Today I was excited to receive my beta invitation for the new ScribeFire QuickAds. ScribeFire is well known as a blog editor. My previous post talks about that. QuickAds is a new service for bloggers which will let you very simply monitize your blog with ads. You wouldn’t have to sign up with different affiliate programs, or AdSense, or any such thing. It all goes through ScribeFire’s program. They serve up the optimal ad from whichever affiliate their system picks out as best. Then you get one check, which combines earnings from all the ads.

The main charm to this is the simplicity of implementation. A serious professional blogger probably likes to have more control over these things. But for a beginner or a hobby blogger, it brings the ability to put some ads in place with only a couple of clicks. Then all they need to do is blog — and (hopefully) take the monthly check to the bank.

Okay. Sounds good. Now the question is, how does it work?

I followed the link from my invitation. It tells me that, if I’m already using ScribeFire, I should download the beta version which contains the new functionality. Did that. And … uh-oh … it’s an .xpi file. What do you do with that? (Yes, I realize that probably the whole world — other than me — have known the answer to that forever. But I’m fairly clueless about these things.)

However, as luck would have it, only last week I had been experimenting with another beta Firefox add-on. The developer of that one kindly included instructions on how to install it. Otherwise I would have been stalled before ever making it out the gate! In case there are any other dummies like me out there, here’s what you do once you download your .xpi file:

1. Open the Firefox browser.
2. From the File menu, choose “Open File”
3. Browse to wherever you saved the download, and select it.
4. The regular box for installing add-ons will appear, and from there, just choose “Install” as usual.

Simple enough to do, but if you didn’t already know how, you’d be left scratching your head.

So, I got it installed. When ScribeFire is opened, there’s a new tab on the left side. The second tab from the top (with a little green dollar-sign) opens the QuickAds page.

In “Step 1″, you’re invited to add a blog to your account. Clicking that opens a box where you can choose from the blogs you already have attached to ScribeFire. First I chose this blog (which is a WordPress blog). After working on it a few seconds, the setup fairy returned with the disheartening news that this blog could not be configured automatically — I’d have to do it manually. It provided a little snippet of code I was supposed to copy and paste into my blog just before the </body> tag. Okay …

I copied the code and went in search of the tag. I opened my blog’s admin section and went to the “Theme Editor” (found beneath the “Design” tab). There I examined every file in the Theme Files … to no avail. I went back to the view of my blog’s site, and used Firefox to view the source (under View menu, “Page Source”). There, sure enough, down towards the bottom, is a </body> tag. But where does it come from? How do I insert anything just above it?

And that brings up another question. I notice that just above that tag, there’s a snippet of code placed there by another program I’m testing (Woopra — I’ll write about that one of these days) which also wants it place immediately above the </body> tag. If I recall correctly, Google Analytics also wants the same position. So, what are you supposed to do about that? And does the Woopra code already occupying that spot have anything to do with why QuickAds couldn’t automatically configure the site?

Well, this is turning out to be something of a cliffhanger. Stay tuned …

So, in the meantime, giving up on this blog I turned my attention to my other one — a Blogger blog. I repeated “Step 1″ with that one. And it worked.

Moving on to “Step 2″, I selected that blog and clicked “Manage Ads”. That opens the selected site, ready for the next step.

In “Step 3″, I chose from the three ad sizes available, then moving my cursor to the blog, indicated where the ad should appear. It took a couple of tries to get the hang of this, but it was pretty intuitive. The problem here was that none of the choices fit very well into the theme used on that blog. I ended up with a skyscraper on the left side which has just a smidge shaved off the edge where it runs into the body text. Also, a white ad block surrounded by a black border sticks out like a sore thumb on the tan background of my site.

But, after all, this is a beta. I’m sure the final version will smooth out a lot of these wrinkles.

As for the ads served, I can’t make much of a conclusion on that. The site where I put this is my personal blog. It’s not really optimized to any subject. Even I’d have a hard time saying what it’s about. So you can sort of see the program struggling to figure out what kind of ads to serve. I can’t say much about earnings either, because there’s virtually no traffic to that site.

For the sake of experimentation, I’ll add this to a couple more sites that I have. (Not that they have any traffic either!) But, that can wait until tomorrow.