How to Make Money The Honest Way

It’s been a week since I started rolling out the PPC ads from Bidvertiser on some, (but not all) of my blogs and websites. In my earlier post introducing my change of heart with this type of advertising, I did mention that I’d keep readers updated as to how things are progressing with this.

Well, I won’t be retiring on the proceeds just yet!

That said, I can actually see some potential here. Ok, I’ve only made $2.06 (I’ll wait until you’ve finished laughing and picked yourself up off the floor…), but the promise is there as I hit a couple of 50 cent clicks in there. That tells me that the particular niche that caught that kind of click needs to be promoted a little better as the site it came from isn’t even optimized for PPC!

That said, other sites that should be attracting more clicks haven’t …yet.

Which means some more work is needed to a) attract more traffic to them and b) resite the ads for better effect. What I’m trying to achieve has already been amply described by my friend Grizzly in his blog, How to Make Money Online for Beginners, so I won’t go into the nuts and bolts here.

Suffice it to say, for sites and blogs that are properly optimized for generating adsense revenue may do reasonably well with Bidvertiser should adsense cease to be an option for whatever reason. But I don’t believe for one minute that Bidvertiser will outperform adsense simply because of the massive difference in the two companies’ inventory and choice of advertisers in each niche.

I’ll let this run for a while and let you know how it pans out

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

I’m not a great lover of CPC advertising, or at least I haven’t been since my rather unfortunate brush with the law (the Google law, I mean) at the end of 2006, when my fledgling adsense account came to an abrupt and untimely demise. The less said about that the better!

So I drifted towards the side of using the space that would normally be filled with CPC ads to promote affiliate products and the odd book that I put together myself. Oh, you didn’t know? That’s mine in the sidebar you see to your right – yes, the one entitled, “The Secrets of SEO Revealed”. I’ve been having some intermittent success with this, so became rather anti-CPC and said so in many of my earlier posts.

But now I’ve come full circle and I don’t hate CPC any more. I still haven’t got back into the adsense program, which is a shame now that I know many better ways to make money from it, so I’ve had to look at alternatives. The best of the bunch so far seems to be Bidvertiser (see their banner in my sidebar), so I’m currently giving that a trial run to see how it fares not just with this blog but with my others too.

I’ll let you know in due course how I get on with it.

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

I just read an in-depth article over at Grizzly‘s blog to How to Make Money Online for Beginners, that goes into the reasons for and why in order to make money you should SEO your site or blog for the search engines, most particularly Google. If you’re not making the kind of money that you think you should be with your blog, go over and read the article – you’ll be glad you did.

To add my own snippet of wisdom to that great article here at The Honest Way, I want to post the question as per my title, “Will you use this information to make money?”

I’d be willing to bet good money that the vast majority of people who read that article will go away with a real buzz and a head full of great ideas and ways to vastly improve their own blogs to extensively increase their make money factor. They may even sit down and get ready to draught their next blog post with a view to using some of that valuable information.

But for most of them, that’s as far as it’ll get.

I’m not saying that the astute make money oriented blogger is going to pass up this valuable chance to make money in greater amounts from his or her efforts, but when it comes down to the nitty gritty of spending the extra time writing and keeping in mind all the tricks they just learned, they will likely as not slip back into their natural way of working and most of the make money techniques will be missed out.

Of course that’s the small percentage of readers who even get that far. For most, it will have been an interesting read and something to put onto their “To Do” list for next year and it will never get done.

Why?

Because it’s too much like hard work for most people. The facts stand out for themselves in the glaringly earth shattering statistic that 95% of all internet marketers will fail. Period.

That’s no idle figure plucked from the sky, that’s the real statistic. The reason so many fail is largely down to the fact that when people get into the business of trying to make money online, they do it because they saw an ad somewhere that promised them they’d make a fortune by pressing a button and sitting back to wait for the suitcases full of dollars to roll up to their front door on a truck!

When the harsh reality hits home that it actually doesn’t work like that and only hard work, long hours and a creative mind will get them anything, they turn their back on it and go on to try something else. Only a very small percentage of the remaining 5% actually make anything more than a few dollars pocket money online, which bears out (no pun intended, Grizz) my statement that most people will not use the information they’ve been given for free and put it to good use, because it is a lot of work.

So for the tiny percentage left, that means rich pickings with valuable information that can and will be used to vastly improve our ability to make money in the niches we have chosen to target using the highly profitable keywords we have spent our valuable time researching.

When you’re like me and you get to the end of yet another 14-16 hour day spent in front of the PC and wonder where most of it went – now you know. Research, learning and information gathering take up a helluva lot of time. Then there’s the site building and all the little bits and pieces that come with it that all add up to a lot of hours that have to be spent day in and day out to achieve the desired outcome. Then and only then can you set into motion the promotion machine that will take up yet more time and effort to push your hard work into the public online arena so you can make money from all your efforts.

So who said internet marketing was easy?

Ha! It’s just very satisfying when it works.

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

Over a course of several posts, I’m going to be looking at the concept of relationship selling. I mean the concept of selling not products, but relationships.

Or more correctly, yourself.

It’ll come as no surprise that many internet marketers simply fail to grasp this concept.

The whole ethos of internet marketing is all about getting people, your potential customers, to trust you. The online version is pretty much the same as in the offline world.

To highlight this point, there was an old rerun of the popular TV series The Munsters. This is the one where Herman goes to buy a car. Of course the car salesman is portrayed as the shiftiest, sneakiest shark that ever there was. The whole reason why the episode was funny is because we, as consumers can relate so well to some poor guy being taken in by a crooked salesman. Of course in the end the salesman get’s his just desert, which is always the enjoyable part of this kind of situation.

But in the real world, this doesn’t always happen. Often an unscrupulous salesman does get his come uppance and his reputation goes down the tubes.

In the online world of internet marketing, you don’t want this to happen to you. But if you concentrate more on selling yourself to people rather than trying to sell the product, you’ll stand a much better chance of running a successful business in the long term.

Having a reputation that people respect and admire is everything in business. That’s something worth remembering.

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way