Web Promotion Ideas For 2007
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
As we head into a new year, it is a time to reflect and of course to also look ahead. On a personal level, I am heavily involved in the promotion of websites and I am currently assessing my plans for 2007 as regards the ways that I will continue to promote these sites. 2006 has taught me quite a lot, I have learnt a number of aspects of site promotion and also a number of aspects that do. In this article I will share my thoughts with you. Before I start I would like to wish all readers of this article a happy, healthy and prosperous 2007.
At the start of 2006, I would spend a great deal of time contacting other webmasters who had websites on a similar theme to my own, to ask them if they would consider a link exchange. I did this to start with via the telephone, I am not sure how many of you have ever attempted this but to say it was a struggle would be an understatement.
I would attempt to explain to the owners of these sites just how beneficial this partnership could be for both parties but virtually all of them were just not interested. More fool them as my main site is now a page rank six! Some would argue that the way I explained it all was not clear enough or that I am a poor salesperson, they may well be right. I just know that I will not be trying this form of web promotion again.
I then thought about constructing a cleverly worded e-mail. I wrote and sent this e-mail to a lot of people but yet again the rewards were virtually non existent.
One area of web promotion that has worked in a very big way for me is article marketing. In 2006 I have written around three hundred articles and this has produced much larger volumes of traffic to my websites.
In 2007 I am going to continue to write articles and could well become the next Lance Winslow, Lance is the king of article marketing by the way and has written well over ten thousand articles.
Stephen Hill helps to promote a number of websites including:
stammering advice
stuttering information
symptoms of std
How To Obtain A Page Rank Eight Link For Free
How would you like to obtain a backward link from a page rank eight page? Now I imagine and would hope that most of you who have your own website would have answered yes to this question. If your site was to only ever obtain this one link, it would still become at least a page rank five site. In this article I am going to write about how you can obtain one of these hugely powerful links for free.
Now I can imagine that some people are thinking, is this guy for real? Well yes I am actually is the answer to this question. I have been promoting other peoples websites for a number of years now and in that time I have met and spoken to a lot of very interesting and educated (in web marketing terms) people. Around a year ago, I had a conversation with a man called Roger who ended up changing my focus in web marketing in a big way.
Roger has a number of very well known businesses that he works for. He is an established and well known web marketing expert and I felt quite privelidged when he agreed to spare me his time for a couple of hours one Saturday afternoon. I explained to Roger the ways in which I was currently promoting sites and he replied, young man there are much much easy ways of marketing a website. This is when he started to talk about obtaining links on pr8 pages.
Roger stated that he spends his time locating sites which have a homepage page rank of eight. He will then contact the webmasters or owners of these sites and will offer his services to them for free in exchange for a link on their site. Now of course a lot of them will say no but you only need one to say yes to make it worth while.
Roger of course is an expert in website promotion and is therefore more likely to receive a positive answer than you or I. We do still have value however, why not offer to write and submit twenty articles for them each week? Give it a go, you may well strike gold.
Stephen Hill helps to promote a number of websites including:
help for stuttering
cure for stuttering
article writing and submission service
Free One Way Links
Website designing is one thing, publicizing it is other. There are so many WebPages with good quality content, which are never read by the appropriate people because of low rankings and unattractive features.
One of the most important factors in getting your web site highly ranked in the search engine indexes is building links. links is one of the most important ways that Google and the other search engines determine the importance and ranking of your site.
Link building is the backbone of the internet. Everybody wants to have as many free one way links as possible. There are many reasons why a website will survive and flourish, and also a lot of reason why your website might die a premature death and have no visitors.
links are just hypertext of a web site's address that is posted on other sites. The way Google determines how important your site is and how it will rank in the search engine rankings is to see how many other people link to your web site and the importance of these web sites that link to you.
There are a few key tips so that your site comes in more views and attracts more visitors:
1) Keep homepage easy and simple
Home page should be looking like the center of the site from where, a visitor can go anywhere in easy steps of clicks.
2) links
There should be links on your home page so that every visitor finds it very easy to reach directly any section he wants. Never put other sites link with those otherwise your visitor can be diverted from you site.
3) search Engine Optimization
Even A perfect Website cannot get enough visitors, until it is not related to the big Internet linkage system. Most of the visitors come to your site by the search engines or the ads you provide on others sites.
