Adding Ads and Sponsor Links to your Blog

By: Joy Laforme Image by: Eric Cahan

There are a lot of great opportunities for bloggers in Ads
and Sponsorships. If you’re making a career out of blogging, it’s important to
know the ins and outs of how to place ads and sponsors links in your blog’s
sidebar, as well as the footer, in between posts, and the leaderboard sections
of your blog.

Ad Network Scripts

An Ad Network will likely give you a line or block, of
JavaScript known as a ‘snippet’ to place somewhere on your blog so that it can
generate the appropriate ad link and image for you. A simple ‘snippet’ looks
something like this:

You’ll likely want to place this JavaScript directly into
your themes source code. If you’re adding it into your sidebar, you can place
the JavaScript directly into the sidebar and widget area. Make sure you know
what size you are enabling, as many standard Ads come in different sizes. Know
the width of your footer, header, content area and sidebar by the pixel number,
to ensure that whatever ad you decide to place on your blog is the appropriate
size. Here is a great reference on Ad sizes and where you can place them,
published by Google
AdSense.

Sidebar Sponsors

Sidebar sponsors are the most common of the typical “sponsor
links”. Whether someone paid you to add their image, or you decided to ad swap
with another blog, this type of sponsor is the easiest to add to your blog.

You can simply add the image and link into your sidebar,
using standard HTML, or you can manage your sponsors by adding a plugin that
helps manage and track clicks for you as well. Recently, someone recommended U-Ads, Ad King Pro, and AdRotate for managing Ads
through WordPress*. If you’re running on a different platform, you can also
sign up for Google AdSense to help
manage your sponsor images, clicks, and impressions.

*Be sure to check with your Web Designer on the
compatibility of these plugins with your current theme.

Check out Joy’s class on the Alt Channel for more secrets to coding!

Search