The Honest Way

While my last post eBay Affiliates, was all about using the eBay editor tool to create an affiliate window to their auctions to earn commissions on sales, this one follows on in a “what happens when…” vein. To badly paraphrase the famous Elton John song, I chose Don’t Let The Host Go Down On Me as the title because I just had a problem with one of my hosts deciding to suspend my account at the drop of a hat.

Not much fun, when I came to editing one of my newer sites that lives on a different hosting account (thankfully to The Honest Way and most of my money making sites) and saw that I couldn’t access is via FTP. On trying to display the site in my browser, the ominous message was pasted across the screen telling me that my account had been suspended - no reason was given, of course.

I was to contact the host and find out myself. Well, as this particular host came with a certain affiliate package that I belong to, I didn’t have the details to contact the host directly, so had to contact the package owner. Not good as I’m at least 6 hours in front being in Europe and the guy is in the US and it was only 8am here!

I was aggrieved because while I only had a handful of low performing websites hosted on that account, one of them was being used in a niche where I was using my eBay affiliates tools and it was just staring to show clicks on the account - and in this game, clicks equals income! It meant that the site was getting enough organic traffic to generate those clicks which meant that to lose it at this stage could kill it dead.

As I had no idea what the perceived problem was with the hosting account, therefore having no way to know how long it would be down for, I had no option other than to switch nameservers to my main hosting account here at Hostgator and rebuild he site on the fly - fast!

By noon I had a working site back on the air complete with eBay affiliate tools. Two hours later, the other host account was reinstated with the lame excuse that it was a billing glitch.

Well, that’s not bloody well good enough!

When this is your main source of income and some spotty little oik can make a decision like that whcih could potentially cost you a lot of money, I start to think seriously about my hosting options.

For one part, I’ve been seriously thinking about upgrading my main host to a reseller account for better stability and less likelyhood of it being pulled if one or more sites suddenly start getting a lot of traffic. Now that I have close to 50 (top level) domains that is starting tomake a lot of sense.

Hostgator are still my first choice for host and they’re cheapest reseller account comes in at only $24.95 a month, so methinks its time to upgrade.

Why a reseller account?

Well, the shared account idea is fine if you only have one or just a few sites hosted and don’t envisage any of them setting the world alight with traffic spikes of 20k hits in a day. Although your host may tell you that you have 250gb or so bandwidth to play with, you really don’t want to push that to anywhere close to its limits. The reality is that the hosting company (in my case Hostgator but it could be any of them) doesn’t expect anyone on a shared host to get anything like their stated bandwidth limits - each server may have a thousand accounts on it and if they all started getting big spikes in traffic they’d bring the server down in short order. Before that could happen, the accounts that were suddenly performing too well would be shut down to protect the thousand or so others sharing the server (and the bandwidth).

With a reseller account they treat you differently. Because they expect you to have a large number of sites hosted on a reseller account, they give you much more leeway with bandwidth usage. While you are still sharing a server with other accounts, the reseller account is given priority with bandwdth and allowed to stay up where other shared accounts would be pulled. That’s food for thought when you are attracting more and more traffic with more and more sites as your business builds (if, of course your business model is set up to expand in that direction).

As for little old me, I intend to keep expanding the number of domains I host, so it makes sense for me to upgrade my host. This has been made all the more prominent following this morning’s debacle. Ok, it was only one performing site that I lost for a few hours, but what if it were my main host and dozens or even hundreds of sites that were all making money all suddenly go off the air because I was worrying that spotty little oik sitting in his office watching my traffic increase a little too fast for his liking.

Unlimited domains they may offer, but realistically, for $7.95 a month you can’t expect to host a hundred or more domains that all attract steadily increasing amounts of traffic. Better to upgrade and be safe than sorry.

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

After my last post Make Money? What’s What!, where I made a valiant attempt to set the record straight as to what really needs to happen if your want to make money online, I think its time to bring things right up to date with the new eBay affiliate changeover.

Today is the first day of the new system where the eBay affiliate program is taken away from its traditional home at Commission Junction and placed firmly at the feet of its originator - eBay.

That means some big changes for those using the editor tools to generate live eBay listings on their websites. I’m affected too in a reasonably big way as I’ve been quietly building a lot of sites based soleley around the eBay editor tool software. Those of you using BANS may have different issues here, as your CJ PID will only work for another month and then you’ll have to have migrated everything over to your eBay affiliate id.

BANS is not my speciality, so I’ll leave it for Vic to explain.

