How to Hire a Professional Blogger

With more and more companies switching to different mediums to grow their businesses, blogs have become an integral part of promotion strategies and a new and effective way to directly connect with the customers. With the increase in blog becoming an essential part of every business's online marketing strategy, the requirement of professional bloggers has increased significantly. Are you planning to hire a blogger for your company or business blog? Here's a basic guideline to effectively fill the position of a blogger with a person that exactly meets your requirements.

Assessing The Requirements

The requirement may differ significantly depending on the type of blog and the purpose of your blog. A company blog created for the purpose of pulling more traffic and diverting it to the main site may need a full-time blogger compared to a tech blog already having a writing team solely made for the purpose of making money out of it. For the latter case, a part-time blogger can also do the job.

Posting Frequency - A lot matters on the number of times your blog will be updated with fresh content. A non-profit organization may require a posting of 1 or 2 times a week, while a business blog or a make money blog may be updated 5 times a week or even several times a day. Depending on the frequency you may want a full or part time blogger.

Extent of Involvement - The level of involvement you are expecting from the potential candidate also plays a major role in selecting the right person. Are you hiring a blogger only for creating content or are you expecting him to take charge of comment moderation, blog maintenance and social media marketing as well?

What To Look For?

Writing Style - Unarguably the most important thing is the writing capabilities of the blogger. Every blogger has its own unique style of writing. Some like to start with metaphors in opening paragraph summarizing the post in the leading text, while some other may prefer to simply jump on to the point of discussion without building any anticipation. In any case, it must match the style of writing you are expecting. To better assess his writing capabilities you can...

1. Ask for a sample post on the topic related to your blog.
2. Read his existing posts and various guest posts done on different blogs to get a fair idea about his writing capabilities.

Consistency - Whether you are aiming for a part timer or a full-time blogger, delivering the content in time is must in any case. It will be icing on the cake if you can get some references of his previous employers. If his track record suggests that he delivers in time then be sure he is good in most of his duties.

Social Media Participation - If you are expecting him to take charge of blog marketing as well, look for his social media profiles and the ask for some quantifiable statistics about the success he has achieved in the past through this medium. You must also observe how he has dealt with comments on different posts and his level of engagement with the readers.

Ability to Work in Team - If you have a multi-author blog, you must give preference to a blogger who has previous experience of working in such kind of environment. It will help him in quickly adapting to the situation and results will be fast and more promising. However, if the candidate has exceptional skills you can hire a fresher as well.

Hiring Process

Although every one has its own recruitment policy, I think this approach works well in most cases. Once you have decided to hire a candidate, make sure you create a draft of clauses tabulating all the terms and conditions. In most cases, exchange of faxed signed document containing all the T&C works fine. First let the candidate work on your blog for 3 to 4 weeks and pay him on per-post or per-week basis. Once you are satisfied with the performance, go ahead with signing the agreement.

Payment Criteria - In most cases paying on per-post basis is the most popular and comfortable payment scheme for both the parties. Short posts (300-400 words) are paid comparatively less than a long post (800+ words).

Performance Incentives - Generally, employers agree to reward on performance. It should be made very clear in the agreement how much a blogger would be paid in each case. For example, you may agree to pay $1 for each new subscriber.

Termination Clauses - Make sure you clearly mention the conditions under which the agreement may stand null and void. For example, if the content is already published somewhere else it may lead to termination of agreement without any prior notice.

Monitor, Encourage and Reward

And last but not the least is tracking the progress and rewarding on performance. Whether it's increase in traffic or more engagement of customers and readers or increase in sign ups of new subscribers. All these results deserve to be rewarded in terms of money as per the signed agreement. If you have enough budgets and your blog is getting heavy traffic, it is highly advisable to keep a back up as a trainee blogger in case the current blogger leaves on short notice.

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How To Reward Your Blog Commentators

Your readers are the best marketing tools to promote and spread the word about your blog. As your blog readership grows, so does the number of channels to disseminate your blog content across the web. The most active commentators on your blog acts as your blog marketing army bringing more and more visitors through their references. How to acknowledge their contribution in promoting and growing your blog?

Invite for Guest Post - One of the best ways to encourage and reward your blog commentators is to invite them to guest blog. This not only gives them an opportunity to present themselves to new audience but also passes some link juice. You can randomly select the top commentators for invites.

