Beyond Adsense: Earnings Without The Empire

Account Deactivated

It’s been a little more than a month since my Adsense account was disabled, and I’m not “Feeling Lucky”. I’m just now starting to slowly recover lost revenue from my websites. The past six months my Adsense earnings were slowly growing to the point where I was getting checks regularly. It wasn’t a lot of money but it was steady and I depended on it for hosting costs and the costs of buying and renewing my domains.

A month before my account was disabled, an article from one of my sites went viral through a bookmarking site and the resulting traffic spike was so big it actually crashed my hosts servers and shut down the website for a day. The residual traffic for the next 30 days increased my Adsense earnings almost 500 percent for that month. I was excited to be finally be making enough money that I could re-invest back into the sites and have some extra to pay off bills, but when the end of the month came I received this email instead of a check.

Hello,

After reviewing our records, we’ve determined that your AdSense account poses a risk of generating invalid activity. Because we have a responsibility to protect our AdWords advertisers from inflated costs due to invalid activity, we’ve found it necessary to disable your AdSense account. Your outstanding balance and Google’s share of the revenue will
both be fully refunded back to the affected advertisers.

Please understand that we need to take such steps to maintain the effectiveness of Google’s advertising system, particularly the advertiser-publisher relationship. We understand the inconvenience that this may cause you, and we thank you in advance for your understanding and cooperation.

If you have any questions or concerns about the actions we’ve taken, how you can appeal this decision, or invalid activity in general, you can find more information by visiting

http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Ouch, not only is my account disabled but ALL unpaid earnings from the previous months is going to be revoked as well. The email included a link to the Google Adsense appeals form. I thought for sure that I was going to be able to explain what happened and since I was sure that I had not done anything wrong it shouldn’t be much trouble to get my account turned back on.

Appeal……Schmappeal

I filled out the appeal form and waited for the response. The form said it could take about a week to hear back, so while I was waiting I started doing some research on other accounts that have been disabled. The more I read the less confident I began to feel. The basic sentiments in the online community are that if your Adsense account gets disabled, you’re screwed. “You will never get it back because appeals at Google are handled by robots that are set to auto-decline.”

Through alot of forum reading and going through all of Googles helpdesk articles I realized that Google expects you to be proactive to prevent accounts from being disabled. If you receive large increases in legitimate traffic that would look out of the ordinary from a robots perspective then YOU must go to Google yourself and inform them to prevent the machines from shutting you down.

Seven days later the results of the appeal came in.

Thank you for your appeal. We appreciate the additional information you’ve provided, as well as your continued interest in the AdSense program. However, after thoroughly re-reviewing your account data and taking your
feedback into consideration, our specialists have confirmed that we’re unable to reinstate your AdSense account.

This was a pretty crushing feeling at first. I realized how foolish it was to let such a draconian and non-transparent company like Google have such a large influence over my earnings. The reason why I had stuck with Google so long is that its simple, requires no real effort on my part, and pays out the highest in terms of PPC ads. They’re the biggest and best PPC ad service available today. However there is no transparency, the whole experience with them felt very inhuman and automated. Without Adsense I felt like I might as well shut down, pack up my things and go home.

I was unable to figure out what I did wrong, and with no warnings and no second chances I’m not able to try and fix it or work harder. If Google’s systems gave out warnings then I might have been able to be a better employee for them. Instead I got shut down and they left me completely in the dark.

Finding Alternative Revenue Sources

My first instinct was to find a replacement for the pay-per-click ad placements I had already optimized to work with Google Adsense. I went and signed up for Adbrite Exchange and Chitika Premium and inserted them into the spots where Adsense ads had been hoping to see some comparable earnings.

PPC Ads

The first thing I noticed with the Adbrite network was that many of the ads being served at first were way too loud and intrusive. They all looked like something if you clicked would give your computer a virus. This was very bothersome, but over time more advertisers on the network approved my website and more ads began showing on the sites. After a few weeks passed I checked to see how the new Adbrite ads were stacking up vs. Google. I wasn’t very pleased, even though I was still receiving several clicks on the ads the CPC (Cost Per Click) was dramatically lower. The Google ads being served on my sites were averaging $0.75-1.15 per click and now the Adbrite ads were only hitting for $0.05-0.15 per click. It was very disappointing and realized that without Google the PPC model wasn’t going to be a viable option for me anymore.

What I’ve learned about Chitika Ads is that some websites have alot of success while others fail horribly. The key thing to keep in mind is that Chitika serves mainly product related ads so websites with product reviews do very well, but other sites struggle getting a good conversion rate. Since most of my sites are not product related, Chitika wasn’t going to b a good replacement for Google Adsense. However Chitika does have a publisher referral program, so you can create revenue by sending other publishers to them.

Affiliate Marketing

I’ve had much more success using affiliate marketing in the place of PPC ads. Direct affiliate sales is much more labor intensive, finding the right products to promote and figuring out what your audience wants, but the payouts have been much higher than using simple PPC ads.

I chose Commision Junction to be the primary affiliate network I use. It took a while to find the which advertisers will convert well on my sites, but now I am actually making more with affiliate sales than I did before using only Google Adsense.

Current Top 3 affiliates on this site are:

#1 – Host Gator Hosting
#2 – Go Daddy
#3 – Groupon Deals

I’ve had an account with Amazon Associates as a secondary income to Adsense for several years to directly sell products to people that I think are useful or related a story I’m writing. Certain products convert better than others on Amazon but one thing I learned since I’ve been using Amazon is to learn to pick products that are higher in price. Amazon only pays out about 5-7% commission and for a few years I was only placing links to books in my articles. No matter how many products converted the commission was always just a few cents. However when I got away from books and started looking at bigger ticket items like computer hardware, and tools my earnings got much better.

Text-Link Ads

Income from affiliate sales is much more irregular than PPC ad revenue so I wanted to find something steady to supplement income on the site. I’ve always thought that text link were unsightly on websites when I was browsing, but I wanted to try it out for a while and see how it worked. There are several different text-link ad companies, however Kontera serves the highest quality of ads. Kontera also has an affiliate program where earn 10% for whatever your referrals make for up to one year.

If your Adsense account has been disabled for any reason then its probably too late to do anything. I recommend just signing up with the ad networks I mentioned and moving on from PPC.

If you are using Adsense currently and you haven’t been banned yet. Then you should take a moment and preemptively read Google Adsense Disabled FAQ as well as take a moment to re-read the Google TOS