Different ways to get free one way link are:
1) WEB DIRECTORIES: You can submit your link to directories and get good one-way links but don't forget to put your keywords in the title. For example www.tradeweblinks.com
2) ARTICLE DIRECTORIES: By submitting articles across the internet with relevant links you can gain some very effective links to your site. For example www.goarticles.com and many others
3) CREATE A BLOG: You could post anything - your thoughts, articles, or affiliate program reviews, for example, but make sure you include a link to your site in the links section, and at the end of each post if appropriate. for example www.blogger.com
4) LEAVE COMMENTS ON BLOGS: Leave legitimate comments, and make it look like you actually have something to contribute.
5) POST ON FORUMS: You won't get a great deal of benefit in terms of page rank, as most forums do not have a high page rank for their threads, but you will build up a good number of links.
6) WRITE TESTIMONIALS: By writing and submitting testimonials to websites that you have previously purchased products or services from, you can get high-quality links to your site, often from the home pages of the sites in question.
Benefits of free one way links:
- Cause your website to be indexed and crawled by search engines
- Increase your visitors from strategic placement of your website link
- Increase your overall search engine position for keywords or phrases
- Increase brand awareness for your name or business name
By
free one way links
The author is Business Head for http://www.ebizpromo.com, and is into web-design, development and Search Engine optimization.
Great Ways For Building Tons Of Backlinks
One of the most important factors that influence the search engine ranking of your site is the number of backlinks you have. Almost every search engine takes the number of backlinks into account while evaluating and ranking your site in the SERPs. The number of backlinks is the most important factor for ranking well in Google. Have doubts? Just type the key phrase “click here” in Google and check the first site that shows up in the search results. It does not have the keyword “click here” in its title, nor in its description, its meta keywords and most surprisingly not even in the body of the content. Then why does it rank number one in Google out of 1,190,000,000 webpages that are there in the competition ? This is because at the time of writing this article, that very webpage has 1,150,000 backlinks pointing to it and all the links have the word “click here” as its anchor text.
In this article I'll be sharing with you the secrets of attaining that much coveted place in the SERP through the creation of backlinks.
Ever wondered why backlinks are so very important in search engine rankings? Well, almost all the search engines, especially Google value websites that are rich in useful and informative content. And whenever a site places a link to your site, Google considers that link as a vote to your site. It feels that the other site has cast a vote in favor of your site because the content of your site is useful to its visitors. Hence, greater the number of votes, greater is the value that your site has from the search engine's perspective. And if you are hankering for page rank, then creating backlinks is the only way to go. backlinks help your website attain a higher search engine ranking and definitely helps to increase your page rank.
Ways to create backlinks:
Blogs – One of the best ways of creating one-way links for your site is through the posting of comments in blogs. Just include the URL of your site while posting comments in blogs and soon you will build a good many number of one-way links for your site.
Forums – Posting in forums is also an excellent way for building backlinks. But don't post your URL directly in the discussion boards or else the spam busters would get you banned and removed from the forum. The best way to do it is through your signature. Include the URL of your site in your signature and then whenever you post a comment in the forum you will be leaving behind a link to your site along with your name.
Social Networks – Since the evolution of WEB2.0 social networking sites like Myspace, Friendster, Tagworld etc are the hottest zones on the Internet today. Millions of people visit these sites daily for making friends or for promoting their products or services. You may also register at such sites and post links to your site along with the comments that you make at your friend's profile. In this way you may create large number of backlinks for your site.
Social Bookmarking – Social bookmarking is another area where you could create one-way links to your site. Just bookmark your sites in social bookmarking sites like Delicious and if your site is interesting enough, others will add your site to their list of bookmarked sites and soon you will garner a large number of one-way links for your site.
Articles– You may write articles on various topics and post them in article sites such as this one and include the URL of your site in the resource box or in the author's bio section. There are many sites which frequently publish articles from various such article sites and along with the article they also publish the author's bio which contains the link to your site. If your article is informative and intriguing, then it will soon be published in many other sites and newsletters. This way you will have a large number of backlinks pointing to your site.
Press Release– As soon as you some up with a new feature on your website, do a press release on it. Press releases are very efficient for website promotion and also for creating oodles of one-way links. Write a press release about any unique feature of your site and submit the release in various press release sites. Press release sites regularly syndicate their content through RSS and Atom feeds and many leading news sites fetch their content from all these press release sites. So you may expect a very good response from doing a single press release.
Directories – Submit you website in as many web directories as you can. These web directories attract a large number of visitors daily and so you may get a good number of visitors from such directories. Submission in directories also helps in building quality backlinks for your website. Consider submitting your website in leading web directories such as Dmoz.org
Link exchange – Though it is a very old method for building traffic and backlinks, link exchange still works. Exchange links with quality and relevant sites for building backlinks.
