Congratulations to Jason Murphy, winner of last months drawing for a free link for a month on PlugIM.  My apologies for not making the annoucement earlier.  I announced it in the newsletter that went out on March 1st and then mentioning it in the blog kind of slipped my mind.  All the more reason for you guys to sign up for the newsletter!  If you didn’t sign up when you created your account, you can sign up using the sidebar on the front page of PlugIM.  I won’t spam you, maybe 2 or 3 emails a month or so along with the newsletter once a month.

Jason is promoting his www.shareadsense.com project with the link he won.

I might run the contest again this month if you guys give me enough positive feedback.  Let me know, did you enjoy it? Does the prize motivate you enough to participate more? Let me know what you think.

Earlier today the 500th PlugIM user account was created. I just wanted to say a quick thank you to all of you who’ve joined the community and contributed over these last few months. The next few months should be even more exciting as we continue to grow and implement several new features. We’re going to stay focused on the goal which is to drive as much traffic to the stories posted on PlugIM as possible.

If any of you are interested in contributing as a member of the team, please let me know. I’m looking for people with graphic design skills, php coding skills and of course marketing and promotional skills.

And as always the floor is open for comments and suggestions for future modifications and features. Most all of the features added to the site have come from the users, so if there’s something you’d like to see, just let me know.

Thanks again everyone!

So you created a PlugIM account, you entered your Adsense ID, you’ve posted several stories on the site, but how do you know how much you’ve actually earned by posting on PlugIM? I was flipping through the user accounts the other day and found out that people either aren’t using the “Adsense Channel” field, or they’re using it incorrectly. The “Adsense Channel” field on your user profile is there so you can not only track how much you’re making from your ads on PlugIM, but also to track how many impressions (views) your ads are receiving. All you need to do is create a PlugIM channel in your Adsense account and here’s how you do that:

1. Login to your Adsense account and click on the “Adsense Setup” tab then click “Channels”
2. Under “Adsense for Content” make sure “Custom channels” is selected (this should be the default)
3. Click on “+Add new custom channels”
4. Name your channel “PlugIM” then click the “Add channel” button
5. Under “Adsense Setup” click “Products” then click “Adsense for content”
6. Change your view from “Wizard” to “Single page”
7. Scroll down until you see “Choose Ad Channels”
8. Click “add »” next to your custom “PlugIM” channel
9. Scroll down and look at “Your Adsense code” look for “google_ad_channel” in the code
10. Copy the numerical value next to “google_ad_channel”
11. Login to your PlugIM profile and paste that value into the “Adsense Channel” field

It may look complicated, but it shouldn’t take more than 3 minutes and once you’ve configured it correctly, you’ll always know exactly what your PlugIM Adsense stats are. The most important part is that you use the numerical channel number, not the channel name.