If your suspends your account for bandwidth overage you need to find a new provider.

Its hardly a unique occurance, but I ran into a link on Digg the other day that was resolving to a hostgator suspension page. What a terrible way to waste all those viewers over a couple of dollars.

Hell, what a terrible way for a host to send a message “stay away from us.” When I got slashdotted a few years back my host, who was just a reseller, had me slap a banner up the page, and that was that. It didn’t even cost me an extra penny.

Don’t know what your host would do if 100,000 uniques hit your site tommorow? Send them an e-mail and ask.

Here is my tip of the day for picking companies to do business with. This can apply to just about any company providing you with a service.

So, lets say you have compiled a list of web hosting companies based on suggestions from your friends. Who do you go with?

Come up with a few questions, and write them down. Pull up the contact information for all of the hosts and then send them the exact same message. Wait a day or two. Then take a look at who responded immediately, quickly, or not at all. The ones that didn’t respond — cross them out of the list. Look a little more closely at the quickest reponders. They may not have the best prices, or even the most experience, but when you’ve got a problem, they’ll be on top of it.

If everything else looks good, go with them.

Over the past month or so I’ve run in to stories of several people making an absolute killing from selling assets in online games and virtual worlds. Several affiliate marketers have even raised the question, “how can we make money off this?”

Lets first classify the two distinct “games” that are money makers for third parties. The first type is the MMORPG - Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Game. This includes popular games such as World of Warcraft, Everquest (1 & 2), Ultima Online, and a very long list of wanna-be’s. The second type of “game” is the virtual world which does not really involve any game play at all. The market leader here is Second Life. The entire game basically involves building new 3D objects and talking to people.

So is this just a fluke or is there really a lot of money to be made brokering virtual property online? Today the largest online game, World of Warcraft, has 6.5 million players. Curiously, the most hyped online world, Second Life, comparitively has around 70,000 (according to MMOGChart.com — “official” stats contradict this.)

Currently online role playing games, such as World of Warcraft, provide the largest opportunities for internet entrepreneurs. The main market here is selling in game currency (gold or credits) and items (such as weapons, armour, etc.)

There are many pitfulls to farming and selling virtual items. eBay recently issued a blanket ban for virtual items (with some exceptions made.)

With uncharted and dangerous territory comes windfall profits. There are various stories being thrown around about online developers and gold farmers raking in millions of dollar over the years. Thats enough money to be serious about.

Much like blackhat search engine optimization, those in a position to benefit the most are programmers who can identify loopholes and exploits in the system. However, if you have the starting capital and drive to succeed, you can profit from this massive emerging market too.

As a publisher there is money in it for you too! Gold sellers are paying top dollar for traffic. Just do a search on Google for “world of warcraft gold” and you’ll see the competition both in PPC and organic listings.

Here is an idea — take a look at mmorpg.com’s listing of upcoming games, and start building the pages and backlinks for sites now. You don’t really know what games will boom or flop, so following one game may not pay off, you need to follow them all.

I like digging for things. And by digging I mean seeking information. Over turning stones and figuring out how things really work.

Let me tell you a little story. Early on in my web publishing “career” I became very interested in the companies advertising on my sites. Why? Not only was that where my money was coming from, I knew they were paying Google perhaps double what I was recieving! Yes, this quest threw me off track from content site publishing. However, during the process I learned about e-mail newsletters, PPC ad buying, affiliate marketing, branding, and a whole hell of a lot more.

It is very important, no matter what industry you are in, to dig into the businesses around you. If you are reading this blog, you probably know a lot about SEO already. Imagine all of the web site owners who really don’t know about SEO nor have bothered to figure out how or why their visitors find their site(s). Yes, there are a lot of them out there.

Heavy marketing campaigns and lots of forum talk can skew your knowledge base towards very competative areas. How often have you seen affiliate links or ads to SEO tools? There are many elements of business that just don’t get mentioned in the popular blogs. Make a legitimate attempt to bridge knowledge gaps in the under reported areas of the web publishing industry: conversion rates, e-mail marketing, the law, lead generation, to name a few.

Learning is costly. It takes time away from your business and, without the right match of assets and skills, newly gained knowledge may prove worthless. The most profitable path to learning is learning about the things immediately surrounding your business. If you already have a website with thousands of daily visitors, its not to difficult to launch a successful e-mail newsletter, forum, blog and so on. If you don’t look into these new opportunities you are under-utilizing your assets.

Two years ago, I didn’t really know much about blogs. I didn’t read any blogs, I didn’t care to make one. Publishers were complaining that blogs were dominating too much of Google’s SERPs. That wasn’t a problem, that was an opportunity. I started a couple of blogs, and here I am today.

In a rapidly evolving and changing industry, learning, or digging for new knowledge, is a necessity to your long term survival.

Most of what you have read about web design is wrong. The majority of mainstream designers are too obsessed with their own artistic vision or how w3c compliant their competitor’s code is to understand what parts of design really do matter.

Yes, when you are building landing pages or entire web sites — design does matter. The question is, what is helping you and what is hurting?

Make visitors eyes lock on whats important. Forget making your sites look “professional” or visually appealing. If you fail to direct the visitors attention in the correct place, you are going to kill your conversion rates — be it affiliate links or Adsense PPC ads.

How do you do this? By making appropriate use of color, contrast, and distance (see the links below for more info, more posts here are coming soon.) Every single design element on your site matters. Each element has an interaction and influence with the rest. The biggest mistake of design is placing user interest on something that doesn’t really matter. Ugliness, thats at the bottom of the list.

