Not sure what the “middle man” even is?

In one word: Reseller

There are many people that are reselling web hosting and domain names. Many times they are not easy to spot when you are looking for a cheap company to buy from.

First you need to do some research.

If you are on a website and they keep pushing a hosting service then once you open their hosting company leave the site open and do more searches on affordable hosting.

Do a side-by-side comparison of the prices. Not only of the hosting services they offer but also check out:

1. How much is it to purchase their domain name?

2. What does it cost to buy a domain name for a longer term (2-3 years)

3. How much is it to renew the name?

4. How much does it cost to buy private registration?

5. How long has the company been around?

6. What is the cost of their website builder? Even though you may not be using this service, you are just looking to see how their prices compare.

7. Check out their uptime. If you are going to all this time and effort of creating a site, you want to make sure that your site will be seen 99% of the time. Yes, all web hosting companies may be down for maintenance and unforeseen circumstances, but if your site is down more than it is online then you will be losing time and money.

8. Are other customers happy with them?

If you are purchasing a website builder or a website-in-a-box, many times you MUST use a certain hosting company. Sure the website might be free, but you may be paying 2 or 3 times the cost of hosting for a year. So how “free” is the website?

If you are buying auto insurance or even house insurance, you will price compare, same goes for your hosting.

One way to possibly spot a reseller is the way their home page looks. Many of the hosting companies that are resellers have a template that looks much like the main company’s page.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against the reselling of domain names and hosting, but I have seen quite a few “hosting companies” that are gouging their clients with prices.

If people would just do a little research, they could save themselves possible hundreds of dollars a year.

So take a little time to research for your webhosting. There are many great and affordable plans to fit almost any budget out there.

One company I do like is GoDaddy.com. They have very affordable (some may say cheap) hosting plans for under US$5.00 a month and if you purchase a hosting plan from them you can get a domain name for US$1.99, which makes it more of a great deal.

Save money = Cut out the “middle man” on your webhosting and domain name needs.

SiteSell Services builds you a site that generates new leads, helps you to convert them to customers AND serves as a buffer against economic downturns, recessions, and low business cycles.

SiteSell Services use Site Build It!’s proven C T P M process to build you a Content-packed Web site which works to bring Traffic to your site. That traffic can then be PREsold on your recommendations, suggestions and offerings and this “warmed up” receptive reaction ultimately leads to Monetization. C T P M is the core that sets Site Build It! and SiteSell Services apart.

SiteSell Services guides you through the process of identifying “searcher” demand, creating focused content to meet it, and setting up traffic-building systems.

You’ll be presented with an outline of high-potential keywords that can be used to create your site’s content and generate traffic from Search Engines.

While working with you, a SiteSell Services Specialist will recommend, and once approved by you, register your domain name.

A SiteSell Services Specialist designs your site’s “Look and Feel,” based on your input, using the SBI! template system (see sample sites).

Build a professional Web site with SiteSell Services, using a process and tools proven by tens of thousands of people. Each page of your site is aimed at pulling in targeted visitors. An increased number of Web site visitors means more new business.

SiteSell.com founder Ken Evoy literally wrote the classic book on how to make a high-traffic Web site. Called Make Your Site SELL!, over 100,000 copies were sold.

A SiteSell Services Specialist will update and add new information to your Web site at your request and can deliver far more for less, using the proven SBI! system that builds Web sites in a predetermined way.

Research!

That is the only way to see if you really are getting a good deal.

Not to long ago domain names were over $30 for a year and there still are companies charging that ridiculous price.

There are many companies that have special pricing for buying a name. You can purchase a domain if you buy any non-domain product (like webhosting). This may be a good deal if you are looking for more than just a domain.

Saving a few dollars may not seem to important for you but remember when you have to renew the domain you  will have to pay the going rate at that time.

That is why I try to research when I am buying something expessily if I will have a reoccuring charge every year on a product.

Before you purchase the name, take a look to see if you can get a discount on multiple year purchase or multiple domain purchases. Many of the domain registars will do that.

