When you make the decision to start a website for your business, it is a big step. Going from the world of offline business where clients are limited to geographical locations to online where the entire world is a potential client can be overwhelming.

There are many things to take into consideration. You have the products to sell, and the design of the website all planned out, now it is time to put it all together by choosing a web hosting company.

The first thing you should decide on is a domain name. This is perhaps the single most important decision you can make. You want something that is professional; the domain name will reflect the nature of your business. Avoid using cute names; people tend to skip to the next website.

Try to choose a name that is short and easy to remember. Think about your customers when they try to reach your web site. Will be easy to type? Can you spell your domain name at the phone without much trouble? This is going to be your presence in the internet from now on, so choose wisely.

Choosing the web hosting company that is right for you is a long process. There will be millions of options, it is important to ask questions and that the web hosting company answers those questions adequately.

The most crucial point of any web hosting company is their reliability. If the site does not offer enough space, then your website will be shut down for all or part of each month. This is not the goal you have set for your business. Ask the web hosting company if it offers an uptime guarantee. Usually if a company offers a guarantee of this type, their service is reliable.

When you are new to Internet marketing, you will have a lot of question. Sometimes the questions you need to ask will not be during business hours. It is important that customer service is available by phone, email, or even a chat window twenty-four hours a day to answer any questions that you may have.

Another service that is just as crucial as the rest is the storage and bandwidth that your website will need. Most likely, you will not know what your website is, but the web hosting company will. If you want a flashy site, you will need more bandwidth. It is important that you know before hand the ins and outs of web hosting companies.

A good way to find your answers is to do some research. A Google search will yield you all of the information you need. The world is your potential client, reach out and make contact. It will ensure the success of your business.

Web Hosting 101

Posted by stinger303 | 1:55 PM | , | 0 comments »

Hosting for your domain name on the world-wide web does not have to be like sending a Space Shuttle into orbit. With a little bit of research and using search engines to review a potential host you should have nothing short of a positive hosting experience.

The majority of people probably spend more time looking over a take-out menu and deciding what to order than they spend on researching their future web host.

The hosting market is saturated with companies both big and small, so how do you even begin to find a suitable company to host your web site?

Research:
You have all heard this before, research, research, research no truer words have ever been spoken when it comes to web hosting. A wealth of information resides on the internet regarding the performance and reliability of web hosting companies. From forums to search engines, all that is required is a little effort on your part.

Contact The Hosting Company:
First and foremost contact the potential company’s sales dept and ask the rep a few questions. Are you satisfied with the answers provided at the sales level? Then email their tech support department with some questions. The end result of this work will be a short list of prospective companies for you to carefully consider.

Valuable Asset:
The most important thing to keep in mind during your search for web hosting is that your web site and data are valuable assets. With that said it is important to finally choose a company that can both serve and protect your asset. The old adage you get what you pay for certainly rings true in the web hosting world.

With a little work and research your hosting experience will be a much better and enjoyable experience and you can rest assured that your web site is being served to the "world".

Write an article, get the traffic. Well sort of! Since the birth of writing articles, our industry has caught on to the phenomena of increasing your website’s traffic by becoming the professional in your field. The only problem with this is that for every serious professional in one field, there are a thousand other writers who are jumping on the "band wagon".

This article phenomenon is hurting every industry!

From bloggers, column writers, and e-books, the writing industry is yearning for more great writers. The internet marketing community is especially hurting for better content.

With the birth of SEO (search engine optimization), people all over the world are searching, browsing, and reading everything they can on how to promote their business on the internet. Because of this demand for different content, the supply of writers are increasing everyday but the quality of articles is decreasing exponentially.

Everyone is writing about the exact same thing! My company receives on average 10-20 articles per hour submitted to us. I would have to say that only 1 in about 100 articles submitted are ever published within our website. Those numbers are extremely low and for good reason.

It's all about "substance" - or lack of it!

Many articles we review are nothing more than simple "babble" and most of them are pointless. You can seriously tell right away whether the article is just a promotional piece or something with actual substance within the content.

