To get approved for AdSense on WordPress blog is every blogger’s dream, because AdSense offers you rates for ads that no other online based ad agency can offer. So if you have a blog that has enough content in a language supported by AdSense and follows AdSense policies to the point, then you too can apply for AdSense. Since this blog is mainly for YouTubers, I will describe the procedure assuming that You already have an AdSense hosted account for your YouTube channel.
I’m writing this article today because I have not found to this day any straight forward and detailing post that describes how to get approved for AdSense on WordPress blog and also how to implement the ad code correctly. Some of the existing articles on the web might be popular, but they are incomplete too. If you follow any of those as a blog owner you might be misguided like the way I once was. I was misguided in the sense that the article I followed didn’t completely narrate the procedure, so my ad implementation procedure was incomplete which is why I may have to suffer in the near future.
Things you need to do before applYing for AdSense
Firstly you have to choose an effective and unique niche for your blog. But don’t make it so unique that it might be difficult to get viewers for your blog. Then write a few articles, at least 10 to 15 and SEO them. Make sure every article is at least 300 words long. Since we’re talking about how to get approved for AdSense on WordPress blog, you can use Yoast plugin for SEO purpose. This is a nice plugin I have been using for a long time now. This has been so effective for my blog that I get almost 67% of my viewers from search results.
Yes, I confess that I have not been able to send good amount of traffic from my social networking pages and accounts. Also my site currently doesn’t have a huge number of traffic on overall basis. Despite all these a 67% search engines traffic sounds very promising. To be totally honest, earlier I wasn’t interested to SEO my blog and use any plugin like Yoast. This is because, luckily I started to have a good size of traffic for a beginner blog. There’s a saying ‘don’t fix it until it’s broken’, you know. But when I was interested to get approved for AdSense on WordPress blog, I made a few searches on the web regarding the requirements for it.
They say SEO is a must to get approved for AdSense on WordPress blog
So I started to SEO my articles, but I was not exactly happy about it. Because by making my posts search engines optimized I actually lowered down the size of traffic on my blog; at least the statistics said so. Well, nobody can say that I improperly SEO’d my articles. To prove it, I present the following link which describes how to SEO an article and also the description of a YouTube video.
SEO your YouTube videos – How to use AdWords Keyword Planner
Anyway, I’d suggest you to make further search on web to find out whether SEO is mandatory to get approved for AdSense on WordPress blog. In my opinion, it isn’t. If you have a good size of traffic on your blog without search engine optimization, you should naturally be considered for AdSense approval. I’m saying this because the purpose of SEO is to send sizeable traffic to your blog. Now if you’re able to do that through social media pages alone, you may not need to SEO your content. SEO is still preferred over social media pages because these pages may be unpublished any time by the concerned authorities, can’t they? God forbids, should something so unlucky happen, you might have a sharp decline in traffic size to your blog which would be really devastating.
Then again there is something called ‘luck’. If you’re lucky enough, search engines will keep sending traffic to your blog on their own; you don’t have to optimize your articles for that. This happens when your articles provide information people are looking for on the web. For example, when I published the article describing how to properly appeal the termination of YouTube account, I started to have a huge number of traffic on this post right from the very first day. This is because, in those days hundreds of thousands of YouTube accounts were being suspended every now and then.
Things to avoid if you must get the approval from AdSense
If you know how to, or can get it done by someone else, go ahead and SEO your articles. But while doing that you need to keep a few things in mind; you mustn’t be carried away while doing SEO. Keyword density is good, but too much density of that can actually get your blog in trouble. Because I came to know from a reliable source that sites/blogs that use too many keywords may NOT be considered for AdSense approval. Here ‘too many keywords’ means an excessive scale of keyword density and a high number of used tags.
Then again, I also came to know from another source that Google doesn’t like SEO. I partially believed that. This is because SEO is an artificial way to send traffic to a blog. Since ‘most searched keywords’ change every few months, your blog and articles can never be ‘SET forever’ with the aid of SEO. This means, you have to change the focus keywords and other parameters for your articles every few months. If you don’t do that, you can’t possibly consider your articles search engines optimized any longer.
Other tips to get approved for AdSense on WordPress blog
You need to make your blog user friendly and easy to navigate. If readers don’t find where your articles are located, your blog is in a ‘bad’ standing then; you certainly don’t want that. That’s why, my suggestion is that you make your latest posts as your blog’s homepage. In order to do that, while you’re on your site’s WordPress dashboard go to settings and then ‘Reading’. After selecting as following, be sure to hit the ‘Save’ button below.
You got to have a few effective plugins for your blog. The plugins that I’m currently using on this blog are Akismet Anti-Spam, Floating Social bar, Jetpack by WordPress, MaxButtons, Really Simple SSL, Securimage-WP, Simple Social Icons, Sucuri Security, UpdraftPlus, WP-Copyright-Protection, WP-PageNavi and Yoast SEO. You are advised to install and activate them all.
