If you read my last article, you know about Chitika and the new eMiniMalls that are popping up everywhere on the web. You can serve up relevant product ads to your users, and let them search for other products without leaving the comfort and safety of your web page. I was asked recently about how to add Chitika ads to your Blogger blog, so I thought I'd take some time to write up exactly how this is done. See
my blog to see how this looks.
In case you haven't seen my
previous article, I'll give a brief rundown on how to get set up. First, you'll need a Blogger blog if you don't have one already. This is quite easy to set up. Just go to
Blogger.com and click the giant "Create your own blog now" button. You'll create a username and password, name your blog, and choose a template. This should take you all of about 5 minutes.
Once you have your blog set up, you need to sign up with
Chitika. You need a running web site to get approved, so post a couple of short items to your blog before applying. It will take you about 5 minutes to fill out their application, and you'll be approved in the next day or so. Note that you don't actually have to be approved to continue on to the next step. You can insert the eMiniMalls code onto your web site, you just won't make any money until you're approved.
Now that you're all set up, you need to insert the Chitika code into your blog. Chitika will send you instructions on how to generate the HTML code to create eMiniMalls on your site. It will generally look something like this:
<script type="text/javascript"><!--
ch_client = "gary99";
ch_width = 468;
ch_height = 180;
ch_non_contextual = 1;
ch_color_border = "#8AA1B6";
ch_color_bg = "#FFFFFF";
ch_color_title = "#003966";
ch_color_text = "#000000";
var ch_queries = new Array("iPod", "dell laptop", "psp");
var ch_selected=Math.floor((Math.random()*ch_queries.length));
ch_query = ch_queries[ch_selected];
//--></script>
<script src="http://scripts.chitika.net/eminimalls/mm.js"
type="text/javascript">
</script>
Looks fairly scary, but you don't have to worry much about it. You can customize the size and colors on the Chitika web site, without needing to touch the javascript code yourself.
Once you have the eMiniMall looking the way you want it, it's time to insert it into your Blogger template. Blogger, unfortunately, doesn't allow javascript inside individual posts, so you can't customize the products to each post. Actually there is a way to do it, but I'll write more about that a bit later. For now, we'll just insert the same eMiniMall code before each post. Note that this doesn't mean the same product will be shown over and over again. The code will pick a random product from the list for each eMiniMall.
Log in to your Blogger account, and select your blog from your "dashboard" screen. Click the "Template" tab at the top of the next page. Click "Edit Current" if it's not selected for you already. Scroll down, probably about two thirds of the way, until you find the <Blogger> tag. This is where the actual posts are in the template. Scroll down just a bit more, and you'll find a tag that looks like this: <$BlogItemBody$>. This is where the body of each post is inserted. Just put your eMiniMall code directly above (or below if you prefer) this tag. Click "Preview" to see what it will look like. You may find you need a couple of <br> tags before or after the eMiniMall code to separate it from the post body.
Once you have the preview looking roughly the way you want it, click "Save Template Changes". Click the little "Republish" button to republish your blog to the live site. That's it, you're now set to start making money from Chitika clicks on your site. You'll find that on average, Chitika pays more per click than Google does for AdSense. Using both is even better. Just remember that you need content in order to get people to come to your blog in the first place.
--> More info on Chitika.
There was a story in today's New York times about Google. Ok there's a story about Google most every day, but this one I found particularly amazing. When Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin first submitted their business plan to Venture capitalists, advertsing revenue was only their "safety net". You may remember back in the late 90's, Google search results didn't have any ads. Page and Brin feared selling advertising space would taint the search results.