Ezoic Access Now is a program by Ezoic that helps smaller publishers to monetize their sites. More often, smaller publishers or new bloggers find it hard to monetize their blogs. There are not many options out there to look out for.
Earlier Ezoic was open only for publishers with more than 10,000 visitors, but in 2021 Ezoic announced Ezoic Access Now Program, opening its doors for smaller publishers, bloggers, website owners, and niche experts to access Ezoic Platform. It has definitely turned out to be a boon for smaller publishers. As Ezoic says on its site
Ezoic Access Now fulfills the true vision for the Ezoic platform, scaling our technology to make it available to all sites no matter their size.
In this post let’s see how to join this program and monetize the site.
Traffic Requirements – While Ezoic Access Now program has no pageview requirement, Ezoic recommends at least 500 – 1000 visits per month. Nonetheless, if your site has good content and good design, page visits shouldn’t be a problem.
Overall Ezoic Access Now Process
Here is a quick overview of the process
- Create an Account and submit your domain
- Complete the courses
- Integrate your site with Ezoic servers
- Setup Ads.txt
- Create GoogleAdManager Account
- Ezoic Site Review
- Google Site Review
Let’s understand each step in detail
First Step – Sign Up For Ezoic Access Now
Sign up for the Ezoic Access Now program using your email id. All the required communications will be sent to you on this registered email Id. Then submit your domain name. Your Ezoic account is ready now and you should be able to see the Ezoic Dashboard.
Understanding The Ezoic Access Now Dashboard
Once logged in, you should be seeing four courses on your dashboard.
As you see 2 courses are optional, Monetization Course and Speed/LEAP Course, the remaining 2 courses are essential courses and should be completed. It’s better to take up all the courses to better under the platform and how it works.
Ezoic has further simplified the process for joiners, it has removed the TEST, during the initial launch of this program, one was supposed to pass the TEST after taking up the courses, and a minimum of 75% marks was pass criteria. Thankfully Ezoic has been very closely monitoring this program, it has put its best efforts to make it possible for new publishers to monetize their sites.
Ever since the launch of the program, Ezoic has made a lot of changes to the dashboard and process and has been continuously putting efforts to evolve it, making it more streamlined.
As and when you continue to complete the courses you should be seeing the percentage of each course that’s completed.
The Best thing about courses is, these are in video format of short duration. One can easily grasp all the technical aspects such as nameservers integration, caching, ads.txt setup, etc., as well. It’s very well explained in layman’s terms. Apart from video format if one wants to know more, Ezoic also has a Knowledge base that has very well-written articles, which are to the point and very well broken down. And not only this there are also troubleshooting articles.
Dashboard has many other features. Analytics is the place where Revenue and Traffic details can be seen.
Ezoic Essentials Course
This is the foundational course that requires you to integrate your site with Ezoic serves, set up ads.txt, and finally send your site for Ezoic and Google Review.
How do I integrate my site with Ezoic?
There are 2 ways to integrate your site with Ezoic, Nameserver and Cloudflare. Don’t be afraid of these terms if you haven’t heard of them before. In course videos, you will get familiar with these.
Cloudflare is only for existing Cloudflare users. As I am not using Cloudflare so I went ahead with the other option Nameserver.
As part of Nameserver integration, all you have to do is just change your existing nameservers, to the one ezoic provides during the integration process.
If you have purchased your domain from Godaddy, just login to your account and you will find an option “Manage DNS” and from here you should be able to update the nameservers.
If you have purchased your domain from Bluehost / Hostinger, nameservers can simply be updated using cPanel / hPanel. For ex: Click here to check in-case of Hostinger.
Once you change the DNS servers to point to Ezoic one’s then wait for 24 hours, as DNS propagation is going to take some time. Clicking on the “Integration Complete” button you may see the error message “The Site is not integrated yet“.
Tip : DNS Propagation can be checked from here, just enter your domain
In case you continue to see this error message even after 24hrs just contact the ezoic support, and they will assist you in debugging/troubleshooting the issue.
Applying for Google Ad Manager Account
If you already have Google Ad Manager Account then simply say ‘Yes’ and enter your email Id and Network Code.
If you don’t have Google Ad Manager Account then simply say ‘No’ and enter your email Id, and you will get an invite to join it.
Please note that this approval may take up to 24hrs, so please be patient. The status will get reflected in the dashboard and also will be notified by email.
How to setup ads txt for Ezoic?
Ezoic offers 2 options here, either you can create it by yourself manually or have it automatically created by ezoic. I chose to create it automatically by ezoic. It’s pretty simple, with just a few clicks it’s going to generate ads.txt and upload to your site.
Please note due to caching you may not see ads.txt immediately on your site. In my case, it took 24hrs hours.
How do I add placeholders to Ezoic?
As part of Ads setup step, you are required to create a few ad placeholders for your site (at least 10 placeholders).
Please note, creating ad placeholders is not going to show any ads on your site, it’s a way for Ezoic to run some tests on your site and check where Ads placements are going to get you the maximum benefit.
Ezoic offers 2 ways to create Ad Placeholders, either using a WordPress plugin or Ezoic’s Chrome Extension.
Essential Course Steps
Monetization Course – Optional
This is an optional course, but as mentioned earlier it’s better to go through it. We don’t need to do any setup here. This course mainly walks us through the best practices, monetization understanding, etc.
Speed/LEAP Course – Optional
This is also an optional course. But highly recommended one, as we need to understand the caching mechanism. This course mainly talks about optimizing the site speed, Core Web Vitals, and how to use/optimize the cache.
Ezoic Affiliate Program
This course basically will provide information on the Affiliate program, its best practices, how to use it, and other FAQs.
Ezoic Access Now Course Completion
Once you complete the courses you should be seeing the overall completion percentage on your dashboard.
On the left side, you would see batches and a message – “You’ve completed the program!”
Ezoic Site Review
After completing the course your site will be reviewed by the Ezoic team. It can take anywhere between 3 days to 2 weeks. If your site has traffic then approval will be much quicker. You will be informed about the status through email and the dashboard also would show the status.
Google Review
This is going to be the last step, your site will be sent to Google for review. Ezoic being Google Certified Publishing Partner follows all the guidelines that Google has set for its publishers.
Google can take up to 2 weeks to review your domain and your status can be tracked from the dashboard.
Ezoic Access Now Support
During the whole process, I reached out to the support team twice, once during the site integration step, as I was getting the error message “The site is not integrated yet” even after 24hrs, after changing nameservers.
Then there was another instance where I chose “Automatic” option to setup ads.txt and the step was completed but I was not able to see ads.txt on my domain.
Ezoic’s support is just awesome, they have created a dedicated support community where issues can be discussed, and the support team is experienced enough to answer the queries and help in all possible ways to get us onboarded.
You can reach out to the support team by clicking on “Level Access Now” and then clicking on “Support Community“.
On the right bottom, that little chat icon will also take you to the Support Community.
To Wrap Up
Ezoic has really taken a great step by initiating “Ezoic Access Now” program. Definitely, it gives a great boost to small publishers/bloggers. If you are a new blogger and looking to monetize your site then definitely Ezoic is a good option.
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