How to Make Money The Honest Way

Hi anyone who still reads this Make Money The Honest Way blog! I suppose I should write something in here before yet another month passes me by in silence, and seeing as I’m bored and started to go off reading other people’s blogs, I thought I’d better stop myself going too deep and writing comments. Better to write something in your own blog, specially as it hardly ever get written in these days!

The boredom comes from building hub pages about crap that I don’t care about but I hope someone else will and be kind enough to click something that will result in money coming my way. Lucky for me I have all these different people writing hub pages about crap that I don’t care about for me. Unlucky for me, its really just me logging in with pen-names.

That Hub Challenge was a good idea and I’m not complaining, really. Its making me some half decent extra cash each day which I wouldn’t be making if I hadn’t built all those pages about crap that I don’t care about. But the building is becoming mind-numbingly boring. I started out with all good intentions and raced away building 5 hubs a day. Ok, not as fast as some, but that’s pretty decent for me and I’m getting close to my 200th. Which is pretty amazing. I’m backing them up with a set of keyword focused mini-sites because while I like the authority of hub pages, I also like the idea of keeping more than 60% of my PPC earnings. That keeps my site building total at 5 a day, which is a decent rate and builds up pretty fast week by week.

Why am I using a bunch of pen names to write Hub Pages with? And why am I keeping the identity of my mini-sites to myself? I don’t want you lot figuring out what that crap is that I don’t care about… because you’ll all start writing about it too.

That was the problem with the Hub Challenge. Too many people also thought it was a good idea and now niches that I was researching three months ago that were little gold mines are getting molested with not just a ton of Hub Pages, but a guzillion badly spun articles on every article directory that’ll take ‘em, plus unbelievably badly formed keyword sniping .info domains, ezine articles, infobarrels and just about anything else you can find to clog up Google’s index with. Of course, it won’t be long before that little gravy train gets put out to pasture because a bunch of noobs spammed it into oblivion, like every other good idea that comes along.

Speaking of which, what’s all this about eBay? They’ve gone and changed their damn rules again in yet another attempt to screw the affiliates out of more earnings. Or so it appears. I can’t be arsed with trying to figure this new change out, so I won’t even bother. Its too much thinking time to waste that could be put to better use, you know, building more mini-sites, posting blogs etc. My sites that have eBay ads (which are considerably less now that they decided I have to own the damn domain) can sit there and keep doing passively what they’ve been doing and I’m not going to fret about them. They’ve paid for themselves many times over, so if they grind to an un-glorified halt, I don’t care. I’ll just find something else to sell on them. Plenty of affiliate stuff out there besides eBay that would be glad of the traffic and the extra sales. What do eBay care if they lose my little bit of traffic and my few sales each month? I bet they’d care if they lost a thousand like me. Whatever.

When one source of income goes down, the trick is to keep finding new sources. I learned that one when I first started in this game and lost an important revenue source through my own noob stupidity. Nearly 3 year on and I’ve learned a thing or twenty. There are lots of baskets to keep your eggs in, so use them all. Then if one gets knocked over, you have the rest to keep the euros coming in while you find a replacement for the dead one.

What is the one thing you should remember above all else if you want to succeed in this game?

Never give up!

Make Money The Honest Way Blog

          

How to make money blogging is something a lot of people want to do, but few will ever achieve it. My last post How to Make Easy Money with SEO, went some way to explaining how it can be done, so I’m not going back over all that again. In this post I actually want to take a look at WordPress mu, or Multi-User host sites.

What are WordPress mu Blog Hosts?

WordPress mu blog hosts are similar to standard WordPress blog software with the added ability to “host” multiple blogs from a single domain, in the same way that free blog hosts such as wordpress.com do. It can be done one of two ways. With the add-on blogs acting like subdomains of the main domain like this:

blog.mydomain.com

or they can act like pages of the main domain like this:

mydomain.com/blog

The more popular method is the first example, which is the way it’s done by the big blog hosts such as wordpress.com, blogetery.com, blogdrive.com…etc. There are hundreds of free blog hosts using this software that are springing up all over the place, with more being added to the mix every day. This is good for bloggers who want to set up an easy to use free blog using the popular WordPress system and of course with access to their great themes.

So how does this tie in with how to make money blogging?

Well, anyone can set up a WordPress mu blog host. If you have a robust enough hosting package (a standard reseller is probably the minimum) you can set one up on a suitable domain and offer bloggers the ability to set up their blogs on your host. Of course you don’t go and do this for nothing, unless you’re feeling particularly benevolent and like working for nothing. You can turn it to your advantage and make money with it. How?

You can set up your own WPMU host with a revenue sharing system so that when bloggers create blogs and put up their own adsense, you take a small percentage of their earnings. Same with eBay affiliates, Kontera or anything else you care to include. If you get enough knowledgeable bloggers to set their blogs up on your host and they start making money for themselves, you get a percentage, which is only fair seeing as you are providing the platform fromwhich they are making their money. You are paying for hosting and some of your time is given over to maintaining the system.