To get approved for AdSense on WordPress blog, you have to follow guidelines and policies provided by AdSense and Google. According to these policies, you’re NOT allowed to post something that describes how to do something unethical like cracking the paid version of a software, invade a Facebook account etc. If such contents are found on your blog, you may not be approved for AdSense, frankly.
Now you may think that once you get the approval, you’ll then start posting these contents. Well, you’re not thinking straight then. Because if any such content is found on your blog while AdSense ads are being displayed, it might be banned by AdSense once and for all. Such activities may even de-index your blog and its pages from search engines. So beware and always follow community guidelines – this practice will save your blog from all hazards.
Is AdSense approval process automatic?
No one knows for sure whether the process of approval for AdSense on WordPress blog is automatic or not. Recently, I have had conversations regarding this with a few experts from AdSense forum. They claim that the AdSense approval process is automatic. I’m neither supporting NOR against this.
Well, all I know is that Google mentions of a thing named ‘crawler’. I’m not sure what this is, because I’m not a big expert on this sort of technical things. This ‘crawler’ thing must be an automatic system or artificial intelligence created by Google that visits a site/blog and determines what the site is about. If this gets a good (passable) signal from the site, it may decide to approve AdSense on WordPress blog.
Most possibly that’s why Google always advises to keep your blog/site easy to navigate. This is because, no matter how much content your blog has, if it isn’t easy to navigate and contents are not where they’re supposed to be, ‘crawler’ might send a negative signal about the blog and hence it may be ‘NOT approved’ for AdSense. So from this point of view, AdSense approval process seems to be ‘automatic’.
Then again, there are numerous arguments against it as well. Recently, one of my friends ran a test on his blog which is mainly on contemporary affairs and his personal experiences. To gather some traffic, he posted a few stories which are not exactly ‘sex stories’, but contained sexually provocative (indicating/meaningful) language. He didn’t use any slang languages or words whatsoever. Then he applied for AdSense on WordPress blog of his. Well, the response was negative. The reason that was given from Google was ‘Adult content’.
Now the question is, how ‘automated system’ would find adult content, if no direct slang was used? This clearly seems to be a verification job by a human. Automatic or not, as an applicant for AdSense on WordPress blog, you really have nothing to do about it. Just make sure that your blog has enough content, it is user friendly and follows Google’s community guidelines and policies. That way you’re basically paving the way for your blog to be approved for AdSense.
The things to do on your hosted AdSense account
We told you earlier we would be assuming that you have an AdSense account to use on a YouTube channel (hosted AdSense). This is because this blog is mainly for YouTubers, so chances are that you too are a YouTuber. Also, I have the experience of upgrading a hosted AdSense account in order to use it on a non-hosted blog. I have not had the experience of creating a new AdSense account to use on a non hosted blog yet. If I ever happen to experience that, I’ll certainly share it with you guys whom I consider my friends. (This post is on how to appeal for and setup AdSense on WordPress blog)
While you’re on your AdSense dashboard, click on ‘My ads’, then click on ‘Other products’. You will see the following page.
Here in the blank box, you need to put the url of your blog and then hit the ‘Submit’ button. After that you’ll be asked to connect your site to AdSense. Basically you’ll be told to copy a few lines of code and paste it at a certain place (between the <head> and </head> tags of the html) of your blog. Simply copy the code by clicking on the ‘Copy code’ button, check the box below and hit the ‘Done’ button. You’ll be shown the following message.
Don’t be assured to see this statement. If your site is going to be rejected for AdSense on WordPress blog, you’ll receive an email within just a week or so stating why it has been rejected (the reason). But if your site is going to be approved, then it will take around two months of time. This is particularly true if you’re in a developing country like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh etc. Now if you’re from a first-world country like USA, UK or Canada, it might be a whole different scenario. In that case you might get the confirmation (congratulations) email just within a week after submission. But most people say it takes several weeks to get approved for AdSense on WordPress blog.
How to implement the code into your WordPress blog
Log into your WordPress blog, be on dashboard. Place your mouse cursor on ‘Appearance’ tab, a menu will emerge where you’ll be clicking on ‘Editor’. You’ll be now on ‘Edit Themes’ page. To the right of the page you’ll see the vertical list of ‘Theme Files’. Just scroll down a little bit and click on ‘Theme Header’ when you see it.
