Blogger Adsense Template Updated

by imrat on August 10, 2010

Blogger over the last couple of months has released a number of new features for its platform:

  • Pages for static content
  • Advanced template designs
  • Template editor

It was therefore time to update my original Adsense template for blogger. Adsense is still growing, and Blogger is still ranking in the top. So without further delay…

…Here goes

Last Updated: 1 August 2010

This guide assumes you are setting up your blog from scratch. If you have an exiting blog on Blogger that you want to monitise with Adsense, or you want to update from the previous version of this template, skip to Part B & C.

Important: If you are starting a new blog, you need to make sure it has good quality content and is ranked in google before you put your Adsense template on it.
This guide is therefore split into 2 main parts: Part A) Getting your blog setup & ranked, and Part B) Installing your Blogger Adsense Template.


Table of Content


PART A: Get your blog setup & ranked

1. Pick your niche, topic and keywords

These instructions are not intended to be an indepth guide on how to choose your niche or blog topic. I followed the Back To Oldschool Guide on The IM Advantage to build my Adsense blogs and pages, but there are also plenty other guides for free on the web.

2. Create your blog

You need a Google Account to use blogger. If you dont have one go and create a google account.

Login

Go to www.blogspot.com and login with your google account.

Create your new blog.

Enter your blog settings

Blog Title – Something interesting including your target keyword phrase

Blog address: Use your keyword phrase, in the following order:

  • acnecures.blogspot.com
  • acne-cures.blogspot.com
  • acnecuresblog.com (replace blog with anything you like: news, info, reviews, etc)
  • acne-cures-blog.com (replace blog with anything you like: news, info, reviews, etc)

Use the “Check Availability” link to make sure the address is available.

Enter the capcha

Continue to the next screen

Select the Simple template and click Continue, followed by start blogging

3. Setup your static pages

Google expects a couple of key pages to be included on your blog:
  • Contact me
  • Terms & conditions
  • Privacy policy
To create these, use the Blogger new Pages feature.
Click on the “Edit Pages” link and create your first new page.

Contact Me

Enter your page title: Contact Me

I suggest you include some introductory text before adding your contact me form.

The easiest way to add your form, and capturing email addresses for future use (* lists *), is to embed a Google Form using google docs.

If you’ve already got a form setup for another blog, just embed that one.

If not, just go over to Google Docs, and create a new form. Here is a good guide on creating forms with Google Docs.

Setup your form based on the data you want to capture and get the embed code.

In your Blogger page, go to Edit HTML and paste the embed code.

Before you publish your page, set your post options:

Publish the page. When you publish your first page you will be asked where you want to include the Pages gadget.

Choose Blog tabs, and click the Save and Publish button.

View the page to make sure you are happy. Make further changes if needed.

Dont worry about the look and feel of the overal blog as this will change when you get to Phase B and implement the Blogger Adsense template.

Privacy Policy

Create another page, this time for your privacy policy. Use this site to generate your privacy policy which is compliant with adsense.

Before you publish the page set the post options. Use the same post options as when you did the contact me page.

Terms and Conditions

There are loads of options for this online, just search Google for them. The one I use is from the UK Government’s Business Link site. You can also use this for things like your Privacy Policy, but I prefer the one linked to above.

4. Configure your blog settings

Before starting to post your blog posts, there are a couple of configuration options for your blog that you need to update.

Go to the settings tab and update the settings below:

Basic

Title Just check you are happy with the title you entered under step 2. Its important your title includes your main keyword.
Description This will be be included on the template under the title. It will help your rankings if this includes either your main keyword or a couple of related terms.

At the moment the Adsense template does not include this description as the description meta tag (dont worry if you dont know what this is). I might change this in future versions.
Add your blog to our listings? Yes
Let search engines find your blog? Yes
Show Quick Editing on your Blog? Optional – I have it set to Yes
Show Email Post links? Optional – I have it set to No
Adult Content? Whatever is applicable to your Niche.
Gloabl Settings Whatever is appropriate to your blog

Make sure you press “Save Settings” before moving on to the next section.