Link back To Their Content - Yet another way to show a gesture of appreciation for their contribution. You can link to best and relevant content of your most active commentators. While linking back, make sure you do not overdo it.

Build Posts On Their Comments (Highlight Them) - Generally readers ask lots of questions via comments. You can pick the best one and build your post on it. While writing such kind of post, quote their comment and link back to their blog. This will encourage more and more visitors to leave meaningful and regular comments on your blog.

Show Top Commentators In Sidebar - This is a very common strategy to highlight regular and most active commentators on any blog. Top commentators widget for Wordpress and similar plugin for Blogger makes it very easy to display the list of most active commentators. You can optionally do-follow the links in this list to further encourage more comments from existing and new readers.

Thanks Personally - If you have enough time in your hands you can even mail the most engaging and best commentators. A personal mail from you will make them feel special whose contribution is well noticed by you. You can also ask them if they want any kind of help from you.

Send A Free Gift - Freebies are always welcomed by almost everybody. You can send free ebooks, a white paper or a free theme to your top commentators.

Related Reading:

1. How To Handle Negative Comments On Your Blog
2. How To Comment On Blogs: An Introduction

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Saturated Niche: Why You Should Brush Aside This Term

A lot has been said about this term and most of the text suggests that you should be extremely careful while selecting a 'Saturated Niche'. Is there anything called a saturated niche or it's just an over hyped term? Let's try to understand this term with a different perspective.

Some even use the term - highly saturated niche. What is highly saturated? A saturated state is either saturated or not saturated. That's it. Let's first see what the word saturated means. According to Dictionary.com, in this context saturated means

- to furnish (a market) with goods to its full purchasing capacity.

In other words, it means demand and supply chain has met its endpoints. When this phenomenon occurs, no wise businessman would like to invest in that market which is already overwhelmed to its full capacity.

Now let's relate this to our much hyped term - saturated niche. It is often said that blogging about blogging (meta-blogging) is a saturated niche. If we go by the definition of the dictionary, it means there are almost nil chances of new players to grow in this niche.

But the reality is completely different. In my experience, there is nothing so called saturated niche. I would like to use the term highly competitive niche in place of saturated niche. A niche can be highly competitive but can never be saturated. Every month thousands and thousands of new blogs come up talking about 'Blogging Tips'. A large percentage of these blogs are abandoned pre-maturely and some never grow beyond a certain level. Still a handful of them cuts the ice and make their own place taking their share of the pie.

So where did the saturation go? How do these handfuls of new players manage to pull traffic and make it big despite of blogging about so called saturated niche? The answer is very simple. They generate unique content and have aggressive marketing strategy. Those thousands of blogs who dies pre-maturely suffer from one of the most common and inherent problems of meta-blogging - 'Repeating the same content already discussed on every corner of the web'. In words of Maki from DoshDosh.

Meta-blogging needs to be parasitic in order to evolve beyond its prison of ideas. It needs to latch onto another conceptual field in order to go beyond the thought circle it currently revolves in.

So, in order to withstand a highly competitive niche, these handfuls of bloggers generate high quality unique content. But again the question arises - If there is saturation in the market, from where does the buyers (visitors) come?

Thanks to never ending growth of Internet users, the raw material (traffic) required to run your blog is growing at constant pace. Today if there are 10 Internet users, tomorrow there will be 12 and day after tomorrow there will be 14 and so on. So we can clearly see that in this case the demand can never dry up.

Now, how does this affect the big fishes on top of the ladder? Well, surprisingly they benefit from this to a great extent. The more competitive quality blogs comes into existence, the more links and references are created to the top blogs. They automatically work as free marketing tools for the big fishes.

So in the end this is the equation.

Highly Competitive Niche -> Never Ending Demand -> Everyone Takes Their Share

Have Your Say

What do you think, in this context a blogging niche can be ever saturated? If yes, how do you see the future of web publishing 50 years from now?

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Why Your Blog Needs A Custom Theme?

A unique blog design plays a big role in popularizing it. Blogging with a standard theme makes it somewhat difficult to compete with established blogs with highly customized themes. You write great content but struggling to retain your visitors? Maybe your standard blog theme is repelling your visitors. Let's try to understand why a custom theme is necessary for every professional blog.

Branding

Every successful business is recognized by its brand. The products are packaged and marketed under a brand name that differentiates the company from its competitors. Same thing applies to blogging. Blog branding is an essential ingredient of every successful blog marketing effort. It gives a unique voice to your blog. An identity that makes it stand apart from the crowd.

