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

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 :)

(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.

I haven't personally used one, but try searching for affiliate job board widget. Monster has one at http://publisher.monster.com/Widgets/ for their affiliate publishers. See these links: http://publisher.monster.com/ http://publisher.monster.com/Widgets/Job-Board-Widget.aspx There are others. Either search for affiliate on major job boards, or do the search I suggested. You can also see these widgets that came up for a search on widgetbox for jobs: http://www.widgetbox.com/search?q=jobs The key thing to know is that you want an affiliate plugin or widget provided by a major job board that has many listings. It would make sense for LinkedIn to have an affiliate offering for their jobs listings; however, I haven't found information on it yet. If I don't find it fast enough I won't be able to edit this answer to include it. You can contact me for more details on these. If you find one you like or need additional information I can ask our Blogger Mastermind group if anyone has used any of these or can recommend others. We have 100+ serious bloggers who are likely to have more suggestions.

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)

Paid option: Do a paid press release on prweb.com. Free options: 1) To respond to reporters that are looking for content related to your product, subscribe to HARO (helpareporter.com) and check it daily and respond to relevant requests with information on your product. 2) To actively pitch your product story to reporters, first find the right ones: A) In google type in keywords relevant to your product. B) Click on the 'news' category C) filter the results by 'recent' or 'blog' Some journalists cover a particular topic, others cover particular region. Find the ones in each category relevant to your product. To contact them, look them up on Linkedin, Twitter, etc. In your correspondence, make sure you show them that you've read what they've written about in the past and describe your product and how it's relevant. They need reads / hits on the article to get paid, so make sure to frame your story in a way that would help them do that. If you'd like more specific advice on how to frame your product for particular stories, etc. let me know, Lee