This is something that many of us will go through in our business making decisions for our online ventures when we first start out. Yes I said business, because even if you are doing your own personal website the fact is you are still in business whether you like it or not. Keeping your website visible to your visitors, both new and returning is a key to your ultimate success. How you choose your web host is very critical to this success.

There are several key factors that many of us look at when we consider a new web host.

1. Price
2. Package includes (storage, bandwidth, etc.)
3. Control panel (e.g cPanel, Plesk, etc.)
4. Price
5. Price and more price.

Yes we are a price driven society. While not all that bad the problem with this when it comes to web hosting is that you get what you pay for. The large companies such as Hostnine, GoDaddy, 1and1, Hostgator and many others like them promote unbelievably large and cheap plans. While this may be good for some and for the price these plans serve their purpose the choice to go with cheap is not always the best one.

If you have a business you are attempting to launch you should consider before anything else reliability and service. Will your business be operating fast and smooth when your customers want and need it to be? This is something to consider when you are setting up your website for online business or even general use. The first 2 to 3 seconds of a visitors experience on your site is very important. If your site loads slow visitors will leave and many will not return. While for many who are simply dabbling with their first website to get their feet wet the large shared hosting providers can and will meet their needs. However, for a serious person they will not do.

So what should you look for if you are going to be operating a serious business on the Internet to attempt to make a great living? Well price is always a factor to some extent. However, you should be looking at a few different factors with your hosting provider when looking for a good provider to host your web business with.

1. Network Reliability. (how reliable is their data center provider and its backbone)
2. Speed of currently hosted websites. (ask for some domains that they host and test them. Make sure you ask for some on different servers if they have many accounts.)
3. Ask if they provide managed accounts if you need this help. (for the novice web operator this is a very good idea and will save you time and money in the long run.)
4. Server specs. (yes this is important as well. Your host needs to be keeping their customers on quality web servers if they are going to charge a premium price. Better servers will give your website a better chance at loading fast and remaining online.)
5. Quality of the customer service. (test their customer service response times via e-mail and phone. Yes they should have both. If they take more then 4 to 6 hours to respond to your questions via e-mail then chances are they are not the host for you. Most good companies will respond within 2 hours or less.)
6. Finally Price. (yes it is important, but is not the number one reason to choose a host.)

So when you are looking to choose your next host try to realize that the size of the package and price is not the only thing to consider. Your reputation and image are the most valuable thing you have and this should sway your decision making when it comes to choosing a hosting provider, not price.

One final note. Make sure to research your hosts using well respected forums and sites such as webhostingtalk.com and webhostingstuff.com. While no host has a perfect record these sites can help you to determine the overall worth of your potential partner in your business.

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There are many questions being posed by people everyday about the effectiveness of marketing your site on a social networking platform such as Myspace and Facebook. The fact is that the social networking sites can be a way to build brand awareness and increase the popularity and traffic of most sites if done right.

With a broad range of demographics these days most social networking platforms are a marketers dream. From young to old alike people are becoming more active in the social networking world created by the success of Myspace and others like it.

Marketers need only look at the total number of users that many of these sites boast to see the true potential of putting up an account and becoming friendly with those very people they are attemptig to put their message before. This type of marketing is something that gives a personal feel to an online business or even an old bricks and mortar one. People like to know that companies are more then just the ads they see on television or hear on the radio.

When marketing to these people being personable is a key point, but many want extras such as free downloads or something else of value that they can share with others. The best part is that the item does not have to be related to your core business, but be something that many people would want. This is viral marketing at its best and it can have a huge impact on your ultimate success or failure.

Some of the most successful companies online today started out through viral marketing. Myspace, Hotmail, Facebook, YouTube and many others similar and different became huge successes for their founders and ultimately made them millionaires overnight. This is the goal for many of us, but some of us do it for the love of what we do, however, ultimately we are still all trying to be successful.

If you can put your site in front of thousands and potentially millions of people the odds are that you will be successful if you simply take the time to make your message loud and clear. By giving something of value to your loyal new friends they will give you that very thing you desire most: success in todays Internet marketing monster.

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This is a question we hear often on many webmaster forums. People are simply not sure of the benefits of blogging. While it is true that there are literally thousands upon thousands of blogs today the fact still remains they are one of the best ways to keep your site filled with fresh content.

Lets take a look at how it helps your site. What if you had a site with static content (or content that never changes). Now the search engines will initially visit your site to index your pages, but as time goes on the number of times per month they visit will simply diminish. Not sure if that is true? Well take a look at your traffic stats and the section that tells you about crawler bots. The fact is that Google especially has changed the way they crawl websites.

