Web Hosting at Gossimer

When it comes to hosting your blog or website, there's plenty of choices for online hosting companies. One hosting company you may want to check out is Gossimer.com, which provides several plans based on your website needs. The first thing I noticed was that their plans don't offer quite as much hosting space as other companies. Gossimer offers a basic Starter plan at $5.95 per month which offers 200 megabytes of space, 5 gigs of Bandwith, webmail and more. For $8.95 you can have 500 megabytes of space and 10 gigs of bandwith. There's also luxury and business plans if you need even more space and bandwith flexibility. For the prices you might expect a bit more than just 200mb of space at $5.95 a month.

One thing about web host, GoDaddy.com, is that the site's navigation scheme can be overwhelming at times, especially if you need to get to a particular section of your account. Gossimer's site seems set up in a much more user-friendly and organized manner. According to the site's "About" section, they launched their company in 2002, and have continued to evolve their services since then. They may not offer the types of deals that other hosts do, but they have many testimonials from satisfied customers. Reliable customer service is definitely something you want from your hosting company.

Gossimer doesn't just offer web hosting plans either. You can register, transfer and sell domains. On their site there's also a helpful "SEO Tools" section which offers an Adsense Calculator, Adsense Preview, Alexa Rank Comparison tool and an Advanced Meta Tag Generator, amongst other tools. There's several site builder tools as well, so users with limited web design experience can easily create a site hosted at Gossimer.

They also provide helpful tutorials which show how to use cPanel, Email functions and Fantastico. For those interested in being affiliates, Gossimer offers a Referral and a Rewards program. Overall they seem to have a well organized and clean site which can help provide web hosting for many individuals.

View more about their web services at Gossimer.com.

Get Your Blog More Search Engine Traffic

On another blog I have, the majority of traffic came from a massive social media network I built up. I recently decided it was time to put some experimental link building into place to benefit from more search engine traffic. I decided to use 4 methods and so far the results have quickly landed a keyword-targeted blog entry into the top 2-3 pages of Google search results. This only took less than a week to do with a simple Blogspot blog post.

I'll use the example of a celebrity blog. Here's the four methods I used:

1) A Squidoo page - I used the Google Suggest Tool and Free Keyword tool by Workdtracker. With these tools you can enter a general keyword such as "britney spears" and see what related terms are being searched for a lot. So I used those two tools to figure out a good keyword phrase based on what has a high search volume and low competition (for PPC ad campaigns). Next, I did my own Google searches on these terms. I narrowed it down to keyword terms that had 300,000 pages of results or less and finally selected my phrase.

I created a Squidoo lens using the keyword phrase in both title and description. I also included my blog's URL and RSS feed on the Squidoo lens. Squidoo can help get you valuable backlinks, so I'm not sure why people downplay it's usefulness so much. If Squidoo's not making you money directly, it still provides you backlinks or a way for people to discover your blog entries. There's value in those as well so don't overlook Squidoo lenses as an option.

2) A series of blog entries - This involves creating a 10 part series of blog entries. For example, if you have a blog about Entertainment, you could do biography style entries on your top 10 favorite celebrities. You then create a post called "My 10 Favorite Celebs" and link back to each of the 10 individual biography posts. This is great for internal linking from what I've read and now from what I've seen. You can even set the date for those 10 posts back to an earlier day, making it link deeper into your blog archives. I also added the links for each of these posts onto my Squidoo page.

3) Article submission - I wrote a general article using my Keyword phrase in my article title, and within the article body itself. The article was 350-400 words long and far from anything I'd call outstanding writing. On some article directories I was able to use links in the article body, with my keyword phrase as the anchor text. Tread carefully with using too many links in your article, as it may be considered spammy. At the end of my article or in the resource box, I linked to my blog URL and the specific blog post I mentioned before ("Top 10 Celebrities"). I submitted to probably about 25 or so article directories using the free Article Submitter software. It seems that my article on searchwarp.com and ezinearticles.com got into the first few pages of Google search results for a few days.

4) Socialmarker.com - I used this to bookmark the example "My 10 Favorite Celebs" blog post which contains the other internal blog links. Socialmarker bookmarks your item to about 20-30 social bookmark sites (Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, etc), all of which you must register with. There's a few sites that may not relate to your content, for example they only want internet marketing, SEO, HTML, and technology story bookmarks. Use this method appropriately with your content. I've found that the site indianpad.com actually showed up on some early search results for Google which may warrant you to try submitting more content there. You may also consider bookmarking the Squidoo page and the article your write with Socialmarker.

