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Archive for the ‘Webmaster Tips’ Category

So you want to pay a little less for web hosting. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, and of course there really are ways to reduce this overall cost. What you must do is assess what you need and what you might be looking for.

The hosting market is very competitive and honestly, most companies are offering many of the same features. This means that you simply need to discover how to get the most out of your dollars.

Shopping around is extremely important. This is not a decision you want to make lightly, so make sure that you know everything that is out there. Saving money isn’t easy!

Look at all of the offers on the internet, but don’t give in to the first company that tells you they are going to give you a killer deal. Make sure that company has a decent reputation. This is perhaps one of the most important things you can do. Saving money is important, but having a reliable web host is even more important.

Hidden charges are a web host’s best friend. In this tough economic time it’s no surprise that they would include hidden fees. But while they need to watch out for their financial interests, you need to watch out for yours as well. Become familiar with all of the fees by reading the fine print.

One good example are the features that claimed to be ‘part of the package’, and you instead find them on the bill. What on Earth? They said it was free! This is why it is so important that you read the fine print.

There are quite a few web hosts that will work to save you money by bundling features together. This will usually save you quite a bit of money, which isn’t something that you can turn down in this economic climate.

One other thing that you could look up are free setups. It costs a bit of money to set up a webpage, and if you can find a host that sets it up and activates it for free, you’ll be doing quite well. It won’t be hard to find a service like this, but never just assume that your web host does it.

In fact, the setup charges for a dedicated server can cost upwards of $100 if you are not careful. Should you find a provider that advertises an attractive bottom line price, but forces you to pay exuberant fees upfront to even get started, it could possibly take you quite a while for that money to reflect in your monthly savings.

Do your research, we cannot stress this point enough. Always know who you are giving your money to, and know what kind of service they have. You can have the best website in the world, but if the server is slow and has low uptime, you will lose your credibility fast.

A bargain deal will only end up costing you more money when your site is unavailable and customers cannot conduct business. Therefore, you should know that saving a couple of dollars is probably not worth risking your credibility.

If you need a dedicated server, Alojate.com is the premier web hosting company in Mexico, offering a range of solutions for every business needs. Servidores dedicados, factura electronica, web hosting & registro de dominios.

True story.  Even though I make my own WordPress themes, I like finding and downloading free themes with unique or eye-catching layouts.  Then when I create a new theme, I look through them to get ideas for colors, fonts, graphics and layout.

Recently I had installed a new WordPress blog and written the first post.  I wanted to take a closer look at some of the themes I had collected so I uploaded them to my server and began activating them one after another. 

While in the Manage Themes screen, one particular theme’s screen print wasn’t previewing.  I’ve come across that behavior several times before, but I’ve never had a problem with any of them not activating.  Thinking that perhaps the screenshot.png file was missing, I clicked on it any way to activate it.

My blog went blank.  I was staring at a white screen.  The post I had just made wouldn’t come up and neither would the WordPress login screen.  I had to log into cPanel to uninstall the blog and then reinstall it.  Had this been one of my well established blogs, I would have been mortified to lose everything.

I immediately deleted the theme from my hard drive and have since emptied my Recycle Bin so it wouldn’t happen again.  In hindsight I should have gone back to the website I got it from to report it.

I come away with several tips for those of you who like using free WordPress themes.

• Don’t download any theme unless it’s from a reputable author.
•  Always do a database export before activating themes.  Here’s how:
  • Login to your hosting account’s control panel.
  •  Go to phpMyAdmin.
  •  On the left side of the screen will be your databases using a naming convention like _wrdpx, with x being a number.
  • To find which database belongs to the blog in question, click on a database to display its tables.
  • Click on the wp-options table.
  • On the right side of the screen, click on the SQL tab.
  • There will be a SQL query already in the window.  Leave it as is.
  • Click the ‘Go’ button to execute the query.
  • Under column option_name you’ll see the siteurl and blogname values.
  • If that’s not it, go to the next database until you find it.
  • Once you find it then back out of the options table and click on the database name.  All tables in the database will display on the right side.
  • Then click on the Export tab.
  •  The default selections will suffice.
  • Check the ‘Save as file’ checkbox.
  • Click the ‘Go’ button to create the export file.
• Then using your FTP client, download your blog’s wp-content/plugins and wp-content/themes folders to your hard drive. 

