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Why am I promoting this Hostgator coupon code? I do it because I enjoy the service they provide. This website, along with many other websites I have, are hosted by them. If you don’t believe me, simply search this website on a WHOIS search. In my experience as an online “savvy” kind of guy, I have been through a fair share of web hosting companies, and I have to admit that a lot of them were alright – but I wanted something more.

I needed a web-host that could could provide me with customer service around the clock. I couldn’t stand the fact that my websites have to run 24 hours a day, yet be subject to a “9-5″ customer service chat-line. In my humble opinion, that’s garbage…

I remember one of the first providers I decided to try out ( I won’t mention names ), actually suspended my account simply because I had a few hundred visitors coming to it. I was floored to say the least. I got so mad, I told them to go “you know where” and began my search for other hosts. If you have never had a website on the internet before, then you are really in for a treat if you decide to start your digital venture with Hostgator.

They provide all of the essentials someone is looking for a in a host. Granted most of us will never use even 50% of the features they give. One important aspect of learning to find a good web-host, is learning to see through the sales pitch.

What does this mean? It means that you need to focus your attention on a few distinct quality of a hosting package. Those being:

• Bandwidth
• Disk Space
• Uptime
• Unlimited Domains
• Cpanel

Now if you don’t know what any of those means, let me give you a quick crash course on website hosting…

Bandwidth: This is the amount of data that you are allowed each month for your website. Essentially, you can think of this in terms of gasoline for your site. Once you run out of gas, you can no longer go anywhere. The same thing applies to your site’s visitors. Once you run out of room for bandwidth, you are a sitting duck until the next month comes up. When it comes to the amount of bandwidth you are given with Hostgator, you have absolutely nothing to worry about.

Disk Space: This is somewhat obvious but it may not be to some of you, so I thought I would add it in here. Disk space is the amount of room you are given on a server, in order to store your files. That includes everything you want to put on your website. It doesn’t matter if it is articles, images, video, etc… Just make sure you have enough. Hostgator gives you plenty of room. I have never hit the limit, even with some enormous files.

Uptime: This is crucial if you want to succeed online. Uptime refers to the amount of hours in the day or month, that your website is active and visible by people. Sometimes websites may go “down” or not show, due to servers restarting, errors, or a poor web host. While all web hosts must update or restart their servers, this should happen no more than a few minutes each month. With Hostgator, this is not a problem.

Unlimited Domains: This one isn’t a big issue if you only plan on having one website, but if you ever want to expand your web presence and build more websites, some web hosts will require you to purchase a hosting package for each site you want! This is insane… and it’s not the way it should be. Look for a host that offers you unlimited domains. That way, you can have as many websites as you want, all on the same plan.

cPanel: What cPanel will do for you, is make your life easier. This is software that comes with Hostgator’s plans, and it allows you to install things, setup email, and a whole lot more – all with the push of a button. If your web-host does not provide cPanel, run from them as fast as you can.

Do not be mis-guided either. Affiliate marketing is a great way to work from home. Why do so many people fail? Why are there so many expectations of a world that owes you instant money when it comes to the internet? It is because of the culture we live in. So now that you know what the problem is, you can avoid it and be ahead of the crowd. How do you work from home online? You have to create a plan of the income level you need. This is called reverse engineering.

Let’s say that you wanted to make an extra $1,000 per month online. This comes to roughly $33 a day. Depending on the products you are promoting, this would be normally be 1-2 sales per day of net profit. (A lot of products tend to pay between $15-$29.) Is it a hard task? Not really, but it will require some thought and focus. In order to achieve this success, you have to start asking yourself some basic questions.

What kinds of markets can bring you this kind of income? What are people interested in? What do people buy online and will most likely continue to purchase? Marketing is pretty straightforward once you have the facts down. Most of your work is planning and research. The actual “selling” is only a tiny part of the equation. If you want to make it online, you need to think “outside the net”. The human race has a long history of what works and doesn’t work, especially when it comes to the types of evergreen products being promoted today.

