The Honest Way

Following on from the last post Don’t Let The Host Go Down On Me, where I sorted out a hosting problem that shouldn’t happen to nice webmasters like me… erm, well now I’d like to talk about bananas.

Yes, that’s right seriously - bananas.

I can see the startled look on your face as you read on in disbelief that this usually so sensible person writes away as if everything were normal while he waits patiently for the men in the white coats to arrive…

Bananas. Why would he write about bananas?

I’d like to say that everything I do is done for a reason, but that would not be entirely true as sometimes I just go off the rails and do something just for the hellovit. But this is one of those times, you’ll be relieved to hear, that I’m doing this for a reason. Whew, I can hear you slumping back in your chair - he’s not really going off to the funny farm after all. Well not today, at any rate!

So what have bananas got to do with anything, let alone with make money?

Well its one of those roundabout journeys that you need to follow a little to get to where you’re going. We started with make money with bananas, not knowing what on earth was going on. Now we know there is a logical explanation on its way.

It starts with one of my newer blogs that I have had going as a bit of an experiment to see how well I could get it to rank in Google for the search term “fast make money”. The blog is my Make Money Hints site that was initially bought as an expired domain. It had age on its side but a PR0, but I liked the name and put it to the test just to prove that age does matter!

And it did.

That blog made it into the number one spot for the keyword fast make money - ok it slid back down a little but it is still on page one. I’d call that experiment a success, wouldn’t you? I outranked PR4 sites for that keyword term and probably annoyed the hell out of the sites that were juggling for that top position, as they keyword gets a fair amount of searches. Anyway, you may still be wondering what that has got to do with bananas.

Now I’m going to tell you. A while ago, I found that a friend of mine had posted a helpful post about bananas and my blog all at the same time. I think he was trying out an experiemnt of his own to rank for the keyword “bananas” but I’m not sure about that! Anyway, this is the post he made: Bananas making money fast with Terry Didcott. That post gave me a keyword anchored link to help me along, which it did. So to return the favour, I’m linking back to that post from this blog.

There is a moral to this story and it’s worth remembering when you’re working some SEO for your own sites. That is if someone links to your blog, do them a favour and link back to the post where they put the link and you’ll be doing yourself a favour in the process. Because not only will the recipient get a nice deep link to their sub-page, but that sub page will get some authority and in turn pass that authority back to the site it was originally linking to. Sort of scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours and get an extra bonus scratch for my trouble!

Don’t you just love the ins and outs of SEO?

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

While my last post eBay Affiliates, was all about using the eBay editor tool to create an affiliate window to their auctions to earn commissions on sales, this one follows on in a “what happens when…” vein. To badly paraphrase the famous Elton John song, I chose Don’t Let The Host Go Down On Me as the title because I just had a problem with one of my hosts deciding to suspend my account at the drop of a hat.

Not much fun, when I came to editing one of my newer sites that lives on a different hosting account (thankfully to The Honest Way and most of my money making sites) and saw that I couldn’t access is via FTP. On trying to display the site in my browser, the ominous message was pasted across the screen telling me that my account had been suspended - no reason was given, of course.

I was to contact the host and find out myself. Well, as this particular host came with a certain affiliate package that I belong to, I didn’t have the details to contact the host directly, so had to contact the package owner. Not good as I’m at least 6 hours in front being in Europe and the guy is in the US and it was only 8am here!

I was aggrieved because while I only had a handful of low performing websites hosted on that account, one of them was being used in a niche where I was using my eBay affiliates tools and it was just staring to show clicks on the account - and in this game, clicks equals income! It meant that the site was getting enough organic traffic to generate those clicks which meant that to lose it at this stage could kill it dead.

As I had no idea what the perceived problem was with the hosting account, therefore having no way to know how long it would be down for, I had no option other than to switch nameservers to my main hosting account here at Hostgator and rebuild he site on the fly - fast!

By noon I had a working site back on the air complete with eBay affiliate tools. Two hours later, the other host account was reinstated with the lame excuse that it was a billing glitch.

Well, that’s not bloody well good enough!

When this is your main source of income and some spotty little oik can make a decision like that whcih could potentially cost you a lot of money, I start to think seriously about my hosting options.

For one part, I’ve been seriously thinking about upgrading my main host to a reseller account for better stability and less likelyhood of it being pulled if one or more sites suddenly start getting a lot of traffic. Now that I have close to 50 (top level) domains that is starting tomake a lot of sense.

Hostgator are still my first choice for host and they’re cheapest reseller account comes in at only $24.95 a month, so methinks its time to upgrade.

Why a reseller account?