If your site is simply the same everyday their system is setup to now reduce the number of visits to around once per month. So the only real way for you to gain serp position is to obviously get more back links. Sure this works and is a very good method, but what if the search engines visited your site daily? This is possible by writing a blog. As the search engines realize that your sites content is being updated on a regular basis the number of visits to your site will increase. This will also have an added bonus of giving your site more indexed pages and a better chance of reaching the top of your keywords searches.

Your blog should be related to your sites content. So simply blogging about your daily adventures in rock climbing if your site is about training parrots will not suffice. You really should keep your blog relevant to your sites theme.

The other added bonus of your blog will be that you will begin to notice more visitors and even better yet more repeat visitors. Of course this is only going to work if you take the time to write quality, well thought out posts. People want your articles to be interesting so make them that way.

You might also run contests on your blog or even allow your readers to submit articles to your blog that will benefit others. There are plugins for doing just this. We use it on all of our blogs that use Wordpress. The plugin is called TDO mini forms and it is easy to setup, install and maintain.

Using plugins such as this will give your blog added fresh content more often as people will want to get their own websites more back links. One other way to entice them to post is to use “do follow” links so that your guest authors will receive credit and a link that will benefit their site. There are also several plugins available for this if you are using Wordpress. We use Lucia’sLinkLove which you can find at her website along with a few other helpful plugins.

The fact is that if you want to have a fighting chance in today’s crowded Internet machine you need to take the extra effort to stand out. Every little bit that you do will help you increase your chances of being a success.

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A recent discussion at one of the forums I visit got me to thinking more about how to put a stop to content thieves. This is a problem that some of us have experienced over the years and can be very frustrating. Because of this discussion I decided to find out more information on how to help put a stop to these thieves and have your content removed from their sites.

What is content theft? Simply put it is when someone intentionally uses images, articles or other promotional material or source code from your site. They use this material to help fill their own site with keyword rich articles and other useful material that allows them to place advertisements from an ad service and  profit from the ad clicks they receive. Now we all know that they normally receive a penalty for using duplicate content, but if they are able to advertise their site through low cost methods they can profit quite nicely from good keyword choice.

There is an ugly downside to this as well for your site. Instead of the thief being penalized it may be your site or even both. Now how is that for a real kick to the teeth?

For those of us in the United States the law is on our side when comes to this situation, but in other countries the law simply does not help those that have been victimized. For those of us in the U.S. we may be able to get the content removed quickly through the threat of legal action, but this does not solve the issue in other countries nor will it always work here in the U.S.

Another method suggested by Terri Wells over at SEOChat.com is to give them a swift jolt where it hurts them the most their pocketbook.

Terri suggests you do this by contacting the offending sites advertisers. When contacting These advertisers you should send a DMCA take down notice. DMCA is short for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Terri suggests your notice should contain the following information:

That your letter is a Notice of Infringement as authorized in § 512(c) of the US copyright law.

That you are reporting what you feel is in good faith an instance of copyright infringement (this may be more important than you think; DMCA takedown notices filed in bad faith can open the filer to a lawsuit).

The title(s) of the work under contention.

The web site address where the plagiarism appears.

The web site address where the original material appears.

Your contact information: name, address, phone number, and email address.

Slow them down

One way to help slow down content theft is to install code in your website that disables the ability to right click and use the copy function of the browser. However, the downfall to this is that it may be a red flag to hackers or others that you may be hiding something more important and only make them more determined to retrieve your sites content and code. Another reason you might consider not putting “no right click code” in is that it gives a sense that you do not trust your visitors and may turn them away. Consider that most of the people who are visiting your site will be there for legitimate reasons and only a few are there to actually commit a crime. Best to keep those true visitors happy.

There are a few ways to help slow them down without really offending most of your visitors in the process.

1. Only disable right click on your images. Place a note in the mouseover that lets your visitors know that only images are restricted from being right clicked.
2. You can mark your images with your company logo, website address or other watermarks that make it unappealing to content thieves.
3. You could use digital watermarks which are essentially invisible and allows tracking of your images and content by means of code. This will not stop the determined thief though, but is a nice way to frustrate them even more.
4. Encode your source code. This will make it impossible to read your source code without decoding it. This is done by using Javascript. If your visitors have their Javascript turned off then your site will be not be able to seen and will lose function. This could be an issue as well so you might think about this one as well.
5. You might use a method that would make it very difficult for those that want your code to use it. It involves removing the white space. Essentially what  you will do is make your code one long line of code with no spaces. This makes it a real pain for those that want to use your sites code or content to filter it out. It might be your best option as well. You would not lose any of the functions of your site nor offend any of your visitors.

