Secret To Monetizing Your Site

So maybe you're thinking to yourself; Hey, I need to start making some money online. Maybe you're one of those that had that thought a while ago now... but aside from maybe the being online part… you're still pretty much at square one. Or, maybe you are actually making a little money online but wouldn't be averse to making a little (or a lot) more.

Like most of you, Jeremy Schoemaker has -at one time or another – fit squarely into each and every one of the above categories. Now, however, he's most widely known simply as 'Shoemoney' (for obvious reasons). We managed to catch up with Jeremy at the Blog World Expo last week and pick his brain about what he considers to be some of the most important factors to keep in mind if you're trying to make money online.

In his video interview with Abby Prince, Jeremy was talking specifically about blogs and how to monetize them. As it turns out, he thinks the real money in blogs is in affiliate networks. "If you're going to blog about something and link to it" Shoe says, "you might as well get credit for that link".

But here's the catch and why I think there's something to the interview for anybody doing business online – not just bloggers. In order to make money, you sometimes should basically put money making in the back seat. Jeremy said, again specifically addressing bloggers that the typical goal of bloggers is to get new readers and generate RSS subscribers.

If you are just writing posts or making blog entries about just whatever affiliate deal is paying the best rate that day, your readership is quickly going to be turned off and over time, your numbers will suffer. True for bloggers but also just as true for anybody with a website and any kind of ads – affiliate or otherwise.

Jeremy cited the goal of bloggers as being basically building a reader base (aka traffic) and cautioned against turning off your base with bs promotional posts (aka bad/excessive ads).

Most of us aren't just working online for the warm fuzzy feeling it gives us at the end of the day. At the same time, you have to remember that your subscribers, readers, end users and/or customers aren't just using the internet for the sheer joy of reading ad copy and clicking links that make you money.

So yes, advertise. Do create content that you are interested in. Create content your audience is interested in. And by all means use relevant affiliate links and/or sell your ad space to sponsors that make sense to be there with your content.

Your traffic is there for your content, not to make you money. If your user-centric content becomes too obscured or too diluted by your revenue-centric content… your users will go elsewhere.

If you wake up one morning and notice that your traffic is trending in the wrong direction… take a look at your site from the user's perspective. Does your site have more sponsored buttons and banners than a NASCAR? Might be a problem. Prioritize and eliminate. Do you have ads and links up for Secure Servers and Web Hosting on your outdoor furniture site? I don't care what their payout is… it's costing you credibility and in the long term… money. Go find a sponsor that makes more sense. Sure they may pay a little less, but they aren't going to turn off your userbase nearly as much – and they'll probably convert better over time.

So when Shoemoney says one of the biggest secrets to making money is putting money in the back seat... this is exactly what he's talking about. Your userbase is your greatest commodity. If you take care of your userbase, your userbase will take care of you. Building that userbase is a tough thing. Are you really willing to roll the dice on losing a chunk of them just to make a few extra buck this month?

What would you consider to be the most important factor for magnetizing a site (or blog)?

About the Author
Mike is a manager at iEntry. He has been with iEntry since 2000.

An Internet Company with No Server

I’m sure this isn’t the only one, after all, SmugMug’s CEO told me that they had moved pretty much everything over to Amazon’s S3 a while back.

But I always assumed that companies would have at least one server keeping things up, just in case Amazon went down. Or just because.

I was wrong.

Last night Mogulus’s CEO, Max Haot, was here at my house to film something fun for my show. Mogulus is the company that, yesterday, provided the live video for Om Malik’s NewTeeVee conference. It was so good I stayed home and watched almost the whole day on the NewTeeVee channel. But more on that when we get the video up.

At one point Max seemed like he was joking around with me when he told me “we don’t own a single server.”

I asked him FOUR more times to make sure I heard him right. I even got incredulous with him at one point saying something like “what the f*** do you mean you don’t own a server?” and “you mean not a single bit of your Web site comes from servers that aren’t owned by Amazon?”

He nicely and calmly explained that, yes, every server the company owns is actually running on Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services.

The world has changed. Now ANYONE can build an Internet company and get it up to scale. No more spending nights inside data centers trying to keep servers running.

Let’s go over to Mike Arrington’s CrunchBase and do some research. They pulled in $1.2 million in funding. Yet they don’t own a SINGLE server!