People have feelings and emotions, this is why dating is such a huge market. People also want to become self-independent. This is why “work from home” products are also immensely popular. Learn to think like a customer and you will begin to see the true power that “search” can hold for you.

When you are managing an Internet advertising campaign, you have to plan what you want before you get knee deep in bid costs. Pick the the keywords you are going to test, write your ad copy, and make sure to focus on tight knit ad-groups. Small, focused ad-groups always outperform their broader counterparts. I can think of one or two exceptions to this rule, where you would be advertising on cities, states, and counties, and you could use dynamic keyword insertion (cannot make 50,000 ad-groups in 1 campaign). But you get the idea.

The big three advertisers are of course Adwords, Yahoo, and Adcenter. However this presents an interesting scenario in light of the PPC industry. With the Yahoo/MSN deal going into effect by the year 2012, what are you going to do about your campaigns? Are you a big fan of Yahoo or Adcenter? The way I understand it, is that Adcenter will be managing the paid ads on Yahoo’s platform. So essentially we have two competing rivals instead of 3.

In my opinion, this not only makes the pay per click market more competitive, but it also streamlines the process. It is my guess that the cost per click will rise substantially on Adcenter as a result of this merger. In turn, it will also help newcomers because quite frankly, Adcenter is much easier to deal with then Yahoo’s paid advertising interface. Even if MSN only gets a tiny percentage of web traffic – I have found it to convert to leads and sales rather well – on par, if not better than Google. I didn’t see as many great results with Yahoo but this of course depends on the markets you are in.

The conversion ratio could potentially go down because of merging Adcenter into Yahoo’s search but on the flipside, it will allow users to reach a much bigger audience with less hassle. So one has to weight the negatives versus the positives. One thing that bugs me about Adcenter is the need to copy your adgroups and repost them, targeting them to a different country. They should really streamline that feature and allow you to choose the countries you want all from the same adgroup.

You see, the fact is that .00001% of newcomers online will likely make that kind of money in a weekend. In fact, it will probably take them a minimum of a year to fully understand some of the basics principles of business and how to go about selling online. Making a lot of money online, whether it be through pay per click, search engine optimization, joint ventures, or other forms of advertising media, all takes time and effort.

Time is really a crucial factor when it comes to business. You learn as you go but even more importantly, you become wiser as you go. It’s one thing to teach someone HTML; it’s a completely different story to have that person go out and create their first website from a pure coding standpoint. Hopefully you can see the point I am trying to foster here. Time, patience, energy, and relationships are what make a great business.

Certainly all other factors play a role as well, like the advertising mediums previously mentioned; however it is important to point out that you should not be solely focused on “making the sale”. You should be focused on “making your business”. This is one of the many pitfalls people endure when trying to strike it rich online. I myself was included in this phenomenom of “need this to make that”. I bought into one program after another, sky-rocketed my debt, and was left feeling hopeless. Fast forward a few years and things have turned around but certainly not without some hard work.

If you want to make money online, I am not telling you to dis-regard marketing techniques, but instead to focus your mental attention on the website, business, or whatever item it is that you are working on. You cannot make a great website within a week’s time. Big time powerful websites are built up over many years. If you are focused on affiliate marketing, focus on giving the end user a unique perspective on what it is you are offering. Be creative and be honest. Let your website grow over time and think of ways to make it grow.

Perhaps you could add a community software section, or a discussion board. People love to become engaged in whatever it is they like to do. This is otherwise known as passion. Speaking of passion, everyone is able to tell when someone is making a website for the pure sake of money, or whether they want to help people as well. Don’t become a “thin” promoter, become a full time marketer.

Why do you save with Hostmonster? Let’s look at some of the facts…

Using the coupon link in the first paragraph, you are only going to pay a measly $5.95 per month. That is almost half the cost of most of the major hosting networks. After all, Hostmonster isn’t going to cut down on quality simply because the price is a little lower. On top of that, you also get a free domain name with unlimited domain hosting, plus an unlimited amount of Gigs for site transer. That’s service you can depend on.

