The first thing you should do is to contact AdSense after you’ve received your termination email. Take note, replying to that email would be of no use. Use their online form instead. When emailing them, make sure to be professional in your writing. Proofread your work and include your details. Never threaten them with any kind of legal action or physical pain. Doing so will only irk them. Make sure to always offer anything you can do to prove that you’re innocent. Don’t give up after a couple of emails, but don’t spam them either. Say an email once every couple of days until they reply would be ideal.

Always have proof ready. Screenshots, documentations, and if there’s a sudden shot of traffic, explain them the situation. If you know where the traffic’s from (i.e., a popular blog linked to you), you can ask that blog to help you out and send AdSense an email about it. If you don’t, then tell them that you honestly have no idea how that came to be. It would of course, be better if you email them as soon as you notice irregularities in your traffic pattern before you get banned. But if it’s too late, then don’t fret, there is hope yet.

Source1 and Source 2

1. Look for AdSense Alternatives

There are many other CPC ads like AdSense out there such as Bidvertiser. Even if you deem AdSense a lot better than all of them, if you really don’t have choice over AdSense banning you, you should settle for whatever suits you best.

2. Look for other Types of Ads.

You can monetize your web site or blog using another model such as affiliate ads, or product advertisements like WidgetBucks and Chitika MiniMalls. Basically, explore options other than CPC advertisements. You never know — it just might be the right revenue model for you.

3. Look for direct advertisements.

This is probably the hardest option of all, although if executed properly, could be the most lucrative. If you have substantial traffic for your web site or blogs, you can start scouting for direct advertisers via web master forums. You can also try soliciting direct advertisements using your blog. You’ll never know if one of your readers is a potential advertiser. Just take note that this method is extremely difficult. Finding one advertiser might be hard, finding multiple advertisers might seem impossible, especially if your blog is relatively new.

These are some options of what to do with life after AdSense. The best way to do thing, of course, is to ensure you DON’T get banned.

Furthermore, there are changes to the payment structure of other AdSense referral programs, first of which is the Google Pack Referral. If, as of current, publishers earn up to $2 for every Google Pack referral they make who runs the pack for the first time, from the third of week of February onwards, the maximum you can earn is $1 per referral. Firefox referrals coming from China will also see a decrease in monetary returns.

In other news, I was so surprised a few days ago when I received a notification from Google about the PIN mailer they sent me. As far as I knew, you would have to have a minimum of $50 in your AdSense account before you’re sent a PIN. I only have $25 in my account. It seems Google AdSense is sending all publishers with at least $10 in their accounts their PIN numbers. Great move by AdSense! At least you can cash out as soon as you reach the $100 mark. Now if only they lower the cash-out amount, that would benefit the rest of us low Google AdSense earners.

If you’re confused about what’s written above, then I suggest you pay the Google AdSense blog a visit. It seems they’re retiring referral ads for publishers outside North America, Latin America and Japan. Some of the people I know outside said areas have been earning quite a lot from the AdSense referrals. In fact, if you take a look at this post, you’ll see why it’s quite easy to earn from them. You can blatantly advertise them so people would click on them. With the referral scheme gone for many web masters, their earnings might take a beating this month and onwards.

The greatest repercussion would be trust. Businesses operate on factors related to trust. A traditional business orders raw materials from companies they trust. It’s the same with web enterprises. True, you might see it as overreacting, but some people don’t send just a couple of people down Google’s way through referrals. Take for example, Problogger, which has reportedly displayed the AdSense Referral ad 20 million times or so, thereby padding Google’s earnings.

For those lucky enough to retain their referral ads, you might find that it won’t be worth promoting them as you did before. You see, they’ve removed their old referral scheme:

1. Refer someone who makes $5 in 180 days and get $5
2. Refer someone who makes $100 in 180 days and get $250
3. Refer 25 people who make $100 in 180 days and get $2000

In exchange, the new scheme is that if you refer someone who makes $100 in 180 days, you get $100. True, if, for example, you make 25 referrals, you can now get $2500 instead of $2000, but who’ll be doing some hardball promotion for them now? Not all your referrals would get $100 within 180 days. Removing the $5 referral means you’ll get nothing for those you referred who earned less than $100 within 180 days. In short, you may just be doing promotion for nothing. Well, whatever, Google. We don’t know why you’ve come to this decision but perhaps we’ll tackle that next time.

Google describes gadget ads as “mini sites” and they sure do look like mini sites. It’s a search function built into the advertisement. All one needs to do is to enter the URL and then there you go. I think visitors would be amused by a gadget ad on your web site and might play with it for a while which transforms into longer page views for you. And since it’s not stuck as is and they don’t get to see the gadget ad 24/7, their curiosity is piqued.

The other new feature would be the new Adsense pixel ads. If you’ve ever come across blogs with small square advertisements before, those are the newly-famous 125×125 pixel ads. It seems Google is toying with the idea of using the format for Adsense. As with the other new features, this one’s also still in beta so you might not get to see them around that much. The new pixel ad format was spotted by Darren Rowse on a 336×280 ad unit. If you have the ad format installed, you might want to check back once in a while to see if Adsense tests the pixel ads on your domain.

