Website hosts advertise in different ways on the web but one interesting thing I have seen is a web host re-branding themselves 3 or 4 different brand names.

These website hosts sometimes do this in a sneaky under the radar purposeful way and other times it just happens because they offer a white label reseller hosting plan.

Web hosts recommended

With a white label reseller account you could basically sign up with a host and create your own website host with logo image brand name and the whole shebang.

To take the advertising customer acquisition thing a step further some of these web hosting companies will have their hosting companies listed in a comparison chart along side other hosts.

The compare charts can be very misleading as you may have an affiliate reseller for a couple hosting companies creating multiple brands and sprinkling them throughout a website hosts comparison chart.

I started my own search by looking at these comparison charts and I quickly saw through the baloney.

It wasn’t until I read some very good articles by a few different bloggers and marketers until I found out which website hosts kept being recommended as peoples preferred host.

The hosts people were recommending were not Network Solutions or GoDaddy and I understand why as these hosting companies are way over priced and geared to sell to people that know nothing.

The hosts were Bluehost and Hostgator. These are two separate web hosting providers but they both offer some really nice advantages over the other hosts out there.

CLICK HERE TO SIGNUP FOR BLUEHOST.COM

Advantages of Top Tier Website Hosts

• For one Bluehost and Hostgator are dirt cheap. You pay monthly with Hostgator and all at once with Bluehost but the price per month is below $10 a month on their cheapest hosting plans.
• Both of these hosts offer scripts like Fantastico that can automatically install website software like WordPress, Openx, and other popular tools. WordPress is the most popular SEO friendly website creation tool in the world right now and is used by some of the biggest and most popular websites in existence.
• These hosting companies offer US tech support 24 x 7 and can often fix some pretty difficult problems. If the problem cannot be fixed by them they have referred me to some turn-key services with other companies that were able to help.
• These hosting companies are great for people just getting a new website up. Bluehost eventually has its limitations but only after your site gets pretty popular and has a very very large file count. At that time you could move over to Hostgator that has a scalable server structure that can grow as your site grows.
• Finally these website hosts have massive love by some of the top website designers, technical server administrators, and ecommerce marketers out there. Considering these hosts are already accepted by the mass public you are obviously on the right track when starting with these companies for your hosting needs.

After probably atleast 3 years and great success with Hostgator you may want something much faster and bigger and that is when using Rackspace or Amazon EC2 could come into use.

Rackspace is left for several years down the road when your site becomes gigantic with loads of traffic if ever that day comes. For most people who begin making money on their website the biggest upgrade in hosting can all be accomplished using an Amazon EC2 instance which starts out with a cost around $70 an instance per month. Depending on your traffic this cost goes up but you only have to pay for what you use which makes this such a great host for large trafficked websites.

With Amazon EC2 you are on a scalable server architecture on the cloud and over the Amazon.com fiber backbone. This is the same backbone they use for their ecommerce site.

An eventual move to Amazon EC2 from Hostgator may be needed after several years with Hostgator but for most people it won’t come up. You will have to get on Odesk or Elance and hire a server admin to setup a hosting account using open source cpanels like ISPconfig .

Once your server admin has you up in a couple days you can run a beast of a website on this cloud hosting service. If they create a script for you, it will be no problem to setup limitless websites on ISPConfig over Amazon EC2 in only a couple minutes per site.

These web hosts are my favorites

There is a good format to follow when mailing to your email list and it follows this method below:

Content Content Pitch Content

An easy outline of this method is CCPC

So lets say you have 5 steps to tell your people to get to the end result of your list achieving their goal.

In this example will stick with the dating advice info product.

So in the first email you want to email with good content. At the very end of that content you can have a small pitch.

It is ok to have a pitch in every email just be cool about it and make sure there was a lot of good content prior to pitching to your people.

So within every piece of content you email to your list you will still pitch but just a little bit and without coming across as obnoxious.

Every couple of days you need to send another bit of content. The people in your list have likely joined many others lists and so you are competing for their attention.

If your not emailing out content every 2 days you will lose them and they will end up reading some other guys emails instead of yours.

