhere on the web)
- I go to create a new post, and there click on the photo button

- Clicking the button launches a new screen where I can either select the location of the photo or enter a URL for the photo (in case the photo is available elsewhere on the internet)

When the upload is in progress, and not yet completed

The upload is complete

Once this dialog comes, click on ‘Done’ and go back to your post. The image will have been uploaded and will be at the top position of the post. Add some ‘Alt’ text to the image (for better search purposes), and move the image to the desired location. Congrats, you are all set.
This image is also available at the following location (also owned by Google): http://picasaweb.google.com; login in with the same user ID and password that you use to log onto Blogger.