The hardest part of getting started with Adsense is getting Google to approve your website. In fact, for many, it is easier to get a $100,000 bank loan than it is to get a free Google Adsense account. The key is to be prepared before you apply.
You can’t start using Google Adsense on your pages until you are approved. This means that you must prepare to open an account, before you apply for an account.
The very first thing you must do is read Google’s Terms of Service (TOS). If your site doesn’t fall within the guidelines that Google sets out, it will be denied. Furthermore, even after you are approved and you start running Google ads on your site, if you break the TOS, you will be removed, and possibly banned, from the program.
Specifically, what you are looking for is the Program policies, which can be found at http://www.google.com/adsense. Scroll to the bottom of the page, and click on then Program Policies link. The first thing to note is that Google will not accept any site that is not complete.
This means that you can’t have any pages that are ‘under construction.’ All of the pages must be complete, and all of the links must be working. Make sure that all of your graphics are also appearing correctly, because even a broken graphic can prevent you from getting approved.
Google also has a set of Quality Guidelines that must be adhered to before you can be approved. These guidelines, along with the program policies, will tell you exactly what you can and can’t have on your site, and what is expected of you and your site in terms of meeting the qualifications for a Google Adsense account. You can find these guidelines at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer =35769.
One mistake that so many would-be Adsense publishers make is not reading the TOS, the Program Policies, and the Webmaster Guidelines. Google lays these out in very specific terms, so there is no doubt as to the rules. They are also very serious about these rules.
Often, people skip this step in the preparation – reading the rules – work hard to build a site, only to be disapproved by Google, or to be approved, but then banned from the program later.
Don’t let this happen to you. These are rules that you must not only follow in order to get approved, but must continue to follow in order to stay in the
program. You don’t want to spend days and weeks putting together sites, only to
get kicked out of the program later. Google is very serious about this.
Once you’ve read the rules, and made sure you understand them, the next part of
the preparation is doing research to find out which topics will be the most
profitable for you, and getting the site built. We will cover these topics in more
depth in a later article, but for now, you just need one website that will be
approved by Google.
Remember that you only have to get approved for one site in order to get in the
program, and from there on, you can publish as many sites as you want, on a
wide variety of topics, and use Google Adsense on them, from the one account
that you have been approved for.
While many just put up a website that will meet Google’s standards, without
doing any research in order to get approved, you could also take a little longer,
and go ahead and build a site that you can use to target the high paying keywords.
This is totally up to you, and it really doesn’t matter much which direction you go,
as long as the site will get you approved for a Google Adsense account.
I usually recommend creating and building a blogger.com blog, and apply using
that one. You may not know this, but Google owns Blogger...