Always try to use your targeted keywords in the anchor text of your backlinks as search engines lay much emphasis on the anchor text of links pointing to your site.
The above mentioned methods will help you build umpteen number of backlinks for your site. But always remember that the content of your site is what really matters. Concentrate on making exceptionally good content and others will voluntarily link to your site.
Ron Jones is an active blogger and specializes in traditional website marketing and marketing through WEB 2.0 applications. He owns Myspace Zone, which specializes in
Myspace Photo and Video Comments He also contributes at Myspace Comments, a blog run by his friend Michael.
Fighting Link Exchange Spam
The black days of link exchange started when someone invented the strategy to automatically surf the net, find contact forms on the sites of potential link partners and send via these contact forms spam messages "I am webmaster... sites are relevant... let's swap links - it will help us both." These beggy emails terrorize all site owners and definitely junk a very good idea of exchanging links.
Imagine, I have around 30 sites under my control - it's not much these days - and to each of the sites via contact form I receive 2-10 link exchange spam messages. I don't even say that they are irrelevant (people who use these solutions don't have enough competence to think about relevancy). What I say is that even the number of link exchange spam to my sites is shocking: 2-10 spam messages a day to my 30 sites, wow this is 60-300 spam messages daily! And all these messages whine and beg to exchange links.
In my place, would you be able to pay attention to all these messages? I am not! I have more important things to do. I just don't read them - these messages go to trash bin instantly.
I know it's a hard truth for those who try to build links this way, but hey - I'd better tell you the truth now, rather than let you waste your time, efforts and money on such a super low effective method of link exchange.
And one more myth busting for those who trust the myth that they can customize/personalize their email message and this will save them the destiny of all other "link spammers." Don't kid yourself. With the amount of messages that I got and managed to view (because I delete around 80-90% of these messages instantly) over the last 3-4 years I saw ONLY ONE GOOD MESSAGE which attracted my attention and resulted in swapping link. And that was a very good business proposition for a very good site.
So, out of hundreds of link exchange emails that I was getting daily over years only one resulted in link swap! Nice conversions, aren't they?
Surely I don't doubt the advantages of automatic link building. But let's be fair, most of automatic link building tools either don't give you quality links or do not create quality, SEO-wise link exchange directory or simply spam. No wonder that link exchange gained a bad stigma these days.
Still, there is a very wise link building alternative.
And this alternative is pretty much automated and uses a very smart approach. It's not some magic pill that will give you tons of quality links within seconds. But you can check the concept and make your own decision.
So, the concept is pretty simple. We can suggest with very high probability that web sites which use special link building solutions are very apt to exchange links with quality, relevant sites. We can even find the pages where these sites want you to submit full details of your web sites as subject for links exchange. It's the same to someone having special door for bringing milk to the house. Surely if you go to this door with your 'milk', no one can give you 100% guarantee they need milk at the moment. But at least this is better than throwing the bottle through the window!
Not to sound blatant I would ask to compare the conversions of using special doors for link building. I was testing conversions from doing link exchange using automatic site submissions for link swap and got from 40% 'yes' replies within one week up to 80% (that was the highest record that I did not manage to break up to now). And now compare it with the link exchange spam emails conversions when 90% of your emails are instantly deleted and out of the rest 10% no one knows if they will produce any effect.
With the strategy that I mentioned there seems to be one drawback - it needs much manual work. But I can prove than most of the processes can be automated. Pickling of relevant sites - can be automated, not easy to do that, but possible. Copying and pasting your site info into link exchange submissions forms and doing the same for your site - easily automated. Creation of link exchange directory with pages that have relevant content for each category - can be automated. Creation of RSS files and SEO-issues - can be automated. Backlink checking - can be automated. And many other important issues to this or that extent can be automated with no loss to quality.
That is why when you hear the next time that automatic link exchange gives poor results - agree with it, but bear in mind that it is because people don't know many hidden doors that you know and can use. Strategy works and those who don't trust will be greatly surprised to see my site on 1st page in Google inside a very tough niche. And I am not alone to get good results with this strategy - not so many of us, but this is better for you.
Don't lose your hope in link exchange. Better learn more information about how link exchange works these days and the new rules of search engines about link building.
Download New Age Link Exchange PDF @ no cost - Membership registration is 100% free + you get free copy of the tool
+ Auto Content Publisher - free bonus on membership upgrade.