What is my speciality is the eBay editor tool that generates BANS-like windows to ebay live auction listings that I’ve been placing in my sites.

I’ve been waiting patiently for today to happen so I could sign-up for my new eBay affiliate account at the eBay Partner Network. That was pretty painless and now I’m a fully fledged member of said network. But the thing I was holding my breath for was the new id that I could place in my editor tools generated eBay windows so that I could transfer my payments from CJ to eBay.

But to my dismay, when I got to the new editor tools page, the message “…coming soon” stared back at me. There was no link and no editor tools to get into. ¡Joder!

So it looks like I along with the lord-knows how many other marketers will have to wait for our precious tools to become available so I can start making more money from my sites!

That’s as far as I can go right now, until I know more about ths.

I’ll post an addendum when I know more…

***********

Ok, I know more!

I just logged back in and the editor tools are up and running. This is so cool!

First you need to create a campaign id for the site or page you’ll be displaying the eBay listing. That’s as easy as entering a website name and some unique identifier that is relevant to your site. You are given a numeric campaign id which you need to copy.

Enter the editor tools page and log in with your ebay account name and password (NOT your new affiliate user. Fill in the boxes as before - its all the same except when you get to the bottom of the page. Where you used to put Commission Junction in the drop down box then enter yoru PID, you now enter eBay Affiliate Network and then enter your campaign id in the box. Then create your page.

I just set up a new page and loaded it into my website and it looks great!

Now I just need a decent stream of organic traffic to come see what I have on offer on my site!

Perfect. I’m as happy as Larry. Sorted!

Now the hard work begins with setting up a lot of sites with the eBay editor tools software and then figuring out how to get traffic to them. My niche affiliate marketing site is already set up to host several subdomain niche sites which are all separate websites in their own rights. There are a couple that I’ve worked quite hard on in order to bring them up to speed quickly and that’s my designer bag site and my sunglasses site. At this point there’s not a lot of point deep linking to all the sub-pages for both those sites, as they need to get placed in the serps.

For that, I’ve been getting links for them slowly and naturally as possible so as to get them growing naturally. Its a long term effort as with most things on the Internet. If you try to rush things, you’ll just get sent straight to the “box” from where you’ll do no business. One more site to provide a link for as it is already getting traffic from one of the other search engines and could do with being placed in Google’s pages and that’s my diabetic shoes site. It’s exciting that this site is already producing clicks, but so far no successful bids. That’ll come in good time, I’m sure as its getting a nice trickle of organic traffic of around 20-30 uniques a day already.

To add to these sites, I’ve been buying some new .info domains while GoDaddy are having a 99 cents sale. That’s too good to resist, as each domain is a potential link producer as well as host for more eBay listings.

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

Shock horror! He’s writing another one so soon after Do It Right, what’s going on?

I also should point out that I just changed the permalinks template for this blog, so all my previous posts now have different urls which is why the Blogging Zoom and other buttons all show zero - can’t be helped!

Well, I noticed that I’m not posting as much as I used to in here and there is a very good reason for that. At the same time, I also realize that this is a good site that is steadily gaining popularity with the search engines in terms of its authority, so I should be spending more time on it.

So I thought I might post about what’s what.

Sure, I can write about making money online until the john cows come home, but would it be the right thing to do? Of course its harder to come up with great stuff that isn’t the same rehashed, regurgitated crap that most make money bloggers vomit up in their blogs almost daily. Most of which is pure bullshit, because most of them are NOT making money themselves, so how can they claim to know how to do something they’re not doing?

I’ve got tired of writing the same old same old and it doesn’t do this blog any favours to fill it up with worthless crap, so the posts are going to be fewer and farther between because there really isn’t that much more to say on the subject of how to make money online.

Griz has practically said it all in his make money online blog about the right way to go about making money online, and I just feel that by writing on the subject, I’m only paraphrasing him and Vic (make money online at Blogger Unleashed) and Court (Internet Marketing School) in order to make posts to keep this place alive and maybe even move it forward.

Perhaps its time to allow this blog to diversify somewhat. It’s too late to pigeon-hole it into one tight niche because its getting rather big and sprawling. So instead, I’ve decided to go with the flow of the site as it is. I’ll be looking at creating sub-pages on related niches with top level posts to support them. Spread it out instead of reign it in.

As I said in my last post, it may not make very much money itself, but it will be useful as a promotion and link booster for other sites I have in different niches. Having the forum attached to the site means it gets spidered often by the search engines, even though there’s not too many people in there these days.

