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Top 5 Tips for Selecting a Web Host

Rick Noel — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 01:51:38 +0000

Based on Unbiased Advice and Real World Experience

1.) Look for Unbiased Web host Reviews – This can be difficult in the world of Super Affiliates who build lucrative, legitimate businesses around ranking high for search terms live “webhosting reviews.” Since affiliate review sites generally only cover hosting companies with affiliate programs where they are members and can earn a commission when someone gets to a hosting providers web site through the affiliate site and then buys. Therefore, while this is a completely legitimate business model, the reviews from web hosting review sites run by affiliates are, by the very nature of their compensation models, not unbiased.

A great source for evaluating hosting companies from a business perspective is the better business bureau, an unbiased third party resource. It is very easy and quick to check any web hosting company out on the BBB website at www.bbb.org. Rest assured, there are plenty of well-known, established hosting companies with BBB rating of A- or better, so there is absolutely no reason to select a web hosting company with a questionable BBB rating.

2.) Compare Web Host Uptime SLAs (Service Level Agreements) – i.e. What % of time do they guarantee that your web server will be available. 99.9% is pretty standard. This might sound like a high % of uptime, but .1% downtime translates into just over 8 hrs and 45 minutes a year which might not seem too bad unless it happens to be the time that an important customer or prospect or even you yourself are trying to access the website. Some hosts will provide rebates or discounts to offset hosting costs when an unschedule outage occurs for prolonged period, violating the uptime SLA.

It is not practical to expect 100% uptime and don’t believe web hosting providers that claim this. Some down time is required to perform routine maintenance to keep the web hosting environment secure by applying software bug fixes, maintenance and security patches. Most reputable companies will perform server maintenance during periods of historically lighter traffic.

3.) Compare Web Host Customer Service – When comparing web hosting plans, it is good to see what kind of customer support they provide. There is no question that either you, someone in your company or maybe a consultant that handles your website and other Internet marketing initiatives, will need to rely on the web hosting customer service department to get an important task accomplished. It’s not a matter of if, but when. You will want to make sure that you hosting company has 24x7x365 phone support available, preferably staffed with consultants that have the same first language as you do which will faciliate communication.

Since customer service is one of the key distinguishers when evaluating web hosting companies, it is worth investing the time to call sales or support representative to ask a business or technical question and to evaluate the hold time experienced and the quality of support received. Remember, once you are a customer and you need support for an online business continuity issue, just think about the difference that good support will make in obtaining a timely solution.

4.) Read the Web Host Terms of Service, paying special attention to things like how they define “reasonable use” which are used to place limitations on the “unlimited storage”, “unlimited bandwidth”, “unlimited email accounts” and other items used in the sales collateral and advertisements of the web hosting companies that compete for your businesses. Other nice things to find in a web host terms of service include a money back guarantee with a prorated refund. There are reputable web hosts that provide 30 day money back guarantee and even one that at the time of this writing provides a money back guarantee for the life of the service term.

The other thing to consider is that as the number of visitors to your website increase, you want to be sure that your web host can support a graceful scaling to account for increase bandwidth and serving requirements as your business and traffic grow. This is especially important when deploying your website on a shared virtual server hosting environment. In this kind of environment, the web server that is serving your web pages is running on a server that is running lots of other web servers shared across a number of websites, all running on the same physical computer. Experienced hosting companies understand how to load balance in a way to ensure that performance is maintained. The key metric to track is page load time as users have little patience to wait for slowing loading web pages. Search results also factor in page load time when determining a page’s position in the search results.

5.) Web Host Redundancy is key – Make certain that any web host that you are considering has multiple data centers so that an outage in one data center does not necessarily mean that your website will go offline. Most will have back-up power, including diesel generators and in one known case, wind power to keep the servers running in the event of an outage. They should also have redundant network connections so that if one network is down for some reason that the back-up network will keep your website, and therefore, your web server, connected to the Internet and accessible by customers.

Remember, finding a good web hosting company is important, especially if you have a web host that has caused you grief and lost business in the past and you are looking to switch to a new provider. If you have tips to add based on your own experience, please comment on this post to share your wisdom.

