Marketing Leverage has gone crazy with the contest sponsorships.  Not that I am complaining I have joined in a few hoping to get something out of them.

The one that I ALMOST missed was John Chow’s.  Today is the last day to enter.  All you have to do is reply to his post or write a blog post with a trackback and a link to Marketing Leverage.

This is my post for the contest

Today I have sold my last link placement through TextLinkAds.  I recommend them if you are interested in selling some text link space.  They are very easy to deal with and the payouts are fair.

Currently TLA is the main way that this blog makes money.  It is about 25% of my total online income currently, but I am expecting more.  I have added the ability to sell private ads using OioPublisher.  This is a great plugin, very easy to install and manage.  The only downfall, if you can call it that, is that it costs money.  I will write a full post on it in the very near future, because it really is worth everything that you pay.

Right now I am offering 3 site wide banners and 1 inline ad.  I have “default” banners located there now, so there are 4 spots available, so get them now before they are gone

My next step in my hobby is to let one site die and build on another.  The killer for me is that the site that I don’t have to time for is the one with the more profitable niche, however I have more “fun” writing for the other site.  Since this is a hobby I am going to leave it this way.  I may not let the other site die prese but maybe I will just let it sit and buy some post for it in the near future.

For my next step I am going to start to investigate my entry into the affiliate marketing space….again.  There seems to be a number of people doing the same, but I am sure that I can succeed.  I have a monthly profit goal in mind that I want to reach for the new year.  If I reach it, I may plan on making this hobby into an actual company.  This has the advantages of limiting my personal liability, but it costs money.

That is enough rambling for tonight.  Maybe in the future when I have more cash flow into this blog I will post my earnings like JohnC and TylerC.

Ciao

I am starting to look for some other web hosts out there.  I am about to begin to dabble in the dark arts of CPA Affiliate Programs and need to scatter my hosts somewhat.  I don’t want to have all of my mini-sites in the same basket, and I definitely don’t want my mini-site experiments to hurt the rankings of my more serious sites.

So along with reading the articles available at WebHostingRating Articles, and now I have found another great webhosting rating site, WebHostingChoice.

If you don’t think that you go enough information at WebHostingRating, there is a good FAQ at Web Hosting Choice.  The other great source of information  at this site is the Cheap Web Hosting page and their Web hosting scams page, here they talk about the downfalls of going with a host that is soo cheap that it is “too good to be true”….Well you are probably right it is.

One of the biggest scams is the Unlimited bandwidth/storage

Unlimited bandwidth/space - it is simply impossible for a company to offer unlimited space or bandwidth to use. As hosting companies and their associated technologies are themselves limited (i.e. bandwidth or hard disk space), unlimited offerings are usually just an advertising gimmick. Often you will find clauses embedded deep within the company’s terms of service contract that negate the unlimited offering. The clauses are usually arbitrary, such as excessive CPU usage will be grounds for account termination.UnlimBand is a good resource to learn more.

So head over to WebHostingChoice and let me know what you think.

I am sure that if you are new in the online community, or are currently on a hosted solution and want to move to a “self-hosted” solution this is a great place to start you brainstorming on the host that you are going to choose.  It is a big decision and your host is going to be a factor in that amount of money that you are going to make online.

I have finially added the very necessary contact page.

Now if you want to contact me regarding this site it is easy as pie.  When you use the form, which is a free Wordpress plugin from Mike Cherim, I get an email that I will be sure to respond to ASAP.  But I, like everyone, HATE spam so don’t try to sell me something.  You can always give me something for free and I will review it.  But I won’t give a recommendation to something that sucks

Happy Blogging

Today I found an interesting resource on cheap web hosting.

There are a lot of places that a beginner can get information on the different types of hosting that is available out there. A lot of those resources are too “full”. WebHostingRating articles is very well organized and has some great articles and tutorials.

I have had some time to browse through some of them and the following are some of the articles that I believe would be the most useful to the beginner:

Concept of Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is the type of hosting that a beginner is most likely to use. It is the most cost effective and easiest to obtain.

Intro to cPanel

cPanel is the control panel of choice when it comes to the backend of your website. It is very easy to use, but this article will help you get a head start when you have finially decided on the webhost that you are going to be starting with.

Fantastico Tutorial

Fantastico is known as a popular library for commercial scripts. It is commonly used as a third party add-on that works with cPanel. It was designed to automatically install applications into a website and eliminate the need to upload files through FTP. These scripts are executed from the administrative area of your website. Websites running Fantastico scripts are said to be installed by over 10, 000 servers. With millions of users on a global scale it is easily the most used product of its kind.

Myphpadmin

myPHPadmin is not something that the absolute beginner is going to be using, but take a read because you never know when you are going to have to use it to change a variable in one of you database tables.

Conclusion

All in all, WebHostingRating Articles is a decent new resource that looks like it is going to be growing in the future. Make sure to add its feed to your reader so that you will be notified when new articles are added.

Then when you have figured out what hosting is all about then you can go to the cheap web hostingpage and figure out what webhost you are going to go with.