Archive for 'May, 2008'

This is my Best Practices cribsheet for setting up new BANS Niche Sites to be profitable.

This is part 7 of the Watch Me Build a BANS Niche Site from Scratch, be sure to read the rest of the series!

I remember when I first bought BANS or “Build a Niche Site” – it said “it may be addictive”. Sure, it may be. It’s no different than having 249 new ideas for making money online – and not enough time to do them all. I want to speak a little bit about the realistic effort(s) required to get a brand new BANS store off the ground and making money. I saw a twitter post last week where one guy said “I just setup a dozen new BANS sites” and I thought – “…are you insane?”. It got me thinking first about the fact that I myself had a half-dozen BANS sites I desperately needed to get setup and running, and then immediately after that I realized it could take an entire week of bleary-eyed late nights to get it all done. I tend to write a lot of in-depth posts and articles about how to do very specific things for BANS sites and WordPress. In fact I wrote Best Practices for Setting up a New WordPress Blog in 60 minutes or less last year as a cribsheet for myself setting up new blogs. I have determined that I now need the same thing for my BANS sites – and hopefully it helps you whether you are a niche site newbie or a pro.

This cribsheet is my personal work plan for 6 brand new BANS sites I just setup. I created it because without a plan – I’ll never do the required work to set them all up and get them running. I mean, if you’ve been reading this series at all you know how much I’ve been dragging my feet on the one test store already – at this rate I’ll never get the rest of my niche sites setup without a concrete written action plan.

Step 1: Initial Creation of Your BANS Stores

I think that if you’re going to setup a lot of BANS sites you should just set some time aside to get the initial setup done for all of them at once. I created 6 brand new BANS sites by taking 30 minutes one night while watching TV to upload the files to all the domains, and then the next day I took another 30 minutes to get them all connected and logged into for the first time. So – all in all it took 60 minutes for the initial setup of 6 brand new BANS sites. For the record I use Linux, and administer my sites with cPanel, all these sites were created on my Hostgator account. Hostgator has been very good for my BANS sites, and one of the easiest setups I’ve ever had on a web host.

This is what I did:

1. Uploaded the latest BANS build to 6 new domains.
2. Created 6 new databases
3. Created 6 new database users
4. Assigned the users to the databases
5. Run bans for first time on every site, adding in database info
6. Login to bans for first time after setup and immediately change username and password

Step one time required was: 60 minutes

Step 2: First time Setup of Your BANS Stores

The very initial setup of a BANS store (once it’s created) can be done in about 10 minutes or less if you’re prepared. That is, if you already know what you keywords are and enough information about your niche to fill out the initial metadata required. If you aren’t ready for this step, read my keyword research cheat sheet.

This is what I do:

In the “setup” tab of your BANS admin…

1. Enter your site name
2. Choose an eBay category
3. In “Site Wide Meta Tags”, remove “CATNAME” if the eBay category name isn’t descriptive enough
4. Delete “keywords”, and enter my own 8-10 descriptive keywords
5. Delete “description”, and enter my own keyword laden 30 word description
6. Choose a product layout (try not to make all your stores the same)
7. Enter your affiliate ID (or you won’t get paid)
8. Check the box to remove the “powered by” link
9. Enter some kind of keyword in “site wide search query” to narrow down products, like entering “ps3″ if the category is “video game systems” but your niche is “playstation 3″
10. Change the navigation. I like “open” (show all pages all the time) for smaller sites, and “closed” for larger sites

In the “template” tab of your BANS admin:

1. Choose a default template (I choose 2 column, one for navigation and one for ads)
2. Upload a custom header logo
3. Add google analytics code to the footer.php for tracking site stats

In the “ads” tab of your BANS admin:

1. Add “above” ads (I prefer 336×280 adsense blocks)
2. Add “below” ads (I prefer another 336×280 adsene block or an Amazon widget of some kind
3. Add “left” ads (I prefer a small link unit)
4. Add “right” ads (I prefer the 160×600 Adsense skyscraper and maybe an amazon search box or smaller box ad)

In the “content pages” tab of your BANS admin:

1. Edit the “home” page with meta info, title, description, and keyword
2. Edit the “page info” with a good main keyword category name and page url
3. Edit “page content” with at least one good 100+ word paragraph of original content
4. Edit “below products” with some kind of offer related to the content from amazon, commission junction, or other affiliates prefaced by a few word of original content
5. Edit “product info” with a search query if you need one…i.e., if you want to highlight specific things on the home page you may need to enter specific keywords here to filter down to what you want displayed

In the “store pages” tab of your BANS admin:

See what you have listed. If you only have one, then your chosen eBay category ID might not have any sub-categories to make pages out of. If that’s the case you’ll need to create your own additional pages and use the same category (or other categories) and use keywords in “search query” to get the specific products you want for each page. If you have a ton of pages listed, you may need to delete ones that don’t apply – or change keywords on them to remove things that aren’t relevant. You may also want to rename the page links and URL’s quickly to what you want (before the site gets spidered by search crawlers).

Believe it or not, I can do all these things in about 10 minutes, but I usually have my header logo already prepared. The only exception would be if the BANS store had tons of store pages (created from eBay categories) I had to edit. So for this section I had 6 sites to “setup” and it took a little over 60 minutes for me to do them all.