Well, the shared account idea is fine if you only have one or just a few sites hosted and don’t envisage any of them setting the world alight with traffic spikes of 20k hits in a day. Although your host may tell you that you have 250gb or so bandwidth to play with, you really don’t want to push that to anywhere close to its limits. The reality is that the hosting company (in my case Hostgator but it could be any of them) doesn’t expect anyone on a shared host to get anything like their stated bandwidth limits - each server may have a thousand accounts on it and if they all started getting big spikes in traffic they’d bring the server down in short order. Before that could happen, the accounts that were suddenly performing too well would be shut down to protect the thousand or so others sharing the server (and the bandwidth).

With a reseller account they treat you differently. Because they expect you to have a large number of sites hosted on a reseller account, they give you much more leeway with bandwidth usage. While you are still sharing a server with other accounts, the reseller account is given priority with bandwdth and allowed to stay up where other shared accounts would be pulled. That’s food for thought when you are attracting more and more traffic with more and more sites as your business builds (if, of course your business model is set up to expand in that direction).

As for little old me, I intend to keep expanding the number of domains I host, so it makes sense for me to upgrade my host. This has been made all the more prominent following this morning’s debacle. Ok, it was only one performing site that I lost for a few hours, but what if it were my main host and dozens or even hundreds of sites that were all making money all suddenly go off the air because I was worrying that spotty little oik sitting in his office watching my traffic increase a little too fast for his liking.

Unlimited domains they may offer, but realistically, for $7.95 a month you can’t expect to host a hundred or more domains that all attract steadily increasing amounts of traffic. Better to upgrade and be safe than sorry.

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

After my last post Make Money? What’s What!, where I made a valiant attempt to set the record straight as to what really needs to happen if your want to make money online, I think its time to bring things right up to date with the new eBay affiliate changeover.

Today is the first day of the new system where the eBay affiliate program is taken away from its traditional home at Commission Junction and placed firmly at the feet of its originator - eBay.

That means some big changes for those using the editor tools to generate live eBay listings on their websites. I’m affected too in a reasonably big way as I’ve been quietly building a lot of sites based soleley around the eBay editor tool software. Those of you using BANS may have different issues here, as your CJ PID will only work for another month and then you’ll have to have migrated everything over to your eBay affiliate id.

BANS is not my speciality, so I’ll leave it for Vic to explain.

What is my speciality is the eBay editor tool that generates BANS-like windows to ebay live auction listings that I’ve been placing in my sites.

I’ve been waiting patiently for today to happen so I could sign-up for my new eBay affiliate account at the eBay Partner Network. That was pretty painless and now I’m a fully fledged member of said network. But the thing I was holding my breath for was the new id that I could place in my editor tools generated eBay windows so that I could transfer my payments from CJ to eBay.

But to my dismay, when I got to the new editor tools page, the message “…coming soon” stared back at me. There was no link and no editor tools to get into. ¡Joder!

So it looks like I along with the lord-knows how many other marketers will have to wait for our precious tools to become available so I can start making more money from my sites!

That’s as far as I can go right now, until I know more about ths.

I’ll post an addendum when I know more…

***********

Ok, I know more!

I just logged back in and the editor tools are up and running. This is so cool!

First you need to create a campaign id for the site or page you’ll be displaying the eBay listing. That’s as easy as entering a website name and some unique identifier that is relevant to your site. You are given a numeric campaign id which you need to copy.

Enter the editor tools page and log in with your ebay account name and password (NOT your new affiliate user. Fill in the boxes as before - its all the same except when you get to the bottom of the page. Where you used to put Commission Junction in the drop down box then enter yoru PID, you now enter eBay Affiliate Network and then enter your campaign id in the box. Then create your page.

I just set up a new page and loaded it into my website and it looks great!

Now I just need a decent stream of organic traffic to come see what I have on offer on my site!

Perfect. I’m as happy as Larry. Sorted!

Now the hard work begins with setting up a lot of sites with the eBay editor tools software and then figuring out how to get traffic to them. My niche affiliate marketing site is already set up to host several subdomain niche sites which are all separate websites in their own rights. There are a couple that I’ve worked quite hard on in order to bring them up to speed quickly and that’s my designer bag site and my sunglasses site. At this point there’s not a lot of point deep linking to all the sub-pages for both those sites, as they need to get placed in the serps.

For that, I’ve been getting links for them slowly and naturally as possible so as to get them growing naturally. Its a long term effort as with most things on the Internet. If you try to rush things, you’ll just get sent straight to the “box” from where you’ll do no business. One more site to provide a link for as it is already getting traffic from one of the other search engines and could do with being placed in Google’s pages and that’s my diabetic shoes site. It’s exciting that this site is already producing clicks, but so far no successful bids. That’ll come in good time, I’m sure as its getting a nice trickle of organic traffic of around 20-30 uniques a day already.

To add to these sites, I’ve been buying some new .info domains while GoDaddy are having a 99 cents sale. That’s too good to resist, as each domain is a potential link producer as well as host for more eBay listings.

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way