How to Make Money The Honest Way

To date, there has still been no word from Clickbank regarding the problem of lost affiliate commissions due to their tracking cookies being blocked by anti-spyware programs running on people’s PC’s.

That means that the problem hasn’t gone away, despite a lot less noise being made about it by affiliate marketers. Maybe some of them are still making so many sales that it doesn’t affect them, but for the average affiliate marketer (like me) it makes a big difference. I know so, because I see my site stats every day and can see that I’m sending x-amount of visitors to the sales pages of products that I promote and I am not seeing the number of sales that those numbers should be converting into.

It’s not just products from Clickbank, either. Products I promote from several different affiliate sources have all continued to underperform so it’s a problem that really needs to be worked out. I get the impression that the affiliate companies themselves are not doing all they can to resolve this by finding a more reliable method of tracking affiliate links when cookies are clearly outdated and failing the affiliate marketers.

If only there were a really clever developer out there that could come up with the solution – imagine the size of the crowd (open cheque-books in hand) beating a path to that person’s door!

In the meantime, we will all just have to promote harder and work off reduced conversion rates to make money at this game. Fun, fun, fun!

One note of good news – for me anyway – and that’s this blog’s Alexa rank has gone up to 116,648.

That’s pretty good going and thanks to all of you for visiting here and reading my ramblings! I’ll keep my end of the bargain by continuing to post interesting and (I like to think) very readable posts. If you have any comments, please feel free to leave them for me. I do respond to them all!

Terry Didcott
THE HONEST WAY

          

This is some additional info that I wanted to post about the usefulness of Squidoo lenes. When it comes to creating those coveted one-way backlinks to your blog, what better way than to create a lens specific to your blog. Then create some backlinks to it.

There is no need to create a link back to the lens from your blog. Think about it. The more one-way backlinks you can beg, borrow or steal to your blog is of major importance when it comes to begging Google for a decent page rank. Once you have that page rank, your blog becomes that much more valuable to you as a way to make money, primarily from advertising… not to mention the potential increase in traffic from the search engines themselves.

So if you haven’t done it already, go create a lens to compliment your blog. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Create a lens with the same title as your blog.
2. If you can, make the squidoo link the same as your blog title as well (if the name hasn’t already been taken!
3. Do a really good write-up all about your blog with the link embedded in the text of that article
4. Use anchor text with the title of your blog for maximum weight
5. Add a module to receive an RSS feed from your blog

All these things will help in generating more traffic as well as creating several valuable anchor text-weighted one-way backlinks to your blog.

Terry Didcott
THE HONEST WAY

          

If you’re someone who likes to use online mail services to share your photos, documents of other files between family, friends and business contacts but are limited by often less than generous download or upload file sizes then there is a way around that hurdle.

With Driveway online file sharing services you can share large files with anyone online at the touch of a button. Or in their case a widget.

They have an easy to use and extremely versatile widget that you place directly on your desktop. It allows you to upload and download files between all the people that you know, bypassing the cumbersome and often limiting services of the file sharing sites. With this cool widget, you can even edit documents with one click from the widget toolbar and email them right back again.

Large files? Not a problem either.

Interested?

Terry Didcott
THE HONEST WAY

          

I was asked a question in my forum the other day about the merits of setting up a free hosted blog as a way to make money. I had to think about that as there are many pros and cons to doing that, so I thought I’d share a little of that here, in case anyone has been pondering the same thing.

Free hosted blogs like Blogger, WordPress et al are very popular with bloggers because it means an easy way to set up and maintain a blog and you don’t have the costs involved with professional hosting or the hassle with building your own website. You don’t need to know HTML or any other web code to write your blog.

With free hosted blogs, it’s pretty much all done for you. All you have to do is choose a nice template that you like for the design of your blog and then start writing! Simple.

If you want to start getting adventurous and adding pictures to your blog, that’s fairly straightforward too.

You can go even further and start adding the bits to your blog that will make money for you. Things like adsense are easy to add you a Blogger hosted blog, although WordPress make life a bit difficult if you want to include ads in your blog.

That leads on to a decision as to which free blog host to go with.

Well, I’d recommend Blogger if you want to monetize your blog as it’s owned by Google and that means they ware more than happy for your to include adsense. WordPress, on the other hand have a much better selection of templates to choose from, so if you’re not too bothered about making money from your blog but want a really nice looking one, I’d choose WordPress.

My reasons for these two over the rest? Well, I used Blogger for my first free blogs and was quite happy with them. They are easy to use and easy to add more complicated things like affiliate links and graphics to, so making them very powerful advertising media. In fact, I still have a couple of Blogger blogs out there!

As for WordPress, well all my professionally hosted blogs use WordPress templates for two main reasons:

1. Because they are very customizable and although they require some knowledge of HTML, that’s not a problem for me. So it’s really my personal preference here
2. Because WordPress comes with my cPanel from HostGator (my hosting company) and it’s dead easy to set up a blog on a hosted domain

Ok, I favour professionally hosted blogs because I have much more control over the way they look and what advertising I add to them, as well as having the host’s guarantee of 99.9% uptime, so I know my blog is going to be there whenever someone wants to read it.

But if you’re not as picky as me and don’t feel the need for professional hosting but want to monetize your blog, then go for Blogger. My preference!

Terry Didcott
THE HONEST WAY