Adsense on its way…
I recieved the adsense approval letter today, along with instructions on how to set this up.
First, I was instructed to login to the site, read and agree to the EULA. Which was not too long. Some of it was kind of particular, so I thought it best to pay attention. If you click your own ads, or have some kind of device hit up your ads, you can actually owe google for the misrepresentation(cheating) the clicks.
Then, to my surprise I was required to fill out a W9 tax form. As I live in the state of WI, I am required to report any income on my taxes. This was actually quite easy to do since they have the form directly in the site. It was easy to fill out and sign. Not to mention convenient that it was at the ready.
The next bit of information they required, was where to send the payment. Again, another form to fill out. There were 3 options:
-
The first was a mailing address.
The second was an express mailing option. This came with a fee of course.
The last option was a Beta version of electronic funds transfer.
I chose the standard mailing option.
Next, I had to get the code to enter in my pages. Whats really quite cool, is that they have a ‘wizard’ to help you out with this. The wizard included a lot of helps and pictures (yay! visual aids!). Some of the things included were add sizes and layouts, and custom defined colors.
After you have walked through the wizard it spits out some code for you to copy and paste into your page.
Being new to Wordpress, I had no idea where to put this. But having some php experience, I pressed on. After a few google searches I discovered I needed to drill down into the theme I was using to find the proper page to put the code in. After trial and error, I found the sidebar page to put the code in. It was pretty simple to paste it in, and cobble up some css to get it centered etc.
Finally, because my site is new and hasn’t been spidered yet, the first few ads were PSA’s. The adsense welcome email did include a link to manually enter my url to their engine, and I did so. After I refreshed a few times, the googley algorithm found the word(s) “blog” on my page, and linked a few blog adds in there. I’m thinking as I blog-on, and the site gets spidered, it will fill with more relative ads.
On a side note: I did find a firefox extension for adsense that displays your earnings and hits in the status bar. Its kind of cool, and I’m expectant to see the first hit(s) soon, I hope.