 Now you can begin previewing themes.  If you run into problems like I did

• Uninstall WordPress.
• Reinstall WordPress.
• Before you upload your files, delete the bad theme from the wp-content/themes folder.
• Upload your files.
• Import the export.

Have fun blogging!

Learn to make your own WordPress themes the fun and easy way with theme development software from Artisteer.  Artisteer can also make themes for other popular CMS applications.

Micro Niche Finder is the best keyword research tool in my arsenal. I can find high paying long-tail keywords to maximize my AdSense income or search engine marketing. I know what keywords people are searching on and how strong the competition is. Plus, it tells me at a glance if a keyword is available for domain registration.

Xfactor's Micro Niche Adsense Course is the perfect companion product. Learn how to take the micro niche keywords you find with Micro Niche Finder and turn them into highly profitable websites with Xfactor's step-by-step blueprint.

SpyFu tells me what keywords my competition is bidding on and how much they're paying. I can use it to find top paying AdSense ads for my content pages or locate profitable niche keywords with laser accuracy. 

Free websites and blogs can only take a serious entrepreneur so far.  They’re a great sandbox for getting your feet wet and figuring things out, but they’re full of advertisements, gaudy templates and themes that reek of “free”.  It’s like doing business out of the back seat of your car – with a Hannah Montana sticker on the bumper.  Few people, if anyone, will take you seriously.

If you build your business on free sites, you risk losing everything because you do not own the site and it can be taken away from you for any reason.

In May 2009, Facebook disabled accounts with, what it “assumed”, were fictitious names.  People with legitimate accounts that have spent years building personal or business relationships had everything disappear in the blink of an eye.

When I first started using free blogs, Blogger shut down one of my blogs and to this day I don’t know the exact reason why.  It could have been because I was using it to pre-sell affiliate products.  It could also be because I hyperlinked every occurrence of my main keyword to my main website and they considered that spammy.  What did I know, I was a noob.  I couldn’t get back into the blog to fix it.  No amount of contacting them ever got an answer and I was forced to abandon it.  Can you imagine if I had built an entire business around that blog? 

I also know that using free WordPress.com blogs for business purposes is a violation of their terms and they will shut you down, too.

Many people starting out don’t know that because they never read the terms of service.  Stay away from free blogs.  You need to own your own blog or website.  Always remain in control of your business.

Before you can run your own website or blog you need your own domain name and web hosting.  The good news is, it’s cheap to get started and I’m going to give you my personal tips for doing it.

Warning:  Do not take advantage of “free domain names for life” when you buy web hosting.  They are only free if you keep your hosting account with them.  Plus, you will not own the name, the web hosting company will.  Always remain in control of your business.

Domain Registration

I’m not going to get real deep into selecting a domain name because that’s beyond the scope of this material.  However, I will leave you with a few guidelines. 

If you want to be found in the search engines, it only makes sense to include a keyword or two that people are using to find what it is you’re selling.  So if you’re an affiliate selling outdoor furniture, incorporating “outdoor furniture” into your domain name is nothing but beneficial.  BestOutdoorFurniture.com beats TomsDeals.com.  No one is going to be searching for outdoor furniture using the words “toms deals”, but they will be searching with “outdoor furniture”, even “best outdoor furniture”.

Only use a .com name.  Stay away from .net, .biz, .info and all the other dots if you can help it.  People don’t remember extensions so when they type in your domain name they will be typing your domain name and automatically adding .com to it.  So get found.  Don’t be invisible. 

Make a list of several domain names because the chances of finding something that isn’t already taken is going to be slim.  Oh, and to stay out of legal hot water, do not use trademarked names in your domain name. 