Your blog's custom theme with a unique logo, header and layout resembles your brand. The more you will invest in creating a stunning custom theme, more it will be easy to market, promote and develop it as a unique brand.

Extended Features

A custom theme gives you the liberty to add non-standard extended features that are normally not available in a standard theme. For example, if you want to integrate video posts, sliding articles gallery, random posts section on the homepage, a standard theme may not support these features. With custom theme you can choose your desired layout to make the landing pages more sticky and attractive for the visitors.

Speed And Reliability

Normally a custom theme is created from scratch and special attention is paid on creating highly optimized code for better reliability and speed. Today, a large chunk of traffic comes from social media sites. This traffic tends to exhibit high bounce rate and is volatile in nature. If your blog theme is sluggish, you are going to loose most of your traffic from these sources.

A custom theme optimized for speed not only helps in keeping the readers engaged, but also reduces the load on your web server significantly.

Search Engine Optimization

Whenever a standard free theme is created for masses, not much attention is paid on the SEO aspect while coding it. The code of these themes is often bloated that may introduce several complications while running the blog.

On the other hand, a custom theme is crafted to perfection with several in-built search engine friendly features. The classic example is Thesis Theme, which supports several search engine friendly features out-of-the-box. This means your blog will be crawled regularly, there will be no duplicate content and your posts will rank higher in SERP's.

Better Browsing Experience

As I said in the beginning, great content alone does not guarantee that visitors will be glued to your blog. Your blog's theme - it's layout, navigational structure, it's look and feel plays a big role in convincing and retaining the visitors. If a reader enjoys his stay on your blog he will come back more often.

Clean navigation structure, legible fonts and custom typography gives a unique browsing experience to your readers helping in reducing the bounce rate of your blog. With a custom theme you can experiment to choose the best performing combination that gives them most fulfilling experience to your readers.

Have Your Say

Do you think a custom theme is really necessary for any blog? If you have recently switched to a custom theme, what positive effects you have experienced after changing it?

A custom theme need not necessarily have to be a paid theme. You can modify the code of any free theme to customize it to any extent, provided you have the necessary skills to modify the theme of your blog.

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Why Your Adsense Ads Do Not Receive Clicks?

Every Adsense publisher wants to see an inflated cheque in his mail basket every month. Some publishers get high click-through rate (CTR), while some wonder why nobody pays attention to their Adsense ads. Are you experiencing the same problem?

There can be many factors that may keep your visitors away from paying any attention to your Adsense ads. Let's discuss each one of them one by one.

Choosing A Wrong Niche

Sometimes publishers pick a wrong niche that inherently has no scope to perform well with Adsense. If you are writing about your garden, your dog and about your eating habits, how much traffic can you expect in the long run?

Choose a profitable blog niche and rest assured that half of the problem is already resolved. Sometimes choosing a popular niche alone does not solve the problem. Some popular niches have very tech-oriented and web-savvy audience who are familiar with PPC ads. They are simply blind to these advertisements and never click on them. For example, blogs on Internet marketing, SEO and blog tips normally receive knowledgeable crowd who are already familiar with these ads. On the other hand, large percentage of traffic on a weight loss blog is not aware about Adsense ads. The probability of clicks is much higher on a weight loss blog when compared to an Internet marketing blog.

Wrong Placement

Sometimes new publishers fail to place their ads at the best performing areas on their blog. Adsense has provided a heat map for publishers suggesting the best placements for their ads.

The red zone represents the best position for ad placement. This zone lies right in the middle of the page, above the fold just before the main content. The second best zones are highlighted in light brown color and the least profitable zones are highlighted in yellow color. Ads embedded around the main content are known to perform the best. Follow the placement suggestions given in this heat map to increase your CTR significantly.

Crazy Color Schemes

Take a look at the color scheme of a sample ad shown below. This dark color combination is definitely going to put strain on the eyes of most visitors.

Such color schemes normally repel the visitors and results in immediate bounce from the site. The enthusiasm and lack of experience contributes to generation of such color schemes by new Adsense publishers. I did it in my early days and found them damaging instead of giving me any clicks.

The best performing ads are gelled with the color scheme of the blog. Follow these simple guidelines to generate the best color combination for your ads.

1. Keep the ad background color, link color and the text color same as your blog's theme.
2. Use the Adsense latest custom fonts feature to closely resemble the ad unit same as your main content.
3. If you are embedding the ad right next to the main content, remove the border from the ad.

