A small blog has three ordinary ways of bringing in money, and this one has hit a wall on all three. Google AdSense has turned it down four times. It is in no affiliate programme. And the two small products it sold were pitched in a way I would now take back. The page that used to sit at this address had 122 words of its own, told you ad networks pay you “for every visitor”, and signed off by telling you to watch your earnings grow with your traffic, above three promotional boxes.
This rewrite has a narrower job. Advertising, affiliate commissions and selling something you made each put someone, or something, between you and the first payment, and that part I can describe from the inside. What I can’t give you is an earnings figure, mine or anyone else’s. I don’t have one I would put my name to, and borrowed ones are how the old version of this page went wrong.
Where each route stands on this blog today
| Route | Who has to say yes | What they look at first | Where this blog is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Display ads (AdSense) | A reviewer at Google | Whether the content is “unique, original, and relevant” and the site is easy to navigate | Rejected four times for low-value content, most recently on 10 September 2026 |
| Affiliate links | Each programme, sometimes only after you have already sent it sales | Your site and, at Amazon, three qualifying sales within 180 days | Not in any programme; no tracking IDs anywhere on the site |
| Your own product | Nobody, beyond the platform’s content rules | Nothing, until a buyer or an ad reviewer reads what you claimed | A $5 PDF on Gumroad and a Kindle book, both pitched in the language this site has dropped |
Read the last column from top to bottom and there is an uncomfortable pattern. The route with the strictest gate is the one beginners are usually told to start with. The route with no gate at all is the one where I did the most damage to myself.
Ads: a person decides, and they read everything
AdSense isn’t a switch that flips once traffic arrives. Someone at Google looks at the site and makes a judgement. AdSense’s page on getting your site ready asks for content that is “unique, original, and relevant” and for easy navigation, and it sets no minimum number of posts or words (checked 21 September 2026). The eligibility requirements add that you must be at least 18 and able to prove the site is yours.
On timing, Google’s own wording is that “the review process usually takes a few days, but in some cases can take 2-4 weeks” (site review help page, checked 21 September 2026). My other blog, the one about web hosting, went into the “Getting ready” state on 31 August 2026 and was still there when I checked on 19 September. Plan for the upper end.
All four rejections of this blog gave the same reason: low-value content. The AdSense script was installed through Site Kit, and when I audited the site nine days after the last rejection, the ads.txt file was correct. What a reviewer found was a hundred posts on one template in eleven weeks, thirty-six of them published on 1 July, and an income figure in every single post. The full tally is in my count of everything the reviewer would have seen. The application failed on what the pages said, not on how the site was wired.
ads.txt proves the site is yours, nothing more
ads.txt is a one-line file at the root of your domain that says who may sell your ad space. Google calls it “not mandatory, but it’s highly recommended”. If the file exists and your publisher ID is missing from it, AdSense marks the site “Unauthorized”, and a fix can take up to a month to register on a site that makes few ad requests (Google’s ads.txt guide, checked 21 September 2026). Both of my blogs serve the same line, with my publisher ID where the Xs are:
google.com, pub-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, DIRECT, f08c47fec0942fa0It is correct on both, and it hasn’t got either of them approved. It proves ownership, not that the site deserves ads.
The consent message European readers need
Some of your readers won’t be American. Since 16 January 2024, serving personalised ads to visitors in the EEA and the UK has required a consent management platform certified by Google and integrated with the IAB’s Transparency and Consent Framework; Switzerland followed on 31 July 2024. Traffic without one “may be eligible for non-personalized ads or limited ads” (Google’s consent management requirements, checked 21 September 2026).
The free, certified option is AdSense’s own European regulations message, under Privacy & messaging. Read about “Maximize message coverage” before publishing it: when consent is missing, Google serves a fallback message that “will contain two buttons (‘Manage Options’ and ‘Consent’)” (Maximize message coverage, checked 21 September 2026). No button to refuse on the first screen. Spain’s data protection authority expects refusing to be as easy as accepting, so the plan here is my own message with “Do not consent” switched on. That is a legal judgement for your own country; I’m describing settings, not giving legal advice.
Where this blog stands: for months it carried the AdSense code on every page and no consent message at all. The message it has now is AdSense’s own, with “Do not consent” switched on, and it went in before I asked for another review, not after.
