3 weeks ago I set up a campaign promoting a page on my blog in Adwords.

When I wrote the ad it got flagged for a trademark violation (which is super common in Adwords) so I “requested an exception”.

The next day my account didn’t have any impressions in it.

I contacted google to see what was wrong with my account.

6 days later I heard back from them saying that my account was suspended.

Here’s the email I got back:

Hello John,

Thank you for your patience. I’ve consulted your account with our
specialist team and it has come to our attention that your Google AdWords
account does not comply with our terms of service and advertising
policies. You have repeatedly submitted ads that violated our copyright
policies in a related account. As a result, your account has been
suspended and your ads will no longer run on Google.

As noted in our Terms and Conditions, Google reserves the right to
terminate advertisements for any reason. To view our Terms and Conditions,
please visit https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder.

We appreciate your cooperation.

Sincerely,

Michael C.
The Google AdWords Team

Needless to say I was shocked.

At first I thought this must be a temporary suspension, I hadn’t done anything wrong. I mean…I hadn’t done anything to hurt Google. I hadn’t done anything that I knew of that violated any of their rules. I used their own process to “request” an exception. I didn’t demand anything. I didn’t do anything malicious. My account was in good standing.

In my mind, this must just be temporary…after all, I had been spending over $20,000/month on Adwords (which, obviously isn’t a lot of money to Google, but 2 days prior I had gotten an email saying “since you’re one of our top advertisers, we’re now offering you phone support.”).

I was wrong.

I contacted them through both live chat and phone (Google phone number: 1-866-2google) and was assured that the suspension wasn’t temporary and wasn’t an accident. It was permanent.

I was also told that the “specialist” team had made the decision and they assured me there was nothing they could do about it, and that there was nobody else I could talk to.

Apparently Google has some magical “specialist” team that doesn’t have to answer to customers, and acts as an excuse for the people who do answer to customers so they can just say “I’m sorry, I know this must be frustrating, but I can assure you there’s nothing anyone can do. The specialist team made this decision and their decisions are final….no, there’s no way you can speak to them….no, there’s no way you can contact them or make any explanations to them….no, there’s no way to appeal their decision, their decisions are final.”

So then of course I started flipping out. This is how I make a living, and I was just told that because I made a simple, honest mistake, I’m not allowed to ever show any ads on google again ever for any reason…forever…permanently.

A simple mistake for which I received no warning, and there is no way to appeal the process.

Murderers don’t get that kind of treatment.

Rapists don’t get treated like that.

(yes, yes, I understand that google is a business and they can do anything they want…blah, blah, blah. Whatever happened to “Don’t be evil”? I’ll tell you, It went out the door on August 19, 2004 just like wall street said it would.)

So, I started trying to contact someone. Surely there must be a way to contact the specialist team and explain to them that this was an honest mistake.

I wrote a very nice email explaining my situation and sent it to a few email addresses inside google that I thought might get some attention (one of them, btw, is matt@google.com. You might want to try it too…although it didn’t get me anywhere).

The email I got back was:

Hello John,

Thank you for your email. I understand your concern regarding the
suspension of your account. However, as mentioned in our previous email,
your Google AdWords account has been suspended due to multiple Copyright
disapprovals. We are unable to revoke your account suspension, and we will
not accept advertisements from you in the future.

Please note that our support team is unable to help you with this issue,
and we ask that you do not contact them about this matter. If you need
more information about our content policy guidelines, please visit

https://adwords.google.com/select/contentpolicy.html.

…
…
standard google email garbage
…
…
We look forward to providing you with the most effective advertising
available.

Sincerely,

Saman
The Google AdWords Team

I thought the “look forward to providing” part was funny.

I then tried to contact 2 different people inside of google directly through linkedin, both of whom declined the invitation to be introduced (not surprised).

At this point, I’ve given up on trying to get my account re-instated. They don’t care that I’m a human who made a mistake. They’re not going to repeal their decision (how could they possibly have been wrong in the first place…right?)

I don’t have an adwords account now. It has been a good 3 weeks of becoming more intimately accustomed to the way yahoo and msn do their ppc. They’ve made a LOT of improvements.

In the end, this will probably end up being a blessing to me. It’s an excuse to start everything from the beginning. New business. New address. New name. New credit card. New websites. New computer. New IP address.

Again, I’m writing this as a warning!. Please don’t rely solely on Google for your online advertising (fortunately I hadn’t…and I had other streams of income). If you do, you might make a mistake someday and find that you’ve been slammed to the floor and kicked while you are down, like I was.

Please feel free to blog about this and spread the word. More people need to know that they’re not allowed to “request an exception”.

Yes, banned from Adwords, not adsense.

