Understanding Google Approval Process

You must get your own website or blog ready before you apply for the Google AdSense program. If you do not have a website, you can register a web hosting package and get a domain at Godaddy.com.

Once your website is ready, you can apply for a Google AdSense account. Google has never publicly published details of its approval process. Here we provide you tips that you should follow to ensure a high possibility of getting your AdSense account approved.

Tips on Getting Your AdSense Account Approved

No one knows about Google approval process. In fact, no one knows how Google decides to accept or reject a site. However, one thing for sure – the main criterion for Google approval process is always the content of the website! Many sites got rejected because they didn’t provide enough or any good content at all. Those websites that consist of links that do not offer any informational content will also be rejected.

Google approval process approves websites that have significant real content. These could be in the form of articles, analyses of various topics, reviews and much more. If your website is solely focus on selling products and services, you could include informational articles about your products or your industry. You can also include reviews of your products.

Another reason why some business websites do not qualify for the program is that these businesses are in a very narrow niche market and the only Google AdSense ads they will get are from their niche market competitors. Competitor ads would be blocked by these businesses, filtered by Google, or both. So an AdSense program that serves no ads serve no purpose.

Similarly, website that focus only on links for generating search engine traffic do not provide any content at all. These sites may rack up fairly high traffic scores and so forth, but they do not qualify for AdSense.

One of the best and simplest strategies is to include at least 30 to 40 informational articles of 400 to 450 words on you website and update them from time to time. Writing these articles yourself may be a daunting task. However, the good news is that there are considerable websites that offer articles for free, and plenty of professional writing resources who can not only write high quality material for you, but can especially optimize that material to work well with search engines and the “qualification” processes for systems like AdSense.

Note
Google updates the AdSense policies regularly and you should read them before you submit your application to ensure a high possibility of getting your AdSense account approved. Please read the Google AdSense policies

AdSense Money Formula Revealed

A lot of people would like to know the success AdSense money formula. The simple formula below is one fundamental formula that you should know.

Money = sum ( [Price Per Click] X [Number of Click] )

Logically speaking, if you want to make more money, you have to either increase the number of clicks or the price per click. If you do one or the other you can make more money from the program.

Make More AdSense Money By Boosting the Number Of Click

Increase the number of clicks on your ads is the most obvious strategy that will make more money for you. There are two ways you can boost the number of click:

1. Getting more traffic for your web site,
2. Make your ads more clickable and position them at the right place.

Getting traffic takes time and efforts. It‘s also a lot of hard work. There are several techniques that you can use to generate more traffic to your web site and hence make more AdSense money. These techniques are:

• Submit your web site to search engine and optimize your web site for search engine.
• Increase link popularity by link exchange, article marketing, directory submission and press release.
• Paid Advertising through classified advertising, banner advertising or search engine advertising.
• Participate in forums/groups related to the content of your web site.
• Add comments to other blogs.

Making your ads more clickable is another way to increase your earnings. It is relatively easy to do because you can adjust your ad format almost immediately. You can do the following adjustments to your ad format to improve your click through rate (CTR):

• Make them more noticeable by positioning your AdSense ads on top of your AdSense page.
• Google states that the most effective ad formats are 336×280 larger rectangle, the 300×250 inline rectangle, and the 160×600 wide skyscraper. However you should choose the best ad format that works for your web site. This requires tracking and testing.
• Create a custom palette that best suites your web site. In general, you can follow the following settings:
  • Border color : no border or background color of your website
  • Background color : background color of your website
  • Link color : color of your links
  • URL color : black
  • Text color : black or color of your main content

Make More AdSense Money by Targeting the Higher-Paying Keywords

You can create unique, relevant and quality contents that target at the higher-paying keywords to increase your average price per click (CPC). Higher CPC means that you can make more money even the CTR remains unchanged. You should find out which keyword variations for a topic pay more. Often the more specialized variations and phrases pay more than the generic terms.

