Monday 9 April 2012
How To Start Making Money With Adsense – A Basic Guide For Beginners
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Maybe many of you have experienced the “post-blog launch depression“: you write and write, and write, you research and document your posts very well, yet no acknowledgment comes from the market. With barely any traffic and no subscribers, nobody would ever buy advertising on your site, because there is now benefit for the advertisers so far.
AdSense is one method of monetizing your blog from Day 1. In this series of articles, you’ll learn how to start using it on your blog, from applying and getting accepted, to tracking and fine-tuning your ads. The series will be spread over some two months time, so if you are interested, you can either bookmark this page (press Ctrl+D on your keyboard),
We are going to talk about AdSense, but the general rules can be applied to any contextual advertising system. I’ve tried several contextual advertising networks, and I decided to stick with AdSense, because it was the most successful in terms of global earnings and clickthrough rate (CTR = % of clicks number out of total ad block impressions).
Contextual advertising means that if your articles are about fishing, the ads which will be displayed will be also related to fishing, like you can see in the image below. In this way, people coming to your site in search for information about fishing will be more tempted to click on fishing-related links than on any other kind of ads. This is why contextual advertising is most successful on targeted blogs (or the so-called niche blogs).
AdSense advantages:
- There is no traffic limit barrier to get accepted into the program.
- There is no minimum posts number limit, either.
- It is easy to implement on blogs (WordPress blogs can use the advantage of special AdSense insertion plugins).
- Optimizing the ads for maximum revenue is easy to do: all you need is attention and discipline. No programming skills are required in order to track your results. I will show you how to do this in some of the next articles in this series.
AdSense drawbacks:
- You lose a visitor with every click (you make money from people clicking on ads, but those people are taken away from your site when they click). In case your wish is to build a sticky blog, you should be aware that the stickiest your blog is, the less people would click on your ads. This is a general drawback for all advertising types.
- If ads are plastered all over the place, your blog might look cheap, despite of your good quality content. This can be overcome by appropriate optimization of ads placement on pages. If you look at the example above, you’ll see what I mean.
- It is not available in all languages. This is the list of accepted languages, as listed on the official Google AdSense site.
Applying to AdSense
You need to have one site up and running in the moment of sending your application for AdSense to Google. Once you get accepted, you’ll be allowed to put ads on any blog you wish, without having to submit any of them for additional approval. In order to maximize your chances of getting approved, make sure you properly prepare your blog:
- Write at least 10 posts before applying. There is no such indication on the AdSense official site, but as they say, “it is better to be safe than sorry”.
- Get some links from other sites. Two easy ways to do it: comment on other blogs, or post in some forums with link to your site in the signature. The best would be to find blogs and forums related to your blog topic. When you do this, try to contribute to the conversation, don’t post stupid things like “Cool”, or “Nice”. If you write about that topic, you must be interested in it, so you must have something smart to say. If you spam, you’ll get the undesirable effect of getting banned.
- Submit the best of your posts to social media. You don’t need to get on the front page; you’ll get some traffic from simply submitting and forgetting about it.
Please keep in mind that none of the above is required to get accepted into the program. However, the more legit your site is, the more chances you have to get approved. Besides, you have to take care of your blog’s marketing anyway, if you don’t want to get old waiting for people to discover it by themselves.
This is the application form you need to fill in and submit. Read it carefully, and make sure you also read the Google AdSense Program Policies before you submit your data.
The approval time is somewhere from 3 days to 2 weeks. If you don’t get an answer, don’t submit again your application. In case of rejection, you’ll be notified by Google, so “no news is good news”. Just wait.
Attention! Be aware that you have to be at least 18 years old in order to get accepted. If you are younger, ask one of your parents to apply with their name. I know some cases when people younger than 18 got accepted (probably by mistake, or maybe they gave a fake age in the application) and then they were not able to get their money from Google, because they were too young.
This post was written by: Bhargav Oza
Bhargav Oza is a professional blogger, web designer and front end web developer. Follow him on Facebook
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