This is a guest post from John Thomson who analyzing distinctive types of website hosting services on his blog. At his blog can read and explore more about web hosting services plus many more articles that will inform you about what to look when you are comparing web hosting plans and companies.

If you are brand new to the World Wide Web business world then one of the primary things that you will have to do is compare and decide on a magnificent web hosting company. These days it seems that there is a nonstop variety of hosting solutions that you have to select between for your site or web business. To begin with, you have to verify that the web hosting firm has the features and functionality that you require. The most valuable thing of website hosting is uptime, and this is considered to be the main feature of any website hosting plan.

A free of charge hosting, as a rule, allows crafting only the simplest websites consisting of a set of static pages. A big problem with free web hosting is that you will regularly have to display advertisements of some sort which “pays” for your web hosting. In order to triumph over the disadvantages of free of charge, paid hosting is chosen by majority of webmasters.

A shared web hosting vendor is a vendor that serves your website along with several other websites, all on the same IP address. This aspect of hosting serves several sites in a single server. Since lots of sites are sharing the same IP and services, there’s a risk for your web page to be hacked.

Dedicated website hosting is a wise selection for someone who requests extra storage and traffic, and also requests resources that are not accessible with shared and without charge website hosting. Various site hosting vendors will rent you the server while retaining possession of the hardware, as others will sell it to you absolute. In the majority of cases, you can expect to pay $180 to $600 dollars per month, but expenditure can go up depending on your supplier and the website hosting solution. The top thing about the dedicated site hosting is having entire regulation over your website.

Co-location means that a good deal of your technology equipment is placed off-site. Your infrastructure should be housed in a state-of-the-art data center, with redundant air cooling and filtering systems, considered to work even in the event of a power crash. Since the data centers do business with a gigantic figure of customers, their overhead expenditure are seen to turn out to be extremely low, which is why they are capable to grant you with very updated and technologically sophisticated solutions at a very low cost. Taking into account the advantages with the colocation plans, it is very clear why these services are seen to be so useful for most businesses at present.

Reseller site hosting is practically identical to virtual hosting except for they provide you further regulation over your account. Reseller hosting is repeatedly used by companies wishing to add an extra income stream to their company due to their current buyer base and requirements. Website hosting resellers act free of website hosting firms, and are not treated as staff. Reselling hosting resources is a terrific commerce choice because it gives you the opportunity to set up a corporation without the overhead charge of buying costly servers, routers, and dedicated data transfer.

Consequently, as you can see, site hosting is quite easy to use (and affordable) and I truly wanted to clarify it so that newbies could get a grasp about web hosting.

These days much of the online conversation about AdSense is focused around AdSense no longer being a viable opportunity for making money online.

My opinion is completely different. I know first hand that AdSense is a viable revenue source but in order to be successful you have to approach it correctly. It takes work something many people hate.

In this post, I will give you my view of seven steps to making 12K a month with Adsense.

Of course, your results may vary but this is my method to earn money online with AdSense.

Step 1: Your Niche Must Be Highly Profitable

With AdSense I start by selecting a niche where the price to advertise keywords is at least $5.00 per click on the Google AdWords side. This ensures I get a good share of the revenue when a user clicks the Google AdSense ad on my website.

By opening a Google AdWords account and setting up a fake campaign you can manually filter through various niches and find highly profitable niches.

The method I prefer is using Keyword Country which provides access to the top paying AdSense keywords with the click of a button.

I never focus on the highest paying keywords because they are normally way to competitive and saturated. I focus on keywords with bid prices in the range of $5 to $15 per click.

Once I find some niches I run that data against Google trends to make sure the traffic trend is solid. If it is declining rapidly I don’t use that niche.

Step 2: Research And Look For Golden Opportunity

Every niche has keywords that are super competitive. I never focus on these. Therefore, once I select a high paying Adsense niche I focus on finding long tail keywords with good search counts.

For example, if I select the niche of Teeth Whitening I would probably not focus the site around that keyword. I would pick other less competitive keywords like professional teeth whitening, zoom teeth whitening, Colgate teeth whitening products, etc..

