The Honest Way

Welcome back! I’ve just finished putting up a free trial promo from those masters of the autoresponder, AWeber. I found the info on their site’s affiliate page, so thought it would be a good idea to try out here on my Products page. AWeber give you the code to create a small opt-in box that allows your visitors to sign up for their free trial (it doesn’t count towards you list). They then promote themselves vis email which gives you a much better chance at gaining more affiliate sign-ups.

There should be plenty of takers, as all internet marketers need an autoresponder. And AWeber are the best in the business! If you haven’t set one up yet, take a look at AWeber and have a look for yourself.

Now, having given AWeber a nice plug, I’m going to deal them out a bit of a rollicking.

I’m a tad picky when it comes to clean html code. I’ve built what I belive is a damn nice site in The Honest Way and I’ve spent a fair amount of time and effort to ensure all my code is xhtml 1.0 compliant. So I really don’t appreciate third party code messing it up with gargoyles like nested tables. Yep, even the mighty AWeber are still giving out prehistoric html code for their opt-in forms that contain ugly nested tables, repeating <font> tags and other nasties.

So I had to spend more time modifying that code to work with a <div> tags using css to keep it all clean. But it’s worth doing it because it looks better and the w3c people prefer clean html/xhtml.

End of that minor rant.

Other News

The “other” Honest Way Blog is still hanging in there and I’m making sure it still gets regular updates (I put out a version of this post over there just now. It’s important to keep it on, as it provides extra exposure for this site and the all-important backlink too. Every little helps!

The Honest Way Forum is also enjoying a good start in life. We’ve got up to 20 members at the time of writing this and I predict that number to double by the end of the week. So if you haven’t registered there yet, now is the time if you still want to get in early.

Well, that’s all for today. Thanks for dropping by and poking your head round the door.

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

There’s an interesting but thankfully short story behind the creation of The Honest Way.

It all came about thanks to the inspiration gleaned from one Steven Wagenheim, a respected online entrepeneur and stalwart of top forums like Warriors and Whydowork as well as a long term MPAM member.

He had already released a short series of informational articles to the MPAM forum for the benefit of its members and these were an absolute mine of online marketing and promotional inspiration.

Before reading these articles, I’d been hooked on the idea presented by SEO 20/20’s “The Plan” which involved setting up a series of websites over a fairly gradual length of time and promoting them using unique articles submitted to article directories as well as posted on each site.

I’d already set up my first site at Hypnosis with Music CDs to sell hypnosis self-help CDs and provide informational articles about hypnosis. The idea was to use adsense as a monetising addition, but fell foul of their “invalid clicks” rule and got banned. So I needed another source of revenue.

Steven’s articles paved the way to increase traffic to that site, but more importantly showed me how best to set up a second site (then a third… etc) and market it to produce an alternative income stream. After all, I knew from MPAM that the way to earn a decent income online I’d need multiple income streams.

But the kick up the backside came when Steven released My Secret Articles. I knew I needed to promote that package and it told me exactly how to do it, so I knew I had to set up a new site to promote it - and fast. I already had the basic layout for The Honest Way, so I just needed hosting and to write some articles to go with it.

Here is teh result as you see it now. There are a total of 9 articles as I write this, a forum which is strating to grow with new members joining daily and finally this blog.

So keep looking in, I aim to keep it updated regularly as well as keep posting in the forum. My next site is on the drawing board and should be released soon - I’ll announce that here too.

See you soon,

Terry Didcott

          

Here is the very first post of the new Honest Way blog associated with and now a physical part of The Honest Way.

It’s been a whole 3 weeks now since The Honest Way went on the air on 10th March 2007. In that time, it has undergone several superficial changes with regards its look, feel and content.

The Honest Way started with a few affiliate products, two free informational articles and a few affiliate links in the sidebar. Now its has grown considerable in that short time. There are now 8 full articles, a good list of recommended affiliate products, an opt-in form linked to an autoresponder, a forum and now this blog.

We’ve been watching the web stats since day one, when we were getting a handful of hits to begin with, buat that hit rate climbed sharply as the articles that were submitted to Ezine Articles were published and visitors started coming over to see what the site was all about. After two weeks of regular article submissions and posts on forums and message boards, the hits had climbed steadily enough for the prediction that we would see over 5,000 hits by the 31st of March.

Well, it continued to grow until the last few days we were getting over 1,000 hits per day. The final count at the end of the 31st was over 12,000 hits. That exceeded all expectations and has set us up for a possible 20,000 hit prediction for April.

We shall see…

As for the forum it has started slowly as expected, with only a few announcements in other forums going out. The first invitation went to www.whydowork.com forum members as that was the first forum that I found in my early days online. The members there are friendly and very helpful - and probably saved me from a savaging by the scammers and rip-off artists that litter the online business world. At the time of writing, the forum has 15 members and there are around 60 posted topics.

If anyone wants to join the forum, all good, decent and friendly people are welcome. There is a registration process that has email verification to help keep the worst of the spammers at bay. If potential members find this too much trouble, then they probably wouldn’t want to stay and be part of the new, hopefully friendly community - and we probably wouldn’t want them as members. Fair play.

That’s all for this first post. There will be more on a regular basis keeping the business up to date and the search engines happy with lots of fresh content!

Come back again soon for more…

Terry Didcott

The Honest Way