Well the blog is doing what it was supposed to do, as outlined in my first post. The content is quite 'blogging-about-blogging' heavy, but that topic is still interesting to me. So let's dig a little deeper into Blogger.
Use of the platform is free, however the cost of hosting a domain is not. Although at £10/year it is not ruinously expensive. That said, there is no reason why part of that cost couldn't be offset by some ad revenue is there?
From the outset let me state that I am not interested in a full-blown commercialisation of the blog with search engine optimisation, careful ad placement strategies and the inevitable desperate attempts to garner e-mail addresses or upsell readers. It's just too much effort.
Instead, this is a curiosity-driven peek into another aspect of Blogger and the target of recouping the domain fees is just a means to this end. If you really want to get into that then there is an ocean of data, help and opinions out there. Good luck…
Opening the Earnings tab on the blog menu displays a deceptively simple set of options,
with an invitation to LEARN MORE being the most prominent.
Following this link jumps you into Google's AdSense basics support pages on the Why AdSense? section.
All of the information on the support pages appears to be well structured and thorough, which is to be expected as advertising is Google's bread and butter. But, rather than starting the in middle, let's begin at the beginning and go through the content in order.
Your guide to AdSense outlines five actions. But limiting ourselves to the first three options, Discover, Join and Start, should be enough to get the ball rolling. Earn and Optimise can be tackled at a later date.
The next section is How AdSense works. Essentially, you are replicating the same process by which newspaper and magazine publishers have made most of their money over the last couple of hundred years or so. Once a publisher has their content lined up for the next issue it is the job of the advertising department to sell the unoccupied space in it to others. Google's AdSense scheme will act as your personal advertising department and sell the space on your blog that you designate to whomever will pay for it. Simples!
Although if you think Google is acting wholly in your best interests you may be deluding yourself somewhat. But they do appear to make the whole process extremely straightforward for the publisher (ie you) so you can't knock them too much. In fact Google passes through 68% of the revenue of individual ads placed on your blog, which seems pretty reasonable as they have to make a penny or two as well. Overall it looks like a pretty good deal.
And now we are back to Why Adsense? The page advances lots of good reasons to be sure, but they are not compelling due to my current poor state of knowledge. I have no experience of anything else to compare them to as the reason for applying is to find out more about blog advertising through the Blogger platform.
Other than that there is not much more in this guide that is directly relevant to my set-up process. So it's back to Your guide to AdSense.
Starting at the top with the Discover option; this gives you three links to follow, two of which we have already looked at and a third which is to the next section, Join.
Now we have arrived at the meat of the process. There are three stages to Create and activate your AdSense account.
First the prerequisites; you will need a Google account ✅; and some of your own content ✅; and that's all.
The first step is to bring up the AdSense web site,
and hit the Get started button, which brings you to a page asking for basic information. My first problem with the process was at the third step, with the URL to add.
When I was setting up the blog there was a glitch in getting Blogger to recognise the custom domain. The process failed a few times and then for no apparent reason it worked, but with the end result that the domain www.skullcinema.com redirects to blog.skullcinema.com. I meant to go back sometime and try to straighten it out but haven't done so yet.
So, the blog is on a custom domain but all of the content of the blog is on the subdomain. As the domain is forwarded directly to Blogger, I don't have access to any HTML space to add the AdSense code to, if required, leading me to think that I should use the subdomain URL. But the guidance on how to enter your URL states that you shouldn't use subdomain.domain.com URLs and instead use top-level www.domain.com URLs. Which to choose? I swithered about this for a while and went with the top level www.domain.com option following the given guidance and not knowing whether it would make a difference or not.
I filled in the domain name, managing e-mail address and yes please for e-mails that help (why not?), then hit Save and Continue. That takes us to the end of step 6 of the process.
The next step was to fill in your country and accept the inevitable region/country specific terms and conditions (I may come back to these later) then check Yes, I have read and accept the agreement and press Create Account.
And that is it, you are logged into your AdSense account.
So far, so good. Onto activating the account next.
As Yong Kuan Leong points in out in his article on 'How to Get Approval for AdSense in 2021' this isn't an automatic process. You are entering a business relationship with Google not accessing a service and they want to know that you will produce ad revenue for them. So the activation process involves a review of your site, which can take anywhere between two days and two weeks.
But there are some housekeeping steps to take care of first. You must provide them with your name and address and verify your phone number (not optional after all).
Once complete AdSense will provide you with your personal AdSense script to add to your website HTML.
Next you need to tick the I've pasted the code into my site checkbox and AdSense will confirm that it is there. I was assuming that as the domain is forwarded to a Blogger blog this would be taken care of automatically but it returned an error message in a pop-up saying that AdSense couldn't find the code on www.skullcinema.com. Hmm.
As that wasn't working I went to the Blogger Control Panel - Earnings tab to try and make the link from the other side. Now Blogger was aware I had an AdSense account, but stated that it wasn't linked to the blog. No doubt as a consequence of the www.skullcinema.com vs blog.skullcinema.com issue outlined above.
So I followed the GO TO ADSENSE link and logged back into AdSense, clicked that I had pasted the code again and it now appears to be working.
That is my part of the activation process over with and I am now at the review stage. Given the one day to two weeks time range quoted for this part of the process to complete a real live person must have to review it (if you are, hi and apologies if the content isn't to your liking). But there are probably also a series of automated processes (eg review content for inappropriate material, review for plagiarism, review personal details to confirm validity, etc) that all have to be ground through before the review is marked as completed.
It is now just a matter of wait-and-see. I'll return to the topic once Google provides their verdict on the application.
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