There are other third party referral services out there such as http://www.recommend-it.com that are VERY easy to use and offer your readers incentives of $10,000 to tell a friend. The down side is that it is not as professional looking when you use a third party.

So get out there and set up a tell-a-friend script now and get those word of mouth referrals via one of best viral marketing techniques available.

You have permission to reprint this article provided you include following resource box:

------------------------------------------------------------

Glen Hopkins is director of ListOpt Publications Inc. If you're looking to build your newsletter subscriber base quickly, easily and inexpensively, visit Glen at: http://www.listopt.com and learn what hundreds of other publishers are saying about ListOpt's amazing List Builder service.

------------------------------------------------------------

All commercial web hosting companies are not created equal. Of course, cost is an issue but reliability and service will likely be major factors in decision making process. You should expect your host to be up and functioning 100% of time but you will likely only see guarantees of 99-99.5% uptime. Less than this is unacceptable.

If you will personally be managing much of activity for your site, make sure that you are comfortable with Control Panel. Some hosts present Control Panels that are cumbersome and complicated. You want to easily navigate through routine functions. You will also want to make sure that hosting company has functionality that you may not be using now but will likely use in future. These would include PHP, MySQL, SSI, .htaccess, SSL, etc. Examine offers for email and autoresponders also.

Many web hosting services offer very low rates if you commit to a year or more of hosting. While this may turn out to be an excellent value in long term, it may be advisable to pay each month until you are confident in service and, quite importantly, quality of technical support that they provide. Getting accurate responses to questions quickly will make your life as a webmaster less stressful.