How To Increase Traffic To Your Blog
These are some tips which can help to increase traffic to a blog.
1. Submit your blog to search engines/directories.
2. Try to participate in many discussion forums and actively involve in the discussions (don’t forget to add your blog url in each posts or in signature).
There are plenty of discussion forums, but I found digital point discussion forum and bloggerforum quite useful. One can use google adsense groups also successfully to bring traffic in to a blog.
3. Use Mybloglog
Using Mybloglog is quite useful one to bring traffic. If you want to read the post about Myblolog, please click here.
4. Read other blogs and leave a comment (don’t spam other blogs, just leave a comment when it is really necessary).
5. Register in technorati. Add technorati tag in all your posts.
I am not yet quite successful in bringing traffic from technorati. But I hope it will change soon.
6. Ping using pingoat and google blog search.
7. Register in feedburner and feed your blog.
8. Find who are your visitors and where you can reach them easily. If you find where you can reach your visitors, your task of advetising and driving traffic will be quite easier.
9. You can use social networks like orkut, hi5 and mylot successfully to bring traffic to your blog/site.
10. Build inbound links by submitting your articles in different websites and blogs.
reddit, digg, del.icio.us, ezine and hubpages are some example networks for submitting your articles. In the above four hubpages share their income with you. So try to submit your articles in hubpages and earn some income as well.
11. Advertise your blog.
One can also do free or cheap advertising for bringing traffic in. I am thinking of getting traffic by doing some advertisement.
adwords, Adcenter, adbrite and YPN are some examples.
12. Give useful outbound links.
13. Optimize your blog to be search engine friendly.
Do you want to know more about, how to increase your page rank in google. Read about this in http://internetbazaar.blogspot.com/2007/01/improving-blogs-google-page-rank_14.html
14. Update your blog regularly and try to fill your blog with useful/good contents.
By doing previous 12 things you can make many people to visit your blog/website. But to make them come again, you need good contents in your blog. Try to write a new content regularly and try to improve your writing style. Of course at the beginning it is difficult to be good, but one improve.
In my opinion these are quite enough for starters to bring at least 100 visitors per day in a month time.
I am Guhan, a ph.d student by profession and blogging is my hobby. My blogs url is http://internetbazaar.blogspot.com
Free Targeted Traffic Tips
Ever Wonder how to get Free Targeted Traffic to your website?
Sick of paying for visitors that don’t convert to sales for you?
Tired of traffic exchanges that only send you other people looking for traffic to their sites?
Well, what I am about to tell you are the best secrets for Free Targeted Traffic I have ever stumbled upon in my years of internet marketing. I am going to show you 3 of the best tips for driving organic, targeted traffic to your website. Its all easy and free!!!
Free Targeted Traffic Tip #1-Forums
Visit forums that are related to your products. Make posts, answer questions and provide advice that is helpful and generally indicates that you know what you are talking about. Don’t Spam the forums you visit as it may result in you getting banned from the site.
In your forum profile, enable your signature and include a link to your product site within it. This is a great way to get traffic to your site in no time. When people see you post sound advice they generally want to know more about what you have to offer, so what do they do? They click on your signature link and voila!!! You have a targeted visitor, pretty simple and not very time consuming.
Free Targeted Traffic Tip #2-Classifieds
Placing classifieds is free, easy, and there are numerous services available. Personally I use USFreeAds. They offer free services that are easy and effective. I got quite a bit of traffic from the free service alone, but the premium service made my traffic go through the roof, and for the price, you cant beat it. The free version offers HTML ads only, the Premium however offers fully configurable ads with the ability to add graphics. Good Stuff. Another couple of services out there that I have had success with is Webclassifieds.us, and freeadvertisingforum.com. USFreeAds by far out performs the other two. I get between 50-100 visitors a day with them as opposed to between 20-50 a day with the others, and the beautiful part is ths can all be done for free.
You cant beat that Free Targeted Traffic for free, getting excited? You should be, your stats are gonna explode if you get started today!!
Free Targeted Traffic Tip #3-Blogs
Blogs are a great way to get a web presence set up for free, and some people don’t know it, but its also a great way to get traffic. First thing you need to do is set up a blog that is catered to your desired market.
Personally I use blogger, they are easy to set up and have a tutorial that will have you up in running in about a half hour. After the site is up you just need to fill the blog with your content.
But how does this method translate to free targeted traffic you ask? Use your blog similar to the forum tip, visit like minded bloggers and post comments on their blogs. Be sure to provide backlinks so they can click on your name and be directed to your blog, where you just happen to sell products and/or services. This method is easy, fun, and free. The success of this method depends on your time put in and how much “visiting” you do.
