I am always trying to keep up with the latest whiz bang kind of stuff as far as social media goes but sometimes there is an easier way and a more simple way and having a Twitter niche strategy really helps for each of your niches.

I have a lot of sites and niches that I manage as a lot of marketers do and a few months ago I made a twitter account for each of my major sites.

This in itself is a great idea since trying to keep up with all of the players in each market can be tough using twitter makes it easy by having lots of people in one place and just by following you can see the updates from everyone. The trouble is Twitter can be a time suck if you do not have a Twitter niche strategy for posting. You will end up reading a lot of useless info.

Here is my Twitter Niche strategy step by step

1. Have a website in the niche. You decide on your niches, I decide on mine. As long as there are people there is a reason for a Twitter niche strategy and integration.

2. Create a Twitter account (free) and find the most important people in the niche and follow them (you must know who they are don’t you?) Otherwise find out or do a twitter search for the keywords in the niche. Make sure that you have a full enough bio as well as your niche website in your bio even though it is no follow it is people seeing this not just search engines.

3. Make a few updates (tweets) a day. Just adding tips but not selling. You need to build trust and message and follower numbers without being an affiliate link spammer. It is a good idea to retweet the good tweets from others that you see though. It will build respect amongst those following you and really adds value.

4. Create an account on Hootsuite (also free). This site allows you to follow everyones updates but more importantly you can add all of your Twitter account and then add a bookmarklet that will let you easily add updates to any one or several of your accounts at once and it even includes tracking of how many clicks to your links that you tweet. This is critical to your Twitter niche strategy to keep you tweeting quickly and easily.

5. Post to Twitter with Hootlet. With my Hootlet in my Firefox toolbar I go to Google Reader and as I read articles that are interesting to the niche I open the link in a new tab and then hit the Hootlet icon and add my view to the link, pick the account and hit send. The great thing about this is that it is fast and easy way to send links and it also has it’s own URL shortener. I do this twice a day for each of my accounts just so that I stay current with my niches on Twitter.

6. Tweet my WordPress Posts. My blogs are all WordPress so I have added Twitter Tools by Crowd Favorite to make sure that all of my new posts go to Twitter.

7. Blackberry or Outlook email to Twitter. I have created an email address on my Blackberry to my main Twitter account using TwitterMail (free as well) as well as to Twitpic (signup for free and go to settings–>mobile) so that I can post status updates or pics on the go through email. This just keeps my updating when the thought strikes.

Why have a Twitter niche strategy?

I like Twitter a lot and this is why I have built this Twitter niche strategy over the last year or so. I like that there is a real one to one kind of interaction whenever you want although Facebook is still a bit better for this. I use Twitter extensively and with my processes above it really does not take a lot of time to do updates because I have automated a lot as I have gone along. Remember always with Twitter that even though you are broadcasting you need to have to always be adding value. If you are thinking always of value then it will not take long to be seen as an authority in your niche but you need a Twitter niche strategy or you will waste way to much time.

But is unlimited bandwidth hosting really unlimited? The answer, of course, is no. Hosting companies have huge banks of servers and massive quantities of fiber optic cables to provided internet access for the sites that are stored on their servers, but all of these things have physical limits.

How Internet Hosting Works

The internet is not restricted to one location but websites must have a physical location. They are not floating around in space. That is what web hosting means: providing storage space for websites and the cables etc that are needed to connect them with the rest of the internet.

So hosting companies are limited to the amount of capacity that they have. And given that they probably have thousands of customers, many of them with a large number of sites, then clearly each site and each customer must have limits too.

Something you will notice if you compare shared unlimited bandwidth hosting deals with the more expensive reseller or VPS packages, is that the reseller and VPS offers have limits. It seems crazy that you can be paying 5 to 10 times as much for a reseller or VPS deal that has limits, when you can get unlimited bandwidth hosting for so cheap.

The reason for this is that the limits on reseller and VPS hosting packages are real and specified. The limits on shared hosting packages can be varied depending on what other customers are doing. If you buy a VPS, you have that space and that bandwidth and nobody else can use it. Your sites will never run slow because somebody else is using a lot of bandwidth.

Shared unlimited bandwidth hosting

On a shared unlimited bandwidth hosting package, one the other hand, your sites will be stored on a shared server with one IP address that is common to other customers. So in fact you cannot use all of the hosting company’s servers. You cannot even use the whole of that one server, because other customers will need space too. All of this is hidden in a ‘fair usage’ clause in the company’s terms of service.

