17 May, 2004 1:59 PM
I feel a little strange writing this post but do so after the encouragement of a couple of fellow bloggers.
After a recent post about some of my concerns and questions about my future a number of people have recently asked how they can support my work with Livingroom in creative ways. One suggestion that was made to me was that a fellow blogger kindly wanted to run some ads on their site on our behalf with the earnings from it going towards our work.
After a lot of thinking I've decided to enable a way of doing this for those of you that wish to support us in this way....
Many of you will know that we do run small text ads on this site, whilst they don't earn a fortune, their earnings do add up over time and help us with our work.
For those who have blogs or other websites that would like to support our work through running ads we now have a vehicle in place to do so using Adsense.
Before I go on, please don't feel any pressure to participate, its purely for those who feel its something that they really want to do.
Here is the process that you would follow:
1. Let me know you'd like to help out by sending me an email from our Contact Page.
2. We will then talk about the size and style of ad you want to place. Adsense have quite a few options ranging from very small ads to larger banner ones like the one towards the top of this page and skyscraper ads (like the ones on the right hand side of this page). They can be customized to suit the design of your site so as not to dominate it. For a samples of sizes of ads go here.
3. Once we've talked about size and colors I will provide you with some code to add to your blog/site. The positioning is up to you.
4. The rest is handled by the Adsense system. You don't have to do anything after that except for to remove it when you feel the time is right. Ads will be served to your pages that relate to the content that you're writing about. ie if you write about blogging, ads about blogging will come up. If you write about church, ads about church will come up. We can block ads that you don't like if that is an issue.
There are a few conditions and prerequisites that you also need to consider:
- firstly only blogs or sites that do not run these ads (or similar ones to it) are eligible. This means that if you have a free blogger blog with similar ads at the top you're not able to help out. Sorry...thanks but sorry.
- secondly you're not allowed to promote the ads to your readers. If Adsense see any evidence of unnatural clicking on ads they shut down my account. That includes anyone repeatedly clicking - so its best just to ignore them once they are up and let them do their job. This is really important.
- thirdly you can only put one ad on each page. Some formats have numerous ads in them, but only one set of ads is allowed per page.
I think that that is all. Once again, this is not something I'm going to twist anyone's arm on. If it suits you and you feel you'd like to support then I'll be eternally grateful, but if its not then that is totally fine.