Top 5 Tips for Selecting a Web Host is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

Online Article Marketing to Boost Business Visibility

Rick Noel — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 14:11:23 +0000

Online Article Marketing Defined

Online article marketing is the practice of writing articles to give your business, brand, product or service a visibility boost . In fact, Article Marketing is a key component of an overall public relations strategy and is a tried and true marketing practice that has been around for centuries.

Prior to the emergency of the commercial Internet in the early to mid 90s, Article Marketing relied on print publications for article distribution and to achieve broad reach. This included newspapers magazines, trade journals and other periodicals. Article inclusion in these print publications is at the discretion of the editorial staff and the fit of the article with the editors needs at the time of submission.

Today the Internet has given emergence to a new Article Marketing distribution channel provides the opportunity for worldwide reach. There are a number of reputable online article marketing sites online that have editors who actively manage quality.

Benefits of Online Article Marketing

Increasing reach for existing content: These article marketing directories increase readership of content by making that content easy to find for their millions of users and getting that content indexed quickly by the major search engines making it easy for relevant Internet users not currently members of these sites to also find your content. Another way that online article marketing directories increase reach is through syndication where other members can republish your content while providing you attribution and if included in your article, links back to your website.
More cost effective than other forms of advertising: Online article marketing costs only the time to write and submit articles. If time is your scarcest resource, then it is possible to hire resources to write and submit articles on your behalf. The real efficiency and returns are achieved when publishing existing content you own, where the cost limited time it takes to post content to the chosen online article marketing directories.
Establish expertise to your target market: Publishing quality articles through a trusted online article marketing site boosts your credibility with readers. Quality articles that enable readers to solve problems based on sharing your relevant knowledge is an effective way to establish yourself as an expert in your field. Your author bio box is the tool to promote your own website and personal brand that can be used to drive targeted traffic to your website. Satisfied readers will want to read more about the same topic that you have written about and the resource box is the place for links back to your additional content.
Create Website Traffic: Since the top online article marketing directories enable you to include links back to your site, readers of your articles can follow those links back to your website, blog or a social media page resulting in driving targeted traffic to your website.
Improving SEO efforts: Links in your articles back to your website boost online visibility of your website to the search engines. Since the top online article marketing directories support content syndication enabling other members to republish other members content under specific rules, links generated from reposts of your articles online will not only drive additional traffic from readers on those sites following your links, but also provide links back to your website, further improving your ranking within search engines. The top online article marketing sites track readership statistics so that you can view how many times an article has been viewed and what search terms readers used to find your content, thus providing insights that can be used to help guide future publishing and SEO efforts based on demonstrated audience interest.
Build brand image: Getting published on a quality online article marketing directory can do wonders for boosting your brand. Having your article get picked up by high quality publishers can boost your brand even further.

The Top 5 online article marketing sites ranked by traffic at the time of this writing are:

Four of the top 5 online article marketing directories have in excess of 1M unique visitors each month with ezinearticles.com, the top online article marketing directlory at the time of this writing, with over 10 million unique visitors each month.

Traffic of Top 5 Online Article Marketing Directories

If you are looking for a great way enhance your public relations strategy today, then sign up for an account at one of the top 5 online article marketing directories and begin increasing the return on your content investment.

Online Article Marketing to Boost Business Visibility is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

Enabling Viral Sharing to Increase Content Reach

Rick Noel — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 21:40:27 +0000

If you are spending resources to create and publish content there are simple steps you can take to use the viral nature of the Internet and social media in particular to increase distribution of your content with little or no incremental effort. Does this sound too good to be true? Well it’s not and here’s how.

There is a company called AddThis, LLC that specializes in enabling publishers to make it easy for their readers to share their content with their social networks, whichever ones they use, without placing a large support burden on the publisher. Other social networks? You mean there are other social networks beyond Facebook? Yes Virginia, there is life beyond Facebook. AddThis is the market leader for social bookmarking and sharing services and aside from being among the 1.2 million sites that share content with AddThis social bookmarking widgets, I have no affiliation with AddThis.

