• WordPress wanted to slim down on redundant coding that had been added in order to utilize PHP 5 techniques
• They wanted to eliminate more coding so that they would have a far more efficient code base

Along with the new WordPress release, however, there have been some other changes that bloggers should know about. We’ll start with:

1. Theme Changes

If you are a regular WordPress user, then you’re well aware that the older Kubrick theme was replaced with a more fresh “Twenty-Ten” theme. Well, a new year has begun and so a new “Twenty-Eleven” theme has been released as well.

Visually, the Twenty-Eleven theme is very similar to the Twenty-Ten theme, but behind the scenes there are some large differences. First, the Twenty-Eleven theme allows you to choose a single or double column layout for blogging inside of the WordPress Admin. Secondly, you also have the option to choose dark or light color schemes. Twenty-Eleven does still allow you to have a custom header image and backgrounds, just as Twenty-Ten did.

2. Less Distractions

WordPress is all about writing, so who wants to have a screen that’s full of different buttons and options and toggles? No one. With 3.2, you have the option of selecting what Mark Jaquith, WordPress’s core developer, calls “Distraction Free Writing.”

To access this new feature, make sure that you are in HTML writing mode. From there, click on the “Full Screen” or the brand new icon for the Distraction Free Writing in the toolbar of the text editor. From there you are presented with a fresh off-white canvas to spill your thoughts and ideas onto. There are some basic tools along the top of the screen, but these tools are to allow for you to carry out basic formatting.

3. The Move To PHP 5.2.4 And MySQL 5.0

One of the big focuses here for releasing WordPress 3.2 was to employ the PHP 5. Though overall this is a good thing, it can wreak havoc for a lot of bloggers and has already caused delays and frustrations for those who were unprepared. As with the adoption of the PHP 5.2.4, WordPress will require that you use MySQL 5.0. Though this isn’t a huge problem for most, and some easy plugins have been created to ensure easy compatibility with WordPress 3.2, some unfortunate users may still be getting headaches over this.

4. A Better Help Menu

WordPress used to be a hands-on learning only environment, meaning that their “Help” pages were lacking a whole lot of actual real help. For those who are new, you can easily find detailed assistance and learn how to use it in no time.

5. Upgrade Enhancements

Remember how long it would take to upgrade WordPress in the past? One would have to agree to the upgrade, and then download an entire package and then apply it over top of the existing version. This took a lot of time and was an area of frustration for many.

The good news is that with the new release there won’t be any lags or delays with each upgrade. The new version has the ability to enable all upgrades so that they will be done in small bite-sized pieces at a time, which makes the process so much faster and so much more efficient.

6. More Focus On The Admin Bar

With the release of WordPress 3.1 we all were introduced to the admin bar. Though with that release it was less than relevant to many, the new release is putting more of a focus on it. The Admin Bar is now being turned into the command central, where any quick actions (such as adding a new post, editing a page, or quickly accessing dashboards) can be done immediately.

7. Bye-Bye, Internet Explorer 6

Not that many users actually utilize the Internet Explorer browser any more, so 6 is no longer being supported in the new release.

8. The File System API

The coding which handles all upgrades and the automatic WordPress plugins has been completely overhauled. Any sort of obsolete or unnecessary coding has been completely eliminated. New “streams” are being utilized (streams were used with PHP 4.3, but they were not as fast) and the PHP requirement now allows for WordPress 3.2 users to do a lot more when it comes to file transferring and writing.

9. It’s Faster

A lot of WordPress users stick with their older version of WordPress because they really see no real value to upgrading. One great reason why you should upgrade is because the new 3.2 release is a lot faster than before. Thanks to the streamlining of the code all over the site, any depreciated functions have been removed from this version and WordPress 3.2 runs a lot more efficiently than earlier versions. So with 3.2 you can expect faster upgrades, faster page loads, and faster plugin additions.

This is even more important for you bloggers as Google is making changes in their organic search engine to include speed and performance in their rankings!

10. How To Fix Two Major Complaints

Most WordPress 3.2 users have two major complaints: they hate the large header size, and they hate that the sidebar is missing from posts.

The good news is that there is a fix for both of them. A plugin can be found on Raygun that will allow you to resize your header immediately. After the installation process is completed, under the “Appearance” tab you will find a new option: “Resize Header.”

As for reestablishing your sidebar in posts, you can go to TricksMommy.com to obtain code that you can ass to your single.php and style.css theme files. Copy your theme folder “twentyelven” by TRP and rename it before you do so, and then under “Appearance” click on “Themes” to activate any copied themes in WordPress.

