How to Make Money The Honest Way

The days of writing short reviews of affiliate products and then blasting them with links to get them ranked in the main search engine (Google) for any kind of long term money making have been over for quite some time. Sure you can still do it using churn and burn tactics for some short term gains, but if you manage to rank a page or a thin site, you can bet it won’t last.

Google are all out to kill any small affiliate marketers who use their own self hosted domains. They don’t want you making money off their search index if you’re not giving them any!

That’s why you see a lot of adsense sites dominating the serps for a lot of the search terms that used to be dominated by affiliate sites. That’s also why you see a lot of the same old faces dominating many terms – webmd.com in first place for just about every health keyword worth ranking for example.

You see Amazon in first place for just about every buying keyword you can imagine, with a few other big name stores (Wal-Mart, eBay etc) behind them effectively squeezing out smaller affiliate sites that used to clean up. That even goes for a lot of the long tails that “bum marketers” used to target as being “low hanging fruit”.

How to Get Past this Wall of Stone?

If you are trying to get past this virtually unassailable barrier with your own site, no matter how great it is and how much time you put into it, if it has affiliate links in product reviews, you are working against the flow. And it’s a pretty damn strong flow.

I’m going to put to you an idea that a few years ago would have been laughed off the stage.

Take all the affiliate links off your site and concentrate on making it great in the eyes of Google and for real visitors. Stop writing articles that hint at answering a question but that don’t really answer it (how we used to write articles for adsense) and answer the damn questions! And answer them well – better than anyone else has answered them.

That will help your site rank better and attract more traffic. “But it won’t make any money if its not monetized!” I hear you scream.

True, it won’t make a dime. But look at it this way. If you kept the affiliate links on there, it wouldn’t rank and you wouldn’t get the traffic so it wouldn’t make a dime either!

Sure, you can get trickle traffic from Bing and Yahoo and maybe from the lower places you might be lucky enough to occupy in Google’s holy tome. And you might make a few sales here and there. But you won’t make anything like what you could (and should) be making if you had one of those coveted top spots for keywords that convert into $$.

Using Your Site

But if you turn your site into an authority on its subject, what you can use it for is links.

Use something else for hosting your affiliate links and then link your relevant review article on your main site to these external pages. They can be web 2.0 properties or self hosted domains of your own that you don’t care if they don’t rank for anything.

Yep, you’ll lose some sales that way, but you’ll also gain some you wouldn’t have otherwise attracted. The trick is to move the pages that Google hates (the ones with those nasty affiliate banners) off your main, squeaky clean site and onto someplace else. You then divert your traffic to the external sales page via a link that perhaps continues your excellent review with a hook that’ll make most visitors want to click thorough to see what else you have to say on the subject.

Like a clever CTA (Call to Action) that uses the same trick a TV show uses to get you to tune in to the next episode.

A cliffhanger!

Using Web 2.0

You can build some Squidoo lenses and put as many affiliate banners on them as you like. Those buggers rank just fine and with a few authority links, they rank very well. Some other web 2.0 properties also rank ok if you link them, like tumblr, weebly etc, You can put your banners on then and they will rank better than your own site because they have massive site authority that you probably don’t have.

So there it is. How to keep making affiliate sales in the current climate of anti-affiliate measures by Google designed to stop you ranking your own sites to sell stuff that you keep all the commission and don’t give any to the greedy!

          

These days, it’s not possible to run a business without having a website. You can try to make it work but basically, it’s easier to fall flat on your face with your endeavors when you don’t have the type of support that websites provide for. Behind the most well constructed and well developed websites are web designers. It follows then that you’ll have thoughts like “I need cash now so that I can retain the services of a web designer who can make me a high quality website”. Keep in mind that quality comes with a price — and you better be prepared for it. But on top of your financial concerns, the question now is what makes a web design or website a high quality site?

The Details of Making of a High Quality Website

Have you ever heard of the saying, God is in the details. If you hire a web design specialist that can look into the details of your website, you’ve got it made. Again, money is going to be a factor because without it, you can’t even begin to find the best web designers in the market. Get it through your head now that if you want quality for your website, you need to pay for it.

The details of your website will mostly rely on the organization of your website elements. It’s true that you want a creative website to catch attention and you want a creative website to entice people to do what you want them to do like shop on your site or sign up for your mailing list. In the case of a blog site for example, the way your site should be designed would be to catch attention, spark interest, foster desire and get people to take action.

The details that your web designer should also incorporate into your website would relate to the typography of your content. Again, you want your web pages to be attractive. Your designer, if he’s a skilled web designer will make sure that you have the most attractive website even by using simple fonts for your content. Nothing beats readability in the quality of fonts. Make sure that the person you hire to do web design work for you will think about the details. Indeed, details make for a fantastic website.

The Simple Things

In web design, simplicity is key. Choosing a web designer to work on your website, it’s good to take a look at their portfolio to see what type of work you’re going to get from them. Contrary to what you might be thinking, being attractive doesn’t necessarily have to be flashy and flamboyant. When you hire an experienced web designer, he can make it work by making your website simple but still eye catching.