Unlimited bandwidth hosting packages are offered on the assumption that most customers will not use much bandwidth at all. Taking all of the customers together, each customer’s sites will have peaks and troughs that will even out against other customers’ needs. It’s a little like airlines double booking a few seats each time because they know that some people will not show up.

Getting More Bandwidth – unlimited bandwidth hosting

So what happens if you do need a lot of bandwidth? Check the fine print for your own hosting company, but you will probably find that you are asked to upgrade to a more expensive package pretty fast. This will happen if you are trying to store a lot of pictures, offering audio or video on your sites, or if your site becomes very popular and has a lot of visitors. As soon as your sites are taking up a lot of space or consuming enough bandwidth to make things difficult for other customers, you can expect to receive a polite email from your hosts making it clear that their unlimited bandwidth hosting is not available to customers who really need a lot!

Free Google web hosting is great if you want to put up a small website such as a personal site or a starter website for a church, club, community group or small business. They have plenty of templates that you can choose from, making it easy to start your own website if you are new to all of this.

Google Web Hosting Templates

The Google Web Hosting templates are imaginative and well designed. They include different features: for example the Project Wiki template allows members of a team to access and update the site easily, so that all members of your team or group can contribute. You can also include a calendar for your big events which has many uses for a project or sports team website.

Another Google web hosting template is the Classroom site template which allows a teacher to post information for students and parents. For example you can post information about upcoming field trips, all the details of assignments that are due, and a lot of other information which you would otherwise have to hand out to kids or parents. There is also a contact form so that parents and students can easily email you.

Google Web Hosting for Business

Other Google Web Hosting templates include the company intranet (internal website for a business) which has a more business-like design, as you would expect. Again there is a calendar for upcoming events and a section for news. There is also a family site template with a more informal design and plenty of space for posting photos.

Google Web Hosting Storage is secure and you can choose to make your site public (so that it is viewable by anybody in the world with an internet connection) or private, so that you can choose who to give access to.

Like most free web hosting services, there are limits on what you can do with a free Google web hosting account. This is not something that you would use for ecommerce sites with a shopping cart, or where you could store huge video downloads, etc. It is mainly designed for small personal or group sites.

Google Web Hosting – Premier Edition

If you need to upgrade, there is a Premier Edition of Google web hosting that gives you access to 10GB of storage, which will be enough for most sites. You can also have email storage and free voice calls through your Google Apps Premier Edition account.

If you are likely to want to develop many sites or offer a commercial service there are advantages to owning your own domain. You can do that through Google Apps which allows you to point your Google site design at your own domain.

If you choose to use the free service, to some extent you are at the mercy of Google. If they have objections to your site, they could close it down. Of course, this is not likely to be a problem if you have a site that is legal and ethical. However it is something to consider before you commit to using any free hosting service such as Google web hosting.

For example, you will usually find that dedicated Windows hosting deals are more expensive than their Linux counterparts. Even where a web host offers both options, there will usually be a higher price for the Windows server.

Why Is Windows Hosting More Expensive?

The main reason for this is that Linux is free, open source software while Windows is strictly licensed by Microsoft. In the same way, many of the services that run on Linux servers such as PHP based applications are either free or cheaper than their asp.net alternatives for Windows.

However, most PHP applications will run on Windows servers. On the other hand, if you want to build sites and applications based around Windows software such as ASP, .net programs, or an Access database, you will probably be better off with dedicated Windows hosting.

So where can you go for Windows dedicated hosting? If you are going to simply rent a server and manage it yourself, including managing the operating system, you should be able to install Windows on any server. However, most people looking for dedicated Windows hosting want some kind of a managed plan where the operating system is already installed.

In fact, in many cases, when you take up a managed hosting plan for your dedicated server then you will have everything up to a web based control panel provided for you. However, there are no industry standards to define what ‘managed hosting’ means, so it can be interpreted differently by individual hosting companies. Read the fine print or ask the question before you sign up.

Liquid Web Hosting Packages

LiquidWeb is one company offering several different dedicated Windows hosting packages. They have excellent customer feedback and many favorable reviews on forums and other sites. Support is excellent with 24/7 technical support from engineers who know what they are doing and a fast response time.

The packages offered fully managed with a choice of Windows or Linux server are:

- Webmaster plan, quad core Pentium or Hexa core processor, 6,000 GB monthly bandwidth

- Professional plan, multi-core Xeon or dual AMD x8 Opteron processor (16 core), 8,000 GB monthly bandwidth

- Enterprise plan, similar to Professional but with other processor choices, 10,000 GB monthly bandwidth.