A great example of that is new businesses that come on board at Commission Junction or other affiliate networks frequently have no restrictions on their name.  Then affiliates will go hog wild snapping up domain names with the vendor’s name in them and spend weeks or months promoting and establishing an online presence.  Then sooner or later the vendor modifies its terms and suddenly bans the use of trademarked names.  It’s happened to me more than once.  It’s a knife to the core of your business.   

Hot Buying Tip

• Get your domain name at NameCheap.com. 
• $9.69 for a .com name, but use the coupon code and get it for $8.81.
• They don’t sneak stuff into the shopping cart during checkout like other registrars.
• They have a very easy to use Domain Manager interface.
• NameCheap is a great domain registrar, but don’t buy web hosting there because you pay too much.  Just get a domain name.
• Be sure to enable the free privacy manager on the domain.  It will hide your personal details from spammers.  goDaddy charges $8.99/year for privacy protection.  At NameCheap, it’s free for the first year and renews at only $2.88/year after that. 

Web Hosting

In order for your new domain name to be seen online, you need to have it hosted by a web hosting company.  It pains me to see web hosting companies take advantage of their customers, so I will only recommend companies with outstanding customer service and reliability.  I also wouldn’t recommend something I don’t use myself.

Hot Buying Tip

I have accounts at both of these places and both are very reliable. 

iPage Hosting- Unlimited green hosting with an easy-to-use control panel.  Their “anytime guarantee” is the best in the business.  Customer service is outstanding.  Server response time is super.  Free Carbonite PC backups.  Easy blog installation.

SuperGreen Hosting- Unlimited green hosting with cPanel.  Very reliable.  My WordPress blogs run at lightning speed and customer service is quick and courteous.  Easy blog setup.

I hope you found these tips helpful for getting your business off on the right foot.

You may have heard stories of how some webmasters make a living from their Google Adsense income.  They insert some HTML code into their web pages that hopefully will display ads relative to their content.  When visitors click on the ads, the webmaster earns money for the click.  This could be anywhere from single digit cents to several dollars.  It all depends upon how competitive and costly the keyword bidding gets for the advertisers.

Making money with Adsense is not a project for a newbie marketer.  You need the right tools and you need to be able to follow instructions.  But most importantly, you can’t be a quitter because it doesn’t happen over night.  I will say this right up front, there will be times where you’ll spend time researching and doing everything right, only to find out that a particular niche isn’t as profitable as you had hoped for.  Other times, you may not see any income for months, then suddenly it takes off like a rocket.   

Personally, I was making money with Adsense, but it was months between the minimum $100 earnings before I got a check.  I knew how to build websites and I knew how to get relative Adsense ads to display on my sites.  However, I also knew that I was missing two important pieces to the puzzle. 

1)  How to find the high paying ads. 

2)  How to get the traffic to my sites so the ads got clicked. 

I bought a lot of Adsense ebooks that explained what to do, but none of them explained how to do it because none of those so-called Adsense gurus were giving up their secrets. 

It was frustrating because I already had the skill set to do the job.  All I needed was some guidance on the finer details – the magic fairy dust that transforms it into something profitable.  What I needed was a step-by-step guide, a blueprint, if you will, showing me exactly how it’s done. 

A few months ago I found it by accident.  I had never heard of the guy before.  He’s very secretive about the sites he creates and with good reason.  He’s making a lot of money with them and can’t risk having his Adsense empire destroyed.  I paid the one-time fee, downloaded his course and spent the rest of the day studying it.  Incidentally, it’s not a product you’ll find on ClickBank.  

Having been a computer programmer in a former life, I know what it means to have a well written design document in order to build a solid application.  This was such a document.  It’s exactly what I was looking for.  The holy grail for generating Adsense income.

Finally, get step-by-step instructions to once and for all learn how to make money with Adsense. 

Here are the tools you need

1)  John Xfactor’s Adsense Masters Course – This is THE course.  The glue the puts it all together.  The holy grail of EXACTLY how to get those high paying ads to display on your site and then how to get free traffic to your sites.   

