Domains Are Great To Build Sustainable Businesses On The Internet?

Here we will see why you need your own domain.

Many people are happy to build their websites at free hosting platforms because there are well.. free. But when you build your website on a free platform, you are not building your own business really, you are building the business of someone else. The reality is: the content published at sites other that yours could vanish without warning and without explanations as it happened several times in the past. If you do this, take the precaution of at least generate backup files for all the content you publish elsewhere.

Free Publishing Platforms Sometimes Are Very Hostile Environments

Rules are tighttening for all the free hosting platforms as spammers like to game Google acquiring links in an artificial way. Spammers will use any webapage they find to post links on them to climb in the Google search engine, as this search engine values links and as a result of that is that every day, pages that have nonsense in them appear on this sites. Tired of this kind of abuse, this properties have changed their policies and now some are very tough:

Hubpages

Hubpages will mark as "low quality" and unpublish any pages that is marked as so by moderators. Also, some popular niches are screened and if you have links to ebook sites or affiliate sites, those pages will be unpublished.

Squidoo

Squidoo has banned some topics as they were very popular for spammers. If you publish pages related to these, you could find that your pages dissapear unexpectedly. It sucks when all your work is deleted for any reason.

Wordpress

Wordpress has not banned categories, but they are trying to ban affiliate. If Wordpress find even 1 affiliate link, they will delete all your website. I read a case of a woman that had a 200 pages Wordpress site, only to see it dissapear completely after she placed 2 affiliate links on them.


Having your own domain gives you the liberty to publish your content without fear of deletion and knowing that the links you acquire with time will help you get more and more traffic. When somebody links to you, they do it using your domain name and even if you move your page, your domain will be same. It is know that traffic from domains is larger than any website, including Google and Youtube as many people travel from site to site through links. If you get a lot of traffic through links to your web 2.0 properties and the content gets removed, you will lose all that traffic even if you had a backup of your content and manage to publish it somewhere else, so why don't help you own domain authority with those links?

Domains And Branding

Domains have a much more important tale to tell. They allow to "Brand" your site allowing you to get the most powerful for of type in traffic. You get type in traffic is people go directly to the address bar of their browsers and type your domain name and in the beginning of the Internet, you could get this kind of traffic with generic domains that had a high number of searches at Google.com because that means a topic is popular. Those names got very valuable as business.com which was sold for 7 million dollars and were snapped very fast. Today the only meaningful way to get type in traffic is branding your domain.

There are two tricks to brand a domain effectively and these are: Get a short name and avoid generic domains. The short name should subtly evoke something about the brand and avoid generic domains as they are difficult to convert into a valuable brand. Search engine specialists will suggest registering your domain with keywords as Google favours pages that have the exact match domain in them, but those usually are not easy to brand, so the best advice is to register a brandable domain along a SEO domain and use each site a the most precise use you could. The SEO site could be a blog and the brandable site could be a flash site will all the bells and whistles you want and you can get the best of both worlds.

Get your own domain as soon as possible.

How To Become A Successful Product Preview Blogger?

After invention of WEB 2.0 standards, Internet arena changes dramatically. WEB 2.0 not only bring the new ideas like - social networking, video sharing, image sharing, micro-Blogging and Blogging it also help internet marketers to expand their marketing ideas from traditional PPC campaign or email marketing. Now a day, online marketers use Blogs as multi-headed arrow. They use it as a moneymaking tool, promotional tool for his/her own product or even use the Blogging platform to promote any affiliate product review.

If you have an online business, no matter whatever products/services you have, you can enhance your sales as a review Blogger through your review blog. It is the best way to tell your potential customers about your products/services. Because in other traditional advertising media, you never ever get direct customer involvement and you need to conduct separate campaign to know their needs, but a review Blogger can directly involve potential customers with conversation and get their reactions about the product/services.

On the other hand, product review Blogs is most wonderful resource for those Blogger who want to earn some extra cash through his/her Blogging. Review Blogs are very much effective on affiliate marketing too. It will generate targeted traffic and remarkable success and open a new earning opportunity for Blogger. If you have a website and want to increase traffic then review Blogs are equally effective to generate your desired traffic. So, if you want to be a review Blogger here is a checklist for you -

Choose The Platform - before you start Blogging, you must know the most popular Blogging platforms, their advantages and disadvantages. Now a day, Bloggers are classified under two categories. They mainly use two Blogging platforms, they are - WordPress and Blogspot. WordPress is an open source initiative and self-hosted Blogging platform with lots of powerful and paid services. They have various pricing for their services, if you want to enjoy the fully functional WordPress Blogging platform, then you must pay the yearly subscription fees. On the other hand, Blogspot is a Google initiatives and it is completely free from any kind of charges/annual subscription fees.

