Wordpreneur.com

You may have noticed that the AdSense advertising that usually appears in the middle of these Wordpreneur posts has changed in appearance a tad. Thank my friend William Bontrager for a recent comment he made here on Wordpreneur (more on discovering really useful tips in blog comments).

What you may not have noticed, however, is that the AdSense formatting has changed throughout the blog, in all the posts.

How’d I do that so quickly?

Easy, I use a WordPress plugin (which are programs, usually 3rd party, that provide a core application like WordPress with additional functionality not originally built into the app) designed specifically to make implementing Google AdSense advertising on your WordPress-based blog a lot easier and more manageable.

Even if you don’t use WordPress for your blog(s), quickly read through this… you should be able to find a similar tool that does the same thing for your blogging platform.

Interestingly enough, there are in fact quite a number of different “AdSense-related” plugins available for WordPress, most of them free. I’ve tested more than just a few of them over the couple of years I’ve been using WordPress, and I’ve settled on this:

• AdSense-Deluxe by Acme Technologies

What it does: It lets me maintain a “database” of sorts of the various snippets of JavaScript code that can be inserted into a blog page to display AdSense advertising. Each snippet of code is uniquely identified by what I call an anchor name. To display that ad in a post, you simply insert an HTML comment with the uniquely formatted anchor name. The plugin will automatically insert the corresponding JavaScript stored in its database wherever it sees the anchor name in your post.

That’s it! Besides the fact that you don’t have to keep pasting a whole bunch of AdSense code every time you create a post (you just insert the HTML comment with the appropriate anchor name), you’ve probably realized by now that to make sweeping, global changes to any particular AdSense advertisement, you’ll just need to make the change in the plugin’s database and the appropriate anchor name record. Any post that has that anchor name will then display the newly formatted ad!

Look at this post. There are actually two (2) AdSense anchors embedded in it, which I place manually on every post:

• one near the top right below the first paragraph or two
• and another at the bottom of the post, which is horizontally formatted as of this writing

Each is a separate record in the plugin’s database. If I need to make code or formatting changes to either or both, I can do so at will! In fact, right before I wrote this, I changed the formatting of the top anchor, keeping the bottom as it was. Very easy to do with this absolutely free plugin (the programmer does request a donation if you like the program, but that’s completely up to you).

A must-have, in my opinion…

…especially when you realize that I use it for a bit more than it claims to do! More on that coming soon…

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