I have two shared hosting accounts – one with Host Gator and the other with HostICan.  I have never had issues with either one until today when HostICan fell off the grid.  Hopefully the issue will be resolved here shortly, but I obviously won’t be making any money from those sites during this time.  This is frustrating, but it also reinforces a decision I made in January to spread my sites across multiple accounts.

There are many things that fall out of your control with affiliate marketing.  Google could penalize your websites, you could lose important data without having a backup, and of course…your hosting company could let you down.  The last two instances can’t be entirely prevented, but they can be controlled.  In the case of hosting, a simple shared account is typically less than $10 a month.  This makes it incredibly affordable to protect yourself from losing valuable uptime if something goes wrong.  When you start to get cheap with things like this you set yourself up for disaster.

If you try a lot different niches like I do then you know how quickly your portfolio of websites can grow.  I will often publish a simple site, do some basic promotion, and then let it sit to see if I get any conversions.  Depending on how much effort I put into a project, it might lay dormant for three or four months before I come back to it.  In the meantime I am building new sites in other niches.  Before I know it, I have ten sites loaded into my hosting account.  This would create a big problem if they all went down at the same time.

My current benchmark for websites per account is ten.  After that I either sell the duds or let just delete the domain (rare).  Once I have ten good ones going it is time to expand to another hosting account.  I recommend this strategy to anyone who wants to avoid losing all your sales when technical problems occur.  It may only take five minutes for your host to fix the issue, but in the meantime your customers are buying from someone else :0

BTW – I strongly recommend Host Gator (especially after today).  I have used both their online chat support and telephone support.  Both times they fixed my problems in less than an hour.  I think they cost a buck or two more per month than other companies, but I will gladly pay this small premium for their proven customer support.

Download it at:  http://www.quityourdayjob.com/hpam2007/

You’ll immediately notice the email submission form, but scroll down a little further for the direct download link.

Thanks to Jeremy Palmer (author and webmaster) for putting this together.

Before you head off to the site to make your purchase, stop by Google and enter “go daddy”.  The results will display a GoDaddy ad in the first sponsored listing at the top of the page.  The ad should read “$6.95 Domain Name with Email Free #1 Overall Best”.

Just click on the link and voila! – you have the best discount GD offers.  I have been using this method for some time now so I don’t see it going away anytime soon.  Enjoy!

But to accomplish the task of building a site with some search engine presence I am going to need some help.  Thus I have decided to try using GetAFreelancer.com to outsource some of the tasks.  Initially I will use them for things like bulk content, link building, directory submission, etc.  These types of things take forever to do, and there is no sense devoting my time to them only to find out later that a product or site doesn’t convert.

I don’t mind putting in the initial effort for launching something new.  It tends to be exciting to check your stats and see if you have hit a home run.  The problem is that it usually takes a few months before you can accurately gauge if a project is going to be strong or not.  So to me it makes more sense to bust my butt and crank out a new concept and then let someone else go through the leg work of promoting it.  If it works…then you can invest more energy.  If it doesn’t…then you lost out on your time, but hopefully you can let it simmer and generate at least a few sales.

Now that i am making some steady (although paltry) money, I feel more confident investing in freelance services.  I figure if I invest about $200 into each new site I will generate enough traction to get ranked well in the search engines.  From there I can measure how successful a project will be.  Worst case scenario, I will gain a domain name with a solid foundation that I can resell if I want.

I posted my first job on GAF today for building links to one of my new sites.  If every thing works out, then I should be able to increase the my productivity and (hopefully) my earnings.  Since I always aim for long-term, SEO-orientated results, striking gold on even one site will pay for multiple experiements in the future. 

We’ll see how it goes!

I found a free tool today on http://www.benjaminmaker.com/that helps streamline this process.  He calls it “GTrends Made Easy” and it is a free software app that calculates both the Google search volume and number of page results for a specific word.  You do have to supply your own list, but you can make this pretty easily with Google’s keyword tool.

Definitely check it out if you spend as much time as I do staring at keyword possibilities.

http://www.benjaminmaker.com/gtrends-made-easy/