Great content is very important. There is a misconception out there that most people won't read your content and you can pretty much post anything you want within your website as long as your website is clean, professional looking, and can be found online.

YOU ARE SOOOOO WRONG!

website content development

If there is one constant online, it's the fact that the general public is getting smarter and more knowledgeable on how to research for honest, reputable companies on the internet.

Unfortunately, authors these days are simply stealing from other great authors!

I am not talking about posting someone else's article on your website! Copying content from other leaders in your industry will only hurt your company. This is why the writing industry is getting worse; many writers out there simply select a topic they want to write about, then they go online and find 5 articles on that topic. Once they have some other great articles, they simply proceed to combine each article for themselves, by personalizing the content a little.

Do you ever wonder why for specific topics within your industry, you can find hundreds of authors that wrote almost the exact same thing? I call these people "Content Copiers".

Even worse are people who buy articles to post online ! ! !

This gets me every time. Did you know that you can now hire a company to write something for you and insert your company information as the source and author of the article? This strategy is seriously sad considering I can almost guarantee you that the article you just bought was also sold to a handful of other companies. All they do is tweak the article a little bit and insert a different title.

No one knows your business more than you do. If you are seriously good at what you do, 9 times out of 10, you probably have enough knowledge to write an article that makes sense, that is unique in content, and that has your personal touch.

We've all come across different situations while operating our businesses. These small but important situations are what gives us confidence in what we do. When you learn from your mistakes, you should also consider educating people on what you've learned in order to help your potential clients or even help better educate your industry.

Think beyond yourself and write down something helpful.

I hope you've enjoyed this article!

One of the single most powerful and free ways to grab targeted traffic is definitely writing articles. Articles like this that you are currently reading serve many purposes.

Firstly, it establishes your position as an “authority” of the subject and also increases your brand name (or your name for the matter). Secondly, the link that is attached at the author resources box is intimately related to this content you are reading. People are more likely to buy after they are “warmed up” to the idea. This is called “pre-selling”. Thirdly, it builds up many one way links thus pushing up traffic and increasing your status amongst search engines. Now tell me why this isn’t a great tool?

How do you go about it? Well say you are promoting an article submission software. Naturally you should write an article on article submission and offer some useful and insightful tips. Churn out at least 2 articles a day submitting it to at least 5 article directories for a month everyday. This is such a powerful method of getting sales.

Which article directories to submit to?
There are thousands out there! For starters you can take down the address of this article directory. Hey I submitted my article here so it must have worked!

Remember this is a totally free medium to get high quality traffic. There are many software out there that instantly submit your articles to hundreds of directory saving you the hassle of doing it yourself if you find it too tedious.

Another method is to participate actively in forums. Again the benefits are quite obvious. You gain tons of back links and you also gain credibility in your niche within the community. This is again, a great way to brand yourself. Remember to genuinely contribute and make intelligent discussion - people will tend to look at your signature more.

Next is to develop a powerful signature with a link to your website in it. Many people overlook this point; your signature is the ‘link’ between the forums’ traffic and your site. That having said, these are not the only ways which you can get free targeted traffic. There are many more ways! Do your research and start exploding your sales.

When advertising with pay per click Google gives the advertiser two broad options. Advertising in search results, advertising in websites content or indeed many choose to do both. Advertising in search means that results are displayed in Google under searches, and in its distributors search results. Google content advertising applies to those websites who choose to incorporate “Adsense” into their websites. As adsense rapidly expands, it is now viewable on millions of web pages throughout the web. However, many advertisers are shunning this in favor of merely advertising in search results.
There are several reasons for this, and the first is trust. This has been a result of smaller websites, through to adsense empires choosing to embark on Click Fraud. Although this issue occurs in search it is far less dominant. Those who commit Click Fraud on search are those trying to weaken a competitor’s ROI. With Adsense the same applies, along with the website owner trying to increase his revenues using similar tactics.

