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

          

I’m following on from my post entitled: How Can You Get Your Site To PR6 Fast?, where I explained that you can buy what are essentially second-hand domains that are set to expire and save yourself a lot of work in building them up as they are already aged.

It’s interesting as well as addictive to watch the domain auctions and get involved yourself. I’ve been pretty active since that last post where I’d managed to get my hands on a PR6 domain. Well, I also got a PR0 domain that had a usefully long life (five years) and a nice name for the dreaded make money niche (where very few people actually make money!) called Make Money Hints. I liked the name and its age means that it will grow in the SERPs much more quickly than a new domain. I’m just getting it off the ground as a Wordpress blog - it should start attracting some PR at the next Google update and then it’s off to do battle with all the competition!

On a calmer note, I’ve also been collecting high PR sites in different niches in order to get a good foothold in them. I already have a small army of free Blogger blogs occupying the niches I’m now targeting with the big gun PR6 sites that I’ve acquired, so they will provide some useful links to the free blogs to push them up in the SERPs.

It’s all an interesting challenge and a lot of hard work, which is why my frequency of posts has slowed down a bit. Onwards and upwards, I say!

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

Aha, thought that’d get your attention!

As my last “experiment” into the world of hot product affiliate marketing bombed as you’ll read in my last post (Canned Article on Get Google Ads Free!), my attention was diverted into a potentially much more lucrative opportunity.

I found out how to get my hands on some decent PR without having to wait a couple of years and work my backside off writing a guzillion articles and begging, borrowing or stealing back-links from all and sundry.

How?

Now you may think I just found the holy grail of Internet Marketing when I tell you that I just tripped over this nugget of solid gold, but the actuality of it is much more mundane. I’m being quite honest in that I know how to get fast PR on a site, but I’m being a little coy here in order to get your saliva glands dripping in anticipation first!

Ok, I’ll spill the beans. It’s not as if I just invented some back door way of circumventing the system or anything. In fact there are already several marketers that I know already doing this right now and because this knowledge has exploded into the domain of public knowledge, competition is suddenly making this more difficult to achieve, but I have done it. Where did this information first spring from? Vic’s place at Blogger Unleashed! If you haven’t already heard about it, check it out.

I’ve got my hands on a PR6 site and it only cost me a years registration fee and an extra $5 to buy the domain. Ah, I can see you’re catching my drift. That’s right, I found out that you can buy ready made domains that the owners no longer want - thousands of them are available at an given time. If you head over to GoDaddy you’ll see them listed for sale in their domain auctions section.

You can bid on expired domains (or soon to be expired) and they start at $5. Of course the really good, useful and keyword relevant domain names go for much more as niche marketers bid against each other and push the price right up into the thousands of dollars. But if you have the patience to sift through all the $5 domains and research the ones that you think might be useful to you, then you can come away with the odd bargain in a well aged domain that already has some PR.

There are lots with PR1, PR2 and a good smattering of PR3s if you look hard enough. These domains in themselves are valuable in that they can be developed into higher PR sites over a 3-4 month period without the worry of being sandboxed by Google, because of their age.

If you’re wondering about that, Google will often send a new site to the sandbox if they think it is growing too fast and may be a spammer site. That doesn’t tend to happen with domains that are over 2 years old, so buying an expired domain gives you the chance to develop a site quickly and start making money from it.

All sounds good, doesn’t it? And it is there for the taking. The only snag is that it takes a huge amount of time and patience sifting through the thousands of domains for one that has some age and PR, because GoDaddy doesn’t tell you any of that - you have to research each domain yourself with whois info to ascertain age and that the domain isn’t blacklisted or anything nasty and the Google toolbar to find out if it has any PR.

So what about this PR6 site?

Yep, I found a PR6 domain that is set to expire in a couple of days and have paid the princely sum of $5 plus another $9.95 to register it for a year, so assuming the current owner doesn’t suddenly pop up at the eleventh hour and decide he want to keep it, it will transfer into my safekeeping on the 22nd.

Just think of all the things you could do with a PR6 site!

Linking to your existing sites to boost their own PR is one for starters. Developing a wordpress blog on there in an affiliate niche to ram it up onto the first page in Google and make some serious money is another.

Or I could squander it for a fast return on my meagre investment and write a brace of high paid reviews and make a couple of fast $grand before the big G finds out and slaps it down. Mm, that actually appeals to me but I think I’ll keep looking to find some more PR6 domains first so I’ve got some for the long term as well.

Interesting?

You bet!

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

I was sitting here pondering over the limitations of my Hostgator’s baby crock hosting package - as you do - wondering if I might have been getting near to my bandwidth allocation for last month as I checked my usage and was just under the 2 gigabytes.

I knew my disk allocation was fine, as I’m only using just under 50 mb of my 100 gb allocation - a veritable drop in the ocean!

But cPanel doesn’t actually tell you what your bandwidth allocation is, so I had to go to the sign-up page to see. Well, what was I worried about?

2 measly gigabytes? Piffle!

Bandwidth allocation is actually slightly more than 2gb… 1000gb to be precise! A whole terrabyte of bandwidth!!! I didn’t realise I had that much!

Compare that with the pathetic allocation I’m getting with MPAM’s cashosters.com. There it’s only 100mb disk space and a useless 500mb bandwidth. They only give you 1 mysql database, so that means only 1 blog and that’s it. If you wanted to add a forum or any other add-on you’d have to pay for an upgrade! Sorry guys, but that’s a bit too restricting for me. Puts it into perspective somewhat.

So to say I’m happy with Hostgator is an understatement. I get unlimited mysql databases, unlimited add-on domains, unlimited subdomains, unlimited email accounts and all that storage and bandwidth!

I’m only scratching the surface with my usage at the moment. I’ve only got 3 add-on domains and two subdomains so far, one forum and four blogs hosted so there’s loads of room for expansion. I do intend to expand… but it takes a lot of writing which takes a lot of time! But it’s time well spent and I do enjoy writing - as you can probably tell!

I’ve just added a new wordpress blog to replace the creaky old one at my hypnosis site and created a brand new blog to compliment this one. I’ll be populating it heavily over the next few weeks, so head on over and have a look when you get a chance. What’s it called? Oh, yeah…

www.makemoney.thehonestway.com

Hope you like it!

Terry Didcott

THE HONEST WAY