Shared Hosting Plans

This is one of the most popular options that many people choose when they are first getting started with creating sites online. Why? Well, it is relatively inexpensive and you can host several (ok lots) of sites on the one plan. This gives you the most bang for the buck, so to say, to allow you to build your portfolio of online properties. Not all plans are shared however, you can even find some plans that will only allow you to have just one domain for the account, similar to the Host Gator Baby Croc plan.

Shared hosting plans are called that because you can share the resources of the server with other people. This isn’t a “dedicated” server just for you, which means that everyone on the server is sharing in the cost of it. When you are first starting out, most “shared” hosting plans are around the $6.95 to $7.95 per month range, however if you prepay for a one or two year service, you can often times reduce that price down to the $4 or $5 per month range.

When you create your account, you will have one primary domain. This can be either a domain you already have registered, or many companies will offer a free domain with the hosting plan as well. This is where the benefit comes in for someone that is just getting started. By using a feature of the account called “addon domains”, you are able to create “subfolders” under the primary account which will house additional domain files for you. This is a great feature to consider.

Now, the bad news about shared hosting plans. There really isn’t much, however there are some considerations to think about for your future planning.

First, remember you are sharing the server with other webmasters. Some of them, well probably most of them, are serious and working legitimate sites. However, sometimes you will find someone on the same server running a program that will hog the resources of the server causing a slower than normal page load time for your sites. This used to be a huge problem, but not so much anymore. Most companies have implemented “CPU Throttling” as a preventative measure. This is good if you aren’t running things you shouldn’t be, however if you have a faulty script on one of your sites like I did, it can throttle all of your sites and slow them all down. Keep an eye on your server logs and my biggest offender what the SlimStat Wordpress plugin, so I switched over to StatPress Reloaded and it is working all better now.

Secondly, if there are any problems with one of your sites that would lead it to be suspended, usually the hosting company will shut down your whole account, not just that one site. If you use any autoblogging software or anything that scrapes content, you better be sure that you can legally use it. Most people aren’t that familiar with this stuff, but ocassionally you will be surprised when you see the DMCA (copyright violation notice) in your email account from your host telling you that you have “X” amount of time to reply to it or face your account being terminated. Trust me on this one, not a fun experience (wink…wink).

Overall, a shared hosting plan is a good way to start and learn how servers work. It is good for smaller sites and those starting to build super sites as well. One key here is that you have no control over the IP address that is assigned to your account. If you are going to build links to your own sites, you don’t want to use multiple sites on the same account to do this as the IP address is going to be the same, thus reducing the effectiveness of the link, even if the sites are similar in niche.

Reseller Hosting Accounts

The Reseller account, like the one through Host Gator, is a great way to expand your site collection into a more powerful system. Like the shared hosting plan, you are able to set up individual accounts on your main reseller account much like having numerous shared hosting plans under one master account. The great thing here is that you control each sites file space and bandwidth under this plan.

I have the “Aluminum” reseller package that provides 50 GB of space and 50 GB of bandwidth for the total account each month, which is plenty. So far I have about 100 sites on it and I can control each one and adjust the specific needs of a site quickly.

Another good thing is sometimes as the servers are moved around to optimize processor requirements, your sites are also moved around and obtain a new IP address. This is good, but don’t count on it as a good way to create your own SEO system of individual IP addresses for interlinking.

While the learning curve of managing this type of server is a little more than just “plug and play” with a shared hosting server, it isn’t tough to do, just a little more record keeping since each “account” that you create will also have it’s own FTP login data that you need to record.

The other nice part is that you can also use each account just like a shared account and host “addon” domains under each one as well. Plus, if you are adventurous, you can sell space on your server to other people and make money, hence it being the “Reseller” account.

SEO Hosting

If you are truly wanting to build your own network of sites for SEO purposes, this is the way to go. With SEOHosting.com, you have the ability to have your own selection of IP addresses available to you to use will allow you to interlink your sites more specifically for better SEO linking.

While I don’t know for certain, but do speculate, that the search engines **cough** Google **cough** knows about this method, to discount the links would be bad for them as a whole. You see, SEO Hosting is owned by Host Gator and they utilize the spectrum of IP address they own to allow you where you want to host your sites.

Much like the Reseller control panel, the SEOHosting panel adds one option that will allow you to select the IP address that you want the “primary domain” to use.

For example, if you create an account on the package that provides 5 IP address (which I have and use), you create a primary domain, so you can have 5 primary domains in this account. The more IP addresses you purchase, the more domains you can host as primary domains. So, don’t let that scare you if you think that you have 100 domains and need 100 IP addresses, no so. Just like the reseller and the shared hosting plan, you can use the “addon” domain function under each primary domain to host additional domains.

