Over the past year or so, I’ve ended up helping four different people get their first blog approved for AdSense — a cousin, a former coworker, a guy from a blogging Discord server, and my sister-in-law who started a parenting blog. Different niches, different personalities, different levels of tech comfort.
What’s interesting is that all four of them made almost the exact same assumptions going in, and almost all of those assumptions turned out to be wrong. So instead of another “here’s my personal story” post, I wanted to write about the patterns I noticed across four completely different first attempts, since I think it’s more useful to see what repeats across different people than just one person’s specific journey.
The Assumption Everyone Starts With: “More Content Is Better”
Every single one of them, without me suggesting it, aimed for a high post count before applying. My cousin had 22 posts. My former coworker had 18. The Discord guy had 30, which he was oddly proud of.
All three got rejected on their first attempt.
My sister-in-law was the one exception — she started with just 7 posts about newborn sleep schedules, feeding routines, that kind of thing, each one pretty thorough because she genuinely had a lot to say from personal experience. She got approved on her first try.
That contrast is what actually convinced me post count wasn’t the lever people think it is. What mattered more, once we went back and looked at the rejected sites, was that most of those 18-30 posts were short, surface-level, and interchangeable with a hundred other blogs covering the same basic points.
What Actually Worked, Once We Fixed Things
Cutting content down, not adding more
For my cousin, we went back through his 22 posts and picked the 8 strongest. Rewrote those to be genuinely thorough — his site was about beginner home workouts, so instead of generic “do these 5 exercises” posts, we added things like proper form notes, common mistakes he’d actually seen people make at his own gym, and modifications for different fitness levels.
Deleted the other 14 posts entirely. Reapplied about three weeks later. Approved.
Writing from actual experience instead of generic advice
The former coworker’s site was about personal finance, a topic where it’s incredibly easy to write generic, could’ve-been-written-by-anyone content. His early posts read like summarized versions of stuff you could find on a dozen other finance blogs.
We reworked his strongest posts to include his own specific numbers and decisions — how he’d actually paid off a specific debt, mistakes he made with a particular budgeting app, what surprised him about his own spending once he tracked it for a month. Same general topics, completely different level of usefulness.
Filling in the pages nobody thinks about
This one came up with basically all three of the guys, oddly enough, but not with my sister-in-law, who’d apparently read somewhere that these mattered and did them from the start.
None of the other three had a proper About page, a working Contact form, or a Privacy Policy when they first applied. The Discord guy’s About page literally just said “blog about tech stuff, enjoy!”
For each of them, we wrote a real About page (a few sentences about who they were and why the blog existed), set up and tested a working Contact form, and generated a Privacy Policy through PrivacyPolicies.com, editing the wording each time so it actually matched their specific site instead of leaving it generic.
Checking mobile layout before applying, not after
The Discord guy’s site looked completely fine on his laptop but had a broken menu on mobile that he’d genuinely never noticed, since he’d built and reviewed everything on desktop. We caught this by just opening the site on his phone, which took about ten seconds and revealed a real problem instantly.
Step-by-Step: What I Now Tell Every First-Time Blogger
After going through this with four different people, here’s the actual sequence I recommend now, right from the start, instead of letting people make the same mistakes and fix them afterward.
- Pick a topic you actually have real experience in, not just interest in. My sister-in-law’s advantage wasn’t writing skill, it was that she was living the topic daily and had specific, real details to share.
- Write 6-8 posts, not 20+. Depth over volume, every time, based on what I’ve seen across all four sites.
- Include something personal in each post — a specific mistake, a real number, an actual decision you made — not just generic advice anyone could write.
- Set up About, Contact, and Privacy Policy pages from day one, not as an afterthought once something goes wrong.
- Check the site on an actual phone before considering it finished.
- Submit your sitemap through Google Search Console and give it a couple weeks before applying, letting the site actually get indexed.
- Apply once, calmly, instead of rushing the moment the post count feels high enough.
A Simple Before-and-After From the Fitness Blog
Just to make the content difference concrete — my cousin’s original post on squats was basically: “Squats are great for legs. Keep your back straight. Do 3 sets of 10.” That’s it, maybe 150 words including the intro.
The rewritten version included proper foot placement, the specific mistake of letting knees cave inward (which he’d actually seen happen a lot at his gym), how to modify the movement for people with knee issues, and a short note on when to add weight versus focusing on form first. About 700 words, all things he actually knew from real experience, not things he had to research generically.
Common Mistakes First-Time Bloggers Make (Based on Watching Four of Them)
- Chasing a high post count instead of writing fewer, more thorough posts.
- Writing generic advice that doesn’t include any personal experience or specific detail.
- Skipping About, Contact, and Privacy Policy pages because they don’t feel like “real” content.
- Never checking the site on an actual phone, only reviewing on a laptop.
- Applying immediately after finishing the site, without giving it time to get indexed.
- Assuming their niche needs to be unique rather than realizing depth and personal experience matter more than the topic itself.
Final Thoughts
Watching four completely different people go through this made one thing pretty clear to me — the mistakes first-time bloggers make aren’t really about the specific niche or how tech-savvy they are. They’re almost always the same handful of assumptions: more posts is better, generic advice is fine, the “boring” pages don’t matter.
If you’re just starting out, the shortcut isn’t some trick nobody’s told you about. It’s mostly just skipping the assumptions everyone else starts with and going straight for fewer, deeper posts with real experience behind them, plus the basic pages filled in properly from the start.
