How to Make Money The Honest Way

Shock horror! He’s writing another one so soon after Do It Right, what’s going on?

I also should point out that I just changed the permalinks template for this blog, so all my previous posts now have different urls which is why the Blogging Zoom and other buttons all show zero – can’t be helped!

Well, I noticed that I’m not posting as much as I used to in here and there is a very good reason for that. At the same time, I also realize that this is a good site that is steadily gaining popularity with the search engines in terms of its authority, so I should be spending more time on it.

So I thought I might post about what’s what.

Sure, I can write about making money online until the john cows come home, but would it be the right thing to do? Of course its harder to come up with great stuff that isn’t the same rehashed, regurgitated crap that most make money bloggers vomit up in their blogs almost daily. Most of which is pure bullshit, because most of them are NOT making money themselves, so how can they claim to know how to do something they’re not doing?

I’ve got tired of writing the same old same old and it doesn’t do this blog any favours to fill it up with worthless crap, so the posts are going to be fewer and farther between because there really isn’t that much more to say on the subject of how to make money online.

Griz has practically said it all in his make money online blog about the right way to go about making money online, and I just feel that by writing on the subject, I’m only paraphrasing him and Vic (make money online at Blogger Unleashed) and Court (Internet Marketing School) in order to make posts to keep this place alive and maybe even move it forward.

Perhaps its time to allow this blog to diversify somewhat. It’s too late to pigeon-hole it into one tight niche because its getting rather big and sprawling. So instead, I’ve decided to go with the flow of the site as it is. I’ll be looking at creating sub-pages on related niches with top level posts to support them. Spread it out instead of reign it in.

As I said in my last post, it may not make very much money itself, but it will be useful as a promotion and link booster for other sites I have in different niches. Having the forum attached to the site means it gets spidered often by the search engines, even though there’s not too many people in there these days.

People still email me for advice on how to make money online and I don’t mind helping out where I can, but I’ll have to be honest and say that the information I’m giving out now comes mainly from what I’ve learned from Griz, Vic and Court, whereas before it would have come from stuff I learned from other marketers who are not gurus or A-listers but market their own products to make money online rather than use their sites as affiliate or PPC advertising media.

Oh, did we forget that?

Yes, we did! Affiliate ads and PPC ads are highly profitable and very doable ways of making money online – no doubt about it. That’s the school of thought coming from the guys I just mentioned. But don’t discount the marketing side of selling your own stuff if you have stuff to sell that people want to buy!

I’ve lapsed on that front and stopped working on my own stuff to sell. Like the eBook I was writing on how I beat arthritis naturally. Its something that I’m sure a lot of people would buy (although not at the outrageous prices that many eBooks sell for online) with some work put into marketing it. Which I can do – only thing is, I shelved that and a couple of other book projects because my attention got diverted from that path.

I read Griz’s blog and realized there was a way to make decent money online without a product of your own and even without a website of your own – just creating free blogs. He also made it clear that working to attract social traffic was a waste of time if you want to make money. He’s right and the stuff he writes about in his blog works too. If you’re doubting it, try it first and see for yourself before you dismiss it out of hand. Its every bit as much work as anything else to make money, but the rewards are there for those that are prepared to do the work.

Then Vic came along and added his side of the story which is also geared to making money as opposed to attracting social visitors to your site or blog. Vic knows what he’s talking about and is giving his knowledge away for free to anyone who is determined enough to want to make money. The catch is that you have to abandon all the stuff you learned from the A-listers and so-called gurus and do it his way. That’s up to you – it depends on how much you really want to make money.

Of course, this is all bringing me back to that terrifying statistic that 95% of Internet Marketers will fail. Period. That’s because they either don’t listen to what they’re being told – because they know better – or they are too lazy to do the work, or they don’t have the self-belief that they CAN do it and give up too soon.