With the 5 IP address package, I am hosting a total of about 15 domains right now, and will be adding more soon as addon domains.

As you can see from my long winded article that has nothing on Griz with some of his, I hope I have covered some of the basic options that you can have with exploring what type of hosting is best for your niche sites. If you have any questions, fire away and let’s share experiences and knowledge!

You see, I have tons of sites, PLR articles and am doing the niche site promotions with article directories and blogs. This is a lot of writing. I have known that video is where it is and is a great way to increase your traffic. Don’t believe me? Just try a Google search for a keyword you are targeting. On that first page, how many videos about that topic come up in the results? Uh-huh!

Now, one concern I had about making videos was I didn’t want to be tied down to the computer all day editing and recording, re-editing and publishing and all that stuff. This software will make your life easy!

It is a simple drag and drop software. Drag in some photos, drag in a text file, shuffle the slides around and click save video. It really is that easy! Don’t believe me? Watch this video that I created about it, and bear with me as it was my first time using Camtasia!

And now the final result as an example of what it can do. If you want to see a larger video of the software, view my videos page.

Order online video story today!

Then I found sites like Griz’s, Court Tuttles and Vic’s sites (links in the sidebar) and really began to see the big picture of how easy it really is to make money online with little to no investments of my own. This was a little over a year ago and I can tell you that I honestly have learned a lot and it is paying off.

The biggest thing that causes people to fail online is patience. I wanted immediate results. I’m sure you do to. There are sites and people that tell you that you can make millions in a month. It’s all hype. Sure, there are the people that have done it, but if you are just starting out online, it’s not practical nor realistic. If you don’t have patience and aren’t willing to give it time, just stop reading now.

Court and Mark began The Keyword Academy as a private members area that offered only videos of how they build niche sites that mostly target long tail keywords. I delayed signing up with them for sometime due to the cost of the program, which at the time was out of my budget. However, I had a really good month and decided to sign up with them and see what they hype was about.

After signing up, I watched the first couple of videos and one of them really hit home. It was dealing with how to find and target keywords that are worth your time. The specific formula that they give in that one video make me excited and depressed at the same time. Why? Well, I realized that quite a few sites that I had been putting all of my time and effort into were not worth my time. That formula also gave me a new list of ideas and keywords that are now paying off, just a couple of months after signing up!

The Keyword Academy is now more than just a simple members area with videos only. Court and Mark have added a forum area with excellent support from other members. If you are new, this is a great place to learn from some of the most honest, down to earth people that are out there. You won’t find fluff and crap here, just good people willing to help you learn and succeed.

So, what is this gonna cost you? Well, I am paying almost $70 per month for just one article submission service. With the Keyword Academy, you get the videos, support forums, access to 30 article sites for your backlinks (more coming soon), monthly webinars that provide up to date information about changes to the SEO systems of Google and other search engines and more, including Q&A sessions and the opportunity to learn from the best in the niche marketing and internet marketing world.

Your only price is $33 per month. To me, that was a no brainer! But, if you can’t afford that much right now, it’s alright. You can sign up for the Keyword Academy Crash Course and still have access to the videos for only $1! This is just a sample of what you will find, and it might help you see the full potential that the Keyword Academy offers.

So, when he wrote his post about hubpages, an employee of Hubpages stopped by and commented on it, and the came back and put Court to the challenge of seeing who can make 100 hubs in 30 days and make the most money with them.

Sounds pretty good, right? Well, you have heard of Hubpages, right? If you’ve heard of Squidoo, imagine it in bed with Google. Hubpages are getting ranked well, and quickly also. Just like Squidoo, the better and more focused your topic is to a particular item or keyword, the better your lens will rank.

Well, what about the “no follow” links and stuff? Well, the become “do follow” when your author score reaches a certain point, like 75 or so. However, you are still making money with them through adsense, amazon.com and eBay and Kontera links too. So, don’t think of Hubpages just as a source of backlinks. Although they are good for backlinks as a source, the hubpages system closely monitors links that are outbound and will unpublish your hub if it has more than 2 links going to the same site, no matter what page.

So, if you are curious about learning more about hubpages, or the Court vs. Ryan 100 Hub challenge, then come on over to my hub to learn more about hubpages.

So, what is the stink with Site Build It! (SBI) that is going on now?