Everybody benefits!

Free blog hosts such as blogetery.com, blogdrive.com, blinkweb.com etc all allow you to place ads, or they plave their own ads and you provide your adsense id. You make money and they take a percentage. It’s a system that works very well and it would be a perfect world except for one nasty great big fly in the ointment.

Spammers.

These bastards get into every great idea and bugger it up for the rest of us. They’re not content to set up a few blogs here and there and make them legitimate with original, relevant content. No, they have to spam a crapload of blogs that are all crap with little or no useful content that has been scraped from other sites just for the quick killing. They don’t care what the search engines do because they get in, work fast and get out before anyone knows what has happened. Along the way, they create a bucketload of crap sites that Google takes one look at and, realising they are spam sites, gets tough and de-indexes them. And so they should.

Except that’s not the end of it.

Google have lately been going around and de-indexing many of the host domains that may harbour these spam blogs. Notice I said may harbour them.

This is certainly not good for all the legitimate blog owners who have worked hard on their real blogs on these hosts as it means their hard work is gone up in smoke along with the host domain, because when Google de-index a domain, all sub-domains are similarly de-indexed.

Just like the pompous, arrogant and sadistic schoolmasters of a bygone age that would thrash the living daylights out of a whole class of boys to “punish” one boy who did something wrong.

Google are punishing all the innocent bloggers just to get at the spammers who may or may not have created blogs on these WordPress mu hosts.

This is wrong and unjust and unfair.

Honest bloggers should not see their hard work penalized just because of a few bad apples in a barrel, such as spammers. I agree that Google should do all they can to stamp out spammers, because they are the bane of all honest bloggers and website owners who are trying to make a living from attracting honest, organic traffic from the SERPs. But it should be done intelligently and Google surely must house more intelligent heads under its umbrella than most places. So how about using that intelligence to beat these stupid spammers, rather than blanket tactics like de-indexing a whole domain?

In fact, if you take that logic and apply it to the real world, which is the domain that hosts more spam blogs than all the others put together?

Blogspot.com

I don’t see that being de-indexed anytime soon. If Google’s logic were to be followed to the letter, then to stamp out more spam blogs than any other tactic possibly could, they should de-index blogspot.com

Ok, now that we have that out in the open, how about applying some common sense intelligent reasoning here. We all know that Google’s index needs to be as relevant as possible to make people’s surfing experience the best that can be achieved. That means making sure that no crap spam blogs are allowed in there. We also know that is a huge task to undertake, as these bastards are everywhere and they are a real pain in the arse.

But Google employ a small army of people who regularly inspect websites and blogs for spam or for violations of their quality guidelines. The serps are forever being tweaked and are more fluid now than at any time in the past, with new site coming in every day. Spam sites get found out soon enough and are dealt with. But there is the ability for any person to report a site they believe is in violation of Google’s quality guidelines and these sites can be checked visually in order to either uphold the information given by the reporter, or to ascertain if the site in question is actually legitimate and the reporter was causing malicious damage to a competitor.

It seems that either way, the site gets de-indexed first, which means the person reporting a site steals a march over their competitor for a few weeks until the site owner can go through the annoying process of begging for a re-inclusion. Is the same thing happening to so many WPMU hosts as well?

No one really knows the real reason why so many WPMU host domains are being apparently randomly de-indexed with all their blogs being taken out with them. We can only conjecture and maybe make educated guesses based upon Google’s characteristic way of working. But whatever is the real reason, it is unfair to the honest bloggers that have built their legitimate blogs on these hosts to be penalized along with any spammers.

We don’t see blogspot.com, or blogetery.com or tumblr.com or any of the other bigger free blog hosts being de-indexed. There are planty of small WPMU hosts that are provided for university students that outsiders cannot join and they don’t get de-indexed. Likewise, there are plenty of small message boards and forums that also provide free blog hosts to their members, which outsiders are not allowed to join, but I have heard that these are some of the domains that are being targeted.

I have my own WPMU host that I run for a certain forum and so far it has been allowed to continue unmolested. All the blogs on it are legit and there is no way spammers can create blogs on it, because only forum members, who have first been vetted to ensure they are in fact real people can join. I hope, for this reason alone it is allowed to remain indexed and its blogs to flourish in the serps, because they are relevant, legit and comply with Google’s quality guidelines.

I also hope that Google sees sense and stops de-indexing these domains willy nilly and instead targets the individual spam blogs themselves. That way is better for everyone. It’s certainly fairer.

Then we honest online marketers can get on with growing our legitimate online businesses unhindered because this is how we make money blogging.

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

Following on from my last post List Building and Autoresponders, I want to make a quick mention of what’s going on with RevResponse.

This is the affiliate site that a lot of us signed up with last month with the carrot of $50 dangling in front of our faces if we wrote them a blurb in our blogs and gave them some promotional grunt. Well, I’m happy to say that whilst I haven’t had much of a response from the sidebar promo I put up here in this blog, I have just received a nice email from PayPal to tell me they just paid up the $50!

