So, you got your WordPress blog started and a few articles going as well.  What is the point of putting content out there without monetization?  You should add some ads in there to pay for your bills.  In this article I will cover the steps to follow for monetizing your WordPress blog.  As a pre-requisite I am assuming that you have gotten your website up and running with WordPress.  If you are unsure how to go about setting up a WordPress blog and need help, please leave comments below and I will add an article on that topic.

First step towards monetization is to get an AdSense account setup with Google.  It is pretty simple really.  Just head over to www.adsense.com.  If you already have a gmail account, you just need to provide some basic information to set this up.  Once you have the AdSense account, you can setup your ads.

When you are ready to create your ads, there are multiple options to choose from.  We have an Auto Ads option available now.  I prefer not to use this option as I like to control the placement of ads on my page.  As you may notice, my blog is structured with a header, footer, main article content and a sidebar on the right.  In this article, we’ll look at placing an ad in the body of the article.  We’ll place another ad in between the end of the article and the comments.  We’ll also place another ad in the sidebar on the right side of the blog and a couple of ads in the footer area.  If your blog is structured differently, your setup might vary slightly, but the general concept is the same.

After logging into AdSense, in the left navigation click on My ads -> Choose Ad units -> In the right content area, in the top navigation choose “New ad unit”.  For my purpose, I want to create an In-Article ad unit.  This also allows me to customize Font settings, background to match the body of the articles I will be blogging.  Give it a name and copy the code.

Placement of In-article ad units:

I generally place ads only in those articles that are longer than 5 paragraphs.  While creating the blog, we just need to embed the ad unit code in between the paragraphs to do this.  That was easy.  Next we need to place an ad between the end of the article and the comments section.  In order to do this, we go to the control panel of the WordPress blog.  In the left nav, Choose Appearance -> Editor.  Some WordPress versions might give you a warning that you are editing the template.  Ignore this.  However, before you start editing, take a back up of whatever page you decide to edit.  We are interested in placing an ad between the body of the article and the comments section.  For doing this, generally the update is in “single.php”.  Spot “single.php” under single post and start editing.  As I said earlier, take a backup of this content so that you don’t mess up the site.  Look for a php tag that is printing comments.  In general it looks like below:

Or like below:

Right before this start tag, embed your ad unit code. Click save. Load up the site in another incognito browser and refresh the page to test if your changes reflect. You should see the ad content in the body and in the section preceding the comments at this time.

Next, we want to insert ads into the footer and the sidebar. For the sidebar, my preference is to use the sky scraper ad unit text/image 300×600 ad unit.  For the footer, I choose the leader board text/image ad unit.  Embedding these ads are easier done using text widgets instead of editing the template. To do this, from the left navigation, under Appearance -> choose Widgets. Add a Text widget to Sidebar and to the footer columns as needed. Embed the Ad unit code into the body of the widget and save the settings. Refresh your website to see if the ads are showing up. If you have ad blocker, ensure it is turned off for the ads to show up.

That’s it. You are done. It might take a bit of time for google to sniff the content and start serving up relevant ads. But you have completed the work to monetize your site with google ad sense. Happy blogging.