Well, Lis has posted a Site Build It Scam Review that has brought out the owner of the company and many of his site “owners” to defend their position of why they charge $300 per year per site to help you learn about how to make money online.

Is this SBI for you? It depends. Many people when first learning or exploring how to earn an income online get curious and start searching, chances are they don’t know that much, if anything, about search engine optimization techniques. The also probably don’t know much about how to set up a hosting account, wordpress or html coding (and some php).

This isn’t bad, but it can open one up to being scammed pretty easily. Now, before I go on, let me say that I am not promoting nor putting down SBI. I don’t own any SBI sites, but I did research them and look into it when I first got started in the internet marketing and make money online sites.

So, is SBI really a scam? From what I can see, the answer depends on how you look at it. Alot of it depends on your comfort level of creating your own sites by hand (hosting, wordpress, etc.) or if you want more of a plug-n-play approach. SBI seems to offer more of a one stop shop with tools, website templates, and more that you can use once you set up a domain name.

But, do you really need to shell out $300 per year per site to make money on the internet? I would argue that you don’t and here is why.

You can get a good and reliable hosting account with HostMonster or HostGator for around $5 to $10 per month. This will allow you unlimited websites to be hosted on this account. So, if you pay for a year in advance, you have spent at least $60 for one year of hosting.

With domain names, you would need to purchase them anyways whether you get them for your own hosted domains or an SBI account, so the price is awash in my eyes.

What else does SBI bring to the table? Well from reading some of the comments on the Site Build It Scam Review that Lis wrote, it brings a forum for support. However some of the people that left comments on her site seem less than friendly. Maybe if you are on “their side” they would be willing to help.

I found it funny that when Griz wrote a post to back up Lis about Site Build It – Don’t Buy It! that he was also targeted with the SBI! crowd and had to close off his comments.

It’s a hard decision for anyone to determine what the best method is for themselves to get started when trying to learn how to make money online but from what I can see, you can definitely do it cheaper and have more control over your options if you take a few minutes, research completely your options and learn some of the basics.

If you don’t want to spend $300 per year, per SITE then here are some of the resources that I highly recommend you read and follow:

• Griz’s Make Money Online
• Make Money Online with Griz
• How to Make Money Online with Court Tuttle
• Make Money with Keywords
• Make Money with Adsense
• Make Money Blogging

If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment or contact me and I will help you out!

So, what do you write about to increase your readership and potential for adsense or advertising revenue? How do you write in order to create income with your local niche site?

One aspect that I looked at when I started my local niche site was since I lived near a large metro area (Cincinnati) was that I would be competing with all of the other media outlets. I knew that I didn’t have the time to be continually writing for the local niche site either.

One of the first things I did was to take local news stories that were either in the newspaper or on the television and then expand on them. This is a great way to bring more information about a certain topic to light and really help bring readers to your site. You can also gain popularity with other media outlets by being the know all resource of information. So how does this aspect work?

If your local media outlet writes about a new restaurant that is getting ready to open, expand on what types of food they will serve. Provide some information about what the food represents and about the country that it is from. You can also write about what used to be in that location too. Anything that you can write to expand upon the topic that isn’t covered by the other media outlets is key here. Put information in your articles that no one else does, or cares to provide.

Another key area that is overlooked is something that I have been experimenting with. Let’s say that you have a large storm come through the area. Oh, let’s say something like Hurricane Ike. One of the first things I did was to write about how the storm hit the Northern Kentucky area. I wrote about the damage that it caused and how local agencies were working to restore electric power and other services.

Now this was a good article as people were looking for information about when they were possibly going to be getting their electric restored. They were looking for information about services that they could use to get the trees removed, or have their roofs fixed…get the idea here?

Well, due to the overwhelming response that I got from the article, I wrote another couple that dealt specifically with roofing repair companies and the scams that always follow them during emergencies and storms. I also wrote another article about how to find a good tree service and what to make sure that they have in order to be qualified.

Guess what? Those were some of the highest adsense clicks that I have ever recorded! When people are looking for information and you give them the teaser info with a “link” that provides the goods, you are golden!

So, what does this translate into? Pretty simply if you run out of local news and stuff of interest to write, don’t dump your local niche blog. Keep it and start writing posts for adsense or other advertisements.

Know of some services in your town that people are looking for? Write about it. Offer advertisement space or referal links to other businesses and write about them. You never know what they might offer up for payment. Of course, you could always write for adsense ads. Using generic posts but customizing them for your local niche is working even more for me so far.

What do you think? Have you had any luck with local niche advertising or not?

http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-content/plugins/

Now, if a hacker can see and find them, the search engines can index them, well, if a plugin has a security hole in it that can be exploited, you are wide open.