There are a few bloggers who have disagreed with this and have said that you only need your mind to improve your page rank, but then again, their blogs also are on page 1000 of any site ranking.

You don’t have to spend a ton of cash on SEO tools, either. As matter of fact, you can do it for free! Below is a list of our favorite free SEO tools that you should be using to help give your website a boost in the page rankings.

1. Google Adwords

When it comes to SEO, what we really like about this tool is its keyword feature. With this tool you can find out exactly which keywords are hot and which are not. You can also enter in your own keyword or keyword phrase and see how well it ranks. It will list the competition, the global monthly searches, and the local monthly searches so you can get a feel of just how successful any keyword that you use for your website or blog is going to be.

One drawback is that though this tool is “free”, the price you pay is that Google can harvest information about your website or blog and use it for their own purposes. Granted, much of the purpose is to provide users with a high quality and precise Adwords tool, which you are using for free anyways, so to most it’s not a big deal. Another drawback to the tool is that while it does provide very useful statistical information, it’s not in “real time”. There are a lot of other SEO tools out there that will give you information in real time.

2. SEOmoz

This tool is the best tool for anyone who is a bit wary about allowing Google all access to their website. SEOmoz allows you to check your rankings daily for up to 5 different keywords for free (which adds up to 150 words a month). It also keeps a running archive for you, which will allow you to better keep track of and monitor your website or blog’s success.

You know that the tool has to be good when big companies like Disney and Best Buy are using it. It’s is credited as being one of the most thorough and comprehensive SEO tools on the web. They offer up a ton of great tutorials for anyone from beginner to expert, and you can have a report card generated for your site that tells you just how well every page that is on your site or blog is doing in regards to search engine optimization. Anyone with any level of experience when it comes to SEO will quickly be able to see just where they are going wrong with their optimization efforts, and then find the solution on how to fix the problem.

3. MultiRank Checker

Created by iwebtool.com, there isn’t really a rank checking tool that works any easier than this tool. If you are interested in checking your Google page rank or your Bing page rank, all you have to do is put your domain name or names into the checker.

That’s right, you can check your domains in bulk and not have to go through every single domain name, one at a time. That alone can be a huge time saver if you have multiple sites on the web. You receive a results table at the end that you can copy and paste and keep for future reference.

4. Fiddler

Don’t even tempt the idea of paying a web developer a ton of money to try to find any problems that you may be having with your website. Use the free application, Fiddler, first to debug your site. Fiddler works in such a way that it is able to capture all HTTP traffic that is coming through your site and it will log it for you to review. It’s also able to “fiddle” with the HTTP traffic while it is being sent back to you.

The newer version of Fiddler, Fiddler2, goes beyond that and now offers additional support for dealing with HTTPS traffic. It, too, is a free download that you can easily find on the web and begin using immediately.

5. Overture Keyword Selector Tool

Overture Keyword Selector Tool is another tool that can at least partially replace Google Adwords if you aren’t a bit fan of Google. The nice thing about Overture is that it is pretty darn easy to use. This site, run by Yahoo!, only requires for you to enter in a keyword or keyword phrase it will then give you a list of other keywords that are more searchable and that will help your site rank higher than if you were to use the keyword you entered.

For example, let’s say you entered in the keyword “free webhosting”. The tool will give you a list of the top searches of keywords related to yours which rank higher. So you entering in “free webhosting” may return a list of other top ranked keywords like “web hosting”, “cheap web hosting”, and “affordable web hosting”. It’s telling you to consider using these keywords beyond the one you entered as more people are searching those targeted words.

Another benefit of this tool is exclusive to anyone who is running a PPC or pay per click campaign on Google. If you run Overture and if you have a PPC campaign on Yahoo!, then you will be able to see the number of impressions you should receive with your ad based on the keyword that you selected. Bear in mind that this data is only reliable for Yahoo! Searches and sites, and not other sites like Google.

If you don’t want to waste a ton of time trying to find the right website, try some of our suggested links below.

1. CreateBlog.com

If you’re looking for options, CreateBlog.com is where you want to go. With close to 10,000 to choose from, you can find virtually anything on this site that you may be looking for.

As with a lot of sites for blog backgrounds, this one unfortunately still lists a ton of layouts for Myspace, which really is seldom used by anyone any more. Half of the layouts are devoted to Myspace, but you can also find a lot of layouts for other ones like Blogger, CreateBlog, Livejournal, website templates, and even some Xanga and Friendster layouts. Though there’s nothing particularly exceptional about this site or most of the layouts they offer, the website is easy to navigate and there are a whole lot of options to choose from.