The less “noise” you have surrounding your point of action, the better. Your visitors have come to each page on your site for a reason. (If you don’t know why, your keyword referal data is going to give you a precise answer.) The more exact your page can deliver that reason in its entirety, the less design matters, good, bad, ugly, pretty.

So what is the reason that ugly sites work? Its because they don’t have all of that distracting artistic noise. A web site is not a painting, it is not a work of art — it is a machine. It absolutely must be functional. Yes, Lamborghinis and Ferraris are damn good looking cars, but the outward the design helps the machine functions, its not there to get in the way.

You can have a beautiful site that is designed well, if you understand the core principles of design.

So when people make fun of Myspace or Plentyoffish for looking like crap, understand that its not a random occurance — its because they delivered exactly what the visitors came for, without the noise. Google’s front page follows this same principle — Yahoo’s, absolutely not.

If you’ve been working for weeks or months on your logo and layout, forget it. Thats not what is going to make you the money. Its time to focus on what is.

For years Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool has been the most recommended site to use when seeking related key words and key phrases for search engine optimization. Other paid services have come along including Wordtracker, KeywordDiscovery, and Wordze.

In the very beginning I did some dumb things. One of them was taking the Overture data at face value. Although its possible to make money building a straight-forward content site with articles based off of 100 results Overture returns, its damn inefficient.

Overture itself is very easily manipulated. Once I built a website from a keyword with blatently overly inflated results (think 1,000,000+) today Overture shows only 25,000 searches a month.

How about the other tools like Wordtracker? These guys don’t have Google or Yahoo’s data. Instead, they have a small sampling of searches from a meta-search engine or somewhere else. The tool then has to guess how many real searches are made a day. To top it all off, I suspect the data skews hard toward certain demographics while missing other groups completely. (Who do you know that doesn’t use Google, Yahoo, or MSN?)

If you plan on dumping a lot of time and resources into a website based off of overture data, forget it. You want real data? Run a PPC campaign on Google. Yes, if the niche is competitive it could cost you an arm or two. The fact is, unless AOL has another leakage, this is as good as it gets. You will see a real number every day for the actual searches for your keyphrase.

Keyword tools are not worthless. However, what it does mean is you should use them for keyword discovery, not for figuring out what the best keywords to focus on are. A few bloggers prematurely announced the death of the Overture tool giving alternatives free publicity. Right now I am also using Wordze.com. Its only $35 a month, which is really quite a deal considering I’ve found it more useful than the more expensive Wordtracker (which is currently $54 on a monthly basis.)

Here are a few implementation suggestions about mining for search data with PPC. First, turn off the content network. You don’t care about it right now, although it can give you a good indication how saturdated the niche will be for Adsense. Second, use exact match by putting key phrases in brackets [like this.] If you choose to use broad match (just the key phrases by themselves) then log all of your search data. Broad search data will give you an inside peak of what related keywords and phrases Google may be using for their latent semantic indexing.

So, is this expansive? You bet, expect to spend at least a couple hundred dollars for a single test, perhaps even thousands. Hmm, makes $250 for a years subscription to Wordtracker sound dirt cheap. If you want to build more effective sites you need real data; that data is not free.

With all that is said on blogs, forums, articles, and beyond, how does an internet business person seperate fact from fiction? With so many conflicting interests resulting in exagerated testimonials and intentional disinformation, discovering new truths can be like walking through a minefield. Sure, it may not kill you, but you bet you can go off track wasting months or even a year doing the wrong thing.

There is one solution. After you read, you must test.

This is much easier said than done. Testing requires time and significant effort. Some concepts are a lot harder to test than others. However, dismissing ideas outright in your own mind, before doing real testing, is probably the one thing preventing you from increasing your income by leaps and bounds.

I believe gut feelings come from personal experience. That personal experience, in business, comes from testing new concepts and ideas. The ability to make rapid, and accurate, decisions probably isn’t going to come from books.

Testing does another thing that words often fail to convey — show power. Ever encounter an idea on paper that sounded warm and fuzzy, but resulted in you making absolutely no money at all? If you took me back even 2 years, showed me a list of business concepts, and said rank these by profits — I would probably get it completely wrong.

Finally, understand that each individual can harness ideas in their own way. Each of us possess different strengths and weaknesses. Really good advice may be useless if you have no means to put it into action. Just the same, a piece of “useless” advice, heck something that one person completely made up, can make a person with the right assets a lot of money.

At the end of the day, the BS artist may be right and the genius wrong. But you will never know if you don’t test.

Just saw this story on Reuters. I’m not much of a hardware person, but these stories interest me.

“The Web infrastructure, and even Google’s (infrastructure) doesn’t scale. It’s not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect,” Vincent Dureau, Google’s head of TV technology, said at the Cable Europe Congress.”

I try to avoid making the this blog my personal bitching platform, but… does anyone else work 7 days a week? One of the most annoying things for me is trying to do business with people and companies who don’t.

If I set up a PPC campaign Friday night, I want it running then, not Tuesday morning!

Understandably, it is hard, and expensive, to have a company operating not only 7 days a week, but also 24 hours a day. Continuous operation has turned into a necessity rather than a convenience thanks to globalization. Highly competative businesses of the 21st century will understand this.

Its about time!!! From eNom’s website –

“As an eNom reseller, RegisterFly is contractually bound to adhere to certain standards of customer service in a speedy and diligent manner. Despite our warnings, RegisterFly has elected not to abide by the agreed standards as outlined in their eNom reseller agreement. Effective March 9th, RegisterFly will be terminated as an eNom reseller.”

A lot of people are pushing hard to have Registerfly’s ICANN credentials pulled as well. These jokers don’t belong in business.