Affiliate links: the sales come before the approval
Affiliate programmes look like the easy route because signing up takes five minutes. Read the terms of the biggest one and the order of events is the reverse of what the sign-up page suggests. Amazon hands you a link first and only looks at your application after you have referred three qualifying sales, inside 180 days of applying, and each click only counts for a day, with a longer allowance for items already in the basket (Amazon Associates’ help pages and programme policies, checked 21 September 2026). Miss the deadline and the ID can’t be reinstated. A new blog is being asked for the one thing a new site can’t show.
I’m not in Amazon’s programme or anyone else’s, and there is no tracking ID anywhere on this site. The old version of the site had 29 boxes labelled “Affiliate link” that carried no ID and pointed at manufacturers’ home pages, and 71 Amazon boxes that recommended no product at all. That clean-up has its own write-up, box by box, with what replaced each one. Cookies, approvals and disclosure, with four programmes’ published terms side by side, are in my guide to affiliate marketing, written from outside every programme.
My own rule: apply only when you already have posts that people reach while deciding what to buy, about something you have actually used. Never for a product you would have to research from its sales page.
Selling your own product: no gatekeeper, which is the trap
Selling a PDF or an ebook needs nobody’s approval. That sounds like freedom. In my case it meant nobody checked what I was claiming, including me.
The costs are published, and modest. Gumroad charges no monthly fee and takes a percentage plus a fixed amount on every sale (Gumroad pricing, checked 21 September 2026); on a cheap product it is the fixed part that hurts. Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing describes its tools as free and quotes ebook royalties of 35% or up to 70% (KDP home page, checked 21 September 2026), and it makes you declare AI-generated content under a definition that is narrower than most people assume.
Now my part. I have a short PDF guide on Gumroad and a Kindle book, and both were sold on this blog in the same register as everything else it used to publish. I have taken both apart, the fee sums and Amazon’s AI question included, in what nobody tells you before selling a digital product made with AI. The box for the PDF appeared in all 100 posts, at $12. The Gumroad listing charged $5.00. On 21 September 2026 the listing’s title still carried a monthly income figure, which is why nothing on this site links to it. That is the trap: on this route, the only check on your claims is you.
There is a second lesson, and it ties the routes together. The AdSense reviewer saw the PDF’s pitch at the foot of every post they opened. Your product’s sales copy is part of the site an ad network judges, so an overblown listing can cost you on the route that does have a gatekeeper.
The running cost while nothing pays
The cash side is small, and it decides how long you can keep going. This blog runs on Hostinger shared hosting, as do my other blog and my studio’s site. Hostinger’s shared plans are priced from $2.99/month on the 48-month term, renewing at $10.99/month (Hostinger’s pricing page, checked 20 September 2026). The entry price means paying four years up front and the renewal is 3.7 times higher, so do your sums with the second number. WordPress and Search Console cost nothing.
The expensive part is time. The hundred posts took very little effort to produce, which is how they came out in eleven weeks. Undoing them takes far more: seventy-five come down, sixty-four of them with a redirect to the guide that absorbs them and eleven with a 410, and the rest are being rewritten one at a time, this one included.
The one idea worth keeping from the old post on AI content: start from questions people actually search for, then check in Search Console whether anyone finds you.
The sequence I would follow for the money side
- Pages worth reading, under a real name, with an About page, a working contact address and a privacy policy that tell the truth. The setup side, legal pages included, is in my walkthrough of how this blog was built.
- Search Console before anything commercial: sitemap submitted as a full URL, key pages inspected, time for Google to crawl them.
- Consent message, ads.txt and the advertising paragraph of the privacy policy in place before applying, not after a rejection.
- One AdSense application, made when the pages you would be happy for a stranger to read are the only pages that are live.
- Affiliate programmes only for things you use, and only once some posts are found by people deciding what to buy.
- Your own product last, with a listing that makes no claim you couldn’t defend to someone’s face, at the same price everywhere.
I can’t promise this order works. My claim is narrower: I did it in roughly the reverse order, and that produced four rejections, a product listing I won’t link to, and a hundred posts to unwind. When the next AdSense decision arrives, its date and outcome go at the top of this page, whichever way it goes.