30 guides · Free to read
Guides for people who work for themselves — and the sites they run.
Freelance money first: rates, quotes, difficult clients, tax, steady pay and knowing when to stop. Then everything about Google AdSense — approval, policy, earnings and alternatives. Each guide covers one subject in full and links to the calculator or tool that does the maths.
Freelance money: rates, clients and cash flow
The thinking behind each SideGigArt calculator — how to set a rate, price a project, answer a pushy client, handle tax, steady an irregular income and decide when a side hustle is worth it.
How to calculate your freelance hourly rate (without undercharging)
Most first freelance rates are set by looking at what other people charge, or by dividing an old salary by 2,080 hours. Both methods leave you short. Here is the method that starts from what you need and works backwards.
9 min read · Updated 28 September 2026
How to price a freelance project: fixed quotes, buffers and retainers
A fixed-price quote is a promise about an uncertain amount of work. The skill is not guessing the hours perfectly; it is building the uncertainty into the price so you are not the one who pays for it.
9 min read · Updated 28 September 2026
How to handle scope creep and difficult client requests
Scope creep rarely arrives as a big demand. It arrives as "one quick thing". The freelancers who handle it well are not more confrontational; they simply have a reply ready before the request lands.
8 min read · Updated 28 September 2026
How much to set aside for tax as a freelancer
The tax bill is rarely the problem. The problem is spending the money before the bill arrives. A fixed percentage moved on the day you are paid solves that almost completely.
8 min read · Updated 28 September 2026
Irregular freelance income: how to pay yourself a steady salary
A big month followed by a quiet one is normal freelance life. What makes it stressful is letting your personal spending rise and fall with it. The answer is to put a buffer between the business and yourself.
8 min read · Updated 28 September 2026
Client hasn't paid? How to chase a late invoice and charge a late fee
Most late invoices are not refusals — they are forgotten, stuck in approval or sitting in the wrong inbox. A calm, scheduled reminder sequence gets the majority paid without any conflict.
7 min read · Updated 28 September 2026
When to quit a side hustle (and when to pivot instead)
The hardest part of a side project is not starting it. It is knowing, twelve months in, whether it is quietly working or quietly eating your weekends. Here is how to judge it with numbers rather than hope.
8 min read · Updated 28 September 2026
Getting approved
What Google is actually judging when it accepts or refuses a site, and how to answer each of the common rejection reasons.
Why AdSense rejects sites for "low value content"
It is the most common AdSense refusal, and the most misunderstood. "Low value content" is not a comment on your writing style — it is a statement about whether your site gives a visitor a reason to be there.
7 min read · Updated 28 August 2026
The AdSense approval checklist (2026)
Everything a reviewer looks at, grouped into the order you should work through it. Nothing here guarantees approval — but every item on this list has been the sole reason somebody's application failed.
8 min read · Updated 28 August 2026
How much content do you need before applying to AdSense?
Every forum quotes a different number: 30 posts, 20 pages, 10,000 words. None of them come from Google. Here is how to think about volume without chasing an invented threshold.
6 min read · Updated 28 August 2026
Writing original, Google-friendly content: topics, length, keywords and meta tags
Google does not reward writing that exists to fill a page. It rewards writing that answers a question better than the alternatives — and there is a repeatable method for producing it.
12 min read · Updated 6 September 2026
The four policy pages every AdSense site needs
Everyone knows they need these four pages. Far fewer know that empty, generated versions of them are treated much the same as missing ones.
7 min read · Updated 28 August 2026
How long AdSense approval takes, and what happens at each stage
There is no fixed number of days for AdSense approval. There is, however, a predictable sequence of stages, and knowing which one you are in stops you making the mistakes that add weeks to the wait.
8 min read · Updated 10 September 2026
Rejected by AdSense: how to read the email and what to do next
The email tells you less than you want and more than you think. Each stock phrase maps to a recognisable set of problems — once you know which, the work is obvious.
7 min read · Updated 28 August 2026
Technical setup
The files, tags and scores a reviewer and a crawler both depend on. Every one of these is verifiable, and the free checker tests them for you.
ads.txt explained: what it is, how to create it, how to verify it
ads.txt is a one-line text file that stops other people selling ad space on your domain. It is trivial to create and surprisingly easy to get subtly wrong.