It is up to you to stay out there in the front of the pack with very good content so you always have your lists attention. You must out cool everybody and really be out in front.

At the end of every email you say something like: “Ok now you know how to do this and do that. I have given you 7 things to do that will accomplish such and so and I hope you really have fun with that. Now listen, if you are really ready to be a success right now you can do that right now. As a matter of fact if you like this stuff you will really like what is out at www.mycoolidea.com. I look forward to working with you in my new course called, “My Cool Idea” so go ahead on over there and take the plunge with the course and I really look forward to working with you soon.”

See the above is all the pitch you need at the end of your content emails you send out. Be sure to always have a pitch like this at the end of every email. If the content in the email is really awesome you will not need to pitch very hard.

Now when it comes to the pitch you want to turn it into an event.

The email you send in the pitch email should say something like, “Breaking news” in the title along with whatever your pitching.

In the body go ahead and have that headline there as well. Next say something like, “Whoever takes advantage and buys my stuff this week will get as a free bonus “blah blah blah”

Make sure the free bonus is something your audience will really really want.

So the first outcome might be to make enough money to quit their job but their second outcome might be to gain the respect and admiration of their friends and family.

So the bonus could promise, “How to go from a beginner to a pro on the internet and gain the respect and admiration of your friends and family in less then 60 days.”

By turning the pitch into an event instead of telling people “buy my crap!” you are giving them something cool. You become the deliverer of good news. Your not the deliverer of pressured lame sales tactics.

Your simply saying I am going to give you this cool stuff if you buy my program today. People will like you for pitching to them instead of hating you for it.

The big bribe will make up for any hype pitchiness sales tactics in your pitch email.

In summary, in the subject say something like “Breaking News”

In the body say something like, “If you buy my stuff today I am going to give some things to you today that are really awesome and it’s free.”

Send them to a sales letter that basically says the same thing.

Have you ever seen a website with one of those lists you can sign up for? Once you sign up every so often you get an email from that website.

There is a method to take the names collected on a website list and obtain money from the people on that list.

The method is to do as much as you can for those that come to your website to the point that people are always willing to reciprocate.

Always deliver lots of value to others and rarely ask overtly for anything in return.

The best way to tackle this is to start with an overall strategy.

Overall Strategy:

Results Ahead of Time

There is a very widely spread misconception about internet marketing and that is that the money is in the list. But honestly that couldn’t be farther from the truth as that would mean spammers should be billionaires.

The money actually isn’t in the list and you cannot make money by spamming people you have no relationship with.

So is the money in the “relationship” you have with your list? By creating value to your list you help cultivate and foster that relationship with your list. So the money is not in the list, it is not in the relationship you have with your list, it is in the value you deliver to your list. This value you give to your list is ultimately what can pay you forever.

The strategies we discuss below will show you how to deliver value to your list and cause your customers to buy from you simultaneously which is like selling without selling.

If you sign up for a internet marketing gurus list you will usually get 4 or 5 messages automatically delivered in a sequence in a short amount of time followed by a pitch trying to sell you something.

What happens is you opt in to the email list on the site and you get a free promised report. So the report ends up being really good with lots of good advice and a small pitch at you to buy a product. Well you feel pretty good at the start and your goodwill is high at this point.

A few days go by and you get another email with another pitch but this time it is a little harder of a sales pitch.

Another day goes by and you get pitched again even harder and they just keep pitching you until your goodwill goes down to nothing.

Goodwill is like currency. Each time you pitch your list if done improperly can reduce your goodwill of your list to zero.

By using the right strategy you can pitch to your list in such a way so that you keep your lists goodwill high without depleting that currency.

So the goal is to pitch to your list while at the same time simultaneously raise the goodwill of your list.

Number one emotion that causes people to buy

Positive Expectancy – What this means is that when your prospect sees something and sees that it will work and that they could do that they get this emotion. They have the positive expectancy that they can do something even if they are not going to go right out and do it now.

By showing people in advance what they need to do to get the results they want to achieve you are injecting your people in your list with faith.

So how do you do all of this and put something out there for people to buy while doing it elegantly and compound the whole effect?

