Whooaaaaaaa!!! My Google AdSense account is finally approved!

The beginning of my journey to AdSense approval

I AM SO EXCITED TO HAVE HAD MY GOOGLE ADSENSE ACCOUNT FINALLY APPROVED! I had the good news yesterday 18th June 2015. I want to share the journey to this excitement with you, and if you are still struggling to get your AdSense account approved, you might just pick up one or two helpful tips and soon be able to join me to jubilate.

In the beginning

When I started this blog in January 2013, I decided to apply for AdSense to monetize the blog. To be honest I did not do any research on the requirements for applying for an AdSense account. I just knew that I could use google AdSense to monetize my blog and earn some cash. I just went straight ahead and put in my application, only to be rejected immediately. This is the point where I started to research about AdSense and the requirements to apply. Prior to this, I knew very little about AdSense: only that it could be integrated into my website to earn me money and that I could not click my own ads. 

What I have learned about Google AdSense

Since I started the research, I have learned a lot more about Google AdSense and the requirements to apply. I have learned among other things the following requirements for being admitted in the Adsense program:

1. Adequate and valuable content;

2. Good site design, with clear and logical navigation;

3. Having a privacy policy, contact us page and an about us page;

4. Having a top level domain (TLD);

5. Submitting a site map to google search console and bing webmaster;

6. Linking the account to google analytics.

This post is not a step-by-step guide to applying for an AdSense account but just to share the experiences of my journey towards acquiring an AdSense account. If you want a step-by-step guide, just google “How to apply for adsense account” without the quotes and you will find a number of valuable articles giving insight into what you need to do before applying for a google AdSense account. However, if you read further, you might find some valuable tips to employ in your own attempts to get into the AdSense program, so continue to read.

One rejection after another

Having been rejected, I waited for more than a year before applying for AdSense again, having added a few more posts to my blog (this blog).

This time I got temporary approval immediately and was able to place ad units on my blog. You can imagine how excited I was. However, my excitement was short-lived when the next day I received an email from the Google AdSense team informing me that my AdSense account had been disapproved. You can imagine how frustrated I was. Following is an excerpt from their email:

As mentioned in our welcome email, we conduct a second review of your AdSense application once AdSense code is placed on your site(s). As a result of this review, we have disapproved your account for the following violation(s): We did not approve your application for the reasons listed below Site does not comply with Google policies: We’re unable to approve your AdSense application at this time because your site does not comply with the Google AdSense program policies or adhere to the Webmaster Quality guidelines. It’s our goal to provide our advertisers sites that offer rich and meaningful content, receive organic traffic, and allow us to serve well-targeted ads to users. We believe that currently your site does not fulfill this criteria. Here are some recommendations to help you improve the user experience on your site and comply with AdSense criteria: 

• It’s important for sites displaying Google ads to offer significant value to the user. As a publisher, you must provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.
• Don’t place ads on auto-generated pages or pages with little to no original content.
• Your site should also provide a good user experience through clear navigation and organization. Users should be able to easily click through your pages and find the information they’re seeking.

I made up my mind to investigate those reasons and suggestions the Google AdSense team gave above.

In the meantime, however, having read about the high rejection rate of applications to the AdSense program, I decided to try some other alternatives. First I headed to Infolinks on 19th May, 2015.

Attempts to get into Infolinks

It was easy creating the Infolinks account. It took me under 2 minutes to complete the application process. Once logged in to your blogger account and understanding how to set up the Infolinks code, setting up the code should not last more than a minute. I took more time because I had trouble understanding how to properly set up the code; their instructions are somewhat vague. I will write a post shortly about how to setup the Infolinks code on your blogger blog.

After submitting my application, I received the usual automated email letting me know that my application had been received. I waited with excitement because I was very sure I was going to get into that one. Two days later, I received an email from infolinks, which I opened with expectation, only to find the following message inside:

Dear, Thank you for applying to join Infolinks with http://howtomakemoneyonline-blog.blogspot.com. Upon reviewing your application, our Quality Assurance Team found that it does not meet our Publisher criteria. 
We at Infolinks have the responsibility to keep our advertising environment up to certain standards to ensure the success of Infolinks for our publishers, advertisers and those viewing our ads. We review each website individually and reserve the right to refuse any application. 
Unfortunately, we are not always able to respond to emails requesting more information about these decisions. 
Thank you for your understanding. 
The Infolinks Team

More disappointment!

Well, I had not lost hope yet. I decided to try Infolinks again with my main site. So on 3rd June 2015, I applied. Of course, you would expect the automated email acknowledging receipt of the application, and it did arrive “in time”. Anything wrong with this site? I did not think so. Note that at this time I had prepared the site to use it to apply for google AdSense (it was almost ready, except for a few minor details), so my hopes were high.