2. Pimp-My-Profile.com

Pimp-My-Profile.com is another site which disappointingly seems to favor Myspace themes, however a lot of different layouts can be found for other sites such as Blogger and Twitter. The site also features a decent layout editor, though there have been complaints about actually having the layouts approved after they are generated. In addition to that, a complaint of lagging customer service at pimp-my-profile.com is quite common, meaning that if you bother asking about why your profile isn’t showing up, you may very well never get an answer.

Apart from those few negative points, there are a wide range with many different themes available on the site. From Animals to Celebrities to Movies/Music/TV to Stripes and Shapes, there’s a good chance that you will find what you’re looking for if you have a Myspace, Blogger, Tumblr or Facebook account. There are varying degrees of themes on the site, but you will be able to find at least one or two that you would like for your blog.

3. The Cutest Blog on the Block

Now here’s a site that most people have yet to check out, The Cutest Blog on the Block. The main idea behind this site is to make your blog look just like a book. There are not only backgrounds, there are also bug banners, animations, custom designs, accessories, and other extras that you can add on.

• WordPress
• Blogger
• Twitter
• Blogspot
• Myspace

This website is lacking a larger variety, but there are some that are visually appealing.

4. Hot Bliggity Blog

Hot Bliggity Blog was started by a blogger who just wasn’t satisfied with the different background options that were available in Christmas 2008. So what did she do? She decided not to settle for some mediocre background and started her own website featuring ones that she liked.

This website offers quite a few nice ones. They aren’t overly exciting, and there isn’t a wide variety of them available, but it’s a good site for anyone who is looking for appealing and quality web design.

5. Shabbyblogs.com

With 9 pages full of themes, chance are that you will find one that you like on shabbyblogs.com. You can find a good handful of picturesque themes, a lot of unique ones, several of the more standard pattern and color designs, and some that you absolutely will not find any where else.

The search function on this site is pretty good, allowing you to search by size (wide or standard), peruse through a number of different styles, and you can even reduce your search by color. Though this isn’t the best one-stop shop, it certainly has some quality unique ones that are the right fit for the right blog.

6. BlogBlings

Though limited on selection, BlogBlings has a lot of variations of the same basic designs. On the homepage for blogblings.com, you can preview a number of blogs as well as quickly snag the coding for both HTML and 3 column or wide blogs, which is a nice feature.

There are some header options available on the site, and again the selection is fairly limited but they are of great quality.

7. Dotty Dot Dot

What one can immediately appreciate about this site is just how easy it is to find what you want at Dotty Dot Dot. Apart from a lot of tabs along the top of the page that offer you what you want, there is also a side bar that lists all of the different backgrounds by genre, color, and so on.

The main page will show off a lot of different ones, as well as the HTML coding for each. You are given a zoomed-in view of each design, and two to three other designs that you may also like which are similar to the one displayed are shown under the first one.

The selections are particularly astounding or unique, but you can find something that you need quickly, easily and for free in a very short amount of time.

8. Blogaholic

If you’re looking for a bit more unique and specialized designs, Blogaholic is the site to go to for web design. You can choose backgrounds based on your blog being 2 columns or 3 columns, and there are a good handful of different designs available. The coding is easily accessed, and instructions on how to apply the backgrounds to your blog are provided.

Using sketchy methods to market your products online could keep you from making any profits. Even if you’re not using black hat methods to market your products, there are certain techniques that never work in Internet marketing. If you are guilty of these methods, you should start using organic SEO and other forms of marketing to sell your products.

Here are the top 5 Internet marketing techniques that never work.

1. Image Searches

Image searches are a great way to generate traffic to your websiteor blog, but it’s not going to convert. If you are submitting images to Google or Yahoo, you are probably getting some great traffic, however, the traffic is just coming for the picture. When the reader clicks on your image, they will get a small window with the image displayed. Once they have the window open they can click on the link to your website, but it’s not guaranteed.

Furthermore, this isn’t targeted traffic. Yes, it’s targeted for your niche based on an image search, but not for converting it into a sale.

2. Keyword Spamming

Keywords are one of the best ways to get traffic to your site. However, keyword spamming is one of the best ways to get blackballed by Google and other search engines. Keyword spamming is basically stuffing your content with an insane keyword density. Google and other search engines like content to have a keyword density around 3-8 percent.

If you are going anywhere above this percentage, you could be at risk of getting your content flagged as spam. Use a keyword density tool to help you determine the keyword density in your blog posts and articles. Make sure that you stick around the 2-8 percent for successful traffic.

3. IM Auto-Responders

This was a method that was primarily used with online dating sites. When it was first implemented, Internet marketers were making a killing. Basically, they would put a post on Craigslist in the personals section and leave their IM client running.