If you are planning on building a website and believing that purchasing a domain name is the first step.

It is not.

Take your time to research different names. Even by moving the words around can help you with a great domain name. Yes, most of the one and two word names are gone (not all but most). But you can still find a great name at an affordable price.

Leaving your job to start your home based business using internet affiliate marketing takes time, dedication and yes even money.

I am not writing this to tell you that it can’t be done, but I want you to understand that if really want to become an affiliate and make a living from the Internet you need to treat the affiliate programs as a business.

When I say to treat it like a business I mean that:

1. You have a plan -

Plan A

You create a website (or blog), sign-up for different affiliate programs, create the links (or place banners) on your site, sit back and the money will come rolling in.

Yes, that was your plan, but have you found out it doesn’t work? So you are right back at square one and either you quit or you will go to “Your Plan B”

Plan B

2. You make a goal.

You create a theme based website on something you are familiar with.

You work on the content for your website by using original content.

Look for affiliate programs that go with what the theme of your website is.

Sure all this sound easy. But it takes time, dedication and yes, again I say it, money.

If you are wanting to build a business using affiliate marketing a free web hosting plan may not be to your advantage. Sure, it sounds good, but you can be very limited to what you can do.

I see many newbies on the forums wanting to know what the best area is to get into to start making money fast.  Affiliate marketing is not a get-rich-quick-scheme.

The scammers out there will let you believe that and for only $9.95 they say they have all the information for you to start making THOUSANDS per day immediately and quit your day job forever. DON’T BELIEVE IT.

There are many forums online that can help you find the answers to your questions and help with getting you started.

Affiliate marketing can be a very rewarding experience but take your time to get to know the ins and outs.

The very first step you need to do to get into the marketing area is to do research. If you have a theme based website that you are thinking of starting see if there is a need for it.

Remember, you don’t need to be selling something on your site. Many informational websites do extremely well with generating income for the webmaster.  Why is this? Because people are looking for answers and they hope to find it on the Internet.

I purchased the upgrade.

It is very different from the other version but this is not a bad thing. I find that even though the old version was user friendly, this new version is even better. It has more bells and whistles to it and many of them I may never use and for me to list them all would take to much time to write out when you can just see the new features that this Xsitepro software program has.

I have been wanting to add an online store to my website, but with the older version it seemed very difficult so I just kept putting it off. Once I purchased the version 2.0 of Xsitepro, I found many of the new tools they added will help me build the online store with very little problem and am working on it as we speak.

Xsitepro has MOST of the tools you need to create a website. The tools you also must have if you decided to get Xsite pro will be web hosting (cost) and keyword research (cost).  Even though the price tag seems hefty at $297.00 (limited time $197.00), I believe the cost is well worth.

But if you are a beginner and no absolutely nothing about building a web site, take a look at Site Build It as it has ALL the tools needed to build a great website.

I purchased Ewen Chia’s Working from Home Special Report.

First thought is that it was just full of fluff and hype. But as I read the information I was blown away at how this ebook actually gives you the step-by-step instructions on how to work from home to make money online.

A part in the introduction states:

“In this short book, I’m going to focus on three quick and easy ways you can combine the first two stages so you can start making money on the Internet.”

This product not only delivers, but it over delivers to help you learn how to create, build, promote and succeed with your own business online.

Making money online is a very competitive business, but with this no-nonsense guide in hand, you can’t go wrong.

What sets this ebook from all the others?

His step-by-step guide has snapshots of pages and many other free websites to help you start your own business online, which is a breath of fresh air from others that are only creating ebooks to promote their other products.

These are tried and true methods to get you started earning money online even if your budget is ZERO.

Many products being sold online have a bunch of freebies included. This one does also, but what sets it apart is that the freebies included are a goldmine of information, not just some ebooks thrown in to make the product look good.

Don’t have a product to sell online? Are you an affiliate marketer and you are not generating any (or very little) income? Don’t worry. In one section, Ewen shows you step by step how you can create for free, package, promote and sell your own product.

