When you look for a web hosting company, they will usually promote the amount of space, bandwidth and their web hosting uptime. Most companies offer a guaranteed uptime to show off their service reliability.

Web hosting uptime is a measurement of the time a server has been running. Uptime is important to not only the hosting companies but to anyone who has a website. The availability of your website is a major concern. What if a potential buyer just read a great article linking to your site, clicked on the link and found an unavailable site? You lose sales. The cost of the downtime can amount to hundreds of dollars.

Most of the web hosting providers offer 99,9% uptime. What this 99,9% uptime means to you? For a 30 day month it means less than 1 hour when your site is unavailable. Please understand that no web hosting company can have a 100% uptime guarantee. Always look for 99,9%, 99,99% or 99,999% uptime and read (and save a copy of) their terms carefully. Can your web hosting provider give back the losses their downtime caused?

If your website experiences downtime, contact the customer service department to ask when your site will be back. If downtimes occur too many times, look for a different company with a higher uptime.

Can you imagine your site is down while there are many customers, potential buyers ready to purchase any product or service from your site? If you are not sitting in front of your computer 24 hours a day (I suppose you need some sleep), how do you notice your site experiences downtime?

That’s simple. Keep monitoring your website or server by using an uptime monitoring service. One of the monitoring services is Web Service Guard.

Let me tell you what they can do for you:

• Web Service Guard let you know when your site is unavailable for any reason. You receive real time alerts so you can fix the problem or contact the support immediately.
• There is no software to install, they can monitor any website. Web Service Guard provides independent third party monitoring services.
• Unlike other monitoring services which have keep the monitoring statistics for 30 days, Web Service Guard stores and provides details of outages for a full year.
• WebServiceGuard tracks and logs all event failures and generates historical uptime metrics. These system uptime metrics are available 24 hours a day.

You can keep monitoring your website uptime for free. Get rid off the lost online sales and low conversion rate caused by downtime and claim your free membership now!

Now you know how to get your website indexed within 24 hours. It’s time to let search engines know about the other pages. The more pages get picked up by them, the better.

How can you help them to spot your whole site? Here are 5 tips:

1. Make your pages accessible.
   Each and every page should have at least one link pointing to it. You can write great articles and you can provide interesting, unique contents – if there is no link, nobody will find it. Make sure your pages are easily accessible. Link from your homepage to the pages to get your entire website crawled faster.
2. Create a sitemap.
   You can create a sitemap that contains links to every page of your site. Place a link to your sitemap page from the homepage. This map can also help your visitors to get familiar with your site.
3. Avoid variables in the URLs.
   Search engines don’t like variables in URLs (like http://www.yoursite.com/page.php?var1=somevars&var2=854). It’s a fact. They don’t index all of this kind of pages if any. You can easily get rid of them with mod rewrite. You can also make your URLs search engine and user friendly.
4. Use internal links.
   The more ways search engines can find your pages, the better. If you’re blogging, you can always link back to your previous posts. It helps Google locate your post and bring more traffic to that post. Internal links can also reduce the number of visitors who leave your site immediately after reading your page. Use them to lower your bounce rate.
5. Get links to the deep pages.
   Everybody knows we need inbound or incoming links from other websites. If an incoming link is not pointing to the home page but another page that is deeper in your site, it helps search engines to discover that page.

   It’s the so called deep linking. When you build links for your site, try to get links that point to different pages and not just to your home page. Don’t forget to use good anchor texts when deep linking.

Google doesn’t index all of your pages (maybe 50-70% of it). The 5 tips above can help you increase the amount of the indexed ones. Always make sure the spiders can find your site from different places.

Let me know if any of the above helped you to increase the number of your pages listed in search engines. Do you know any other technique? Just leave a comment.

I received a $117 commission today from one of the visitors I sent from a 4 days old website. What is so great about it? Well, that I haven’t set up any PPC campaign. The buyer was coming from Google. Was I lucky?

I saw many of the website owners are complaining about their sites are not indexed on the first week/month. My sites are always listed on the major search engines within 24 hours…

Did you do anything to get indexed? Do you have any backlink that can be followed by search engines? You don’t need any special software. All you need is what you have – a PC/notebook, Internet access and 15 minutes.

Sounds pretty strange, huh?

So, you’ve built your website – uploaded to your server and now are waiting for traffic. You need traffic as soon as possible because your site has a lot of unique and precious content.

Here is what I’m doing to get listed on the SEs on the very first day: I’m using the power of social bookmarking/networking sites.

Social networking sites are one of the best ways to appear in the SEs. These sites are crawled every few minutes by Google and its friends. Whenever you submit your pages you get picked up by them within hours. I (and Google) really like the following ones:

Digg.com
Delicious.com
StumbleUpon.com
BlinkList.com
Propeller.com
ReddIt.com
Fark.com
Furl.com

Using the right keywords during submission can help you getting more targeted visitors. Submit your story/article with as many related tags as you can. Tags are used in these social bookmarking sites to categorize stories.

Don’t forget. The more backlinks you have, the quicker you get indexed by search engines because the bots have more leads to get at your site with. The more links you have, the more interesting your site must be. Because of this search engines allow you to climb higher in the search engine rankings.

