Recovering From A Banned Google Adsense Account

The Google Adsense team has become notorious for terminating accounts and returning the outstanding ad revenue to the advertiser without appeal or even the ability to reach a human being. This is frustrating for webmasters who were consistently generating a monthly income from the adsense program and now have to find another alternative. Many are crying foul because they are adamant that they did nothing wrong, but unfortunately their appeal will fall on deaf ears, because Google rarely if ever reinstates a banned account. At some point you have to simply move on and go about finding a new program that can replace the lost income from bitter feelings toward Google.

While the online advertising industry has a host of upstarts and diversity of advertising alternatives, what are some of the strongest Google Adsense alternatives for businesses that want to advertise online or individuals who want to make money through ad revenue while publishing online? Unfortunately if you want to continue to make money using contextual advertising, you will not find a program that pays better than Adsense, but there are other solid programs available. Also, you may want to explore other monetizing methods like affiliate marketing or pay per lead programs.

If you ever receive the dreaded "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 click activity, we've found it necessary to disable your Adsense account". There is more information in the actual notification, but you get the picture. Below I have listed a number of alternatives that can be used if you are searching for other ways to generate income for your website or blog. Instead of fuming about losing your account, your best option is to move on so you can quickly replace your lost income.

Contextual Advertising

If you are comfortable with continuing to serve ads on your site you can use advertising networks like Chitika or Adbrite.

Chitika

Pros:

• Chitika advertisements can run on web pages that have their own ads or competing advertisements. This allows website owners to run both Chitika and other advertising sources simultaneously.
• Ads are based on clicks where 60% of the advertiser’s cost per click are going to the referring website.
• They also have a referral program that pays 10% of each of your referral's earnings for 15 months.

Cons:

• Chitika ads are only served when someone visits your site using a search engine. Chitika feels that this provides more targeted ads which will result in a better click through rate (CTR). Visitors who go directly to the website will not see Chitika ads unless they manually make some changes to the add code.

Adbrite

Pros:

• Adbrite allows advertisers to select keywords as well as websites to promote their ads.
• Adbrite has a low minimum payout versus the $100 required by many pay per click websites. If you do not receive a lot of clicks, you can still make some money because of the low threshold.
• Adbrite pays for both impressions and clicks.

Cons:

• Advertisers select which sites they want to advertise on. If an advertiser decides not to advertise on your website, then there are no ads served on your site.
• The CTR is much lower than Google Adsense.

Pay Per Lead Programs

Pay per lead programs are based on a cost per action (CPA) model. They are great to use because the payout is much higher than using contextual advertising. Like contextual advertising you will be serving advertisements, but instead of getting paid when a visitor clicks on an add, you will get paid when someone clicks on the add, goes to the site and performs some sort of action. An action can be signing up for a survey, providing an email address, signing up for a newsletter or downloading a file. The pay normally ranges from $1 to $10. Also, if you promote programs like Payday Loans or Dating sites the payouts can be much higher.

Because many of these programs are free, they are highly convertible and fairly easy to generate good income for your site. If you are interested in Pay Per Lead programs you can get started using one of the networks below.

• Leads Market
• T3Leads
• ShareaSale

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is the process of promoting products or services for an advertiser or a merchant. In return for your advertising efforts you will receive a commission whenever a product or service is purchased using your referral link. Affiliates normally receive anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of each sale made. To be a successful affiliate takes a lot of work. Not only do you need highly targeted traffic to your site, you also need to have a great reputation with your followers. So the quickest way to fail as an affiliate marketer is to promote crappy products. Most successful affiliates pay for traffic because they find that it is easier to convert than normal organic traffic from a search engine.

If you are interested in selling affiliate products, you can get started using one of the networks below:

• ClickBank
• Commission Junction
• Amazon

Final Thoughts

Generating income from a website or blog is a marathon and not a sprint. Building a solid following takes time, but you can do so by creating engaging and useful content that will provide the traffic your site needs. Once you are generating consistent traffic, remember that only solid and reputable programs will get you the much needed conversions that will generate consistent money.