The Honest Way

Following my last post , I’m breaking with my freelance schedule for a moment to make a post that was prompted by an email I receieved this morning.

First a little background.

Its no secret that I lost my adsense account back at the start of 2007 mainly due to my own inexperience and lack of knowledge, so to gain any kind of revenue, I had to look at alternatives. Several months went by with no real alternative so I concentrated on promoting affiliate products instead, which was a partial success, but nowhere near what I could have been making with a decent PPC publishing campaign.

I signed up for the Fair Ads Network (FAN) as they claimed to be creating a viable alternative to adsense with which invalid clicks could not be generated - one of the main reasons people lose their accounts either through their own foolishness, or by malicious rivals clicking their links via TOR proxies so as to avoid revealing their true identities. This would be the ideal PPC rival to a rigid and unrepenting adsense that would not under any circumstances listen to any arguments to reinstate the account.

Unfortunately, FAN was only in Beta and remained so until ealy this year, when they migrated to Gamma and finaly went live on 1st May 2008.

In the meantime, I investigated alternatives for those of use who do not dwell in the US (as a good many of Internet Marketers are not US citizens). Yahoo’s PPC is very good, but not available to us Johnny Foreigners. The next best effort was Bidvertiser.

Bidvertiser is a lot more work than Adsense or Yahoo and the potential to make money is much lower, but it works as an income stream. I put a lot of time in setting up my account on my various websites and started seeing my income gradually increase as my websites attracted gradually more traffic.

Well, up until yesterday, all was well.

Then I checked through my sites on Google Webmaster Tools and found that one of them still contained some of the malware that hackers had dumped on several sites on my server about a month ago. I went in and cleaned it out but instead of seeing the red mist and hitting the delete button, I copied some of the multitude of bad neighbourhood links that were “hidden” inside some of the blog’s posts with invisible “<ul>” tags.

I was already mad as hell so I investigated the owner of the url that featured heavily in that list and found a www. miniamo.com. That domain is owned by a certain person called:

Victoria walsh
PO Box 305
Edgecliff, NSW 2027
AU - That’s Australia, by the way
Tel: 0415144859
email: victoriawalsh@ciroahomewares.com

Oh, I hope she doesn’t mind me publishing her name and details here. Oops, is that an email address that spambots might be able to scrape from this post? Good. You see I probably made the mistake of emailing her yesterday to point out that her site might be the unwary victim of a hacking attack and malware added to certain sub-pages, which are MFA pages. She didn’t respond to my kindly attempt at assistance.

Well, this morning I got an email from Bidvertiser telling me that my account was terminated for generating invalid clicks.

If I was mad yesterday, I blew a damn fuse this morning.

There was no need to return my kindness with malice. I can only assume that she knew perfectly well what was lurking on her website and that she probably knew all about the hacking attack on my server. If that bitch has made a load of clicks on that site she hacked, then she had better watch out.

People who live in glass houses should not throw stones.

If Bidvertiser do not reinstate my account because of that evil bitch, then I’m afraid I’ll be doing a little more than simply publishing her details.

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

Following on from the last post Don’t Let The Host Go Down On Me, where I sorted out a hosting problem that shouldn’t happen to nice webmasters like me… erm, well now I’d like to talk about bananas.

Yes, that’s right seriously - bananas.

I can see the startled look on your face as you read on in disbelief that this usually so sensible person writes away as if everything were normal while he waits patiently for the men in the white coats to arrive…

Bananas. Why would he write about bananas?

I’d like to say that everything I do is done for a reason, but that would not be entirely true as sometimes I just go off the rails and do something just for the hellovit. But this is one of those times, you’ll be relieved to hear, that I’m doing this for a reason. Whew, I can hear you slumping back in your chair - he’s not really going off to the funny farm after all. Well not today, at any rate!

So what have bananas got to do with anything, let alone with make money?

Well its one of those roundabout journeys that you need to follow a little to get to where you’re going. We started with make money with bananas, not knowing what on earth was going on. Now we know there is a logical explanation on its way.

It starts with one of my newer blogs that I have had going as a bit of an experiment to see how well I could get it to rank in Google for the search term “fast make money”. The blog is my Make Money Hints site that was initially bought as an expired domain. It had age on its side but a PR0, but I liked the name and put it to the test just to prove that age does matter!

And it did.

That blog made it into the number one spot for the keyword fast make money - ok it slid back down a little but it is still on page one. I’d call that experiment a success, wouldn’t you? I outranked PR4 sites for that keyword term and probably annoyed the hell out of the sites that were juggling for that top position, as they keyword gets a fair amount of searches. Anyway, you may still be wondering what that has got to do with bananas.

Now I’m going to tell you. A while ago, I found that a friend of mine had posted a helpful post about bananas and my blog all at the same time. I think he was trying out an experiemnt of his own to rank for the keyword “bananas” but I’m not sure about that! Anyway, this is the post he made: Bananas making money fast with Terry Didcott. That post gave me a keyword anchored link to help me along, which it did. So to return the favour, I’m linking back to that post from this blog.

There is a moral to this story and it’s worth remembering when you’re working some SEO for your own sites. That is if someone links to your blog, do them a favour and link back to the post where they put the link and you’ll be doing yourself a favour in the process. Because not only will the recipient get a nice deep link to their sub-page, but that sub page will get some authority and in turn pass that authority back to the site it was originally linking to. Sort of scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours and get an extra bonus scratch for my trouble!

Don’t you just love the ins and outs of SEO?

Terry Didcott
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