Step two time required was: 60 minutes

Step 3: Creating Original Content Pages for BANS

The thing about BANS sites is that you want to make sure your niche store has original content. Without it, google sees it as one big heap of garbage. It’s true, I’m making money on our test site created earlier in this series from only MSN traffic – but I think that the profits would be x4 if I had google traffic too. Probably one of initial reasons I put off setting up a BANS site is knowing how quickly I have to get original content into it (before the spiders come) if I want it to be successful. I personally think you should have at least 6 original content pages for a brand new BANS site, but in reality I’m usually lucky to crank out two.

The time required to create good original content pages for a BANS niche store depends on how long the research takes and how good a writer you are. For a good, quality, keyword-laden, well-research article it takes me usually one to two hours (*per article). You may think that’s a long time, but it’s really not once you factor in the research and reading time, keyword research, and then actually putting into BANS itself – adding in title, description, keywords, URL, link text, etc.!

What makes a good BANS Content Page?

1. A good sentence of two introduction “synopsis”
2. An introduction or setup paragraph with keywords
3. Sections separated by keyword-laden “headers”
4. “Ask a question” based on good keywords
5. Explain the product or concept
6. Describe specific models using names and numbers people search for
7. Close with a closing statement paraphraph summarizing your article

This may seem kind of vague at first, view an example on our test site for Bluetooth Headset Review. Any additional components you add to an original content page will only enhance it. Try adding images, relevant YouTube videos, flickr images, whatever you can find. It’s also a good practice to link other sites in original content pages because then all your external links aren’t all nofollowed and you look like more of a legitimate site to a search engine and less like a “store”. You may also want to re-read Creating BANS site content for Traffic.

Step three time required: 12 hours

That time required is just for 2 articles per site to get them going. 6 articles per BANS site would be 36 hours or more.

Step 4: Registering Your BANS site with Google, Yahoo!, and MSN

All Bans 3.0+ sites have an “XML Sitemap” automatically created. You can access yours by adding “sitemap.xml” to your BANS url. Here is our Test BANS site sitemap. To get your site and all pages properly indexed in the search engines you must register that sitemap with MSN, Yahoo, and Google. You need to make sure you get this done, but don’t do it a second before your original content pages are created in your BANS store. The entire purpose of doing this is to get those new pages listed in the major search engines.

Step four time required: 15 minutes

Step 5: Building Links for BANS sites

As soon as your site is registered you want to think about building some links for it. My advice is make sure you do this, but don’t go hog wild the first month – because that will increase the factor by which your BANS site could be “google sandboxed”. Read BANS Success: Building backlinks Part 1, and How to Build Better Backlinks in Forums. By leveraging blog comments and forums posts you can easily build links for your new BANS site. My advice is to spend at least 15 minutes per site per week creating 2 or 3 backlinks. For 6 sites that’s 90 minutes per week – and I would do this for about 4-6 weeks at least (if not more).

Step 5 time required: 90 minutes (per week)

Step 6: Promoting BANS sites

Steps 1-5 are all that are required to get a brand new BANS niche store off the ground and ready to start making money. If you wanted, you could at this point start some adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns to direct traffic to the site and start making money. Personally, I’m a fan of seeing how much money I can make without spending any money. To do that (organically) requires good old fashioned promotion. Some of the best ways to do this are by submitting articles, and by created community pages like Squidoo and HubPages. I’ve writte guides for both subjects – read my guide to Article Directory Promotion, and BANS: Building Targeted Links and Authority.

The time required to submit at least 2 articles and create one HubPage and one Squidoo page is about 4 hours total (from my personal experiences).

Step 6 time required: about 24 hours for 6 sites

There you have it – in my estimation, to properly setup 6 brand new BANS niche sites to start attracting organic traffic without spending any more would would about 70 hours over the course of a month. That’s about 2 1/2 hours per day, 7 days a week for a 30 days. I’m a firm believer in planning and honesty – and I’m not here to sell you “hope in a box” (as Jeremy says). I want you to understand that there’s money to be made online for sure, but you must invest the time and effort required. The next time you hear someone say they “setup a dozen BANS stores”…now you know that it takes about 2 months to do that right!

Don’t have “Build a Niche Store” yet? Click here:

If you’re reading this page to try and figure out is Build a Niche Site for you or not – please consider buying BANS through my affiliate link. I make a small commission, which would help defray some of my time and expense for putting together this BANS tutorial (and future BANS success articles) for you! I purchased my copy through an affiliate link in gratitude to the blogger who talked of his success with this niche building site script.

Also – if BANS isn’t for you, please consider reading How to earn money using Affiliate eBay WordPress Plugin BAYRss. With BANS you build content basically around eBay auctions, but with BAYRss you place eBay auctions in your posts and pages. Check it out, I use (and make money) with both BANS and BayRSS!

Adding a Forum to WordPress increases SEO by adding indexed pages and improves community by giving your visitors the ability to “participate” far beyond what normal comments allow. It also gives you a place to write random bits of content without writing lots of short, useless (and annoying) posts.

Web Forums are a very interesting way to build an online community, such as the infamous webmaster forums Digital Point, and Webmaster World. Forums are generally where people ask questions, and hopefully they get answers. A successful web forum can generate exponential pageviews vs. a blog or web site if there is a good community reading and participating.

