We received our first Adsense Cheque, and yes it felt great and we want to share the little we learnt on maximizing your earnings with adsense.

We made more than half the amount required for a payment to be generated (which is US $100), when we had the 336 x 280 (Large Rectangle) under the post title. Although we were very thrilled with the performance of this advertisement, it does get a little inconvenient for the reader, who sees an advertisement rather than any post content as soon as they get to the blog.

So keeping in mind that we want you to have a good time here we then changed the size of the google advertisement to a 200 x 200 (Small Square) and aligned it to the left hand side.

The income dropped by 30%, to cover this gap we introduced text ads at the bottom of the page, just under our resources section on the posts.

Adsense Optimization Tips

Some of the tips that helped us are mentioned below,

Matching the ad colors with the blog colors helped us a lot.

Marking content for the adsense bot to provide relevant ads for.

Inserting the ad in the post content.

Changing the link color to blue, it seems people are sub consiously used to clicking on blue links.

Google's own Adsense Optimizations Tips

You can also check Problogger's guide, adsense tips for bloggers.



How to Insert Adsense in Blogger Posts?

This really took me a while to figure this one out. Whenever you paste your google adsense script directly into the edit html section of blogger you get a template error such as, Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Please make sure all XML elements are closed properly.

You need to convert your Google Adsense code to XML for that, Blog Crowds has a lovely XML parser tool that allows you to convert your Adsense code to XML. Once converted you can follow the optimization tips to place the ads in your post content.