They have about 15,000 people already creating live video channels. They have one of the most innovative Web sites I’ve ever seen.

But they don’t own a server.

How else has the world changed? Where the hell is Microsoft in this whole business? How did Microsoft screw this up so badly? Let’s get this straight. Amazon used to be a book store. Now they are hosting virualized servers for Internet companies. So much for having billions of dollars in the bank like Microsoft does, some of the smartest people in the world working in your research arms and having “monopoly” market share in operating systems.

Heheh, maybe now Amazon can use some of the new money that they’ll be earning from these startups to buy some decent PR. According to Read/Write Web Amazon needs the help in that department.

Oh, back to Max. One tip he gave us is that when using Amazon’s services you have to design your systems with the assumption that they will never be up and running. What he means by that is services are “volatile” and can go up and down without notice. So, he’s designed his systems to survive that. He told me that it meant his engineering teams had to be quite disciplined in designing their architecture.

How many other Internet companies are out there that are “serverless?”

Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net's Vice President of Media Development.

Web Host For Beginners

You are just beginning to explore the Internet and you have decided that you need a website on the Internet to be successful. You researched the many web hosts that all claim to have the best features and you are over whelmed by all the possibilities.

Let’s discuss what a book for beginners should tell you.

Most of the time, people looking for a web host asks all the wrong questions about the web host. Since the Internet is considered "technical", it seems that people automatically start looking at how many gigs of memory and how much bandwidth each web host provides for the price. They read that they can get 10,000 email addresses, 1,000 FTP accounts, and 1,000 mailing lists (Isn’t that a joke? Walmart might need that kind of support, but a starting website? I don’t think so!) They consider what software is provided? .ASP, Perl, PHP, .NET, Cold Fusion, etc. (Yes, "etc." is not software).

My observation is that people tend to get so bogged down in the technical aspects (hardware and software) of what a web host offers that they lose site of the basic fact that the hardware side of the web host is only the medium that carries their message to the world via the Internet. It is the means to the end.

Web hosts are a dime a dozen and the competition for customers is fierce.

On the hardware technical side, a web host should provide:

• A secure data center that stays up running 100% of the time.
• Bandwidth wide enough to handle the all the traffic quickly.
• Storage to handle all the data.
• Processor speed fast enough to process the traffic without delay.
• A secure, reliable connection to the Internet

Any of the major web hosts provides these so why research it to the Nth degree? It is a waste of time.

What people starting to build a new website should really ask is "what is the mission of my website”? Then they should look for the best web host that helps them build a website that satisfies that mission.

All web hosts are not all things to all people. Spend the time finding the best web host that satisfies the needs of your new website.http://www.the-best-web-host.com

I wish you the best in building that new site.

Copyright 2007 John Howe, Inc.

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Choosing A Webhosting Service

Webhosting service is a business that provides a web site a home to be able to be viewed online worldwide. You can choose from either a free webhosting server or paid webhosting service.

Free webhosting service is totally free of charge. Free webhosting server allows you to upload or transfer your website to the server without any costs. In return, the free webhosting service will require you to put their banner ads in your website. Sometimes they would require you to use a primary and secondary domain name. Others would allow you to use your own domain name. The problem with free webhosting service is that they offer a limited disk space and data transfer. If your website is large and has lots of graphics, it wouldn't be a good idea to avail of free wbhosting services. Free webhosting service rarely or do not have customer support at all. Also, this typo of service cannot guarantee you a continuous uptime. Free webhosting services pretty much leave you on your own resources. Free webhosting do not assist you in acquiring a domain name. Most free webhosting services have limits when it comes to running and installing CGI scripts. They do not also provide ecommerce solutions such as shopping carts, software and space for credit card transactions.

For those who are novice or just starting out with web hosting, this could be an inexpensive way to avail of webhosting services while you develop your website. But it could also be a disadvantage considering you cannot turn to the free webhosting server for support in case of hosting-related problems. Also, for those who do not mind the lack or limited features of free webhosting service, this could be a good venue for simple personal web sites. The popular free webhosting services are: FBhosting, Xoom, Hypermart and GeoCities.