So if you have your own stuff to sell, and you are sure there are people who will buy it, then go for it! You may have created a great piece of software that is highly useful in some way, or written a great book on how to cure something or cook something or whatever – just don’t be trying to sell yet another book on how to make money online – there are more than enough of them! You’ll be surprised just what people will buy if it will help them in some way or make their life a bit easier. Maybe you have developed a a great line in safe children’s toys, or a new board game… the options are endless as long as you are sure people will want what you’re selling!

Of course the knack is then in the marketing – you have to make people want your stuff by getting their interest and creating desire for your product. Here’s and example: Sunny Delight is a sugary orange flavoured drink that thanks to a TV campaign in the UK actually overtook sales of and knocked off the No1 spot, Coca Cola! Ok, that’s extreme, but marketing rules if you are trying to sell something. That’s beyond the scope of this post, but there are several good marketing articles on this site.

There are more ways to make money online than the few that you constantly read about. Selling your own good, worthwhile product is one of them.

If you want to make money online, you need to:

• Listen to what you’re being told
• Know how to filter out the truth from the bullshit
• Understand and accept what your being taught because you do NOT know better (even if you think you do)
• Be prepared to work hard and put in long hours
• Truly believe in yourself that you can do it
• Don’t let negative people put you down or tell you that you’re wasting your time
• Have the patience of Job

and…

NEVER GIVE UP!

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

My last post Make Fast Money Keywords?, which was based on the SEO technique of using a liberal dose of keywords to your content, highlighted how you can use your content to give your blog a leg-up the search engines results pages to some extent.

Well that’s fine and works better in some niches than others. The make money niche is far too competitive to make much headway in and the rewards for getting right up there are not so great when you compare putting the same amount of effort and hard work into a blog or website that occupies a less competitive niche.

So where exactly does this particular blog sit?

It’s primarily in the make money niche, by the simple fact that it was my first tentative entry into the world of Internet Marketing and I didn’t know any better at the time.

Well, who could have known, when the vast majority of sites and “informative” blogs were telling everyone to get into Make Money fast, and Blogging for blogging, and Web 2.0 was the way forward. All the self-styled gurus, A-listers and big-time online money makers (I won’t bother naming them, you probably know who they are by now) were saying the same thing.

And do you know, they were all not entirely right?

That’s not to say they were entirely wrong either, but at the time (end of 2006) getting into blogging and make money was obvious as a way to make money for newbies. The A-listers and gurus just jumped on every newbie that came along and filled their heads full of promises that were never delivered, while making pots of money for the perpetrators!

Big fish will always eat little fish, that’s a fact of life. Its up to the hardiest little fish to survive the maulings along the way and to learn from their mistakes and use those mistakes to make them stronger. Its a steep learning curve and it takes time and often a lot of hard knocks along the way before we get it right.

As for those like myself who were technically newbies although I was selling stuff online in the mid 1990s via a really (by today’s standards) bad website that I built myself! True, I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing but just struck lucky that my site was selling stuff that not many other were.

Being a hypnotherapist, it made sense to sell my own produced hypnosis cassettes (cassettes, remember them?) through my practice’s website and I actually made quite a few sales in those days! I foolishly never cottoned on to the fact that there was much more money to be made online with the proper knowledge. In those days, the only sites that seemed to be raking it in were the porn sites and I wasn’t getting into that – no way!

There were no “make money online” sites around that I remember in 1996, no Clickbank or CJ, no Paypal or eBay. So it would have been much tougher to set up a true e-commerce site back then, but not impossible and I missed the boat completely!

By the time I re-entered the arena in 2006, of course things were rather different. I’d missed the adsense jamboree where MFA sites were everywhere and they made an absolute packet for their owners. I got in just too late to make a killing with text-lonk ads and paid reviews, because as soon as I realized they were there my sites were not sufficiently highly ranked by Google to make them viable.

Of course by the time they were, Google was stamping down on those practices that certain A-Listers were telling everyone to jump on.

