Google Adsense - Steps for Approval

Well I have just had my Google Adsense account approved, and, I thought I would share my experience with you. It will also give me the opportunity to experiment with placing ads on my blog in different places. I am going to start by placing one at the top to the right, which you can hopefully see now, and, then a banner advert across the centre halfway through the prose, and finally, just to be way over the top I will post another jumbo advert at the bottom. Feel free to let me know your thoughts, or, ask any questions. Oh and, my usual caveats apply to check all the facts, and, perform your own research. 

So how did I get here? I first applied for an Adsense account one month after I started my blog. At that time I had three posts. About five days after my application, I received an email from Google stating I had been unsuccessful with the most likely cause being that there was insufficient content in my posts for their web crawlers to assess. I have since read that you probably require a minimum of five posts, and, six months of activity to be considered, although no one really knows as it is the mighty Google who determine their admittance criteria. 

It’s difficult to know what made me reapply for an Adsense account, but for whatever reason, I did so about five days ago. The first major difference was that I received a response within a day stating “my application had been successfully reviewed”. Obviously this was an occasion of great joy. The email went on to say “I should create my first ad unit, and, place the code within my blog posts”, but because my account was not fully active the ads would be blank. Armed with this information, I went into the earnings centre on the blogger menu to access my Adsense account. This is where my joy turned to despair! Clicking on the view dashboard link just brought up a web page telling me my account was not valid because it was still in the review process. Fortunately it was getting late, so I retired to bed in the hope that it would take a few hours for the systems to talk to each other, and, enable my account.

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The next morning I leapt out of bed (I never normally have this level of enthusiasm), to see if I would be able to create an ad unit.  Alas not.  I tried several times throughout the day but to no avail.  Twenty five hours after the first email, I then received another email, containing the same wording as the previous one.  However, the good news was that now, I was able to log into my Adsense dashboard, and, create my ad units, and, thus paste the code within my blogs, which was good news.  As the email stated the ads were blank, and, hence were just white space on the page.  I placed the ad code at the bottom of my posts so it did not really affect reading the content, just a few more blank lines at the bottom the blog.

At this point I was prepared for the long haul, and, did not expect to hear from Google again for quite some time, but to my immense surprise after another 25 hours I received another email stating “Congratulations – my account has been fully activated”.  I must admit this was a great surprise, as my posts in all fairness get very minimal viewings!  As an aside on the days when my account was being reviewed my views per day were about 100, compare to my normal 3 (if I am lucky).  I presume this was down to the Google web crawlers assessing the site.

And here we are, all fully functional.  I must admit now though it is all a bit of an anticlimax.  The reality has set in that I am not going to get any clicks on my ads, because I do not think my posts have enough traffic.  It appears that to actually initiate a payment to your bank account you require earnings of £60.00, which at the moment seems like a million miles away, but hey I can live in hope.

So there we have it.

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