The Honest Way

The Honest Way loves to tell it straight, as it is, the honest truth and all that! So this may come as no surprise to my regular readers…

There is an alarming debate going on over the merits and possible problems associated with writing paid reviews for sites like PayPerPost, ReviewMe etc. I learned this from a recent post in my friend Grizzly Brear’s blog, Make Money For Beginners.

It stems from the recent page rank shake-up by “The Gonster” (I think you know who I mean!) where some very high profile blogs were slapped down in the rankings for selling links to make money…

Gasp! Make Money? How dare they!

Well, that seems to be the feeling at The Gonster, anyway. Of course this is still only conjecture, as no one outside of The Gonstser actually knows the whole truth. Maybe the likes of John Chow (who suffered a massive cut in his PR) were doing something else that rankled the Big G.

But as far as anyone can intelligently surmise, the PR cut in the big name blogs was highly probably because the search engines don’t like crappy sites buying links to boost their own page rankings. When you think about it logically it is an unfair way of getting a high rank and coming out as popular in a keyword search when your site is actually a pile of ads and misleading links. The search engines are trying hard to keep such sites from their high pages because when people search for something, they should get the most relevant sites first. Fair enough.

So it makes a lot of sense. Except like all corporate monsters, The Gonster is shooting the messengers, and not the perpetrators by penalizing people for trying to make money from facilitating this practice, which is after all simply exploiting an opportunity that has presented itself.

Isn’t that what business is all about? Making money from supply and demand?

Of course it is. And there will always be the ones who oppose it. Which is fine as long as the opposers don’t have too much power or too loud a voice.

But when a big voice booms “Don’t do that or you’ll be sorry…” we have a problem. The Gonster is that problem and they appear to be after hitting anyone who does not comply with their precepts.

“Resistance is futile…”

Well, that’s my take on the paid links bit, so how does that affect paid reviews?

Paid review sites have their own set of rules, one of them being that when they give you a link to include in your review (and they always do) they state that the link must not be altered in any way or the post will not be accepted.

Now, if your review was to advertise a company and to raise their profile by being exposed to your blog’s readership, which is how they do it in magazines and newspapers, then as long as the link sent some of those readers to the advertiser’s site, then the paid review has done its job.

But what if the predominant purpose of that paid review was not simply exposure, but to gain link juice from the link in the post, especially if it came from a high PR blog?

If that’s the case, which when you think about it makes all the more sense, then isn’t that the same as paying for links? Oh, dear - sounds like the same problem! The Gonster may well penalize naughty, misbehaving bloggers who are trying to scrape a living from the few dollars they make from writing these reviews.

Oh, oh.

As the message clearly sent out by The Gonster was to stop selling links or have your PR cut down, then anyone writing paid reviews must surely fall under the cosh as well.

So what can we do about it?

Well, at the moment, it appears that it’s not possible to distinguish a paid link in a review from a naturally given link love link. To muddy the waters further, some blogs write reviews of other websites and blogs for free either because they thought the site was worthy of it or they wanted to get the attention of the site so they’ll maybe link back by way of thanking them for the review. That’s something you can’t realistically penalize blogger for, because it’s all part of promoting yourself for no direct monetary gain.

If paid review companies want to stay in business - and let’s not bury our heads in the sand here, they will lose a lot of business if The Gonster has its way - they need to be more flexible in the way links are allowed to be displayed on blogs. One simple way is to allow the rel=”_nofollow” attribute to be added to the anchor tag. This effectively cuts off the link juice to the advertiser, but still allows the link to generate traffic to the advertiser’s site.

Another way is to get clever with the “full disclosure” directive. This is a measure enforced upon paid review sites whereby the reviewer must disclose that the review is sponsored and who by. The disclosure is usually in the form of text or a link, which can be read or followed by certain techniques - high tech ones like robots and text recognition and low tech ones like a person actually reading the text! Guess which one will be most effective across the billion or so blogs out there. Here’s a hint: There aren’t enough people to physically read them all.

So instead of a text or link disclosure, how about a graphic disclosure? PayPerPost actually do that on some reviews, but it falls down because they use a tinyurl.com link to the graphic on their own server, which is too traceable. Now if they got clever and gave that graphic disclosure bubble as a download to be linked direct from the reviewer’s blog’s server, not so trackable!

Well if it was MY business on the line, I’d be thinking along those lines…

To conclude. For now, it is probably still relatively safe to carry on writing paid reviews and I shall certainly continue for as long as I feel justified in doing so, as it brings me in some very welcome income that reimburses me for all the hard work I put in writing for my several blogs, sites, lenses and everything else I do online that takes up my 12 hour plus day sitting in front of this thing.