All these keywords have decent search volumes and much less competition then the generic term teeth whitening.

By focusing on less competitive keywords I can normally land in the top 10 of Google with a little SEO work. I will describe SEO in future steps.

Step 3: Building Content Fast

After doing my research I have the map for my site and start building content. For speed I outsource my content writing. You can outsource at elance, guru.com or just do an google search for article writing.

I pay around $10 an article and the content is of good quality unique content.

It is important you get good quality original content, your goal should be to build a nice quality site that covers the key topics in your niche.

I normally start with about 30 articles and expand the site once I start making money.

The key to this step is make sure you get good quality unique articles.

Step 4: Building The Site Foundation

While my articles are being written I head over to Bluehost, where I host unlimited domains for the low monthly fee of $6.95 a month.

For my domain name, I always try to be creative and keep it as short as possible. My highest searched keyword will always be in the beginning of the domain.

Once I have a domain added onto my Bluehost account, I do the 1 click install of WordPress to get my site started.

With WordPress installed I now have the foundation to build my site. I find a nice quality WordPress theme with light colors and design a nice looking logo. If you don’t have graphic skills you can outsource logo design for $25. Try elance, or guru.com.

Step 5: Building The Site

Now that I have my sites foundation ready to go, when my articles begin arriving I start building my site via WordPress pages. Each page of the site is a keyword focused page.

I set my home page as a static page in the WordPress options. I build the home page on the highest paying keyword from my chosen long tail list. This is normally the same keyword that appears in my domain name.

For SEO I use the All In One SEO plugin and put the keyword early in the page title, H1, meta description of each page on the site. I also edit each permalink url to be keyword focused. I make sure my internal page links on my sidebar are keyword rich links.

In the page content I weave in AdSense ads using the Adsense Deluxe plugin. I also have some ad placements in the theme design.

Step 6: Links, Links and More Links

Once I have my site designed with lots keyword rich articles, I next focus on link building.

Versus finding link partners by sending e-mail after email to webmasters, I lookup whois records of other sites in my niche. I get the webmasters phone number and use OOMA my free voice over IP phone, to make unlimited free calls.

I get a lot of voicemails, but I always leave a nice message why I called. When I connect with a webmaster I tell them how great their site is and how I have a related site and would like to partner. I ask them to blog roll me and I will do the same.

I’ve had a ton of success with this method and it tremendously helps my search rankings. I normally have no problem getting a site in the top 10 of the search results for my chosen keywords.

One note, some people will get pissed you are calling them if so just move on to the next and forget about it.

I also focus on all the other ways there are to get links. Quality blog commenting, directory submission, article submission, squidoo, forums etc… There are tons of ways to get free one way links!

My most highly effective method for getting tons of links is by using
My Article Network which also gives me an added benefit in the next step. With My Article Network I can post one article and send 1000s of unique articles to blogs all over the web. Each article links back to both my home page and internal pages.

One last note, many of you might think reciprocal links don’t work anymore. But that is not true if you balance the reciprocal links with lots of incoming one way links. Having some reciprocal links with one way links looks more natural then all one way links or all reciprocal links. This is a big reason I use My Article Network for easy one way links.

Step 7: Free Content To Make Your Site Expand

One of the things the search engines love is updating content. I hate to keep buying articles for my site, so I use the blogging function of WordPress combined with My Article Network, to get unique updating content to my site.

With My Article Network you’ll be surprised of the quality of unique content you can deliver to your blog. Sure it might have an outgoing link or two but who cares. Each post expands my site giving me more SEO internal links for my AdSense money pages. Also I put AdSense ads on each blog post which drives more revenue.

I just create a few categories in WordPress and link them up with the appropriate category at My Article Network and I have free frequently updating content.

This is a super handy feature for my site and also drives additional traffic and AdSense revenue.

Step 8: Repeat, Repeat, Repeat

I’m a pretty busy guy but by working part-time I have my sites up and running with tons of links in 2 to 3 weeks. My target is to get each site to produce between $1000 to $1500 a month. I’ve invested a total of $300 to $500 to build each site so the return is excellent.