It’s no surprise that this kind of functionality is long sought after in WordPress, and what site owners want most is the ability to embed and use that forum from with WordPress itself. Who wants a separate forum install? I’ve had them, and even from within a sub-directory of a successful site – it’s hard to get them off the ground.

There are lots of ways to “add a forum to wordpress”. The first methods is to integrate a popular forum with your WordPress install like Simple Machines, Vanilla, bbPress, phpBB, or PunBB bulletin boards. Integrating a forum into WordPress means a separate directory, a separate install, and a separate database. With some advanced coding and hacks you may be able to share logins, comments, etc. I am not a fan of this, and personally I think these techniques are a setup for failure. Mainly because, if you had to hack them to make them work – making them work with future versions of WordPress is likely going to be difficult, hard, or impossible. If you want to try, follow some of the older threads listed on this post: Integrating a Forum with WordPress.

The next way to setup a forum in WordPress is by using a theme that displays the categories and posts in forum type layout. This is nice because it requires installing nothing and only changes the way your content is displayed. It could also be bad because then you’re limited to that kind of layout. To check it out try the TDO Forum Theme for WordPress.

The final way to setup a forum in WordPress is by using a plugin. There are two that seem to be no longer supported, or not updated to be compatible with WordPress 2.5 and up: both XDForum 2, and WP-Forum.

The WordPress plugin that I chose works with WP 2.5 and seems to be updated on a regular basis: Simple:Press Forum WordPress Plugin. It’s currently the only one I see listed on the WordPress 2.5 Plugin Compatibility list.

There are some things you need to know about using Simple:Press. The plugin is listed to work with WordPress 2.04 – 2.51+, but in addition to that your MySQL server needs to be version 4.20+. The first site I tried this on was WP 2.3.3, but the mySQL was 4.1.2 (Hostgator) and I got this error:

WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '' at line 1]
SELECT display_name FROM wp_sfmembers WHERE user_id=

Immediately following this my entire WordPress install (dashboard and public pages) locked to a blank screen, and I had to delete the plugin to get my blog back. So I opted to try it on my (still existing) godaddy hosting account – which gives you an option of MySQL 4.x or 5.x. I just created a new 5.x database and dumped my current (4.x) WordPress blog db in it. Then I reuploaded the plugin – and everything seemed to work good, until I created some groups – and lockup central again! I deleted the plugin and all was well again. I did determine that if you decide to use Simple:Press on 5.x MySQL database on godaddy hosting – it has to be the main domain, it can’t be a virtuall hosted subfolder with a domain mapped to it (unless you figure out how to fix the .htaccess file). Finally I moved it to my dedicated box and it worked fine. My advice to you is backup your WP database if you try it on an existing site, and make sure your MySQL server version is 4.20+ and you’re plugins and WordPress install are current.

Once you enable the Simple:Press plugin, just to go “forum” in your main WP dashboard and (if you did everything right) you should see the install button as in the pic above. Unlike other plugins (that install database tables when you enable them) this plugin requires you to manually “install” the first time.

If everything goes as expected this is what you should see:

The basic setup options of the Simple:Press forum are like any other forum you’ve encountered in the past – with the exception of the fact that this forum is setup within WordPress itself. WordPress by default has 2 kinds of accounts “guest” and “administrator”. Simple:Press adds a new type “member”. But the real advantage of WordPress ‘embedding’ is Simple:Press’ ability to do “post-linking” – which is best explained by the help file itself:

This has some very distinct advantages over a normal wordpress blog or standalone forum:

1. As a blog owner this gives you a TON of more search engine indexable pages
2. It keeps blog posts from getting clogged with hundreds of comments (just close them after a few and force everybody to the forum after that)
3. It makes your blog uber-interactive, much more than a blog with comments alone
4. You now have a place to post random tidbits of info without having to create tons of useless blog posts
5. If your blog gets comments now, that’s pretty much a guarantee that your forum will get posts. The worst thing about a new forum is getting people to post, by seeding it with blog posts you get an instantly active forum
6. Your blog now has more pages to monetize – w00t!

Simple:Press also has an “accounce template tag”. Once you enable this option you can display most recent forum activity from either your sidebar, home page, or any other post or page in your blog:

As “Add-Ons” in the forum you can enable private messaging, image uploads, or polls support (through the “Democracy” WordPress plugin). There are many, many other options – such as graphics, style, icons, and more that you can use to customize Simple:Press look and feel to be more like your site design.

I’m only beginning to scratch the surface of Simple:Press in this WordPress blog, but you can check out the new JTPratt’s Blogging Mistakes Forum Here. This is only the beginning of dramatically changing the methods of interactivity and community in this web site.

Have you managed a forum or tried to include one in your WordPress blog before? Comment now – or follow the forum link and add to the discussion!

If you’re not getting any BANS traffic from Google – there is still hope of making money. Just make sure you’re BANS site is registered in all the right places!

When I first started this series “Watch Me Build a BANS Niche Site from Scratch” I had envisioned working on my BANS site nearly every day. I had never used BANS before, so I felt this would be a good way to see if we could make money or not – and have a great tutorial series as well for all of you wondering the same. The reality of it has been I haven’t had nearly enough time to devote to this project, but despite my (sporadic) effort our BANS test store has still made some money. Maybe I should have called the series “Watch me make money with BANS while nearly ignoring my site!”.

