How to Make Money The Honest Way

Ah, its Sunday morning and I have a theory… What if…?

Its all a smokescreen. A great big craftily engineered smokescreen. To try and stop all the damn noobs creating tons of mini sites that were once a lucrative source of links and in the case of hub pages, money, for those of us who know what we’re doing. To stop the directionless masses in their tracks from building tons of thin sites that were clogging up the search index and get them to concentrate on…

Authority sites!

Well, sorry to burst the bubble and throw my spanner into the nicely oiled works, but its not a new fad, as is being touted around by the big names right now. Big content rich authority sites were always there. And in most cases they always ranked well as long as they had the links to back them up. But its only recently that the Internet marketing trend has swung back to building large, content laden authority sites because we’re all being told that’s what Google now wants to see in its index.

But that’s the beauty of this little ruse. Its not new!

Google has always wanted that. But people have short memories and will latch onto whatever any mentor or highly respected and knowledgeable marketer or SEO expert tells them. And we’re all being told that we should be concentrating on building authority sites if we want to dominate the SERPs. Thin sites simply don’t cut it any more and the dreaded algorithm is sniffing them out and tossing them asunder while giving more emphasis to authority sites.

There’s a little marketing psychology going on there because its quite stunning how everyone is suddenly focusing on the authority site theory and that means their focus has been diverted away from the splatter mini site theory of a few months ago. Is it just me or are Hub Pages starting to earn a little more money these last few days? Is there a slowdown in them being built because we’ve all been told its not worth it any more, because Hub Pages lost some of their SERP authority?

Maybe. Also, I don’t know if this is new, but I’ve recently noticed some PPC ads promoting Hub Pages appearing on Google’s front page for some make money terms. Why would they need to do that, I wonder? Perhaps the recent surge in page building has abated and the owners started to like the extra income it was generating for them and now that it has fallen off, they want some more? Only theorising here, by the way. I could be way off. But I’m not so sure I am.

But don’t take any notice of my Sunday morning ramblings. What do I know? Get back to building your authority sites and leave those mini sites alone as they’re no good to you. Honest!

Good! I’m happy now I’ve sorted that out. I’m also happy that I have more coffee. I’m not making a big deal about this minor discovery, either. I want everyone to keep concentrating on their authority site(s) while I can get back to building mini sites. I might be completely wrong here and those mini sites might not stand a better chance of ranking and making money, now everyone else and their dog have averted their radar to something else.

I might go write a few blog posts about how important authority sites are… Oh, I already did!

Gotta love the Internet, God bless Google and God help the rest of you!

Never give up!

Make Money The Honest Way Blog

          

As a follow up to my last post here at The Honest Way Blog, where I gave a certain hosting account a hard time and deservedly so, I decided to take a closer look at reseller accounts for anyone who is thinking about going this route. Remember, you really only need a reseller if you are intending to either host a lot of domains yourself, or your online business caters for hosting customer domains.

First of all, what is a reseller account?

This is a type of hosting account that allows you to create individual hosting accounts for single (or multiple) domains withing one easy to control and administrate hosting account. Think of it like owning a department store, where each floor is sub-let to a different business, so that say the ground floor is your own where you sell electrical goods, then the first floor is owned by a company that sells clothes, the next floor sells kitchen equipment and the next sells furniture and so on.

Online, a reseller account does pretty much the same thing as a brick and mortar department store in which it allows you to have all those different users who sell their own stuff together under one roof. Of course the difference here is that a brick and mortar store is limited by its physical size, whereas a reseller hosting account is not so limited. You can add as many accounts to it as the hosting company has room for on its server!

I personally have two reseller accounts where I have my own domains spread out between them. It makes maintaining and administrating each domain much easier than with the more popular shared hosting account, where if you want to add multiple domains, you have to add them as “add-on” domains under the one account. There is a problem with that setup and I’ll explain that.

If you have more than one domain occupying a shared hosting account, under normal day to day running you should have no problems at all as long as each domain you host on there stays within certain operating parameters, such as the amount of bandwidth it uses and how much processing resources it uses. Problems start to occur when one of your domains either suddenly starts getting a load of traffic and stars eating up bandwidth, or has a script running that suddenly starts hoarding system resources.

Your host provider will suddenly take an interest in your account, you can count on it! If you start hogging too many resources, your account could get suspended until you do something about it, such as upgrading your hosting if its a bandwidth thing, or fixing your scrip if its swallowing up system resources. The upshot of this is that if you have multiple websites on their own domains all together on this shared host, they will all be taken down with the offending domain. That could mean your business going down the drain overnight until you can sort it out.

Downtime like that, even if its 24 hours can seriously damage some businesses!

This is much less likely to happen if you take out a reseller account. Because of its structure, you host each domain on its own account within your overall reseller. What this means is that if one domain starts hogging resources, only that domain gets singled out, not your whole reseller account. That means all the other domains keep active and your business carries on uninterrupted. The domain that is causing problems can be administrated by you by increasing its bandwidth allocation, which you can do within the bounds of your overall allocation. Of course if its running a bad script, your host will let you know and you can disable the individual account before any real damage is done,while all your other accounts remain active.

This level of flexibility is what attracts so many people to reseller accounts, especially those who own multiple domains and need their business to keep going without the potential problems associated with standard shared hosting packages.

Regular readers here will, by now I’m sure be quite aware of the hosting company that I endorse, but don’t dis-count other companies as there are many good ones to choose from. Discount Domains are one such company that are based in the UK and cater for most online business types. They have a good customer support section and will help you one to one if ever you need them. Discount Domains are a popular UK ICANN registrar and well worth checking out as an alternative to the usual suspects.

Whatever you do with your business, work hard, stay focused, keep at it and above all else…

Never give up!

Make Money The Honest Way Blog