By producing 1 site a month you can see the earnings potential with Ad Sense is still alive!

Have fun and don’t rush things. All you need is one site a month, then at the end of a year you’ll have 12 sites. If you can achieve $1000 a month per site, that $12,000 per month or $144,000 per year!

This month Business Week did its 5th annual article on America’s Best Young Entrepreneurs.

In the article, you’ll see several college students that started out in their dorm room to create solid growing businesses. You’ll also see lots of the young entrepreneurs focused in the area of online business.

My three favorite businesses highlighted in the article are:

NoteHall.com – Four college students started this business which is an online market place for buying and selling class notes. It’s 2010 expected revenue is $900K.

GiveReal.com – A very creative business idea that uses a Facebook application to allow friends and families to buy each other drinks. With over 500,000 bars and restaurants available around the USA this is a home run!

IdeaPaint - Three college students who couldn’t afford a whiteboard for brainstorming sessions, decided to create a brand new product to compete with whiteboards. IdeaPaint is a special paint that turns a wall into a dry erase board for much less then buying an actual whiteboard.

These stories just go to show you there are tons of opportunities out there if you apply yourself!

Are you struggling with finding a topic to start blogging about?

Over the years, I’ve had several friends faced with the same dilemma. Working with them, I was able to help them identify a topic and now they are all running profitable blogs.

One of my friends is a dental student, and was trying to find a topic he could blog about. He really likes baseball and cars. He was leaning towards blogging about cars until I sat down with him in a brainstorming session.

By brainstorming we found the perfect niche for him focused around his interest and specialized knowledge. It was writing about the topic of dentistry. Being a student the topic is fresh in his head and he can add a unique twist to his blog based on his current experiences in dental school.

You can do the same, but it is important you find a topic you can stick with. The number one reason bloggers fail is topic selection.

When you create a blog you’ll want to have a topic you love. Not just some everyday topic but a topic you are really passionate about. It’s that simple, and that’s the key to all successful blogs.

Remember your not just blogging about your topic. Your building friends on social networks, joining groups and engaging yourself in the topic all over the web. If it’s a topic you don’t like then everything from writing to building relationships will seem hard.

To provide a huge boost to ensure success, try to select a topic around your hobbies, interests, and particular experiences. Everyone has some passion or hobbies that can be used to build a blog to earn money online.

Here are some questions to ask in helping you find a topic:

• What sports do you like?
• What non-work related area do people ask you about at work?
• When just surfing the internet for pleasure, what sites do you visit?
• What job related skills do you have? Any specialized skills?
• Do you have kids? What experiences do you have?
• At a party if you have to speak with a person what topic would you prefer?
• What type of books do you like to read?
• Do you have firsthand experience with health or medical conditions ?
• If you asked your best friend, what would he or she say you are most knowledgeable about?
• What is your favorite hobby?
• If you retired today what would you do all day?
• What volunteer activity would you do if you had all the time in the world?
• Are you knowledgeable or experienced with finance, home improvement, travel, relationships, photography, cars, or anything in your daily life?

It’s that simple. Just sit down and brainstorm and find that one area you are super passionate about. That will be the first step for you starting a successful blog that can make online income.

This is a guest post by Gagandeep Singh, a freelance writer who writes on Landing Page Optimization, Affiliate marketing and Social Networking.

A landing page is a specific page where all the traffic is directed once a user clicks a link in search engine results, online ad or promotional email. It is the first page which your visitor see when reaching your website and it is not always the homepage of website. Landing pages play an important role when they are created with specific purpose to get sales or generate leads. The conversion ratio and success of an online campaign depends on how optimized your landing page is.

In this post, I am going to share some practices which will help you in creating a landing page that converts and sells well.

Setting a Goal for Each Page: Experts have different views on this. Some think that your landing page should be dedicated to only one offer but other think that there is no problem in adding navigational links or to mention about other offers.

The best way to find an answer to this is to experiment with both and find the solution which works best for your niche. It may vary niche by niche. Normally, if traffic to your landing page is coming from any PPC campaign then you should mention only one offer in your landing page. PPC traffic is very focused and looking for a specific thing.