Alternatively, it is suggested that, if you want to uniquely distinguish your blog from others, then you must change its appearance no matter whether you are using WordPress or Blogspot (Blogger). You can find lots of free and paid blog templates over Internet by searching them in any major search engine like - Google. In this article, we mainly penetrate on Blogger, so, you can search "Free Blogger Template" in Google, and you can find numbers of free yet stunning templates. You can change the template from your user dashboard. Finally, you can use your custom domain in Blogger without any extra cost; it is a good idea to purchase/register a domain name that matches with your niche. It is really big thing when you are going to purchase or obtain a sub-domain from Blogger. The main reason of it is - keyword in domain name or sub-domain name can give you better search engine visibility.

Increase your Blog's popularity - if you search in Google by typing "How to increase my Blog's popularity" surprisingly you'll get thousands of results contains hundreds of tips and tricks. But it is recommended that, do not apply any unethical aspects to promote your blog, otherwise Google permanently ban your blog or remove your blog without any prior notice. So, try to promote your blog with, guest blog posting, article submission, video sharing on Youtube and commenting on other Blogs. Those are organic traffic generation methods approved by Google.

Review Blogging - hopefully the most critical part of any review Blogger. Your primary target is to generate traffic or generating sales lead, but keep in mind that, while you are going to post any review that means your views are independent and must not sales oriented. So, keep your sales voice lower and to make your review more appealing, useful and believable, you must include the benefits of the product/service and disadvantage/pitfalls of the product/service. Because it is proven that, potential customers equally check for the drawbacks of the product/service they are looking for. If you clearly show them the drawbacks possibly you'll win more customers! Happy Blogging.

My Experience With Hostmonster and Website Publishing

With lots of bad news about the health of our economy and the skyrocketing unemployment figures, many people, especially younger people that just finished college, flock to the Internet in the hopes to find a good living online. Some rush to get a web publishing company like: Hostmonster and start building their website with high hopes and naive dreams.

Here Comes The Reality

The reality is that making money on the Internet is not longer easy. Although never has been easy to earn money on the Internet, in the past, it was easy to just start earning a decent living as a writer even using Adsense because competition was not stiff. Some say that affiliate marketing is the easiest way to start a business on the Internet, but let me tell you the reality of this. Some years ago, I starting promoting the Hostmonster service as an affiliate marketer and noted a lot of competition for this keyword. I chose the Hostmonster keyword because product names tend to be more valuable than general keywords because they come with purchasing intent.

I published my site, created many videos to promote them and recently, a lot of articles but Google takes several months to put them in the place they deserve, thanks to spammers that create millions of pages in the hopes to get them indexed fast and this is no different to promote a product like Hostmonster which pays $90 bucks every time sale is made. Long story short, I will have to wait several months to even start to see any traffic to that website from those articles.

I have been on the Internet for a very long time now and I see that is becoming increasingly difficult to earn money as an affiliate, not only because of competition, but there are several attacks on every front.

Youtube Videos

I created hundreds of videos related to Hostmonster in the hopes that each video ranked well in the search engines for low volume keyphrases (the long tail keywords) and it worked, but they are referring very little traffic from each, in the range of 10 visitors per year, per video. If you think that it is easy to make hundreds of videos, you have to be nuts. Only 1 in 10 people that visit my videos visit my website, so I will have only 200 visitors to my website for these Hostmonster videos. More of less 1 in 100 buys through my affiliate link, so that effort is worth 2 sales or $180 in total per year. It is a whole lot of work for just $180 a year and maybe refining the system could make this profitable, but it is very troublesome.

Here are some of the problems outside competition:

Google attacks

Google hates affiliates. Although they don't say exactly this, the reality is that they think that affiliate marketing is unnecessary and put a lot of pressure on affiliate marketers, so they tend to go away Adwords. It is true that for many products, promoting them as an affiliate in Adwords is totally dead right now.

FTC

The federal trade commission is putting a lot of pressure (a legal one!) on top of affiliates. You should disclose clearly your relationships with the merchants you are promoting or you will face high fines and your website could be closed.

Taxes

Some states are taxing affiliate programs. In response to this, Amazon closed their affiliate operation in those states, leaving their affiliates dry from that source of income. Although taxes are not that bad, it is bad when the product owner shuts down the affiliate program due to them.

Scams

If all the above was not enough, you should have to avoid scams in your way to make money online. You will find a lot of different kind of scams online: people taking your money without giving you anything, people that don't deliver, people that give you an excellent service and develop you an excellent product, only to find that the product doesn't work later... (that happened to me in a software development project). There are hosting scams as well, servers that get a lot of downtime, people that charge your credit card many times without notice, etc. That is the reason you should go with a reputable company like Hostmonster and that is why I recommend Hostmonster.

Well, if you forget about all the bad things about being an affiliate marketer, you could still be doing it, but don't think for a second that is an easy route to riches, because it is NOT. If you like Hostmonster as your hosting provider, I could give you some of the best bonuses you would ever see on the Internet that will help you overcome most of the problems you could face as a merchant on the net and if you are still attracted to being an affiliate marketer, you will have an easier time doing it.