Now ex-black hatters are coming into the mainstream and divulging some of their secrets, but still, some of these techniques can raise eyebrows at Google and get their radar fixed firmly on your whole operation, so it’s debatable whether to use them of not. Yes, there are some techniques that are grey-hat and will probably keep you under the radar while still giving a boost to your blogs and websites. And there are some which will get your sites de-indexed faster than you can say “keyword stuffing”.

So now, its all about balance.

Yes, write lots of content for your sites and yes, use keywords liberally. Just don’t overdo it.

Yes, write keyword focused articles with your anchored link in them and submit them to article directories to spread your incoming links around.

Yes, gather back links and make as many of them as you can strongly keyword anchored links to improve your keyword authority. You need that to get high in the SERPs and attract targeted organic traffic in order to make money from your ads, whether they be PPC or affiliate.

Yes, use Technorati tags (wisely) and make sure you ping every time you post.

Yes, make sure your sites are correctly SEO’d on-site as well as off-site to give yourself the best chance of competing with everyone else.

Yes, create many and varied sites and blogs spread over as many different niches as you can handle. The more niches you occupy, the better your income will be and if one niche doesn’t perform there will be plenty of others that will.

Yes, get a self hosting account and host your own websites to have more control over what you’re doing. Use Hostgator because they’re the best – you can host unlimited domains and it doesn’t cost a packet either and…

Yes create a lot of free blogs as well as Squidoo lenses, they all count towards your overall network from which you can create back links to you own sites and the bigger your network, the better.

While the advice is to steer clear of the Make Money, or Blogging niches as they don’t actually make money, there is another reason to keep one or two sites in there. Authority. You can work a make money or blogging blog into your network and as they rise in rank, they can be used via links to help boost your newer sites and get them indexed faster and also help them up the ladder. So while your make money sites might not actually be making you any money, they have a purpose – to push the sites that DO make money into better positions through keyword authority and back links.

Yes, research keywords to find the best performing ones with the least competition. Get hold of Keyword Elite because its the best program for the job. Never fear that all the best ones have been taken already. There are millions of combinations of long tail keywords and more than plenty to go around. Sometimes its better not to compete where you’re banging your head against a brick wall. So don’t compete, get creative and you’ll surprise yourself what you can find.

Above all, be patient.

Rome was not built in a day and neither will your online empire. Try to go too fast and you will fall over, trip up, get caught in the big G’s radar, or upset a competitor who may report your site. Take it slow and natural and build your sites and blogs over time and they will grow well with Google’s blessing as long as you do everything (or at least appear to do everything) the right way.

Do it right and you will make money. Fast? No.

But over time, without needing to resort to reading tarot cards, you’ll gradually build up a business that, spread widely over multiple income streams, will send those trickling streams together to join up into a flooding river of income, so that if one stream dries up, there are still plenty of others to keep the money flowing.

Remember, “softly, softly, catchee monkey…”

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

Ok, I’ve left this blog alone for quite long enough, so its time to post something useful. The last post Hacked!, said it all about what can happen when you let your guard drop. The consequences were bad enough for me in that it cost me a lot of valuable time cleaning out all the malware and dodgy links that whoever got into my sites inserted all over the place. They could have been a lot worse had they infiltrated some of my sites that actually make me some money by costing me a lot of traffic.

Which brings me onto a point I just posted about in one of my other blogs about how the unaware marketer can be fooled into thinking they are sitting high in Google’s SERPs and still not be getting any traffic. The post can be found at: Make Money Fast.

What it highlights is that most Internet Marketers, when doing their keyword research to find good, well searched long tail keywords with low competition, then put their site together and work hard with their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and after a while they see it appear on page one of the SERPs.

That’s great and they then check their stats to see all the traffic flooding in – and… wait a minute… a mere trickle

How can this be?

Its a phenomenon I recently noticed on a couple of my own fairly new niche sites as well as the make money site I mentioned above. When I search on the keyword term “Fast Make Money”, which the site ranks well for, it actually sits in the top spot on Google. The keyword search program, Keyword Elite, shows that search term gets over 11k monthly searches, so I should be seeing a ton of traffic to that site.

