How I got approved for Adsense in less than two months

In this article, I will share how I got approved for Adsense when my website was just two months old, and had around 100 monthly visitors. My goal with this article is to help out other people with small websites that are trying to get approved and monetize their websites.

General guidelines

When I was in the process of applying for Google Adsense, I was reading quite a lot on the Internet about what was necessary to have in place before even thinking of getting approved, and I think the most common points are

• A fair amount of pages (like 30-40 at least with 1000+ words)
• Unique quality content
• Domain older than 6 months
• Contact us page
• About us page
• Cookie policy
• You must be older than 18

I would agree that it is fair points, but some of them are still from case to case, and I will discuss them next.

Amount of pages

On many forums people are stating that you must have at least 30 pages with 1000+ words and write about unique topics etc. In my case, this was not exactly the case. I did had a bounch of tutorials and guides, maybe around 50-60, but they were not near the amount of 1000 words each. Some did maybe have around 150-200 and some longer.

I also have the Software & APIs page where I provide some unique features and APIs, and that might have helped a bit as well though. By that time I had maybe 3-4 APIs and a couple of widgets.

Unique quality content

This is the most important thing I would say. The quality > quantity is something I think is one of the biggest reasons you'll get approved or not. To ask yourself "why should people visit my page?" and what do they get out of it. In my case, my hope is to help people that need help with their applications and projects with various things, and also to give my personal projects and solutions to whoever needs it and are interested in them.

But I can't say it is that unique actually, even though I make everything myself in my own way. There are a lot of tutorials and blogs about software development, and I suppose that similar articles and tutorials to mine can probably be found somewhere else, since React, JavaScript/TypeScript and NodeJs etc are very common technologies. So I don't think that the you should beat yourself up if you are not sitting on a super unique new invention or something. E.g, there are many like travel blogs and so on that are showing ads, and they still talk about very similar things, but still with their own uniqueness in terms of the bloggers and authors different views on things.

So what I mean is that, even if you have a website that does pretty much the same as many others, I am pretty sure it is unique in some way and can bring value to an audience, if you make sure to put effort and energy on it.

Product/solutions

In my case, I have my APIs and open source projects, and I think that is helping out as well in terms of the "giving my audience unique content" since they are 100% my own stuff and I have made them myself according to my way of being creative and solving problems - so if you can provide something like that with whatever your website is about, it can be beneficial.

Domain older than 6 months

So I don't think Google themselves has this criteria, but many forums and people are stating this, I even got this from ChatGTP when I asked it (it might have learned by now though). But this is simply not true, you can get approved with much "younger" domains as long as the content etc are in place. And Google doesn't have any traffic requirements either, which are really good for new starters that want to start monetize their websites.

However, I read that the reason people are sometime suspecting that they get rejected because of this, is because Google want to prevent fraudulent behaviour in terms of false clicks etc, and a new domain is always a red flag. In my case, I am showing myself on our about page, and also working as hard as I can to make this website as professional as I can - so I think that putting effort in giving a professional and serious look is very beneficial as well, especially on newer domains.

Cookie policy and other legal requirements

I actually got denied in my first review process, and I got back that I didn't met the policies and that I had to read their policy pages and update my website so that I could be compliant.

The policies that I wasn't compliant with, was my cookie policy page, which was not updated for the Adsense rules. My old cookie policy page said that we didn't use any cookies what so ever, and not storing any information and so on - but when we are showing ads through the Adsense program, we simply must allow Google to use cookies so that they can show the relevant ads to each specific user.

So make sure to have a cookie policy page. Feel free to copy or get "inspired" from mine if you like. Find it here.

And also have a cookie pop up - if you are using a React application, we have a free open source project that got you covered, get it here.

Images

One thing I also did wrong, was that I had images from the Internet that might had been copy right protected, I actually don't know since I never really looked it up. But I changed all images, and used a free image provider like Pixabay where they provide royalty free images for commercial use.

About us and Contact pages

Having an about us page and contact information is also a big plus, and it should be present for the visitors as well. It provides a great improvement when it comes to the professional appearance of the website - so I would highly suggest to invest some time in creating that as well.

Summary

In this article, I wrote about my own experience in how I got my website approved for the Adsense program in quite a short time, and also tried to prove some of the misconceptions that people are saying on forums wrong.

My view on having ads early on, even if you might not make more than a dollar a month, is that it is great that Google gives that opportunity for us that have just begun our journey so that our visitors are getting used to it early on and not getting a bad surprise if we suddenly just starting to bombard with ads all of the sudden. Another big plus is that we can adapt our UI and experiment on showing ads in the best possible way, before the website has grown that much that a lot of users are getting bad experience with poor usage of the ad placements.

I hope you enjoyed this article, and if you have any questions or feedback, please reach out here.

Good luck, and have a great day!