"Wealth gotten by vanity shall be diminished: but he that gathereth by labour shall increase." -Proverbs 13:11 (KJV)
I was over the moon when a few cents appeared on my Adsense account:
"This really works."
I was hopeful.
Instead of leveraging this opportunity, however, I kept looking for shortcuts and did little work on my blog. I added new blogs in the process; many of which remained unfinished. I refused to work hard. I was lazy.
I wanted to be my own boss but refused to work hard to achieve that goal.
Faithful to my daily ritual, I kept checking Google Adsense; I was delighted to see my earnings gradually approaching the $100/€70 payment threshold.
I was aware of all my bad habits, but I kept doing things the wrong way. I wasn't just stubborn as a mule; I was worse than a mule. I admit.
I walked around proudly thinking of the money I was going to earn. I even had the audacity to blow the trumpet to announce it to my colleagues, thinking they would be delighted for me.
Little did I know that a bitter surprise was awaiting around the corner to catch me off guard.
What a fool I was.
My Adsense earnings had reached almost $ 100/€70. There were only 50 cents left to reach the threshold before I could cash out. It was not much. The amount of money did not matter much; it could increase later; what mattered was the evidence that making money online was real.
One early morning, sometime in March or April 2011, I logged in to my Adsense account as usual to check my earnings.
To my surprise, my account had been disabled.
If I had a heart condition, I would have died of a heart attack.
What happened?
Was this a mistake?
I logged out and back several times, hoping something would change.
Nothing did.
I cannot describe my disappointment. I tried to figure out what had gone wrong and wondered whether I had made some technical mistake. Back then, Google provided bloggers with information on ways to improve performance and revenue, and I wondered whether I had misunderstood or done something wrong.
I contacted Google and explained the situation, but to no avail. I was told that my account had shown invalid clicks.
Google was strict about its policy against clicking your own ads. I knew this and never deliberately clicked on my own banners to earn money. I could remember clicking an ad once or twice while adding banners to my posts, simply to check whether they worked.
Had that caused the problem?
Had I made another mistake without realising it?
I didn't know.
I searched YouTube for similar stories. I wanted to know whether other bloggers had had their AdSense accounts disabled and, more importantly, whether they had managed to get them reinstated.
Some hadn't.
One or two apparently had.
I tried to convince myself there were other ways to earn money through my blogs. But I had depended heavily on AdSense, and it was one of the few things that had actually delivered some results. Accepting that I could no longer rely on it was difficult.
By then I was already sitting at the bottom of a pit created partly by my own mistakes. Losing Adsense felt as though a huge rock had been rolled over the opening.
I have had enough; I quit blogging.