But I’m only seeing a trickle. Why?

Because I, like most Internet Marketers use quotes around my keyword search terms in the search engines search box. Then it dawned on me that most people (who are not Internet Marketers) do NOT use quotes. The keyword search tools do not discriminate between searches done with or without quotes, they just report traffic stats for the keywords searched.

They can be in any order, by the way!

So when I do the search on the same keywords without the quotes, a very different picture appears. The first thing you’ll notice is where your keyword search tool has told you there are X amount of monthly searches and Y number of competing sites on Google, its telling it the way it sees it for the keywords in the order it displays them.

So for Make Money Fast, I see 11.5k monthly searches for only 106k competing sites. That, one would naturally believe, is an extremely good keyword competitor to get into the ring with.

Except its not the whole picture. In reality, take away the quotes and you get 11.8 million competing pages – not such a great bet after all. My own site actually manages to scrape in at the bottom of page two without the quotes, so that’s why it only sees a trickle of that search traffic.

But even that’s not the end of the story.

The keywords themselves are not necessarily in the order that the ordinary organic search traffic surfer keys in, so you then have to look again at different word orders for your keyword. Of course most people won’t search on Fast Make Money, because it doesn’t make sense. They’ll naturally search on Make Money Fast, or even Make Fast Money, as these terms are simply better English!

So you do another Google search on Make Money Fast, and whoa! The number of competing pages changes (9.8 million) and the sites displayed also change with different sites occupying the top places.

This phenomenon occurs with all keyword searches. Change the order of the words, use quotes or don’t use quotes, you get a different result every time.

So what does that mean for all the hard work you just put into trying to dominate your chosen keyword?

It means that you have more work to do. You not only have to rank for that great, high traffic, low competition long tail keyword you thought you’d found, but you also have to rank for different configurations of those keywords and without the quotes too. Makes it all a little more difficult, doesn’t it?

Another point here, which I’m sure will be obvious to you and you probably already thought about it and that is:

The fewer individual “words” that make up your long tail keyword, the better, because it means fewer combinations of the keyword phrase, so more chances for you to rank for the assorted word order alternative for your keyword term.

Of course, single word keywords are best, as in that case, all of the above does not apply – quotes or no quotes it won’t matter, as you’re only dealing with one word to be searched, like Money. Except you’d be going up against 933 million competing pages for that term.

Do you fancy your chances?

Most people, unless they have a very highly rated site simply cannot compete with that much competition, which is why we all work more with long tail keywords instead. It at least gives us a fighting chance. Of course, in niches other than money, politics, health and finance, there is less competition and fewer highly SEO’d sites making up that competition, so you have a much better chance of getting your site onto the front page of the SERPs and attracting that valuable organic search traffic, which will convert into dollars if you’re site is properly SEO’d and monetized. Take something simple, like Asia’h Epperson, for example. Much easier to compete when there are not so many pages to go up against!

Lastly, you might be thinking, “Who cares about the search engines when I get 1000 visits a day to my blog from social networking sites, like Stumbleupon, Digg, Del.icio.us etc.”

Well, if you like having a lot of readers, that’s fine.

But if you want to make money, you need targeted, organic search engine traffic, because they are the people who will click your PPC ads and affiliate banners.

Social traffic visitors to your site tend not to click ads or buy affiliate products. That’s simply because they are Internet Marketers themselves and for one, don’t click people’s PPC ads and two won’t buy your affiliate products. That’s because they most likely already have a Clickbank account themselves and will use their own affiliate id to buy any ebooks or software and have the discount themselves.

If you don’t believe me, and you’re relying solely on social traffic to fill your daily site stats, just have a look at your bank statement and see all the zeros where the Clickbank and Adsense cheques should be…

Ouch! Reality can be painful, can’t it?

Terry Didcott – Freedom Writer
The Honest Way