If I get slapped down for doing it, then what have I lost?

I still have my ever increasing traffic on all of my blogs which I attract by my own promotion - very little of it comes from The Gonster anyway - it’s all my own efforts and I like to think my interesting and informative writing skills that people keep coming back to see.

So I’ll take the money while it’s there, because it wasn’t there before and if it goes away in a while, then I will have made considerably more for doing it than I would have for not doing it. (If that made sense, then you have a brain as chaotic as mine!!!)

Here’s to your success!

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

This is probably a little cheeky, but when it’s done with a smile I’m sure I can get away with it!

My previous post on content was probably missing on a couple of points that I can add here.

I’m a busy blogger, as anyone who has got to know me by now can surely tell. Which is a good thing in that it means I’m writing on a regular basis for several of my own blogs as well as the JV blog I’m running in conjunction with Monika at Blogging Web 2.0.

Well, as a busy blogger myself, I’m also a busy reader of other people’s blogs. I do this because I like to read what other people are writing about - and there are some wonderful yet criminally underrated blogs out there to read. There are also some blogs that are high ranking yet lack lustre, as well as every shade of the spectrum in between.

Then something screamed at me as a glaring need that I can fill.

Some bloggers, for whatever reasons, start to neglect their blogs or the quality of their posts goes downhill. The enthusiasm seems to have gone from the writing and this is something that can kill a blog very quickly unless something is done in short order to breathe new life back into it.

This can be critical if the blog is a good source of income for its owner.

The solution is in hiring a good writer to fill the gap. To breathe that new vibrancy and enthusiasm back into the posts and to give the blog a leg-up.

Well, if this is you, I can help. I am offering my expert services as a writer on many different themes to give your blog a lift, inject some excitement and new blood into it.

But don’t all rush at once, as I don’t come cheap. I’ve created a separate page with a tariff for my freelance blogging services. You can find it HERE, or in the navigation bar at the top of this page.

Well, you can’t blame a bloke for trying!

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

The word on the street is: “Content is King”.

If you’ve ever doubted it before, then this should set you straight. The speculators and rumour-mongers are whispering quite loudly now that Google has once again altered its algorithm to place ever more emphasis on sites that contain lots of quality, unique and regularly updated content.

That means sites that have been up until now spending lots of time and money on harvesting as many back-links as they can to boost their PR are going to start to feel the wrath of the Google monster as it starts trawling through the world wide web and sifting out the sites that have lots of SEO and back-links but poor quality, static content and penalizing them.

Good!

On this I’m all for what Google are trying to do. That’s to force website owners to give good quality sites to their readers by rewarding their hard work and efforts to really give a service that readers will use.

Their search algorithms are getting better and better all the time.

As recently as a couple of years ago, you could still enter a search keyword and end up with pages full of irrelevant sites all hogging the top pages. That horror story is systematically being consigned to the past with ever more sophisticated methods of bringing much more relevant results for search keywords on the top pages and all the irrelevant garbage being relegated to the nether-regions.

Good!

What does all this mean for the website owner who is using the web to make money?

Well, it just means that the days of putting up highly SEO’d and strongly linked but poor quality sites full of ads and little else just to hog the top pages of the search engines are over. Now, if you want to make money from your sites, you have to work hard at filling them with good quality, relevant and readable content! That doesn’t include the mechanically written articles that article creating software spews out, either. They’re on to that trick too!

No, your content has to be written by a human being in a language that the reader will not only understand, but get something from and enjoy reading in the process. It has to be informative, relevant, on-topic and above all else, interesting.

It doesn’t take much figuring out to see that blogs are the way to go with this.

Blogs are exactly what the search engines like to see - they have everything the newly reconfigured algorithms praise and reward sites for. That means lots of informative, human-written content that is regularly updated and added to with ever more fresh, interesting content. They have to be this way, or no one would read them, which would defeat the object of creating one in the first place.

So blog away and keep your readers coming back for more. As your blog builds it’s readership, so too will the search engines be helping you out as well by pushing you up to the high pages as long as you’ve got your on-site SEO configured properly. So make sure your main keywords are prominent in your post, as well as in your blogs meta tags and titles. Back-links are still important, so you should make sure you have plenty of these, by visiting other blogs that, like this one have a “do follow” policy and posting comments with a link back to your own blog.

Now the humble blogger can stand up against the top marketers by having a level playing field - something that until now, they have never truly had the benefit of.

Terry Didcott
THE HONEST WAY