www.SelfPublishWeb.com

Whether you’re planning to host a web site or a blog, I recommend using cPanel hosting. cPanel makes managing your blog hosting very easy, especially if, like me, you’re not a “techie” but would like to manage your own blog, web site or business online.

For this post, I am going to assume that you have done your research and found a reliable webhosting company that is customer driven and that offers excellent support. If you’re looking for a great blog hosting service provider but don’t know where to start, then the two companies I highly recommend you look into are:

Hostgator – This company offers great value for money hosting for most blogs and websites, especially for small businesses.

LiquidWeb.com – They’re not the cheapest host, but they offer superior web hosting services and heroic customer support. I recommend this hosting company if you need a dedicated web server for your web presence with 24×7 support that will guarantee your peace of mind.

I use both of these companies for hosting my own sites as well as those of my clients and I am more than happy with the excellent service and value for money they provide.

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Are you thinking of starting a business blog? If you are, then one of the first and most important decisions you will have to make during the planning phase of your site, is the aspect of blog hosting.

Blog hosting generally refers to companies that provide a hosting service better suited to a blogger’s specific needs while also offering all the regular features you would normally find in a typical webhosting company. Some of these needs might include special requirements for adult blog hosting, audio blog hosting, video blog hosting and so on.

Other features of a blog hosting service allow you to install a blog software such as wordpress, typepad, b2evolution, nucleus, pmachine or lifetype directly from your hosting control panel.

Another benefit of using an exclusive blog hosting service, may be that popular blog hosting providers already rank highly in search engine results and can thus give your blog exposure to a greater and wider audience faster because of factors like their authority and the automatic encoding already included in their service.

When researching blog hosting services look for sites that offer blog hosting comparison charts, where the charts are divided into categories (e.g. starting with cheap blog hosting options and moving up towards full-featured hosting packages), as well as information on the main blog hosting platform differences you can expect.

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If you’re trying to generate traffic for your new blog and you haven’t set up the automated systems we show you how to do in our business blog video tutorials, then be prepared to invest a considerable amount of time and hard work into getting people to find your site.

To help ease your task, however, I’m going to let you in on a little secret that successful blog marketers use to literally steal traffic away from other blogs.

Think about this for a moment: What if you were to search for blogs in your niche market that were already established and had a ton of traffic and then were able to divert some of that targetted traffic to YOUR OWN blog? Wouldn’t that be something neat?

Well you can, using a method known as Blog Commenting.

One of the great benefits of using a blog to grow your business online is that a blog offers interactive and dynamic features, like the ability for visitors to leave comments on your posts.

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Most of my blog posts so far have focused on helping business owners understand why a business blog can help grow their business online faster, cheaper, easier and better than using a traditional static business website.

In this post, I want to start discussing the benefits of using a blog, or blogging, to generate income online via affiliate marketing.

If you are new to the concept, Affiliate Marketing is simply a way of connecting buyers (people searching for something they need) with sellers (merchants) online. According to Wikipedia, Affiliate Marketing is a performance-based marketing channel on the Internet where a merchant pays a commission to an affiliate for generating clicks, leads, or sales from a graphic or text link located on the affiliate’s site.

For example, I own an online Audio Book store called AudioBookOne.net. If you own a web site and want to promote audio books related to your web site’s topics, then you can become an affiliate partner, which allows you to place specially encoded links and banners on your web pages. When visitors click on these links, they are sent directly either to the main audio book online store, where they can browse thousands of best-selling audio book titles on a wide range of topics, or to a specific page containing more information about a particular audio book title or category. As the referrer, you then automatically earn sales commissions on all purchases of audio books made by your site(s) visitors who clicked on your affiliate links.

Affiliate marketing is a great, low-cost and fast way to start generating an income or additional business revenue online, as you don’t have to carry any of the inventory, or provide any customer service – the merchant is responsible for this. There are literally hundreds of thousands of physical and digital products and services that you can promote as an affiliate marketer. Although it sounds simple and easy (and if you know what you’re doing it is!), affiliate marketing does require some “how to” knowledge in order to be successful and turn your efforts into a profitable investment of your time.

One of the best resources for anyone interested in learning more about how to succeed with affiliate marketing, is “The Super Affiliate Handbook” by Rosalind Gardner. Rosalind shows you how she created a $500,000+ annual income using affiliate marketing and teaches you how to create a foundation for a similarly profitable business. Continue Reading »

Once your blog is up and running and you have added a few posts to it, you will want to start driving traffic to your site.

Here are 5 great ways for driving more traffic to your blog for free that I personally use with great results:

1) “How To Start A Blog” Videos – These step-by-step video training tutorials show you not only how to set up a WordPress blog, but also exactly how to configure it using FREE plugins that will automatically notify search engines, feed directories and social networking sites as soon as a new post is made to your blog.

Even if you (or your webmaster) have already set up a WordPress blog, these videos will show you how to go beyond the default WordPress blog installation and set up an automatic “set-and-forget” traffic-getting system for your blog that can help you grow your business online faster and save you a lot of time and effort. Click here for more details …

2) Publish Articles – Submitting articles regularly to article sites like isnare, Article Marketer, Article Dashboard, Goarticles, etc … can get you lots of traffic, visitors and new blog readers. Just make sure you have a link pointing back to your blog in your article’s “resources box” (e.g. “for more information about [your-area-of-expertise], visit the author’s blog here: [insert your blog URL]“.