Relevancy: The headline and title of the landing page should be relevant to the advertised offer. You should consider creating separate landing pages for each different keyword and offer. If a user clicked on an offer which claims to give 14 day free trial then don’t direct him to the landing page where he have to pay.

Compelling Headline: Make Your Headline bold and strong so that it can stand out from the rest of the page. Don’t use headlines like “ Learn how to earn online money” instead of that use compelling headlines like “ Learn How I earned 100,000 dollars in 30 days”. The second headline is more likely to get clicked and have a high Conversion rate.

Add Images: An image is equal to 1000 words, using a relevant image can convey your message quickly and effectively with very less effort. Image describing the product and your offers play a very important role in increasing the conversion rate.

Call to Action: The purpose of the landing page is to encourage visitors to get the desired action. The call to action link For eg: – Click here should be at the top of the landing page so that it could be easily visible to everyone. Putting your call to action link at wrong place can reduce your conversion rate a lot.

Building Credibility: Building Credibility with your customers is very important to sell your product to them. Adding short testimonials from likeminded people, awards and recognitions or putting logos from some reliable websites can build trust amongst your prospects about your website. Landing pages with testimonials and reviews always have high conversion rate as compared to others.

Keep it Simple: Try to keep your landing page simple. A complex landing page filled with images, videos or information about other offers is very distractive and don’t convert well.

Focused Content: The content on landing page should be highly relevant and focused completely on a single offer. Break big paragraphs in to short and highlight the important points so that they catch the user attention easily. Provide all important information and conclusions at the top of your landing page as users don’t wait long to read so far. Not so important or supportive information should be last.

Free Offers and Money-Back Guarantee: Always provide free offers related to your product as such offers will help your prospects to remember you and encourage them to buy from you whenever they need your product. If possible try to provide a money back guarantee with your product. These guarantees help in creating a risk free environment for your prospect to buy from you.

Contact Information: Always add your contact information with your image and a short profile at the end so that users can feel that your website is completely reliable and they are not going to buy from a scammer.

In the internet marketing world you always hear marketers talking about traffic. Traffic this, Traffic that, how to get more traffic, etc… Traffic is the lifeblood of any internet business.

Sometimes by focusing on traffic, you as a marketer can forget about one key principle. People are behind the traffic to your site. It is important to always keep that in perspective or your site and brand will suffer from one time “hit it and quit it” traffic.

People are what buy your products, click your ads, make more page impressions, and virally spread the word about your site.

Therefore, it is important for you to use your site as a way to engage people and let them know you are human. The profit of any internet business, is directly influenced by the number of people inspired to believe and trust in the site. Your personal relationship with readers will do this more then anything!

To help you engage and build trust with your readers here are six internet business tips:

1. Blogging Contests: I wrote a long post about blogging contests, which are perfect to engage your readers.
2. Social Media: Build friends on social media sites like twitter, facebook and stumbleupon and actually communicate with your friends. Join groups on these sites adding value to the group and build relationships and trust off your site.
3. Comments: Actively respond to comments from readers. Over deliver every time. Get out and comment on other blogs and some of the same readers may see you have been active. This helps them gain trust in you and your brand.
4. Take Care of Your Readers: Most people don’t just read a site’s content and become a fan. On your site take care of your readers. Take surveys about which topics they would like to learn more about and deliver it. Encourage your reader to join you on social media sites and communicate with you.
5. Share personal stories with your readers: People want to know there is a real person behind the blog, twitter account or facebook profile. Sharing personal stories lets people know you are human.
6. Partnership: You can’t get people engaged unless they trust you. Associating yourself with other popular brands can help you build trust quickly. Networking with other sites or brands in your niche and doing guest posts can help you build trust quickly.

There are many other ways to engage people so be creative and make sure you always over deliver to your readers. Once you engage and build the trust of your readers your internet business will never be the same.

One of the most important on-page search engine optimization (SEO) variables is your page title. All other things being equal between two sites, the page title can be the reason one site out ranks another in the search results.

