“At some point, we are probably going to want to make money with our blog. And one really good way to do that is to run either affiliate ads or space ads or something to find some way to monetize your site. You’re going to make offers on your site somewhere. So there are several facilities within the Insta Blog that allow you to do that, to support you in doing that.
First things first, you’ll notice that in the Insta Blog template, I haven’t done any styling to this one, you’ll see we have these spaces marked out. So one in the header, one on the sidebar, and one in the middle of the homepage. These are placeholders in the actual theme itself, the page layout. We fill those in with a plugin named Ad Inserter. And there are some reasons why Ad Inserter is the one we use, which we will talk about another time, but right now let’s just talk about how to put ads in these different spaces. Ad Inserter has some debugging tools in the front end, which will help at some point as well.
So right here, if we hover over Ad Inserter, we go to label blocks, it’ll turn on some decoration here that tells us the block number that’s used, and the name of the block, which is indicative of its size, 728 by 90. And you can name those anything you want to. And then “n=1″ means that the number of ads that are defined in that block, and so of course, the only one defined is this placeholder image in each of those cases. Let’s turn that back off, just to disable debugging. Then we can go see where we actually define those.
And so the first thing we’ll do is we’ll go into the theme panel, and we’ll select ads. So the header ad, you’ll find is in fact Ad Inserter block one, which if you go back and forth, you’ll see that that’s correct. And the sidebar is block two. And then there are some legacy ones you can’t really use. There are some others, but custom one through custom five, you can. I expect that these will disappear in the next major update. Custom ad one, we have block three.
So where do we define these? Now, you don’t typically have to change these shortcodes for those three block locations. And so you add locations in the homepage. You don’t typically have to modify those. You can if you want to, there could be reasons why you’d want to. You could also add more ad blocks. And so if you go to the front end, open up the composer, and you can drag other ad blocks into the theme. In fact, in a more advanced video, I’ll demonstrate that. For now, let’s just figure out how we go about putting different values in there, because obviously those images as we have them are not actually even ads.
So what we want to look for is on settings, Ad Inserter. And here you see, sure enough, we’ve got block one, block two, and block three, and they have those images there. For a real site, what’s going to happen is I’m going to have an anchor tag with an image in it, maybe some text as well, whatever. And that’s going to be my affiliate link. There are a whole bunch of different cool options within Ad Inserter that we’ll talk about later. But for right now, the moment that you have an actual ad to put in here somewhere, just make sure that you copy it over the top of this, and away you go.
So that’s a very brief introduction to how ads get managed on the Insta Blog. Up next, we’ll go through and look at additional options, other places we can put ads in the theme, and that sort of thing.”
