This weekly feature is for my readers who have their own blogs are are thinking about starting one. This week I have a blogging tip I want to share along with a discussion that relates to making money blogging. Today let’s talk about Google Ads, but first I’ve got a quick tip for bloggers (and a question for you).

Do you want your links to open in a new window?

I was getting really tired of modifying my html for each and every link I posted and thought that there must be a better solution to accomplish the same thing. I know that this is not something that every blogger may want, but I think it makes sense to do it. It helps readers from getting “link lost” and not returning to your blog to read further. If you click on any link in my blog it will open the URL in a new window. The reason it does this is because on every post I write I go to my “Edit Html” tab and type in: target=”_blank” after each and every URL. This can get time-consuming but I still do it because from my own blog browsing experience I like to be able to easily get back to the blog I was reading no matter how many links I’ve clicked on.

Well, Angie at BlogCoach just made my day by linking me to this tip. But guess what? It didn’t work when I tried it. But then I looked at the rest of the html in my template and tried some minor changes and found the html that did work. Here are my notes on the html that worked for me, I wrote them in a text program to link to rather than posting an image of the code, another trick I also learned from Angie. The downside to applying this tip is that every single link on your blog will open in a new window. But maybe there is some html you can apply that overrides this for a specific link? Tell me if you know!

Question: Any tips on getting labels to appear below my posts?
My labels are missing and I don’t know what to do to get them back! When I go to “Layout” and click on “Edit” for my Blog Posts element I see that I can check or uncheck the box that says “Labels” but they never appear beneath my posts. Do you have any tricks for me to try to convince those labels to start appearing?

My Experience with Google Ads
The first advertisements I had on my blog were Google Ads. I still have Google Ads because they are a good source of ad revenue, and because for the most part I feel the ads are resources that may be useful to my readers. Google Ads are everywhere because it’s easy to sign-up for them and they have a wide variety of advertisements you can display.

I’ve experimented with Google image and text ads on my blog, and decided that I like the text ads between my top 3 posts. The reason is that they take up a minimum amount of space, they appear in the area where my readers are reading, and they are less likely to bring-up annoying ads that I would want to block from showing up on my blog.

A big concern among bloggers is having control over what types of Google ads appear on their blog. I encourage you to become familiar with how to block the domain names of sites you do not want to see advertised on your blog. If you have an account you can do this by going to the “AdSense Setup” tab, clicking on “Competitive Ad Filter” and then you can enter up to 200 URLs to block. For the most part, Google shows relevant ads on your blog based on keyword searches. But sometimes Google picks up on keywords that show ads you don’t like, local political ads are a perfect example. If you also use the AdSense for Search you will want to copy your blocked URLs over to that tab as well. If you want to find out how to determine the destination URLs of your ads (without clicking on them because as we all know you never want to click on your own Google ads – you’ll lose your account) then you should read the Competitive Ad Filter guide.

If you want to have a larger degree of control over your Google ads, you can always create a list of permissible sites and only show those ads by going to “Allowed Sites” in the “AdSense Setup” tab. This makes it difficult to show new ads on your blog, but you can keep an eye on other blogs with Google ads and when you see one you like you can add it to your list. This prevents you (or your readers) from every seeing an ad that you don’t want appearing on your blog.

Penny by Penny
Lastly I want to leave you with a reality check. When I said that bloggers make money penny by penny, I was telling the truth. A recent survey on BlogCoach with responses from 96 bloggers showed that less than 40% make more than $10 a month and only 10% make more than $500 a month. If you are curious what bloggers are saying about how much money they make (and how they make it) you’ll want to read more here.

What questions do you have about Google Ads? What tips do you have based on your experience with Google Ads? I am definitely not an expert, but I can share with you what I’ve learned from my experience with them.

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