They would have an auto-responder installed on the IM client with a script for when somebody responded to their ad. They would basically say that they had pictures on an online dating site to get the person to sign up. This gave them a lead commission for the site and it worked really well. This has been dead for a long time. If you are using IM auto-responders, you should completely delete the program from your computer.

4. Time Restraints

How many times have you seen a website that is offering you a deal for the next hour? “Buy our product in the next hour and you’ll get our special price!” Although this might work with television, it doesn’t work on the Internet.

People know that you’ve just installed a countdown script to try to entice them into buying the product. They also know that if they come back to your site in a couple of days the countdown will start over. This is a sketchy method that your readers will see right through. Focus on soft sell copywriting instead of giving them a fake countdown script.

5. Free Gifts

Everybody loves a free gift, but when you’re offering free gifts that nobody wants you’re going to come off as unprofessional. The worst cases of the free gift involve rehashed versions of other products. These products are usually compilations of Ezine articles or other content that you can find online.

Giving your readers real products as free gifts is the best way to entice them to buy from you. Offering a free gift is a good method, but you have to make sure that the free gifts are worth their investment. The thought that any free will work isn’t the mindset you should have in your Internet marketing. If you’re offering bad free gifts you might as well not offer any at all.

Internet marketing is an ever-changing field. When you are using bad methods to try to bring in sales, you could be costing yourself traffic and readers. People remember the sites that come off as unprofessional. Don’t fall into the trap of bad marketing techniques just because they are easy to implement into your site. Most of these methods will not only come off as amateur, they will come off as unethical to your readers. Do the work and you should see a great amount of traffic and conversions from the products that you are selling.

Research has shown time and time again that people prefer to watch videos to reading a page of text too, so you’ll be able to get your message out to more people too. Here’s another benefit to video marketing: any one that you post to the web can be shared amongst the various social networks out there. This sharing is exactly what will make just any plain old video made for marketing or promoting your blog go viral. As long as the one that you put out there provides a link back to your blog in the description of the video, you will see a huge increase in the number of visitors that you will have to your site.

TIP: Top internet marketing firms have now chosen to use video marketing as their number one method when it comes to promoting companies, products and services online.

How To Create A Video

Bloggers have this misconception that it takes a lot of work and money to be able to create a videos that have the potential of going viral.

Well, we’re here to tell you that this could not be any less true. As a matter of fact, a lot of the ones that have gone viral were absolutely free for the user to create! Viral videos can be of Superbowl commercial quality, or they can be as simple as using a webcam attached to your computer.

When creating videos, you can do two things:

• You can be the star of your videos! This is great if you are giving a product review or if you want to talk about your experience when using a particular product or service. Having your face on the camera is going to be a huge benefit to your blog. It will give your blog a real human element, and it will help your visitors or customers come to trust you and therefore become more loyal to your product, brand, or opinion.
• If you’re a bit camera shy, you can still produce  high quality promotional videos. You can create a PowerPoint style slide presentation and insert an audio clip of you speaking in the background about a product, service or your blog. If you include a catchy song in the background (one tat you are authorized to use, of course) and video or picture of a product or service you are reviewing, you can still captivate your audience.

You don’t need a lot when it comes to materials to create viral videos. Just having a handheld camera is probably the one and only tool that is required. Make sure that when the videos are taken there is good lighting so that people can see what’s going on, and aim to keep it at around 2 minutes or less. Anything beyond 2 minutes and people tend to wander off to the next thing that grabs their attention.

How To Get Your Video Out There

Once your video is complete, it’s time to start spreading it out on the web. Start off by uploading it to the internet by using several online video upload services so that the whole world can find it. Here is a quick list of the sites you should submit it to:

• YouTube
• Hulu
• Google Videos
• Dailymotion
• Metacafe

If you don’t already have a fan page on Facebook or a Twitter account for your blog, now is the time to create one. You can upload your videos directly to social media websites and start spreading the word there, too. If your videos are good enough, then your friends and fans will start “sharing” and “retweeting” it, which is the beginning of you video going viral!

TIP: When you post your videos to social media sites, make sure that you always provide an enticing link back to your blog along with the link to your video. Suggest to viewers that they should check out your blog and include information on a special deal (like 20% or free shipping) on the product or service that you are reviewing. This is a great advertising technique that will definitely boost your blog’s traffic!

Additional Viral Video Tips

If your first video doesn’t get a whole lot of hits, don’t worry about it. It will take some time for you to figure out just what exactly people want, and what they don’t want. It may not even be until your 20th video that you are able to go viral with it or start to see an influx of traffic to your site.

