I am writing this answer not just for you only but for general audience who might facing trouble getting adsense approved. I read and respect other's answers but, their is no need to do whole lot of stuff for approval. Adsense may used to have some parameter like Privacy Policy, About Us, Disclaimer, Traffic , your email id, blah, blah.
But, for now they only look for content and site design.
1. Content:
Your site content must be well written and structured. It does meant to be SEO optimised. All you need to use is proper paragraph structure, headings and sub heading, using images.
One more thing I like to point. Google does not care how well you write. Only, how well you present your content in your blog post. For example purpose visit my profile and my site. I got approval of it in under 20 days. its been 4-5 month and still i don't have Privacy policy.
2. Site design:
You need to make sure your website is ready to run adsense ads. And, your wesbite should look good, simple is prefered. Site speed is secondary issue but matter the most. Even though adsense ads are A-sync but takes time to load. So, take care of that too.
Using other ads will not be the issue, unless you use spammy ad site like propeller.
Hope this may help to anyone looking for adsense approval.
If you're looking to headstart it for you, just message me.
Thanks
Taj Soheil Siddique
At Applying For Adsense - Have A Domain Named Email, For example, If your Domain is "xyz.com", then make a gmail account named "[email protected]" and Apply For Adsense!