How to Make Money The Honest Way

When you want to set up your own blog (and this article is specific to blogs and not static websites) there are several very good reasons from a business point of view why you should use professional hosting. But there are also several equally viable reasons why you should also consider using free blog hosting as well. Here I’ll compare some of the top pros and cons to each.

Reliability

Self hosted blogs have the edge in this respect in that some of the best professional hosting companies will offer you a guarantee of 99.9% uptime for their servers. This is a cast iron guarantee that your blog will be on the air practically continually and any outages will be so few and far between as to be as good as non-existent. You don’t get that guarantee with free blog hosts and if they want to shut down their server and take your blog off the air they can do it whenever they want and for as long as they want and they don’t have to be accountable for it.

Cost

Free blog hosting is the obvious winner here as it is completely free to set up as many blogs as you can handle. Self hosting does cost you a monthly fee, although you can find many good professional hosts for less than $10 a month. This site is hosted with HostGator and that’s all it costs me. On top of that cost is the registration fee for your own domain name which you will also need. This needn’t cost much either as there are places like GoDaddy.com that will register a .com domain for less than $10. This fee also reserves your domain for one year. This is a small price to pay for all the benefits you will receive.

Professionalism

With a professionally hosted blog usually comes a professional sounding domain name, as you have the choice of what you want to call your blog. A free hosted blog name usually comes as a subdomain of the free blog host, so your blog will never sound as professional as your own domain name. There is another side to this in that all traffic that you attract to your blog ultimately benefits the host as far as their Alexa rank and search engine status is concerned, so all your hard promotional work is actually for someone else’s benefit.

Content

In most circumstances, the content that you fill your blog with will be acceptable to both free and paid hosts, but not all. Some free blog hosts will not allow you to put up advertising on your blog – WordPress being a prime example. Others, like Blogger are fine when it comes to advertising. Another problem with free hosts is that if they decide they don’t like some of the content in your blog for whatever reason they decide, they reserve the right to delete your blog without notice. That is a highly potential hazard when you’ve spend a lot of time and effort to build a really first class blog and obtain a good page rank. All it takes is one post with sensitive content that the owners of the free host don’t like and POOF! Your blog is history!

This is much less likely to happen with a professionally hosted blog, although you can be banned by your host for certain illicit practices like spamming. However, your domain name is yours to keep and along with it it’s page rank and all it’s content which you can simply move to another host if your current host does feel it necessary to ban you. Importantly, they will contact you first so that you are able to transfer your database and content safely an intact should this become an issue.

No such warning needs to be given by free hosts and you instantly lose your blog’s (sub)domain name and with it all page rank and privileges.

Advertising

This follows on from the last point about content in that with a professionally hosted blog you can advertise pretty much whatever you want while some free blog hosts are more restrictive.

Paid Reviews

Currently a controversial subject due to Google’s crackdown on blogs that contain them. However, despite this problem, pro hosted blogs with your own domain name are offered a greater variety of paid reviews to write as many advertisers restrict the platforms they will accept opportunities being written on to mainly full domain names ie www .mydomain.com. For this you will of course need to host your own domain name professionally.

Other restrictions apply to free blogs in the choice of paid review site that will even accept your blog into its system. Notably, LoudLaunch will only accept self hosted domains.

On the flipside, as blogs are being hit with page rank reductions for including paid reviews, it does pay to be setting up a load of free blogs that you can afford to sacrifice to this. By systematically creating a new blog every week for the sole purpose of using it for paid reviews after three months of existence (by which time if you have SEO’d and promoted it correctly it should have attracted some page rank too), they can be used to write as many paid reviews as possible before being rendered useless by the Slap. That way, as one blog goes down another comes ready to take its place. But don’t tell everybody about that idea or they’ll all be doing it!

Ease of use

On both sides, the ease of use is similar. With a pro hosted blog, you will have to go through the stage of installing it onto your server, but with most good hosts providing a simple way to do this with Fantastico you can have a WordPress blog installed on your server with a few mouse clicks in minutes. Selecting a template is as easy as it is on a free host, as is posting to and managing the blog.

