Bloggers Journal

Google AdSense is a popular advertising stream used by many webmasters to monetise their blogs and websites.  It is used as a means to earning passive income.  This is something many webmasters do not consider.  It is something I wish I knew about sooner, as every little amount that you earn can help pay your hosting fees.

I have tried to get accepted to Google AdSense a number of times – usually getting the response, best summed up as, “not accepted”.  So how do you get accepted?  You can see I now have Google AdSense.  What changed?

When I was applying for Google AdSense using this website, my content was very diverse, as it is at the minute.  I read around, looking for why I wasn’t getting accepted.  Here are some of the things I found:

• Be specific – your website, or blog, needs to be about a single topic.  For example, my personal website was about lots of little things that interest me, rather than one specific topic.  Without being specific, the adverts you display will not be related entirely to your content.  This means that Google would be failing its paying customers, as well as it penalising any revenue you wish to make.
• Profitable – the topic you choose should be one which is actually going to earn money.  This may sound a little silly, but if you are creating a website on something that gets really low traffic, you will probably not get accepted.  The difficulty comes when choosing something that will make you money that isn’t over-saturated with other websites.  An example, creating a website on making money online.  You will more than likely get accepted, but your earnings will be low – there is just too much competition.
• Own your domain – this is not one of the reasons why I wasn’t accepted initially.  I own all my domains.  But you must own a domain before you can even apply – free ones don’t count.

Putting your site together

So you have decided you have a website, or are going to create a website with the intention of making money from it using Google AdSense.  You may be thinking great – I’ll buy a domain, register it, and upload a holding page to let people know what’s in store, and bam – let the money roll in.

Wrong!  To get accepted you must have a site that is functional.  Your website doesn’t have to be complete, but you should have sufficient content that you provide some information which will be useful to your (potential) readers.  Yaro Starak refers to these as being pillar articles.  This content defines the structure of your site, from which you can grow content from.

I employed this strategy to a site I am working on – a Couple’s Guide to Disney.  The main pages you see in the first level of the navigation bar are the pages I started with.  These pages built a framework which would describe the content of the eventual website, as well as providing some provisional information.

I registered the domain, and had it a week before I submitted it to Google for consideration.  I received my acceptance within 24 hours – I was pretty pleased!

It’s worth noting though, that not all sites are accepted as quickly.  Furthermore, some applications, depending upon where you are from must own your site for at least 6 month.  Check out Google’s terms and conditions when you apply.

The great thing about AdSense is once you are accepted, you can put the code into your websites.  Of course you put it on the site you have applied for.  But, provided your other sides, like this one, abides by the rules laid out by Google, you can also use advert streams there too.

Do you use Google AdSense to monetise your website?  What other advertisement streams do you use?