Sometimes, color blindness play a major role in reduced CTR. You can use the powerful palette rotation feature to deal with this situation. Recently, I've written an article about reducing ad blindness through palette rotation.

Not Using Large Ads

In many cases, a publisher uses small size ads that may fail to attract the attention of the visitors. Use large rectangle 336x280, medium rectangle 300x250 and wide skyscraper 160x600 to get the best results.

The combination of right color scheme and large ad size, supported by correct placement according to the heat map shown above, increases the probability of getting more clicks for your ads.

Displaying Less Ads

This is one more reason that may contribute to low CTR on your blog. Adsense allows up to three Adsense for content units, three link units, two search boxes and one Adsense for video unit on a single web page. So you have a total of nine ad units available for a single page of your blog. Having said that, one must keep in mind the negative implications of stuffing all these nine units on tightly packed page with relatively less content.

If your blog template is wide with good portion covered with your main content, you can experiment and choose the best combination (number of ads on a single page) for your blog.

Irrelevant Ads

Adsense ad delivery technology is very sophisticated supported by years of refinement to serve the most relevant ads on your blog. Still some publishers complain about getting irrelevant ads on their blog. What's the reason?

Well, this normally occurs when you try to blog about just anything under the sun. When a blog has no definite topic (no definite niche) and host content on wide number of topics some of which are totally irrelevant from each other, this phenomenon may occur. Narrow down your niche and post consistently about that topic to get the most relevant ads on your blog.

Dull Content

If you are experiencing low CTR, see the bounce rate of your blog. If it's alarmingly high (80% or above) you've found one of the reasons that are contributing to this low click-through rate. One of the primary factors responsible for high bounce rate is low quality content.

If large numbers of your visitors are not staying for long on your blog, the probability of clicks automatically reduces drastically. Write compelling content to give them a reason to stay longer on your blog. The more time they will spend in scanning the content, more will be the probability of getting clicks on your Adsense ads.

Less Organic Traffic

If large portion of your traffic is coming from social media sites or referral sites, you may observe low CTR with high bounce rate. Visitors coming from search engines are more likely to click on ads as they are genuinely looking for something, querying for something.

You cannot expect the increase in percentage of traffic from organic sources in a fortnight. It takes time to build an archive of quality content. As your blog archive will grow, traffic from organic sources will automatically increase bringing the kind of visitors you need.

Have Your Say

Have you ever experienced this phenomenon? If yes, what other steps you took to increase the CTR on your blog?

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8 Tips To Use Twitter More Effectively

Twitter has gained massive popularity giving many established social media services a run for their money. This excellent micro-blogging service is becoming a favorite marketing and business development tool for thousands of organizations and individuals. Are you leveraging the power of twitter to help grow your blog?

Get smart and use this excellent social media marketing platform to give a much needed kick-start to your blog. It's simple, it's fun and it's intuitive. Let's see how to get more out this powerful micro-blogging service to get more eyeballs for your weblog.

Profile Says It All

A twitter profile giving a clear, crisp and unambiguous message gets the most attention of potential followers. Custom twitter background, your real name, a link to your blog and an appealing mini-bio turns any twitter profile into an effective fishnet to get new connections.

Services like twitbacks, freetwitterdesigner and PrettyTweet lets you create free custom twitter backgrounds. While uploading your twitter profile picture, give first preference to your own thumbnail image. The second best choice is your Gravator image. The whole idea is to keep your identity uniform across all the social media networks.

Follow Right People

Your success on twitter largely depends on whom you follow. It's not the quantity but the quality of your twitter network that matters the most. Follow most active, popular big names in your domain and leverage their strong network by interacting with them and by attracting their attention. Swim with a big fish and benefit from their reach.

Use services like MrTweet to get recommendations about whom you should follow to get the maximum benefit from this micro-blogging service.

Track Hot Trends And Join The Bandwagon

One of the keys to get connected with more people on twitter is participating in constructive debates. Use services like Twitscoop, Tweetmeme and Twitterfall to keep yourself updated with the latest happenings and the hot trends on twitter. Pick ongoing conversations and heated debates related to your niche, and take that debate to the next level by sending your constructive tweets. This will create large number of new connections in quick time.