Don’t give up. Continue to make videos regularly.

When you make your videos, they have to be original. If your video is a copy of another one that already exists on the web, you can be sure that someone who will view your videos will call you out on it, which will totally destroy you and your blog’s credibility. Not only that, but chances are that your videos will be removed from the video hosting site too.

You also need to come up with a great title that’s going to capture your audience’s attention. This may be harder than you think. Your title can be outlandish or it can be a bit of a teaser. Use a free keyword searching tool to find out which keywords are doing well in your niche and this can help your rankings in search engines.

If you are having a hard time getting any views, then why not visit other high traffic blogs and post a video comment or a video response to their blog entry? Provide a link back to your blog so that visitors who frequent this high traffic blog can swing by and check you out, too.

1. Target The Right Keywords

You have to know what keywords you’re targeting so that the search engines know how to categorize your blog. You want the search engines to rank you for the most popular keywords in your niche – meaning that if you have a site about training puppies, people can find your site in the first few pages of a Google search when they type in the popular keyword “puppy training.”

Identify the top 10 keywords you’re targeting. It’s important to know how much potential traffic is available for the keyword phrases that you’re targeting. Otherwise, you may find yourself disappointed. Your post may be ranked #1 for a term that only gets 10 searches per day. It’s better to be in the top 10 for a stronger keyword or keyword phrase.

2. Use Back Links

Getting links from high ranking (PR3 and above) sites in your niche is critical. Reach out to other blogs and website owners to  see if they’ll link to you or let you write guest posts with links back to your site.

Social media is excellent for getting these types of links! Write good content that people want to share and make sure that you’re publishing it on the top social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

3. Use WordPress SEO Plugins

There are two plugins that you must have on your blog for SEO! These are easy to use and will help fine tune your site’s SEO so the search engines can find you more easily.

All In One SEO - Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization). The free version works just fine – haven’t found a reason to upgrade to the pro version.

Scribe SEO – Think of it as a content optimization assistant – that analyzes web pages, blog posts, and online press releases at the click of a button. It’s the only one that we’ve found that let’s you analyze your content BEFORE it goes live and it’s a great tool to get you in the habit of writing both for people AND for the search engines.

We run the Scribe SEO Analysis on every post we write.

Be Patient – Getting Free Search Engine Traffic Takes Time

It may take at least 4 months to start seeing regular traffic from the search engines. Google especially is like a stuck up dog – it’ll sniff your yard, go away, come back, mark the territory, come back again, and eventually, your blog will be a regular stop for Google’s crawlers – but it doesn’t happen overnight. Be patient and let the tools work for you. As long as you’re putting up valuable content that people want to read and using highly searched keywords within your niche, it will happen!

One of the best ways to make some extra cash either on the side, or to make enough to quit your full-time job, is to simply set up a landing page. If you have a blog or are starting up an affiliate marketing campaign, this is definitely a “must.”

What Is A Landing Page?

A landing page, which is also commonly referred to as a “squeeze” page or a “capture” page, is really any page that traffic is directed to on a website which will then try to prompt a particular action. A few different examples of landing pages include:

• Internet traffic is directed from your blog post or a link on a sidebar to a landing page that is selling affiliate products
• Internet traffic is sent from a link that the clicked to a page that is prompting them to purchase something
• Internet traffic is sent from a banner advertising that they clicked to a landing page that is designed for that particular target audience (i.e. if the banner ad was about doggie daycare, it is to be assumed that whoever clicked it is looking for doggie daycare. The landing page would then be related to that)

The goal of a landing page is really to obtain personal information on whoever is coming through your site. You may ask for an email address on a landing page, or a name and an email address. Some landing pages ask for phone numbers and addresses, though people are far less likely to offer up that information. The benefit of this is that when a person who provided you their email address leaves your website, you then have the ability to contact them again. You can send them follow-up emails, daily specials, deals… you can send them whatever you choose and boost your potential sales as a result.

How To Write The Best Landing Page

The problem with a lot of landing pages out there is that the quality of the writing is lacking. There are some things that you should do when you write a landing page to ensure it is successful. First, provide a clear call to action. Whether you use hot linked text or graphic buttons doesn’t matter. The text on your page needs to tell your reader what they have to do to get in on whatever it is your landing page is about. Try to add in a call to action at least 3 times in a landing page so that you are sure that they got the message.

The headline of your landing page should also refer to where your visitor just came from. Make sure that you always write in the second person (which means using “you” and “your”) and make sure that the message is clear and persuasive. Don’t try to be clever, don’t try to be overly creative – now is not the time. Be direct, be clear, and you will have better results.

