The Honest Way

Regular visitors to this blog, The Honest Way, may have noticed that after the surge in paid reviews that appeared for a few weeks, they seem to have suddenly stopped. What happened to them?

Well, following the page rank changes a month ago now, this and my two of my other blogs, Make Money and Make Money Blog, all got a PR3. That meant they were eligible to accept many more better paid reviews from the various sites that provide them. The initial problem was that only this blog had been accepted by the paid review sites as the other two needed to be at least three months old before they could be accepted.

They achieved that status about a week or two later. That meant that at first, this blog was the only one I had to take advantage of the higher paid reviews, so I did just that, for which I make no apology – I’ve been working hard building this whole website/blog/forum up for several months now and not getting paid for all my hard work, so it seemed only fair that I take advantage and reap from the harvest I’d sown.

However, once my other two blogs were accepted by the paid review sites, there was no longer any need to be filling this, my main and most popular blog, with any more paid reviews because the other two can quite happily cope with taking the load. After all, that is exactly what I created them for in the first place – to make money!

That doesn’t mean I won’t be writing any more reviews in this blog. It does mean that I’ll be picking and choosing very carefully what I write about in here from now on, especially as Google are systematically slapping down blogs that contain paid reviews. So any future reviews will have to be Google friendly.

That means that I shall continue to promote this website and its forum and blog to attract ever more visitors (we’re currently averaging 450 a day) so that we become attractive to advertisers that want to be seen by lots of people rather than just to pay for a back-link, which is exactly the practise that Google are trying to stamp out.

So what does this all mean for me, the reader?

It means that I’ll be concentrating on writing good, informative, interesting and valuable articles in here once again – just like I always did, actually. So I hope you’ll all enjoy my writings enough to want to keep coming back for more – and tell your friends about this blog!

If you really like what I’m doing in here, I don’t mind if you want to link to me either – but you have to keep Google happy and do it for free just because you love my blog!

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

This is a bit of a poser for those of you who make money online doing whatever you do to achieve an online income.

Do you consider what you do as a business or a job?

Most of you will answer that with a resounding:

“Its a business, of course! I work for myself, don’t I?”

But would you be right? I was thinking about this last night after responding to one of Monika’s blog posts at The Writers Manifesto and I’m not so sure it is as cut and dried as a lot of people suppose.

There are glaring differences between the two that are obvious when you take time to really look at what you are doing online. The first thing you should consider is this. Do you work only for yourself, do you work for someone else, or do you do a combination of the two?

Let’s look at the differences between the main two categories here. Are you the boss or is someone else the boss? Let’s take each side and lay them bare as to exactly what they are.

Think of a business in terms of how you are paid, or how you make money.

Do you make money from the income you generate from selling products, be they your own or commissions from affiliate products, or from revenue generated from advertising space on your websites or blogs? Do you make money from the sale of websites or blogs that you have created? Do you make money from the sale of articles you have written yourself? Essentially do you make money from the sale of something that is generated by you or your websites or blogs?

If the answer is “Yes,” then you are in business.

Now think of a job in terms of how you are paid.

Do you make money by being paid by someone else to produce something within a time frame and for a set amount of money that has been pre-defined during your negotiations? Do you write articles or ad copy or blog posts or write the content for whole websites or even create and design websites for someone else who will pay you for your work? Do you fill in surveys, read emails, write paid reviews or essentially doing anything or performing any task online that someone else pays you for?

If the answer is “Yes,” to any of that, then you are doing a job.

What is the difference?

Well, if you make money by generating that income from the sale of goods or products that’s a business. If you are being paid by another person for any other reason for a service you provide online, then its a job pure and simple.

When you run a business, you work your own hours to suit the nature of what you are selling. You do your own promotion and marketing and you then reap the rewards of your work depending on how much you put in and how well you do it. You make money from your customers, of whom there are many. When you write a book and put it up for sale, you’ve created your product and now you will promote it and many people will buy that product. You don’t have to re-write it for each new customer – that would be silly. You can offer additional bonuses with your book, for instance you can offer free updates of the books for each customer for a certain length of time. But when you do this, you’re not working for those customers, you’re working for yourself because those updates are made to the one copy of which you will mail out to many customers. After a certain amount of time has elapsed, your book will have been updated enough times for you to market it as a new product, so all your updates will essentially have been for your benefit.

