Tuesday, July 31st, 2007
Reliable, timely, fast… Those words, as good as they are, only begin to scratch the surface regarding the host of this blog. Hostgator has been nothing short of SPECTACULAR as a host. I’ve had a few hosts over the past couple of years for a variety of projects and it was on a whim (I’m a cheap ass and saw a really GOOD Hostgator deal)that I ended up signing up with them. Every step of the way they have been there to not only meet my needs but to exceed my needs.
Their customer service has gone above and beyond the call of duty. I’m paying $10.00 a month (9.95 to be exact) and on 3 occassions they have had a customer service agent on the phone with me for over 2 hours each time fixing an issue that *I* caused! I’ve never received customer service like that for $30.00 a month, let alone $10!
Wanna hear something better? The other day I moved this blog to it’s very own domain name and Mr. Murphy showed up to personally usher me into the experience. Who do you think was there via chat, phone, and email over the course of 16 hour holding my hand each step of the way to ensure not only did I get the site up and running, but also to ensure that the loss of content due to my own foolishness went no further than a couple of comments? That’s right, it was Hostgator’s outstanding customer service staff in partnership with their technicians and other staff that kept me sane.
All that’s well and good, but let’s look at the practical aspects of what Hostgator offers. First they offer four shared hosting plans. Shared hosting means that multiple accounts (hundreds and even thousands) are served from the same hardware. This is by far the most common type of hosting and is the cheapest. Here’s a small taste of the features and benefits of the two cheapest hosting plans that Hostgator offers.
Hatchling ($6.95 per month)
50 Gigabytes Disk space
200 Gigabytes Bandwidth
24/7 support
No contract
FREE/INSTANT setup
CGI, SSH, SSI, mySQL
And many more features
Baby ($9.95 per month)
100 Gigabytes Disk space
1,000 Gigabytes Bandwidth
24/7 support
No contract
FREE/Instant setup
CGI, SSH, SSI, mySQL
UNLIMITED DOMAINS
And many more features
If for some reason you need more you can always take a look at their Dedicated Server offerings! Or maybe you’d like to try your hand at offering your own hosting. Take a look at Hostgators reseller plans. I’ve not had any reason to need either of these two options, but if their service has been so outstanding for a $9.95 per month plan I can hardly imagine how good it would be for someone paying hundreds of times that amount.
Give Hostgator a try. You won’t be disappointed and if you are be sure to post a comment on this blog letting me know what happened and I will contact them directly on your behalf to try and work the issue out!
Well here it is time for another post. Problem is that after a grand total of 3 hours of sleep in 48 hours I’m not clear headed enough to try and post something of any depth. In fact I should probably not post at all until I get some rest, but obviously I don’t listen to my own good advise. Rather than trying to write a post of any depth and stature I thought I would ask everyone a question. Or two…
When you have no idea for the topic do you still post just to post, or do you wait until you have something to say?
How much time (in hours) do you spend actually developing the content of your blog vs “playing around”?
Would you spend $250.00 to promote your blog if you had some extra lying around?
Just post a comment with your answers!
And the prize? A link back AND a donation of $20.00 to the charity of your choice.
And how do “I” win? I pick the winner based on the comments. Sorry I’m a small time operation. There won’t be any third party overseers for this.
It is a simple fact of life that we are creatures of habit and one of our habits is that we need a reason to do just about anything that we do. Sure sometimes we do things “just because” but a reason to do something makes it worthwhile. In our minds we’ve actually accomplished something if we had a reason for doing it. Now you have a total of 12 reasons to:
Get your blog reviewed by A Blog about Nothing
You will get a fair, and honest opinion of your blog from another pair of eyes
You will get an indepth review of your blog
You will see an increase in traffic to your site after the review is made public
A few weeks ago I had indicated in a comment, which apparently Murphy decided to take care of, that I didn’t plan on monetizing this blog and would in fact remove the ads after a bit of experimentation. Well, I’ve changed my mind and decided to try my hand at monetization. Ultimately it’s because I’d be a fool to turn down the opportunity to make a passive income, but it’s also for the challenge. We often read and hear of people making tens of thousands of dollars a month through properly monetized websites (to include blogs). No one can lie and say that kind of income doesn’t intrigue them so I won’t bother even trying.