Here’s what happened:

He is a beginning affiliate. He just promotes other people’s stuff through adwords. Obviously not google’s favorite person, but not something they discourage either (there are hundreds of thousands of people like him).

He has promoted 4 products:

1. JP’s Niches In a Box
2. Brad Callens’ Niche Revolution
3. Mark Roth’s Affiliate Radar
4. Keyword Elite

He got a “content violation” warning for the first 3 campaigns.

In his words:

Sure, the first 2 just have a brief mention of ‘Adsense’ at the bottom. But not affiliate radar, that’s just a conversion tracker. I emailed Adwords explaining this, and they apologized and said they would route this to their technical team. So the killer came with KE, which they disapproved automatically after 24 hrs of me putting up the ad. Not suspecting anything wrong, I just made some slight amendments, and emailed them explaining why KE is not a ‘Adsense template generator’ but a ‘keyword research tool’.

6 hours after making the changes he got banned from adwords and was told that if he tries to sign up again they’ll know and shut him down.

He chatted with them 3 times, sent 2 different emails, and had 1 phone conversation where they said that their decision was final.

So here’s my question: Why is it that Google makes these blanket decisions and then has no process for repentance or explanation or forgiveness or anything of the sort.
What if they’re wrong with their decision? What if they made a mistake? Do they not know they’re playing with people’s lives?

I’m not saying that they don’t have to run their business, but can you imagine if my adwords account got banned and they said “our decision is final” and there’s no way for me to appeal or anything? That would sort of change my life!

This guy didn’t get any warning about it. He wasn’t even doing anything wrong either. Keyword Elite is a keyword tool. Yes, it also builds adsense pages, but it’s main purpose is as a keyword tool.

Also, why this guy?. If you do a google search for keyword elite you’ll see dozens of KE affiliates still promoting the product.

Why aren’t they being shut down.

Why will google not even look at someone’s explanation and consider it?

Remember when google used to be cool and hip and trendy? Back before they went public and they cared about people, not shareholders?

Back when they said “going public won’t change our company!”

To tell you the truth, google looks more like microsoft than like google.

Now, a disclaimer: I could have been told half the story. I don’t think I was, but it’s possible that I wasn’t told the whole truth and that this guy really did do something wrong. I don’t think so, but it’s possible.

[tags]adwords, google, banned from google[/tags]

He said “I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors about adsense that have been going around.”

Of course, the guy sells a course about adsense.

Now, I’m not saying that Scott Boulch’s Life After Adsense or Click Flipping are the end all solution to this problem. They are just a different way of making money.

But, I am here to say that right now I’m making more than Joel Comm is off adsense and I’m saying that Adsense is dead!.

It’s dead if you’re just getting started building websites.
It’s dead if it’s your only business model.
It’s dead if you’re just now building spam sites.
It’s dead if you don’t have 10 months to wait to see results of your tests.

The money we’re making off adsense is from sites we built a long time ago (less than 2 1/2 years, but more than 6 months ago).

Adsense is dead if you’re just getting into internet marketing.

But that’s not what they’re telling you.

And, here’s another reason it’s not a good business model. Right now, it’s taking 6-10 months to get real results back after building adsense websites. In internet time, that’s just too long to wait for a test. It’s too long to wait to know if the stuff you’ve been doing for the past 8 months is going to work.

The search engines have gotten so strict and have implemented such harsh sandboxes that it’s literally taking 6-10 months before you start getting real traffic.

Go find something else to do.
Tell the “adsense gurus” to find another product to promote, or to produce some evidence that it’s working for normal everyday people. I don’t want evidence from someone with a website ranked in the top 50 online. I want evidence from someone who started 3 months ago.

With the release of Joel Comms rebuttle, Adsense is alive!, I think I need to talk about what is going on.

I’m doing this for the same reason I do What’s Crap and What’s Not.

First of all, before I say any more, you need to realize that Joel has a 5 figure monthly income from selling adsense lessons. Of course he cares if people talk about adsense being dead. He has a huge stake in adsense working.

Is Joel really making what he says he’s making on adsense? Yes. Absolutely.

Is it as easy as he says for YOU to make money on adsense anymore? No. It’s not.

So what’s really going on with adsense?

The reality is that it’s becoming more and more difficult to make money off adsense UNLESS you have an already established website that is getting a significant amount of traffic.

But…NOBODY is talking about this.

Why? Because there isn’t a bunch of money to be made in selling a product to existing webmasters about how to put adsense on your site. There IS a bunch of money to be made however, in selling to people who want to make money online but who don’t really have anything to start out with.

So, I wanted to respond to what Joel Comm is saying in the “Adsense is Alive” ebook but I didn’t want to type it all out.

In short, I think Joel (and Eric) missed the point of what Scott is trying to say.