Tweet What You Are Known For

Large number of your followers expects to get specific kind of tweets from you, whether it's your personal tweet or a tweet related to your business/domain. Intelligent tweeting involves cleverly crafted personal and business tweets intermixed with each other to keep your followers asking for more.

Direct Your Twitter Stream To Other Social Media Profiles

This is one of the best methods to leverage your already grown social media profiles. With the advent of various social media mash up technologies, you can easily feed your different social media profiles with your never-ending twitter stream. This will not only keep your other social media accounts active, but will also spread your tweets across different channels giving more eye balls for your twitter conversations.

Don't Be An Owl, Tweet During Peak Time

If you know your audience, then you are also aware about the demographic data associated with them. That means you very well know when they are most active on twitter.

Tweeto'clock is an excellent service that calculates the best time to tweet someone. You can handpick the most popular, active and interesting users in your twitter network and can calculate the best time they are most active on twitter. This will help you to engage with them more easily during their convenient hours.

Understand The Power of Retweets

Initially, Internet marketing experts never saw twitter as a viral marketing platform. As it grew, tweeple realized how a snowball effect is created when people start retweeting some interesting stuff. Once people start picking any tweet, it creates a rippling effect in connected networks spreading the content to massive number of people in very short time. Here are some tips to get your tweets retweeted more often.

1. Keep tweets short.
2. Keep them interesting. Ideally a condensed teaser excerpt with a link.
3. Use best URL shortening services to track performance of your tweets.

4. Embed retweet buttons in your posts available from Tweetmeme.

Don't Be a Bot, Ask And Discuss

In recent months, twam (twitter spam) has increased significantly and most twitter users are aware of it. Try to give your tweets a more human touch by answering questions and discussing heated topics.

Use TwtPoll to conduct short surveys on twitter. This will not only spawn more conversation threads, but will also give you vital data that can be used to craft new posts.

Over To You

I've been using twitter for last one year and found it extremely valuable tool in my arsenal to promote the blog. Do you have a twitter plan to increase your blog readership? Are you getting the desired results or finding twitter a waste of time?

Related Reading:

1. How To Lose Your Twitter Followers
2. MicroBlogging: Twhirl Guide For Beginners

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How To Optimize And Speed Up Your Blog

The content alone does not guarantee success of your blog. Fast browsing experience always plays a major role in retaining the visitors and giving them a reason to come back. Today a significant part of traffic comes from social media sites. These visitors generally exhibit high bounce rate. If our blog is sluggish, they are not going to give us a second chance. Let's see how to improve the load time and speed up our blog.

Optimize images

Pictures are an essential part of any blog. When we talk about image optimization, we generally aim for two things. 1. Reduction in size 2. Preserving the quality.

Reduce the size - by using Photoshop's 'Save for Web...' option. If your image is rich in color having various effects, use the .jpg format, else you can use the .gif format to reduce the size. Guilherme Zühlke O'Connor (Web Design Specialist) shows how we can optimize images for web.

Specify image size in code - to prevent server using extra CPU cycles to know the size of image. Here's an example.

<img src="URL of image" width="100" height="100" alt="Image Description"/>

Specifying image size significantly improves the load time of the web page.

Optimize CSS

Since the emergence of cascading style sheets (CSS), they have become the cornerstone of web development process. Today, almost every CMS use CSS for robust, clean and high performing web site. However, sometimes we may introduce latency in page load time by inadvertently introducing unnecessary or redundant code in CSS files.

Remove white space/compress CSS - to reduce the size of CSS files. You can use various CSS compressing services to strip off all white space and hidden junk characters from the file. Use Clean CSS, which not only remove white space from CSS, but also optimize it by removing unnecessary or redundant code.

Use shorthand CSS - to further reduce the size of your CSS file. The code shown below introduces redundant code.

.section {
width: 160px;
margin-top: 10px;
margin-right: 5px;
margin-bottom: 5px;
margin-left: 15px;
}

Same code can be re-written as:

.section {width:160px; margin: 10px 5px 5px 15px;}

Before you compress your CSS files, keep a backup copy of original file. You may need this more reader-friendly version in future to add/modify the code.

Use External File For Scripts And CSS

Do not fill your HTML files with inline CSS and scripts. Group all scripts/CSS in separate files and include/call them from header as shown below.

<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/theme/style.css" type="text/css" media="screen"/>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/scripts/effects.js"></script>
</head>

This will reduce the file size and redundancy in code speeding up overall load time.