However, when you do a job, you work the hours that you have to in order to fulfil the criteria of your boss and get paid what that boss has agreed with you initially. If that work entails writing articles or ad copy, you will write each entity once and hand it over to your boss who will take ownership of it. You won’t be able to re-sell it to anyone else because it will no longer be yours, unless you have managed to negotiate something to the contrary with your boss. However, this is unlikely to happen, because your boss is paying you to produce content for them. They won’t be too happy to find their content turning up on someone else’s site.

Like it or not, when you are in this situation you are still working for someone else - a boss - because they are the ones who pay you. By working a job online, your income still has a ceiling which is defined by the amount of hours you are able to put in and the amount of dollars per hour you are able to negotiate for your pay.

You will never get rich working for someone else.

Ever hear that statement? Well better believe it because it’s true.

You’ll only get rich working for yourself. How rich you’ll get depends on many factors, but can basically be worn down to a few essentials. Like how dedicated you are to your business, how motivated you are to succeed, how well you have educated yourself for running a successful business.. oh yes, and how good a product you can produce – although that’s only part of it – more importantly is how good an advertising and promotion campaign you are able to create in order to sell that product.

Lastly we have the hybrids. The ones who are running their own business selling products, affiliate products and advertising space etc as well as working for someone else by creating content specifically for them or even writing paid reviews.

I fall into this category at present, which is why I mentioned it.

I sell my own ebooks and other niche products that I have created myself. I also sell articles that I write via Constant Content. You might pipe up and say, “Hey, that’s a job isn’t it?” - well no it’s not because I don’t write to any set time frame or set wage. I sell each article for an individual price that I define at the outset and I’ll put up as many articles to sell as I have time to write. The buyers are actually customers who buy the rights to each individual item, in a similar fashion to an artist selling one of their paintings – there can be only one! Constant Content are not my boss, because although they pay me, they are only a broker who pass on the payment from the customer and take out their commission. They are acting as an affiliate in that respect, by promoting my product for me.

So what about paid reviews? Didn’t I just say they were a job?

Yes, I did although that is more of a grey area. While the review sites act as broker to sell my review to the customer and take their commission before paying me like with Constant Content, they also have more stringent rules that I must follow. Of these, the most poignant ones are that once I accept a review, I have a limited time frame in which to complete it, which makes it more like a job. Granted, it’s up to me to decide how many reviews I want to take but there is no negotiating the price – I accept the review and the price that goes with it. Those two points make it more of a job than a true sale, but not entirely, which is why I called it a grey area.

Well, I expect there are those of you who will find some objections to my reasoning here, but there really is no denying the facts.

If you’re working away for several hours a day producing content, writing ads, designing websites, reading emails or whatever for someone who pays you for your work and for those hours you are putting in to produce that work, then you are doing a job and you have a boss - pure and simple.

If you’re selling something to customers, then you have a business and you are your own boss. Even more pure and simple!

So which are you?

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

When you want to set up your own blog (and this article is specific to blogs and not static websites) there are several very good reasons from a business point of view why you should use professional hosting. But there are also several equally viable reasons why you should also consider using free blog hosting as well. Here I’ll compare some of the top pros and cons to each.

Reliability

Self hosted blogs have the edge in this respect in that some of the best professional hosting companies will offer you a guarantee of 99.9% uptime for their servers. This is a cast iron guarantee that your blog will be on the air practically continually and any outages will be so few and far between as to be as good as non-existent. You don’t get that guarantee with free blog hosts and if they want to shut down their server and take your blog off the air they can do it whenever they want and for as long as they want and they don’t have to be accountable for it.

Cost

Free blog hosting is the obvious winner here as it is completely free to set up as many blogs as you can handle. Self hosting does cost you a monthly fee, although you can find many good professional hosts for less than $10 a month. This site is hosted with HostGator and that’s all it costs me. On top of that cost is the registration fee for your own domain name which you will also need. This needn’t cost much either as there are places like GoDaddy.com that will register a .com domain for less than $10. This fee also reserves your domain for one year. This is a small price to pay for all the benefits you will receive.

Professionalism

With a professionally hosted blog usually comes a professional sounding domain name, as you have the choice of what you want to call your blog. A free hosted blog name usually comes as a subdomain of the free blog host, so your blog will never sound as professional as your own domain name. There is another side to this in that all traffic that you attract to your blog ultimately benefits the host as far as their Alexa rank and search engine status is concerned, so all your hard promotional work is actually for someone else’s benefit.

Content

In most circumstances, the content that you fill your blog with will be acceptable to both free and paid hosts, but not all. Some free blog hosts will not allow you to put up advertising on your blog – Wordpress being a prime example. Others, like Blogger are fine when it comes to advertising. Another problem with free hosts is that if they decide they don’t like some of the content in your blog for whatever reason they decide, they reserve the right to delete your blog without notice. That is a highly potential hazard when you’ve spend a lot of time and effort to build a really first class blog and obtain a good page rank. All it takes is one post with sensitive content that the owners of the free host don’t like and POOF! Your blog is history!