Another great benefit to blogs is search engines love them and constantly list them in their searches when key words are crawled. So be sure to use keyword dense articles and posts!!
Conclusion
Utilizing these Free Targeted Traffic Tips alone, I have been able to direct large amounts of traffic to my sites. The results will vary and depend on how much time and effort you put into this, but I will tell you this. By implementing these tips you can greatly reduce your advertising costs and actually achieve better conversion rates. I still get traffic from posts I made to a forum over a year ago. So, what are you waiting for? Get started today and get the Free Targeted Traffic you desire and watch your sales go through the roof!!!
Yours in Wealth,
Christopher H Smith
Internet MarketerI.S.S.A Certified Personal TrainerLife Empowered Member
Getting More Web Site Traffic with Less Effort
Getting more web site traffic with less effort is what we would all like to be able to do. We all want a ton of great traffic that buys our products and helps us build our online business. There is a simple way to build website traffic with less effort. Follow these steps.
- First, start using google adwords to get your site out on the google search engine. The greatest thing about google adwords is that they have ads displayed on a ton of websites and you can choose the keywords you want to target. Plus you do not have to make an initial deposit. All you have to do is sign up and get started.
- Second, learn as much as you possibly can about google adwords and how to use it properly to build traffic. There is a ton of information out there about using google adwords, choosing quality keywords, and getting a ton of traffic from google adwords. You need to be studying this information all the time and staying up to date on what is going on.
- Third, track more than one campaign on google adwords at a time. This will allow you to compare your different advertisement and figure out what is working best for your website. With this information you can test your ads and delete the ones that are not pulling you good quality traffic.
Now you have a simple 3 step plan to start getting more web site traffic with less effort. Once you have your google adwords campaigns set up and they are doing the job you want them to, you can set your entire advertising on auto pilot. Get started today and get the traffic you are after.
Learn more about building quality traffic with this FREE Traffic Report. Go here to claim your copy now:
Free Traffic Building Report
Is Your Online Home Business Generating A Sufficient Traffic Volume?
By having an online home business there are a number of aspects that you must focus on. Advertising the product, creating quality customer service and developing fresh and enticing content are just a few of the duties to developing a successful home based business. However, none of that is worthwhile if there are no customers to see your work.
The most crucial part to creating a successful online home business is generating a high traffic volume to get business rolling in. You will encounter a number of difficulties being in the internet industry, but continuously bringing in traffic to your website is one of the most difficult things you will face. How can you generate higher website traffic is a question asked by hundreds of thousands on the internet.
There are a number of ways you can go about increasing the traffic to your home based business. The easiest way lies within the content that you produce. You have to ask yourself if the content that you are producing is worth the time of millions to read. You want to make your content clear and precise so that it is easily understood by your readers.
If you are going to make your content worth your reader’s time, make it as original as possible. A majority of the content that is produced on the internet is the same from website to website. If you want to make your online home business stand out from the rest, work on producing fresh and enticing content. By giving the reader’s information that they haven’t seen before, they will be more inclined to return later to see what else you have to say.
While the content that you deliver to the visitors is crucial, how you treat the visitors is just as important. Customer service and developing personal relationships will go a long way when it comes to the type of business that your home based business produces. Many of the website marketing strategies used to increase traffic are based solely on computer numbers, while forgetting that your visitors are actual people. If you go the distance to reach out and assist your visitors to the best of your ability, it will not go unnoticed.
The last way that you can go about increasing traffic for your online home business is through email. First off, email is a great way to develop a personal relationship with your customers and keep in touch with them. You can also use the email to send out newsletters to your targeted customers to keep them informed of things to come.
The traffic volume that your website generates is an important facet to your home based business. By providing fresh and enticing content worth the visitor’s time and taking the time to reach out and help your visitors and customers, you will have no problem generating a high traffic volume for your online home business.
Paul Jesse is an Author, private pilot, and lifetime student of internet marketing. He created SheaMarketing for those interested in working from home. He invites you to visit his website at http://www.sheamarketing.com
Web Hosting Companies - How To Choose A Web Hosting Provider
The amount of choice available for selecting a hosting provider these days is staggering. you are presented with almost as many options for hosting plans than you get types of coffee at a Starbucks.
How do you know which are the good, the bad and the ugly?
For one, let's just straight out exclude any type of FREE hosting. If you are serious about running an Internet Business, an ECommerce site or a Business Brochure website, then you should definitely NOT use a free hosting provider.
