Monetizing Customization

I switched to Green Marinee weeks ago, but I'm still not quite down with customizations. Today I tweak the template a bit to monetize this blog and integrate Google Adsense. I won't go through all the technical details and how to, its all already documented under hacks and Google Adsense. Basically you need to run the Adsense code through our HTML Parser.

You can see I have a 468px ad running across the top. At first I was going for a square ad floated left of the content for better exposure like at my other blog Blogging2.0. However the square no matter what the size always cause some issues with the design of the blog. I rather have no ads at all rather than ad that 'break' my template. This brings me to another point, for better click through rates its advised to have the ads as much like normal content as possible. Having the link the same color as normal link and background color with no border like normal background are very important.

This ad thing is really demands lots of changes doesn't it? To accommodate the horizontal ad, I had to move my meta information like labels, authors, etc to the body of each post when the coment was. I increased the font size and added a green boarder running across the top to seperate the meta info from the body of each blog entry. Overall I'm pretty pleased with this change as it blend in with Green Marinee's design characteristics.

Finally, I also added a Adsense Referral ink at botom on each page. Don't see it? That's because I only added to the subpages that shows individual post? How did I do that? Well, just wrap whatever you want in subpages inside

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'></b:if>


So, you can see in the May the 4th be with you post that we recommend you to use Google Adsense

That's it for this customization, undoubtedly I will tweak this template a lot more but that's all for now. Good night!