No matter how you decide to handle the issue on your site make sure you take your visitors and the growth of your business into consideration.

Resources

For more information and resources on protecting your sites content you can visit the following sites.

• Disable Image Right Clicks: Javascript.internet.com/page-details/disable-images-click.html
• This site offers information on visible watermarking design: wdvl.com
• You will find information on encoding your source code and how it can affect your site: aw-soft.com

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There are two types of people on forums. Those that take the time to make worth while posts that contribute to the overall community and help others and there are the spammers. The spammers are easily spotted by their irrelevant posts and utter disregard for the community rules and others. The question is which do you want to be?

For those that chose the first option this then we are those that will ultimately succeed. Why is this? Because people respect people who show them the same. This means giving answers to questions that are not attacking them for learning. Everyone is learning everyday and the courtesy we show others by helping them learn is what will help your own online reputation as an expert thrive. This means people will more often look to your websites for advice since you are trusted. A link you provide to them will not be questioned as you have shown yourself to be trustworthy and insightful.

How does this affect your sites search engine optimization or seo as most of us know it? This is a good question and many of you are asking yourself this right now. Consider these same people you have helped have websites, blogs or are thinking of starting one. Now they come to a point that they have trusted your advice and want to share your knowledge with others. So what do they do? They link to your website or blog. This is very valuable for many reasons. First you will most likely gain new visitors to your site and additional page rank and serp position due to others linking and referencing your advice.

Does every site linking to you have to have a high page rank? No. While this does help it is nice to have as many links from different sites as possible that are natural. Natural links are valued much higher by Google and other search engines then unnatural (paid or link farm sites).

To sum it up: It is more important to become a valued member of one or two communities then it is to become a spammer of many. Those that spam ultimately lose by being banned and ignored as irrelevant. Their posts are more often then not, deleted. Their sites get a bad reputation and ultimately will fail. So do the right thing and contribute.

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One nagging question that many of you have is how to make more money on your website. There are of course the standard methods such as placing contextual ads from Google or Yahoo or one of the smaller providers on your website and earning a small amount of money from a large number of visitor clicks. Of course this does not always work to well for smaller less known websites.

No I am not saying to completely nix contextual ads, but maybe you should consider adding some other revenue streams to your website. One very effective method to make money is through Affiliate programs that are targeted towards what interests your visitors. For example if you operate a blog about technology related information then you might consider joining an affiliate program from sites such as Newegg, Dell and many others.

Yes you may say that some of these programs pay very little, but consider this. If you place a banner for NewEgg on your site (which is administered by Commission Junction) and your visitors are actively seeking information or products that are technology related then you might notice that they are likely to visit a link you recommend to a site such as NewEgg. This can add up significantly if you target your customers needs. So why not add a new source of potential revenue if it is highly focused towards your visitors makeup afterall the goal is to help your customers and make money.

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With gas prices and other costs rising to record prices it is no wonder many people are looking for eco friendly products and companies. The push for independce from foreign oil suppliers is something that is driving this new trend.

More frequently we are seeing ads from many companies touting their strive to be eco friendly. Take SC Johnson for example. They are one of the leaders in pushing to find eco friendly products and production methods that will ultimately help to save our environment.

So what does this mean to you as a website operator? First take advantage of this move towards helping to reduce our dependence on outside energy sources and saving our environment. Make a move to provide eco friendly services and then use this in your advertising and marketing campaigns. For example if you are a web hosting provider then find a data center that is striving to cut its energy consumption by installing systems to save energy such as advanced cooling systems, solar or wind energy generation and other environmentally friendly upgrades to its services. If you are an online retailer try to find products produced by companies that are producing products in a way that helps to meet these same criteria as data centers for web hosting providers.

No matter your online business you can use the push to save energy and the environment to your advantage. Remember marketing and good advertising of your companies benefits will win the hearts of those that are looking to help find relief in todays worsening energy and environmental situation.

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First I want to say hello to all of you. Our blog is going to be a general blog based on helping you to learn more about web basics such as marketing your website, advertising and other related subjects for webmasters.

For those of you that are not familiar with our services we have been developing and selling domains for almost 5 years. It was only this year that we decided to finally start building a brand of services under the Hostnetric name.

We hope you enjoy our services and our informative blog and we look forward to bringing you the best in information to help your own websites grow.

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