What to Watch for with Windows Hosting

Hardware support is important too. What if your dedicated server fails? It happens to most hardware sooner or later, although in most cases your hosting company will upgrade their servers long before that time. LiquidWeb’s dedicated server service agreement offers a 30 minute hardware replacement guarantee. This means that they guarantee to replace any failed hardware within 30 minutes of identifying the problem, or offer you credit for 10 times the amount of additional downtime.

First of all I have to say that fast food marketing just like most consumer goods is a commodity that can be marketed on it’s strengths while totally avoiding it’s weaknesses. That is the food can be created easily and changed with a marketing plan to improve sales and to do product testing. Here are a few things that marketers have done great in the past to sell us fast food.

How fast food marketing Works

Sell to the kids and the adults follow – In my house I would like to say that my wife is in charge but really it is the kids.  The commercials for McDonalds are obvious with the selling of the free toys but really the happy family in the commercial is selling to us adults. If you are tired and driving and looking for something to eat the kids may plead for the toy but we as adults know it will happy and serene once we get in the restaurant (I know, it is not really true and so do you). This is a great example of how fast food marketing sets a tone and an expectation.

How can we use this? Make sure that you marketing is not just selling benefits instead of features but keep it engaging to each part of the target market

Food as entertainment – TV Commercials are engaging and there are lots of times that the fast food marketing can crate a story that we can follow for 30 seconds of someone quiet and alone at home and then out and having fun with friends at a restaurant. In Canada Boston Pizza definitely does a great job of doing this. Selling the dream of inclusiveness and fun has always been a good motivator

How can we use this? Story telling is a great way to get your message across tell stories in emails, blog posts, and articles. Also selling to the inner needs of our customers

Pick Your Time Slot – Have you ever noticed when Pizza Hut puts fast food marketing commercials on TV? Not at dinner time while people are eating but instead later at night to catch the people too lazy to make something but still hungry. Just think (if you don’t do this already) If you are hungry at 8:00 at night and you see a pizza commercial with a phone number you can just order right away. Fast food marketing from the very beginning has tried to reduce friction to the sale by putting stores close to the neighborhoods and have had home delivery.

How can we use this? Make sure you are going to your market where they are and giving them an offer that is easy to use

There are lots of things we can learn watching fast food marketing from the big marketing businesses engaged in fast food marketing on how to capture, engage, and then get our target into our sales funnel. Watch the sales process of any big fast food chain and through fast food marketing you will see exactly how the process works for them and then drop it into your business.

If you have a web hosting reseller package on a Linux server you will usually have WHM or Web Host Manager, a central control panel from which you can set up accounts and allocate disk space and bandwidth to each account. You can also set new passwords for the accounts and control the account overall.

Why have a Web Hosting Reseller Package?

Many people have web hosting reseller accounts for their own use and do not resell the hosting as such. They may do this because they find sites easier to manage when each has its own account, or because they have a lot of data to store so that they need a real allocation of disk space.

For example if you are frequently buying and selling sites, it is often easier to transfer them if they are in a web hosting reseller account. You could offer free hosting to the purchaser and still have them control the site through cPanel without having access to any of your other sites.

Companies and individuals who offer web design and build services also often provide hosting through a web hosting reseller account. Here they may not charge separately for hosting, but include it in an overall retainer rate for their services.

Selling Web Hosting as a Reseller

Offering web hosting as a free extra to your other internet-related services can be very lucrative. Being a web hosting reseller serves to lock customers in to a standing charge or membership fee, or at least make it harder for them to leave. Many clients will be reluctant to cancel your services when they know that it will mean they have to find (and pay for) new web hosting and transfer the site – something that the average small business owner would find extremely scary.

On the other hand there are some pitfalls associated with operating a web hosting reseller package. Most of these apply to resellers who are using the account in the way that it was designed, i.e. reselling web hosting services. But even if you offer hosting as a free add-on to other services, there are some points to watch out for, especially in a situation where customers have access to their own control panel.

Downside of Being a Web Hosting Reseller

First and foremost is the question of support. Will the hosting company that supplies you with the web hosting reseller package provide support to your customers, or will your customers have to request support through you? Clearly the first option is better, but not all hosting companies offer this. If you have to act as a go-between then you will need to either be prepared to field their support questions and watch for downtime 24/7, or outsource this.

You will also need some way of accepting payments and keeping track of whose payments are due. The usual method is to have a monthly recurring charge on a credit card, but this has to be updated whenever a credit card comes up for renewal. Plus of course people sometimes lose or cancel their cards.