6 min read · Updated 28 August 2026
robots.txt and Googlebot: how a blocked crawl kills your application
A reviewer cannot approve a site they cannot read. Most crawl blocks are accidents left over from a staging build or copied from someone else's file.
6 min read · Updated 28 August 2026
XML sitemaps for AdSense applicants: create, submit, verify
A sitemap does not get you approved. It gets your pages discovered, which is the precondition for anyone — reviewer or reader — finding the work you did.
6 min read · Updated 28 August 2026
Google Search Console, end to end: verify your domain and get indexed
Search Console is the only place Google tells you what it thinks of your site. Setting it up takes twenty minutes; reading it correctly is what actually gets pages indexed.
11 min read · Updated 6 September 2026
Mobile usability and the viewport tag
Most of your visitors, and Google's primary crawler, are on a phone. A single missing line in the head is enough to make a good site unusable for both.
6 min read · Updated 28 August 2026
Page speed and Core Web Vitals, explained plainly
Speed rarely decides an AdSense application on its own, but it shapes everything else — how much of your content gets read, how well ads perform, and how a reviewer experiences the site.
8 min read · Updated 28 August 2026
Programme policy and compliance
The rules that apply once ads are running, and the ones that get accounts limited or disabled.
AdSense ad placement policy: where you can and cannot put ads
Placement rules are enforced separately from content policy, and they catch experienced publishers as often as new ones. Here is what governs where an ad can legally sit on your page.
8 min read · Updated 10 September 2026
Cookie consent for AdSense: what Google's EU policy actually requires
If you have any EEA, UK or Swiss traffic and you run AdSense, Google's EU user consent policy is not optional. Here is what it requires and where publishers get it wrong.
8 min read · Updated 10 September 2026
Invalid traffic and AdSense: what the policy covers and how to stay clear of it
"Invalid traffic" is the reason behind some of the most severe AdSense penalties, and also one of the most misunderstood policies. Here is what it covers, what it does not, and what to do if you are warned.
8 min read · Updated 13 September 2026
Earnings, alternatives and monetisation
What display advertising realistically pays, what else you can do with a site, and where AdSense is the wrong tool.
How much does AdSense pay? A real way to work it out
Anyone quoting a single dollar figure for AdSense is guessing. Payouts depend on an auction, your niche, your visitors' country and the season. Here is the arithmetic to work out your own number.
8 min read · Updated 13 September 2026
AdSense alternatives: an honest guide to your real options
Most lists of AdSense alternatives are affiliate link dumps. This one tells you which options exist, what they actually require, and why the honest answer is often more traffic rather than a different network.
13 min read · Updated 15 September 2026
How to monetise a website: the real options and what each one needs
The right way to monetise a site is not a matter of taste. It follows from how much traffic you have and what that traffic is trying to do. Here is every honest route, matched to the situation it actually suits.
9 min read · Updated 13 September 2026
How to make money from a website: a realistic plan by traffic level
A website makes money in proportion to two things: how many people arrive and what they came to do. Here is what is realistic at each traffic level, with the maths shown, so you can pick the method that pays now instead of the one that pays someday.
10 min read · Updated 28 September 2026
Website monetization strategies: 9 models compared side by side
Every monetisation strategy has a traffic floor, a typical value per visitor and a hidden cost. This comparison lays them out together so you can combine two or three that suit your site instead of guessing.
9 min read · Updated 28 September 2026
Newsletter monetization: how to earn from an email list of any size
An email list is the one audience a search update cannot take away. Here is how newsletters actually earn, how to price a sponsor slot from your own numbers, and what a list of 500, 2,000 or 10,000 readers can realistically bring in.
8 min read · Updated 28 September 2026
YouTube AdSense requirements: how channel monetisation actually works
Searches for 'YouTube AdSense requirements' usually mean one of two different questions. Here is the distinction, the current eligibility routes, and what happens after you apply.
8 min read · Updated 13 September 2026
Use a guide, then run the numbers
Each freelance guide links to the calculator that applies its method. Website publishers can also check HTTPS, ads.txt, robots.txt, sitemaps, policy-page links, navigation and PageSpeed against a live URL. Everything is free and works without an account.