How to Make Money The Honest Way

There are lots of ways of generating traffic to come to your site or blog, many of them for free although they may involve some work on your behalf.

One of the lesser realised of these amongst internet marketers is Yahoo Answers. It’s really quite simple to do. You’ll need an account with yahoo, but most internet marketers already have one of these. Then you log on to:

answers.yahoo.com

Set up an an account if you don’t already have one. Once you’re up and running, select the category that closest fits your niche. You’ll find plenty of questions that you can answer intelligently and knowledgeably, so jump right in and make sure you sign-off with a link back to your site or blog, whatever you want to promote. Then go and answer a few more.

Do this a few times a week and you will gradually build up not only a decent number of targeted visitors, but a nice brace of valuable one-way back-links to your site.

Double-bubble!

I bet you wished you’d thought of that one before!

Terry Didcott
THE HONEST WAY

          

If you want some pretty handy statistical tools for your website or blog outside your own cPanel’s stats like Webalizer, then have a look at Google Webmaster Tools. You need to have a free account with google (most of you probably already have) and then copy and past a meta tag into the header of your website or blog that you want to do the analysis on.

There are plenty of tests you can perform on your site, from checking the functionality of your robots.txt file (if you have one), to listing your incoming links (very handy to gauge how your page rank efforts have been going). You can analyze individual pages within your website too.

There is a section under sitemaps that got my attention, as I’d added an XML sitemap to The Honest Way several months ago. Guess what? I hadn’t added it in the webmaster tools page, so although it was sitting there all this time, google (probably) didn’t know what to do with it! Well, I’ve set that mistake right!

My main reason for spending time with this tool is to figure out how many back-links I’ve got coming into the site. It seems they only show links crawled up to the end of July, so all the extra link gathering I’ve done this month doesn’t show yet.

All in all a useful tool if you need to gather statistics on your site. I don’t want to go into too great detail here, as it’s pretty user-friendly and straightforward to use, so this is really just an overview of some of its points that I found useful. If you haven’t tried it yet, go ahead and see what you think. It might be useful to you too.

Terry Didcott
THE HONEST WAY

          

Ok, this is a little self-indulgent but it was fun to do and what’s the point of anything if we can’t waste a little time having fun?

Monika at The Writer’s Manifesto blogged about this today and it got my attention. I scored less than her, by the way! Here’s my result:

71%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Try it for yourself. Maybe you’re more addicted to blogging, maybe less!

Terry Didcott
THE HONEST WAY

          

I shouldn’t need to go into too much detail about what forum signatures are – they are simply a place where you can write your name and add a link and they are displayed at the bottom of all your forum posts. This is different from posting links in your actual forum posts, which is taken a dim view of and could get you outright banned an most of the better forums.So forum “sigs” are the place to promote yourself.

There is more to it than simply that. Of course, your posts should be as interesting as possible, because you will want the members of that forum to read your posts in order that you will gain their respect. Then there is every chance they will click on your links out of curiosity.

But the whole point of this short article is a greater use for those signature links. At least for the owners of websites and blogs (which, let’s face it is just about all of us).

I’ve seen it in countless forums, new members join, try their best to write decent posts and as often as possible but they let themselves down by doing something which I think is pointless.

They use up all their allocated signature space by placing a bunch of affiliate links.

Why is that bad?

Because they are missing out on a golden opportunity to improve the page rank of their website or blog.

Let me explain. You own a website or blog and naturally want to promote it. On your site you promote your affiliate products to make sales and make money – generating an income from your site. The more popular your website becomes, the more traffic it will get and the more sales it will have the potential to generate. Right?

Right! One way of raising the importance of your website or blog for that matter is by procuring a decent page rank from the search engines. And let’s not beat about the bush here. You want the best page rank you can get from Google. It means everything.

The best way to improve your page rank is to acquire lots of one-way backlinks from high PR sites.

Some of the top forums are high PR sites. To obtain one-way backlinks from forums, guess what you have to do? Write and submit your posts with the link to your website or blog in the signature!

The more posts you make, the more one-way backlinks you generate to your website. That’s if you have a link to your website in your signature.

Has the penny dropped?

Don’t waste the space in your sig with affiliate links (giving the sales page of the vendor all those juicy one-way backlinks). Put your site first. Your affiliate links are already on your site and that’s where you’ll make most sales from! The higher your page rank, the more sales.

Terry Didcott
THE HONEST WAY