Monday, March 12, 2012

Wassup!

Today I would like to share with you ladies and gents, what’s been going on with my forward move into offering advertising/sponsor space on my blog.

Since you’re ALL part of Vent, I think it’s important that I fill you in on the various changes I make.

Because as the Sister Sledge, said, “We-are- fam-i-ly!”

So let’s see….where do I start?

Well, when I began investigating the process of setting up ad space on a blog, one of the first things I learned is that it’s very important to have a blog design that accommodates a variety of ad sizes. I decided that I wanted to start off by offering a simple 125x125 ad banner on my sidebar, but discovered that I didn't have the proper widget on this blog to do that. Initially, I thought I was going to have to change my whole blog template, which I didn’t want to do because I really like this current design. As an alternative, I searched the Internet and found a customized 4 slot 125x125 ad widget that I could just install myself. And luckily, my sidebar was wide enough to accommodate the widget, so I pasted the code into my blog, and viola, it worked!


I found a free 125x125 graphic that I could use as an “advertise here” button, and then hosted it through my Photo Bucket account.


*if you look on my sidebar, you will see the finished results.

The one ad you see in the widget (Netflix) is part of Google Affiliated Network, which I signed up for last week and was accepted. I will also be signing up for other advertising affiliates within the next couple of weeks; experimenting with various ads each month to see which programs work best for me.

I also created a new page on my navigation bar below my header, which contains my current advertising/sponsor fees, blog stats, and guidelines, so feel free to check it out. That too, was something I had to investigate and decide what I wanted to charge, and how I wanted to present it.

Additionally, I had to set up a PayPal account, which my good friend, Jen, helped with me with. So thank you, girl!

Allow me to interject here, that having a blog hosted at Blogger is very challenging because it does not presently offer enough variety for those of us who wish to move into a more professional theme. However, it’s taught me A LOT about the technical aspects of web design because I’ve had to do a great deal of research on self-customizing, thus I’m learning some valuable lessons. I am not yet ready to move over to another blog hosting platform, nor am I ready to self-host, therefore I am trying my best to make the most of Blogger.

One of the most wonderful things I’ve discovered through having this blog is that there is so much available to us online in the way of education, if we are just willing to take the time to investigate it. I’m one of those people who enjoys leaning through research. I find that if I self-investigate, I tend to learn better. I’ve made COUNTLESS mistakes by learning this way, but I’m willing to make mistakes, as long as I do it myself.

So there you have it folks! That’s wassup with me, right now. It’s been challenging trying to figure out all this stuff about advertising on a blog, but it’s also given me a great deal of enjoyment and knowledge.

I’m very curious to see where this new addition takes me. And as I shared in my past post when I first told you guys about my interest in possibly doing this, I said that I’ll never know unless I try it. So, we shall see!

And I’m hoping that by sharing this process with you, you’ll learn things too. Because we’re all in this together.

Thank you for taking this experimental journey with me everyone!

Have a faaaaaaaaaabulous week!