BOOM! In your face Miniwing! You thought you could just buy a website, slap some well thought out and painstakingly curated blog posts and we’d let you have small unobtrusive ads that could help offset the cost of hosting… Well you’re wrong. Your content sucks!

Well, that’s how some people might read that notification after over two weeks of waiting for the “human review” portion. On the surface this is frustrating. While I don’t actively seek ads in any form, I am writing about my journey to increase passive income and ads on small sites are a vital form of not taking losses year over year to hosting costs, even if the site never explodes into a true wealth funnel. I’m looking at you, MMM…

Anyway, the long and short of the documents they sent me regarding this review basically boils down to my posts are too short. Average posts for successful adsense connections are around 800 words, but I strive to write – Miniature Thoughts! – which in theory is supposed to lead to short form posts. Perfectly designed to latch onto the increasing short attention spans fueled by Shorts, Reels, and Tiktoks. Not to mention small form text posts like X, Threads, Substack, Patreon. See what I did there… I know you did. Reminds me of our Referral dilemma.

So, how do we solve this issue of wanting to offer bite sized knowledge, experience, and stories, while also getting Google to help us cover some site level expenses. My answer isn’t to go edit all my content and meet a mystery word count. I plan on focusing at least 1 wordy post a week on a topic. Making sure to break that 700 word count and over all push the site “average” above the mystic threshold.

Now that’s a word I’ve not heard before, usually English teachers say stop padding your essay, or you’re being too wordy. Well today we need to be wordy, and petty. Because we already said this week that Motivation and Perseverance are vital to success. That means we don’t get to quit. 365 posts by mid Jan 2027. Though with vacations, a wedding I must attend, and several other life obligations we might run a little shy. It’s still a goal and in that goal I want to see my passive income increase.

I think one thing we’re recognizing in this is that the value we assign to things is different between a human interaction and the calculating nature of the machine. Whether it’s AI, or a corporate machine, we might focus on something short that meets our needs while the machine wants something that fulfills a time commitment. 30 seconds to 2 minutes on a webpage is much more likely to generate an ad click than 10 seconds.

I will give Google credit though, they are very strict in their policy that ads cannot be placed in locations that can accidentally be clicked, or where a user is trapped into clicking an ad to escape a page and that’s why I’d rather run Adsense than something else. They also verify that you don’t make up straight lies, that you don’t relink to a million other streaming or video content pages. Their checks are very thorough.

I feel that part of this strive for quality content and the human review process is a good sign, I want to have to work to post better for something that takes the time and effort to make sure they aren’t supporting shady sites and bot behaviors, but with a capital B… I think many people also want to see something short, maybe something they searched for specifically. My Chicken Soup post is exactly the kind of length Google wants by word count, but I specifically have a link in the first paragraph taking you straight to the recipe because I know if a real person is hunting a recipe they don’t want to read 10 paragraphs on a life story.

The soup post was about budgeting, scratch cooking in bulk for less money than buying store bought and taking those dollars and pennies saved and investing them into your future. Either Debt payments, growing that Emergency fund, or Investing it in an investment account, but at some point some person hunting a chicken noodle soup recipe will find that post and not care about any of that. That’s where the google expectations can fall short of function.

So as I keep saying Stoicism will bring success. Don’t falter carry out your plans. If a bump knocks you sideways, alter your trajectory, never give up and never quit. So I’m going to maintain consistency. I’ll post and post and post some more. I’ll re-apply, and we’ll see how it goes.

Let me know in the comments, or via any of those social links if the ads get intrusive or are placed annoyingly. I want a minimalist look so we’ll hunt the layout together.

#minithoughts #staymini

P.S. They also really don’t like when people have short bios and don’t look “trustworthy” well passion leads you places and I am passionate about saving, investing, and frugality.

~~Miniwing~~
Stoic, Investor, Parent, Wordsmith