Strategic Internet Marketing

Website Hosting Packages

January 14th, 2008

Website hosting packages are not all created alike. It is important that you choose a hosting package that will accommodate your current and future needs. Stay away from the free hosting services because they don’t offer everything that you will need to run an online business. Don’t handcuff yourself with a hosting service that can’t deliver the goods just because they are cheap or free of charge.

Here’s what you will need to have from your website hosting package.

• At least 30 gigs of web storage
• Multiple addon domains
• Autoresponders
• Multiple email accounts
• MySql database capability
• FTP upload capability
• PHP capable
• Has perl and cgi
• Has a shopping cart

The above is the minimum of what you will need for your website hosting package.

Make sure that your website hosting package provides at least 30 gigs of web space. There is nothing worse than not being able to do what you need to do with your online business because you don’t have the space to get it done.

Having multiple addon domains is a must. Don’t confuse an addon domain with a sub domain. A sub domain looks like this subdomain.yourdomain.com while an addon domain looks like this yourdomain.com. While both sub domains and addon domains share the same ip address the addon domain is a separate domain while the sub domain uses a prefix to the main domain.

Multiple addon domains will allow you to setup multiple domains without having to get a new website hosting package for every domain that you want to have which would be very expensive. The only thing that you will have to pay for is to register the additional domain’s which is usually about $10.00 or less each.

Having an autoresponder is an absolute must because it will allow you to send follow-up emails to your customer when they buy something or put in a support request.

You also need to have several email accounts for each segment of your online business. E.g. Support, Administrator, Customer Service etc.

Be sure that your website hosting package provides a MySQL database. MySQL is simply a database that records important information about your online business such as blog info, eCommerce info etc. You may not require a MySQL database now but I will guarantee you at some point you will need it. It is best that you have it from the very start otherwise you will find yourself shopping for a new hosting provider.

You’ll also need an FTP that allows you to upload entire folders to your website. You don’t want an FTP where you have to upload one file at a time or even worse they don’t allow you to use their FTP server at all.

You will also need perl so that you can run scripts from your domain. Most website hosting packages do come with perl but some don’t. Make sure that perl comes with your website hosting package otherwise you won’t be able to run scripts and you will be very limited to what you can do with your online business.

Since many online scripts use php code be sure that your website hosting package allows php to be run on your domain. Some hosting providers don’t have php installed on their servers.

The last thing that you’ll want to have with your website hosting package is a shopping cart especially if you sell multiple items on your website because you will have a fair amount of people that will buy more than one item from your website. Whether you sell multiple items or not you should have a shopping cart anyway.

Most website hosting packages come with much more than listed here these are the most important things that you will need to have with your website hosting package.

Don’t sign on with a hosting provider until you read the next post.

Posted in Strategic Internet Marketing | 5 Comments »

Niche Marketing Research

January 12th, 2008

Before you do any niche marketing research or setup your niche business you need to get yourself in the right mindset. Most new webmasters run out and get a hosting package, register a domain name and setup their website before knowing what their web business is going to be. That’s a mistake that cannot be corrected once it has been done. There are so many things that you need to do before you can even consider doing the above things. These beginner webmasters have zero chance of success because what they have setup is completely wrong for what they need. The only way that their mistake can be rectified is by starting all over with a new hosting package, domain name, and a new website.

You have to have the mindset that setting up a new online business is a series of processes and getting a hosting package, registering a domain and setting up a website are not where you want begin. There are several things that you need to do before you can even consider the above. Take your time. Get it right before you build your website. If you do things right it will probably take you about 2 weeks before you can look at the other stuff. By taking your time and considering everything will save you far more time and money than just jumping in with both feet and you will see results a lot quicker as well.

If you are just starting out and you don’t have a website yet, that’s good. Before you can setup an online business you will need to do some research first. What you are going to do is some niche marketing research.

The first thing that you have to decide is what kind of online business you want to have. You’ll want to setup an online business with a topic that you know a lot about because it will be a lot easier to do if it is about something that you have a lot of knowledge about. Setting up a niche with a subject that you know a lot about will save you from having to do a lot of niche marketing research which will give you more time to work on getting your website up and running much quicker.