Publishing

No need to change anything here at the moment, unless you want to change your domain or point your blog to your own domain.

Formatting

Most of the settings on this section can be set to your own preferences. Make sure the following are set in the way I outline:

Show at most 4 posts
Show title field Yes
Enable float alignment Yes

Comments

Set as per your own preferences.

Archiving

Set frequency to No Archive.

Site feed

Again – choose as per your own preferences. I publish my full site feeds to RSS.

Email & Mobile

Set as per your own preferences. I dont use this at the moment so leave it per the default settings.

OpenID

Set as per your own preferences. I dont use this at the moment so leave it per the default settings.

Permissions

The default settings are the ones you want for the Blog Readers section. But just in case you accidentally changed things, make sure that anybody can read your blog.


5. Find your authority site

Authority & trust are important and increasingly tests indicate it might be a factor used in Ranking sites. Therefore make sure that your sites link out to relevant authority sites. How to find one?

Take your target keyword and search for it in Google. Look at the top results, and see if you can spot a Wikipedia listing, or .edu or .org website. If there isnt one, move a “level up” to your main keyword.

“Whats a level up?”….A level up is “Acne” if your target keyword is “Acne Cures”.

If your still out of luck, just look on Wikipedia for a relevant page to your topic and use that one.

Make sure that in each of the posts you write about below, you include 1 authority link.


6. Post your 4 articles

Write (or outsource) your 4 articles. 2 for your main keyword, and 2 for your target keyword.

Then post them on your blogger blog.

As per Steve & Tim’s template and Adsense Guide in The IM Advantage, if you dont use a blog title then it wont show a post heading on the home page. Myself, I do use blog titles because it improves usability and it also helps with ranking your sites.

I suggest you experiment whether with or without title works best. Make sure related keywords are included in your page title if you do, and keep it to 70 characters. For example:

Herbal Acne Cures

Feel free to include images in your post.

7. Getting indexed & ranked

This guide does not focus indepth on how to get your blog to rank. However, most guides that do seem to broadly use the same techniques. In summary:
1) make sure your onsite optimization is as good as it can be
2) get your site indexed
3) do your offsite optimization

Onsite optimization

Make sure your main keyword is included where possible as exact match in your domain. Also use your keyword in your page title and description.
Focus the body of your blog posts on readability first, and remember that reading online is different then reading a book.
Keep paragraphs short.
Keep language simple
Use headings to breakup your post (wrap them in <h4>….</h4> tags1)
Use bullets to allow scanning of certain sections

Once you have your post written, keyword optimize it by:

  • including your target keyword and some related keywords throughout your document, but only a couple of times. Dont overdo it.
  • include your target keyword in section headings across your posts
  • link out to 1 authority site in the body of your post (see step 5 above), but only once.

Is your site indexed?

Before you can start to rank in the search engines, you need to get your site indexed. Because google doesnt notify you when it ranks your site, I setup a little trick so that Google does notify you:
Go to Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts), and setup an alert.
As the search term include “site:” (without the “) followed by your domain name.

Search engine rankings

Instead of creating a bunch of social bookmarks (delicious, digg, stumbleupon) to your blog to get it indexed, I use a technique that is slightly different.
It works by making sure that your site is crawled by the search engine spider via a secondary link.
Follow the steps in this ebook and you should see your sites rank after a couple of days in low competition niches.

Here are some other good tips from ProBlogger: 5 Ways to Get Your Blog Indexed by Google in 24 Hours

Important: Don’t move on to offsite optimization and extensive linkbuilding until your site is indexed!

Offsite optimization

This is all about getting backlinks and there are so many ways to do this that I am not covering them here. Make sure your dont over optimize the anchor text2 of the backlinks.

