My last article explained a bit about How to Setup a Web Site.  But before you can setup your web site you need to find a good hosting provider.  “Where will you host your new website?”  There are a lot of web hosting providers out there both big and small.  And just because they are a big operation doesn’t mean you will get the most bang for your buck.  Even the little guys can provide superb service. Here are a few things to consider to help you choose a good hosting provider.

Reliability - Does the web hosting provider have new fully supported hardware.  Or do they have old equipment that may break down at any minute.  Are they backing up your files or will they provide a file backup service in the event a problem arises.

Speed - If your website is slow because of your service provider, your visitors will not stay around to watch the web page load.  Many web hosting companies use virtual servers to keep the price cheap.  They carve out many many little virtual servers out of one large physical web server.  If the physical server is over subscribed, meaning too many virtual servers, the physical server comes to  a crawl and becomes very slow.

Ease of Use – How easy is it to manage your website and your hosting account?  What about adding new domains or sub-domains?  Or creating email addresses?  Most competitive unix based hosting providers use cPanel to allow their users to manage their accounts.  cPanel is very intuitive and easy to use.  Some larger web hosting providers like GoDaddy have their own web portal for managing dns, web and email settings.

Support -  Do they have a knowledgeable friendly staff and that can help you and solve your problems quickly?  What are their hours of support?  If you have a problem will you be able to call them when  you need them?

Stability - The internet is open 24 hours a day and so should your web site.  If the server you “rented” is not in good shape, over subscribed, or if the web host just didnt pay their electric bill, your web site will suffer.

WordPress Support-  This one is great if your a blogger. Having the ability to quickly and easily install WordPress is a must.  Also having a support staff who understand WordPress will really help you in the event you run into trouble.

Price - Last but not least price.  Price may not be everything but in the competitive world of web hosting price can means the difference between having customers or not not having customers.  And just because they charge a lot doesn’t mean its better.  Some of the best web hosting providers charge only $6 or 7 bucks a month and are outstanding places for you to host your web site.

List of recommended providers. – Below is a list of web hosting providers that I recommend.

Hostgator – This is who I use (LOVE THEM!)

BlueHost – Used by Yaro Starak and Caroline Middlebrooke

HostMonster- Used by Brian Johnson and many top bloggers and webmasters

There are many more but these are ones I have experience with or others I know have recommended.  If you have any web hosting providers that you love let us know!  We would love to hear about them.

There’s a lot advice that gets thrown around on how to make money online.  People telling you what you need to start your own online business or which product to buy, blah blah, blah.  The thing is, the most common questions I get from my readers are simply: “How do I get started?  Where do I start? How do I setup a website?” So with this article we are going to start with the basics and explain how to setup a website.

I remember trying to explain to my Mom once what the internet was and what a web site was.  I had to laugh because these questions seemed so simple to me… until I tried to explain it.  It was a little harder than I thought.

But seriously, the Internet is very similar to the public phone system.  Everyone is familiar with the public telephone system.  It’s not owned by any one company or organization. You can pick up a phone and call anyone in the world if you know their phone number.  Whether they use AT&T or Verizon, it doesn’t matter,  the call will go through. The Internet is just like this, it is just a network (like the public telephone network).  People use their laptops or desktops to connect to servers that are on the web (web servers) to look up information (kind of like directory assistance).

These web servers have websites that are setup on them.  They are a lot like your laptop or desktop at home. They are really a computer, with a hard drive, cd rom, etc..  But whats different about these computers is that they are “tuned” or setup to serve files (web pages) through their network card.  These high performance race cars of the Internet are designed with one thing in mind and that is to transmit data over their network connection.  They don’t have sound cards or fancy video cards.  But they DO have a fancy network card, and most likely a lot of memory and hard drive space.

Web servers can be installed on just about any computer.  Windows, Apple, or Linux it doesnt matter.  The most popular web server is the Apache webserver.   Probably because its free!  And setting up an Apache web server is fairly easy.   Oh yes, I can hear you screaming, “But what about Windows?”  Yup, Windows also has the Internet Information Server that comes with the Windows Server Operating system too. It is also free (well , it’s included in the price of Windows).

Webservers are what make websites possible.  They serve up web pages.  These web pages are simply files that end with the file extension .html.  The “html” stands for hyperText Markup Language.  But that is probably way more than you really care about or need to know right now.

HTML files are just simple text files.  You can create these with Notepad on windows (or any text editor). Try this yourself.  Open Notepad, just type some text (dont worry about html tags or anything like that) and save the file as “test.html”. Make sure it doesn’t have “.txt” at the end.  Then open the file with your browser.

TADA!

Now, How to Setup a Website?!? Web sites are really just nicely organized web pages (those .html pages) all linked together and served up by a web server to anyone who requests them.  When you first configure a webserver you designate one folder or directory on the server that will contain all of the files that the web server will serve up. Most of the time this folder is called “public_html”.  It can be called anything, but just know that what ever is in this folder is fair game for public consumption.

So anyone can setup a web server.  But really the hard part is keeping it running. Protecting it from power surges during a storm, keeping it cool, and keeping it secure (don’t want anyone stealing your website) thats’ the true challenge. And it gets expensive.  You need a dedicated internet line (can’t have a dsl or cable hookup). You need a dedicated IP address and don’t forget DNS and Email.  GEEZE!

What many people do to help them setup a website is to “rent” a webserver from a web hosting provider.  There are a lot of companies that make good money renting servers to webmaster.  One great hosting provider I use is Hostgator.  I love them.  They provide everything, the physical server, the protected clean power, they back it up, they secure it, provide ample bandwidth, monitor it, and best of all if anything goes wrong I just call them and they fix it!  Its great.  All for only $10  month.