So, how do you close this hole?

You can block access to the plugin folder by two methods that are easily accomplished.

First, you can open your text editor, write some jibber-jabber or a “nice” message that someone would see if they are attempting to read your plugins folder. Save this file as “index.html” and upload it to the plugins folder. Don’t worry, it won’t hurt anything. This will show people a blank page or whatever message you entered if they try the trick to see what you are using or have in your plugins folder.

Secondly, you can modify your .htaccess file. I am in no way an expert with .htaccess files. I found this solution in a couple of other spots and have put it in place and it seems to work.

At the top of your .htaccess file put this:

# Prevents directory listing
Options -Indexes

Now that will also block access to the plugins folder, but more so for the search engines also. This way Googlebot and other bots won’t index your plugins folder for the entire world to see.

Now, you want to see how many people don’t know this? Visit Google and type in:

Index of /wp-content/plugins

Now thats a lot of open plugin folders!

One of the frustrating parts is I don’t know where people are looking when they arrive on my site. Are they even looking at the navigation? What about where they are clicking? That would be really helpful. I found a product that will create a heatmap for you based on your timeline of daily, weekly or monthly.

The product is called Clickheat by labsmedia and it looks pretty good. While I haven’t installed it yet, I plan on doing so in the next couple of days on my servers to start tracking clicks on my sites.

Now, here is the most amazing part of the whole system. I know you are wondering what it costs, so let me tell you that I have worked out a special deal with labsmedia for my readers. For a limited time it is free! Well, it really isn’t a special deal as it is free anyways, but it sounded good, right?

Here are the requirements for your server that you will need to run Clickheat:

- on the browser’s client: Javascript (tested on Firefox 2.0, Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Konqueror…)
- on the server: either Linux or Windows (since ClickHeat 1.3 release), Apache or Lighttpd (other may work fine), PHP, the graphic library GD2 (PNG support needed).

ps…I am finally back from vacation and two weeks without the internet. I hope to be posting more regularly here now that I am finally getting organized with my sites and getting caught up!

There seems to be some confusion about how to find a good niche and get a BANS site set up to start making money and get ranked. Building a BANS site is just like any other niche site, however you already have a wealthy list of keywords and products at your disposal to make your research a little easier.

I have had some success so far with my BANS sites, so here is a little information that will hopefully help you out.

The first thing that I have been doing, even before buying a domain name, is to go to the eBay category page. This is crucial as it will help you find a niche and give you some keyword ideas. If you already have a domain name, great! If not, this might give you some fresh ideas for a keyword filled domain name, either pre-owned to be looking for, or a new one to register.

When you are on the main category page, take a second to scroll down at the broad categories that are there. If you already have an interest in something, then go for that area as you will be able to write some content for your BANS sites and be more likely to be enthusiastic about your niche.

Expand the certain category that you choose and look at what all is under it.

Now you have narrowed down your niche to a more specific area, but this might not be optimum just yet. Why? Well, are people looking for items in this topic? How many items are listed for sale? What is the success of items listed for sale here? You can see how many items and the category number of those items by using the checkboxes at the top and resubmitting the “search” again.

And the big one, are people looking for this item or niche on Google?

Once you have found a sub-category of an item, now the research starts. Take a look at the items listed for sale in it. Get some paper and a pencil or pen and start taking notes on name brands or other identifying information about the items, such as model names or nicknames.

Now that you have written down some information and verified that there is a good supply of items in this niche, you will want to check and see what the successful sales look like. It does you absolutely no good to build a BANS site for a category that has plenty of items if none of them are selling! Go to the left sidebar in eBay and check the box for “Completed Listings”. This will reveal all previous items that have sold in this category, or haven’t sold, and give you an idea of how much they are going for.

Ok, so items are selling too as you have found out. If there aren’t many sales, maybe you need to rethink the category.

Once you have your niche idea and keyword ideas from the listings, you will now want to check out the keywords and see what people are searching for to find them. If you have Keyword Elite or SEO Elite, then great. If not, I have used the Gtrends Keyword tool with some good success, and it’s free.

Start exploring your keywords and see what type of search volume they are predicting. You will want at least 50 searches or so. You won’t see a “green checkmark” until it reaches 100, but that is ok. As for the competition, the lower the better.

You don’t want to target a keyword that has 250 searches with over 1 million on the competition. Sure, you could do it, but the purpose of BANS is to start making money and get ranked with Google.

