Lesson One: What is Web Hosting?

Web hosting is essentially placement of your website onto Internet through a server. Once your site is on a server, anyone with Internet access can look at your website - from anywhere in world, 24 hours a day. In order to have your site hosted on web, you need to have following three things:

A Website - a page or set of pages that is located under same domain name. brandblast.com is a website (but you knew that already!) A web page is a computer document written in a publishing language called HTML. When an Internet user types in your web address, your web server sends content of your web page to that user.

A Domain Name - a unique text-based address used to locate a specific set of web pages. A domain name is made up of words and/or numbers plus a TLD (top level domain). The TLD for most businesses is ".com", such as http://www.brandblast.com/; non-profit organizations use ".org"; universities and educational sites use ".edu"; and sites involved with U.S. government use ".gov". More TLDs are available, such as .biz, .pro, .name, .info, etc.

An Account With A Web Hosting Company, or a server of your own to host your website. A server is a computer that stores information that can be accessed through network. Servers can also be used to store website information that can be accessed by any computer with a connection to Internet - and a browser such as Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator, two most popular web browsers.

Web hosting is, in many ways, similar to renting property. There are plenty of companies that will rent you space on their web servers. The wide range of services start from free hosting on up to buying a server for your own personal use. It's possible to spend thousands of dollars a year on web hosting alone, though average person or small business typically pays $10 - $50 a month, depending on how many features, web space, and data transfer they need.

Lesson Two: Do I Need a Web Host?

If you are planning to establish an internet presence, whether it be in form of a personal homepage or a full-service e-commerce catalogue, and do not own your own personal server, you will definitely need a web host.

Finding a good web host, however, can be a rather difficult endeavor. BrandBlast’s website hosting services are a great place to start your search, our hosting plans are designed to acccomodate any website requirement and can be upgraded at any time, our plans grow with you.

Choosing a host for your website should not be taken lightly. Once committed, it becomes a real headache to move elsewhere - not to mention damage that can be done to your business if you make wrong choice.

This makes it very important to "get it right first time." Find out as much as you can about your prospective host before making any decisions, and have a clear idea of scope of your site, and functions you wish to have prior to searching for your host.

Doing proper planning will help you a great deal in your selection of a host, and will save you headache of trying to change hosts later.

Lesson Three: What type of web hosting package is suitable for me - free or shared?

FREE - Free is for fun. If you want to experiment with a site or put up a small, personal site for fun of it.

If you fall into this category, you probably need just a small amount of web space and little bandwidth: 1 to 2 MB should be plenty for your needs; and a personal, unique domain name may not even be necessary. In fact, you can get web space FREE. A popular provider of free space is Geocities (http://www.geocities.com/). However, because it's free, you may find out later that there are many limitations - it all depends how far you want to go...

By Alessandro DeBarros

Ezine advertising has been glorified by experts world over as last refuge for little guy/gal to make a buck online. Well, I hate to deliver bad news, and please don't shoot messenger, but there are some draw backs to ezine advertising and many of Inner Sanctum E-Letter subscribers are making them daily. Let's look at most common mistakes and their solutions.

Mistake #1: Not Tracking Your Ads

Many business owners have no idea how they can track every ad they place. Whether for an affiliate program or their own product, they just don't know. Not knowing what ad is working and producing sale will cost you and your business thousands of dollars. When you know what ad produces and what ad doesn't you can cut worst of ads and only keep ad/s which is producing for your business.

--Solution--: If you own your own website and domain name, you can track every ad by creating a special redirect link that is only used in that ad. Or you can add a question mark to end of URL and check that on your stats page.

A simple, http://www.yourdomainname.com/pagename.html?trackingcode will suffice in most cases. Check with your web host to see if you have access to your web site stats log. Or sign up for one of free/fee tracking services online.

Mistake #2: Writing Me-Too Ads

When writing your ad you must take your ego, your desire to boast about you and your company, out of equation. An example of a me-too ad:

"Acme Law Offices have been in business for 20 years. Our staff of lawyers all graduated from Harvard Law School with honors. Call us at 1-800-acme-law today!"

--Solution--: Write benefit and results oriented ads. Example:

"Guaranteed Settlements! Win your settlement guaranteed and save 43% on attorney fees by calling ACME Law Offices at: (blah, blah, blah)"

This ad focuses completely on end result, main benefit. Guaranteed Settlements. Which ad do you think would pull more responses?

Mistake #3: Running Classifieds

Since they don't cost much, business owners tend to use classifieds to save costs. Classifieds are cheap, $5-$20 per ad, and in most cases run faster than solo or top sponsor ads because ezine publisher runs 10-20 per issue.