You can increase your CPC by reducing the occurrence of lower-paying ads. You can use AdSense competitive filter mechanism to filter out the ads that you don’t want to be shown on your web site. It is suggested by others that showing fewer ads on a page will result in higher-paying ads displayed on your web site. A lot of publishers report that they make more Adsense money if they remove ads completely from pages with few or no clicks. Again you have to test whether this strategy works in favor of you or not.

As you can see, it involves a lot of hard work if you want to make extra Google AdSense money. You need to put in your time and effort to make it happen.

Using Google AdSense without Your Own Website

If you don’t have your own website to start with or if you don’t want to use Google AdSense on your website, you might want to consider blogging. A blog can be like a online journal wherein you make daily “journal” entries or it can be more like a newsletter set up to inform or communicate with other people. There are several blogging sites on the Internet that allow you to have targeted Google AdSense ads running on your own blog pages. A few of the most popular blog sites are:

• Blogger.com
• Bloggerparty.com
• Writingup.com

You can also search blogsearch.google.com for an extensive list of blogs. Not all of these carry Google AdSense ads. It
is all up to you whether or not to include AdSense ads in your blog and make money with it. How to Promote Your Blog When You Are Using it to Earn Google AdSense Dollars

You could write the great American novel and if there is nobody reading it, you won’t make any money. You have to
attract people to visit your website. You need to get traffic for you blog in order for you to make money. It is very logical that the more people or traffic you get, the higher chances that you get more clicks from your visitors.

There are several ways to get traffic for your blog.

• You should include your blog URL in your email signature.This way you get to promote your blog for free.
• You can link your blog with other blogger’s site and ask them to link to yours.
• You can comment on other people’s blogs but only do it if it is sincere. This will increase your overall traffic as you will pique others’ curiosity and they will want to read your blogs.
• You can write a newsletter and offer a free email subscription to your blog.
• You can put a referral button on your site.
• You can put an AdSense for Search button on your site.

What Are Google URL Channels and How to Organize Them in Google AdSense?

If you have your Google AdSense ads showing on multiple sites, you can use Google URL Channels to monitor the performance of your AdSense ads on each site. Google URL Channels allow you to view detailed information about the performance of your AdSense for each site. The following steps show you how you should organize them.

1. Suppose you have two websites showing Google AdSenseads, one is called yourweb.com and the other one is called yourweb2.com, you would like to track which one is getting more clicks.
2. Log in to your AdSense account and click on AdSense for Content.
3. Please scroll down the page until you see Channels and then click on manage channels.
4. Under Manage URL Channels you would type yourweb.com and click on Create New Channel.
5. You will immediately see yourweb.com in the Active URL Channels dialogue box.
6. Now type in yourweb2.com in the same channel text box and again click on Create New Channel.
7. You now have two channels and you will be able to track your progress on each channel.

Google URL Channel Reports

You can view channel reports from the Advanced Report page under the Reports tab.

1. Choose AdSense for Content, choose the date range and then select the Channels Data radio button.
2. Choose any number of active channels by holding down the CTRL key.
3. Next, click on Display Report.

It’s as simple as that. Now you would be able to track the performance of your AdSense ads on multiple sites using Google URL channels.

What Is An Invalid Click and How Will It Affect You?

More than anything, an invalid click is a big no-no and it will get your account terminated faster than anything else.
Having said that, what are invalid clicks? The following scenarios generate invalid clicks.

• When publisher clicks on their own ads for any purposes, an invalid click is recorded.
• When publisher asks others to click on their ads for any purposes, an invalid click is recorded.
• When someone uses robots or automated software to generate click, an invalid clicks is recorded.
• When any deceptive practice is used to generate clicks, those generated clicks are invalid clicks.

Google AdSense has state of the art technology to monitor its AdSense program. They know whether or not a particular
AdSense site is generating invalid clicks. Invalid clicks raise the advertiser’s costs and hence Google won’t tolerate
this. Invalid clicks are unnecessary as there are plenty of money-making opportunities with valid clicks. With an
optimized website, useful content, and attractive ads, there’s no reason for anybody to even entertain the idea of
using invalid clicks.

