No, I put those ads there myself. My blog software (a Joomla CMS) is built on templates. much like a WordPress site or other kinds of blogs, so I signed up with Google AdSense and walked through a wizard to generate some HTML code to put into my site's template. Google then puts ads that they think will work well on my site and I get a portion of the ad revenue when someone clicks on an ad. Sweet!

You can even decide what kinds of ads you want on your site. They can be text or images. You decide the color scheme of text ads. There's even a way to put ads in YouTube videos that you put on your site as well.

To make it successful, it's best to come up with a blog that centers around a central theme or several themes, like I do. My interests are cars, skiing, Macs, Music, Global Warming (how much of a hoax it is) and Politics. So in my blogging software, I set up different categories for each. I then make new posts when I feel like it and assign the post to a category. If it doesn't fit in any of my categories, no sweat, I just put it into a general "Blog" category.

What makes a really good blog post, which will attract some attention from search engines, is "how-to" articles. I post them from time to time, usually after I took the time to do some research online to find out how to do something. I usually have to go through several articles to find my answer, so then I'll create a blog post and put it in my own words, which is legal to do. It's like a min book report kind of, but much more fun. That's all you do.

Some more tricks include getting blogging software that puts the URLs of your stories into real text instead of just a bunch of letter and numbers. This is what is called making "Search Engine Friendly URLs" or SEF URLs. Search engines like it when they're meaningful and end it .html and have dashes between words.

There are a few other tricks, too, but what is most important is content. You need good content and you should blog consistently. Do at least 4 posts a week. The more you do, the more of your friends and other people will bookmark your site and make it one of the sites that they always check out when they are online. You also want to try to keep things upbeat and fun. I sometimes use my blog as a soapbox and those posts don't get as much traffic, but that's fine - it's my blog. I can do what I want.

It's a lot of fun to blog. The blogging software makes it easy, so you just login, create a new entry in what looks like a word processor in your web browser and then click on Save and then it's live on your site, first thing on the home page. All the other items move down automatically. Pretty slick!

I think you have to like to write stuff and your spelling and grammar has to be decent. I have a number of clients that I would not suggest a blog to, but hey, we're all created differently.

Another tip is not to write too long of an entry so I'll take my own advice and call it quits. If you're interested in getting a blog started, let me know. Below is a link to Google AdSense if you're interested in that.
-T

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