If you’ve been reading the entire series, you already know that our test site Used Cell Phones is NOT indexed in google at all (even though it was in the beginning), and we might be in the google “Sandbox” too (for being a new site). This means we may have some time before we get google traffic again. For a BANS site google traffic is very important, because it’s a significant source of revenue. There are different kinds of traffic, such as “social traffic” you might get from say digg or stumbleupon. But “organic” traffic is natural visitors you get from a search engine when someone types in keywords and your site comes up as a listed search result. This type of traffic works well for BANS sites because if someone types in something they want, say a specific model cell phone – when they visit your BANS page for it the “conversion rate” will be much higher because you took them directly to what they wanted. Social traffic is more like a “recommendation” of something cool – and not as specific.

Google is the best source of “organic traffic” currently because they are the largest search engine, and they get the most searches. That means they can send you the most visitors, and getting good traffic from them can make you the most money. But they’re not the only search engine, and it’s definitely worth your while to try and get traffic from both MSN Live Search and Yahoo! Search as well. Why? Well, because it can enhance money you make from Google, but if (like our case with the test site) google isn’t sending you any traffic – the other two search engines may be all you’ve got until you get some google love again.

So – you may be asking “can I really make money with MSN or Yahoo?” I think that I’ve definitely found out (by accident) that you can. Let me show you…

The graph above are the eBay earnings for May 1st – May 19th, 2008. For the most part you don’t see a lot of activity or commission. Then on May 16th you see $58 in commissions and then on May 18th you see $52 in commission for our Used Cell Phones BANS site. When I first saw this graph I thought that we were back in google’s good graces, so I went to google analytics to check.

In the pic above from google analytics, I ran a report for the last 7 days which shows that 79% of all our traffic to our BANS site is coming from MSN search (the first 2 lines).

This pic from the same google analytics report shows that 61% of our traffic comes from just 2 keywords “used cell phones”, and “refurbished cell phones”. So I went over to www.live.com to see how we ranked for our main keywords “used cell phones” –

Now you can see the source of all our BANS traffic – it’s because we rank #2 in MSN search for the keywords “used cell phones” (not bad!). That means that we’ve been all the right things in our BANS series so far, setting up the site for traffic, using good keywords (which we researched), and built good backlinks. Even without google traffic that has all paid off, and in fact we’ve made back our entire cost of the BANS software in just 2 days commissions! So, my advice to you would be to first re-read this BANS series to make sure you’ve everything to date. Then – make sure that you get your BANS site registered with Yahoo, Google, and MSN by reading my post Increase Traffic with MSN, Yahoo, and Google! Now that I know what kind of money my BANS site can make by hardly paying any attention to it (once setup properly) – I’m convinced I need to spend more time promoting it. Especially since you can even make money – without Google!

If you have anything to add or a question about this post – please comment now!

By becoming involved in specific communities you can promote your BANS sites, build links, and possibly make money all at the same time! Build buzz for your BANS site AND your blog!

This is installment #6 of “Watch Me Build a Niche Site From Scratch”, and since our BANS test site still has a google penalty and/or is in the “Google Sandbox” (read the last installment) – we’re going to start building some more “targeted” links back to our BANS niche store. We’re not going to see results overnight with this, but over time this can and will dramatically help our store with both relevant backlinks and possibly traffic!

If you are building BANS stores (or any niche sites) there are two communities you should know about right now.

Both of the communities above allow you to “author” your own targeted pages (as many as you want) on specific (or broad) niche topics. Want to become an expert of learning guitar? Maybe you love origami? Write about travel topics, cars, or sports! Whatever you choose, these niche pages have the ability to promote your BANS or Build a Niche Store better than anything you’ve seen. Why build a single link when you can build an entire relevant page! And the best part is, if your page is successuful (on hubpages or squidoo) you can earn money there too!!

First view the pages that I created for our BANS test store as part of our series “Watch me Build a BANS Niche Store from Scratch“:

My Used Cell Phones Squidoo “Lens”

My Used Cell Phones “Hub”

The process of building your own page is nearly identical at both Squidoo and HubPages. Select a (not already taken) name, click “ok”, add “modules”, publish! Both sites have similar modules, “text”, “Amazon”, “eBay”, “polls”, and more. Squidoo has more robust modules since they’ve been around longer, both sites allow you to pull images from flickr. Both sites allow you to earn commissions from affiliate sales, but at HubPages you actually get to enter your Amazon, Adsense, and eBay affiliate ID’s for direct commissions. Squidoo I believe pays you a percentage.

At both sites when you build a page (“hub” or “lens) it’s like you’re building a mini web site all on one page. You squeeze as much original content in as you can about the subject, then add relevant modules for either additional content or relevant monetizations (like items from eBay or Amazon). The give and take of Squidoo and HubPages is no different than submitting articles to Ezine Articles or working the Entrecard system. Creating a page is great, but you are expected to promote it a bit by commenting on other people’s pages or using the forums. This will raise your “score” (hubpages) and “rank” (squidoo). You “could” spend as much time modifying these pages as you do an entire blog or BANS store – I recommend that you try not to lose yourself in these as you will quickly lose 1/2 a day (they are addictive!). I could write dozens of posts just on the ins and outs of creating Squidoo lenses and HubPages hubs.