Advanced Use

Both free and pro platforms allow many advanced features like being able to directly edit the template settings and get at the actual HTML and CSS code. However with self hosting you have one more advanced feature that you do not have with free hosted blogs. That is the ability to get into the database directly through MySQL queries or through user panels in phpMyAdmin. Here you have the flexibility to make deeper changes to your blog content that advanced users might be interested in.

For example, if you wanted to use a certain blog for submission to a paid review site but hadn’t posted anything in there for over a month, it would normally not be accepted because of the big gap in posts. From within the database, you can alter the post date of your posts to spread older posts out more evenly so it looks like you’ve posted regularly. That could be construed as being a black hat technique, which it basically is, but if you were desperate to use your blog in this way, now you know how to fiddle with the settings to achieve that!

Well that’s about as much as I want to write about in one rather long post. If I think of other arguments on this subject I’ll publish them in later posts.

So you see there are pros and cons to each method of hosting your blog. The best advice is probably to not keep all your eggs in one basket and spread your blog empire between self hosted for important blogs and free hosted for the simpler ones that you can afford to lose if push comes to shove.

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

The debate is still being hotly disputed amongst bloggers from all directions, flavours and niches. Do you carry on writing reviews in your blog and risk losing your page rank, or do you stop and find some other way to monetize your blog?

I was commenting in Liudmila’s Diary about this earlier today after reading her post about the ethics of writing reviews about online casinos. Should a blogger who initially stated that he’d never write a review about them turn tail and then take the money instead. Would that action devalue his blog and his reputation?

Was that post aimed at me?

Maybe. I do remember writing that while I’m happy to write reviews in this blog, I wouldn’t go off topic (which is broadly internet marketing based) and write about anything not in some way related to my niche. That would include the topics of online casinos and gambling, which I have to say carry a fair few paid reviews.

But I also stated that I wouldn’t write them in THIS blog.

I have other blogs.

Two of them were created specifically with a view to making money. They are even called Make Money and Make Money Blog respectively and their niche is purely how to make money online. Their reason for existing was for me to promote them until they reached maturity (three months is the standard acceptance period for paid review sites) and hopefully attracted some page rank in that time to make them eligible to carry higher paid reviews.

Well, they achieved exactly that in the time I set out for them and now I am doing exactly what I planned to do with them, and that is to write paid reviews to make money for me.

Sort of payback for all the hard work I’ve put into all of my blogs, websites and lenses and all the free information I’ve divulged since I got all this going nearly a year ago.

So I don’t feel guilty for reviewing online casinos on those two – it’s what they were created for. I’ll review anything that pays well on those two and thank the review sites that have approved them for their business.

Here, I’ll keep things to Internet Marketing, finance and online business related reviews and over time write fewer reviews and more informative and I like to think interesting normal posts.

So I haven’t sold this blog out – that’s for the ones which it was meant for.

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

It never ceases to amaze me that there are bloggers out there who still, despite my earlier exposee on this subject, come to this blog and copy my articles and then publish them on their own blogs. Some are nice enough to credit me with writing the article and link back to me, which I don’t mind.

Others annoy the hell out of me by simply stealing my article and posting it as one of their own.

Well, on the one hand, using my stuff and linking back to me is ok as I benefit from the additional exposure. But to blatantly steal someone else’s work an be so ignorant as to try to palm it of as their own simply beggars belief!

Do they think this will help their blog and get them lots of traffic?

Think again.

By using someone else’s work, you are not only publishing duplicate content on your site but many blog readers read many different blogs and there’s a very good possibility that they’ll come across the same article in more than one blog. Then they’ll start wondering who published it first.

Well, some people get curious enough to go consult Copyscape or even one of the search engines to see which blog posted the article first – thereby discovering the true owner of the article. Guess what they’ll think of the blog owner(s) who have that article on their front page with their name on it?

