PureBlogging

So, you’ve expanded your blog empire to a few blogs and have started to notice that you are ignoring some of your money-makers. You’d like to dedicate more time to them but you really don’t find yourself coming up with good articles – it’s expected, your spending a lot of your time launching your new project! What do you do?

Open your blogs up to guest bloggers! It’s not very difficult and you’d be surprised at the response you’ll get from people who would just like to spread their AdSense IDs out to other domains. The most common scenario is allowing the guest blogger to use their AdSense code when the post is viewed (a single post, that they authored) while you maintain your AdSense codes on all posts you have authored as well as any pages (to include the homepage).

I’ve recently established a scenario exactly like this on my gaming blog, GibThis.com, and this is how David runs the guest blogging program here at PureBlogging as well. It took me longer to walk my new authors through the process of registering for Google’s AdSense program than it did to setup the revenue sharing on my blog. Now, I’m going to walk you through that process as well.

The Plugin
The first step is to download the AdSense Author plugin. This plugin allows authors to enter their AdSense ID within a control panel on their Dashboard. After they’ve accomplished this, their AdSense IDs will be positioned throughout the site in the manner we’ll configure below.

Configuration
After downloading, uploading, and activating the plugin – your first stop should be the Author Adsense Configuration panel, found within the Plugins menu. The configuration is very easy with only three fields you must fill out:

• Admin Google ID: Place your AdSense ID in this box – if the plugin finds an author without an AdSense ID setup, it will use yours instead!
• Admin Percentage: Enter a percentage of time you want your own AdSense ID to be displayed rather than the authors – we’re going to be nice and give our authors 100% of the revenue off of their posts (if you placed 50 in this field, you and the author would split the page views evenly).
• User Level: This determines the lowest level a user can be to have their AdSense ID displayed – we’re going to position that at the Author level, since it’s the lowest level that can actively contribute to the blog.

One final step that people often miss is configuring their own AdSense ID. Technically, if you didn’t do this the plugin should realize you are an author without an AdSense ID and use the Admin ID within the plugin configuration. Unfortunately, this didn’t work for me – but it’s easily fixed. Just go to the Dashboard menu, click My AdSense, and enter your ID in the field. Now your ID will be displayed within every post you make!

The Setup
Not so fast you say – that was to easy… you’re right! Although we have the plugin all setup to do what it is supposed to, we still need to call the plugin from our template files. Head over to the Presentation editor and find one of your AdSense fields (probably in your Sidebar). Find the line within the AdSense code that reads:

You want to change this line to read:

Make sure you run all around your blog and change this across the entire site. Note: The plugin author provides a different means of accomplishing this (assigning a variable to the returned value, then merely echoing that variable throughout the template). I tried to do this within my header and it didn’t work – what I’ve done here is working fine for me though.

Touch-Ups
If you have AdSense ads that are placed within “global” areas of your blog (the header, footer, sidebar, etc) – then you may have noticed an odd occurrence: whoever authored the last post gets their ID displayed in the ad unit. We’ve been nice to our authors by giving them 100% of their own posts but we still want to get some money coming our way as well, right!?

This can easily be accomplished using PHP’s if…then statement. The following code will ensure your ID is displayed on the home page as well as all static pages within your blog. You should use this code whenever you have an ad unit that is displayed at the same time as multiple posts (the home page, archives, etc).

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