Insider Marketing Tips

When you first start out online, finding the right hosting plan can be quite frustrating.

The two most common hosting plans used by most online marketers are shared and reseller packages. Some marketers require their own dedicated servers, but this is really only an option you should pursue when your online presence has grown too large to handle normal bandwidth and disk space. As an example, the owner of an online forum that receives 100,000 visitors a day would need a dedicated server to handle the enormous bandwidth of that much daily traffic.

However, for a majority of online marketers, shared and reseller packages are the most popular choices. Each of these plans come with various options that can suit the needs of almost any small to medium online business. Now the question is, which is right for your online business?

If you are just starting out and only have one or two websites with minimal traffic, then a shared hosting plan is more than adequate enough. Since reseller hosting starts at around $25 a month and quality shared hosting starts around $4.95, we can use simple math to discover that a reseller-hosting plan isn’t right for your business.

Now if you own multiple websites and are planning on adding more in the future, then it is time to make the economical move to a reseller plan. With a standard reseller plan you will have around 24 gb of disk space and 250 gb of bandwidth every month. To put this into perspective, an average Website uses less than 2gb of bandwidth and 75 mb of disk space a month.

Again, by using simple math, it is easy to see you can have 50 or more medium sized websites hosted under this plan. This is perfect for marketers who want to create multiple niche websites for affiliate marketing.

As you can see, shared hosting vs. reseller hosting doesn’t have to be confusing. As always, an educated marketer is an empowered marketer.

Several examples of black hat SEO include keyword stuffing, cloaking, and bait and switch page swapping.

Keyword stuffing is when keywords are overused on a page and make absolutely no sense to the reader. I’m sure you have come across this common black hat method numerous times in your surfing endeavors. These pages are easily identifiable by content filled with gibberish, but have one phrase being repeated over and over.

Cloaking is when a webpage shows different content to the search engine spiders, than it does to human visitors. An example would be a website that tells the search engine spiders it is information about a futon bed, but human visitors are shown the actual content which could be an adult site.

Bait and switch is the practice of getting a website ranked highly for certain content, then switching it to something that is entirely different.

It is a common misconception that only spammers and unethical marketers use these tactics. In fact, I know of a number of legit marketers who practice these techniques with regularity. This topic of course always calls into question the ethical boundaries of using black hat SEO. Is it unethical or is it a justified means to an end?

On one side of the fence, people will tell you that the search engines are stealing their content and using that information to make millions of dollars. They will argue that the search engines have no right to dictate how they market their websites.

Proponents of white hat SEO (using methods the search engines approve of) will argue that black hate SEO is unethical and just as bad as spamming.

However, as with spamming, black hate SEO can be very profitable, or no one would bother with it.

I have personally decided not to ever use black hat SEO, as the possibility of having my sites de-indexed by the major search engines is not worth the risks. I’ve found that if you use white hat SEO and give the search engines what they want, they will return the favor.

Deciding between black hat and white hat SEO is a dilemma all online marketers will face at some point. As with anything in life, it is a personal decision you must make alone, but be very cautious about weighing the risks if you do decide to do anything the search engines frown upon.