You can add an AddThis social bookmarking widget to your website, blog (both WordPress or Blogger currently supported) or a MySpace profile in three easy steps:

Select your Service. choices include website, WordPress, Blogger and MySpace
Select you Button Style
Click the Get Your Button button

Once you click the Get Your Button button, you will be brought to a page with customized instructions based on steps 1, 2 above. The customized instructions for installing your AddThis social bookmarking widget are simple and adequately detailed for anyone who manages or administers a website or blog to implement. For WordPress installations of AddThis, no html knowledge is required and the AddThis widget can be installed from the WordPress administration interface in literally under one minute. I reserve the right to update this post with a short 60 second video just to prove the point.

The same is true for installation of the AddThis social bookmarking widget on a Blogger blog, however, for the Blogger template, if you want to have the AddThis widget associated with each blog post so that social bookmarking widget will appear at the end of each post and be associated with the post and not only the blog level, you will have to edit the blog html template to insert the AddThis widget for blog posts. Nonetheless, the instructions are detailed and if you get lost, AddThis has a step-by-step tutorial for adding AddThis to Blogger posts to guide you through the installation.

Free Social Bookmarking Analytics for Those who Register

Though not required, to get the full benefit of the AddThis social bookmarking widget, eBiz ROI recommends to clients that they register for a Free AddThis account to obtain access to analytics for their sharing buttons, weekly analytics email reports, and other cool features.

So what are you waiting for? Why not start increasing your content reach virally today through the addition of an AddThis Social Bookmarking widget to your content, while giving content the added bonus of generating inbound links from popular social network sites, all with just a few clicks!

Enabling Viral Sharing to Increase Content Reach is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

WordPress Blog Ping List

Rick Noel — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 03:33:49 +0000

What is a WordPress Blog Ping List and what do I do with it? While reading a post about whether Google likes blogs better than websites, a comment was made that a blog provides mechanisms to let Google and other key directories and search engines know when a blog post is published. For instance, this Internet Marketing Blog is a WordPress blog and therefore has an update service.

What is a WordPress update service and what is it used for you ask. When a a new post is published on a WordPress blog, WordPress automatically notifies the list of sites in the update services configuration. This list of sites is what is referred to as the WordPress Blog Ping List.

The ones used to configure the eBiz ROI Internet Marketing Blog include:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://www.feedsubmitter.com
http://blo.gs/ping.php
http://www.pingerati.net
http://www.pingmyblog.com
http://geourl.org/ping
http://ipings.com
http://www.weblogalot.com/ping

The ping list was added to the WordPress Update Service, from the dashboard > setting >> writing.

There are longer lists out there, but the danger is that some of the services in these WordPress blog ping lists are intermediaries, forwarding update notices to multiple sites, often creating unintentional overlap which can result in 3 or more pings to the same service for every update. The impact could be that your blog gets labeled as Spam.

Why not update your WordPress Blog ping list today to get your content the visibility it deserves?

WordPress Blog Ping List is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

Submitting Your Website to Google

Rick Noel — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 02:03:12 +0000

So now you have your business website. OK, that’s good. Now what? Wait for someone to fill in their contact info and then click submit on the contact us form? Wait until somebody calls the phone number listed on the website? Wait for someone to click the email link? Well, you could, but why not submit your website to Google to expedite the inclusion of your website in the great and mighty Google database, and by extension, in the Google search results.

The process of Submitting your website to Google is quite simple.

Navigate to the Add your URL to Google
Enter website address in the URL input field
Enter comments in the comments input field
Enter the optional characters in the image which is a mechanism used by Google to distinguish between sites submitted to Google and by individuals and those submitted to Google automatically through software. Note that this input field is optional
click the submit button

Only the top-level page of your website needs be submitted to Google and then the Google web crawler will discover linked pages that collectively comprise your website. According to Google, the comments entered in the add your URL to Google form do not affect how your page is indexed or used by Google once submitted.

If you are a procrastinator, fear not as new domains, once registered, generate what is called whois records that include the domain name and name servers which get communicated to Google who adds the new domain information to the queue of web address to crawl. That is not to say that submitting your URL won’t expedite the process getting your website listed on Google faster to bring more natural search traffic sooner.

Google does have the following disclaimer listed on the Add your URL to Google page: “We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.” In my experience, it is rare that Google will exclude any unique and useful content from its database but like most things in life beyond death and taxes, nothing is guaranteed.

As the next step in managing your website positioning within Google, navigate to the Google Webmaster Central and login to learn more about tools and techniques to enhance your search positioning and Google search referral traffic.