So to everyone who got involved and hasn’t yet seen a return on their promotional site set up with RevResponse, don’t worry as at least you’ll get (or have already got) your prize for giving them some exposure on your sites.

For me, its confirmation that these guys are serious and I shall step up my efforts to promote the affiliate mini-site that bears my name to see if I can’t wring some affiliate dollars from them as well!

That’s all for this post – short and sweet and so unlike my usual marathon posts!

Until my next inspired piece of prose…

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

Following on from my last post Make Money or Save Money?, where I looked at several honest methods of making money by actually saving money ( you have to read it!), I’m going to turn my attention back to one of the oldest and still most successful ways of making money online.

List building and doing it using the favourite tool of the Internet Marketer, the autoresponder.

We’ve come a long way in the last year or two in the general mode of thinking when it comes to list building. It is something that has been around for a very long time and will probably still be around after all the current fad make money techniques and search engine subterfuge have died away.

The reason that “the list” is where the money always was and still very much is, boils down to one major fact of life. Trust.

If you are trusted, then people are more likely to buy something from you or something you recommend than from someone they don’t trust. Trust has to be earned and one sure-fire way to earn people’s trust is to keep in contact with them and prove to them that what you are selling or recommending is giving them true value. People hate to be ripped off, but the flipside of the coin is they love to be shown respect and honesty. The honest Internet Marketer who can prove their integrity and honesty to a wide group of people gains their respect and will be seen as someone who deserves their loyalty and trust.

Many Internet Marketers who fall over and blow it are the ones who build up a huge list then rip the people on that list off by selling them crap, or trying to sell them too much too soon. Greed is the common denominator in many an Internet Marketer’s downfall.

So where does that leave someone who wants to be successful, make a lot of money the honest way and keep doing it if they can’t sell a ton of products to their list constantly and often?

Well, it means using the benefits of having a large list to make money but not being so greedy and hasty as to go at it too quickly and with products that are not 100% value for money. By all means build as large a list as you can and give them plenty of free stuff. Everyone loves something for nothing and the more free stuff you can give away to your list that has value for them (even though its free) the more the people on that list will trust you. If, every once in a while you throw in something that your list will have to pay for, as long as you explain how it will benefit them and give them more value than the money they would spend on buying it, then you should be ok and will not alienate anyone from your list.

Be honest and tell them if there are any aspects of the product you want to sell them that might detract from its value to them. Or highlight specific areas that the product will help them and those that will not help them. If they know exactly what they will be paying for before they open their wallets, there is much less chance they will be asking for a refund a few days later and sending you an unsubscribe email!

So this then leads me on to how to build your list.

The most important aspect of building a list is having a good autoresponder. An autoresponder is a software package that enables you to harvest the email address of anyone who opts-in to your free giveaway or promotion package and then sends them whatever emails are necessary for them to download your freebie as well as generating a series of follow-up emails as you define over a period of time.

By using a good autoresponder, you circumvent the possibility of being accused of sending spam emails. That’s because firstly, the person willingly gave you their email address and secondly, the subsequent emails send out contain an “unsubscribe” link should they wish to opt-out and no longer wish to receive any further emails from you. This is infinitely better than using your own host’s autoresponder service. That’s because any accusations of spam activity must be investigated by your host which could mean your account being suspended for the duration of the investigation. Meaning all your sites go down for an unspecified length of time. Which could be disastrous for your business.

So where do you get a good autoresponder?

Well, there are several good ones on the market of which some are free and some must be paid for. It stands to reason that the autoresponders that are paid for are going to be better in many ways to the free ones. They will contain several important features not available on free autoresponders and will be much more robust and reliable. One such offering comes from iContact Email Marketing. iContact is a simple to use email marketing, surveying, autoresponder and blogging tool. It allows small businesses, non-profit organisations and associations to communicate easily online with their customers, prospects and members. Its worth checking out as their monthly rates are highly competitive and the additional services that come with the package are substantial.

Of course its a matter of personal choice and there are other autoresponders around, so the honest way recommendation, as always, is to look at all of the available choices and weigh up the pros and cons before deciding upon which is best for your business.

Remember, once you’ve built up a solid list of email subscribers, you don’t need to keep trying to sell them stuff, otherwise you’re just using them as milking cows and people will not tolerate being treated as such. So there are lots of other ways to make use of your list while keeping in friendly contact on a reasonably regular basis. There are always free offers that you can direct their attention to – as long as you have checked them out yourself first and are happy they are not thinly veiled opt-ins for scams.

You can also direct their attention to other money making possibilities that you have affiliate links to, such as online writing sites like Constant Content that will pay them for selling their articles, or online job offers from legitimate companies.

Just as long as everything you recommend to your list is honest and trustworthy, you’ll keep the people already there while continuing to nurture it as it grows. From which you will make money, honest!

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way