For those of you who have realised that having several websites, each with a different topic is a really great way to earn extra income, you will have realised that hosting is rather expensive. If you usually pay a fixed monthly fee for your website, and getting another website means getting a second hosting package, then you will know how expensive this can get. But how do you avoid this, and keep your costs down when it comes to hosting? Easy.. get your own web server. Isn’t that expensive or hard to do? Not at all.

Hostgator is a wonderful company, which offers hosting packages used for reselling. This basically means that for a small monthly amount you can buy plenty of space and bandwidth, and host plenty of websites all in one hosting area. Hostgator offer three packages, which I will list below:

1. Shared Hosting @ $6.95/month
2. Reseller Hosting @ $24.95/month
3. Dedicated Hosting @ $174.95/month

A Shared Hosting account is a good start, but I would personally go for the Reseller Hosting account, as it has a good number of features on top of the Shared Hosting account, which is extremely useful. I have been using Hostgator for almost a year already, and have had no problem as of yet, and am not worried about having any problems for that matter. They have live support via the Website which makes it really easy to get advice when you are stuck!

Head on over to the website and have a read for yourself!

Top Ten Blogvertise Results

Check out Blogvertise, and list yourself!

I was just over at Live Alchemy reading a very interesting post about effective adverts. I contacted Andrew to ask whether it would be alright for me to post his article here, and just a few minutes later, I received confirmation. Thank-you Andrew.

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Here are two ads that we have been running on Google Adwords. Guess which one receives more clicks:

The .COM advert has been viewed 125 times, and nobody has clicked on it. The .CO.ZA advert has been viewed 73 times, and 4 people have clicked on it. The only difference is in the URL at the bottom - one displays YuppieChef.com, and one displays YuppieChef.co.za (both addresses go to the same place).

200 people is not a huge test-group, but if the trend continues it raises an interesting question about what our branding and marketing strategy should be. Until now we have been pushing the .com version of YuppieChef because we feel it looks more professional and allows us to expand internationally in time. However, for now our market is entirely South African, and this little test seems to suggest that South Africans would rather visit a .co.za website if they are looking for stuff to buy. Perhaps they have been disappointed too many times after looking at a lovely international website and then finding that delivery to South Africa is not available or too expensive.

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I found this article extremely interesting, and it actually added to something I was thinking about the other day. With this huge web interesting in South Africa at the moment, there is definitely an increase in supporting local websites. I must admit, I would have clicked on the .co.za advert above as well. I commented on Andrews blog saying that I would assume it has to do with one of two things:

1. Readers feel that visiting a local website is more ‘reachable’, in other words, if there was something to purchase or the need to contact the person authoring the advert arrival website, it would be far easier than an international comparison.
2. Bandwidth reasons, we all know the costs involved with South African bandwidth, and if an account has been soft capped, local websites are still an option.

I will do a follow up with Live Alchemy, to find out whether they have more information in a couple weeks, and report back here with the results. Thanks again Andrew, for letting me post your article.

I have recently been spending some time looking into various methods that bloggers can use to increase the awareness of their blog. There are a number of ways, which this can be done. I have been focusing mainly around increasing traffic with your current traffic though. The simplest way is to set up some kind of referral form, where your readers can email an article they enjoyed to a friend, this is a highly effective method. Another way is to offers users a badge, which they can copy and paste onto their website. I prefer the referral system, as it’s a very direct form of marketing.

I spent some time looking into this method, taking note of the pros and cons, and I came up with one magor area of interest - Users don’t want to do things, which involve page refreshes. There is nothing worse than filling out a form, or taking part in a poll, and waiting for a page to reload after submitting the form. I feel that the thought of waiting for a page reload is enough to totally discourage someone from using a service. This is where a little ajax, some html and some php come in really handy. The ability to perform a task, and have that task handled behind the scenes is invaluable to anyone who runs a blog. As a programmer, these kinds of things interest me from a programming point of view, and I took some time to read about ajax, and managed to put together a nice little emailer item.

The program consists of three files, this is for user simplicity, in case you are interested in downloading the program and want to be able to easily adapt it to your website. If you are familiar with programming, I am sure you will quickly be able to compile it all together into one neat file.

emailer.php - This file consists of some very simplistic html tags to create a form with 3 elements, a javascript include statement, and javascript function call and a <div> success message class.

backend.php - This is a standard, straight forward php mailer script. It is very simplistic, feel free to adapt it. This file, you will need to open in notepad, for example, and change accordingly, to suite your needs. I have included some easy instructions to guide you.

ajax.js - The Ajax handler file, which processes the functions behind the scenes. I am not going to go into detail as to how this file works exactly, as that is not what this blog is about. If you are interested in programming, I’m sure you will be able to easily figure out what is going on, and if you are not interested, and just want to use the code, you don’t need to worry about this file.

If you are keen to use this little source code snippet in a website, which you currently author, this is what you must do:

1. Upload the three files to your webserver
2. Type <?php include(’emailer.php’); ?> in your .php file where you want to have the form appear

It’s really as simple as that. I hope you enjoy the snippet, I would have loved to go into detail as to how the whole thing works, but that is not what this blog is about, so perhaps another time. Please feel free to email me though, if you have any questions.

Download Webtrepreneur Ajax Emailer.