Since the beautiful KarmaCake has now changed the template for the karmacake blog, it was time that Google AdSense was utilized as a means to generate some income.

Being that I'm the nerdier of the two of us, it was my responsibility to get this bitch into action.

Luckily after a bit of tweaking and a few bad words, AdSense is showing up nicely both in our blog post sections and our side bar

There are a ton of tutorials on Blogger / AdSense on how to get yourself an AdSense account and getting it associated with your Blogger account. Simply click on the Monetize tab in your Blogger dashboard and you can find all the information you need.

To get ads to appear in both your blog post section and the sidebar of your template (if it supports it), simply go into the Layout section of your dashboard and add the AdSense gadget to your widget area. From there you can select which type of ad to show, how it should be styled, etc. This will allow you to add ads to the sidebar component of your template.

To get ads to appear between posts, simply go into Layout --> Page Elements --> Blog Posts --> Edit and you are presented with a window allowing you to select if you want ads to appear, what they should look like and how frequently they should appear.

I ran into a MAJOR bit of annoyance when trying to set this up because I forgot that Google only allows you to have 3 ads on a page at any given time.

Previously, my settings were configured to display 5 posts a page, with ads appearing every 2 posts. This meant that I had 3 post ads showing up but my sidebar ads weren't! By simply changing the post ad frequency to every 3 posts, I now have 2 post ads, and 1 sidebar ad.

Anyway, problems are solved.

Next step is to tweak it to actually show relevant content!

Stay tuned!