Blog Setup Lab

Here’s a great Adsense plugin for WordPress – The guys at WhyDoWork have created a plugin that lets you define 10 separate Adsense code blocks (i.e. 10 different Adsense ad units) and then gives you a whole host of options for how WordPress displays these ads.

Firstly you can exclude any posts or pages that you don’t want Adsense ads on by entering the page or post IDs. You can then customize how your front page posts display Adsense ads with 3 sets of options. So for each set you choose which Adsense unit to show, how the ad will be aligned (top, top middle, middle, random etc.) and which posts to show the ads on (first post only, first and second etc. all the way down to the 10th post).

You then get a similar set of options for pages, single pages and for single pages older than x days (where x is a number of days you can specify) giving you the ability to show different adds for older pages.

It doesn’t have the ease of use of some Adsense plugins (such as All In One Adsense and YPN) in that you can’t enter your Adsense ID and customize the Ad units within WordPress. Instead you have to create your Ad units on the Adsense site (unless you’re hard core and can manually code them) and copy the code block into the plugin. WhyDoWork does however then allow you to be extremely flexible in the ad placement in your blog which some people will certainly prefer.

Check out the WhyDoWork Adsense Plugin for WordPress at

http://www.whydowork.com/blog/whydowork-adsense-plugin/

For users of MailChimp‘s email marketing service there’s an easy way to add an email list subscription form to your WordPress blog and start building your list.

If you don’t already have a MailChimp account go here to signup. Their services are free for up to 500 subscribers and they allow you a generous 3000 sends per month.

Once you’ve signed up to MailChimp log into your WordPress blog and go to ‘Plugins’ and ‘Add New’. Type MailChimp in the search box and click ‘search plugins’ – you should then see the MailChimp List Subscribe Form plugin.

Install and activate that plugin and you’ll then get in Settings in Worpdress a MailChimp Setup link. Here you enter your MailChimp username and password and the MailChimp plugin connects to your MaiChimp account and lets you select an Email list to create a signup form for. Customise your headings and colours if you like and then in WordPress under ‘Appearance’ and ‘Widgets’ you can drag the MailChimp Widget from Available Widgets to whichever sidebar you’d like it to display.