You may or may not be thinking that you don’t know enough about a particular subject to setup a niche from your personal knowledge. If that is what you think I can tell you that you are wrong. Everyone is knowledgeable about something. You also may be thinking that what you are knowledgeable about is not marketable. If you think that, you are wrong again. If you have an interest in it, chances are other people will too.

A friend of mine has a real obsession with juggling. He always thought that this would not be a marketable online business. Boy was he wrong. Today his website gets thousands of visitors a day and he makes thousands of dollars a day from the sales of juggling equipment that he advertises on his website. The reason that he is so successful is he knows a lot about juggling. He is actually obsessed with it therefore is very passionate about the subject. Another reason for his success is that the market is not super competitive.

The reason I’m telling you about my friend is because this is what you want to model your online business after. I’m not telling you to go out and setup a juggling online business. What I’m telling you is to find something that you are knowledgeable about and love to do and talk about. If it’s something that is super competitive don’t worry about it I will help you make it not so competitive. The first thing that you have to do is decide what your online business is going to be. This you have to do yourself. No one can help you with this. Only you know what it is. Make a list of the things that you are interested in if you have to. From that list there will clearly be something there that you will want to pursue. Seeing a list in writing often gives a clearer picture of what you want to do.

Don’t underestimate the importance of selecting what your online business will be. Everything that you do once you have defined it, hinges on it. Once you have decided what your online business is going to be you can start doing your niche marketing research.

A niche is simply a smaller piece of a larger market. For example; a smaller piece of the electronics market may be computers, dvd players, televisions, cell phones etc. Computers, dvd players, televisions and cell phones are probably still to big of markets to compete in so you will need to break those down to even smaller pieces of the electronics market.

Let’s say that you have a real interest in computers and you know a lot about them. Let’s further assume that you know how to build your own computer. You could setup a niche that teaches people how to build their own computer. You could provide information on what parts they will need to buy and teach them what motherboards are compatible with what cpu chip and what memory is compatible and how much memory they will need for a certain operating system. You could advise your visitors on what the most reliable operating systems are. Well you get the idea. Monetizing this niche with computer parts and computer software is a no brainer. The point here is; no matter how competitive your business market is there is a smaller niche within that market that isn’t real competitive. That’s the market that you want to go after.

To summarize; decide what your online business is going to be. Break it down to a manageable niche and then monetize it.

Now that you hopefully know how to find a smaller niche you can start doing your niche marketing research. Your niche marketing research will tell you how competitive the niche that you have chosen is. Your niche marketing research can also help you find a smaller niche of your main market if you haven’t yet decided on one. Let’s get started.

You will need to use a keyword tool to do your research. The free version of wordtracker is a great keyword tool that gives you daily searches on your chosen keyword. You can find the niche marketing research keyword tool here.

Using the computer example earlier; you would search for a phrase that deals with building computers. Keep in mind that you are looking for the best keyword fit for your online business. You only need one but you want to find the keyword that best fits your niche and at the same time will give you a decent amount of traffic. I ran a search using the wordtracker free keyword tool for the phrase computer building. Below is the list of results. As you can see the search term “building a computer” is a better search term than computer building and it gets a lot more searches too.

What you’ll want to do next is copy and paste the list of results to a word processor and eliminate the keywords that are not relevant to your chosen niche. Using the list below; the keyword phrase “computer building workshop+texas” is not relevant to building computers unless I have a workshop on building computers in Texas.