Protect Yourself From Invalid Clicks

You are aware that clicking on your own AdSense ads will lead to the termination of your Google AdSense account. However, because you are constantly working on your AdSense web site, you fear that someday you may
click on the AdSense ads accidentally. There are two simple ways that can protect you from clicking on

your AdSense Ads accidentally. Please read How To Protect Yourself From Clicking Your Ads Accidentally. You can also find a list of Don’ts for Using the Google AdSense Program that may give you some ideas on how you can protect yourself from invalid clicks.

Google AdSense Account Terminated For Invalid Clicks

There are few honest Google AdSense website owners have their AdSense accounts terminated for Invalid clicks. These honest webmasters certainly did not click on the AdSense ads themselves and they certainly did not violate any Google AdSense terms and conditions. Their accounts were terminated unfairly. They managed to get their account reinstated. If your account is terminated unfairly, you can follow this detail guideline on how to get your Google AdSense account reinstated.

How Does Google Smart Pricing Affect AdSense Publisher?

What is Google Smart Pricing? Google Smart pricing is designed to help advertisers to improve the effectiveness of their advertising campaign over Google content network. As a result, Google is making less money since the cost to advertisers is reduced. Indirectly, smart pricing affects the earnings of AdSense publishers because they are paid lesser.

Unfortunately, smart pricing is not just affecting publisher’s earning on one AdSense site, it affects the entire
AdSense account. Regardless of the high performance of other AdSense sites across the AdSense account, if one of your AdSense sites is smart priced, all of your AdSense sites will be affected.

AdSense publishers are earning less because of the low eCPM. You could find AdSense publishers revealing their eCPM in a forum when their accounts have been smart priced. They normally have low eCPM ranging from $1.50 to $5. However, low eCPM does not necessary implied that your account has been smart priced. AdSense sites in lower earning niche generally have lower CPM.

What can AdSense publishers do to avoid being smart priced?

The best way to ensure your AdSense site is not affected by smart pricing is to create a good environment for advertisers and your readers. Creating compelling content for your targeted readers is as important as providing good user experience on your site. The more targeted traffic to your AdSense site, the better quality clicks for advertisers.

Some AdSense publishers maintain good quality AdSense sites as well as “less than quality” sites under a single AdSense
account. They are facing higher risk of getting their AdSense account smart priced because any of the “less than quality” AdSense site does not perform well could be smart priced easily. The increase in revenue of putting these “less than quality” websites could be less than the loss of revenue due to smart pricing on the entire AdSense account.

The smart pricing system should not only be viewed as a system to protect the interests of AdWord advertisers. It is
also a system that indirectly benefits quality AdSense sites in the long term. The smart pricing system could force some AdSense publishers to drop those ‘low quality’ sites. Perhaps with more quality sites, this could boost the advertisers’ confidence to advertise in Google content network. Hence, it will bring more competition for keywords. Eventually, AdSense publishers will benefit from the high paying keywords.

Wordpress Plugins for Google Adsense

Wordpress allows bloggers to easily integrate Google Adsense inside wordpress using plugins. Google Adsense has become the most popular online contextual advertising program and proper custom integration with Wordpress can help to increase Adsense earnings.

Google Adsense Wordpress Plugins

Listed below are 10 best Adsense plugins which help you work smarter with wordpress.