You have to start with an outline and to demonstrate this I want to use the example of a dating tips info product

The picture below starts with a lonely guy in his basement that simply wants to learn how to be a cool guy and be able to go out on a couple of dates without being rejected. At this point he lives in his parents basement.

• So step 1 is to learn how to simply approach a woman without getting a drink thrown in your face. (Here you could write about what cologne to wear.)
• Next they have to be able to have a conversation and to put simply, talk (Write about what to talk about and what not to talk about)
• Next they need to get the phone number without them saying something like, “get a way from me you wacko”
• Then call to talk and have a nice conversation on the phone
• Finally the guy asks and gets the date

Of course there is much more to this then in the steps and diagram but these are the main super basic milestones. It goes from lonely guy to non-inflatable girlfriend which are the main components. So what you should do is take this time line example and outline in a similar way what your prospect must go through to achieve the results he needs to achieve.

When you are outlining the basic how to for this person think of them as the mysterious stranger who has gone out and bought all kinds of cool stuff for you and your family. You want to write it in such a way that you want to do them so right because they have done you so right. If a mysterious stranger has done all of these things for your family wouldn’t you want to offer them tremendous value so be sure to write the outline in a way that presents the main milestones in an easy to follow acheavable way for that person.

The strategies are always changing it would seem in regards to building back links to your site but in reality they haven’t changed all that much if you play above the board when creating blog content.

The online money making forums always have newbie type people in them claiming all kinds of weird stuff but what it comes down to are some very basic stuff that has been in public knowledge for years.

When building back llinks to your site content you want to link not only to your main domain but also to each and every post you write.

Each time you write a post on your blog or website I recommend going into ezinearticles or another popular article directory and creating a very good high quality article.

In the resource box link back to your post on your website or blog and then wait a week.

After a week go into ezinearticles and find your article. Copy the url of the ezinearticle and we will use it in an article submitter.

You don’t have to use ezinearticles if you prefer you can use Newsgrape or Buzzle which are also very good article directory sites.

When you have copied the url to your article in one of these directories go ahead and paste it in notepad somewhere for quick reference.

Go to this link below to complete the process we use to get good back links for each post we write: http://tx.cm/get-back-links

Use the wild card redirect to effectively redirect old pages on an old domain to your new domain name you want to use instead.

So what this does is turn “folder” into a redirect folder.

ReWriteEngine on

RedirectMatch 301 /folder/(.*)

http://www.domain.com/$1

The way to properly redirect a single page on your website somewhere to another page of your choice and it be done using proper SEO is to edit your htaccess file using the following code.

Be sure to use this code as one redirect per line which means hit the “enter” key guys! Did I just offend you good. It was time you had a father figure in your life, and stop playing World of Warcraft you should know this information by now.

Anyways here is the code.

ReWriteEngine on

Redirect 301 /old.html http://
www.domain.com/new.html

Don’t forget to change where it is says domain to your actual website domain name.

If you have hundreds or thousands of redirects you shouldn’t do this all in an htaccess file.

Instead you should have a programer out at odesk create a custom 404 error script.

The script should be able to lookup tables and map old broken urls to the new urls on your site.

If the script finds the url it should send a 301 redirect. If the requested ul is not found the script should log and notify and return a 404 error.

These instructions on how this type of script would work is based on the idea that a database will be used to lookup the url’s. Your programmer should be able to create a script for you to do all of this in short order.

Canonical url’s matter an without using this code on your redirected url’s you are only hurting yourself in the long run.

Search engines rank pages and so if you are not showing the search engines which page you want ranked it will rank duplicate content twice and reduce the authority and reputation of both.

One broad example of having two pages ranking twice and splitting the authority and reputation of the site is http://example.com and also having http://www.example.com

You want to properly redirect http://example.com to http://www.exampe.com

So pick one of these and redirect the other.

Search engines say they got this under control but they still mess up so we need to do this right so their mistakes don’t hurt you site.

In Google you can go to site settings in webmaster tools and set a domain preference. In Yahoo and Bing you do not have this option.

In large part this issue can be solved by setting your domain preference to http://www.example.com in Google and unfortunately like we said above you cannot do this in any settings Yahoo or Bing has.