1) Free hosting is normally actually paid for by advertising. This means that you will be forced to have some form of advertising on your site.
2) Free hosting is not so reliable and you share your hosting space with thousands, if not millions of other websites. This is also true, to an extent, of shared hosting, but at least with shared hosting you have some type of service contract with your hosting provider.
3) You are just not projecting a professional image if you make use of free hosting. hosting has become so affordable these days that there is no excuse any more for not having your own domain and your own hosting provider.
The next step up from free hosting is shared hosting. This is by far the most common hosting model today. With shared hosting you also share space on a hosting server. This is where it becomes tricky to distinguish the melons from the real thing. The problem is that the next step up from shared hosting is Virtual Private servers, or even dedicated servers. These are very expensive especially for the average website owner. shared hosting is much more affordable for website owners that are venturing into the Internet world for the first time.
If you have a relatively large company with a relatively large website and you do not have your own internal server infrastructure, you would definitely steer away from shared hosting and rather go into partnership with a hosting service provider where you can use dedicated servers or Private Virtual Servers. But we are talking here more of the requirements of the average Joe Schmoe - the little guy, like you or me, who wants to start his own little Internet empire.
So, shared hosting is what it will be.
The advantages with shared hosting is that is cheap. hosting is becoming cheaper and cheaper - in the United States at least. The problem is that there are a lot of unscrupulous operators out there, who overload their servers. If you land up with one of them, you will definitely find that YOUR website performance degrades due to the fact that some idiot sharing the same box is sending out 10000 emails to his newly bought list of scraped emails.
Take the following steps:
1. There are a lot of web hosting review sites. Visit these sites and see what customers are saying of the web hosting provider. But please note, do not take everything you see at face value. No hosting provider is perfect, and all hosting providers WILL get some bad reviews. The trick is to determine how well the problem was handled and how well the hosting provider recovered or did something about the problem. It is also worthwhile to visit hosting review sites where some type of rating is assigned to a host.
2. To narrow down your search considerably I am going to give you advice based on my own prejudices - search for CPanel hosting on a Linux server. Don't mess around with other control panels or operating systems. Not everyone will agree with me and there are a lot of other control panels that are equally good, but you cannot go wrong with this combination and it narrows the field somewhat.
3. If you are on a potential hosting provider's website, take a look at the following details:
- Do they provide a physical address and phone number? Sure, everything can be done by email, but I was once in the situation where my support ticket for an emergency went unanswered and I decided to phone the company - only to find out that they didn't publish their phone number.
- If they have so-called 'Live site support' available, how often is the support actually available? I've seen lots of sites claiming to have 'live support' but the life support seemed to be very dead every time that I visited the site.
- Send a pre-sales question through their support ticket system and make sure that you are happy with the way that the support desk is set up. You might spend some time here in future and you must be able to initiate and sustain support tickets easily.
You also want to see how quickly the hosting provider responds to your question. Don't get too excited however if they come back almost immediately. Pre-sales are normally much quicker off the mark than technical support! But it does give an indication.
See how long the company has been in operation (some review sites provide this) - the longer the better!
- See if they allow adult hosting. If they do, be aware that adult hosting consumes a lot of resources and traffic. Your site might be negatively impacted by this if you land up on the same server.
4. THEN you take a look at features.
The following features are essential:
- Enough hard disk space. This is almost the least of your worries since ridiculous amounts of hard disk space are on offer these days. You can easily get 500 MB of hard disk space for about $2 per month and even more commonly, over 1GB or 2GB per month for about $7. You will probably not need this much space unless you are going to run a forum or membership site, or plan to host videos or podcasts. For a 'normal' site anything between 5MB and 100MB will be enough.
- Enough bandwidth - this is also normally more than enough these days.
My advice is, however, NOT to go for the $2 per month options. You are going to get what you pay for....
Other features that are important are:
- Web statistics. I have found a very nice hosting company only to find that they did not offer online statistics. According to them it degraded the performance of their servers. This may very well be, but you cannot operate a website without statistics! Most hosting providers DO offer statistics, but it will never hurt to just make 100 sure.
- If you elected to go for CPanel hosting as I am recommended, you will find that most other features that are essential are available by default - quick installation of software such as shopping carts and blogs; subdomains; FTP accounts; email account setup management; backups and more. Everything that you would ever need, in fact.
Christine Anderssen is the owner of Tailormade4you and specializes in Web Hosting and Web Site Design services for small to medium businesses. Visit us for free tutorials on website design and Internet Marketing.