Now, it’s easy to get indexed by Google and the others. The next step is to get a higher position in the search results for your keywords…

Do your sites get indexed faster with the help of the sites and technique above? Do you know any other method we should use to speed up the process or anything that can bring visitors from the first day? Let us know.

Affiliate marketing is a great way to start making money online. It’s easy to find a profitable niche and affiliate programs that offer products you want to promote. Then you can start an online business with minimal investment. Your startup investment may be registering your domain name and paying for a hosting plan.

I think affiliates must have their own web site designed for a specific niche. You can earn revenue without it but you can (and will) multiply your earnings by having one. I also mentioned before that some of the affiliate networks (most of the CPA networks) required you to have your own website.

Affiliate URL vs. Your Domain

If you only promote your affiliate links, you will lose sales. People need easy to remember and short domains. They would never type in an address like http://www.trackingsite.com/?ref=8555412&pid=10257855&sid=7151521. Affiliate URLs are complicated and almost impossible to remember so people will try the www.trackingsite.com URL. If you’re lucky, cookies will save your commission. Are you lucky enough?

Consider you have your own website with a simple and catchy domain name. People will remember it and they will follow the links from your site. And yepp, it makes you money.

Affiliate links vs. Redirects

You can save some of your sales with redirection techniques.

What is not looking natural (and our affiliate links are definately not…) is looking suspicious. People don’t like to click on affiliate links and some of them make sure they access the site without using your affiliate link. They will not click on that scary link.

You will get more clicks on your redirected link (www.yoursite.com/youroffer/) than on your affiliate link. I’m sure.

Track your visitors – Increase your conversion rates

If you are serious enough, you want to carefully monitor your visitors. You want to know where they are coming from, how they can find you, what keywords they are using etc.

Having your own website and a free Google Analytics account makes it easy to track your traffic. It will allow you to check which keywords are driving traffic and wich terms are causing your visitors to leave your site. It also helps you adjust your strategies to increase your conversion rates.

Sell more affiliate products

Almost forgot the best… Your site provides you a place where you can promote all of your affiliate products (within one or a few niches). Your visitors can also buy other products once they are on your site. (E.g. You can set up comparison pages and give your customers what they want. They will be more than happy )

If you have your own site, your possibilities are endless and you have complete control over your projects. (E.g. I like to build review pages for different products. This way, I can presell my visitors on a product before I redirect them to the sales page.)

It costs you less than $10 per month and you can host more than one (so called additional or addon) domain per account. Does anyone here earn huge amounts from affiliate programs without having a website?

If you would like to reduce your startup costs, you can host your site free for 3 months. 3 months is enough to receive your first payments;)

After the catchy headline I have to tell you that the free offer is only for 3 months. But it’s free and everyone likes free things.

As I mentioned around a week ago I recommend to get your own website with your own domain. If you promote an affiliate program, one of the things you have to consider is having your own website.

Having your own website makes you look more professional and costs you less than $10 per month. And now here is your chance to get 3 months of Jumpline hosting for free.

Let’s see… What do you get with this free Jumpline offer?

• 10 GB disk space what is more than enough for 10-20 websites! Simply amazing.
• Have you ever wanted sub-domains, just like helpdesk.yourdomain.com? You can host up to 16 sub-domains with one account.
• Do you want to have more than one website? Host unlimited pointed and parked domains! It means you don’t need to buy other web hosting packages – just buy some domains from $0.99 and host them on the same account.
• An average website is around 1MB. With 500 visitors daily (that’s more than enough you to earn $100 per day) you need around 10-15GB of monthly data transfer. Jumpline offers 100 GB monthly data transfer for you!
• I’m sure you want to look professional, so you need your own email accounts, just like yourname@yourdomain.com. You can have up to 100 of these kind of email accounts.
• Do you want to build a blog or forum? Do you need dynamic pages? Jumpline support PHP language with MySQL databases what is a requirement now.
• You can manage your databases from the PhpMyAdmin.
• Couldn’t you set up a WordPress blog or a forum? Just a few clicks and you can use over 30 integrated applications, just like WordPress, phpWiki, phpAds, phpBB etc
• Did you do something wrong and don’t know the reason? With the daily backups you can restore your website as soon as you want.
• Do you have any problem with your account or website? You can contact the support team immediately! They are available 24/7.
• The availability of your webtime is a major concern. Jumpline offers 99.99% server uptime – for a 30 day month it’s less than 5 minutes when your site is unavailable. Please note there is no web hosting provider can have 100% uptime.

It sounds good. But is it really free?

Yepp, you are not required to make a purchase. You have the option to cancel the free offer at anytime and you will not be billed after the free offer expires. You can simply cancel the free offer inside your online Customer Manager.

Your free web hosting account will be set up within a few hours. Jumpline can assist you in transferring your domain name to their nameservers.

You will have access to 24/7 email ticket support. You will also receive toll free phone support Monday-Friday 9am-9pm.

Jumpline.com requires a valid credit card to secure the free hosting offer. However you will not be billed unless you choose to keep the webhosting service after the free offer expires in 3 months. You must cancel the trial before then.