The thing that’s unique about these community type “all-in-one” promo pages are all the different things they can be used for. You are building a targeted keyword laden page containing new original content that can obtain it’s own pagerank over time and promoting it. Within that page is a link to your BANS site, you could even link several pages within your niche store. You can link back to your relevant blog(s), web sites, forums, or whatever else you have. If you promote well you can build traffic to both these pages AND your BANS store.

The potential is unlimited because you can created UNLMITED hubpages and lenses at both these sites. For instance, I created the default page about “used cell phones” at both Squidoo and HubPages which links to my BANS store, and my cell phone blog. Backlink, traffic, and monetization all at once! But, I could create many, many more pages on specific topies linking back to BANS content pages, BANS product pages – linking to specific accessories, cell phones, plans, parts, and more! Imagine a dozen pages on Squidoo and a dozen pages on HubPages all pointing to a BANS site home page and deep linking inside pages! If you promote these pages well and become an authority in these communities the targeted links you cultivate will gain their own pagerank and become better for the health of your BANS site than hundreds of blog comments or forum posts!

Have a special way you drive traffic to your BANS site? Comment now!

Today we’ll learn How to add Tag Support by hacking your WordPress theme!

This is day #15 of 30 WordPress Hacks in 30 Days.

If you’re using WordPress 2.3x or 2.5 or higher you have the ability to use “tags”. If you use social media at all, you should already know what a tag is. Basically it’s just a piece of metadata, a “descriptor” of some kind. When you blog, it’s also another way to pigeonhole and file your content. The implementation of tags in WordPress is very important, because it keep people from “using categories as tags” as many of us have done over the years. There were dozens of plugins available to add tags to your WordPress blog, but now all that functionality is available without using any plugins at all.

Think of categories as high level descriptions. What do you like to blog about? Movies, Music, Politics, and Web Design. Those are categories. However, when you blog – the tags would be Obama, John Candy, AC/DC, and HTML. Get it? All you have to do is enter description tags when you blog, along with a category. Now you’re probably wondering, what do I do with that information?

Depending on how old your theme is it may or may not have “tag support”, which means that it might not be coded to do anything at all with those tags you’re entering. The first thing you can do is to add a (now famous) “tag cloud” in your side bar like I did, with this code:

<?php if ( function_exists('wp_tag_cloud') ) : ?>
<li>
<h2>Popular Tags</h2>
<ul>
<?php wp_tag_cloud('smallest=8&largest=22'); ?>
</ul>
</li>
<?php endif; ?>

If you want to know more about how that codes works and how you can modify it, visit the WordPress Codex Tag Cloud Page.

Another thing you can do is to add the tags you used beneath your post by adding some code to your single.php file (for single posts). You could do it on your index.php home page as well, but I don’t much see the point in that. All you have to do is add the following code near the end of the loop to display the tags used at the end of the post:

<?php the_tags('<p>Tags: ', ', ', '</p>'); ?>

So, now we’ve talked about how to modify your theme to add the tags used after a post, and how to place a tag cloud in your sidebar (without using a plugin). Click on one of the links in my post (to a tag) or my tag cloud and you’ll see (much like a category page) it goes to a “tag” page, or something like site.com/tag/wordpress-hack.

Be default WordPress will look for the “tag.php” file (that most themes don’t have), and if there isn’t one your archive.php will be used by default. You could just leave this as-is, or create your own custom “tag.php” to make your tag pages unique. One way to do this would be to add a “tag cloud” to the top of each tag page. The WordPress Codex Tag Page has more information on creating a custom tag.php file for your theme.

This post was all about “how to add tag support to your WordPress theme”. In a future post, I’ll show you what you need to know about tagged pages and WordPress SEO. As always, if you have something to add to make this post better, or a question – comment now!

This is what cheap shared web hosts don’t want you to know – their account have limits (they don’t tell you about)! Don’t worry – I will!

This is installment #4 of JTPratt’s Guide to Web Hosting

Every Web Host wants your business and wants you to know they offer more than anybody in the world at the cheapest price. They will hype every single feature over and over, but it’s what they don’t tell you that you need to worry about. How many web sites are hosted on each box? How much memory is on each box? How often are backups performed? Do they have backup generators in case the power goes out? How many and how powerful are the processors on the servers? Do they have TRUE 24/7 support – or only emergency on call? Can you physically talk to live support over the phone? How many customers do they have? How long have they been in business? You need to extract all the information you can before going with a web host, in addition to googling “this host sucks” or “I love xyz host” to see what people are saying about them.

I’ve hosted some things with goDaddy for a few years now, and their accounts and services have gotten better. I’ve used many other web hosts too, and had some of the exact same problems with them, but I’m going to detail my GoDaddy experiences here because they are the largest web host in the world (or so they claim) and I see lots of people every day searching for various bits of “godaddy help” online that’s not available within their system of FAQ. My “run-ins” with them are perfect examples of things “I didn’t know” before I signed up with them for web hosting. For the most part – hosting my slower web sites with them have been great, but here’s what nobody told me once things got a little bit busier…

Email accounts are limited: I was used to “cpanel” based web hosts, and godaddy has built their own custom control panel to manage their sites. Management of email is in a whole separate control panel from the web hosting control panel, and when you setup email each account is limited to 100MB. This is MUCH better than when I first signed up – all email accounts were only 20MB. What annoys me is – my account has 10GB of space. If I only use 500MB for my web sites, I should be able to use the other 9.5 GB for my email accounts if I want.

