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29 Apr 11 How to Promote Your Reseller Web Hosting Plans

Many of web hosting resellers find it difficult to break into the big leagues of web hosting companies. They feel selling reseller or normal web hosting plan is tricky, and no one will be interested in buying from them because they wrongly think they do not have the required budget to compete with the big guns.

To bust this promotion myth, in this article, I am going to talk about three places where one can promote one’s web hosting reseller accounts.

Web hosting forums

Meaningful discussions in web hosting forums pull a significant numbers of visitors, some of which, after seeing your offers converts into customers.

You need to participate in 4-5 top forums, and visit each one of them regularly so that you can build credibility in the market. And always remember to not ever do blatant promotion. It often gets neglected and it may result in banning.

Add your plans to web hosting directories

Regardless of what they say, vertical directories (niche specific directories) works wonder – sometimes directly, while at others indirectly by boosting your search ranking.

Choose a handful of high-PR web hosting directories and submit your website into each one of them. Provide as much details as possible. Make sure you have filled each column properly.

Start web hosting channel on YouTube

YouTube is the second largest search engine on the web, and in many ways it has replaced article consumption. Now more and more people watch instructional as well as educational videos, and you do not need to be a Hollywood film producer or director to produce or create such video. For that, all you need is a basic consumer camera, PowerPoint, screen recorder, and a headphone.

You will not even need PowerPoint and screen capture software, if all you need to do is talking. Create a YouTube channel, deliver good content, and optimizing it for discoverability.

Start will these three things now, and see the result. In the next article, I will give you some more tips on promoting your web hosting reseller accounts.

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07 Jun 09 The War of the Search Engines

Once there was AltaVista and then came Google, and everything changed. From the way we perform search on the Internet to the way search engine index pages. It also changed the way marketer used the Internet to market their products. The new wave of search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) showed the marketer the real value of virtual real estate. The rush to acquire the first two slots of the search engine result pages (SERPs) kicked off.

Since Google, many attempts were made to change the course of the Internet search industry the way Google did, but despite the industry analysts, and self-proclaimed web gurus promulgations nothing happened. Google kept growing larger and larger, heavier and heavier. The David itself has now become Goliath.

Many blue-eyed entrepreneurs launched their dream projects to disrupt the flow, and cut Google down to size, but nothing happened. Some time back, couple of employees left Google and launched Cuil, it was one of the most ambitious launch since Google.  The search engine looked good. SERP was interesting, but not the content of SERP. This baby came and gone without disturbing the peace.

People even tried several spin-offs, from verticalization to localization to search result aggregation but nothing worked. Search result aggregators like Scour even started offering reward point to use its services, and that made people try Scour. Even I used Scour for many days. My motivation was not entirely point earning, I was interested in much more. I was interested in participation. Despite, what I wanted and what the search aggregator wanted, I switched back to Google, and like me many did.

The war is heating up again. MSN, the third largest search engine, has launched it new, improved search engine Bing. MSN is betting its future in the industry on this new search engine. Bing looks promising. The search results are similar to that of Google’s. Bing is far better than the Google Squared, the new search engine from Google. With Google Squared, Google is trying to flank the attack led towards its home page, but Google Squared lacks the vitality to scare off the new entrants. Google need a relook at the weapon it is using for flanking.

Google needs not only worry about Bing, which appears as an improved version of Google, but it also needs to be watchful of Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha boasts about its power to churn out hard facts and objective data. The search engine is going to be the new Google for data mining, and other kinds of research. A search for your name may not fetch any result in Wolfram Alpha, but a search for an objective data like GDP of a certain country, Dollar exchange rate, weight of moon, depth of Atlantic Ocean, etc. will fetch you the result you were looking for. It will not waste your time as Google does when searching for similar data.

New entrants like Bing and Wolfram Alpha are going to give Google many sleepless nights. For Google, these are the competition worth fighting with. Wolfram Alpha with its power to provide hard facts and objective data, in my view, is going to take away a sizeable portion of Google’s search traffic. People who use Google for hard fact will shift their focus towards Wolfram Alpha. As far as Bing is concerned, it looks just like Google (a me-too) with a better result. Hence, I will not bet my Dollars on Bing.

Tags: Aggregators, Disturbing The Peace, Dream Projects, , Google Engine, , , Index Pages, Industry Analysts, , Search Engine Index, Search Engine Result, Search Engines Google, , Search Industry, , Spin Offs, Time Back, , Web Gurus