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

          

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

          

I love post titles that get the old grey matter stirring and the inquisitive juices flowing! After my last post How Can I Make Money Online?, where I rather blatantly promoted Grizzly’s new blog I think its time to return to some honest money making information spill over!

Lots of Internet Marketers are busily beavering away on making money with the various tools, affiliate programs, products, merchandise, advertising or whatever else they use to make a buck here and there, some more than other. So everyone is keen to learn of any new promotional packages that might turn up to help them along with another stream of income. Its how we all work.

Well, here is one that I just learned about and it looks like being a good way of producing some additional income while sitting passively there in the old sidebar. And it has nothing to do with selling links or writing so-called paid reviews or anything else that might get you into trouble with Google or anyone else for that matter. Its a company called RevResponse and their main aim is to promote free subscription magazines, podcasts, webinars, white papers and the like that their affiliates – that’s me and you – are paid to promote. Its a sort of lead generation program that pays its affiliates to generate leads to these free resources.

Well, does that sound good?

Want to know what sounds even better? Well, for the month of July only, if you sign up with RevResponse and write a blog post about them, they’ll send you a bonus $50 for your trouble! The program is pretty simple to sign up with and they create a subdomain site for you to promote, ready made with all the links and blurb so you really don’t have to do anything except direct some traffic to it and hope that traffic will be interested in getting something for nothing.

Which is a great way for you to add another how to make money with something for nothing, leading back to the title of this post.

I’ve only just signed up myself and obviously this is the $50 post to raise awareness of RevResponse, so I can’t produce any earnings stats for you yet. I think its fair to let it run for a couple of months to see what is produces and if it looks good I shall spin it out to some other of my sites to see if I can’t extend its potential some.

Of course, if you haven’t already signed up for it yet and are interested I’d be most happy of you clicked my affiliate link and make me a dollar for my troubles which is here: RevResponse. If you’d prefer to rob me of a measly dollar, you can sign up with this non affiliate, direct link: RevResponse.

Here’s to your continued success!

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