People still email me for advice on how to make money online and I don’t mind helping out where I can, but I’ll have to be honest and say that the information I’m giving out now comes mainly from what I’ve learned from Griz, Vic and Court, whereas before it would have come from stuff I learned from other marketers who are not gurus or A-listers but market their own products to make money online rather than use their sites as affiliate or PPC advertising media.

Oh, did we forget that?

Yes, we did! Affiliate ads and PPC ads are highly profitable and very doable ways of making money online - no doubt about it. That’s the school of thought coming from the guys I just mentioned. But don’t discount the marketing side of selling your own stuff if you have stuff to sell that people want to buy!

I’ve lapsed on that front and stopped working on my own stuff to sell. Like the eBook I was writing on how I beat arthritis naturally. Its something that I’m sure a lot of people would buy (although not at the outrageous prices that many eBooks sell for online) with some work put into marketing it. Which I can do - only thing is, I shelved that and a couple of other book projects because my attention got diverted from that path.

I read Griz’s blog and realized there was a way to make decent money online without a product of your own and even without a website of your own - just creating free blogs. He also made it clear that working to attract social traffic was a waste of time if you want to make money. He’s right and the stuff he writes about in his blog works too. If you’re doubting it, try it first and see for yourself before you dismiss it out of hand. Its every bit as much work as anything else to make money, but the rewards are there for those that are prepared to do the work.

Then Vic came along and added his side of the story which is also geared to making money as opposed to attracting social visitors to your site or blog. Vic knows what he’s talking about and is giving his knowledge away for free to anyone who is determined enough to want to make money. The catch is that you have to abandon all the stuff you learned from the A-listers and so-called gurus and do it his way. That’s up to you - it depends on how much you really want to make money.

Of course, this is all bringing me back to that terrifying statistic that 95% of Internet Marketers will fail. Period. That’s because they either don’t listen to what they’re being told - because they know better - or they are too lazy to do the work, or they don’t have the self-belief that they CAN do it and give up too soon.

So if you have your own stuff to sell, and you are sure there are people who will buy it, then go for it! You may have created a great piece of software that is highly useful in some way, or written a great book on how to cure something or cook something or whatever - just don’t be trying to sell yet another book on how to make money online - there are more than enough of them! You’ll be surprised just what people will buy if it will help them in some way or make their life a bit easier. Maybe you have developed a a great line in safe children’s toys, or a new board game… the options are endless as long as you are sure people will want what you’re selling!

Of course the knack is then in the marketing - you have to make people want your stuff by getting their interest and creating desire for your product. Here’s and example: Sunny Delight is a sugary orange flavoured drink that thanks to a TV campaign in the UK actually overtook sales of and knocked off the No1 spot, Coca Cola! Ok, that’s extreme, but marketing rules if you are trying to sell something. That’s beyond the scope of this post, but there are several good marketing articles on this site.

There are more ways to make money online than the few that you constantly read about. Selling your own good, worthwhile product is one of them.

If you want to make money online, you need to:

• Listen to what you’re being told
• Know how to filter out the truth from the bullshit
• Understand and accept what your being taught because you do NOT know better (even if you think you do)
• Be prepared to work hard and put in long hours
• Truly believe in yourself that you can do it
• Don’t let negative people put you down or tell you that you’re wasting your time
• Have the patience of Job

and…

NEVER GIVE UP!

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

My last post Make Fast Money Keywords?, which was based on the SEO technique of using a liberal dose of keywords to your content, highlighted how you can use your content to give your blog a leg-up the search engines results pages to some extent.

Well that’s fine and works better in some niches than others. The make money niche is far too competitive to make much headway in and the rewards for getting right up there are not so great when you compare putting the same amount of effort and hard work into a blog or website that occupies a less competitive niche.

So where exactly does this particular blog sit?

It’s primarily in the make money niche, by the simple fact that it was my first tentative entry into the world of Internet Marketing and I didn’t know any better at the time.

Well, who could have known, when the vast majority of sites and “informative” blogs were telling everyone to get into Make Money fast, and Blogging for blogging, and Web 2.0 was the way forward. All the self-styled gurus, A-listers and big-time online money makers (I won’t bother naming them, you probably know who they are by now) were saying the same thing.

And do you know, they were all not entirely right?