Read the original article on http://www.internet-web-hosting.co.za/webhosting-info/web-hosting-companies-how-to-choose-a-web-hosting-provider.html
Free Web Hosting: What You Must Know About Choosing A Free Web-Host
free hosting is sometimes a great way to go when you want to put up a website. Its great when you don't have a credit card to arrange the hosting and domain name. Also if it's your first website, a personal page or many other factors you may choose to go the free hosting route. In order to have a good website though, there are some things you need to be aware of and look for in a free host provider. They are:
1. Trustability
For the first reason, I'm inventing my own word! Trust in the provider is very important though because your privacy is of importance to you. The last thing you want is to have all your information sold to mortgage companies or something. What happens if you spend a lot of time on your website and then the free host company has a server crash or just vanish?
2. Storage, The importance of space
This one is important. Storage is important, especially if you want images on your free website. Many free hosting services are free for the first 10mb and then start billing you in order to get more storage. Find a host that has at least 50mb of storage so that you don't risk running out. My choice of free host offers a very generous 700mb!
3. Bandwidth, Required for your site to stay 'online'
This is where lots of free hosts fall down. They only offer small amounts of bandwidth, and then once you reach it, they suspend your account. If this happens, often you need to pay for more bandwidth, or wait until the month is out in order to get your account functioning again. If this happens in some cases you can email them and ask for more and they might grant you some more, but is it worth the risk of website downtime?
4. Ads
It's a free service and the provider needs to make the income to pay the servers and maintenance somehow, so ads are expected. Lots of free hosts though go overboard with Popups and float-ins, as well as banner ads and plenty more. Try and find a free hosting provider that has non obtrusive advertising (NO Popups, visitors hate that!)
5. Functionality and Uptime
Without user-friendly functionality, you could struggle to get your pages looking the way you want them to look. Try and find a service provider that offers easy editing and also has safe, reliable servers and maintenance, otherwise you may risk your website being up and down throughout the day!
John Triggerman is a member of the 007iHost admin team. 007iHost is a hosting provider that meets all the above standards and also is a site offering 7000mb, 7gb of free bandwidth usage! 007ihost is one of the best free hosts when it comes to bandwidth. If you use all the allotted bandwidth, a simple email and they may grant you more: http://www.007iHost.com
Automatic Script Installation Services - Are They Right for You?
Many web hosting accounts today use cpanel as the interface for a webmaster to manage the files on their domain. Within this control panel, you'll often see an icon titled Fantastico. It is a service many web hosts subscribe to that allow you, the webmaster, to install new scripts automatically without any of the usual mysql database creation, file uploading, installation and configuration. This seems like a great service doesn't it?
Let's take a closer look at the possible long term effects of using this automated service.
Many of the scripts Fantastico can install are discussion board scripts (bulletin boards), content management systems (cms), blogs, ecommerce scripts, customer support, mailing list scripts and more. If you are familiar with the requirements of many of these, you know they usually require a mysql database to function properly AND they often have frequent updates that need to be installed.
These updates are usually to fix security holes, bugs or are program upgrades.
There are no warnings in Fantastico that you should manually back up your mysql database and your files before you install any upgrade. Failure to back up everything before upgrading means you do not have a way to restore your files when things go wrong. At some point, you will have an upgrade mess things up so much you will need to restore your site from the backups.
The thing you were not told when you used this automatic installer was the name and password that were used when the mysql database was created. With some scripts, you'll need your database name, database username and database password so you can reinstall the script then restore your data from the backup. If you don't have this information, you will need to backup a copy of the mysql so you can import the old database backup after you have done a completely new install of the script again.
If you ever decide to leave your current host for a different web host, you will need your back up of the scripts and database along with all of the usernames and passwords to get the script working without having to do a complete new install on the new web host. How are you going to do that if you let Fantastico or some other automatic script installer do the work for you?
My opinion is to either learn and do the installation yourself and record the info somewhere you wont loose it, or simply use the automatic script installer under the icon called 'script library' already inside cpanel. This allows you to determine what the database name, username and password should be.
NOTE: Always do regular backups of all your files, scripts and more importantly your databases, this way you are always protected.
Find affordable web hosting at http://www.speedlogix.org where Jim Weltzin is the experienced IT professional that is currently working to provide a reliable and quality service.
Maximize Your Profits With Affordable Ecommerce Web Hosting
ecommerce, or Electronic Commerce, allows people to exchange goods and services immediately and with no barriers of time or distance. Any time of the day or night, you can go online and buy or sell almost anything you want.