TIP: When it comes to writing your landing page, you can write your copy to be as long as you want. Just keep in mind that it should be as concise as possible and to keep it tight. As a general rule of thumb, have a longer copy when you want to sell something and close the sale, and have a shorter copy for any sort of newsletter or subscription sign-up (or something of no monetary value).

All of your most important points should be at the beginning of each paragraph, and in bullet points. Keep in mind that visitors are just skimming your page and not looking at it word for word. Having things like bullet points and white space will help you draw your customers’ eyes to exactly where you want them to be.

Oh yeah, and keep that first paragraph short. 1-2 lines is just enough to engage them rather than bore or overwhelm them.

How To Design The Best Landing Page

Not sure how to design your landing page? Not a problem. Start scoping out what your competitors are up to. Make note of what you like and what you don’t. Write it all down and start thinking about what you could use for yours. Think of any simple revisions that you may want to make.

One thing that we have to stress is that when it comes to your landing page, remove all visual clutter. This includes navigational bars and any links to other sections of your site. Your goal is to have the reader focused on your writing and your writing only. Their eyes should not be tempted to wander off to a flashing graphic in the sidebar.

On that note, any critical landing page elements should be placed in the upper 300 pixels of the page. Why? Because people want information quick and immediately. Most people who are just skimming through your site are only going to look at the top half of the page and won’t even bother to scroll down. So make sure that you get right to the point straight away without having to make any visitors do any “work.”

It’s also a good idea to use standard conventions when creating your landing page. For example, if you have any links, underline them. Allow them to be “blue,” this is what people expect. Be clear, be descriptive, and make sure that any visitor looking at the link will understand why it’s there.

Lastly, make sure your page loads quickly. Having a page that doesn’t load quickly enough will have them clicking that “x” in the upper right-hand corner faster than anything else. This means keep the graphics to a minimum and only optimize those which are essential.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t start your own web hosting company; but before you dive right on in, you need to educate yourself on this type of business and then decide if it’s for you.

What To Consider Before Opening A Web Hosting Business

Let’s start with the first most common misconception about the business: because there are control panels, you don’t need to have a lot of technical knowledge. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Control panels will make some tasks easier, sure, but you still need to know how to actually trouble shoot.

The money also isn’t as easy as some may make it seem. First and foremost, it’s a saturated market, so you must have something to offer to actually make any cash. This means that you have to be able to do your job, and you should also have great customer service. Customer service is what will make or break your business.

You also have to think about how much you have to spend on the server. So let’s say the server has 80GB of hard disk space. You pay maybe $100 a month for it, and then sell off in 20MB chunks for $10 each. Since 1 GB equates to being 1024MB in space, you can make decent money but again, you must have great service in order to attract any attention.

This means working well over 8 hours a day. As a matter of fact, if you do not have a partner with you in the business, you can easily be sitting at your computer and working away for 15 hours a day. So really, you’re not making a whole lot considering how much of your day is being spent on it.

Before you go into your own web hosting business, think about the above points seriously and then come up with a solid business plan before jumping into it. You’ll be able to see how much money you will actually be making off of the business, and see if you may be just running yourself into a deficit in the long run.

Deciding On The Specifics

So you’ve decided that web hosting is for you. Great! Now there are some things that you will need to keep track of and think about, regardless as to whether you are building your own infrastructure or using a hosting service. We’ll go over these in brief detail:

Terms of Service (TOS): This is the service level agreement. You will have to decide what is a fair terms of service for both you and your client. You may want to check out some message boards on web hosting talk forums and threads to see what are reasonable terms at around the time and date you plan on starting your online business.

Pricing: All prices should be ones that people can afford, but you don’t want to make your prices so low just to have some sort of competitive edge (you will definitely be losing money if that’s part of your business plan). Focus more on advertising the fact that you have an available, uncluttered server and that you also have great customer service.

Billing: You may want to request for payment of services in advance. Think of subscribing to a third-party merchant service to help keep your finances in order a well. Trying to keep numbers in a spreadsheet on your computer isn’t going to cut it.

Some other things that you will have to keep track of include:

• You will need to monitor your servers religiously. If a server goes down, you need to know about it. Try a program like Alertra to help monitor things
• Always backup. Even when you haven’t had a server go down in ages, keep backing up so that no data is lost.
• Maintain a good email list so that you can keep your clients in the loop about scheduled or unscheduled service interruptions or outages. It’s best to keep the email lit off of your own servers.
• Problem customers will happen. This is also another good idea to have a fair but not too cheap pricing scheme. If you’re too affordable, then someone with little to no knowledge will probably sign up because $1 a month is nothing to them. Think about also including in the TOS that you can terminate service at any time.
• If you are building your own infrastructure, then you must keep your servers up to date with the latest security patches.