Submitting Your Website to Google is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

Twitter Intetgration into Google Search Results

Rick Noel — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 01:02:23 +0000

While performing a search for “Interent Marketing Services” on Google, in addition to the top sites that have dominated that keyphrase sinse eBiz ROI began tracking last year, a funny thing happened. On the first page of the search results were labeled Latest Results for Internet Marketing Services which included Twitter Tweets containing the words Internet, Marketing and Service, broad matched, integrated into the first page of the Google search results.

Google search results with tweets integrated into first page results

I have heard about this coming and maybe this is old news, but this is the first time that I have noticed Twitter tweets integrated into page one search resutls for Google searches. This could certain alter the role that Twitter plays in search engine marketing and SEO. Since terms like interenet marketing services may not lend themselves well to video and image references being included in blended search results, maybe integration of tweets with those keywords in the tweet could provide another dimension of relevancy and timely information. This new approach provides savvy Internet marketers who use Twitter to promote their business, to get on the first page of Google, much like the opportunity that integration of the Google 7-pack does with the integration of local search results triggered on search of keywords likely to have location based intent.

Oddly enough, Google searches in the past would include Google 7-pack local search results, but in the instance of search results for Internet Mareking Services captured by the image above, it appears not to be the case as no local search results were included in the results. Does this meant that Google is mixxing things up in this regard, making sure to provide only one back door at a time (i.e. Twitter Tweet integration vs. Google 7-Pack) to the search results at time so as not to overly disrupt the delicate balance of the PPC-SEO-ecosystem too much at one time? Only time will tell.

Readers are invited to comment on whether this is old news or whether this is a new opportunity and incentive for search mrketers to step up their investment in Twitter to promote their businesses and their clients.

Twitter Intetgration into Google Search Results is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

When bidding $25 per click provides ROI

Rick Noel — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 16:13:10 +0000

When evaluating your target market and by extension, your marketing options, its good to align your sales and marketing strategy with the average lifetime value of a client. Take a lawyer for instance, the average lifetime value of a client for a good civil litigator could be six figures or more, depending on circumstances of their cases. On the other hand, if selling $1 per piece widgets, then the average lifetime value of a retail client will be low, limiting the allocation of marketing funds available for each new client acquired.

Each scenario has its own needs. For the lawyer looking for 6 figure clients, the cost of customer acquisition can be high. For example, lawyers and businesses selling leads to lawyers, bid for $25 per click from mesothelioma searches providing ROI (Return on Investment). Let’s do some quick back of the envelope math. Assuming a very conservative click to conversion rate of one in a hundred clicks resulting in lead captured. This would be $2500 per captured lead. A more aggressive assumption might be one captured lead per ten clicks which translates to $250 per captured lead resulting from clicks purchased from sponsored links on mesothelioma
searches.

Now taking it a step further, lets assume that a sales close rate of 1 in 4 leads. If we take the conservative click to conversion estimate of one in a hundred, with a close rate of 25% yields a cost of client acquisition of $10,000. If we assume the more liberal click to conversion rate of 10%, which is entirely possible with a well optimized and tested landing page strategy, the cost of acquisition drops to $1000.

While $1000-$10,000 seems like a lot for client acquisition, for a lawyer averaging fees in excess of six figures, the strategy of bidding $25 for mesothelioma provides ROI.

When bidding $25 per click provides ROI is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

Linked In for New Business Presentation

Rick Noel — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 21:07:52 +0000

Check out the following presentation on how new businesses can use LinkedIn to promote their business.

LinkedIn for New Businesses

View more presentations from Rick Noel.

LinkedIn Presentation Overview: LinkedIn for New Businesses provides a brief introduction of LinkedIn, shares some references to articles about LinkedIn membership and history, provides stats from Compete.com, Google Insights and Quantcast, provides business benefits of using LinkedIn to promote your business and concludes with four action points that if taken, can provide immediate business benefits.

Linked In for New Business Presentation is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

95 Videos Viewed Online by Every Man Woman and Child

Rick Noel — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 23:07:10 +0000

Recently I created a short video to provide an Internet Marketing Overview targeted for non-technical business persons.