As a web hosting reseller you may decide to offer plans where people can buy 6 months or a year’s hosting at a discount. This can be great for ensuring that customers stick around, but it leaves you more vulnerable to fraud. People buying with a stolen credit card number can leave you with expensive chargebacks some time down the line.

Always ask for a phone number and consider calling any customer who orders more than the regular monthly package. You should also, of course, check that the name and address on the account match the name and address on the credit card, and have your system take the IP of the computer that places the order. It is easy to check the city, state or country of any IP so you can then check that this IP matches with the customer’s credit card billing address. These measures should help to protect you against fraud when operating a web hosting reseller package.

Even if you have several years’ experience of web hosting, when it is time to upgrade to a different level of service you may be a little lost. Perhaps you are not entirely happy with your current hosts and feel it is time for a move. Or perhaps they do not offer the service that you are now looking for. This is where web hosting review will come in

Whats in it for the Web Hosting Reviewer?

Of course you can find a web hosting review online and you may manage to track down the best website host for your needs that way. It is worth keeping in mind, however, that many web hosting companies offer a commission to anybody who refers a new customer to them. This means that the owner of the site where you are reading that favorable review of a certain hosting company could be paid for recommending them.

In many cases of course they will still give an honest web hosting review, especially if they are reviewing several web hosts side by side to provide a web hosting comparison. The best reviews will tell you some negative points along with the positive and clearly set out who will benefit from using this particular company and who will not.

Where to Find Web Hosting Reviews

Another place to find an excellent web hosting comparison is any online forum that serves internet businesses. You can ask around for which hosting companies are used by visitors to the forum and ask what they would recommend given your particular situation and needs.

There are also some dedicated forums specifically discussing what kind of web hosting to choose where you can find criteria for a web hosting comparison. One example is Web Hosting Talk. This type of forum is an independent site where people gather to discuss their web hosting issues.

Many of the threads on these web hosting review forums deal with technical matters, but you will also find a lot of threads either criticizing or praising specific web hosting companies. These can be very useful, but of course you have to bear in mind that it is only one person’s experience and often written at a time when they are most frustrated. Their experience as well as their needs and expectations may be very different than yours.

Often times representatives of the actual companies check in to this type of web hosting review site and may respond to criticism. It can be very useful to see how they deal with issues here. Since you do not have a chance to see how they respond to a real technical support ticket before you sign up, this will be the best indication that you can get of whether they remain polite and helpful in the face of what can be severe and even unfair criticism from frustrated customers. This can be one of the best ways of building up a useful web hosting review.

Your web host will have a bank of physical servers which store all of the data for your websites. The internet is accessible from anywhere in the world so in this respect, it does not matter so much where these servers are located in the physical world.

Web hosting is not like a lawyer or a dentist, where obviously you need the office to be close enough for you to visit. There is no need to visit your web hosting company. So perhaps it is not so important to have Canadian hosting just because you happen to live in Canada.

Many people use web hosting services on the other side of the globe. Most of the biggest hosting companies are based in the USA. These companies are used by people in Australia, Europe and many other countries as well as people in North America.

The advantage of having US hosting is that your website will then have a US-based IP address which may make it come up higher in the search engine results that are returned to American visitors. Google and other search engines are now able to return search results depending on where the person searching is located. The USA is the biggest national user of the internet so this can be a big advantage if you just want to attract as many visitors as possible.

Why Web Host in Canada?

However, if it is important that your website attracts Canadian visitors, then you might want to have Canadian hosting. For example if your client base is entirely Canadian, you would naturally want Google to know that your website is a Canadian site.

In order to do this, you would start by having a website that ends in the letters .ca, which is the country indicator for Canada. So for example if your business is carpet cleaning with offices in Canada, you would want to get a website with a domain name something like ABCcarpetcleaning.ca.

Then you could look for Canadian hosting to host your website. Then your website would have a Canadian IP address and it would be very clear to the search engines that this was a Canadian website. Result: your site would be presented higher in the search engine results to internet users located in Canada than a US based carpet cleaning website, other things being equal.

If you want to go for web hosting services in Canada, you should know that it can be a little more expensive than the US companies. Very heavy competition keeps the prices down in the USA. However, you can still get a good deal on Canadian hosting from many companies including primehost.ca and webserve.ca.

HostGator Web Hosting

Baby plan: $7.95 per month, unlimited domains, unlimited space and bandwidth (subject to fair use policy).
Reseller plans from $24.95 per month. VPS from $19.95, dedicated servers from $174.