2)  Micro Niche Finder - This is one of the best keyword tools I own when it comes to doing research for Adsense for finding those super high paying keywords with little to no competition.  I have it running in the background right now while I’m writing this and I’m looking at a keyword with a Adwords cost of $23.46 where the strength of the competition is practically ZERO!  Cha-CHING!  Imagine the Adsense payouts from one of those clicks.  The software will also tell you if  the .com, .net, or .org domains available for your newfound keywords.  Having the keywords you’re trying to rank for in your domain name makes it a shorter trip to the top of the SERPS.

3)  NameCheap – I buy all my domains from NameCheap for only $8.81.  They have a free privacy manager called WhoIs Guard for the 1st year.  It renews at only $2.88 yearly.  goDaddy can’t touch NameCheap on pricing.

4)  SuperGreen Web Hosting- I use WordPress to create my websites.  I’ve used web hosts in the past where traditional websites will run ok, but really bogged down when running WordPress.  Not SuperGreen.  It consistently gives me great performance.  iPage Web Hosting is another good one.  Both are reliable, cheap and carbon-neutral, powered by renewable clean energy like wind and solar.

5)  Artisteer- I make all my own WordPress themes.  If you can use a word processor, you can use Artisteer.  It’s a design tool for creating unique and attractive themes for WordPress, Blogger (Blogspot), Joomla, DotNetNuke, Drupal, and HTML templates.  You don’t have to know any code.  I have practically quit building traditional HTML sites.  Why do it when WordPress automatcially does the navigation and layout on its own?  It’s the fastest way to crank out a site.  With a few of my favorite WordPress plugins, I can make sites that look like HTML sites.  Only another experienced developer would be able to tell.

Trying to get more profits? Give these 10 extreme ways to rocket launch your profits. The purpose is to grow your list and you need to use as many of these as you can to both increase your profits and the number of people on your email list.

1. Offer a free subscription to your e-zine. Many marketers are using e-zines to stay engaged with their customers. Remember to continue to add value and not just use your list for selling.

2. Pop up windows on your web site offer an opportunity for people to opt in to your mailing list. They grab the visitor’s attention because they jump right out.

3. Have a discount offer on your ad. People love a good deal. You could offer a percentage discount, dollar discount, buy one get one free discount or any other variation.

4. Use a testimonial on your webpage as well. Social proof is a huge incentive for others. The testimonial should include just enough information so they understand the offer.

5. To get the most from each one of your visitors, ask for the subscription. Add a tell a friend feature and bookmarking to your page. Give them options to spread the word for you. Can you say “free”.

6. Have a contest or free giveaway. You could ask for the best success story in your niche or some other creative. Make the prizes something of interest or value to your visitors. The people who enter will visit more often to see who won. And they may share it with others which leads to visitors as well.

7. If you have some software, offer it up as an incentive to opt in to your list. It could be freeware, shareware, demos etc. there are plenty of useful software program available for free to download, so you do not need your own. For example I have seen BMI calculators on many weight loss sites for free.

8. Offer some form of free online service from your web site. It could be anything from search engine submitting, article writing or linkbuilding. Just make sure it is aomething that your target audience would want or need.

9. Benefits, benefits and more benefits. You can never offer too many of them as justification for the value of your product or service. Whether is make money, lose weight, increase energy, save money, save time or whatever clearly state them for the visitor.

10 Add a message board, forum or chat room to your web site. If people enjoy it, they will revisit your web site.

Any one or combination of these 10 Extreme Ways To Rocket Launch Your Profits tips can assist you to increase your click through and add value for your visitors. The longer you can engage a visitor on your site the better your odds they will return and opt in to your list.

Adding a message board, forum, classified ads or blog to your site is easy within Fantastico in the cPanel control panel of your web hosting account. WebHostingPad uses cPanel. For a limited time you can get 3 years of unlimited web hosting with cPanel for less than the price of 1 year at WebHostingPad.

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Matt Cutts from Google answers a question from Quentin in Vancouver:

“In the search results, Google will often display a snippet appropriate to the specific search query – often disregarding the meta description. Is Google doing away with meta description use like they did with meta keywords? ”

If you’re using a URL shortening service like TinyURL, find out what Google does when it finds one.  Before you pick a redirect service, make sure it does what you want it to do with respect to using 301 redirects.