Getting Adsense to blend?

[Cassie]

Hi guys, I was approved for Adsense tonight and was playing around with ad placement for a bit. However, I can't seem to blend my ad backgrounds with the background of my website. Is there a way to have an exact match through the Adsense palettes? I've noticed some websites with the same 'pink' background as mine in their ads, but I can't seem to figure out how to do it.

Any advice?

If anyone has any advice on alternative ad placement, I'd love to hear some suggestions as well. I'd like to run some discreet ones running across the top, but I'm not quite sure how to place them there yet.

[Richard_Todd]

If you know the color code for the color you want (as in, #FFFFFF is white, etc), then you can customize each aspect of the adsense ads from their setup screen. You don't have to stick with a predefined palette. As far as I know, the background must be a solid color, so cannot blend in with a patterned or image background perfectly.

(if you don't know the color code(s) you need, because you didn't design the site, or it's in an image, or whatever, there are free utilities out there that will tell you the color code of any pixel on your screen.)

hope this helps.

[Cassie]

Thanks so much, Todd, that helps a bunch. I'll hunt down a color code tool and reconfigure from there.

[Steve]

You're talking about the sidebar?

Try setting the background to this: F8EBE4
and the link text to this: FE0000

[Cassie]

Oh, that worked beautifully! Thanks Steve

[Steve]

No problem. I see that you're starting a money-related blog, you should read this: 25 Steps To A Wildly Successful Personal Finance Blog, if you haven't already.

[Cassie]

No, I hadn't read that. I'm a very newbie blogger still (my second day now), but thank you for the extremely informative article.

You know, it's funny you should share that because I've been debating back and forth whether or not I should invest in my own domain name and hosting. Typepad has a free 30-day trial so I thought I'd start here and try it out to see what happened. Now I'm thinking I should go for my own domain after all. Since my site has only been launched two days, it's better to move now than in a few months when it would be an absolute nightmare.

[Alvin]

Hi Cassie,

I'd suggest you do go for your own domain name, as the search engine optimization and the options with ownership far outweigh the costs.

Just a thought; 'broke-student' might work better as a domain name than 'broke-ass student', 'ass' might get porn hits. I'm not too good on my SEO so you might want to check up on this.

[Dating Specialist]

Well one way to find out is to do some keyword research.

Type in broke-student, broke-ass student or whatever else you can come up with and google it. See how much results it bring and you'll know how popular that is.

That's also a way to see if porn sites turn up when ass is included

[TheBull]

Originally Posted by Steve

No problem. I see that you're starting a money-related blog, you should read this: 25 Steps To A Wildly Successful Personal Finance Blog, if you haven't already.

That post is really good. I would also suggest joining The Ad-Free Personal Finance Blogs Aggregator, which is a blog aggregator and really think about submitting posts to the various finance related blog carnivals. Both of those have really helped with traffic to my money blog.