The main approaches I use to create backlinks:

  • Directory sites
  • Forums
  • Setup squidoo lenses and hub pages
  • Guest posts
  • Outsourcing

Aim to get to 10 visitors a day before you move on to the next step.I suggest you continue building links, and maybe once a week writing a new high quality article.

*** Warning ***
If you go ahead and implement adsense too early, before your site is indexed and ranked, it could result in your site getting flagged by Google. This could make it much harder to get your site to move up the Ranks!

PART B: Installing the Adsense Template

Are you sure you are indexed and getting 10 visitors a day? Dont apply this to your main blog until you do. Feel free to test this on a temporary blog.

1. Download template

Download the template to your harddrive. Some browsers open up XML files (the file format of the template), so I have zipped the file.

Once you have downloaded the file to your harddisk you need to unzip it. If you dont know how to do this, there are plenty of guides online. Just google ‘How to unzip a file’.
Previous versions of Blogger and this template required you to download images for the backgrounds and the posts, but this is no longer needed. I have dropped the background image.

2. Install the template

Go back to your blog dashboard and click the Design link for the blog where you want to implement the Adsense template.

Then go to the Edit HTML page and upload the template file you just downloaded and unzipped. You do this by selecting the template file using the Choose File button followed by the Upload button.

You are likely to get a warning after you have pressed Upload. This is because the Simple template includes a number of widgets that this new template does not use. You can keep the data if you really want, but I recommend you choose the delete widgets option.

If all has gone well, you will see the following confirmation message:
Sometimes you get an error message about incorrect XML, something like the error below. This is either because you did not unzip the template file, or you accidently edited the file or corrupted it during the download.

If this happens, just start over with Part B, make sure you unzip and dont edit the template before uploading.

Viewing your new blog template

Go to view your blog and confirm that the template has been applied. It should look something like this (without the red borders and text):

Updating the homepage intro text

The template includes a big square with gray background on the home page. This is there to include some introductory text about your site. For example, you can include in here an image of yourself, and talk briefly about who you are and why you created the site.
Make sure this is relevant to the niche / market you are targetting. So if you are going after weight loss, talk about why your interested in weight loss, that you started this blog to share with others the tips that work for you.

To edit this text, go to the Dashboard, and click the design link.
This will take you to a screen showing the different widgets/badgets embedded in the template. Click on the edit link for the one titled “Intro Text”.
A window like the one on the left will pop open and enable you to add text.
If you want to include an image, for example a photo of yourself, you will need to do this in html using the edit html tab.
I suggest you make the font 14pt so its larger than the font of the main blog posts.

3. Enable Adsense

Its time to setup your adsense ads now. Again, I will assume you know how to use the Adsense features to get the embed code for your ads.

Getting an adsense account

In case you dont have an adsense account yet, make sure you develop your blog first. You need to request the account for a site that has at least 20 or so pages, meets the quality criteria for websites, as well as a regular flow of visitors.

You can apply direct with google, or through blogger. If you are struggling to get approved, follow the tips in these guides:
http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=42534
http://www.squidoo.com/get-approved-for-google-adsense
http://www.tricksdaddy.com/2010/05/100-working-trick-to-get-your-adsense-account-approval.html

http://hubpages.com/hub/adsense_approval_tips

Linking blogger with adsense

If your blogger account is not yet linked to your adsense account, then also choose “Switch Internet Account” and make sure you are linked to the correct account.

You will need to fill out a number of details from your Adsense account to enable the two accounts to be linked.

Once you have submitted this, you will get an email from Adsense on the email account used to register for the account. The subject will be something like: “Google AdSense Access Verification for blogger.com“.
Follow the instruction in that email to link your Adsense account and your blogger account.
Once you have done this, go back to the monitization tab in Blogger, and click on the Customize/Add ads. Set the confirmation to ‘Dont add new ads’ like the following screenshot shows.