97 building a computer
29 computer building
24 building a gaming computer
21 building your own computer
19 building an inexpensive computer
12 building computer
10 building computer tips
10 building inspection computer programs
10 building plans for computer desks
10 computer building online training
8 building a high performance computer
8 building code inspection computer programs
8 building computer course online cambridge
8 building new computer reusing old case
8 computer building workshop+texas
7 building a home computer
7 building a server out of old computer
7 building computer desk
7 computer programs for building code inspections
7 olympia, wa computer building class
5 building a corner computer desk with hutch
5 building a custom computer
5 building a custom computer photos
5 building an audio computer
5 building houses on your computer
3 abcs of building a computer
3 building a gaming computer
3 building a computer cheap
3 building a computer for recording music daw sonar
3 building a computer seattle wa
3 building a home theatre computer
3 building computer day trading
3 building laptop computer guide
3 building my own computer
3 computer building foru
3 computer building jobs leeds
3 computer building tips
3 computer science building purdue
3 computer software for home building
3 computer website building sebewaing michigan
3 diagrams for building computer
3 high cost in computer integrated building
3 make money building computer
3 online courses on computer building

Now that we’ve trimmed down our list it is time to see how competitive the keywords are. Take the keyword phrase that you most want to use and run an allintitle on it. An allintitle is simply a way to search to see how many web pages are using the keyword term in the title of their web page. The search engines put a lot of weight on the title. If a small percentage of web pages have the keyword in the title you probably have a keyword term that will rank well on the search engines.

To run an allintititle go to Google and type allintitle:Your Keyword Phrase replacing “Your Keyword Phrase” with your chosen keyword. My first keyword choice for computer building would be “building a computer”. The allintitle would look like this; allintitle: building a computer. Here are the niche marketing research allintitle search results for the keyword phrase “building a computer”. If you look just above the list of result links to the right you will see the results for this search term. As of this posting the search results for the keyword term “building a computer” is 19,700. This keyword term is a bit too competitive for my liking. I would have to beat out 19,700 websites to list at the top of the search engines. The keyword term “building computers is even more competitive with 54,100 competing web pages as of this posting. The third keyword term “building a gaming computer” has just 620 competing web pages that use the term in the title. A keyword term with this competition will be very easy to compete against. The problem is that there are only 720 searches a month for this term. This may not be enough to be worth while. If you sell a product that gives large profits 720 visitors a month would be enough. Generally it won’t be.

While the keyword phrases for building computers didn’t work out, I still can run different searches using different keyword phrases that relate to building a computer until I find a keyword phrase that is suitable. Above I have given you the general idea of how to find low competition keyword phrases. What you are looking for are keyword phrases that have an allintitle of 2,000 competing websites or less and get at least 75 searches a day.

One last thing that you’ll need to do with your niche marketing research where competition is concerned, after you have found a good allintitle keyword phrase of course, is to check how many inbound links that the top 5 resulting websites have.

Here’s how to check how many inbound links the top five listed sites have. From Google, run a link search of the top five sites listed in Google for the keyword you have chosen. Here’s how you would run a link search.

Type into the Google search box your keyword phrase. Click on the top 5 sites from the search results that are listed, one by one. Copy the url from the address bar and paste it beside your keyword phrase. Do the same for the other four urls.

Once you have all of the urls for the top sites, go to yahoo and run a link search. Using the “building a computer” example, the link search would look like this link:building a computer. Click the niche marketing research inbound links to see the number of inbound links for the top site.

You will get a list of results. The only thing that you need is the inlink number that will display at the top of the link search results. It will look like this. Inlinks (652) as of this posting. That’s what the #1 site on Google has for inbound links which means I will need to get more than 652 inbound links to my website to beat that search term. Make note of the number of inlinks for your corresponding keyword phrase. Go through the same process for the other four links for that keyword phrase. You should end up with 5 Inlink numbers for your keyword phrase. The reason that you want to check the 5 top competing websites is that the first website may have a huge number of inbound links while the other sites may have a more manageable number. There is nothing wrong with placing second or third for your keyword phrase. You will still do quite well.

To summarize the allintitle and how many inbound links the top competing websites have for your keyword phrase. The allintitle shouldn’t have more than 2,000 competing web pages and the inbound links for the top 5 sites should be a manageable number. If a web page has 50,000 inbound links pointed to it, it will be very difficult to beat, but if it has 300 inbound links this would be very easy to beat. There is no set number where inbound links are concerned. You have to determine for yourself what is manageable.

Niche marketing research is a very important part of starting up a new online business and should be done before you do anything else. Take the time to do the niche marketing research. It is well worth doing.

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