• Adsense Deluxe – offers advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your WordPress posts. Easily switch all AdSense ads to a new color scheme across the entire site.
• Adsense Injection – inserts Adsense code randomly into a pre-existing blog. Takes a random paragraph (or br tag) break in your article and inserts adsense code. It does one per story on multi-post pages (home, archive, category) and let�s you pick how many to show on single post pages.
• Adsense Inline – inserts Google adsense in blog posts.
• Shylock Adsense WordPress plugin – allows you to insert Adsense ads on your blog without modifying the template. Set it up to show different Adsense ads for articles older then ‘n’ days. E.g. insert a 468�60 ad at the bottom of a new article for regular readers, and replace with higher paying 336�280 ad after 7 days for the search engine visitors.
• Adsense Beautifier – makes your Adsense look beautiful by placing images beside them to increase your clicks (CTR) and subsequent Adsense earnings. (May not be compliant with Adsense TOS now)
• AdSense Widget for WordPress Sidebar – Google AdSense widget designed for the new WordPress Sidebar Widgets plug-in.
• AdRotator Wordpress Plugin – rotates your adsense ads with other affiliate programs like Chitika Eminimalls wherever you want. Helps to reduce ad blindness and test different ad formats and affiliate programs.
• Adsense Earnings Wordpress Plugin – displays your adsense earning details within wordpress admin panel.
• AdSense Manager – is a Wordpress plugin for managing AdSense ads on your blog. It generates code automatically and allows positioning with Widgets.
• AdSense Sharing Revenue and Earnings System – allows you to view your adsense earnings and share your adsense impressions with your friends and co-authors.
• Author Adsense Wordpress Plugin – allows blog authors to enter their Google Adsense Publisher ID and have ads displayed on their own posts generating revenue. Admin can set the ratio of author�s ads to admin ads.
• Author Adsense MU Plugin – Webmasters of Wordpress MU sites can generate adsense revenue from hosted blogs as this script allows you to set an admin ID and the ratio of admin ad�s to blogger�s ads.
• Google Ad Wrap – wraps posts and comments inside Section Targeting tags for better targeted ads.

Support and upgrades are provided by the respective authors of these wordpress plugins. Use at your own risk. If you know of more Adsense wordpress plugins you like, let me know in comments and I can add them to the list.

Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Effective Adsense Link Units Optimization

Most webmasters and bloggers make money from their website through Google Adsense and I’ve noticed that not all of them include Adsense link units as part of their contextual monetization strategy.

It’s useful to note that Adsense link units can and will help you to generate more income from your website, if you are able to integrate them perfectly within the overall site design and layout.

Google has recently updated their Adsense program policy and publishers are now allowed to place three link units on a single page instead of just one:

As we’ve noted in the past, link units are a great way to provide relevant, user-friendly ads in hard-to-fit locations on your site. With the new opportunity to place three link units — and the plethora of link unit formats — we hope you’ll find great ways of incorporating this unique ad format on your site.

While this change won’t drastically improve your monetization potential, it does offer more placement options for publishers. I thought would be helpful to create a basic primer on how to use Adsense Link Units for your own website or blog.

If you’ve never used link units before, this might be a good time to experiment and find out how they work for your website and monetization goals.

What are Adsense Link Units?

Basically, link units are simply a collection of four to five links within a horizontal or vertical format. When clicked, each of these links will open up into a webpage that consists of nothing but Google ads.

Characteristics of the Adsense Link Unit

• Link units are unobtrusive. They do not take up much space and can be easily integrated into any single webpage. Their small size and design will not affect the viewer experience of content on your website.
• Link units do not seem like ads. Unlike other contextual ads, link units can be skillfully blended to look like navigational units on any website. This increases the possibility of click-throughs.

How do you Make Money with Adsense Link Units?

Unlike other Adsense ad units, you’ll only make money when the visitor clicks on the link unit and then clicks on any link within the link page. In other words, you’ll need two visitor clicks before you actually make any money.

This means that, in order to maximize your earning potential, you’ll need to get as many people to click on the link units as possible in the hope of receiving a larger percentage of second clicks.

The link units earnings model simply emphasizes the importance of ad blending and placement. From my experience with link units, I believe that one can easily see a decent number of ad clicks if your link unit is well blended on your site.

Setting up Adsense Link Units for your Website

First of all you’ll need to signup for Google Adsense if you haven’t already done so. After which, log into your account and then click on Adsense Setup and then Adsense for Content. You’ll come to the following screen:

Select the Link Unit and click Continue. You’ll then be able to choose a horizontal or vertical link unit while determining the number of links that will show up in each unit.

After which, you’ll have the option of setting up a channel to track the performance of the link unit. Create a channel by clicking on the Add New Channel link at the bottom of the screen and give it an appropriate name that suits your site.

And you’re done! Just copy the code to your site template and the link units should show up immediately.