Spam filters block “some” email: When I first signed up my email account(s) went through a spam filter and I didn’t always get all my email. Now, when you setup an email account with them they say that you can choose to turn the spam filter off, but even when I did this I still had problems with mail. I think they use some kind of “blacklist” to determine who can and can’t communicate with their mail servers, and I could never get email from either doubleclick or amazon at all. My own parents sent me an amazon gift certificate for my birthday (5 times) and I never received it, and in fact they got “bounce” emails back saying my mail server rejected the amazon mail. I had a blogger last month send me email from the contact form of this site, and because it had his email address on it (which was apparently wrongly on some black list) my own site wouldn’t deliver it and sent him a rejection notice. That was the straw that broke the camels back – I moved all sites with email from goDaddy to another host last month and have had NO problem getting any email from him, Amazon, or doubleclick since. I talked to goDaddy about this over the phone – they were not helpful.

All logging is turned off by default: Your account doesn’t save any access stats or error by default. All logs are turned off. You can turn on the access stats (which are free), but you can’t really customize them and they are godaddy custom stat reports, not Analog, AWStats, or Webalizer that you might expect. In addition, if you have problems and want to error check, you have to go into your admin panel and “turn error logging on” and then it only lasts 30 minutes – then stops. Many bloggers and web workers might not care about this – but both these things really irked me.

Their “unlimited web sites” for Premium accounts doesn’t apply to auto-install scripts: Here’s a shocker, their $14.99 “premium” account offers unlimited web sites, AND they have cool auto-install scripts you can use (like WordPress, Drupal, Mambo, Forums, etc.). If you install WordPress in your main “root” account, and then attempt to install WordPress, or ANY script that uses clean-url’s, permalinks, mod-rewrite, or an .htaccess file THEY WILL NOT SUPPORT IT! I went round, and round, and round with GoDaddy support about this over the phone. They will allow you “unlimited web sites” and “auto-install scripts” for ever single one of them, but NO SUPPORT for nearly all of them, because they can’t figure out how to resolve conflicts with url re-writes. It’s for this reason that my post “How to Fix .htaccess File for mod_rewrite and addhandler on godaddy subdomain” is on of my most popular. They sell you one thing, without telling you critical details of how it may not work in some of the most popular scenarios people want to do (host multiple blogs in one account).

It’s nearly impossible to reach 300GB of transfer: This point is something that most of you may never find out – but if your blog, web site, and online businesses are growing you should. Web “transfer” is when your web site sends something to someone’s browser. If a visitor comes to your home page, your hosting account would send your index.php file of your blog, maybe a few graphics, a stylesheet, and maybe a javascript or two. You might have 5-10 “hits” or that one visit. In addition, the data contained with your index.php would come from your blog mySQL database, and to get your title, metadata, posts, comment counts, pages, categories, tags, and whatever else your site contains could take up to 20 database queries before it has everything it needs to send that page out to the browser.

I realized over a year ago that it’s nearly impossible to ever reach the 300GB of transfer they say you can use for only $4 per month, when I had a site generating a lot of weird errors like “unavailable”. Let me give you a scenario. Let’s say that your index.php was 100K in size, and it sent a stylesheet (8K), a few javascripts (15K), and 3 graphics for logo, header, and footer (37K). The total to send your entire home page would be about 160K in size. That’s only 16% of 1 megabyte. By dividing 300 “Gigabytes” (300,000,000,000) by 160K (160,000) we get 1,875,000. That means you should be able to get 1.8 MILLION pageviews per month on this “economy” account for only $4 per month. That’s 62,500 unique pageviews per day, which equivalates to 2,604 per hour. Every knows that traffic is never distributed evenly throughout 24 hours, you have 6-8 hours of the day that are busiest.

This means that you should be getting 2,500-5,000 pageviews per hour to reach your limit every day. I went to all the trouble to explain this because I had a site on goDaddy that was getting only about 25,000 pageviews per day and I was getting the “unavailable” errors. I called goDaddy support and was on the phone with them for over an hour drilling them about the errors, their account limits, and what I could do about it – since my site was fine (until it got that busy), and then all of the sudden every 5th or so pageview either turned out an error or incomplete page. It turns out (after much screaming and profanity, 2 support people, 2 phones calls, and one supervisor) that they have a “150 concurrent connection per account limit”.

Wow. I was stunned. I realized right away what this meant – and I went off on that guy. I told him I felt I was lied to from the start (of signing up with them). The “150″ limit means that only 150 people could be requesting a web page from my site “at the same time”. And a request is a “hit” or each graphic, script, and individual page. So if a person gets one page and has 10 “hits” that’s 10 connections. If you got lots of people browsing a site at once, it’s easy to reach that limit – and I did every day between 1 and 4pm on days I had 25,000 pageviews or more. The less busier hours of the day were ok.