In summary search engines say they got this covered for you and not to worry but in reality they get this issue wrong all the time and it will hurt your site.

No because Bing does not use the rel=canonical tag like Google but instead uses it as a “hint” you have to go in and do some manual stuff for Bing and Yahoo search engines.

I bet Bing is not reading the canonical tag at all. But anyway we need to handle getting the domain to show only one version of the url.

IIS windows servers require an IIS_Rewrite script or ISAPI_Rewrite to give Apache like behavior in order to do this website tweak properly.

Unfortunately if you have your website on a Windows server I recommend going to odesk.com and hiring a programmer to do this redirect stuff for you because otherwise it will be a pain for you to figure out.

If you are like 95% of us website owners you are on an Apache server and below is what you will want to do.

Edit your htaccess file with the below code. Note: If you already have in your htaccess file the line “ReWriteEngine on” you will not need to rewrite it.

ReWriteEngine on
ReWriteCond % {HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com
ReWriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1
   [R=permanent,L]

By the way this htaccess change should not effect any subdomains you have setup so no worries there.

This will tell the search engines you only have one version of every article on your site.

I hate to mention this but be sure to edit example.com with your sites address.

Originally these shortening services were used to shorten urls so you could fit them into text based emails.

Now with twitter and other social networking services people use these services to limit the amount of text in a message they send out.

A common service nowadays is bit.ly and what people will do is automate the task of posting blog post updates to Twitter and facebook by using Twitterfeed, Networked blogs, and other services that are configured with a bit.ly account.

The automation task sums of the blog post in a couple sentences and links to the original article using a shortened url like so: http://tx.cm/web-hosting-companies

Bit.ly uses a 301 redirect which is what you want for SEO although other services use 302 / 307 redirects and others cloak the redirect (bad, very bad!)

Bit.ly can be trusted but you can also create your own shortening url service by installing a wordpress plugin on your site called “pretty link”

A 301 acts much like a link to a site pretty much.

The redirect tells the search engine to go from point A to point B.

A 302 to redirect is supposed to keep the original url but fetch content from page B or the new url.

302 Redirects are considered the best way to do a redirect for SEO

302 redirects make good sense for internal linking but not good when content is on different domains.

Regarding 307 redirects, they are used for pointing to an external resource that may move.

This may be used for redirecting your blog feed to feedburner. If Feedburner were to change your blog feed address would still remain the same.

You could use this for offsite calendars so you could 307 redirect to a Google Calendar and if a better calendar came out you could redirect to it instead.

Meta Refresh redirects is code in the head section of an html page. If it is a zero second delay it is treated as a 301 redirect. If it is any linger than zero seconds it is treated as a 302 redirect.

So this can be good sometimes particulary on a Yahoo store.

Javascript redirects can be done in many ways. We really don’t know exactly how search engines understand these.

The way you do this is to hide javascript redirect code and exclude it in your robots file.

Search engines do not have good visibility about what is going on so it is recommended to avoid this although the risk isn’t that high.

Checking your redirects to see if you did a good job

Go here to this tool: http://tx.cm/header-check

What matters when using this tool is the first lin that says “Status Code” and in regards to checking redirects, the location: header

If you get a 200 then your OK and it should then be followed by content.

If you get back a 300 series it should redirect OK but if you get a 400 series it cannot redirect the link.

The point of this tool is based on the premise that just because you see the redirect happening doesn’t mean the search engines do.

So seeing the 200 OK and 300 OK is a good thing but seeing 400 and 500 codes coming back when using this tool is not a good thing. Got it! Good!

All and all best practice when using any redirect is to use the rel=canonical tag for any link using redirect. Obviously this tage would go on the final link you want to be what the search engines see.

The rel=canonical as of late is becoming a popular standard used by most search engines to determine what a site wants the search engine to index as the main url in a redirect chain.

In situations where you have a picture and text link that both contain links for SEO you need to simply leave off teh ALT tag from the image.

Images are required to have an ALT tag but leaving it off allows you to put alt text in the text link instead.

By leaving it off you can send anchor text authority on to the site your linking to. The search engines will simply pretend the picture does not exist and allow you to give link priority to your text link which is what you want.