This special offer only works if you click the link below on this site and do not block the referrer.

Sign up for the free Jumpline account!

They honestly do not charge your credit card when you sign up with it.

Grab a cheap domain name and host it for free!

I’ve just received an email from Sedo saying “Payment took place!”. I like these emails especially this one – I’ve sold a domain for $800.

I registered this domain on 1and1.com for $3.99 about 5 months ago. It’s a hyphenated 12 characters long .com domain. I wanted to use it for an affiliate program (oh, what a surprise!) but I never made any sales from this site.

So I decided to list the domain for sale on Sedo marketplace with a $60 asking price. I usually list my domains for $60-$100 and sell them for $60-$200.

Some weeks ago I received a $60 offer for my domain and of course I took the name to auction. An auction period runs for seven days. On the seventh day I received an email saying: “We are pleased to inform you that the auction of your-domain.com has ended with a closing sale price of 800 USD.”

Err… Not again! Another non paying buyer… (Well sometimes it happens on Sedo – I just had a transaction cancelled due to non payment from the buyer.)

On 5th May I received another mail saying they had received the escrow payment. Yeppp, the buyer paid the amount and fortunately it was a very smooth transaction. I have received the amount today:

Quick tip: You can add your bank details to your Sedo account if you want to avoid Paypal fees for receiving the money.

Have you found the right domain name? Think you are ready to buy this domain?

There are hundreds of registrars available and most of them offer domains for less than $10. But you can’t choose…

As an affiliate you may need full DNS management, URL/domain forwarding and masking.

This post is just a quick overview of some of the best registrars that I have worked with over the past few years.

1and1 Internet

This is a large web hosting company that also provides one of the cheapest domain name registrations. For .com, .org, .net, .biz domains you are charged $6.99. They also offer .info domains for $0.99.

Do you need privacy? The above fees include private domain registration, which means that your particulars are hidden from public view. You get full DNS management, domain forwarding and masking. Both credit card and PayPal payments are accepted by this registrar.

Do not buy hosting from this company, there are better and cheaper solutions. But if you are looking a cheap domain registrar, you can try them!

Dotster.com

Dotster provides cheap prices and easy-to-use web interface to manage your domain settings. They are a Top 10 ranked ICANN accredited domain registrar.

You get email forwarding, URL forwarding, full DNS management, domain locking, web hosting, email boxes. The prices are from $3.99. Both credit card and PayPal payments are accepted here.

Moniker.com

This domain name registrar allows domain name registrations for plenty of TLDs, including .com, .net, .info, .mobi, .biz, .us, .co.uk, etc. The full list is too long to store in my database… Prices for domain names differ, depending on the choosen extension.

They charge $7.97 for .com, $6.29 for .net these days.

Their interface allows you to manage your DNS settings, URL forwarding and everything else you may need. Both credit card and PayPal payments are accepted by them.

GoDaddy.com

This is an extremely popular registrar. They offer .com domain names for $9.99 (plus 20 cents ICANN fee).

They have an easy-to-use web interface to manage your domains. Both credit card and PayPal payments are accepted.

I also like their auctions where you can buy ’second hand’ domains for as low as $5 (but you have to pay for the renewal). I bought some great, old domains here with backlinks and PR2 pageranks…

Almost forgot to mention… Don’t buy hosting from GoDaddy I’ve found GoDaddy to be a great domain registrar, as long as you host somewhere else.

Your web hosting provider

Yes, it’s another great way to regsiter a domain. Some of the hosting companies offer free domain registrations with annual plans.

Once you’ve decided, you should not hesitate to click on that purchase button. I’ve lost more than 5 domain names by hesitating.

Stay one step ahead of your competitors!

If you are planning to promote an affiliate program, one of the things you have to consider is having your own website.

Why do you need it?

Having your own domain makes you look professional, build trust and a big plus that the advertising networks / affiliate networks take you more seriously. Some of the networks out there won’t accept your application unless you have your own domain name.

I’ve seen some people who started with a free domain / web hosting, build some quality backlinks, good Alexa and PR rank. But once they move their own domain, they have to start everything over.

So it’s really important to start with your own domain!

But what domain name should you have?

Finding a good domain name is hard these days but not impossible. First of all you need a Top Level Domain (TLD), even better if you can go with a .com TLD. If you target a certain country, you can buy a Country Code Top Level Domain (ccTLD). E.g. if you are targeting the UK, you should buy a .uk (.co.uk) domain.

The simple one-word domain names are sold or held by domain brokers. You have to be creative. Combine simple (key)words in a unique fashion. Create a list of basic words that describe your niche or the product(s) you promote then add a positive word that will make your name stand out.

Pick a short domain name that is easy to remember. It has to be short enough to type. Having the right keywords in your domain name would give you better chances to getting targeted visitors.

Once you come up with some great domain name, check their availability.

Where can you buy a cheap domain name?

There are some great domain name registrars you can choose from. You can buy domains for as low as $0.99.

The next step is finding the right web hosting for your website, at a good company, and of course at a reasonable price.