How I will make the money
Obviously there are several ad spots on here utilizing various methods of earnings.
Google adsense because I believe if you
you’ll be well ahead of the game!
The purpose of mentioning each ad partner that I am currently working with is to draw your attention to them one at a time so I can give an admittedly amatuer breakdown of how they each work. We’ll start from the top and work our way through them one at a time. This isn’t meant to be an indepth review of any, but a general overview of each one.
Google Adsense
Tnis is the “grand daddy” of the online advertising market. I don’t mean in terms of age, but in terms of the power they wield. Unless you’ve been dead and buried for the past 3 or 4 years you are no doubt well aware of how influential Google is. Adsense is a marketing coup in every sense of the word. Go to nearly any website out there and you’ll come across “Ads by Google”. They seem to be everywhere. And for good reason. Let’s take a quick look at what makes them so powerful.
A trusted name. People will click where they see Google more readily than if it were an unknown company
A household name. My grandmother at 86 years old has no clue about the internet or computers, but she knows of (if not about) Google.
Easy to customize the ads. The interface setup is great for manipulting text and background
Ability to run multiple campaigns at once
Comprehensive self-help and support from the Google experts
Extremely well documented both from Google itself and around the WWW
No0b friendly
Honestly if I can figure out how to setup, run, and manage a Google adsense campaign anyone can do it! Just be sure to follow the rules, study the advise of others, and keep up with your Google adsense account and you’ll easily pull in the money!
Text Link Ads
I only just signed up for TLA for this domain. I had it signed up on the old domain, but never bothered to set it up properly. From what I can tell it looks like you are actually selling advertising space to third parties via TLA. It’s worth a shot and the sign up is painless and quick. If it turns out not to work out I can just remove the TLA links and sell that space directly to advertisers. I do like that they give you 50% of the sale price for each text link ad sold off your website through our system. Not sure yet if the sale is per day, week, or month but either way 50% is still 50%!
Bidvertiser
It was at the recommendation of John Chow that I decided to try out Bidvertiser. Not a direct recommendation, but based on a post of his that I dug up when I was reading through his blog. Experimenting with them has been interesting over the past few weeks. Originally I gave them a permanent spot and they always appeared, but I’ve decided as I make posts if it is long enough (such as this one) I will insert the code at appropriate intervals to break up the page a bit. Not sure what to expect, but to be honest the return for the work hasn’t been anything to write home about for when it comes to Bidvertiser.
Ad Bright
A friend originally pointed me to Ad Bright and then the same John Chow post that turned me on to Bidvertiser brought them back to the front of my mind. I’ve choosen to use the banner ads only at this point, though I might well end up dropping Kontera and going with both the banner and the in-line ads provided by Ad Bright. That remains to be seen at this point. Another week or two of Kontera to see if there is any change in the performance.
Auction Ads
By far this is the adspot that gets the most clicks on any given day. Unfortunately it is PPA (pay per action) advertiser so if people don’t buy the item they click on I get nothing out of it. I really like having Auction Ads on the site, but I’m starting to think that moving things around and placing a PPC (pay per click) in their place might make better sense from a revenue standpoint.
Kontera
Without beating around the bush I’m not at all happy with how Kontrea has been performing for me. Despite a couple of thousand impressions and my pages often being saturated with Kontra in-text links I’ve managed less than one dollar from them. To my way of thinking that’s a pretty poor return on time. Two other things I’m not to fond of. Their reporting is a day behind (if not more) and they serve really bizare ads for the keywords they choose to highlight on your page. An example is they have the words “stage magic” highlighted and the add popping up if for shopping.com. Not sure how one relates to the other, but ok. It should be noted that in order to get a Kontera account you either need to have a huge amount of traffic or get a special code. Check out this page for details of what to do if you choose to sign up.
