How to Make Money The Honest Way

Hi everyone,

In this instalment, I’m going to take a short look at affiliate marketing.

Why affiliate marketing?

Well, as a source of income for your online business it can be very lucrative. It doesn’t take too much work to set up and once you have created a list of products that fit your niche, all you really have to do is tell the world about them.

There are several well known affiliate programs out there, but the biggest and best known has to be Clickbank.

Another up and coming affiliate site is PayDotCom.

If you don’t already have an account with either of these, you can follow the links to each site and sign up for free. There is no charge whatsoever for joining either of these programs and they will both enable you to sell products from their extensive lists and make money on the generous commissions the products offer.

The beauty of affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to produce a product of your own. There are none of the costs involved in promoting your own product, like website creation and hosting, product creation and packaging or hassle with merchant accounts and giving refunds. Both Clickbank and PayDotCom do all that for you. All you have to do is promote those products and then collect the commission cheques as they arrive (in the case of Clickbank) or watch your PayPal account grow (in the case of PayDotCom).

Promoting affiliate products is the same as promoting most things online. You don’t even need your own website (although it will give you more credibility). You can create blogs and squidoo lenses to promote your affiliate products and then advertise them using the several promotional methods already outlined in the several articles found on The Honest Way articles page.

So if you are looking to ways of increasing your online income, you could do a lot worse than set up some promotional pages in blogs, lenses or you own website(s), sign up with both Clickbank and PayDotCom and start promoting some of their affiliate products that are relevant to your own niche.

There’s no time like the present, so if you think affiliate marketing is for you go for it right now. You’ll be glad you did.

See you again soon!

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

Hi everyone.

Just found a new writer’s resource online that looks really useful for new and just getting going writers. It’s called The Writers Manifesto and is a well thought out and put together website. There are some good links to free authoring sites as well as some free articles all about… yep, writing!

It covers one of my favourite article submission sites, Constant Content of which I myself am a very satisfied member and which I reviewed in an earlier post on this very blog. Its a free to join site that pays you for your articles – the more you write and submit, the more you sell and the more you earn. Simple!

There is also a feature on a site called BlogsVertise that looks like a good way to earn money from your blog. I won’t give the game away here… to find out more about it and other ways of earning some decent and honest money online from writing, go visit The Writers Manifesto.

I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised!

See you all again very soon!

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

Hi again,

It’s time to take a concise look at website promotion on a shoestring – in fact we are going to look at some ways to promote your website for nothing. All it will cost you is some time and a little effort on your part.

So without further ado, here are four of the most effective (and free!) methods of website promotion geared to driving targeted traffic to your website.

1. Forums and Message Boards

2. Newsletters

3. Blog and Ping

4. Article Writing and Submission

Let’s take a brief look at each in turn:

Forums and message boards are probably the best source of targeted traffic that you can attract to your website. It can be time consuming, but is very worth it in the long run. You have to be patient and work at it slowly and surely to make it work for you. It’s no good going at forums like a bull in a china shop and spamming your affiliate links all over the place. All that will get you is shunned by the serious Internet Marketing community and likely banned from all the forums. Take a professional approach and do it right. Join a few forums to start with and post a “hello…” note to start with. Read some of the discussions and learn who the senior members are and who the most active members are. These are the ones you need to get on your side. You do that by being patient, polite and gradually showing you own knowledge by answering a few posts with valuable info (not irritating one-liners, like “yes that is so true” of “Yes, I agree”), then asking one or two pertinent questions and generally getting involved in the forums. Never post links to your site or affiliate links in your posts – put those links in your signature and follow the rules of the forums that you are a member of. You will eventually be accepted as part of the community and the members will naturally click your signature links out of curiosity to see what your business is. They may even become customers, so it is sooooo worth it to develop a good relationship with the various forums.

Newsletters are a great way to promote the products that your website is offering as well as offer the readers your insight and knowledge by including some good relevant articles.

Blog and ping has already been covered here in a previous post. Suffice it to say, if you have your own hosted website, then attach a blog to it and update it regularly. The search engines like to see new, original content on your site, and a blog that is part of your site counts towards that additional content. Ping the blog every time you update it and that will generate a steadily growing stream of visitors who are curious about what you have to say about your website.

Finally, writing articles that are relevant to the theme of your website and submitting them to some of the better article submission sites like ezine articles will generate more targeted traffic to your website. Curious readers looking for information will find your article and, if it is well written and interesting, will see your link in the author bio and click it to your site.

So there are four great, free methods of promoting and driving targeted traffic to your website. All they will cost you is some of your time, as in the case of forums but that time is enjoyably spent in meeting like minded people and learning from them as well as contributing your own knowledge to help others while attracting visitors to your website in the process.

This post is expanded upon in greater detail in my latest article on the articles page entitled Generate Website Traffic For Free!. Follow the link and check it out.

That’s all for today, thanks for looking in and check back again soon for my next instalment.

Terry Didcott
THE HONEST WAY

          

Well, so much for offering a blog pinging service from the website. I found out the server hosting that particular service just pulled the plug on the operator for using up all his bandwidth! How short-sighted of him to start offering website owners the ability to use that service when he hadn’t reckoned on having sufficient bandwidth!

Oh, well. We all live and learn. I believe I might look into the possibility of creating my own script at some time in the near future to ping the major blog services from The Honest Way website. So I won’t write that one off just yet!

On a slightly different note, I think it might be a good time to announce the arrival of our sister site, Alternative Cures. It’s a brand new site dedicated to raising awareness of the alternatives to conventional medicine that are readily available here and now. It’s article database is just starting to get going with two articles already on the board and there are some very good reviews of alternative products that are currently on the market.

If you are interested in an alternative to conventional thinking, take a look over there at Alternative Cures and see what you think.

As for The Honest Way, there are more articles to get you up and running in your own internet business on the horizon, so keep looking in and keep working at your own online business, because the hard work you put in now WILL pay off later!

Until next time…

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way