Internet Marketing Video for Dummies – No Offense

Then after uploading the video to a few more sites, it dawned on me that Internet Marketing is going to be heavily driven by video this year. Video usage and sharing has never been more popular and easy than it is today and near real time indexing of video content by the large search engines is now common. Its no wonder given that the large search engines all have their own video acquisitions, Google with YouTube, Yahoo with Flickr, etc.

You know the old expression, a picture is worth a thousand words, then how many words is a video worth, a million perhaps? A recent headline on marketingcharts.com indicated that according to the comScore Video Metrix service, US internet users watched 32.4 billion videos in January 2010. That’s mind blowing!

Thinking about further, with an estimated US population of just about 341M according to Internet World Stats, the 32.4B videos viewed in Jan 2010, means that on average, each man/woman/child in the US watched 95 videos online in January. If your target market is online and wired into social networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, their video consumption in January was likely much higher than 95 given the very young (to young to use the computer) and the very old (nursing home old) are likely not watching any videos and thus driving the average video consumption number down.

It is my strong belief that this phenomena has been accelerated/enabled by popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr which have made sharing videos with large numbers of people incredibly easy. therefore mainstream. Since major search engines with large video content assets routinely index video content quickly and return links to videos in blended search results, video not only continues to represent a great branding opportunity, but also a useful tool to obtain natural search results for competitive keywords.

Convinced? The time for integrating video into your Internet marketing efforts have never been better. Remember, a video could be worth a million words and that by April, maybe users will averaging over 100 online video views per month!

95 Videos Viewed Online by Every Man Woman and Child is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

Internet Marketing Rational for Local SMBs

Rick Noel — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:29:46 +0000

The Rationale for Internet Marketing for SMBs goes something like this. More and more people come online and are staying online longer every day. These users are buying more online now than ever before with many relying on the Internet as their primary source of local products and services. Internet Marketing for SMBs is critical, especially for local services businesses competing to capture a growing segment of their local market, namely online shoppers and those turning to the internet first for local business information. For those that don’t invest, they remain invisible to a growing portion of the local market.

Internet marketing enables local SMBs to reach more users as today in the US, 3 out of 4 are online. More than 90% of the 170M+ US Internet users access their rich media content through high-speed Internet connections. These high-speed connections enable rich media experiences include online gaming, video with digital quality picture and sound and applications running as nimbly as if they were running locally. During recent years, the US online media consumption, on average, has nearly doubled from 2.1 hours/day to 3.8 hours/day. With increased online media consumption comes increased online sales. In fact, the US Depart of Commerce estimates that, as of November 2009, eCommerce has reach 3.7% of overall US retail sales as compared to .8% in 2000, representing a 362% growth during that period.

Further accelerating online media expansion and increasing the importance of Internet Marketing for SMBs is the emergence of popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Unless you consume zero media in your life, you no doubt have heard mention of these networks. The explosion of highly specialized user generated content available on these social networks and other popular sites like YouTube and others have increased peoples reliance on the Internet, which for many, now has become their primary source of local business information.

As more businesses and consumers turn to the Internet first for product and services information, it’s Internet Marketing for SMBs becomes even more critical, particularly if the business is a local services business where online visibility to the local market is key. Local services businesses, in particular, need to ensure that their businesses are listed in the local search results of precious in-market users for at least the most popular local search spots.

By way of example, imagine you are a financial advisor building a practice in the Albany, NY area you are probably investing in print (yellow pages, newspapers, magazines, etc.) possibly TV, Radio and maybe even outdoor (billboard) advertising, but late to the Internet Marketing game. Now image a potential local investor is online and performing the following search on Google Local: financial advisor, Albany, NY:

As you can see, the list of your competitors for this potential investor is long and if you are not in the search results, people using Google Local to locate financial advisors will not find your business. It is as if your business is invisible to a segment of the market which could be substantial. This kind of prospect garnered through Internet Marketing is valuable as they are actively searching for the very services you offer.

The takeaway is that Internet marketing represents a great opportunity for local SMBs, particularly local services business. Internet Marketing, and local search in the example above, provides valuable visibility to a growing segment of the local market who turn to the Internet first to find information on the local products and services they are interested in.

Internet marketing solutions for small and medium businesses are affordable with directly measurable results. Getting started can costs less than a single print advertisement!

Internet Marketing Rational for Local SMBs is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |