The Honest Way

The debate is still being hotly disputed amongst bloggers from all directions, flavours and niches. Do you carry on writing reviews in your blog and risk losing your page rank, or do you stop and find some other way to monetize your blog?

I was commenting in Liudmila’s Diary about this earlier today after reading her post about the ethics of writing reviews about online casinos. Should a blogger who initially stated that he’d never write a review about them turn tail and then take the money instead. Would that action devalue his blog and his reputation?

Was that post aimed at me?

Maybe. I do remember writing that while I’m happy to write reviews in this blog, I wouldn’t go off topic (which is broadly internet marketing based) and write about anything not in some way related to my niche. That would include the topics of online casinos and gambling, which I have to say carry a fair few paid reviews.

But I also stated that I wouldn’t write them in THIS blog.

I have other blogs.

Two of them were created specifically with a view to making money. They are even called Make Money and Make Money Blog respectively and their niche is purely how to make money online. Their reason for existing was for me to promote them until they reached maturity (three months is the standard acceptance period for paid review sites) and hopefully attracted some page rank in that time to make them eligible to carry higher paid reviews.

Well, they achieved exactly that in the time I set out for them and now I am doing exactly what I planned to do with them, and that is to write paid reviews to make money for me.

Sort of payback for all the hard work I’ve put into all of my blogs, websites and lenses and all the free information I’ve divulged since I got all this going nearly a year ago.

So I don’t feel guilty for reviewing online casinos on those two - it’s what they were created for. I’ll review anything that pays well on those two and thank the review sites that have approved them for their business.

Here, I’ll keep things to Internet Marketing, finance and online business related reviews and over time write fewer reviews and more informative and I like to think interesting normal posts.

So I haven’t sold this blog out - that’s for the ones which it was meant for.

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

Mortgage interest rates have increased yet again and as a result, a large number of home owners are finding it ever harder to pay their mortgage.

With house prices at an all-time high, banks are having to relax their lending restrictions by offering ever larger mortgages to enable people to buy their own home. Often, people will overstretch their finances to accommodate a high mortgage without taking into consideration the effects that rate rises will have on their ability to make the repayments.

So who is to blame? The banks for allowing people to borrow more than they can realistically afford. Or the house buyers who are still falling over each other to get onto the home ownership ladder pushing the house prices ever higher?

Whoever is to blame, the worrying increase in bad debt is being reported daily and shows no sign of abating.

A lot of the heartache can be avoided by house buyers opting to take out a mortgage payment protection scheme with their mortgage. This will protect their repayments should disaster strike and the principal breadwinner find themselves without an income for whatever reason.

Remortgages are another sure-fire way of reducing your monthly outgoings and making long-term savings by being able to shop around for a better value mortgage deal.

The Thrifty Scot can advise on the best mortgage solution for anyone thinking about buying a home. So visit their site and see for yourself. They’re waiting to hear from you.

Brought to you by The Thrifty Scot

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

It never ceases to amaze me that there are bloggers out there who still, despite my earlier exposee on this subject, come to this blog and copy my articles and then publish them on their own blogs. Some are nice enough to credit me with writing the article and link back to me, which I don’t mind.

Others annoy the hell out of me by simply stealing my article and posting it as one of their own.

Well, on the one hand, using my stuff and linking back to me is ok as I benefit from the additional exposure. But to blatantly steal someone else’s work an be so ignorant as to try to palm it of as their own simply beggars belief!

Do they think this will help their blog and get them lots of traffic?

Think again.

By using someone else’s work, you are not only publishing duplicate content on your site but many blog readers read many different blogs and there’s a very good possibility that they’ll come across the same article in more than one blog. Then they’ll start wondering who published it first.

Well, some people get curious enough to go consult Copyscape or even one of the search engines to see which blog posted the article first - thereby discovering the true owner of the article. Guess what they’ll think of the blog owner(s) who have that article on their front page with their name on it?

Yep. They will at the very least never go back to the blog of a content thief. At the very worst, they may well report that blog to the owner of the original article or to Copyscape who can escalate things - if the blogger is using a free blog service, they can have their blog deleted. If they are self hosted, for one they should be professional enough to know better and two their host can be contacted with the details and they could find themself being blacklisted.

Not only that, the search engines, Google in particular absolutely loathe duplicate content - and when (not if) they find duplicate content on your site, they’ll slap you down so fast you won’t know what hit you.

Maybe you’re sitting there with a free blog and no page rank and you think, “Who cares? Ive got no page rank to take away in the first place so I’ll just keep on doing it.”

That doesn’t do you any good either, as it just means that if you are indexed, you’ll be de-indexed and if you’re not already indexed you’ll be sand-boxed for a very long time - until you remove the duplicate content!

So to sum up - Don’t Do It!

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way