This took work, but I believe these 4 methods helped my blog entry get into the first few pages of Google search results. I'm going to continue with the article submission, social bookmarking and some other ways to get backlinks to see if I can get to page 1 of the results. If you use the Google Suggest and Wordtracker, I think you can find some heavily searched terms with low competition related to your blog topic. Create a series of blog posts about the keyword phrase you select. Also create a Squidoo page, and the article all using your selected keyword phrase. Then start bookmarking your Squidoo page, blog post and article. You just might surprise yourself at how quick you can get into the first few pages of Google search results!

I know sometimes tech talk can go over my head or other's heads so let me know if anything seems confusing or you have questions.. The Monetizer is here to help.

People Want Answers - Wiki Answers

This isn't a paid review of any sort, just a bit of info sharing about a site The Monetizer found. The site is called Wiki Answers and one of its question pages came up within the 1st two pages of a specific search I did on Google. Wiki Answers is just what you might expect; a site where people pose questions and others provide the answers. It's easy to register and use, and can potentially provide you with a flow of extra site traffic.

The coolest part of the site, is you can add in your own answer to a question or even "Improve an answer". You are given an option to supply a site link as part of the answer, with anchor text for your link. The Wiki Answers site currently has a pretty high traffic rank, so this makes a ton of sense to do. Leave a link if you have a blog post that answers a popular question, even if the question has been answered 10-20 times. People who view that question will see your link and possibly visit for more info on the topic.

I placed a link as an answer there and it has brought about 400-500 visits in several days time. That's not Digg like traffic, but it's not bad either for a new steady stream of traffic. It basically means you're listed within the first few pages of Google search results too. Consider this technique: Do a search on keywords or phrases on Google related to your blog. See what comes up in the first 2 pages of the results. If there's any Wiki Answers listing or another Ask & Answer type site, you may have struck a new traffic source for your blog. You can also register for the site and just poke around a bit. Find out the popular questions related to your blog, and see what you can answer with blog posts. While this may not be groundbreaking, it may be a technique many overlook in terms of getting some extra traffic.

(Note: The above technique may vary based upon the popularity of your search terms. Also use the obvious ideas of leaving links on forums, blogs and YouTube videos that may come up in the 1st few pages of a Google search.)

PayPerPositivity: Buying Blog Votes

A member of a social media site I frequent posted an interesting link to a "Vote for Hillary" blog. It was hosted on the free Blogspot platform, and actually included a post in which they were offering people $1.00 for posting positive comments about Hillary on other blogs. Shameless? Very much so. It's a sign that someone believes influencing the comments in the blogoshpere can help shape the vote. It's like a sort of "subliminal blog messaging". It's amazing the way technology is playing into this 2008 election, but this is a low. Here's a look at their offer:

But enough about that, you want to know about getting paid to write positive comments about Hillary. The way it works is this: in your spare time, you visit several political blogs. Whether they're for a specific candidate, undecided, or even a downright Hillary hater, your job is to post comments that portray Hillary in a good light. Each time you post a comment like this, make a note of the website's address in a text file (we recommend notepad). After a day's worth of blog commenting, send us an e-mail with that notepad file including all of the blogs you commented on. We will then visit a few of them to confirm you in fact leave the comments (Sorry folks, but there's always going to be someone out there wanting something for nothing). We will then pay you $1.00 per positive Hillary comment.

The blog went on to give you tips on how to comment positively about Hillary on blogs. They have a number of other posts including news about the Clinton campaign. The blog also is running Adsense ads, but down below the fold. It would be interesting to know if they made any extra revenue on this sort of blog. Anyways, that was their offer back in November, $1 per positive blog comment.

Then, on December 19th, this heartbreaking announcement came:

We have a lot of good people in this movement and most of you are good honest hardworking people. But we have been misled. Hillary is not the candidate to turn back America, she will keep us moving in the wrong direction that will most certainly turn to disaster.

We are not going to endorse a different candidate at this time, but we are calling off all support for Hillary Clinton. This was a very difficult decision and we hope you understand.

This is a definite example of the types of make money online concepts to watch out for. I'm not here to bash Hillary or try to boost any other candidate, because this isn't a political blog. But the question now becomes, based on their change of heart, will they be paying people to post newer, more truthful comments about Hillary?

(Note: I'm the Monetizer, and I approve this blog post.)