I told the goDaddy support guy the problem was obvious – the support people, the server admin people, and the marketing people never talked. Marketing wrote up the ad slick based on the highest capabilities they could sell at the lowest price. The server admins put the “150 concurrent” limit in as a governer to keep the busier sites from crashing the box and stealing resources from the other 900 sites that weren’t as busy. And support was just trying to put out the fires from people who called in barely knowing there was a limit at all, and not realizing (or caring) what advertising information people were reading before signing up.

The fact of the matter is – cheap hosting is “shared”, and your account is on a server with up to 1,000 other web sites. Like being a tenant in an apartment building, the landlord couldn’t tell you before signing a lease “you can use up to 10,000 gallons of water per month” if there were 100 tenants and the capacity of the entire building was 100,000 per month. If each tenant used 10,000 gallons per month, the usage would be 1 million gallons per month, and that’s 10X the building’s capacity.

My point is – a shared web host is kind of like a utility. They have a pretty good handle on what each consumer uses, and even in most peak times they can handle the load. But in the hottest times of the year, in big urban areas you see “rolling blackouts” when everybody has their air conditioning on – because the can’t handle all that load at once. Your web host may sell you all these grand amounts of bandwidth you can use, but in the end given the amount of other “tenants” and the physical limitations of the machine and your account, you couldn’t use that much bandwidth in a given month (on the economy account) if you had to.

The next post in this guide will be “Differences between Shared Hosting, VPS, and Dedicated Server”
Read more – JTPratt’s Guide to Web Hosting

Godaddy – the largest web host in the world, treats hosting like a fast food drive through…

This is installment #3 of JTPratt’s Guide to Web Hosting

I got sucked into GoDaddy the same way that people were sucked into “supersizing” at McDonalds’s when it first started. GoDaddy had slick ads during Superbowl halftime that millions of people noticed. I remember the first ones. They were cool, sexy, funny, controversial – but in the end I remember that domain names were somehow $1.99 there. I had only owned a couple “domain names” over the years, and I always registered them with Network Solutions because they were always known as the most reputable (and the first ever) registrar. But – to register a domain name there (and renew it each year) was for years and years $35 annually. See why I never bought any more domains?

So, a couple years ago I got an idea for a new web site and wanted to try my hand at making some money with it. Up until that point all my personal web sites had been for fun, and the work I did online was either for my day job (web programmer) or for some moonlighting on the side consulting with a few companies here and there needing help. I’ll never forget that first time, because I only wanted to buy one domain name. After I selected it I had an offer “buy .net, .info, and .org for just $5 more” and I thought “really? why not…” so I did. The trick was (at that time) if you buy 3 or more you get the $1.99 price, but just one would have been $8.99. So I had 4 new domain names I think for like $7 – and I thought that was awesome.

It got me thinking, and a few weeks later I had some more web site ideas, and I went back and bought more domain names. They also had a deal where if you bought any single product (like $3.99 web hosting) every domain name you buy is only $1.99. They still have this deal today. So I bought that economy hosting account, and then about 10 new domain names. I have hosting AND 10 new domains for about $24 – sweet!

What GoDaddy sells is “opportunity”. Their marketing is based on “hype” too, and pumping you up to buy lots of stuff “right now” – because they feel that they’ll make it up on the backend when you renew each month, or each year (for domain names). They hope you’ll come back – again and again! I did for the better part of a year. But, much like McDonalds with the “supersizing” – it’s not their fault if you get fat, or if you can’t stop eating. I think the difference is, McDonald’s doesn’t advertise that you’ll become healthier or lose weight by eating their food every day. They may infer you’ll be happier, buy not healthier. GoDaddy, and just about every cheap web host out there thrives on showing you how many “features” they can shove in your account for a very, very low price. When you’re offered 10 GB of space and 300GB of content for only $4 and you’re just starting a web site, you may think “that’s incredible, I’ll never use all that…”. Much like the fact that McDonald’s doesn’t say “it would take 10 miles of running to burn off all the fat from one Big Mac Combo Meal…”, GoDaddy won’t say “we’ll give you 300GB of transfer, but we actually know it’s physically impossible for you to use that much the way our servers are configured…”.

The next post in this guide will be “What Shared Web Hosts Won’t Tell You…”
Read more – JTPratt’s Guide to Web Hosting

Can you get a quality web host for $3.99 per month? How can they afford to give you all that space and bandwidth so cheaply?

This is installment #2 of JTPratt’s Guide to Web Hosting

I’ve had many web hosts over the years for a paltry few dollars per month. Like most people, a great majority of the time I’ve had no problems with any of them. The difference between my 95% success rate and 5% failure has been the growth of my web site. I think in many ways though – it wasn’t my fault because I think that nearly every web host in the world is engaged in false advertising.

Let’s take a look at goDaddy, who say they are the “largest webhost in the world”. They have an “economy plan” for about $4 per month (price depends on how long you pay for). Before I go on let me state the first rule of web hosting: Never pay for more than month to month service. This rule has served me well, because it’s easy to move to a new web host, and I’ve been with dozens over the years. Just because a host is good this month, doesn’t mean they will next month, or next year. Do you think there’s a reason that a host has a 95% satisfaction rating? What do the 5% unsatisfied customers have problems with and why?

