Author: Bert Colijn

A 52 year old webmaster from the Netherlands got banned from the Google
Adsense program in just a few clicks. He went looking around for alternatives
and found a lot of very creative brand new advertising solutions. That webmaster was me. Do as I did and you will get a message like:

? Your account is disabled because of invalid clicks.

What was all the fuzz about? The adsense account was set up for my website
www.wereldwijdbellen.nl , wich I started one year earlier as an affiliate for a
German / American Voip company (voice over IP, internettelephony). At that time Adsense was new for me and I decided to give it a try. Doing some cutting, copying and pasting with the codes and voila, I was advertising competing Voip companies on my website.

Spyware was already a big nuisance on the internet at that time. In my battle against it I experimented with anonymous surfing via so called anonymizers and proxyservers with the purpose of hiding my IP address. Simply just out of curiosity, whether or not the number of clicks on my ads could be influenced, I produced them and guess what happened? They were interpreted as invalid clicks. Adsense disabled my account and I have to admit it : they had a good reason to do so (stupid me, what a shame). However It was never my intention to harm the advertisers nor anyone else.

? I realised that the possibility to earn money with these ads had gone forever.

For hardworking affiliate webmasters, generating 100% of their multiple website income through Adsense, this must be a nightmare. Google has no obligation to explain its decision in detail.

So I begged to Google: Here are my sincere apologies. I'll never do it again please let me in again !!!

No way, don't waste your time, forget about it, don't pull on a dead horse.
Google won't unlock your account again. Remember we live in the internet age and everything is automated. Google's answers to my sincere and arguing emails were no exception. They were completely robotized. So would this be the end of a dream earning an income with my website? Answer: NO. As the famous Dutch football player Johan Cruyff ones stated:

? Every disadvantage has its advantage.

I decided that I had to forget about Adsense forever being an internet advertising possibility for me and guess what I found out ? I was not the only one and this nightmare of the possibility of getting banned is discussed in forums all over the internet now. You want proof? Just google (yes this is a new verb) with 'banned from adsense' and you will see. But what is more important is that the alternatives are given in these forums and on individual sites as well. Here I'am going to share with you what I discovered.

Clickbank-ad-sense-script, a new program that serves Clickbank based affiliate products in your website. These ads resemble adsense ads but a lot of webmasters are preferring them. Unlike pay per click this program pays for every sale you make in over 11,000 Clickbank products. The yield is higher than adsense because it pays you between 50 and 75% of product cost, wich can mean $ 100 in your pocket from only one click. Clickbank-ad-sense lets you make a selection of your favorite products that you believe are not competing with your own product. Similar programs are: AffiliateSensor and CBPlugin.

? You want more money making advertising solutions? Just read on.

Another creative way of adding something new is done by Chitika. Their
eMiniMall is a CPC-based intelligent product merchandising service. Alternative to static web banner ads it combines product merchandising, a recommandation engine and comparative shopping. Go to chitika.com and have a look for yourself. One picture says more then a thousand words.

? There are pros and cons and every rose has its thorn but what do you
think of this one?

Adbrite sells ad space on thousands of websites. There are two things you can do with Adbrite?C buy and sell ad space. If you are an advertiser they provide you with all sorts of websites. When you find the site you want to advertise on, you write your ad and pay. If approved by the webmaster your ad will appear on that site at the scheduled time. If you are a publisher you can set your own rates and approve or reject every ad that's purchased for your site. The revenue is split 75/25 in your favour. Adbrite provides publishers with more revenue and better ads by selling the ads directly to your visitorsthis is something the other ad systems don't do.

? The pay-per-click contextual advertising has grown into a $ 3 billion
business.

Thanks to Google's Adsense network contextual advertising, with the short text based links that appear next to a website's content, is a very hot item on the internet now. Steve Balmer recently introduced Microsoft's version called
Adcenter and Yahoo unveiled a pay-per-click beta program called Yahoo
Publisher Network (YPN).

Let me give you my impressive 'competitors' list that I have found in my
search to survive my ban from Adsense :

adbrite, adcenter (beta), adengage, adgenta, adhearus, adsclick, ffiliateseansor, allfeeds, bannerbxes, bidclix, bidvertiser, cbadwords, cbplugin, chitika, clicksaddirect, clicksor, contextweb, expoactive, fastclick, infograbber, intellitxt, kanoodle, mirago , miva, nixxie, quigo, revenuepilot, targetpoint, yahoo ypn (coming soon...).