You’re basically about to change the html coding of your site. You need to worry about nothing if you’re a conscious person. But in case you often mix things together up, then you had better ‘backup’ your entire site right this moment. You can use the ‘Updraftplus’ plugin to do that. I, for one, saved the previous html coding of the header file in a word document. Now remember the code you copied from AdSense? You need to paste it now after the opening <head> tag. Before pasting it should look like below:
As you can see from the above image that there is nothing between <head> and <meta charset> tags at the moment. Now you may go ahead and paste the code right between these two things (I do so all the time – it is the best practice indeed). After pasting it should look like following:
Now you need to hit the blue ‘Update File’ button below and get out of there before you mess something up. After this pasting procedure you may visit your site by typing the url of your blog into the address bar of a browser and then hitting ‘Enter’ button on your keyboard. If it shows the homepage correctly, then you can assume that you messed up ‘nothing’ during the editing of the html file. Now it’s time for you to await any responses from The Google AdSense team. (This post is on how to appeal for and setup AdSense on WordPress blog)
What to do if you receive ‘Negative’ response
In case you got negative response from the AdSense team, they will show a reason why they rejected your application. This email usually arrives within one week after appeal. Now after being rejected you need to work on your particular issue. If they say ‘insufficient’ content, then you’ll have to add more articles to your blog. But make sure that each of them are at least 300 words long. The lengthier, the better; provided that they contain useful information or interesting content, NOT unnecessary garbage.
If you have sufficient content on your site, but still they say ‘insufficient content’, then you have to assume that the navigation system on your blog is not user friendly. That’s why they don’t find the content. In that case you should set ‘recent posts’ as the homepage of your blog, also use ‘WP-PageNavi’ plugin.
There might be other reasons as well to reject your appeal for AdSense on WordPress blog. For example, they might say ‘Unsupported language’. In that case, you have to add at least 15 to 20 articles written/composed in a supported language (by AdSense) and then apply again. If you’re confident that you deserve to be included in the AdSense program, then it shouldn’t take more than two or three appeals to get finally approved.
However, remember that when you’re going to be approved for AdSense on WordPress blog, it’s likely to take a lot of time like two months on an average. (This post is on how to appeal for and setup AdSense on WordPress blog)
The first ‘congratulations’ mail from AdSense team
If AdSense team thinks that your site/blog is eligible for their program, they will send a preliminary ‘congratulations’ mail. If you receive this mail, then you just crossed the first level of AdSense approval (according to AdSense forum experts). My first congratulations mail looked like following:
The second stage of AdSense approval might take another two months. Recently I got my second congratulations mail as well. In the meantime I contacted the experts on AdSense forum. But their behavior and suggestions were not appropriate. If you’re interested to know what really happened there you may choose to read the following article. You can also click on the link that follows; this one shows the conversation I had with a few forum people in the first week of this month.
Google AdSense forum: How effective and helpful is it? – Here’s my experiences regarding it.
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/adsense/KAxfgNB2Cl8/jPkq_hzkDgAJ
In the last few days I have received the second congratulations mail four times; on the 8th, the 10th, the 12th and the 14th of January, 2018. Well, each time this mail looked like following:
How to implement ad code on your WordPress site
Every congratulations mail will prompt you to implement ad code on your site. When you first applied for AdSense on WordPress blog, you put some code in the header html of your site, remember? After putting the code it looked like following (although this image is already given above, still for your convenience we provide the picture here again):
By putting this code you basically took necessary actions to activate page level ads. You did your part, the rest is on AdSense team.
Now you will learn to implement ad code in other parts of your site like sidebar, footer etc. You have to first login your AdSense for this purpose. While you’re on your AdSense dashboard, you will have to click on ‘My ads’ on the menu to your left. Now you have to click on the ‘+New Ad Unit’ button. You can now select ‘Text & display ads’ and proceed. You have to give the ad unit a name. I always name ad units according to the date I create them on, because I never create more than 1 ad unit a day. Then you can scroll down by keeping all the defaults and hit the blue ‘Save and get code’ button.
This time you have to copy the ad code and get out of there by hitting the ‘close’ button and logging out of your AdSense account. (This post is on how to appeal for and setup AdSense on WordPress blog)
Putting the ad code in your site’s sidebar
While you have the ad code copied to clipboard, you have to log into your WordPress dashboard. Hover your mouse cursor over the ‘Appearance’ section and then select ‘Widgets’. You’ll probably see the ‘Text’ portion already added to your site’s sidebar, as shown in the following figure:
If ‘Text’ portion is not added yet, you have to add it now. Just scroll down while you’re on Widgets page until you find the ‘Text’ thing. Click on it and select ‘Blog sidebar’ and then hit the ‘Add Widget’ button. Now scroll up and go to the ‘Blog Sidebar’ portion, the thing shown in the above figure. You can drag the text segment to the top if you would like ads to show up at the top of sidebar. Now click on the ‘Text’ section.
You may enter a value (some text) in the title field, I prefer to leave it empty. Then between ‘Visual’ and ‘Text’ tabs click on the ‘Text’ tab and paste the ad code in the big rectangular shaped gap/box provided below. Then it should look somewhat like below:
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