So if you are a small entrepreneur entering the ecommerce space for the first time, then you want an affordable ecommerce web hosting site.
Small or new businesses need affordable ecommerce web hosting services to help them generate more traffic and sales for their business. However, the road to creating a successful online store can be a difficult and confusing one if you are unaware of how to avail affordable ecommerce hosting services.
Making the right choice on your solution package won’t be easy, because providers offer combinations of solutions at different prices. Some services offer easy to install shopping carts as part of their affordable ecommerce web hosting service. You will have to use your search engine to see what is available and which of these services suit your needs.
affordable ecommerce web hosting Should Not Mean Losing Out On Potential Customers
While searching for an affordable ecommerce web hosting service, there should be a few imperatives to consider. Your affordable ecommerce web hosting solution may be so because it has too many websites on its server. This could mean slower downloads of your site, resulting in potential clients losing patience and buying from a faster site. Long download times account for highest amount of lost sales with potential customers.
Also, make sure there is website security. It is your responsibility as an online business owner to maintain the security of sensitive information to prevent credit card fraud. In the past, people were wary of transacting on the Internet because of scams and disloyal companies. This is a thing of the past and people are now secure when purchasing items on the Internet.
Can You Afford To Not Use affordable ecommerce web hosting?
This has led to incredible growth in the online business category and you are missing out if you are a business owner who doesn’t participate in Internet sales yet. The biggest way people purchase their items is with credit cards and if you don’t offer a shopping cart solution, they may just go elsewhere. You may want an affordable ecommerce web hosting service, but if this service does not offer all these solutions in its package, you may find it eventually costlier, in terms of loss of sales. The traffic on the internet is growing by the day, and with each growth spurt you have the chance of generating more revenue.
So make the most of the boom and help your business along with affordable ecommerce web hosting.
Visit affordable ecommerce web hosting
to get excellent information on web site hosting.
Benefits of Using CPanel for Your Business Web Hosting
For new webmasters, especially those with minimal computer experience, the idea of being responsible for maintaining your own website can seem overwhelming. However, this might be an obstacle you'll have to overcome if you really want to have your website online. And as we all know, very few businesses can afford to not be online. But if you have a limited budget and can't hire a full-time "web person" what are your options?
Well, one of the best things you can do to shorten your learning curve is choose a web host that uses cpanel. cpanel is one of several popular control panels used by web hosts and allows the website owner to manage all sorts of tasks related to maintaining a web site. Now when we talk about maintaining the site, we're not talking about creating web pages necessarily. Instead, we mean things like setting up databases, additional email addresses, FTP accounts, or checking web statistics.
The beauty of cpanel is that it allows you to do all of these otherwise "technical" tasks from a user-friendly control panel. The result is a generally short learning curve on the part of the inexperienced user and less need to rely on tech support (though your web host should also provide excellent tech support, but that's a topic for another article).
In addition to administrative tasks, many web hosts offering cpanel also include a feature called Fantastico. This allows you to install a variety of programs and scripts within just a few clicks. Some of the more popular programs found within the Fantastico suite include Wordpress (for blogging) or Simple Machines Forum or phpBB (for hosting an online forum). There are usually 30-40 or so programs included with this feature, depending on what your web host decides to offer, though some are admittedly not that useful. However, the fact that Wordpress and forum software is included makes it well worth it so this might be a feature you'll want to keep an eye out for.
When you sign up with your web hosting company, they will give you all the details on how to access your cpanel. Usually, it's as simple as typing your web address into your browser, followed by /cpanel...so it would look like www.yourwebsitename.com/cpanel. Of course, since having access to cpanel is essentially having access to your entire site, you should guard this access carefully and ensure you have a very strong password.
There are other control panels offered by a wide variety of web hosts that are comparable to cpanel. However, you will likely find that cpanel is one of the most common features found throughout the web hosting world. That can also be to your benefit when it comes time to get help with something within cpanel since there is a large base of people online also familiar with its functions.
By choosing a web host offering cpanel, you can spend more time focusing on your business and getting traffic to your site rather than learning the intricacies and technical details that are the backbone of your web hosting environment.
You don't have to spend a fortune to find quality, secure CPanel-based web hosting. Research top solutions for affordable business website hosting that would be great for your small- to medium-sized business. Find out more by visiting us today at: http://www.OnlineWebHostGuide.com
Copyright 2007 - Kevin Nelson. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
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