Newcomers to the wacky world of blogs and making money from them have their work cut out for them. You’ll find plenty of land mines to trip you up, including seriously outdated advice that can get you banned from Google Adsense.
When you go tramping about in the scrunchy undergrowth of making money online, you’ll find an army of shady information products hawkers who want to sell you paper-thin e-books that supposedly reveal the secrets of making money via Google Adsense, affiliate marketing, and other tools. There are a lot of sites that, while marginally active, never bothered to remove their old content–content that tells you to do things that are in clear violation of the updated terms of service for Google and elsewhere.
What can you do to avoid getting burned by old, no longer relevant and just plain bad advice? There are a couple of obvious answers and at least one that’s not so obvious until you read it and wonder why you didn’t think of it yourself.
The first and most obvious advice–be intimately familiar with your terms of service agreement for Google Adsense and any other program you use. Google Adsense terms of service state clearly what is allowed and what’s not. You can be banned for life if you violate these terms whether you did so willingly or not. Yes, you might be able to appeal, but chances are you’re done once you get banned. If anyone has any stories of being reinstated after a ban, I’d love to read about them in the comments section.
The second is to cross reference ANY advice you get with other information from trusted sources. Again, a no-duh bit of advice, but some people tend to read something and try implementing it right away–only to learn later they got what my friends in uniform call bad intel.
The third recommendation I can give here is to simply disregard any advice on Google and affiliate programs that’s older than six months. That site that told you in 2005 to put images directly above Google ads to increase your clickthrough rates? They’re telling you to do something that has since become a direct violation of the Google Terms of Service agreement.
Blogger Beware!