The Honest Way

Regular visitors to this blog, The Honest Way, may have noticed that after the surge in paid reviews that appeared for a few weeks, they seem to have suddenly stopped. What happened to them?

Well, following the page rank changes a month ago now, this and my two of my other blogs, Make Money and Make Money Blog, all got a PR3. That meant they were eligible to accept many more better paid reviews from the various sites that provide them. The initial problem was that only this blog had been accepted by the paid review sites as the other two needed to be at least three months old before they could be accepted.

They achieved that status about a week or two later. That meant that at first, this blog was the only one I had to take advantage of the higher paid reviews, so I did just that, for which I make no apology – I’ve been working hard building this whole website/blog/forum up for several months now and not getting paid for all my hard work, so it seemed only fair that I take advantage and reap from the harvest I’d sown.

However, once my other two blogs were accepted by the paid review sites, there was no longer any need to be filling this, my main and most popular blog, with any more paid reviews because the other two can quite happily cope with taking the load. After all, that is exactly what I created them for in the first place – to make money!

That doesn’t mean I won’t be writing any more reviews in this blog. It does mean that I’ll be picking and choosing very carefully what I write about in here from now on, especially as Google are systematically slapping down blogs that contain paid reviews. So any future reviews will have to be Google friendly.

That means that I shall continue to promote this website and its forum and blog to attract ever more visitors (we’re currently averaging 450 a day) so that we become attractive to advertisers that want to be seen by lots of people rather than just to pay for a back-link, which is exactly the practise that Google are trying to stamp out.

So what does this all mean for me, the reader?

It means that I’ll be concentrating on writing good, informative, interesting and valuable articles in here once again – just like I always did, actually. So I hope you’ll all enjoy my writings enough to want to keep coming back for more – and tell your friends about this blog!

If you really like what I’m doing in here, I don’t mind if you want to link to me either – but you have to keep Google happy and do it for free just because you love my blog!

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

How about this for a change of style?

When you’ve finished scratching your head wondering “what change of style,” you might notice that while I needed to make some changes to the layout of this blog, I actually liked the original template and didn’t really want to swap it for a new one.

So what I did was made a compromise.

I kept the original template and did what I’m good at doing and that’s tinkering with CSS! I widened the main display area by a hundred pixels and then created a second sidebar. That has increased the space I now have available for any textual advertising I might pick up and even perhaps some banners which I can display near the top of the page.

I liked the colour scheme, so didn’t mess about with it any more, although the grey border has gone. I also updated the header graphic. I needed to stretch it without stretching the text or it would look like I just stretched the whole banner, which is cheating and looks amateurish. So it was back to my trusty Fireworks to re-jiggle the original and make everything fit the new wider canvass.

It keeps the same feel as before with a more modern three column display, so anyone who hasn’t visited for a while will still recognise the place!

I hope you like it.

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

You might be wondering where that annoyingly slow to load up widget from WidgetBucks went from my sidebar.

Well, I got so fed up with it halting my browser window as I scrolled down to it so that it could load up, that I took it off! It wasn’t the best advertising skyscraper block for my sidebar here anyway, as there wasn’t anything truly relevant to this site to advertise. Well, I suppose PCs and PDAs might be loosely associated with the business of running an online make money blog, but for all that I didn’t actually make a single penny with it for the few weeks it spent clogging up my page.

If it annoyed me, how much would it have annoyed my readers? I had to think of you as well, so in the best interests of everybody, the widget had to go!

Now if I could find a decent money making replacement…

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

You may have noticed a shiny new button has appeared here on The Honest Way blog that says “Zoom”. Well, its a widget that comes from a place called Blogging Zoom. I heard about it on my friend Grizzly’s blog at How to Make Money Online for Beginners.

So what is Blogging Zoom?

Blogging Zoom is a social networking site that was created by internet marketer Courtney Tuttle and programmer and SEO specialist Vic Franqui. These guys have got together and built this social networking site exclusively for bloggers with a single goal in mind - to increase your traffic!

Blogging Zoom is similar to other sites like digg and PlugIm etc with the exception that Blogging Zoom does encourage you to submit your own blogs and blog pages. This is not generally allowed with some of the other social networks. Blogging Zoom also has another important benefit - it doesn’t allow news sites and all the popular websites that tend to dominate and crowd out the smaller blogs.

Blogging Zoom is designed to attract traffic to your blog in two ways.

• Firstly from people who browse the site directly (the Zoomers).
• Secondly by creating SE optimized snippets that hopefully will rank well on search engines.

You need to sign-up (it’s free) with Blogging Zoom before you can start voting for your favourite blog posts.

So How Does Blogging Zoom Work?

Simply write and publish your post on your blog as usual, then submit it to Blogging Zoom and write a short description of it. Once it’s submitted, you can vote for it, which gets the ball rolling. If your post grabs the interest of other readers, they’ll vote for it too and with a bit of luck you may even get to the front page - where even more people will see it and vote. You can put a button on your post as I have here to encourage your readers to “zoom” you as well.

This button is a wordpress plugin that you can get on the site and as far as I’m aware there is a version for Blogger nlogs as well.

So there’s another great way of further improving a blog’s exposure to more readers and should attract more traffic as a result. Thanks guys!

By the way, if you blog about Blogging Zoom, Courtney will give you a link back to your blog from his PR3 site.

Also, if you also mention (and link to) The Honest Way in your post, I’ll also give you a link back to your blog from here - this is PR3 too!

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way