A good SEO optimized page title needs to be no more then 70 characters counting spaces. Since your page title is placed in the search results it is important to keep it less then 70 characters. If your page title is more then 70 characters then Google will cut it off in the search results. Titles cut off in the search results have a … at the end of the title and will result in a lower click through rate.

Your keywords are the important part of your page title. You’ll want to ensure your page title lists two or three keywords. It’s best to place the keywords in the title early versus at the end. I recommend focusing on two keywords, but you can push it to three if totally necessary.

You’ll see many sites simply place the keywords in the title with no selling. For instance, you see many titles like the following: Bad Credit Home Loans – Poor Credit Finance.

While the above title is optimized for SEO, it is important to realize that the search engines are not the only ones you need to please. You also need the searcher to click on the title. Adding a boring title like the above can influence how many clicks you get.

I highly recommend you get creative with your page title and try to make it sell. This will drive way more clicks then a boring page title and help differentiate your site from the competition. To add sales flavor to your title you’ll need to understand the mindset of the searcher.

For instance, for someone searching for bad credit home loans, the mindset of the searcher may be a little insecure. This searcher may also be frustrated with shopping from lender to lender trying to locate a lender that will approve bad credit applicants.

By understanding the above mindset of the searcher you could add some sales power to your title and still hit the necessary keywords. Perhaps you create a title, Trouble-Free Bad Credit Home Loans For Poor Credit Finance Applicants. Or even better, Guaranteed Bad Credit Home Loans For Poor Credit Finance Applicants.

The above two titles immediately solves the searchers emotional needs. This will result in a higher click rate then a generic keyword stuffed title such as Bad Credit Home Loans – Poor Credit Finance.

Here are some other tips for your site’s page titles:

1. Each page on your site should have a unique page title and be focused on different keywords. If all your pages have a page title that is too similar then your site could get caught in the Google duplicate content filter.
2. Make the keywords in your title a little different then the keyword in the meta description. For instance, if you place bad credit home loans in your title, use loans for bad credit in your meta description.
3. To maximize click through rates, always capitalize the first letter of each word in your page title. Don’t use all caps or all lower case.
4. Do not repeat the same keyword twice in the title.
5. Try to use semantic related keywords in your title. This will help with Google Latent Semantic Indexing. For instance, a semantic related word to loans, is finance. Don’t use loans twice in the title.
6. The page title should focus on the same keywords as the anchored internal links to the page. So if your page is primarily about bad credit home loans, then the internal links on your site should use the anchored text bad credit home loans.
7. For WordPress blogs the All In One SEO plugin has custom page title management to help you place a unique title on every page.

Based on my five years of testing, good on-page SEO can make a huge difference in your search ranking. Yes backlinks are more important, but don’t underrate on-page SEO. With Google filters if you don’t approach on-page SEO correct your site can disappear.

Are you maximizing StumbleUpon traffic for your blog? StumbleUpon is an excellent traffic source since it features a very large user base community with topics spanning from books to making online income.

StumbleUpon traffic can be funneled to your blog no matter what niche or topic your blog is covering.

Actually, StumbleUpon like other social media sites should not only be used as a traffic source for your blog, but also leveraged from your blog to build a friends list. Having a big StumbleUpon friends list can be highly beneficial with helping your content go viral on the site.

Here are some steps you’ll want to take to ensure you are maximizing your StumbleUpon traffic.

1. Build a BIG friends list: The larger your friends list the easier it will be to get your content stumbled which helps it go viral. Make sure you leverage your blog to get your readers to become friends and also become active on StumbleUpon sending friend requests to others in your niche.

Another great way to build a friends list is to become active in several groups and send members of the group requests to become friends. Don’t spam, but if you are communicating with members of a group chances are you will have new friends.

2. Use Tags: When you submit your blog posts to StumbleUpon, make sure you use multiple relevant tags. Tags allow your content to be labeled so that others can examine it.

When tagging try to think “out of the box” and find broad tags that will appeal to different people. For instance, if you have a post on repairing credit, you might tag credit, debt, credit cards, finance, financing.