Some of the main benefits of creating useful content like articles, is that you can then reformat and reuse the same information in different ways to help you not only drivet more traffic to your blog, but also target potential new customers, educate existing customers and generate more sales of your products and services.

Some of these ways, for example, are as follows: Continue Reading »

Yesterday one of my clients sent me a disheartening email. He had just finished setting up his brand new business blog following my business blog video tutorials and a couple of days later, he went to visit his site and all he saw was a completely blank page!

The tragedy is that he had not gotten around to backing up his site files and data. This is somewhat understandable, as most people wouldn’t think of backing up their site or blog as soon as they get it up and running. It is highly recommended, however, to back up your data on a regular basis (e.g. at least monthly when you first start, then weekly or even more frequently as your blog starts to grow and more content gets added to it.)

My client also let me know in his email that his hosting provider had informed him that his “wordpress crashed” and there was nothing wrong on their side.

I sent my client an empathetic email and suggested he try a couple of things first, before deleting the site from his server and starting the blog installation process all over again:

1) First, make sure that you’re hosting your blog with a reliable web hosting service provider.

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Following on from the videos I made where I track the progress of starting a business blog on a brand new domain name using the system shown in our ’step-by-step’ how to start a blog video tutorial, in this post we will look at the results of starting this blog after 90 days.

Like the previous videos, the video below looks at actual results – specific to this video, however, we look to see whether we have achieved the following four main objectives:

1. Get Indexed In Search Engines Fast
2. Attract Regular Visitors To Our Blog
3. Generate New Leads
4. Make New Sales

To view the results of this blog after 90 days in each of the above areas, click on the video below:

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About 3 months ago I did a presentation to a small business network group in my local community about the benefits of starting a business blog vs. starting a business website.

After the presentation, I was approached by a local business owner who told me that his business was not attracting enough clients and offered to pay me to build him a business blog to help him better promote his business and generate more leads.

I spent a few days helping my new client set up a web hosting account and getting his business blog built, and even agreed to visit him on the weekend to show him how to manage his blog. When I arrived on Saturday morning for our training session as arranged, my client introduced me to a local neighborhood teenager and asked me to train this young person instead, telling me that she was going to run his blog as he found the whole “internet” thing too technical and overwhelming. He then left the room, and I spent the next half hour or so showing his young “assistant” how to post articles to his business blog and how to access and use the training area containing the step-by-step videos and tutorials.

This morning I received an email from my client. In the email, he conveyed his dissatisfaction at getting – and I quote him directly here, “ABSOLUTELY NO RESPONSE/RESULT ! If I got even one or two inquiries/calls that would have been enough. But I got absolutely NOTHING !!!”

After going over his email a couple of times, I went to get myself a cup of coffee, then came back to my desk and thought about this. I have built over 70 blogs this year using the exact same system I used to set up my client’s blog and I have gotten very positive results (i.e. visitors, newsletter subscribers, sales, etc …) with every single blog I have set up.

So, I decided to investigate things a little bit further and take a look at the results my client’s blog was getting before sending him a reply.

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If you’ve been following the posts on this blog, or have set up your business blog as per our step-by-step video tutorials on how to set up a blog, then it should be pretty clear by now that the only work you have to do as a business blogger is to keep writing about your business and posting it on your blog.

In previous posts I have listed some of the many topics you can write about – all of which are designed to help you build trust with potential new customers by educating and informing your blog readers about the benefits of your products and services and why they should be doing business with you instead of your competition.

Now, whenever I talk about this with other small business owners, most of the responses I get tend to fall into two main categories:

1) “I don’t have time / I’m too busy”
2) “I don’t know how to write”

Business owners, small business owners and micro-business owners listen up!

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I recently set up a Google AdWords pay-per-click campaign to bring more visitors to my “How To Start A Blog” video tutorials product.

Setting up an effective Google AdWords campaign is a fairly comprehensive subject. I do run very successful and highly profitable Adwords campaigns for a few select clients – if you are interested in knowing more about my PPC services or discussing setting up a PPC campaign for your business, feel free to contact me here. If you just want to learn more about Pay-Per-Click advertising, then I recommend you get Perry Marshall’s The Definitive Guide To Google AdWords.

What I do want to talk about in this post, is how to use data from your online advertising campaigns to grow your business blog organically. In other words, how to go from paying for traffic to getting visitors coming to your blog for FREE.

The concept is actually very simple:

1. Set up advertising banners or text ads to drive visitors to your website, e-commerce store, product sales page, etc …
2. Make sure you can track which keywords visitors are searching for – not only the keywords and keyword phrases people are using to find your ads, but more importantly, the keywords and keyword phrases that get them to click on your ads in order to get to your site, and especially the search terms that end up converting visitors into buyers.
3. Write content on your business blog based on the specific keywords and keyword phrases above that convert searches into sales of your products and services.

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