That’s about it.  Next time I will go over how to choose a hosting company for your business.  Price isn’t everything.

As always, I’d love to hear from you.  Did this article answer any of your questions? What kinds of problems have you had with setting up a website? Comments help websites come alive and allows us all to share our ideas.  I’d love to hear yours.  Thanks!

Have you ever written a beautiful article or blog post and wondered how to create a hyperlink directly in the body of the post?  I’ll show how to do that today and it’s really not that hard to do.  I must warn you, we will be learning a little html in the process – but don’t worry I promise it won’t hurt a bit.

In my example today I’m going assume we are working from a post written in WordPress.  Whether its wordpress or a straight html page… the code is the same.

So from our blog post edit screen, we need to click on the html tab.  This will will allow us to embed html directly into our article.

The html tag we will work with is called the anchor tag (or “a” tag).  The finished code for a plain anchor tag looks something like this:

<a href=”http://www.www.joesinternetmarketing.com”>My Awesome Website</a>

And the result looks like this:

 My Awesome Website

In the html code itself we can break it down and see that it’s not too difficult to understand. So lets dig in to it

First off,  html code is always surrounded by angle brakets – < and >.  The first letter “a” after the first angle bracket tells the browser its an anchor tag (also known as an “a” tag).

The next part is “href”.  This stands for “host reference” – basically saying where are we going to link to.  This is then followed by a closing angle bracket.

Then we add our text we want to highlight for the anchor which in this case is “My Website“.  FInally, we close the entire thing with the closing “a” tag -</a>

And that’s it!

So right about now you maybe thinking… GEEZE!  What a hassle.  And your right sometimes writing this out for every link you want to embed is a hassle. Especially if you have a lot of affiliate products you may want to link to in your article.

To make things easier, I’ve had my eye on a product that automatically will add links for me based on certain keywords that are in my articles or blogs.  Its a WordPress plugin called Ninja Affiliate.   It has been a bit pricey though, at $97 and was just too hard to swallow.

Well, MaxBlog Press, makers of Ninja Affiliate just reduced the price of Ninja Affiliate! They’ve knocked off $30 bucks from the price and its now only $67 dollars!.  I have been watching this product for a while and it has never gone on sale.  So needless to say I bought it yesterday.

I have to say I’m glad I did, its an awesome WordPress plugin that has already begun to pay for itself. Its you have a chance check out the sales page and read about it. It will save you time and possibly make you some money!!

I’m sure your thinking, “oh great, another review of an Internet Marketing Product”.  Well your right, I’ll cut right to the chase.  Firepow is great.   If you have 10 or more blogs or niche web sites, this is a tool that will help you save time, and make promotion of your sites a whole lot easier. But it’s not flawless and it does have its short comings.  But of course that is what a review is about ;=)

There are a lot of ways that I could review  Andrew Hansen’s new blogging software Firepow 2.0.  And since it’s not flawless I thought I might focus here on at least one particular part of the application that I think is key to the success of a nice site builder or affiliate blogger.  And this is, namely, the thing that everyone wants and that is the ability to drive traffic to their site.

If you’ve ever started a web site, niche site, blog, or any other type of website trying to earn some cash, you know that you just can’t live by the motto “if you build it they will come”.

Even a great web site or blog doesn’t get guaranteed visitors, and a major part of a webmasters focus has to be in spreading the word about their new web site in any way they can think of in order to constantly try to increase visitors and  hopefully profits.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot more to Firepow 2.0.  I could have talked about the blog creation and management aspects of Firepow, which I know so many webmasters, especially those who have multiple properties, will find very valuable. But for me, I’m more concerned about how the program can  increase traffic to my sites and make more money.

Anyway, with that said – I thought I’d at least talk a little about some of the features of the program so you can see some amazing ways this program might be as much of a  benefit to you as it has been for me.

One of the cool things I love about FirePow is the ability to easily generate backlinks to their blog once it’s up and running.  This is where the many built-in promotional tools help out.  When you start a new blog, you want enough search engine link juice pointed to your site  to help it rank well for those long tail keywords that has very little competition.

In addition to giving you powerful on page optimization capabilities (like allowing you to set the meta data AND h1h2 tag data for every post or page), Firepow also lets you quickly generate the spider juice you need to get indexed and potentially ranking for an uncompetitive term.

For example, as soon as your site is created, you can click a button to have your RSS feed submitted to a bunch of RSS directories. You’ll get some valuable link backs, plus some great spider activity right off the bat. Not to mention the ping from your post.

And, if you choose to, you could use the BlogLove Builder, to quickly and easily implement a trackback to a popular blog post within your own blogs first post – and instantly generate more link juice, and even a few visitors right from the get go too!

When you focus on search engine traffic you know about the importance of link building in locking in long term rankings. Initial spider juice can get you a quick ranking, but for a LASTING ranking, you need an assortment of relevant quality backlinks establishing your page as an authority on that keyword.

Firepow has that more than covered, giving you the ability to obtain links from social networks, blog comments, and in content links from Firepow’s own network of high PageRank blog sites as well.

There are way more features that I can talk about here in post.  I really just wanted to stress some of the key tools that I like that help me get my sites ranked and in turn gets visitors to my site.   I use Firepow and I wouldn’t recommend it if I didn’t.  And it’s for that reason among many that I ‘m recommending all my blog readers to check it out for themselves.

Here’s the link:

http://getfirepow.com/?&aff_id=6980