HostGator is one of the most popular CPanel top web hosting sites for internet marketing and other internet-based businesses who own or manage a large number of websites. There is a very wide range of plans which can be confusing for beginners but makes it easy to upgrade as your business grows.

HostGator provides good live support. Unlike many services, the live chat option is staffed pretty much 24/7 and you will usually be talking to somebody who can actually help you, at least with shared and reseller hosting plans. When it comes to setting up a dedicated server, however, you will need to know what you are doing and may have to wait longer for help.

HostGator stand out among the top web hosting sites for low to mid range services such as shared hosting and reseller packages. For VPS and dedicated servers you might be better off with a specialist such as LiquidWeb.

Inmotion Web Hosting

Power plan: $7.95 per month, up to 6 domains with sites plus 20 parked domains, unlimited space and bandwidth (subject to fair usage policy). Optional: one domain name registered free for first year, renewals charged at prevailing rate.

Inmotion are among the biggest and best known top web hosting sites for business hosting and have excellent user reviews. They have cheaper plans starting at $3.95 per month for a personal site, and other options going right up to dedicated servers (but not including reseller packages). Upgrading is easy as your business grows.

Live chat may not always be great for technical support and users recommend using the help desk instead for anything other than simple account questions. There is also a users’ forum where you can find answers to many questions.

Inmotion are excellent for a small business situation where a company is not likely to want a lot of different websites. The typical Inmotion client will have 1-6 actual sites and perhaps own other similar domain names which divert to their main site.

BlueHost Web Hosting

$6.95 per month, unlimited domains, unlimited space and bandwidth (subject to fair usage policy). Optional: one domain name registered free for first year, renewals charged at prevailing rate. This is still an interesting top web hosting option.

BlueHost offers a simple, reliable shared web hosting service. One main domain is hosted, and you have unlimited add-on domains. There are no other options such as reseller, VPS etc. Like Hostgator and Inmotion, they offer CPanel, SSL and various shopping cart options for ecommerce sites, as well as WordPress, forum scripts, PHP5 and much more.

Customer service is fast and helpful but policies can be arbitrarily applied. ‘Unlimited’ will not allow you to store huge numbers of photos, videos etc. Because there is only one type of account, you cannot upgrade. You have to transfer to another host if your site grows beyond what they will accept. That said, they are a fast growing and popular service and make it into our top hosting sites list on that basis.

There are so many web hosts on the internet, it is confusing enough just trying to compare all of their packages. Shared, reseller, VPS or dedicated … which is right for you? This is the big question that most people spend all of their time on. They will look at the different packages and what is offered.

But the truth is that with most web hosting companies hosting technical support is not so important because upgrading is such a simple matter. Provided you start out with a company that offers one or two levels above what you need right now, you can sign up for the minimum for your current needs and know that all it takes to upgrade is an email to the web host’s support desk. They love customers who upgrade and will usually do everything for you, including transferring your sites to a new server if you are moving from shared hosting.

So the package should not be an issue. The next question that most people consider is cost. OK, this can be important, but is it really going to make a huge difference to you whether you are paying $7.95 or $9.95 per month for shared hosting? How much do you waste in a month on stuff that you don’t really need? A lot more than $2, we guess!

So don’t stress about an extra dollar or two on your web hosting costs. You can almost certainly afford it. It is worth a little extra to get what really matters – excellent hosting technical support.

Hosting Technical Support

Hosting Technical support is the most important question when you are looking for the best website host because without it, you will almost certainly waste hours of your valuable time unnecessarily. You will struggle to find the solution to problems that good support staff could have answered for you – or even handled for you by going into your site and fixing it.

If you have a commercial website, you could also end up with a situation where you are losing money because your website is offline or not working correctly. In this case you need a response from the hosting technical support that is both fast and helpful, solving the problem rather than just raising more questions.

So how do you find out about a company’s hosting technical support before signing up with them? In many cases, you don’t. Most people sign up on the basis of cost and what is in the package, without even considering support.

Search for Hosting Technical Support Stories

You can often get good feedback on a company’s support team if you look at web hosting forums online. However, remember that what you are reading is usually just one person’s experience, and they may have very different needs and expectations than yours. Also it is important to take angry stories with a grain of salt. Every single person that has a problem is going to talk about it put yourself in that person position and then look for more honest reviews as well both good and bad.

In a sense, you are always taking a chance when you join a hosting company. For this reason it is best to avoid long contracts. Start out on a monthly plan even if it is more expensive. Then in 6 months, if you are happy with the service, you could consider contacting hosting technical support and asking to switch to the cheaper annual option. This will allow you to find the best hosting technical support from your own experience.