Compress JavaScript - to reduce the size and to optimize the JavaScript code. JavaScript Compressor is an excellent service for compressing your JS scripts.

Append Forward Slash ('/') In Permalinks

While specifying the default permalink structure in your Wordpress dashboard, make sure you append forward slash '/' in the end as shown below.

/%postname%/
/%category%/%postname%/
/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/

Appending the forward slash at the end of URL clearly indicates the server that it is a directory page and no further look-ups are required.

Minimize Database Queries

There are some URL's and fields that rarely or never change during the lifetime of a blog. Instead of fetching them again and again from database, hard code them directly into your theme to speed up the download process. An example is shown below.

/* --- Original Coding --- */
<title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></title>
/* --- Replaced by static HTML --- */
<title>MintBlogger - Blogging Tips And Social Media</title>

Similarly, you can hard code all references to blog title, blog description, theme's CSS file path, comment RSS links and post RSS links. This will ensure reduction in database queries and load on server.

Minimize Requests To External Elements

Try to avoid flooding your sidebars with 3rd party flashy widgets. This will only increase the load time testing the patience of the visitor. Similarly, avoid hosting all your images, scripts and other components on any external web server to reduce the HTTP requests and load time.

Use Speed-Up Plugins

Use Wp Super Cache and PHP Speedy plugins to make your Wordpress install respond quickly even during heavy traffic load. Both plugins are well known to speed up serving of web pages by caching web pages and by reducing the number of HTTP requests.

Analyze And Optimize

Use Pingdom full-page test to analyze the page loading action.

This test mimics page loading in browser and calculates the time taken by each component (including their total size) during the load process. Pingdom test helps in identifying the key elements responsible for slow loading of a web page.

YSlow is another excellent Firefox add-on tightly integrated with Firebug web development tool to analyze the elements of a web page.

Combined with the power of Firebug, YSlow provides vital information about web page components and the reasons why the page is slow. This helps you in identifying the problematic elements.

Have Your Say

What other optimization techniques do you use to speed up your blog? What was your post-optimization experience in terms of traffic behavior and conversion?

Related Reading:

1. 5 Best SEO Tips For Bloggers

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Google Ad Manager: Complete Ad Management Solution For Bloggers

Displaying ads on a blog and keeping track of all the granular data related to those ads are two completely different things. Almost all of us are familiar with a simple process of pasting ad code in our blog template. What about accurate and real-time tracking of impressions and clicks? What about the performance of these ads based on demographic data? Here comes the role of specialized ad management software.

There are several ad management software in the market. I chose Google Ad Manager for several reasons. It is free, uses the same proven ad management technology used by Adsense network and offers tons of options for complete ad inventory management. Here are some of the salient features of Google Ad Manager.

Simple User-friendly interface - helps you get started within few minutes after exploring various sections of the dashboard.

Adsense integration - gives you an option of filling empty slots with Adsense ads and an optional smart pricing feature for maximum revenue.

Speed and reliability - of Google's ad serving technology is proven from years of expertise in this domain. As I mentioned earlier, Google Ad Manager uses exactly the same ad delivery technology used by Adsense network.

Cost savings - are guaranteed, as you don't have to pay for anything. You can directly load all your direct ad banners on Google Ad Manager servers giving you significant bandwidth savings.

If you are accepting direct ads on your blog that are blended with ads from different advertisement networks, managing them can be a real headache. Google Ad Manager (GAM) gives you complete control of your ad inventory with maximum possible automation giving you peace of mind. Let's see how to manage our ads through GAM, which includes creating ad, tracking and reporting.

Creating An Ad

To demonstrate an example, let's create an ad with single slot (125x125) containing ads from two different advertisers shown on round robin basis (rotating banners). Let's assume we are going to display this 125x125 rotating banner ad on left sidebar.

Create New Ad Slot

1. We will start by creating a new Ad Slot. Go to 'Inventory -> Ad Slots -> New Ad Slot.

2. Give a unique name to this slot (for exp: 125x125AdSlot1). Next, select the size 125 x 125 from the drop down menu.

3. Specify the target window for this ad slot. If an advertiser wants the landing page to be opened in new blank window select _blank else select _top.

4. Deselect the 'Adsense' check box to prevent automatically populating this slot with an Adsense ad in case any advertiser does not book it.

5. The other two fields are optional and can be ignored at this moment. Click the save button. You've just created a new ad slot.

