I have a newly established online magazine via wordpress and my application with Google Adsense has not been approved. Any recommendations?

(Background: I founded the largest marketplace for direct ad sales. Powers sites like Microsoft, Aol, Gawker, etc) If you want to sell ads directly to advertisers... that's awesome, but recognize it takes more work than just dropping AdSense on your site. I'm glad you're thinking of it like "how can I attract advertisers (customers) to do business with me?" I personally don't think gimmicks work well in the long run. It's all about the fundamentals. You are essentially a business (the website) that sells a product (the ad space / ability to reach your audience) to customers (the advertisers). All the normal fundamentals apply - you have to attract potential customers, sell them on your product, close the business, get repeat business, etc. So while a gimmick may work to get someones attention, if their experience of doing business with you is terrible they won't buy or won't come back. We believe the best way to attract, close and keep advertisers is to make your "products" as easy to find and purchase as possible. In the direct ad space, it is way too complicated - often requiring lots of emails and manual effort. Plus they have to find you to begin with. Some actionable stuff for you to do: * Do some customer validation. If you want to sell a product (the ad space), how do you know there is a market? Have you talked to potential advertisers about this? Do you have any pre-committed deals? Do your similar competitors do direct sales successfully? * Have a .com/advertise page and promote it well. You have to let people know you're open for business. Make it easy for people to find it. * Have a system that makes it easy to place/execute/manage actual ad orders. This is what we do at www.isocket.com. There are other tools for various needs, website sizes, costs, etc.

Yes if you have a site that has traffic these can be great streams of revenue. If you google my name and check or Adsense check you will see me holding a check and what can be possible :)

I am a firm believer in hiring professionals to do a professional job. We have worked with dozens of freelance videographers and helped brands achieve some sharp marketing videos. So some tips: 1) Hire a freelance videographer and writing team. Developing a story board is not easy and there are brilliant writers just waiting for jobs like this. 2) If you are going the DIY route make sure there is a beginning, a middle and an end to your story board. 3) Use humour where possible. 4) Keep the script short and attempt to get your message out in the first 30 seconds. 5)Speak directly to the audience -so know really well who that audience is! 6) Find the right tone depending on your company brand and mission. 7) Tell a solid story. So you want to start by presenting a problem, introducing a solution, then explain how it works, and lastly create a call to action for your target audience. Hope this helps. I'm here if you'd have further questions. blue skies, Daniela Hope this helps

Source: I founded www.buyads.com and www.isocket.com, which powers the direct ad sales for the web's best sites (like TechCrunch, AOL, Microsoft, etc) We hand invited the publishers that join our market because, as your question suggests, there is some threshold between who should and should not try direct sales. There are no hard rules, just guidelines. The superseding one is this: Do you have inventory (audience) an advertiser would take the time to specifically work with you for? If you open a "store" and starting selling this stuff, do people want to buy it? One measure is traffic, but that's not enough. In general we like to look for sites with 100,000 page views a month or more. But it can depend on the content and vertical. For example, we power a website that gets 25k hits a month but is the only site covering the voice over talent industry in Hollywood - so its super nichey and there is a market for those advertisers. Other examples of small but successful premium properties include some hyperlocal ones (www.queensmamas.com, www.brooklynheightsblog.com, www.brokelyn.com, etc), the largest blog for truckers, largest blog for prison wardens, etc. The conflicting examples are sites with large traffic but bad audiences/verticals. We reject a lot of "tech blog" also-rans that just copy and paste content from TechCrunch but get a lot of SEO traffic from it. Or even if it's a legit site, it can be in a bad brand-advertiser vertical like home finance / mortgages (which is mostly lead gen advertisers)

Yes. Use the "Link Text" in your facebook ads to A/B test various domain names. To do this, simply launch a few identical ads, and only change the link text to say the variation of the domain name you are considering. The ad with the highest CTR (not conversion rate or other KPI) will be the one that sparks the most interest in your target audience. Note: one domain may have a high relevance to one audience, but low relevance with another. So this tactic should only be used if you have a very specific demo you are targeting.