Web Hosting Options: Building Your Own Infrastructure

So you’ve decided that web hosting is for you. Great! There are a lot of great advantages to building your very own infrastructure for your web hosting company, the most obvious being that if you built it, you are in complete control. You can choose the hardware, operating systems, the database and a number of other tools. Not using a web hosting company also mean that you won’t have to learn their web hosting procedures, and you probably won’t have to pay any extra fees for bandwidth use or hard disc storage space.

Web Hosting Options: Using A Web Hosting Service

You don’t necessarily need to turn your nose up at hosting services, such as HostGator. If you have less tech knowledge but still want to open up your own web hosting company, this is probably the best way to go. You get a fast Internet connection, and the start-up costs are pretty low and reasonable. Technical support is often offered for free, and you only need to buy into the services that you need and can add-on as you grow.

The only thing about these hosting sites is that you are totally limited to the type of hardware and software options that they offer. Your monthly fees may also change from time to time, depending on how many customers you have visit your site. Whatever you do, make sure that you do your research prior to choosing any particular web hosting service.

If you want your blog to be seen as exceptional, if you want to make sure that your blogs are getting read, and if you want repeat readers, these five tips are the essentials that will make sure that your blog is a success.

1. Be Consistent

Write whenever possible. But keep in mind that whenever possible sometimes comes tomorrow and tomorrow is the worst possible day because it never happens. You want to write consistently. Your readers expect consistently and the search engines expect consistently so do not do it for 7 days in a row and then not for three months. You are much better off doing it twice a week or three times a week. Start at once a week and then move up from there. If you do feel inspired to write seven posts in one day, schedule them out so that it looks consistent.

2. Stay Up To Date

If you want to be a good writer you need to be up to date in your topic and niche. Read trade journals, magazines, stay up to date with the news, or to training or seminars; whatever you need to do to do to truly be an expert in your field and it will come through in your writing.

3. Avoid Being Boring

Be interesting and let your personality come through, if you are putting people to sleep it is not going to do you any favors. Keep in interesting, keep it fun – adding a little humor is ok. If you are one of those people that tends to be extremely wordy and flowery and find yourself writing 2,000 word articles you need to go back through that article and take out everything that is not absolutely necessary because if there are too many words people get lost.

4. Be Concise

Nothing is more of a turn off than visiting a website or a blog that has huge blocks of text glaring back at the reader. A simple way to avoid annoying and inducing a headache for the reader is to keep your blog limited to short and concise paragraphs. This is important for two reasons:

• Readers like to skim, and short paragraphs allow their eyes to skim the page and find the information far easier than if they were to scrounge through a large, bulky paragraph
• Blogs have to be visually appealing, too. Having short paragraphs provides your readers “visual relief.” No one likes a website loaded down with text!

If you are making some important points in your text and you know that your target readers are skim readers, you can further draw attention to these points through some basic methods, like using bold text, italicized text, and highlighting text. Make sure you break up text by using things like bullet points and numbers, and make sure that you also learn how or have the ability to include pictures to go along with your blogs. Using images along with text also gives peoples’ eyes a break from reading, so try mixing it up from time to time.

5. Check Your Work

You do not want to look stupid after you have done all this great work. Use the tools available to spell check your work before you publish.

Additional Writing Tips

A. It’s All About Your Tone

Make sure that your blog “voice” is human and conversational. You also want to make sure that your blog “voice” actually matches the niche and the audience you are writing for. A lot of blog owners know that they have to be conversational in their blogs, but a lot don’t actually bother to find out who their “target market” or readers are. Your blog has to be written in a way that the majority of those who are coming to your blog will appreciate.

If you are just starting a blog, you need to think about:

• Who is going to want to read what you write?
• Why are they going to want to read your blog?
• What sort of goals do you have for your blog? Is it for personal reasons? Affiliate marketing? Do you have your own company/business that you will be using this blog for?
• What expectations is your audience going to have for your blog?

B. Be Honest

As touched upon briefly in point #1, you have to be honest when you wrote. If you love something, say so. But if you hate a product that you may be reviewing, for example, make sure you say so too. Make points about what you love and what you hate. Don’t skirt around issues, and try not to leave anything in the “gray.” People come to blogs for honestly and for a clear decision, not to be further confused

C. Give Credit Where Credit Is Due

One of the worst things that someone can do with their blog is stealing content, plagiarizing, or copyrighting material from the web. There are a lot of bogus bloggers out there whose only purpose is to steal content from other hard and honest bloggers. Never, ever steal or use any material that’s either on the web or “in real life” without giving credit.

