If you love blogging like me, I’m sure you don’t care about the money (ok I was kidding). I’m sure many of us aspire to become full time bloggers like Darren Rowse of Problogger.net or maybe CF Liew from liewcf.com (closer to home). Obviously the first step towards that is writing decent posts on your blog and attracting traffic via search engines or social networks. That is definitely the hard part and step NUMBER 1! But there’s also an exciting part here which is actually monetizing your blog. Typically bloggers like to monetize their blog using various ad networks out there such as Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network, Chitika etc. Adsense is by far the most popular and has a wide variety of advertisers as well. If you are using blogger for publishing your blog then good – its probably a piece of cake for you to integrate Adsense to your blog. But if you are like me, a wordpress lover, then you probably need to get familiar with a little bit of coding. But hang on, there is an easier way too – Adsense plugins for wordpress (isn’t this why we love wordpress in the first place?). Here is a list of Adsense plugins for wordpress that you might want to try!

1. Adsense Deluxe
One of the most commonly used adsense plugin for wordpress. AdSense-Deluxe is a WordPress plugin offering advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your WordPress posts.

2. WhyDoWork.com Adsense Plugin
WhyDoWork.com Adsense is a WordPress plugin that allows you to insert Adsense ads on your blog without modifying the template. More then that, you can set it up to show different Adsense ads for articles older then X days (x is the number of days you decide).

3. Adsense Injection
Adsense Injection plugin just takes a random paragraph (or br tag) break in your article and inserts adsense code. It does one per story on multi-post pages (home, archive, category) and let’s you pick how many to show on single post pages. It lets you pick how many total ads to show at any time as well (0-3) and it lets you set the formats and colors you want it to randomly select from.

4. Advertising Manager
This plugin will manage and rotate your Google Adsense and other ads on your WordPress blog. It automatically recognises many ad networks including Google Adsense, AdBrite, Adify, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Adroll, Chitika, Commission Junction, CrispAds, OpenX, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN, and WidgetBucks. Unsupported ad networks can be used as well.

5. Mighty Adsense
It will allow you to host the code in wordpress without having to modify the templates. Google ads is displayed in post item and you can specify how many block its going to show up in a page. Ads preview tool included in control panel.

6. Google Ad Wrap
Plugin to be used if you are looking to employ section targetting for your Google Adsense ads. Section Targeting is a way of embedding special tags inside HTML to give Google’s omnipresent spider a better idea of what’s important on your page. This is a really simple plugin that wraps posts and comments inside these tags, in the hope that they’ll lead to better search rankings.

7. Adsense Inline
Another plugin that makes inserting AdSense into your blog posts really easy.

8. Author Advertising Plugin
This plugin allows blog admins to create a revenue sharing program utilising one of the many advertising programs out there i.e Yahoo, Google Adsense, Amazon, Allposters etc. It can also be used as a banner manager, author photo/website widgets.

9. Adsense Earnings WordPress Plugin
There is an awesome wordpress plugin available to get your adsense earning details within wordpress admin panel.

With the AdSense Earnings WordPress plugin you can:

* Check your daily earnings in your DashBoard or Options page
* Check your earnings for specific period
* Show to the public how many $ you made today

10. Who Sees Ads
Who Sees Ads is an advanced ad management plugin that lets you decide who will see your ads, depending on user defined conditions. The association of an ad and these conditions is called a context: a set of circumstances you define, that will eventually display or not an ad.

So there we are, a top 10 list of Adsense plugins that I found. I have tried quite a few of them and I like some (not all). I won’t say which are the ones I like in case my opinion influences yours too . Have fun trying them out, most of them are very easy to use and integrate into your wordpress blog.

Thanks Mashable.

Google Adsense has recently introduced a nice new feature for adsense ads – expandable ads! Pretty nice feature to have as it is really non intrusive, but its really going to be something to look forward to for a while for us Malaysian bloggers since it is available only for North American and European publishers. Isn’t it weird that Google actually makes it available for publishers based on their location rather than the reader’s location? Something wrong with the marketing team perhaps.

What are these expandable ads?

Here’s what Google has to say:

Expandable ads will be served as third-party ads and will be created by Google-certified rich media vendors for the top display advertisers in our network. And like other Google ads, you’ll earn based on whether the expandable ads on your site are priced on a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM) basis. Keep in mind that you’ll generate earnings from CPC expandable ads when a user visits the advertiser’s landing page, and not when a user simply clicks to expand the ad.

Yes that’s right – the user will have to click on the expanded ad and a simple mouse over will not be enough. I’m guessing that this is to prevent an accidental mouse over. So your reader will have to click on the expanded ad and reach the advertiser’s landing page pretty much like all other adsense ad formats. I’m guessing that there will be no CPM ads with the expandable ads and only offer CPC ads for now.

How to enable expandable ads on your site?

Like I mentioned, as long as you are located in North America or Europe and you publish in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish you will be eligible. All you need to do is to enable image ads on your website – simple!

Let’s hope that these expandable ads soon make their way to Asia and more importantly for us – Malaysia. After all, it certainly looks like a nice feature for adsense without obstructing the reader’s concentration. It does remind me of a certain Kontera though.

Update!

The adsense team has verified that the information that was initially posted was incorrect. The ads are available to selected advertisers in the US who can then decide their target locations. Here is the comment from the adsense team:

Hi everyone,

Thanks for the comments so far. I just wanted to let you know that some of the information around how to display expandable ads was incorrect, and so we’ve just updated the post for accuracy. Expandable ads are available to a limited number of U.S. advertisers, who can then select the sites they’d like to target – so your location as a publisher won’t limit your eligibility. I apologize for the miscommunication — please feel free to continue leaving your feedback about this launch.

-Arlene

That probably means everyone as a publisher is eligible now – Yay!