In a nutshell

This paragraph below is a quick snippet that sums up this special report:

“You don’t have to be a technical genius, and you don’t have to know everything there is to know. You’ll learn as you go. You have enough information to start right now.”

This is very true of this report. You do have enough information to start earning money online within a very short time, but you have to take the time to learn it and put it into action.

Is worth the price?

Yes, without a doubt. I have purchased other products many times the amount of this report and they did not deliver even close to what this package does.

This ebook is affordable for the masses and teaches beginners the step-by-step way to work from home to make money online.

Ewen Chia’s Working from Home Special Report

Blogs

Blogging can take a lot of time. You need to create ongoing original content to keep traffic flow. Once you stop posting, your traffic will start to slack off as people look at blogs as being up-to-date with events and information, many do not read “older dated” blogs.

If you are wanting to start your own business at home or just looking to earn extra money online, having a blog as a “store” does not look very professional, nor does having free hosting for your blog.

The URL of your blog may be very long and difficult for someone to remember. mygreatstore.wordpress.com

Create a website

Once you create a web page for your site, you don’t have to continuously update it.

Owning a domain name looks for professional for a business. If are thinking of starting your own home business and can’t afford even basic hosting and a domain name, then you may want to look at other options for making money.

Easier to create hierarchical navigation (home page, tier one, tier two)

See more information about Blog vs Create a Website.

Wordpress.com

Hosted by a third party and if you wanted your blog’s name to be thegreatestblog it would be thegreatestblog.wordpress.com.

If you use wordpress.com to host your blog, you will be very limited to the look of it. You are also not allowed to use any affiliate links or any advertising that you would get paid for (ie: Google Adsense, Widget Bucks, etc). If you do use affiliate links within your posts and you are reported, you could end up having your entire blog suspended.

Creating a blog using .com just for the sake of creating inbound links to your oun website (or another 3rd party site) is also against the Terms of Service (TOS).

To create your free blog using wordpress.com, you need to decide on the name and if it is available, create your account and you’ll be blogging within a few minutes.

You get many different layouts with the free blog. You can customize the look and feel by moving different sections around and even uploading your own header to the blog.

But you cannot upload any available plugins using wordpress.com. They do have a few already on your free blog to help with spam, but that is about all.

If you are looking to blog to make money online, then wordpress.com is not your answer.

Wordpress.org

This is used with a paid web hosting plan. There are many affordable web hosting plans that have a quick installation of wordpress so you don’t need to download from the wordpress.org site and upload to your hosting plan.

Many are turning to creating blogs instead of websites as they are very easy to install on your hosting account.

When you purchase web hosting and install a wordpress blog, you have complete control of it. With hundreds of plugins available, you can make it search engine optimized, add Google Adsense, create a sitemap for the search engines to spider your site better, and much more.

You also have hundreds of themes available which you can customize with your own colors and how the blog will look on your site.

If you are on a limited budget, but want to create a blog to make money online, you can get web hosting and register a domain name for about $50 a year through GoDaddy. Their basic hosting package has plenty of space to get you started.

1. Submit Articles - Ezinearticles.com, Goarticles.com or any of the other Article directories you can submit to. You may think that it is difficult to write your own articles to help with your link building campaign. It is not. Take an idea of something from your website and write a small article. Many article directories have a minimum of 200 words.

2. Forums - When you become a member of any forums, you can usually put a “signature” at the bottom of all your posts. Make sure you read the Terms of Service before you add your signature line so you don’t get booted out for spamming. Some forums will also let you use a direct affiliate link in your signature.

3. Value-Exchange Program - Sitsell has a free program you can sign-up for to help you find quality links for your website.

4. Social Marketing- There are hundreds of different types of social media/marketing sites in which you can use to create backlinks to your site. These sites are a great place to start with your link building campaigns. I found a site that steps you through the mass confusion on how Social Media can help you generate free traffic. Learn more about SEO20/20.

