I consider myself somewhat of an expert on web hosting as I have dealt with my share of webhosting companies throughout my career in internet marketing. I have numerous shared hosting accounts as well as some dedicated server accounts also. What I have found out that a dependable web hosting company is essential in running an online business. Dependable includes such things as how close to 100% of the time your site will be up, the quality and knowledge of the customer support team, and of course prices for the services.

Granted no hosting company is perfect as technology is not perfect but some companies are better than others. The companies I’m listing below are good quality companies which I have used or are presently using or have done good research on. If it is listed below I feel the company offers a great value as well as great service.

The first company I’m mentioning is GoDaddy.com which is the first company I started with in web hosting. I’m sure you have seen their ads everywhere including the last couple of Superbowls in which their ads kind of teetered on the edge but were very entertainable. The best things about GoDaddy are their excellent customer service and the good deals. Being at the top of companies in their industry gives them access to the best techs and affordable prices.

Fatcow.com is another site we use and have been very happy with the service. I found out about them in an ad in PC Magazine. The best quality of this company is price. Their customer service is very good also. Make sure you take a look at sales they are running when choosing this company.

Justhost.com is a first class hosting provider offering free domains, unlimited disk space, and unlimited bandwidth among other features. They are by far the simplest to get started with and the fastest to get your site up and running.

Other web hosting companies I recommend are:
Dot5 ONLY $3.95 Web Hosting!!!
HostMonster – Perl, CGI, SSH, Free Domain
$4.95/mo – Webhostingpad.com
Dotster.com
Lunarpages Web Hosting

Today I’ll make the writing short but I want you all to spend some time watching this video by Jeff  Johnson entitled: Crush Your Competition With Banners That Get You More Clicks.

In this video Jeff Johnson shows you how to use free research tools from Commission Junction to see what banners and text offers get clicked on the most. This helps you actually spy on your competition and will help with your affiliate marketing and traffic getting abilities. Enjoy the video and then hop over to the Underground Training Lab  for more FREE videos, tutorials, and software.

It’s Friday and I’m in the mood for a little fun so I thought that I would stir something up here on the blog. I’ve been reading quite a bit about the CommentLuv plugin lately and thought that I’d let everyone know that I support it. If you don’t know what the CommentLuv plugin is I’ll try to explain.

Everyone knows that backlinks are an important if not the most important way to increase your page rank and increase web site traffic. Getting incoming links from other web sites alerts the search engines that somebody is looking at your site. One of the best ways to get backlinks is to comment on other blogs and forums most importantly blogs and forums that are related to your own in subject matter. What the CommentLuv plugin does is when you go to a site that has installed the plugin and make a comment, it creates a backlink and lists the title of your last blog post. This does two things 1) creates a backlink to your blog post and 2) shows what you wrote last. Both of these are good because the first helps your ranking and the second alerts people to what you are writing about. I have included the CommentLuv plugin on all of the blogs I have had since I started and I do click on posts from other people’s comments that I think are interesting.

The Dofollow part is almost the same as CommentLuv as it allows your comments to create backlinks back to the person commenting blog. WordPress blogs are by default Nofollow which means any comments you leave will not create a backlink.  I installed a dofollow plugin I found for WordPress blogs to make mine a dofollow blog. You can get the plugin by clicking here.

Now the reason that WordPress made blogs nofollow was to combat “comment spam” where people go to your comment section and add spam comments to create backlinks to their site. I have very good control over my comments with moderation, filters, and such so please make all comments on my site pertain to the subject at hand.

There are other tips on using SEO tactics to increase your web site traffic which you may do but if I could I’ll suggest that you try Jeff Johnson’s Free Traffic Getting SEO Plug In because it simplifies the procedures and best of all it is FREE. To get his plugin Click Here Now

I just received an email from one of my teachers in the internet marketing world Howie Schwartz and it prompted me to write this post. What jumped out at me are a couple of facts that I didn’t realize and here they are:

- 30 percent of all search queries contain
a city, state or zip code. (source: Piper Jaffray)
- There are 2.6 billion local searches each month -
its bigger than the Yellow Pages

Now I did know that local niches are often overlooked and can be a great way to make money online but these two facts just blew me away. The stories I’ve heard from other people in the business have alerted me to local niche marketing. For example, an IM guy that I follow regularly has a teeth whitening site in a big city and has it monetized using Adsense. He does nothing more than build a couple of links monthly but brings in several hundred dollars a month.

One of the best ways to get started with making money from local niches is to build a website targeting a local service, for example local heating and cooling contractors. After you have ranked number 1 on the search engines, it shouldn’t be hard, contact the leading companies in the industry and offer to sell the site to them. Be prepared to show them the amount of traffic you are bringing to the site and show the amount of money that can be made by being in the number one spot on the site. You should either get one of two things at this point. Either they will offer to buy the site outright or offer a sum of money to be put in the top spot on the site. Here you will have to decide what you want to do. I have heard that websites such as this can bring up to 5K or more and don’t require much work.

There are other ways to profit from the local niches such as selling advertising on your site and I’m sure you can think of more. But as you decide keep in mind the two statistics from Howie I mentioned previously and you will realize how big local niche marketing is.

Jeff Johnson has a new offer out there you need to check out called the Zero Cost No Brainer Guarantee

The goal of every web site owner in regards to getting web site traffic is to get targeted web site traffic that will lead to them accomplishing the goals for visitors to their site. It could be to make sales, sign up for a newsletter, or whatever. You may be convinced that you know what the visitor to your site wants, but do you really? Sometimes what you assume may be wrong and the only to find out is simply to research.
One type of research used is to ask the customer what they want by survey. This works particularly well if you have many customers. If you don’t have customers to survey then you must use another strategy. This is where keyword research can help.

Basically, keyword research is doing research to see how many people are searching for a particular word or phrase. Doing keyword research though involves having a good keyword research tool. There are many free research tools out there such as Google’s Keyword Tool but if you own a business and are serious about finding the right tool then you must purchase or subscribe to a good research tool. I recommend you try out Keyword Elite, Buyer Keywords Generator, or Market Samurai. These tools are top of the line and you can learn how to use them utilizing the training provided by the seller.

Researching the keywords using a keyword research tool will allow you to seek out high demand keyword and phrases. You are looking for keywords that are in high demand but with low competition. These high demand/low competition keywords give you the ability to rank high in the search engines which will increase web site traffic to your site and help you accomplish the goals you’ve set. But without the proper tools it will be a long and hard journey.