Bind Ad Slot With A Placement

Multiple ad slots are grouped together under a single logical unit called placement. Let's associate this ad slot with a placement.

1. Go to Inventory -> Placements -> New Placement.

2. Name this placement (for exp: LeftSidebar125x125Ads). Leave the 'Targeting' check box unchecked.

3. Associate the newly created Ad slot with this placement by clicking the 'Add >>' link in the slots table. Click 'Save' button. You've just created a placement and connected the ad slot with this placement.

Create Order

1. Now it's time to create an order. Go to 'Orders -> New Order'.

2. Name the order (for exp: CompanyName12x25AdSlot1).

3. Specify the 'Start Date' and 'End Date', the period for which ad will be displayed. You can also choose 'Unlimited' for 'End Date' in case there is no fix closing date for that particular ad.

4. Now associate this order with a particular Advertiser by selecting the advertiser name from the drop down box. If you have no record of that advertiser, you can create it instantly from the 'New Advertiser...' link within the drop down box.

5. Rest fields are optional and can be safely ignored. Press the 'Save' button to activate the order.

Create And Bind Line Items For Order

Since we want to display 2 rotating banner ads on a single location (ad slot), we will create two line items for this order. Let's move ahead...

1. As soon as you will save your order you will be given the option to create a line item for that order. Click the 'New line item' link to get started.

2. Name the line item (for Exp: CompanyNameProduct12x125).

3. Choose the 'Exclusive' option for 'Delivery Priority'. This ensures quick delivery of ad without any latency.

4. Specify the 'Start Date' and 'End Date' for this line item.

5. Enter the 'Cost' and optional 'Discount', if any. If you have chosen 'Exclusive' option for delivery priority, you can only provide cost on Cost per day (CPD) basis. To specify cost on Cost per thousand impressions (CPM) or Cost per action (CPA) basis, choose 'Delivery Priority' as 'Standard'.

6. Bind the line item with appropriate placement by choosing it from the placement table.

7. Leave the optional 'Targeting' criteria as it is.

8. Select 'Delivery Rate' as 'As fast as possible'. Select 'Creative rotation' as 'Even' to ensure equal impressions (rotations) of both banner ads in a single slot.

9. Click the 'Save' button and repeat the same process for second line item to be made for banner ad from second advertiser.

Define Creative For Each Line Item

After creating both line items, the final step involves providing details of banner images/Landing page URL's/Script/HTML code to create the actual advertisement.

1. Click the first line item draft from the table and click the link in yellow box asking you to create a 'Creative' for this line item.

2. Give an appropriate name to the 'Creative' and select the ad slot size (125 x 125 in our case).

3. There are several options for 'Creative Type'. The most common three are explained here.

Rich Media - option is selected when all you have an ad delivery code. If your advertiser is providing the JavaScript code, choose this option and paste it in the 'Code snippet' text box.

Standard image hosted - option is used whenever you only get the banner image and click-through URL from the advertiser. Upload the image and provide the click-through URL to complete the process. The image will be hosted on Google servers saving your's and the advertiser's bandwidth.

Standard image redirect - option is used when image is hosted on advertiser's server or on any external image hosting service. In this case, just provide the image and click-through URL.

4. As soon as you will click the 'Save', you will be presented a new button 'Approve and activate'. Pressing this button will activate the order and the associated line items and creatives. Repeat this process to create a second creative.

Generate HTML Ad Code

After completing all the steps, you can generate the ad code and paste it in your blog template to start serving the ads. Here's the process...

1. Go to 'Inventory' and select the appropriate ad slot. Now click 'Generate Sample HTML' to generate the entire HTML code.

2. The code will be divided into two parts:

Header code - As the name implies, this code will be pasted between <head> and </head>.

Ad delivery code - This code should be pasted on the actual location in the body of your template where you want the ad to appear.

After pasting the code, it may take up to 10 minutes before ads start appearing on the web page.

Tracking And Reports

Google Ad Manager has a rich reporting module giving you extensive details about ad performance, order status, impressions, average eCPM, Revenue, Clicks and much more.

Two most common report groups are Delivery Reports and Inventory Reports. You can automate the report creation and delivery process (via email) so that you can keep yourself updated about ads performance without leaving your inbox.

Related Reading:

1. How To Get Direct Advertisements For Your Blog
2. Ad Inventory Management For Bloggers: A Comprehensive Guide

Image Credit: Stabilo Boss

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Written by Rajeev Edmonds | | View Comments