The Honest Way

In affiliate marketing there is nothing more powerful in terms of promotion than by writing an honest review of a product that you want to make money from. I’ve just done exactly that with an honest review of the “Get Google Ads Free” product.

If anyone’s interested in trying this for themselves, the steps are pretty straightforward. So by putting in a little effort in writing the review and some associated articles anyone can promote any affiliate product and expect to make some affiliate commissions for their trouble.

First you need an affiliate product to review and promote.

I chose one straight from Clickbank. By taking the top product from the list I got the hottest product of the moment and then wrote a review of it. The product is “Get Google Ads Free” and I published the review on a page on my Make Money site at this link:

Get Google Ads Free Review

If you want to have a look for yourself, I’ll wait… but do remember to return here after you’ve read it!

You’ll notice it’s a pretty unbiased review of “Get Google Ads Free” and gives the bad points as well as good ones. I added a couple of nice banners to liven the page up a little plus the all-important affiliate links directly to the sales page, which are cloaked to prevent affiliate link theft. You may also notice that there is no sales pitch in there, just a review and link. It relies on people’s curiosity to take them to the author’s own sales page where he can do all the selling.

Then my promotion of the review begins.

In order to drive traffic to the review page, I’ve blogged about it here and in my other blogs. I’ve written an article to be spun it out to a few article directories. That will get the page indexed quickly by the search engines as well as generate some traffic to the review page.

Then I’ve visited some of the better message boards (the ones that allow ads) and post in them.

I’ve put up some small banners in my blogs and Squidoo lenses to spread the word from my own camp.

While there are other good methods to use, like safelists and traffic exchanges, I don’t much like them as promotional methods so I’ll pass on them, but if you like them then go right ahead and use ‘em! The more different ways you can spread the word there about your review page, the better.

I’ve used social networking and pinging to promote my blog posts which will get some more interested traffic.

So far, my affiliate promotion of “Get Google Ads Free” is a work in progress, so lit will be interesting to see how this works out over the next couple of weeks or so.

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

Just to show I’m not all anti-giving of links to people who write interesting blogs and have caught my roving eye in the blogosphere, I think its a good time to spread some more link love around to those that deserve it.

Here’s an interesting take on recent events and conjectures concerning what Google may or may not be up to. He’s called it Googlenoia Update #2 and I think it’s an interesting aside to all the current fears and worries that bloggers, including me, have been mulling over recently. Nice one Frank!

For those bloggers who lost their PR and want to get it back, you might want to check out this post by Mohan who describes how he got at least part of his PR reinstated at I got my PR back! 5 Steps to get back yours!

David Dalka has a great business development and marketing blog at David Dalka - Creating Revenue and Retention - Chicago GSB MBA and he has left me several comments which I feel are unfairly no-followed, so to redress the balance, here is a free link to your site David!

Finally, Tim over at Redneck Bar & Grill is leaving his “Do-Follow” plugin in place, ut doesn’t care too much as he’s just moved sites and has no PR to lose in any case! I like his blog because it’s not so much a marketing site, more a site about beer… and I like beer!

That’s it for link love on this chilly Monday morning after taking the dogs for a walk in a veritable gale and sub 20ºc temperatures (brrrrrrr!!!)

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

Now to be honest, I don’t know what to make of this.

No sooner do we learn about the probable threat of the loss of PR to blogs sporting the Do-Follow plug-in, I now find even more sinister evidence when logging in to my Squidoo account in order to update my lenses. First a bit of background…

About six weeks or so ago, I was delighted to find that some of my Squidoo lenses had been adorned with some page rank, several of them achieving PR3, for which I was very happy and grateful. Some of those lenses have had a lot of work done on them by yours truly and it took a lot of writing, I can tell you! I felt they deserved the accolade and was very proud of them.
So honestly, imagine my horror as I log in and view the state of my well performing lenses.

They’ve all, with the exception of two, been reduced to No Rank - not even a PR0! The Honest Way Lens managed to retain it’s PR2 while one of the others promoting My One Stop was slapped down from a PR3 to a PR1. All the rest - slapped down to the ground.