Once you have done your research, now comes the fun of finding a good domain name. Begin by going broad with your keywords. What is the main category related to? Are you targeting a specific model or product? If so, try some of those keywords.

Once you have done your research and have registered your domain, the rest is “cake” so to say. Just get going and get BANS set up!

Vic has an excellent video on how to set up BANS, from uploading the files to adding store pages and content. If you don’t know much about BANS, then you really need to watch this introduction to BANS.

Any questions or comments?

Check back soon for an introduction in how to modify a BANS template and create your own from a Wordpress theme!

In a previous article I wrote about used domain tips I talked about how to be sure to check in Google Webmaster Tools for any issues or problems related to your recently purchased, aged domain name.

While you can sometimes get a good keyword focused domain name for your niche site that is new, this lends itself to a whole set of potential problems when dealing with the search engines. If your site becomes popular or starts doing too well in the search engine results, Google can and often times will sandbox your site.

While there is a great debate about whether the sandbox exists, I can tell you it does. One of my sites was a new domain name that I started in the fall of 2007. It was ranking on the first page of Google for several months for about 3 different keywords related to iPods. I was seeing about 30 to 75 unique visits a day and was pretty happy with it.

All of a sudden in December, my traffic died. And I mean died. No hits, or visits until about April. Then, all of a sudden, it was back in the results and I’m starting to see an even higher number of uniques now.

The Google sandbox is a method by Google to help put “spammer” sites in control somewhat. It does catch honest sites, but each site probably goes through it at some point.

What does that have to do with preowned domain names?

When you buy a preowned domain name, you are buying the trust of Google and the other search engines. Generally these sites, anything over 1 or 2 years, have been around and have already gone through the sandbox process. They have “aged” like fine wine and are trustworthy in Google’s eyes.

However, some of these older domain names have already been abused by their previous owner(s) and used as spam sites, often times deindexed or banned by Google. This might sound like a potential problem, and it can be. But it can easily be overcome with a reinclusion request.

How does a reinclusion request for an aged domain work?

Once you have purchased a preowned domain name, what I usually do is go to Google Webmaster Tools and “verify” ownership of this site. This is a critical step to begin the process of letting Google know that it is under “new management”. You should also set the prefered domain at this time, either with the www or without.

Before you go an ask for reinclusion, you really need to add some good content to the site. I usually start off with about 5 articles as a minimum. This will show Google that you are a serious owner and are going to be putting good and legitimate content on the site. I wouldn’t just throw 5 PLR or junk articles on it, as this will throw out the duplicate content penalty and look like a spam site.

Give it a week or so and build some links back to the site. Submit the articles to a few social bookmark sites. Check and see if you are getting any traffic to it. I use StatCounter (free) and for wordpress I also use a plugin called Slimstat.

If you check your site with “site:www.yourURL.com” and see results that are with your current content, then you are good to go. If you don’t see anything, then chances are you need to take the next step.

Go back to your Google Webmaster Tools and file the reinclusion request for your domain name. What you need to put in it is basically something to the effect that you are the new owner of the site and you think it was previously used by a spammer. Let Google know that you are going to use the site for legitimate content and would like a visual reinspection and reinclusion into the search engine results for the site.

One recent site I purchased worked just fine this way. I have no doubt that it was a spam site. There were over 200,000 backlinks pointing to it in Yahoo, but nothing in Google. RED FLAG!

I put about 6 articles on it, nice, long and legit content, and asked for a visual inspection and reinclusion, and within two weeks, it was in the Google serps getting traffic.

Preowned domains that have age on them are nice. The best part is that you could take a preowned domain name that dealt a topic and as long as your niche is closely related to what the previous owner used it for, you will rank pretty good for it.

This doesn’t mean that you should bypass an 8 or 9 year old domain name because it is not in the niche area you are targeting. These are sometimes the best domains to buy. Especially if you find an aged domain name with someones name in it.

If you are looking for a way to help with backlinks, this is critical. You can purchase a preowned domain name with someones name and use it as a general blog. Create a new persona in someone elses name and now you can blog about your own money sites and give great backlinks to your own sites. Not a bad idea, eh?

Preowned domain names are a great way to build your portfolio. However, you should still build a mix of new and old domain names as necessary. The dot info domain names are good for BANS sites, but Google knows that since they are so cheap, spammers use them. You will probably get your .info sites deindexed, but don’t worry, just keep building back links and it will come back. Google will eventually realize it as a legitimate site.

As with anything, if you are just starting out, don’t buy more than you can afford. Also, don’t buy just two or three of them and sit and wait for something to happen.