Optimization Guidelines for Adsense Link Units

Most of these optimization tips apply to Adsense ad units as well so they may not be new to you:

• Text color for the link unit should be the same as the link color for your website.
• Remove the ad borders and ensure that the background color matches your site. This will increase the potential for blending and clickthroughs.
• Above the fold placement or placement of link units near the top of any webpage will work best for link units.
• Avoid Ad Congestion and clutter. Link units should not be placed too closely to other advertisements because they may be easily overlooked by visitors. Link units work best when placed to navigational links or as standalone units.
• Optimize for Search Traffic. Link Units work best with visitors from search engines and should be placed on pages which receive the most consistent search traffic, even if you don’t want to use them on a site wide basis.
• Use Ad Channels. Ad channels allow you to measure the performance of each link unit you use and allows for comparative analysis. Essential if you want to know which link unit to drop and which to maintain.
• Mirror your site link structure. One useful method to improve your link unit click through rate is place your link unit beneath or beside your on-site navigational links. This conceptually makes them blend in extremely well although they may confuse visitors.

Four Link Unit Placement Examples

Adsense link unit placement can be broadly divided into four formats, each involving different usages of both horizontal and vertical link units.

I’ve included several screenshots of each format and have included a brief commentary on how you can use them for your own website.

1. Horizontal Link Units as Menu/Navigation Links

In my opinion, this is by far the best way to use link units because they do appear to be exactly like menu links and will attract navigational clicks from visitors who are trying to find more information from your website.

You can include the link units within your header, just beneath your header or only on individual webpages or blog post pages. The key point is to keep them above the fold to ensure maximum visibility.

2. Horizontal Link Units as Footer links

Footer link units are the most unobtrusive and will attract clicks from visitors who browse or scan your website from top to bottom. They can be a useful addition to other link units placed above the fold.

I’ve used horizontal link units as a footer link on Dosh Dosh for about a week and the results have been rather satisfying, given its almost indiscernible placement on the homepage.

I initially put them up as an experiment and I have found that this link unit makes me a few dollars a day, which is not too bad at all.

3. Vertical Link Units as Category Links

I’ve seen some blogs and websites use vertical Link Units as some sort of a category unit in their sidebar. I think these vertical ad units generally perform poorly in comparison to the horizontal link units, which are more well blended and less ad-like.

Unless you’re willing to create a linking structure similar for the link units (see the first screenshot on top), they are likely to stand out like a sore thumb.

Then again, the vertical link unit’s performance may depend on your actual site design and layout so you’ll need to test them to see if they do attract ad clicks from visitors.

4. Vertical Link Unit within Content

I’ve come across very few websites which include a link unit within actual content of a web page and I always wonder how they are performing for these publishers.

Most webmasters would rather include an Adsense ad rectangle instead of a link unit because it only provides one click earnings, instead of the two-clicks which you need from link units.

Giving up a prime in-content spot to link units is not a good idea and it might actually add to the overall clutter of your webpage.

Disadvantages of Adsense Link Units: Factors to Consider

Some have suggested that very well-blended Adsense Link Units are unethical because they can be made to appear as legitimate navigational links which have a high chance of inducing clicks from visitors who are searching for information on your site.

A visitor might click on the link thinking that it is a category or menu button of some sort, only to be led to a Google Adsense page full of links.

While the links might be relevant to the link unit text and your site, some visitors might not like the feeling of being ‘tricked’ when they click on the link unit.

Another issue to consider is that these link units are exit points which siphon traffic away from your site. Instead of browsing more pages on your site, a visitor might click on a link unit and then click on another link to be led to another site.

The visitor might not return to your website again and the likelihood of this is higher if they are led to a page full of ad links which point to similar websites or even your immediate competitors.

Experiment, Document and Evaluate.

As many have mentioned before, experimentation and analysis is the best to way to ensure that you’ll make money with Adsense. You need to put up ads and measure them over time to assess their performance.

Don’t be reluctant to tweak your ad placement to see if you can achieve higher click through rates. Only by experimenting with different ad formats and placement positions can you find an format that will bring you the most potential for profit.