Adding more Ads

I've now signed up for Ad Affiliate Accounts with Amazon and iTunes, in addition to AdSense Ads.

'The History of Gin' now has one Amazon Ad box for Books and another for DVD's. In both cases, I selected the class of products; Books and DVD's, and some general categories within those classes; bestsellers, sci-fi, TV shows, drama, etc..., and Amazon displays several varying suggestions that can be selected in the Ad boxes. I also had to choose the shape and orientation of the Ad boxes, narrow & tall, broad & short, a small square, etc.... Amazon has a good selection of box shapes BUT the shapes have to fit within size limits for New Page Elements permitted by your selected Blogger Standard Format. For instance, elements inserted down the side of my Blog can only be 150 pixels wide. With the Amazon "narrow/tall" boxes, only one width, 120 pixels, fit within the 150 pixel limit, which greatly reduced my selection of Ad boxes. If a box is too big it gets cutoff -- AdSense seems to prevent selecting a box too big.

The Blog also has an Amazon Search Box, which is just a place to type keywords and go to Amazon -- it has a similar AdSense Google Search Box. Apparently, if a search leads to the purchase of something recommended at the Amazon or Google site, one makes a commission.

Finally, there is an iTunes Ad box which stays static (advertising NBC TV box sets in my case) rather than displaying recommendations that change, like the Amazon boxes. The iTunes Ad box really is just something to click that leads to the iTunes site where searches and purchases can be made. The iTunes Ad box selection wasn't as good as Amazon's. The iTunes Ads are administered, by LinkShare for Apple. In addition to Apple, LinkShare offers Affiliate Ad programs with other companies. . .but I haven't pursued this yet.

The AdSense Content boxes are behaving better, advertising things other than COTTON stuff, but still not much of interest to me. Supposedly AdSense works very well for people?

I also have an AdSense referral Ad, but that whole category is way too complicated and hard to set up. I'll have to work with it more.

Except for the AdSense content Ads, the necessary Ad code was generated by the Ad company and one inserts the code in a Blogger HTML Page Element. As I said before, AdSense Content Ads also can be inserted as HTML or by using the special AdSense Page Element.

For the Ads where I had input on content, I concentrated on books and DVD's. Since I also make Theme Song recommendations for the different chapters posted in the Blog, I thought an iTunes tie-in would be nice.

I've concentrated on Ad boxes so far, I haven't tried any Text Link Ads yet. They apparently are just words you click on to go to the advertised product.


The biggest problem with Ads is the size limitation imposed by your selected Blogger Standard Format. This problem illustrates why one probably shouldn't depend on Blogger, or at least Blogger's quick blogging tools, in the first place.

But the Blogger Standard Formats CAN be edited by delving directly into the Template HTML code for the format you choose. . .It's easy for someone comfortable with HTML. More on that later...