Hostmonster has a reliable track record too. You won’t find very many unhappy people that used their hosting. You will always find someone who is unhappy with a company, that’s just the facts of life. What you want to make sure on is whether or not there is a large portion of unsatisfied folks. If there isn’t, that’s good news.

Another good reason to use Hostmonster is that they offer their customer quad core processing servers. If you know anything about web hosting, it is that CPU power generally is used before more Ram on a server – depending of course on the clients needs. In this case, since it is shared hosting, top notch CPUs are what is used. Not to bad huh?

They are known to keep on top of their updates and as such, always have the latest version of PHP etc… and they even give a SSL secure server for those of you wishing to run an e-commerce operation. That’s a sweet bang for the buck, especially at $5.95 a month. Where else can you get all of these goodies?

Now I know you can go anywhere for web hosting, but why not use the Hostmonster coupon I gave you? Heck you can always refund if you don’t like them. The reason I put this article together is for other people’s benefit. I’m not blowing hot air here (well typing not speaking I suppose) for nothing. Get yourself a reliable webhost today. Sign up with Hostmonster below or find another provider – either web, the web awaits you.

If you have any questions, feel free to give me a shout. I’m always on this site and if I see you wrote a question I’ll be happy to help in any way I can. Well, you can always give a shout out even if you don’t have a question about Hostmonster of their hosting packages. All the best in your web journeys.

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• United States
• Canada
• New Zealand
• Australia
• UK
• Japan
• France
• Germany
• Ireland
• Sweden
• Spain
• Switzerland
• Italy
• and others…

When most folks are getting started in a marketing program for their business, whether it be online (it should) or not, they tend to look over some basic facts. Take a look at your sale stats right now (if you have any yet) and see where your sales are coming from. Granted you can’t sell your services to everyone in every country, but you may be missing out on a huge opportunity if you decide to stick just to your native country. Depending on what you are selling, you may not be able to ship goods around the world.

This is why offering a digital solution of your program (if feasible) is a great idea. By allowing the end user to purchase your program and have it right away via the internet or download, you are opening up your market share quite substantially. Most purchases made online are done in North America – no one will dispute that. What if you gained an extra 5% in sales from other countries though? How much would that add to your market revenue for the year?

A lot of people laugh and scoff at tiny numbers when it comes to sales but in reality, it’s the tiny numbers that when added together, produce those giant figures you see. So the next time you are thinking of doing a marketing campaign, look at the stats. Try advertising to some new areas and measure the return on investment from those countries. You may even see a greater conversion ratio than expected.

Getting yourself setup with some top paying affiliate programs is usually the fastest way to start earning some cash. The affiliate industry is in my opinion, one of the best “things” to be created. Now while this model has been around for some time (commission based payments), it has never taken off so fast as it has on the Internet. It’s a great way for anyone to earn some side cash month after month – or to turn it into a full fledged business. Here’s the mistake that most people make though.

They have no idea what to look for. Most people just begin seeking out the top paying affiliate programs and start promoting those. While this can be a profitable venture, you have to look past the amount you get paid. If you are earning $100 per sale and have to spend $95 to make a sale, then the $100 no longer seems that huge does it? On the other hand, if you are promoting a product whereby you make $60 per sale and only have to spend $30 to get the commission – that seems like the better alternative.

I can’t sit here and tell you which product is the best. There is no best product to promote, yet there are a few factors which you will want to keep in mind while scouring the net for affiliate programs. A program must have:

• Lots of searches
• A decent payout rate
• Timely payments
• Lots of competition

If you can find a product that offers these essential items, you will be on your way to finding a “gold mine” as they say. Remember, competition is not a bad thing. The more people selling a product means the more chances you can have to get a slice of the pie as well. So don’t jump the gun on a product just because it offers a higher commission. Think sideways – not vertically. It doesn’t always have to be a digital product – you can promote physical stuff too from Commission Junction and other networks.