This is much less likely to happen with a professionally hosted blog, although you can be banned by your host for certain illicit practices like spamming. However, your domain name is yours to keep and along with it it’s page rank and all it’s content which you can simply move to another host if your current host does feel it necessary to ban you. Importantly, they will contact you first so that you are able to transfer your database and content safely an intact should this become an issue.

No such warning needs to be given by free hosts and you instantly lose your blog’s (sub)domain name and with it all page rank and privileges.

Advertising

This follows on from the last point about content in that with a professionally hosted blog you can advertise pretty much whatever you want while some free blog hosts are more restrictive.

Paid Reviews

Currently a controversial subject due to Google’s crackdown on blogs that contain them. However, despite this problem, pro hosted blogs with your own domain name are offered a greater variety of paid reviews to write as many advertisers restrict the platforms they will accept opportunities being written on to mainly full domain names ie www .mydomain.com. For this you will of course need to host your own domain name professionally.

Other restrictions apply to free blogs in the choice of paid review site that will even accept your blog into its system. Notably, LoudLaunch will only accept self hosted domains.

On the flipside, as blogs are being hit with page rank reductions for including paid reviews, it does pay to be setting up a load of free blogs that you can afford to sacrifice to this. By systematically creating a new blog every week for the sole purpose of using it for paid reviews after three months of existence (by which time if you have SEO’d and promoted it correctly it should have attracted some page rank too), they can be used to write as many paid reviews as possible before being rendered useless by the Slap. That way, as one blog goes down another comes ready to take its place. But don’t tell everybody about that idea or they’ll all be doing it!

Ease of use

On both sides, the ease of use is similar. With a pro hosted blog, you will have to go through the stage of installing it onto your server, but with most good hosts providing a simple way to do this with Fantastico you can have a Wordpress blog installed on your server with a few mouse clicks in minutes. Selecting a template is as easy as it is on a free host, as is posting to and managing the blog.

Advanced Use

Both free and pro platforms allow many advanced features like being able to directly edit the template settings and get at the actual HTML and CSS code. However with self hosting you have one more advanced feature that you do not have with free hosted blogs. That is the ability to get into the database directly through MySQL queries or through user panels in phpMyAdmin. Here you have the flexibility to make deeper changes to your blog content that advanced users might be interested in.

For example, if you wanted to use a certain blog for submission to a paid review site but hadn’t posted anything in there for over a month, it would normally not be accepted because of the big gap in posts. From within the database, you can alter the post date of your posts to spread older posts out more evenly so it looks like you’ve posted regularly. That could be construed as being a black hat technique, which it basically is, but if you were desperate to use your blog in this way, now you know how to fiddle with the settings to achieve that!

Well that’s about as much as I want to write about in one rather long post. If I think of other arguments on this subject I’ll publish them in later posts.

So you see there are pros and cons to each method of hosting your blog. The best advice is probably to not keep all your eggs in one basket and spread your blog empire between self hosted for important blogs and free hosted for the simpler ones that you can afford to lose if push comes to shove.

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

It’s been a week since I started rolling out the PPC ads from Bidvertiser on some, (but not all) of my blogs and websites. In my earlier post introducing my change of heart with this type of advertising, I did mention that I’d keep readers updated as to how things are progressing with this.

Well, I won’t be retiring on the proceeds just yet!

That said, I can actually see some potential here. Ok, I’ve only made $2.06 (I’ll wait until you’ve finished laughing and picked yourself up off the floor…), but the promise is there as I hit a couple of 50 cent clicks in there. That tells me that the particular niche that caught that kind of click needs to be promoted a little better as the site it came from isn’t even optimized for PPC!

That said, other sites that should be attracting more clicks haven’t …yet.

Which means some more work is needed to a) attract more traffic to them and b) resite the ads for better effect. What I’m trying to achieve has already been amply described by my friend Grizzly in his blog, How to Make Money Online for Beginners, so I won’t go into the nuts and bolts here.

Suffice it to say, for sites and blogs that are properly optimized for generating adsense revenue may do reasonably well with Bidvertiser should adsense cease to be an option for whatever reason. But I don’t believe for one minute that Bidvertiser will outperform adsense simply because of the massive difference in the two companies’ inventory and choice of advertisers in each niche.

I’ll let this run for a while and let you know how it pans out

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way