Another reason why website owners are choosing to market out with content is the motivation of the buyer when he is on a website. Someone who is on a different website, other than the advertisers might be there for entirely different reasons. For example a website discussing the disadvantages of Adsense, would actually return adverts for those selling “Adsense Websites” for example. People may click on it, but they are unlikely to buy after reading a negative review. The other reason could be that the person on the adsense website was actually looking for what is the best color palette to use. The person therefore would not find the advert relevant, but might click on the advert in a care free manner.
Adsense websites are also often rejected by the advertiser because they feel it involves more administration. Checking through websites to see how relevant they are, and editing their bids to ensure they still appear on a page. With some words having a network of over 500 websites, it is surely a tedious and expensive task. Although this is the case, many also find that their Adwords account returns websites, that don’t even appear to be trying to support their keywords. The example which is ripe, are those advertising under legal phrases who appear on adsense websites “terms and conditions” and “privacy policy” pages.

Although many are rejecting content advertising, there are still those who feel it provides a similar ROI to search. A reason for this can be found through in the fact that more and more advertisers are only choosing search. As this occurs the advertiser has less competition so the price of the word reduces. Advertisers are also finding a good ROI from publisher’s websites who decide to actively promote the advertiser’s services within their content. An example of this can be realized from when someone is discussing printing services, and actually directly recommends the advertiser’s services. This is a positive move for both the publisher and the advertiser, and a good way for publishers to move forward. Despite this, publishers still have to remember, to not be too obvious in doing this, or savvy buyers will definitely calculate the publisher’s intention.

Another reason why advertisers are opting for content is to increase their scale, however this can also be done across other search engines. The fact however still exists that those who choose content advertising should choose the Google Adsense network. It is regulated far and above yahoo’s and others equivalents whilst its superior network of publishers means the advertisers will benefit from being able to spread their message through a diverse range of websites.
Despite Adsense being the best PPC content distributor, it certainly doesn’t compare to search for the advertiser. On search the leads are more qualified, more regulated, and less fraudulent. This has seen advertisers consistently choose search over content. Despite this advertiser’s should always test adsense and see if it can provide the ROI they are looking for. Some advertisers say that content provides a better return for their business than search. This varies, however in general search remains King for PPC advertisers.

When you are trying to make money off of the articles on your website, it is important to effectively promote your site so that you will attract customers and they can see just what a good, quality site you have. There are several ways so market and promote your website, one of them being though banner advertisements.

What Banner Ads Can Do For You

Banner ads can help bring visitors from others sites to your own. Although monthly fees can be expensive to advertise on high traffic sites, in the end it may be cheaper and/or a faster way to start seeing significant revenue from your website efforts, rather than waiting for SEO techniques to bring your own site to the top of search engine results. Aside from paying to advertise on someone else’s site, there are also free banner exchanges to choose from. We will look at the pros and cons of each banner advertising method below.

Free Banner Exchanges

Free banner exchanges are when you and other sites exchange each others banners. Their banner will go on your site and your banner will go one their site. Although this option is free, there are two main problems with it. First, if you want your banner on a significant number of sites, it will mean cluttering your own site up with these banners. This could even shot you in the foot if you run an affiliate website because, instead of clicking on your affiliate links, your visitors may be clicking on your banner exchange links. Secondly, you have to be really careful about the types of sites that you exchange banners with. Some sites like to gather a lot of banners so that they can be a directory or portal site and not have to have any real content. These “banner farms” or “link farms” will do nothing positive for your site and, in the meantime, you will be bringing them potential traffic.

Paid Banner Ads

As we saw above, paid banner ads cost money, but they will eventually pay off if you choose the right ones. You need to ensure that the site produces the amount of traffic that they say and that they have your ad placed in a way that invites visitors to click without being too pushy. You also want to choose a site that does not house too many other banners on the same page as yours or that there are no competitor links on the same page.

All in all, banner ads can end up being profitable for you site if you go about it the right way. If you do decide to check out banner advertisement as a marketing avenue, be sure to keep the above tips in mind.