Paid webhosting offers more features than free webhosting services. For a minimal fee of $10 to as much as thousands of dollars per month paid webhosting server let you enjoy a number of additional features than the free webhosting service. The fee usually has money back no questions asked guarantee. Among the features of paid webhosting are the larger disk space, data transfer and email accounts.

Other additional features are added for a fee such as scripts and other, email services. But using a paid webhosting service does allow you some advantages such as uptime guarantee of 99%, 24/7 customer support especially on technical problems related to hosting service that you have encountered Paid webhosting service also offers databases and many other features. If you are into business and you need your website to conduct transaction in your behalf, a paid webhosting service could most likely fulfill the part than a free webhosting provider.

There a number of free and paid webhosting service operating in the internet. The trick is to know which one to choose according to your needs. The better your choice, the better your options will be. And you won't have to pay for expensive add-on features which you do no really need.

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Web Hosting Company

We are living in an age of consumerism and today's consumers are not only knowledgeable but also inquisitive. Reaching to maximum-targeted consumers and presenting the product to them is the primary goal of all manufacturers, no matter what the product is. Here the role of a web hosting company begins.
Web site hosting service helps in disseminating the information resources about the product to any Internet user. They have a team of web design specialist who design and update various kind of information on the website. Thus, make it possible to reach the targeted customers, in the absence of which your product will lag behind in the race. There are myriad website design firm who make this possible.
A web design firm has specialized people who will design websites for you or who will enhance the look of your website and publish it on the Internet. If you want to grow your business the internet can help you. A website design firm will help you develop an eye-catching, inviting website and store it on a special computer called server.
In addition, the professional web hosting and website designing service help you reduce and control operating costs; improve focus on core business of the company; gain access to in-depth expertise. It also frees the internal resources, which can be utilized for core competencies.
There are many types of Web site hosting services available in the market. Each has its own advantage.

Free web hosting services:
It is free. It can be an advertisement-supported web hosting; however, it is extremely limited when compared to pay hosting.
•Shared web hosting service: In shared service the web site is placed on the same server along with many other sites. If you decide to go with the purchase of a shared hosting plan, then the allotted bandwidth is important, because your site may be down a lot or it loads too slowly because too many sites are jammed on one computer. This is a an economic solution for medium to large businesses
Dedicated hosting service: In this service the user gets his or her own Web server and gains full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows), even though the user does not own the server
A web site hosting company has several persons dedicated in keeping the software up to date and secure, personnel who are focused on designing sophisticated websites to suit the manufacturer's objective. They also have people for consumer relations, and to deal with marketing. A web hosting company will ease the burden of creating and maintaining the website, so that the manufacturer can focus on core business and expand it considerably.

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Fire Your Web Host

There seem to be an infinite number of web hosts on the Internet. It is impossible to really get a fix on the number since new ones enter the market and soon disappear. It is an extremely competitive market.

You probably picked your web host based on a review that you read on the Net. It showed how many gigabytes of storage and how much bandwidth the host provided for a low price and you signed up.

Unfortunately, the technical specs for a web host are not the best way to evaluate the best web host.

You should demand much more from a web host if you expect to succeed in the competitive environment of the Internet (and the competition becomes fiercer each year).

The main attribute that separates the best web host from the "also rans" is a research tool that allows you to perform detailed prior planning of your keywords and to research the competition. You need to know how difficult it will be to place on the first search engine results page for your keywords before you start the battle.

I remember a saying that goes something like this, "if you are going to fight a battle, be sure to pick the ground on which you are going to fight it". This planning helps you pick "your battleground on the Internet".

Another thing that you should demand from your web host is automatic creation of site maps for your website and automatic pinging of Google, Yahoo, and Ask. You do not have time to ping three search engines each time you update or add a page to your website. This is an important little detail that make a significant difference in how your web pages rank with the search engines.

Does your current web host have a tool that reviews your web pages and makes recommendations for improvement to make them search engine friendly? The best web host provides this type of a tool. When you complete a page you submit it to the tool. It suggests changes to improve the page from a search engine prospective. This is very helpful to get your pages ranked high on the search engines. It makes the difference between traffic and no traffic on your site.

Does your web host provide these services? If not, fire your web host and find the best web host that will provide these services for you.

http://www.the-best-web-host.com/ will help you find the best web host.

Good luck in finding the best web host for your website. I wish you success.

Copyright 2007 John Howe, Inc.

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