In business today, many of the elements are interrelated. You need a website to be and to stay in business. Your website needs to be well designed and you can only get this from a skilled web designer. Make sure that you reach your fullest potential in running your company by making the best choices with regard to web design.

Make Money The Honest Way

          

Starting out as an online marketer or a work at home professional can be really confusing because of the many methods presented on how to go about the job successfully. But no matter how many suggestions you get, you will find that the top online marketers will always suggest email marketing and the use of the best autoresponder. So if you are serious about making money online, then don’t forgo email marketing. The question now is- how do you start making money with email?

The Strategic Game of Email Marketing

Just like any other game, having a strategy for email marketing always yields productive results. Keep in mind that your strategy as an email marketer is to have your customers look forward to your emails rather than ignore the email that you sent. This is a hard goal to achieve especially if you want your email to be the first one that they clicked on as soon as they open their emails. But if you are able to achieve this, then you not only get them hooked but you also get to have the chance to see bigger earnings in your bank account.

Email Marketing is about Building Trust

When a potential customer visits your website for the first time, it is a given that most likely they will not buy anything from you yet just because they don’t trust you enough. It’s also a given that once they clicked out of your site, there’s a large possibility that they will not come back to your website. And if you don’t want this to happen then consider having an autoresponder incorporated in your website.

When you have a good autoresponder incorporated into your site, you will have the chance of developing a good relationship to your potential clients through email. Once they are able to trust you by providing them with valuable information about the services or the products you are offering, then most likely you will be able to see these potential customers as paying customers.

How the Best Autoresponder Works for You

A really good autoresponder is your gateway to developing that trust with your clients through emails. It will gather the contact details of your website visitors using a web form that is incorporated in your website. In exchange of their contact details, you promise to give them valuable information on what you are offering free of charge. Since they are filling up the web form, they are also giving their permission for you to contact them via email.

When a potential client gives that permission, the chances of them reading your email will be higher as your email will not go to their spam folder. Now all you have to do is make an interesting subject line so they will be interested to open up the email you sent. If your subject line is something that fails to catch their interest, although your email did not end up in the spam folder, it will most likely end up on the trash.

Email marketing and the use of the best autoresponder are definitely rewarding but only if you know how to do it the right way.

Make Money The Honest Way

          

There are always things that get in the way of trying to make a decent living from the Internet. If it isn’t the constant battle with competitors in various niches, then its all the hard work that goes into trying to rank a site high in the SERPs, only for the goalposts to move as the way in which Google ranks sites changes. But this latest hurdle that Google have thrown up is just too high for anyone to jump.

I’m talking about the mew search index layout and in particular the way that the three ads now sit right above the organic listings and look almost exactly like true organically listed sites. Which they are not. They’re ads and not only are they stuck right above the true listings, they are taking the lion’s share of the organic traffic!

I have some websites that rank #1 for certain keywords that were attracting a lot of visitors and converting into decent sales. At least that was the way it was before the three top ads were redesigned to look like organic listings.

Click for larger image

What we have now is an ad-loaded page of a search index, very much like the way the old Yahoo used to look before the cleaner, more user-friendly Google burst onto the scene in the late 1990s. I might have already mentioned this in my post Is Google Becoming the New Yahoo?. For now, the general public who use Google don’t really know any different and will naturally click the top ads thinking they are genuine organically listed sites. They are being tricked in a sneaky way, because even though Google prints the word “Ads” in small letters at the top right of the ad block and even gives the block a very pale yellow background, most regular folks don’t see the difference.

Its the same way that TV advertisers can promote a product and make people believe its something better than what it really is. Google are using clever layout to make those ads appear like organic listings and by putting them at the top are giving an unfair advantage to the advertisers who have the deepest pockets.

This actually totally flies in the face of Google’s own stance on “buying your way to the top of the SERPs”. They have recently stamped on a number of big websites for buying links in order to rank above their competition. The fiasco over the JCPenney slap springs to mind here. Google outed them for buying links to get to the top. Fair dues.

But what about these paid ads that are now sitting pretty at the top of the SERPs for some pretty high octane keywords?

Are they not also “buying their way to the top of the SERPs?”

Technically, they are doing little different to what JCPenney were accused of doing to make JCPenney money. They are just doing it in a way that makes Google money.

An aspiring Internet Marketer may well ask the question, “What should I do to get my site to rank at the top of the SERPs for the difficult keyword making money online?” There are now two valid answers.

1. Spend a fortune in time and money on learning SEO, creating a great, authority website full of original, relevant content, backlinking the shit out of it… etc etc etc and maybe wait a year or two for Google to grace all your hard work with a high place on page #1.
2. Spend a fortune on Adwords and zoom straight to the top for that keyword and reap the benefits of the traffic right NOW.

Who said that this business was fair?

Make Money The Honest Way