Signing Up Made Easy

The sign-up page asks for a relatively small amount of information, not all of
which is as obvious as you might like.
First, you’ll have to tell Google the “primary” site on which you want to place
your ads. If you have more than one site, just pick the one that has the most
traffic and content. You’ll also need to tell Google the language of your
website so that they can assign the site to the right person for review.
You’ll then be offered two checkboxes. One of them requires you to state
that you won’t be placing the ads on sites that contain pornographic content.
The other indicates that you agree not to “place ads on sites that include
incentives to click on ads.”
At the bottom of the page, you’ll also have to agree not to “click on the
Google ads I’m serving through AdSense.”
Both of those are important and they’re themes that will run throughout your
time as an AdSense publisher.
If you click on one of your own ads — even to see which companies are
advertising on your pages or to make sure that the system is working —
you’ll cost your advertisers money. They’ll have to pay for that click. Google
can track suspicious clicks, and while it will take a few “mistakes” into
account, deducting those clicks from payments, it can be pretty unforgiving
towards publishers who try to make money by clicking their own ads, or
encouraging their users to do so for them.Many publishers have found that they’ve been permanently banned from
AdSense for those sorts of practices, a very costly mistake.
You can — and should — encourage people to click on affiliate ads because
they only pay if someone actually buys. But you can never encourage people
to click pay-per-click ads, like AdSense.

Once you’ve completed your website information, you’ll need to provide
contact information. The only tricky question here is whether you want an
“individual” account or a “company” account — whether you’re a company
with more than twenty employees or practically a one-man show that’s just
you and up to nineteen others. That’s important for just one reason: it tells
Google where to send the money. Take a business account and the payments
will be made in the name of your company; take an individual account, and
they’ll be paid directly to you. You might wish to consult with a CPA to
decide which is the most advantageous way for you to go.
Once, you’ve completed the basic details, you’ll be asked to confirm them.
(Do check that the address is correct. Google likes to send out checks, so if
you’ve put the wrong address, your neighbor will be receiving your AdSense
payments instead of you. I like being nice to my neighbors… but not that
much!) And you’ll be asked to log in using a Google Account such as your
Gmail username and password, or to create a username and password if you
don’t have one.
Google will then send you an email with a link to confirm that your details
are correct. Click the link and someone will review your website to make sure
that it’s appropriate for AdSense.
That process can take two or three days, although often it’s a lot faster, but
it does mean that for those first two or three days, you won’t have any ads.
Use that time to create more content so that you’ll have plenty of space to
put your ads once the site has been approved. And the more original quality
content you have on your site, the better. Likewise if your site is loaded with
other advertising already it may not be approved.