Why?

That is an honest question I have no honest answer for. They are not blogs, so cannot contain paid reviews, as the sites that promote paid reviews only accept blogs! They are certainly not selling links in any way, shape or form. They don’t accept comments with followed links, so that idea can honestly be ruled out too!

So what have these honest, information and relevant knowledge packed pages been slapped for?

One can only speculate this awful possibility:

That those lenses do provide one-way links to my own websites.

Could Google honestly be going so far as to be trying to stop people from working hard on their various web projects and rewarding their hard work by linking their own sites together?

Why in all honesty would they do that?

It’s not gaming the system to link your own sites together for heaven’s sake. Or maybe they think it is? Who can possibly know what goes on behind those closed boardroom doors in Silicon Valley?

This could be the start of a chilling campaign to stop all inter-site linking as a means of climbing up the SERPs ladder. Maybe their eventual plan is to instead give the top SERPs pages only to those sites big enough and rich enough to buy their way up there. Surely not - they honestly wouldn’t go that far, would they?

Maybe this is an isolated incident and it’s only my lenses that have been affected so far. Although I somehow doubt it. I posted this question in CYN forum earlier this afternoon, so I’ll look back in there later this evening to see if anyone’s lenses have suffered similar fates.

In the meantime, you all had better be careful who’s links you have in your blogrolls…

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

Here’s some more honest information that may or may not interest you: I got wind of this from a post in Grizzly’s blog How to Make Money Online for Beginners.

Following the crackdown on link selling and paid review writing blogs by Google, it appears they are not intent on stopping there with their single-minded all-out assault on the acquisition of links by any means other than the natural way.

By that I mean if you think a website is really helpful to you and contains lots of relevant information to your search, it would be natural for you to provide a link to it on your own site so that others could find it and make use of it too. That’s a naturally given link to a good site.

The opposite is giving a link to another site whether it’s good or just a page full of crappy ads just so that you can either obtain a reciprocal link, or get paid in some way for providing the link. This is what Google are quite rightly trying to stamp out so that the sites at the top of its list are relevant to the search term entered.

No arguments there.

But it is coming at a terrible price for small blog owners who are trying to raise the profile of their own blogs and make a few bob in the process. The argument has been raging for over a month now and there’s not a lot of point in adding any more fuel to the fire here.

What I’ve since learned has dampened the blogging spirit just a little more - that Google may well increase their slapping activities to include blogs that use the do-follow plug-in.

That would make sense as their primary goal is to stamp out ANY form of link acquisition that is not naturally generated and this would include obtaining back-links for posting comments in other people’s blogs that allow it.

For that reason, this blog has deactivated the do-follow plug-in until this matter is clarified.

It has been noted that Blogger (the free blogging host that is owned by Google) has removed the URL box from all it’s blogs comment boxes, so you are no longer able to enter your URL when posting a comment to a Blogger blog. That effectively sends out the message that Google will not tolerate anyone even giving away free links.

Where will it stop?

How will anyone be able to obtain links to their sites if no-one is allowed to give them without fear of losing their own page rank?

Will anyone who even links to one of his OWN sites be penalized if he doesn’t use nofollow?

Does that just mean that only the very top sites will ever get to the top of the search engine results pages because everyone else links to them?

Ok, it hasn’t come to that (yet) and let us hope it never does… but one thing still amazes me about the whole slapping thing.

How come the very recipients of these paid links still have their infernal page rank?

And one more thing to ponder.

PayPerPost are the paid review site most targeted by Google as it hammers it’s member bloggers blog’s page ranks down to zero. It must be hard work sifting through all those 100,000 or so blogs to find the ones with links that have earned their owner’s a few dollars.

You’d think they’d go after the easiest site of them all to find in order to slap their page rank down to zero to make an example, but they have not and this particular site’s page rank is still PR5.

Who am I talking about?

PayPerPost themselves!

Go figure!

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way