4. Setting up Adsense

Here are the dimensions for each ad position in the template:

Sidebar: 2 x Skyscraper 120×600 px
Homepage Main Ad: Big square 336×280 px
Homepage Link units: 3 x Link Unit 180x90px

Go back to your dashboard, and click the Design link. This will take you to the Add and Arrange Page Elements page.

There are 6 adsense ad units on this page that can be added in – 3 link units and 3 ad units. If you are not seeing all of them, re-upload the template after you have enabled Adsense on your blog.

For each ad unit, click the edit link, and choose the correct ad format and colors.

Select the relevant Format. For the units in block 1 above use the big square ad, lblock 2 are the 180 x 90, link units and in 3 are the sky scrapers.

I prefer to allow both text and image ads to appear on my blogs, but this is really up to your personal choice.
Finally set the colors. Keep the title close to dark blue, text and url to black, borders and background set to white.
I also add a relevant picture between the two ad units in the left sidebar, but be careful with making this too obivously a picture that focuses attention on the ads. For example putting an arrow that points to the ad unit would not be in line with the Adsense policy.

Additional tips

  • Make sure you use the correct ad sizes
  • For the colour scheme, use the default Google color scheme but set the border to white, and the display URL to black
  • If you look carefully you will notice that the body text of the template is set to dark grey (#222). Based on tests where I have done this and had the main ad text pure black (#000) increased CTR.
  • Check your allowed sites setting in the Adsense Setup area. Make sure its set to Any site, or include the URL of your blog


4. Customizing the Theme

Blogger now comes with a great Theme editor build in. Depending on the template your using, you can use this to change a number of design elements like colors, fonts, and layout.


TO FOLLOW

5. Improve your rankings

Continue to build backlinks, making sure you mix and match the anchor text between your main keyword, target keyword, web address, and related keywords.

Also make sure you create some backlinks to your main post pages, and your contact us page. Again, make sure that each page that is linking to your site is indexed by Google.
Once your indexed and ranking, also make sure you continue to post articles. One a week is normally fine.
Promote your blog on twitter, facebook and other social sites as well. In particular ask people to comment.

PART C: Updating from previous versions
This will follow

notes

1 The standard blogger templates use H1 for your site title and H3 for the article heading. Therefore for now use H4 to break up your posts in sections. In the future I might update the template to ensure that it uses the best compination of H1,H2,H3 tags for ranking your site.

2 The text used in a link that you click on, usually underlined and blue.

  • Pingback: Blogger Adsense Template Updated | Internet Marketing Rat | Adsense Trick

  • joana

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  • http://pinoy-quickbooks.blogspot.com/ Pinoy-QuickBooks

    you made my day! Thank you for giving a detailed instruction on how to create blog. Keep it up!

  • http://imrat.com imrat

    Thanks. Glad it helped, although I would recommend to go for some of the simpler tutorials if all your after is a blog. This is more targeted at building a specific adsense blog on blogger.

  • Feastfree01

    a very interesting topics indeed
    am having a question though
    will i be in any trouble creating an army of google accounts?
    what the limit per person does goolge allowed for a single account anyway?
    if i’m not mistaken, every registration required mobile verification which limited to 3 per number (correct me if i’m wrong)

  • http://imrat.com imrat

    I dont know what the limit is on the number of blogs you can create with 1 blogger account, but I have not run into any limits. I would not create multiple adsense accounts – 1 is fine and you can use that on every blog you create.

  • Feastfree01

    sorry if my question is a bit hard to understand. what i meant to ask is pertaining to how many google accounts can a person create?
    p/s: from a blog i read, some say in an account we could create up to 100 blogs and yes i know we should only create 1 adsense account

  • http://imrat.com imrat
  • copyright

    Wonderful blog & good post.Its really helpful for me, awaiting for more new post. Keep Blogging!
     

  • copyright

    Wonderful blog & good post.Its really helpful for me, awaiting for more new post. Keep Blogging!
     

  • jon

    Wonderful blog and is very informative….
    Thank you  for sharing such text……..
     

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