Blog The Honest Way

Without further ado, let's take a look at what this lens has been created to do - and that is to support the The Honest Way Blog.

The Honest Way Blog was created in April 2007 as an afterthought when I set up the main website, The Honest Way. Thanks to the advantage of having my own professional web host, HostGator, I had all the benefits of cPanel which included a strange (to me then) addition called Fantastico. At first I had no idea what it was and didn't have time to investigate as I was very busy populating the website with content.

Once I looked into it, I found that you could easily set up a blog with a Wordpress template (they have tons of great ones to choose from) and Fantastico did all the hard work like setting up the MySQL database and the PHP scripts to run it all. Thus, on the 1st of April 2007 The Honest Way Blog was born!

Did it turn out to be an April Fool?

Not at all. The blog started slowly, because back then, despite already publishing a few blogs on free servers (Blogger) and knowing they had value as providers of backlinks and traffic to websites, I hadn't really grasped the potential to make money from them.

Sure I'd already tried adsense and got kicked out of the program before I knew what had happened. After that, I merely saw a blog as a means of creating a backlink to my site and maybe bringing a trickle of traffic. I had no idea of it's potential as a solid means to make money.

So I didn't bother finding backlinks to The Honest Way Blog back then, as I saw it merely as a page hanging off the main site, which was starting to earn me some affiliate commissions.

But more recently, I discovered how potentially powerful blogs really are as generators of income and have now spent the last month setting things right!

How to make a buck online is a bit like asking where can I find the holy grail?

Well, its right in front of your face, if only you know how to see it. There are many ways to figure it out and there are many ways to do it!

One way is domain flipping, or website flipping as its sometimes called. A really good article on domain flipping can be found at this site: How to Make Money Online.

There are plenty of other ways of making cash online and you'll find many of them highlighted at that website, as well as at this lens' sister website, The Honest Way and it blog and members form.

Once I'd found that certain sites were out there that paid you to write entries in your blog for advertisers, it changed the whole ball-game. I kicked myself in the backside for not working to gain a good page rank for my blog, which was (and still is at the time of writing this) a lowly PR0.

I started with BlogsVertise who accepted my blog because of it's age (it had to be over 3 months old and regularly posted to), but did point out that because of its low PR, it would be limited to lower value opportunities. This meant that I could only expect to earn an average $5-10 per blog entry. Not bad for scribbling 100 words or so - 15 minutes work at best! But there was potential to earn much more than that per post if only I could increase that PR.

Joining ReviewMe and PayPerPost hit this home even more squarely. They have a list of opportunities but show you what your blog is entitled to and what it is not.

All the high paying reviews were on offer only to high PR blogs. You need at least PR3 to start earning decent money per review, but get up to PR6 and PR7 and you could be raking in two or three hundred dollars per 100 word review.

Now that's something worth striving for!

So promotion and marketing has been the centre of attention as I try to build backlinks from other bloggers and by doing some article submissions.

The best backlinks are the one-way flavour that are keyword anchored and they are the hardest to obtain without paying for them - something I am disinclined to do as I have the feeling that with all the continual tweaking that Google do to their algorithms, that before too long they will begin to take a dim view on paid for backlinks.

So we shall see how things go for The Honest Way Blog. Another point that Google are hot on - backlinks from non-relevant sources are not given nearly as much weight as those from relevant sources - like this lens!

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Update 25th March 2008

The above information was relevant to the middle of last year, but after September, Google started clamping down hard on blogs and websites that were selling links, by slapping their Page3 Rank down to zero upon being caught.

That meant that writing so-called paid reviews were also tarred with the same brush resulting in the loss of PR. So now that lucrative income stream has dried up almost completely, unless you're prepared to take a chance with your blog's PR.

This is a short article to highlight the ways in which your collection of blogs can help each other in their climb up the search engine results pages (SERPs) by giving each other a little link juice.

Where you have several blogs in the same niche, like for instance the how to make money online with SEO which is a sub-niche of make money, then you should write a post covering one particular keyword that you would like another blog to rank for and then link to that blog using the keyword as the anchor text.

This gives the blog a little extra keyword authority for that keyword and will thereby boost its standing in the SERPs.

It's important not to make lots of links to lots of blogs in one post, as that will simply dilute the amount of link juice each blog will get. Much better to link to one blog for each post.

Ok, that means a lot of writing, but that's what blogging is all about!

Happy linking!