One way to make money with your writing is to set up a blog or a web site and add Google AdSense. If you get enough visitors and clicks, you could start making a few dollars or more each day. However, it’s important to learn the rules of the AdSense game. If you’re not careful and end up doing something that violates the TOS, Google could boot you from the program.
Here’s a list of 8 things you should never do:
1. NEVER click on your ads for any reason. Don’t tell your friends, family, or co-workers to click on the ads either. Google is pretty good about sniffing out click fraud.
2. Don’t keep refreshing your page. Google pays for clicks, but the page impressions matter a great deal too. A page impression is whenever someone looks at your site. It’s OK to look at your own web site and refresh it if you’re tweaking the design, but if you keep refreshing it over and over again to increase page impressions, Google isn’t going to be very pleased with you.
3. Don’t trick people into clicking your ads. An example of such trickery would be to make your ads blend into the content to such a degree that it’s easy for people to mistake them for navigational links. Making an ad look like an image caption is a bad idea, too.
4. Don’t mess with the AdSense code. You can choose the colors and styles when Google walks you through the ad creation process, but that’s about it. Cut and paste the ad into place, then leave it at that. Google frowns on ad tweaking.
5. Don’t encourage people to click on the ads. Asking people to click on your ads is a big no-no. Don’t even have little gimmicky images pointing at the ads.
6. Don’t send AdSense ads in email. Apparently since you can format email with HTML, some people got the clever idea of pasting AdSense ads in their messages. Not good. AdSense should be displayed on web sites only.
7. Don’t use paid-to-surf or paid-to-click programs. Google doesn’t like anything that artificially generates traffic and clicks. Keep it real.
8. Don’t display more than three ad units on each page. I take that to mean displaying an AdSense ad in each blog post is out of the question.
Now that we’ve gone over a bunch of the don’ts, here’s one important thing you SHOULD do:
Post a privacy policy. Recently Google made it a requirement for all AdSense publishers to post a privacy policy on their web sites. It’s not an option. Don’t worry, though, it’s not hard: You can have a policy created at Serp Rank.
There’s a lot more to know, but those are some of the biggest issues. Check out Google’s official AdSense Program Policies to learn more. It will also tell you what kind of content is and isn’t allowed on your AdSense pages.