• Usability
• Readability
• Functionality
• Navigation
• W3C Compliance
• etc…

If you have been doing web design for any period of time, you know that the speed of editing becomes more important – in a direct correlation to how big your website is. This is where the beautiful PHP Include option comes in handy. For those of you that have never used it or heard of it, this is what it is.

A PHP Include is of course, written in the programming language of PHP. An include allows you to insert this piece of code, onto every webpage you own. You then place regular HTML code into the include file. Whenever your PHP Include is called on the page – you can have your HTML displayed.

What is this good for? It allows you to put something on thousands of pages, and only have to edit one file. What is the opposite of this? You could open up every webpage and edit the same file over and over again… but who wants to do that?

So here’s how it works…

1. When working in your web design program, you can cut/paste the HTML from one spot that you need on every page, and paste it into a completely blank document (that means no HTML markup at all – the best way to make sure is to view the source code of the page).
2. Save the page with a memorable name and have it end in the “.inc” extension. So if your page-name was “orderbutton”, your file would be “orderbutton.inc” (do NOT have it end in .htm or .html)
3. You will then place the following code on your web-page, into the spot where you want your file to appear: <?php include(”path-to-file.inc”); ?>

Now if you are completely new to PHP, this may seem overwhelming so let me explain a bit further…

You are going to replace the “path-to-file.inc” above with the destination to your “.inc” file on your website. So if you had created a PHP include file called “orderbutton.inc” in a folder called “php”… your code would read <?php include(”php/orderbutton.inc”); ?>.

Also keep in mind, that for each sub-folder you create, your path file will change by “../”. So if you had a folder on your website that was called “products” and inside that folder you had another folder called “specials”, your PHP include code for any web-pages inside the “specials” folder would be <?php include(”../php/orderbutton.inc”); ?>.

This is how great websites are made – by simplifying the redundant tasks of editing over and over again. I hope this helps you – and if you have any questions, please ask!

Do you know what you are doing when it comes to your online business? If you haven’t the slightest clue of how to run a profitable pay per click campaign, or rank for a keyphrase that doesn’t even exist, then you need to re-think your plan. The best way to learn the “ropes” of marketing is to get your feet wet at the start. By doing some of the basic tasks in the beginning, you will have at least some knowledge to help you instruct people who you plan to hire.

Do you really expect someone to work for you as a freelancer and turn your business into a multi-million dollar campaign? Of course not… or at least I hope not. Outsourcing is the perfect way to scale up your business, only AFTER you know what to do – in order to succeed. If you know you need to rank for a bunch of long-tail phrases, then get writers to give you quality, original content. Hire another set of people to focus on attaining quality backlinks, through link-bait, press releases, or any of the various forms. Just make sure your site is actually worth linking to.

If you rather spend money on a quicker pace, hire people to research hundreds of keyphrases for you. You could then plug these into one campaign after another and split-test the results. The problem with outsourcing, is that many people feel the work will not be up to par – if they don’t do it themselves. The bad thing about this, is that you are shooting yourself in the foot. How can you expect to have hundreds of sales a day, unless you have thousands of pages of content, links, promotions, and strategies in place?

Getting back into it took some time, but I gradually learned to enjoy it more and more. I think PPC is an art that definately takes time to master. Browsing around Internet forums from time to time, I see a lot of people asking questions about bid prices and CTR. It’s amazing how obessive this can be. Almost as bad as PageRank in my opinion. Anyways, how much should I pay per click? This is the exact question you should be asking yourself when you setup a new campaign or adgroup.

The “formula” for this is to actually take your EPS (earnings per sale) and divide that in half. Then take that number and divide by 100. So let’s say you earn $50 per sale. The formula would be:

• $50/2=$25
• $25/100=$0.25

Thus, if you are making $50 dollars per sale, you should be looking to spend .25 – .30 cents per click, on your key-phrases. Remember to go long tail, and to also go horizontally in your advertising. Super affiliates separate themselves from the noobs in this very tactic. Look to expand your campaigns instead of just digging for the highest searched keywords. You will start to see your profits grow once you master this technique.