I personally have tried using YPN a few times before and it was waaay behind AdSense for actually making me some money so I’m not sure it’ll be missed much. Interestingly in the email that they sent me to announce the closing, Yahoo even suggested that people using YPN switch to Chitika, which I thought was very interesting. I will admit Chitika is quite good, but the fact that Yahoo stepped out to suggest something shows just how much they hate Google over there.

There aren’t a ton of already optimized for AdSense Blogger themes, but here are a few:

• AdSense Ready Theme – A pretty solid and straightforward AdSense optimized theme.
• Online Business Template – Not my favorite looking design, but its ready for AdSense.
• Money Generator Theme – Again not a huge fan of how this one looks, but its supposedly good for AdSense.

Its also quite easy to setup your own optimized AdSense template. Take this theme, Columnus, for example. Adding skyscaper ads in the center column, a link unit at the bottom of the header and a square or rectangle below each post and you’ve got a template ready to make you a few bucks.

And of course if none of these work for you, just use your current template and click the Monetize tab in Blogger and they’ll help you optimize you template for AdSense.

If you use any of these templates or ideas, swing by again and leave a comment to let me know if the templates work out well or not.

This is the start of a new series on making money by blogging. Today we’ll start with probably the most obvious method for making money from a blog, AdSense.

AdSense is a free service designed by Google that anyone can place on a webpage. AdSense then determines what the topic (or topics) of the webpage are and shows advertisements relevant to those topics. For example, on this blog, The Blogging Fool, the main topic covered is blogging and making money from blogging. So if you look at the ads on the right side of the page most likely some or all of the ads are in regard to blogging and/or making money from blogging. Simple enough.

Get AdSense

So if you don’t already have an AdSense account I strongly suggest that you get one right now. It’s totally free and will help you start to make money from your blog. If you’re interested, click on this button to sign up:

Ok you’ve signed up, now what?

Placing Your Ads

The next step is placing your ads on your website. Google’s heat map is a huge help for this. Based on Google’s research, the heat map shows you exactly what sections of a website tend to be most successful. Of course, every webpage is different so this should only be used as a guideline. In fact, no one knows your webpage as well as you do so take a minute and think of how people’s eyes look at your page and go from there.

One great resource that AdSense also provides is custom channel tracking which will allow you track the performance of each ad unit on your page. Make sure that you use custom channel tracking and check every few weeks or so to see which channels are performing best.

Color Choices For Your Ads

One other choice that you must make when placing AdSense ad units on your page is the color of the text in the ads. There are two schools of thought on how to best do this. One is to make the ads blend into your page so that they fit with the overall theme and appear somewhat as part of the content. The second is to make the ads stand out by using contrasting colors to draw visitors attention.

As you can probably tell from the ads on this page I prefer the former, in which the ads are blended into the page. I think it makes the site more professional and avoids giving people the feeling that all you want to do is make a quick buck.

Well that’s all for now, if you have any further questions on AdSense please drop a comment and I’ll either respond with my own comment or write another post to clarify.

Best of luck with AdSense!