Blog The Honest Way

Blog The Honest Way!

This is a blogging lens partnering my main lens, The Honest Way and my flagship blog The Honest Way Blog.

It will contribute information on the pleasures and rewards of blogging for fun and to make money online - the honest way!

The Honest Way Blog

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!

Making Money With That Blog (27 Aug 07)

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 The Honest Way Blog 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.

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Don't wait for your competitors to get this book before you do!

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So save yourself a lot of time and effort trying to source all this information yourself - while you could be using that time to effectively promote your online business and get on and make money online using the information here at your fingertips.

After all, time IS money!

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SEO Elite: When it comes to placing your website at the top of the search engine pages, you need to do some serious search engine optimization to have even a slim chance of making it against the competition.

That can take up a serious amount of your time and a ton of effort and there are still no guarantees that you'll get anywhere near page one.

That is unless you have a secret weapon up your sleeve! Well here it is. SEO Elite will manage ALL your SEO needs and not only help you get your site right up there, but just as importantly keep it there!

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Instant Article Wizard: Jonathan Leger, creator of $7 Secrets, AdSense Gold, SEO Explosion etc has just released his latest and possibly most useful authoring tool.

Instant Article Wizard is the newest addition to his growing list of marketing business products and tools.

If you are an article writer that spends too many hours researching and writing articles for your websites and wish you had nore time to relax and enjoy some of that time, then this is for you!

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Instant Article Submitter: The process of submitting articles to lots of different directories adds up to an awful lot of time consuming work. Each submission site has its own forms to fill in for each article you submit, so if you want to really hammer your articles out there it's going to take up a lot of your day.

What would you rather be doing with your precious time? Spend quality time with your family? Enjoying days out with loved ones?

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WidgetBucks - Another Way to Make Money from Your Blog

15th October 2007 Terry Didcott

I just read that master marketer John Chow has unveiled another great way to make money online with your blog. It's called WidgetBucks. Well, I was impressed by it, so I went straight over and signed up!

It looks like it could be a fair replacement for either Auction Ads or Adsense.

While it won't beat Adsense earnings, it'll do well if your site is about promoting certain products like mp3 players or music, dvds, books, sports items etc.

How Does WidgetBucks Work?

WidgetBucks works by placing a graphics style banner (comes in varying sizes) on your site. You then make money based on clicks (not sales) in a very similar way to Adsense.

The minimum payout for WidgetBucks is only $50 and to get you started they are giving you $25 in your account upon signup. Payments are done at the end of each month either by a check sent or PayPal deposit.

WidgetBucks gives you about 12 categories to choose ads from, as well as sub-categories in each of those (examples: media, family, sports, video games and cars). This means it is better suited to niche blogs at present, so if your blog is about Making Money or Internet Marketing, the product choices are limited. However, WidgetBucks does offer an option you can select for it to "crawl" your blog or site. This means it can match ads to your content.

There are several banner size and colour options available at the moment, with more planned for the near future. That's enough to get you up and running.

So if, like me you've been banned from Adsense or Auction Ads aren't performing on your site, WidgetBucks might just be the alternative source to make money from your blog or site.

I believe it's definitely worth being a member and experimenting some. This might be your next big income stream!

So what's there to think about? Get over there and signup:

Earn $$ with WidgetBucks

Affiliate Blogging for Profit: Monetizing Your Blog

Exceprt of a great article by Jinger Jarrett

There are many ways that you can monetize your blog. As an affiliate marketer, you can take advantage of these different programs and use them to make more money with very little effort other than promoting your blog.

The goal here is to do the work one time and get paid over and over. Thus, you are leveraging your time to earn more money.

The best thing about using most of these systems is that once you set it up, you don't have to hassle with it anymore except to make a few tweaks to get more from your ads.

To properly monetize your blog, you need to know a little HTML. Don't let this scare you though; it's really a little more than cut and paste.

Also, once you've added your ads to your blog, make sure you preview your blog in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. About 35 percent of users online now use Firefox, and if your blog is hard to read, these readers will click away.

Finally, read the guidelines for each ad program to see what you can and can't do. You don't want to violate the terms of service and lose that stream of revenue...

We can't bring you the rest of the article as it has gone awol with the parent site changing hands and being used for different stuff.

Get Into Video News

17th September 2007 - Terry Didcott

With Web 2.0 taking the web by storm and social networking and bookmarking sites proliferating the internet now has never been a better time to jump onto the bandwagon and get your blog or website known to the millions of potential viewers that are out there.

One sure-fire way of building a traffic super-highway to your blog is to include some up to date and up to the minute news video feeds. I recently found an excellent site that provides this service and to make it even sweeter, they pay you on a CPM (click per thousand) basis for every person who clicks to watch a news video on your blog.

The site is The News Room and you simply sign-up for free then choose which news video stories you want to display on your blog. You clock a link called "mash" which takes you to a panel so you can set up the code and size of the news window. Then simply copy and paste the code into your blog.

Each time a visitor to your blog watches the video you get paid, but that's only a small part of the lure of video on your blog. Once word gets around that your blog is the place to watch some great news stories, your traffic will increase - which can only be a good thing.

There is no affiliate program with this yet but for it's traffic generation potential, this is just another tool in your workshop for building your overall internet presence.

Here's my guestbook if you'd be so kind as to leave your signature for me!

If you're hovering around here and have something you'd like to say, here is theplace to do it!

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