In this MP3 I talk about:

• How Joel didn’t understand what Scott Boulch meant when he said “Adsense is Dead”
• Why Adsense isn’t dead, for a few people
• What’s not being told when Joel says that an “average person to make a substantial income from adsense” and why it’s not true
• Who are the “peers” Joel talks about who are making more money than he is, and why those “peers” don’t apply to the other 99% of us
• Who is making 4 and 5 figure monthly incomes when they’re just starting out with adsense
• Why there isn’t a Catch 22 in the Click Flipping/Adsense is Dead model like Joel says there is
• Why both Click Flipping AND adsense are middlemen (why adsense is actually the middleman of middlemen)
• What’s different about Click Flipping than about what others have talked about in the past (because Joel is right about this one, that it’s not new, …he just kind of missed the point)
• Why Click Flipping isn’t just a temporary “tactic” that will come and go
• What’s the real truth about making money online with adsense

Now, don’t get me wrong and think that Click Flipping is the solution to all adsense problems. It’s just a different way of making money online. It work, but so does selling ebooks, selling membership sites, selling useful software, selling physical products, selling on ebay, writing reviews as an affiliate, …

Nothing will every be as easy as making money on adsense has been over the past few years. It was a get-rich-quick scheme that actually worked. It’s not anymore.

I can understand everyone telling people that it still worked up until a few months ago, but after that, your message needed to change. You needed to tell people that making money online just isn’t as easy anymore and that you’re going to have to do a significant amount of work now.

Click flipping requires a significant amount of work. So do the rest of the things you can do online to make money.

Listen to the mp3 and be careful with what you buy from people.

The “gurus” have had an easy time selling stuff to people over the past few years because what they were selling actually worked. It’s not as easy anymore and a lot of them just won’t stop.

One last thing…a disclaimer: While I don’t actually have anything to do with click flipping and don’t have any vested interest in it, Scott is a good friend of mine and I have helped give him advice on what he’s doing with click flipping. I have been a beta tester of his system, and it does work. Other than that, I don’t have a financial interest in the click flipping situation.

Adsense is Dead/Alive MP3

[tags]adsense is dead, death of adsense, life after adsense, adsense is alive, adsense, make money from adsense[/tags]

The death of adsense

Scott made a huge splash in the internet marketing community.

He released “Life After Adsense” today (which you can download inside your account on the site).

In it he basically details the method (click flipping) he uses to make a ton of money online. I’m not going to talk about it, you can read it for yourself.

What I loved about it is that Scott gave it away for free. This ebook details exactly what he does to make money. It’s not a sales letter, unlike every other offer out there.

Everyone wants to sell something. They prostitute themselves for anything they can find. The Almighty Dollar is more important than being honest with people and giving them what they want.

Scott was different.

So is Perry Marshall (join his mailing list, the guy is amazing).

I think we’ll start to see a lot more information given away over the next few months because of the success of Scotts marketing campaign. Sure, his timing was impeccable and so was his message, but when you give something away for free, especially something as valuable as this, you gain a lot of respect. There are a lot of people who will buy whatever Scott wants to sell them right now, because he has gained their trust first.

If you want to sell a bunch of something, give people something of huge value first. Once they trust you, they’ll do anything you tell them to.

[tags]the death of adsense, death of adsense, life after adsense, adsense, scott boulch, click flipping[/tags]

> Hello,
>
> While reviewing your account, we noticed that you are currently
> displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our
> policies. For instance, we found violations of AdSense policies on
> pages such as
>
ilead.itrack.it/clients/extas.aspx?cid=5436&sid=35526&wid=6115&swid=AdS531314&targetpage=popup&openpopup=0&rescale=1&kid=219050&bid=853173&dat=531314&keyword=null.
>
> We’ve found that you are displaying Google ads within a pop-up window.
> As stated in the AdSense program policies, publishers may not place
> the AdSense ad code in a pop-up, pop-under, or any other window
> separate from the main content of your website.
>
> Please make any necessary changes to your web pages in the next 3
> business days. We also suggest that you take the time to review our
> program policies (https://www.google.com/adsense/policies) to ensure
> that all of your other pages are in compliance.
>
> blah blah blah we’re dumb blah blah
>
> Sincerely,
>
> The Google AdSense Team
>

Well, we don’t own ilead.itrack.it and every time I go to the page I get a different website with no adsense on it.

We replied and told them that it’s not our and to please disable ads on that domain.

They replied and said they had sent the previous message in error.

The email was signed:

Sincerely,

Sandor
The Google AdSense Team

Now, I could be way out of line on this one, but “Sandor” isn’t a very popular name in the US.

Oh where, Oh where could the Adsense Team be?