You can also view the popular tag section on StumbleUpon to view which tags in your topic are the hottest.

3. Submit to the proper category: You might think submitting your posts to the largest category versus the most relevant would make your content appear more. But this is simply not the case. The more relevant the category the more positive votes you will achieve. This will help your content be seen more frequently.

4. Send a shout out to your friends: If you think your friends will enjoy your stumbled post, then use the share function on StumbleUpon. The share function allows you to share your content with your friends. With the share function, you can share it with specific friends or all your friends.

Don’t use the share function every time you post. If you do then you will be labeled a spammer. But if you have written a really good blog post that your friends may like, then share it! I only share posts every once in a while to prevent from being labeled a spammer.

5. Leverage Groups: There is a very active group community at StumbleUpon. By participating in groups and responding to questions, you will establish many solid relationships. These relationships can help your content to be shared with the group.

If you have been active in a group and see a topic you have written about being discussed, ask the moderator to post your link. Many times if you have provided value to the group the moderator will help you out.

Using the above tips will help you get the maximum benefit from StumbleUpon. The day one of your posts goes viral you will have a huge burst of gratification. Your RSS subscriber will also shoot up.

In the past, I’ve often written about why blogging is one of the best business models online. I covered many reason in my free make money online guide, and I also covered some in my recent post Making Blog Income.

Perhaps one of the biggest reasons blogging rules, is viral traffic. The simple fact is that it is much easier to drive viral traffic to a blog then other types of sites.

Blogs integrate extremely well with social media since blogs are conversational and the core of social media is all about conversation.

Also, there is no shortage of viral traffic methods for your blog to use.

Some of the common viral traffic sources include:

1. Twitter
2. Social media sites (Facebook, Stumbleupon, Diggs, etc…)
3. Writing link bait
4. Swapping blog posts
5. Competitions with other blogs (i.e. A competition between two blogs to see who can get the most twitter followers in 2 weeks).
6. Giving away a free report
7. Video posts
8. Article marketing

While all of the above are great viral traffic strategies, in this post I want to highlight Blog Contests a viral traffic strategy commonly overlooked.

A blog contest is simply a way to engage your readers by letting them participate in a contest.

Blog contests are great for building loyal relationships with your readers and helping your blog generate a buzz.

When you are ready to start a blog contest you have a couple considerations. First off you need to select a nice prize for the winner(s). I recommend a 1st, 2nd and 3rd place prize.

Next you need to plan the contest qualifying requirements and how the winner is determined. This is where things get interesting.

If you plan your requirements correctly it can have a huge viral traffic impact for your blog.

I recommend you consider some of the following requirements for your contest. Each requirement must be met before a reader can be selected as a winner.

1. Write a blog post promoting the contest.
2. Promote the contest by adding it to at least 5 social media sites (stumbleupon, facebook, digg, etc…).
3. Subscribe to your blog feed.
4. Add five quality comments at least 5 times on any of your posts.
5. Tell at least 5 friends about the contest (Note you’ll need a tell-a-friend form on your blog.)

The above are commonly used requirements. You can add as many as you like, but I recommend using 3 or 4 that will drive viral traffic to your blog. If you use more then 4, it may be difficult to get readers to participate unless the winner’s prize is of very high value.

After you have your requirements firmed up, you’ll want to set how the winner is determined. It could be at random, but it is much better if it drives an action that helps your blog. One example may be to select the winner based on the reader that completes all of the 5 requirements above and has posted the most quality comments on your blog. It can be anything just be creative and try to drive an action that makes sense for your blog.

One last recommendation. Blog contests always work better when your blog already has a base of readers. So if you are a new blogger you’ll probably want to focus on other viral strategies before a blog contest.

Here is a super short, but highly influential post for you today about a bloggers success story.

Is blogging in you? Do you need some inspiration on blogging? Take a look at this New York Times story about a blogger’s success: Click Here

Quote for Today: “Don’t aim for success if you want it; just do what you love and believe in, and it will come naturally.”
-David Frost