For $4 per month goDaddy offers:

• 10 GB of space
• 300 GB of transfer
• 10 mySQL databases
• 100 email accounts

I’ll tell you right now that 95% of the customers are satisfied because they aren’t getting any traffic. The 5% unsatisfied customers are unhappy because their sites have become busy or big or complex, and they’re unable to keep them working right. When a web host claims “99.9%” uptime that means their servers are online and running 99.9% of the time. It doesn’t mean that their customers web sites were available and error free 99.9% of the time.

The next post in this series will be “GoDaddy – the McDonald’s of Webhosting?“
Read more – JTPratt’s Guide to Web Hosting

If your blogs and web hosts are growing beyond your web host – you are not alone. This guide will teach you everything you need to know about choosing and moving to a good web host.

This is installment #1 of JTPratt’s Guide to Webhosting. Follow the link for all installments.

Have you ever heard the phrase “you don’t know what you need until you need it?”. If you are a blogger, a niche site builder, an affiliate marketer, a domainer, an SEO, a web web designer, a web developer or any other type of online web worker – your “working environment” is the web, and your office building is your web host. You may outgrow that office building before you know it and not know how or where to move to expand your business.

It’s not surprising to me that so many people fail in online business, people fail in the brick and mortar business world each and every day. The difference between the two is, online a person can start a “web business” with no money at all (and virtually no risk) – and the only investment you need to make is “time”. There’s no penalty for walking away and abandoning your business either if you haven’t been successful.

In a lot of ways building a business online is still like the old wild west but it’s maturing more each day. When I started on the internet in 1995 there weren’t any classes (and hardly any books) on building web sites. You learned HTML, web graphics, and how to get search engine traffic purely by the seat of your pants. There were no classes or degrees you could get in nearly any kind of web technology. Those of us that trained ourselves were able to command high dollar amounts consulting with and working for small businesses and large corporations.

Nowadays, you can get all kinds of degrees and certificates as a web designer, web developer, and many specialties have emerged like database architect, information modeler, network engineer – you name it. What you don’t see are a series of courses designed to prepare you for building an online business. There aren’t even a lot of real world courses available that apply to working online. If you want to learn to manage a site with WordPress, how to do search engine optimiztion, how social media works, how to build income from multiple affiliates, how to interpret web statistics and trends, how to write good linkbait, or even how web hosting accounts work you are left to scrounge information for yourself from dozens of blogs and forums to piecemeal that information together yourself.

I’ve built and maintained web sites for more than 13 years now, and I even did technical support for and worked at an ISP and webhost in the 90′s for nearly three years – and even I have had a very hard time with web hosts over the last few years. The thing I had a hard time recognizing was when one of my web sites was too big for a web host, when to move it to a bigger account, and who that web host should be. In order to describe to you the process that I went through, first I should explain to you the big business of hosting cheap web sites.

Tomorrow’s post in this guide will be “Cheap Cookie Cutter Webhosting – Good or Bad?”
Read more: JTPratt’s Guide to Webhosting

I just wanted to take a minute to update all the readers of jtpratt.com – and those of you subscribed via RSS what’s been going on behind the scenes here at jtpratt.com. This week has been plagued by quite a few web hosting snafus – even though I have 3 different web hosts! I’ve had problems with BANS sites, WordPress sites, and WP plugins – so bear with me which I fix all these issues, move a bunch of sites around, and acquire yet another (and bigger) web host because my little enterprise of sites is growing.

I apologize for not having the “30 WordPress Hacks in 30 Days” up to date, in addition to the BANS series (which is seriously behind in content). The good news is, I have a tendency to document everything I do and write it up into articles to help you be a better blogger and learn about the pitfalls of working and building a business online. This means that you once again, will be getting content from me in the very near future that you won’t find anywhere else – regarding all the issues I’ve been having.

Working online is not all roses, especially the first few years. Did you know that in brick and mortar small businesses 90% are lucky to even make a profit the first two years? Most are lucky to not have to close their doors in that time. All too often I read about a “guru’s success” and huge profit online – but it all sounds like a walk in the park. They want you to buy their $87 eBook that will “change your life”, and everything they say is hype, hype, hype. Have you ever read a sales pitch page that contained something negative? Ever seen an online marketer’s page that had both “pros” and “cons”?

The posts and articles that I write for you come from an incessant need for me to document information that I myself had a hard time finding. The information is free, and I’m not trying to “build my list” or convince you to buy things I think are “awesome” so I can make an affiliate commission. Sure, I’ll put my affiliate links out there – and if you choose to buy something through me or click on my ads, that’s great, but I’m not John Chow and I don’t “Make a living telling people how much money I make online”. In fact, – (at the present time) I don’t even make a living telling people my struggles trying to make a living online.

My goal with this site has been to help you become successful by watching me fail 10,000 times. Be learning from those mistakes – it should be easier for you to do well with your online business (but no less work). I will give you the good, the bad, and the ugly – and hopefully the end result of this site will become “how I became successful online”. For now – we’re still muddling through the mistakes and gaining some traction, but I promise if you stick with me and work hard – you will begin to build a monthly income online as well.

Be on the lookout for my next post, which will be “JTPratt’s Guide to Web Hosting”. It contains everything I wish someone had told me 5 years about about web hosting accounts, and invaluable advice for growing sites and blogs. I have 46 pending drafts for this site and a dozen more written down on paper I haven’t entered yet. The best has yet to come.