Many startups and small businesses have adopted the idea of Minimum Viable Product (MVP), a product “that has just those features (and no more) that allows the product to be deployed”. I too have jumped on the MVP bandwagon and have decided to start with Google AdSense as my first money making attempt. While it isn’t a product per se, it still adheres to the idea of starting small and staying lean. And in case you’ve been hiding under a rock: AdSense is “a free program that enables website publishers of all sizes to display relevant Google ads and earn.” While I feel that advertising can be both distracting and in poor taste, I created this site with the intentions of trying anything, so AdSense it is.
So far, AdSense has been easy: just sign up, format your ads, and put Google’s code on your site. It’s painless and low risk, but it’s also very low return. There are many stories like the founder of the dating site plentyoffish.com who was making close to a million dollars a month off of his AdSense ads. I don’t have any delusions of grandeur for AdSense (nor do I have millions of visitors), but if it makes me a few bucks, I won’t turn it down. Still, AdSense revenue can be very fickle and given that Google can change their policies at any time, I’m not counting on AdSense to line my pockets with gold.
Setting up AdSense
Here are the steps I needed to do to setup my ads (your steps may not look exactly like this if you choose different options early in the process).
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- Choosing the type of ad I want. I chose to go with the standard content ad since it is simple and unobtrusive.
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- Selecting my ad unit type. “Ad units” are text and image ads and “link unit” are block of links.
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- Choosing my ad colors and format. Since I was adding the code to the WordPress sidebar, I chose a vertical format. I then matched the hex colors of the ad to the hex colors of my theme. I found the hex colors of my theme by using Firebug (an extension for Firefox).
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- Creating an ad “chanel” to keep track of my ads.
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- Associating the channel to my ad.
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- Naming the ad unit for later reference.
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- Generating my AdSense code.
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- Adding the code to my WordPress sidebar using a text widget. I just dragged the sidebar widget over to my active widgets and copied the google code into the text widget. I left the title empty.
More resources
Here are some more resources I came across while writing this post (your mileage may vary):