Despite all the hate AdSense has incurred due to bans and similar circumstances, we can’t deny how simple it is to use AdSense. You just tweak the ads to fit your web site, get the code and paste it onto your page.

2. AdSense Does Not Require Hard-Selling

You don’t have to make posts about AdSense for people to notice it unlike your affiliate programs. You just paste the code and let it sit while you promote the web site and earn from it.

3. Earn As Much As You Can

Provided you don’t use illegal means against their TOS, of course. There’s no cap in earning with AdSense and payout is as small as $100.

4. Variety of Ads

People have their choice of ads to click on and not just a single one which would fail to pique their curiosity later.

5. May Be The Best for Some Niches

There are some niches which don’t have a big enough fanbase for affiliate programs and whatnot. In that case, AdSense is the best way to go. Of course you can also use other CPC advertisement networks like AdSense, but at least with AdSense you know you’re safe because…

6. Google is a Trusted Company

Despite the throng of Google haters, it is still a trusted company. You’ll get paid what you earn for sure unless you get banned from your account or someone stole the check from the Post Office.

This means one cannot exactly filter out anything they want in contextual non-targeted ads so you might still get some ads you don’t really want to show. However, this is one step into total advertisement control. Basically, AdSense is starting to offer the Ad Review Center panel to their publishers. This has reportedly already been made available to several publishers with the intention of spreading the service to the rest of the publisher populace over time.

In the Ad Review Center, all of the targeted ads will appear before they’re published on your web site. You have two options — to auto-allow the ads or to choose to manually approve them. You better hurry though, because Google gives you 24 hours before the targeted ads appear on your web site. When you reject a targeted ad however, you’re required to give a reason which the advertiser would also be shown and be made aware of. The reasons with which you can reject ads include: competitor ads, Ads from companies with which you’d rather not be associated, visually unappealing or inappropriate ads and ads which attack your stand as a publisher.

I’ve never paid much attention, since I thought they were there to stay for good. But apparently, as it turns out, Google’s alternating on testing between the scrollers and the link at the bottom. I had not bee able to spot either since so I can’t present you with screen caps. However, James from PinoyMoneyTalk has been able to take screen shots as well as a video demonstration of the arrow scrollers. Seems like Google’s testing out which ones would elicit the more positive response and perhaps, which one looks better on the ad units. If you ask me, I rather like the up-down, left-right scrollers — they look classier in my eyes.

We all know Google’s improving and adding more features to Adsense all the time. One blog, Make Meaning, conjectures on where Google got this idea. While it’s not so ingenious that one can shout intellectual property theft at first glance, according to the aforementioned blog, Google might have gotten an idea from Baidu advertisements. Baidu advertisements use a tab ad feature which, in essence, is very similar to the scrollers and “Show More” link Google seems to be testing. Head over to the blog for a screenshot.

Basically, when you click on the “Advertise on this Site” link, you get redirected to Google Adwords and the ads you buy will be targeting the site in question. Google is slowly phasing out this feature due to its poor performance. There are many publishers who opt not to use show or use the feature anyhow. However, to those who’ve been benefiting from its presence, I reckon it’ll be just a BIT of a hassle — nothing really big to worry about. Even without the presence of this feature, advertisers could target a particular web site, so it’s no biggie — that is if all your advertisers know how to target web sites even without it. They’ll learn soon enough though, if they currently don’t. Or you can take advantage of the situation and solicit paid links directly so you can keep 100% of the revenues. You could also launch a tutorial for it if you’re that loyal to Google.

In the end, this is just one of Google’s many future plans for Adsense. We can only know if it affects anyone when it’s completely phased out. Watch out for follow-up reports soon enough.

Gmail

The whole thing was discovered by Problogger because of Gmail. Someone emailed Problogger’s owner, Darren Rowse, about the discrepancy. According to them, the ads in their Gmail account retained the old clickable zones. I wasn’t surprised when I read this. After all, Gmail belongs to Google. While it may be true last week, it isn’t anymore — at least not for me. I checked my Gmail account and noticed it implemented the new clickable zones.

Engadget

For some reason, I’m having difficulties getting the Google ads in Engadget to show, so there won’t be a screen cap. But yes, Engadget retains the old clickable zone.

About.com

As demonstrated by the screen capture, About.com’s Google ads retain the wider clickable zones.

MySpace

Same as with About.com, MySpace still has the old clickable zones.

CNN

Yep, the old clickable zones.

Darren Rowse conjectured that these big sites retaining bigger clickable zones might be due to the fact that Google considers them premium sites. He also raises a valid point by saying that big sites such as these could generate more random accidental clicks than many, many smalls sites put together. If their reasoning should be believed, retaining the old clickable zones for premium publishers defeats their purpose. How about you, what do you think Google’s up to? And about Gmail suddenly reducing the size of clickable ads — Darren Rowse must have done great to pique publishers’ curiosity.