Google Adsense Approval
Applying for a Google Adsense account can be a pain in the neck these day. In contrast with other advertising companies, registration only takes 2-3 days, but it is not the case with Google, some user s may take up to a year before receiving an account. To my knowledge, bloggers from China and India must have a website 6 months or older to be qualified to apply for AdSense.
My Experience with Google Adsense
With my own personal experience with Google Adsense, it took me about 7 trials before I got into the program, and it was something ridiculous and stupid that I hope Google will work on it to improve their service. When I first applied, I was rejected due to my site contains “promotion of compensations programs/websites”. I was like, it wasn’t even listed on their policy but anyway, I took down the content and re-apply, and the same rejection email was sent to me. At first, I thought could be, that I did not completely remove the content and may had remains in my cache pages, so I took some time checking every little corner of my website and it was clear to me I did not have the content. I tried to contact Google support team, but there isn’t any way to get in touch with them, you can only look for help in their forum from fellow Adsense peers, and if you’re in luck, a Google employee may reply you with an answer. After I received some advice from the forum, and reapplied, I was still sent with a rejection letter saying that I had the same content. I was really mad at the system and left searching for other Adsense alternatives. Then, I found Chitika and InfoLinks, but the payout and relevant of ads wasn’t satisfying my needs, so I went back to Google Adsense and gave it another shot, this time, I wanted to try something new, and so I sign up with a brand new email. I am guessing, if I had deleted the content and I am sure of it, but Google still kept rejecting me with same reason, it could be that my previous website had been indexed with the same email account and was never re-index. In just a few days, I was approved when I login to my AdSense account. I dint receive any notification emails that I was approved; I was just able to login to my AdSense account without any restriction. So if you had receive a rejection email the first time for being “lack of content, contains pornography, or broken any Google policies before, try signing up again with a new emails, and of course you have to remove the undesired content by Google or fulfill the requirement.
Bottom line is, i think if you’re rolling with Google Adsense, you will see much better pay and more relevant ads to your website than most advertising companies. Just think about it, if you’re trying to advertise your business, who would you go with?
Infolinks, an alternative to Adsense
What is InfoLink and how does it work?
Are you struggling to make a dollar out of Google AdSense or even trying to get into the program? Ever heard of Infolinks? Infolinks work fine as an alternative to AdSense, however can be slightly different and can increase your CTR depending on your style of blogging. Unlike most pay per click companies that display ads mostly on your heading, sidebars or footers, Infolinks have a different approach to ads emphasizing their ads on links as you probably already knew that based on the name Infolinks. How Infolinks work is that it will automatically pick up the major keywords on your article and embed ads on it. One few things that I really like about Infolinks is the quality of their ads. As you can see, I have also used Infolinks on this site, if you just hover over the links, you can see the type of ads that are displaying. While they may not be very relevant to your topics, the ads look attractive enough to encourage clicks.
Getting Approved
Lets be honest, an average internet user is not stupid, most of them are aware that many ads actually leads to a harmful site flooded with spyware and virus. That is where Infolinks have their advantage on unlike some advertising company that display ads such as “Download”, “Local singles around you”(well maybe if your visitor is a desperate one) The ads actually look legit but it is just the matter if the ads actually interest your visitor. Unlike Adsense strict application, registering for Infolinks is quick and easy where you sign up and the Infolinks team will review your site within a few days and you are in for the program. If you ever try to sign up for Adsense these day, where it will take more than months, in some cases 6 months +! As long as you keep up with their policy and do not have any illegal content in your site such as pornography, gambling, illicit drugs, or etc, you should be approved within a week or maybe within 24 hours. For some reason, Adsense will try to find a whole lot of reason to reject your site, for example, your site is not old enough or you do not have sufficient contents. You may even find that, when applying for Adsense, you have lost track of your application. “Besides the long approval wait, you will realize, “That is it, I am sick of waiting, I gotta do something about it” You will find that there are no ways to contact the Google Team directly to sort out your issues, you can only relies of fellow peers through their forum.
Incentives Clicks?
Since Infolinks focuses on link advertisement, you will find yourself to receive better click through rate just because that is how most people browse, they are more likely to click on a link that are relevant instead of look at the sidebars. Once you have an Infolinks account, you can start to customize, how your Ads would appear within your article, whether it is double lines or dotted lines, the color of the links and the amount or links. Some people often use the dotted lines and the color blue instead to hide the facts that the link is actually a link and not ads. This adjustment can lead your visitor to click on the Ads thinking it will redirect to another page of your website. In my opinion, it is better to keep things honest and straight for your web credibility rather than being all sneaky . While you may benefit from it on the short term, having a high credibility for your site is far more important on the long run and to a successful and trusted website. Hope you enjoy this article and good luck with blogging!
10 WordPress plugins every blog should have
#1 HeadSpace2
HeadSpace is a very useful seo plugins that manage various seo tasks such as managing Page titles, Tags and keywords, Theme-specific plugins, Description, tracking code, and many other functions that could improve your overall seo. Setting up HeadSpace is very easy; however, to maximize its potential can be a little tricky. Below, is a HeadSpace2 video tutorial by Cenay from install to setting HeadSpace which i found to be very informative.
#2 SEO Friendly Images
SEO Friendly Images is a plugin that automatically add relevant ALT and TITLE attributes to all your images. This plugin give you the upper hand when comes to image search. Google and other search engine will pick up the ALT attribute to match a search, improving your overall SEO
#3 Google XML Sitemaps
Google XML Sitemaps, this an awwsome plugin that generate a XML sitemap where you can submit to search engine to help you index your blog. Plus, this plugin will notifies every search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com everytime you create a new content on your site. A MUST HAVE!
#4 W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is one of the best caching plugin available for WordPress. This plugin pretty much increase the speed of your website by reducing page loading time and lags while increasing server performance. A long loading website and hurt your SEO where search engine algorithms will separate your website from others reducing your overall rankings.
#5 SexyBookmarks
SexyBookmarks is a social networking plugin. This plugin allow your readers to submit post or page to various social networking site such as Facebook, Twitter, Thumblr, Digg, and many others that I never even heard about. There are also many social networking plugin out there that works just as good, but personally I choose this plugin because I like how it looks, you may find other plugins that suit your blogs.
#6 Akismet
No blogs are spam free without Akismet. This plugin checks your comment for possible spams and reveal suspicions links and notifies you where you can take action upon it.
#7 Exploit Scanner
Exploit Scanner said it all, this plugin searches everything from post to comments looking for anything suspicious that can harm your website. Some of you might not consider this plugin because you don’t really have anything to hide, but it is better not to take any chances of your password and etc leaked out where it can change your whole website overview, and it may be a pain in the ass to restore it especially if you do not have a backup file. This plugin, does not remove anything, it informed the user and it is up to you to take the action, so you don’t have to worry about anything being deleted.
#8 SEO Smart Links
SEO Smart Links increase your SEO by simply adding interlink to keywords in your post. Search engine like Google loves to see interlinks in your site, thus increase your SEO. You can also add affiliate links to your post increasing your revenue = Thumbs up!
#9 SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2
This is a great addition to your website SEO. This plugin increase the number of pages indexed by adding a special link to search result. This plugin also include a keyword research capabilities where you can find what keyword are popular and create a new post using those keywords.
#10 SEO Slugs
SEO Slugs plugin automatically removes words like ‘in’, ‘the’, ‘a’ from post slugs to improve your SEO. You can also remove these words manually, but this plugin will come in handy when you have a lot of posts and pages to manage.