However, my hopes were once again dashed:

Hey,

Thank you for your email.

Kindly note that upon reviewing your application, our Quality Assurance team has found that your website is not compatible with Infolinks.

Unfortunately, we are not always able to respond to emails requesting more information about these decisions.

However, if you have any other websites which may be compatible with Infolinks, you are welcome to send me their URLs and I will gladly re-review your application.

 Wow! I thought infolinks was easier to get into?

Back to Google AdSense

I headed back to AdSense. I decided to do a little work on the blog and resubmit to AdSense. I unpublished videos I had copied (legitimately, of course) from smartrebrander.com, (formally royaltepays.com). After this I had nine (9) original posts left and decided to apply for AdSense again. And again I was rejected. Their reasons this time for rejecting my application were slightly different from the other time. Here it goes (you might learn a few things):

Thank you for your interest in Google AdSense. Unfortunately, after reviewing your application, we’re unable to accept you into AdSense at this time. We did not approve your application for the reasons listed below. Insufficient content: To be approved for AdSense and show relevant ads on your site, your pages need to have enough text on them for our specialists to review and for our crawler to be able to determine what your pages are about. To resolve this issue, please work through the following suggestions:

• Make sure that your pages have sufficient text – websites that contain mostly images, videos or Flash animations will not be approved.
• Your content should contain complete sentences and paragraphs, not only headlines.
• Ensure that your website is fully built and launched before you apply for AdSense – do not apply while your site’s still in a beta or “under construction” phase or only consists of a website template.
• Place the ad code on a live page of your website. It does not have to be the main page, but test pages that are empty except for the AdSense ad code will not be approved.
• Provide a clear navigation system for your visitors so that they can easily find all of the sections and pages of your website.
• If you’d like to monetize YouTube videos, please apply for the YouTube monetization program. Note that blogs and websites that contain only videos will not be approved.

The most likely reason why my application was rejected was because of insufficient content since I had only nine posts, I thought. I abandoned monetizing this blog for the time being and took a different route. I went on to attempt to monetize my main website with Google AdSense.

This time I made sure I followed all the instructions in the guides that I had read concerning how to prepare a website for applying for google AdSense: I had a top level domain, used a premium template, had good layout and navigation, had good colour contrast, had at least twenty (20) well-written articles (under different categories), had a privacy policy page, an about page and a contact page, both of which had been redesigned.

Not there yet?!

Armed with all the changes and improvements, I believed that this time I was going to get approved, but I was wrong. Google AdSense rejected my application for the 5th time (I had been denied twice in 2013) on 15th June 2015. After the fifth rejection (please note that the first four disapprovals were for this blog, not the main site), I took to the internet again to find out whether I had missed something, and I think indeed I found what I had missed. I think the problem had to do with the placement of the ads. I obtained this new information about the placement of ads from the Google AdSense website. Here are excerpts:

Ad limit per page

Currently, on each page AdSense publishers may place:

• Up to three AdSense for content units
• Up to three link units
• Up to two search boxes

Publishers may not place more than one “large” ad unit per page. We define a “large” ad unit as any unit similar in size to our 300×600 format. For example, this would include our 300×1050 and 970×250 formats, our 750×200 and 580×400 regional formats, and any other custom sized ad with comparable dimensions. However, keep in mind that placing the maximum number of allowed ad units on a page might result in it looking cluttered. Read our optimization guidelines for tips on where to place your ads. For best practices on custom sized ad units, review our custom-sized ad units page. The above ad limits also apply to mobile sites. In addition, two or more AdSense ads may not appear on the screen at the same time on a mobile site.

I had placed my ads in my main articles. I had placed two large articles, one each at the top and bottom of each article. The bottom articles were near social sharing buttons. I believe these were the reasons why I did not get approval because it was after correcting these problems that I got the approval.

Give media.net a try

At this point I decided to add a third option to my list of ad networks to monetize, so I signed up for an account with media.net. I’m still awaiting their reply, which could take up to a week or even more, according to their request submission confirmation email. In the meantime, I moved on to continue work towards AdSense.

Light at the end of the tunnel

Immediately I discovered the above problems, I set to work correcting them. I placed just one ad within each main article, away from any links, buttons or images.

Finally admitted in the AdSense Program – Don’t give up

On 16th June, 2015 I re-applied and at 5:07 am on 18th June 2015, I got my much awaited approval.

If you have been trying to get AdSense approval for a long time now, I urge you not to give up but to keep on trying.

I hope this article provided you with one or two valuable pieces of information. Let me start making some money now. I hope you join me soon.

Feel free to express your thoughts in the comments section below.