Yep. They will at the very least never go back to the blog of a content thief. At the very worst, they may well report that blog to the owner of the original article or to Copyscape who can escalate things – if the blogger is using a free blog service, they can have their blog deleted. If they are self hosted, for one they should be professional enough to know better and two their host can be contacted with the details and they could find themself being blacklisted.

Not only that, the search engines, Google in particular absolutely loathe duplicate content – and when (not if) they find duplicate content on your site, they’ll slap you down so fast you won’t know what hit you.

Maybe you’re sitting there with a free blog and no page rank and you think, “Who cares? Ive got no page rank to take away in the first place so I’ll just keep on doing it.”

That doesn’t do you any good either, as it just means that if you are indexed, you’ll be de-indexed and if you’re not already indexed you’ll be sand-boxed for a very long time – until you remove the duplicate content!

So to sum up – Don’t Do It!

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

When I was at school there were certain teachers that would punish a whole class because one boy broke the rules.

To my mind those teachers were ignorant.

They were ignorant because there is no fairness or justice in punishing a whole classroom full of innocent kids because one boy broke the rules. I personally grew up with a very strong sense of justice and fairness and I positively boil when I see injustice being done by anyone in a position of power. Especially when that person has a choice. The choice to be fair or to be ignorant.

Google in their position of immense power are not being fair in their slapping down of small blogs that write paid reviews to make a few dollars. Maybe they don’t care, after all, they make billions of dollars so why should they care that one blogger who, for whatever reason might rely solely on those few dollars they make with their blog.

What if that blogger is disabled and can’t make any money by working at a normal job?

Do they even stop to think about that?

So they have put their foot down and by doing so will punish everybody because a few people break their rules. Take no prisoners, right?
Is it so bad that small bloggers write reviews that include a little link juice (and I mean little – I’m not talking about high PR blogs here) to the sponsors who want to pay for them?

It’s not like they’re simply putting up a link and getting a regular monthly payment for it. Reviews are one-off and the link gets buried in the blogs archive. Reviews take some time and thought to write and provide relevant information about the product or service they’re reviewing. If the blogger gets paid for writing a quality review isn’t that fair? If that review contains a bit of link juice as a part of its reason for being isn’t that also fair? To write a review about a product that you think is really useful and then link to the owner of that product and NOT get paid for it – is that wrong too?

Or is it the getting paid part of it that is perceived as wrong?

In all fairness, the ones to punish should be the ones buying their way to the top!

There will always be a system of supply and demand and as long as there is the demand for link juice, there will be people who will want to make a few bucks for supplying this. It works in any industry. People like to drink a certain brand of fizzy drink, so companies produce it. They don’t get penalized because those drinks rot people’s teeth and their insides and make them obese and curtail their life expectancy. Ok, I’m getting a little off track, but you see the comparison?

Google have a very sophisticated system that knows about pretty much every published site on the world wide web. They know who is buying links to get to the top.

Well hammer those guys! They are the problem because they are the ones trying to game the system by getting high placement in the search index, which is exactly what Google are trying, rightly to stamp out.

They are the sites that will make their owners a lot of money by artificially getting to the top of their niches. So hit them where it hurts – in the pocket!

The little guys writing reviews and including a link are not trying to game the system to boost their own placement in the SERPs because they are only low PR blogs to begin with. They shouldn’t be punished by taking away their small source of income directly because it is not fair!

And didn’t I mention I cannot bear unfairness.

I’m sure every disabled blogger who has been or is about to be slapped down because they make enough money to eat by writing some paid reviews will be happy that Google are stomping on them in order to get the bad guys.

If anyone thinks that the saying “Life is unfair” applies here, they need their head examining. Life is only unfair when someone who wields a lot of power makes it that way, when they don’t actually have to. Google don’t have to make life unfair. They have the power and the technology to make life very fair. I hope they see reason.

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way