That’s not to say they were entirely wrong either, but at the time (end of 2006) getting into blogging and make money was obvious as a way to make money for newbies. The A-listers and gurus just jumped on every newbie that came along and filled their heads full of promises that were never delivered, while making pots of money for the perpetrators!

Big fish will always eat little fish, that’s a fact of life. Its up to the hardiest little fish to survive the maulings along the way and to learn from their mistakes and use those mistakes to make them stronger. Its a steep learning curve and it takes time and often a lot of hard knocks along the way before we get it right.

As for those like myself who were technically newbies although I was selling stuff online in the mid 1990s via a really (by today’s standards) bad website that I built myself! True, I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing but just struck lucky that my site was selling stuff that not many other were.

Being a hypnotherapist, it made sense to sell my own produced hypnosis cassettes (cassettes, remember them?) through my practice’s website and I actually made quite a few sales in those days! I foolishly never cottoned on to the fact that there was much more money to be made online with the proper knowledge. In those days, the only sites that seemed to be raking it in were the porn sites and I wasn’t getting into that - no way!

There were no “make money online” sites around that I remember in 1996, no Clickbank or CJ, no Paypal or eBay. So it would have been much tougher to set up a true e-commerce site back then, but not impossible and I missed the boat completely!

By the time I re-entered the arena in 2006, of course things were rather different. I’d missed the adsense jamboree where MFA sites were everywhere and they made an absolute packet for their owners. I got in just too late to make a killing with text-lonk ads and paid reviews, because as soon as I realized they were there my sites were not sufficiently highly ranked by Google to make them viable.

Of course by the time they were, Google was stamping down on those practices that certain A-Listers were telling everyone to jump on.

Now ex-black hatters are coming into the mainstream and divulging some of their secrets, but still, some of these techniques can raise eyebrows at Google and get their radar fixed firmly on your whole operation, so it’s debatable whether to use them of not. Yes, there are some techniques that are grey-hat and will probably keep you under the radar while still giving a boost to your blogs and websites. And there are some which will get your sites de-indexed faster than you can say “keyword stuffing”.

So now, its all about balance.

Yes, write lots of content for your sites and yes, use keywords liberally. Just don’t overdo it.

Yes, write keyword focused articles with your anchored link in them and submit them to article directories to spread your incoming links around.

Yes, gather back links and make as many of them as you can strongly keyword anchored links to improve your keyword authority. You need that to get high in the SERPs and attract targeted organic traffic in order to make money from your ads, whether they be PPC or affiliate.

Yes, use Technorati tags (wisely) and make sure you ping every time you post.

Yes, make sure your sites are correctly SEO’d on-site as well as off-site to give yourself the best chance of competing with everyone else.

Yes, create many and varied sites and blogs spread over as many different niches as you can handle. The more niches you occupy, the better your income will be and if one niche doesn’t perform there will be plenty of others that will.

Yes, get a self hosting account and host your own websites to have more control over what you’re doing. Use Hostgator because they’re the best - you can host unlimited domains and it doesn’t cost a packet either and…

Yes create a lot of free blogs as well as Squidoo lenses, they all count towards your overall network from which you can create back links to you own sites and the bigger your network, the better.

While the advice is to steer clear of the Make Money, or Blogging niches as they don’t actually make money, there is another reason to keep one or two sites in there. Authority. You can work a make money or blogging blog into your network and as they rise in rank, they can be used via links to help boost your newer sites and get them indexed faster and also help them up the ladder. So while your make money sites might not actually be making you any money, they have a purpose - to push the sites that DO make money into better positions through keyword authority and back links.

Yes, research keywords to find the best performing ones with the least competition. Get hold of Keyword Elite because its the best program for the job. Never fear that all the best ones have been taken already. There are millions of combinations of long tail keywords and more than plenty to go around. Sometimes its better not to compete where you’re banging your head against a brick wall. So don’t compete, get creative and you’ll surprise yourself what you can find.

Above all, be patient.

Rome was not built in a day and neither will your online empire. Try to go too fast and you will fall over, trip up, get caught in the big G’s radar, or upset a competitor who may report your site. Take it slow and natural and build your sites and blogs over time and they will grow well with Google’s blessing as long as you do everything (or at least appear to do everything) the right way.

Do it right and you will make money. Fast? No.

But over time, without needing to resort to reading tarot cards, you’ll gradually build up a business that, spread widely over multiple income streams, will send those trickling streams together to join up into a flooding river of income, so that if one stream dries up, there are still plenty of others to keep the money flowing.

Remember, “softly, softly, catchee monkey…”

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way