To keep yourself from potentially stealing material – which can even happen unintentionally – if you find anything elsewhere that didn’t come right off of the top of your head, then provide a link to the source. Reference your information. Acknowledging where a piece of information is from doesn’t make you seem all the less credible. In fact, it will only further support any comment or argument that you may have, so don’t be afraid to do it.

D. Avoid “Over” Linking

You’ve probably seen these blogs, the ones where people just link to other peoples’ content all day long. While blogging does take a lot of time and effort, that time and effort is so worth it when compared to constant links. No reader wants to be stuck constantly clicking on links that source back to other information and which is not explained in your blog content. It’s your job to put things together, to make it all make sense, and package it in a well written, well thought out piece that your followers will appreciate and enjoy.

If you’re just getting started, this may seem a bit overwhelming. After all, when it comes to marketing on the web, there are a ton of different choices you can make on how to run your campaign. We’ve listed some of the more effective ways for internet marketing below, but we must stress that not every business is the same. You need to monitor and keep track of how well the campaign’s doing and adjust accordingly. Using a tool like Google Analytics and GetClicky will help you keep track of a number of different things that will help you determine the success of your internet marketing campaign.

1. Video Marketing

The best way to give your business a real boost is to start up a video marketing campaign. Think about it: when you actually see the face of someone behind an online business, you immediately feel more connected to the brand and the product. You feel as if they’re more trustworthy. Plus, if you actually are able to see the product or the service in action, you feel more assured in your choice for buying that product or service than if you were to look at a flat image on the screen.

Time and time again video marketing has shown that it will help you increase your conversion rates. But even if you aren’t selling anything on your website, having videos will help build trust with your visitors and regular followers. People also tend to prefer watching a video over reading text, so you can get your message out faster and reach a broader audience.

2. Blogging

When people start up a blog, they see themselves as a professional when it comes to whatever niche they are blogging about. But it’s not only you who sees you as a professional. Other people who visit your blog will come to see you as an expert in your niche topic as well. People trust experts, so if you make suggestions that they view, check out or even eventually purchase an item that you recommend, they will be more likely to do so.

Blogs are also a great way to direct people to other sites related to your business, such as the company website and to your social media websites, like Facebook and Twitter. Just make sure that you update your blog regularly with fresh content (there should be a new post at least 3-5 days a week). If you start to run a bit dry on content, ask someone to guest blog on your site and you can guest blog on theirs. There is a mutual benefit in this. The host will get fresh content, and the guest blogger will receive a backlink from the host, thus giving them an SEO boost.

3. Social Medial Marketing

Have an online business? Then you need to have a Twitter and a Facebook account for social media marketing. You can also consider opening up accounts on sites like Google Plus and LinkedIn too. Search engines are putting more and more emphasis on how popular links that are shared through social media outlets when it comes to SEO. It’s become a form of “link building”, which will definitely increase your website’s ranking in search engines.

But here’s the tricky part: how do you get people to share links that you post that are related to your business? The challenge that most businesses face is learning how to create content that is of value and therefore worthy of being shared. Twitter and Facebook are very different social media platforms too, each requiring a different technique. Try to entice the viewer with a great offer (50% off!), put in a call to action (Only until midnight EST!) and then include a link (for Twitter, there are tools that will give you a “tiny URL” so that you take up less character space).

4. Pay Per Click (PPC)

Pay per click has been around longer than most of these other marketing strategies. It’s still incredibly relevant in that it helps create awareness about your company, product or service, and it does produce high quality, targeted leads.

When you start with a pay per click campaign, you want to keep your target audience in mind. What do they like? What is their age demographic? Use jargon and images that you think would appeal to your target market.

Pay per click is also highly valuable in that it will help you determine which keywords bring in the most traffic to your site. Not sure which keywords are worth using? Don’t take a guess at it. Use tools like the Google Keyword tool to help figure it out. And as always, monitor, monitor, monitor! Keep track of how successful or unsuccessful your campaign is. Be prepared to change it up from time to time.

5. Mobile Marketing

Almost everyone has a smartphone these days. If you want to stay relevant and on top of the Internet marketing trend, then you have to appeal to mobile marketing as well. This means using QR codes, social media, and SMS or text messaging marketing. Get peoples’ phone numbers and send them deals directly to their phone in the form of a text message!

Create an app for your business that will make shopping online with you and breeze. Release video and audio content online so that those who are on a smartphone can easily put on their headphones and watch and listen while they’re on the go. Mobile is the way of the future, so if you want to make it big with Internet marketing, start exploring your mobile marketing options too.