5. Reciprocal Links - You can search for other websites that would work well with yours and ask for a reciprocal link. If you are requesting this from a webmaster, make sure it is not a canned e-mail that you send out to a lot of webmasters at the same time. This one is very time consuming, but could lead you to be able to have high PR sites link to yours.

6. Pay for them - Yes, people are still paying for them. You could contact a webmaster and let them know you will pay them a certain amount monthly, yearly or just a one time fee for text links on their site.

7. Web Directories - DMOZ, Yahoo are a few that you could request to be added into their directory. Yahoo does not come cheap to be able to add a link to their directory and you may do better by using many of the free ones. Many of the directories will now ask for a reciprocal link in exchange to add you to their site. Sometimes this may not be to your advantage as you link is buried so far down in their pages, that the search engines may not find them for a long time (if ever)

8. Create or use existing blogs - Many people are creating blogs to help drive traffic. One of the best ones I have found it wordpress.com. If you do use wordpress.com, be advised that you can not use any affiliate links within the posts, but you can link to your own sites.

9. Squidoo Lens - Create a lens about one of the products you are an affiliate of. You also are able to use Amazon and such to add more money making ways. Squidoo puts up google ads on your page and if someone clicks on them you will earn a commission from it also.

10. Hubpages - Here is something else that you could create a page on to help you generate traffic. It is pretty much set up the same way as Squidoo.

11. Google pages - Google loves themselves. Just like Hubpages or squidoo, you can create a page on products or information to help with link building.

12. Craigslist - Many people overlook this type of place to build links. Sure many of the ads are for selling items, but you can find all kinds of ads. Take a look around and see if you could create an ad for your website to help generate more traffic.

13. Press Releases - A press release is just a notification that your site is online. The ones I have seen you have to pay for, so it may not work for you, but it does not hurt to look into it.

14. Video Submissions - Youtube is just one of the websites that you can create a video and upload it to generate traffic. I am sure you have noticed that when you are doing searches on the engines, there are many videos that show up in the top 20 results. Using video is becoming a huge marketing ploy for many website owners.

This, of course, is just a small list of the many different areas to help you get started on your link building campaign. Don’t think you have to tackle all these in just a short amount of time. You may have better results from one than another.

These are just tips to help you with your offsite search engine optimization. If you need tips for onsite SEO, here is my web site search engine optimization page.

Main Theme (1st tier) - Chocolate Recipes

Items for the side menu navigation (2nd tier) will be: Benefits of chocolate, White chocolate recipes, sugar free recipes, low fat recipes, dark chocolate recipes and online store.

Then all the recipes and information will be under the heading in which they fall, this will become my 3rd tier, which most of the time will not be shown on a side navigational menu but a visitor will get to it by going to a 2nd tier page.

Example - If they arrive at the home page - any of the side navigational pages will get them to the 2nd tier and from the 2nd tier there will be links within my content to get them to the 3rd tier for even more information related to the second tier.

I am not an artist, but I believe this image will give you a better understanding.

Click on image to enlarge

The online store will be on the side navigational menu, but you will also be able to get to it within any of the 2nd or 3rd tiers on the site. The store will include gift baskets and baked goods (many affiliate programs for these items)

The Site Build It program uses the tiered effect to create a website. The search engines like this as all of the information below your main theme is related to your main theme.

Many beginners try to create a website about too many different products or information that does not relate to one another. You must keep within the same theme for the site.

While doing research for this example of creating a site using SBI, not really sure why I thought about it, but I put into the search engine “chocolate diamonds”. I found out that there really are diamonds that are called chocolate diamonds, BUT I would not want to add this information to my website as my site is about Chocolate Recipes. If I started a website about Diamonds then it would be a perfect fit but not for this site.

By using the Site Build it program, you can create a website easily. By using the Site Build It action guide, all of this (and more) is explained in much greater depth.

Take a look also at your competitors and see how they have their website built. I bet you will find something close to my drawing above. Also using your competitors site map will help you see what product or information is going under what page.

No matter what type of website builder you will be using to build your own site, by using the tiers as shown above it will help the search engines really understand what your site is about and help you generate targeted traffic.