OK, eventually I'll want to make money from my blog, so I'm going to start right away and add advertisements to my blog. I use Google Adsense, mostly because it's a breeze to set up, and it seems to produce relevant ads that result in a decent click-through rate. As you can see, this Wordpress template has built-in dummy ads that represent optimized placements for Google Adsense. This will make it easy for me to install the ad code. Here's a step-by-step walkthrough of adding Adsense to your blog.
First, go to google.com/adsense. If you don't have an Adsense account yet, hit "Click here to apply button" and follow the instructions to set up an account. Once you've done that, log in to your account and click the "Adsense Setup" tab, see picture.

Now, hit "Adsense for content". On the next page, you'll have the "Ad unit" preselected, so just hit "continue". I recommend you keep the selection as text and image ads so Adsense will be able to insert relevant image ads on your site for variety.

Now we get to the meat of the adsense setup wizard. On this page I will select the attributes and design of the ads that will appear on my blog. I'll start by building a 250×250 pixel ad for the top of the sidebar on the right. Look at the picture below. I chose 250×250 square, and in the next menu I chose the colors as seen. I have a pre-made palette for my blog called Wordpress blue n white, so I just chose that and the color codes are automatically selected. I recommend that you go to the "Edit palettes" feature and make a similar palette for yourself using the color hex codes below (the #FFFFFF etc…). This will give you a nice blending ad color design. Next time you create an ad, you'll just select your pre-made palette.

As you can see in the above image, I created a "Custom channel" for my ad. This is important and you should make it a habit to always create a custom channel for each individual ad. This is the secret to succesful Adsense blogging. I will be able to follow the performance of each ad individually using these channels. I just clicked "Add new channel" and gave my channel a name that clearly describes the ad placement.

Finally, I chose what to display when occasionally the Adsense program does not find any suitable ads for a certain blog page. I picked the public service ads, so the ad space will be put to use for the greater good.

We're almost done here - just click "continue". We will be taken to the adsense code page. The code is ready to be copy-pasted to our blog template - more on that in the next post!