When your site or application grows beyond what can be supported with shared or even VPS hosting, perhaps it’s time to look for a dedicated server. Countless companies provide dedicated hosting, and the features of their offerings can be difficult to untangle. In this week’s article, Khurram guides us through ten different entry-level plans and points out their pros and cons to help you make an informed decision.

2010-01-29T00:37:24+00:00

The theory behind the Six Degrees of Separation is that all people on earth can be connected together in as little as six steps.
The concept was made fun in the 1990’s, with the creation of The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (oracleofbacon.org) – which is a website that documents how nearly all actors in Hollywood can be connected to Kevin Bacon through no more than six people. I played with the site earlier today and the Hollywood actors and actresses I tested all connected to Kevin Bacon in only two steps… That was interesting. Even Lucille Ball connected to Kevin Bacon in only two steps.
Now, I know what you might be thinking at this juncture… That sounds fun and interesting, but what does that have to do with Internet Marketing?
Great question.
Undertakers and Wedding Planners know something that most people do not realize. With a few exceptions like Michael Jackson and Billy Mayes, most people will only have up to 300 people attend their wake or wedding. As a result, the average undertaker and wedding planner will only bring 300 chairs to the festivities.
That’s neat… But what does this have to do with Internet Marketing?
Great question.
If you really have 300 friends and you can tell them about your business, and your 300 friends share your business message with their 300 friends, then in very short order, you will have communicated your business’ sales message to 90,000 people!

I am constantly amazed by the number of people I meet on the web who have absolutely no marketing strategy whatsoever behind their site or online marketing.
I am even more amazed by the number of people who believe all they have to do is buy a domain, slap a few HTML pages together and place them on a web host somewhere. Then they expect everything else to just happen because their site or business is on the web!
It very rarely happens that way.
Creating an online business takes some planning and strategy if you want your site or business to succeed. You must have a plan of action, but most of all, you must have some fundamental marketing strategies behind your online site.
Now, I am speaking from experience here, because I also stumbled around on the web for 2 or 3 years like the people I described above. I foolishly thought just because I had a web site, I could do business on the web.
Well, not very much happened. I received very little traffic and very few sales. My site was going nowhere fast.
Fortunately, the theme I chose for my first site was Internet Marketing! I spent those first years studying all the online marketing material and information I could get my hands on. I gradually learned what to do and what not to do when it came to marketing online.
Mostly, I stumbled across some great Internet marketers like Marlon Sanders, Neil Shearing, Ken Evoy… true pioneers of online marketing. By studying those first class marketers and their marketing techniques I learned how it was all done.

Internet marketers using article marketing as a traffic building strategy have a new tool in their arsenal. GoArticles.com, one of the Net’s largest article directories, has joined forces with Content Crooner.
12/23/09 (Castro Valley, CA)— Combine the distribution reach and power of a leading article distribution platform with the credibility and readership of one of the Net’s largest article directories, and what do you get?
More exposure, in all the right places, according to Kenneth Vogt, CEO of Content Crooner.
“GoArticles is the perfect partner for us in this venture,” explains Vogt. “Our authors are looking for widespread syndication, which we provide with our article distribution service. They also want deep exposure into particular niches, which is exactly what GoArticles offers through this new feature placement.”
The partnership allows Content Crooner’s clients to not only post their articles into the GoArticles.com directory at no cost, but to purchase additional feature placement in specific categories. This feature placement puts their articles front and center to the site’s visitors who are looking for fresh content on specific topics.

Cutting Rank: Improper Domain Name Redirects
Let’s face it, compiling a list of this type is always subjective. Trying to figure out what to include and what to leave off can have you second-guessing yourself, more than a few times.
But in the end, being only human, you do the best you can, and let the readers judge for themselves. Anyway, I present to you my listing of “The 10 Biggest SEO Myths Exposed.”
1. Search Engine Optimization will put you on the first page of Google.
This is without question the biggest SEO myth floating around the Internet today. Here’s the truth: SEO is a tool – nothing more. And any tool is only as good as the person using it. That’s why some people have success with SEO, and others don’t.
Can SEO help get your website on Google’s first page? If the person doing the optimizing is competent, sure, it can help. But it’s far from guaranteed.
Here’s why: There are far too many variables that are involved in the ranking of a website – not the least of which are the age of the domain, relevancy and quantity of quantity of content, number and quality of inbound links, competition, and of course Google’s ever-changing algorithms.
2. Getting on the first page of Google will guarantee your success.
This is false. Let me tell you something: Getting on the first page of Google guarantees absolutely nothing!

Have you upgraded to a new computer and are wondering how you can transfer your Dreamweaver website files and site definition from
your old system to the new? This article
shows you how you can do it in a quick and easy way, without losing any work and without having to redo anything.

Today we’re unleashing the final installment of our three-part Flex Data Visualization tutorial series. In part I, author Toby Tremayne showed you how to build the back-end to generate a dataset from the SitePoint forums. Part II saw us building a data visualization in flex, to show how often the keywords are used in forum threads. We also got to play around with the oh-so-cool SpringGraph library.
In part III, we’ll show you how to add another dimension to the data and refactor the code so that it’s better structured and more equipped to meet best-practice standards.
By the time you’ve finished working through this third installment, you’ll have yourself a nice data visualization that comprises relative popularity, relationships, and keywords relationship strengths.
Of course no SitePoint tutorial would be complete without one of our quizzes, so be sure to check how good your memory is after you’ve read the article.
Have fun, and good luck!

Having worked with a large number of small business owners, one common mistake I see over and over again is the obscene amounts of money they throw away on advertising. Many of them believe the more money they spend, the more business it will bring.
WRONG!!! WRONG!!! WRONG!!!
The main reason traditional marketing doesn’t work is the small business owner doesn’t really know much about marketing, and relies on the salesman of the marketing media to tell them what they need. The problem is they use the “trust me” method which is: “Give me your money, I’ll run your ad and trust me; the leads/money will come rolling in”. But they seldom do.
So what’s a new entrepreneur to do?
It’s simple!!! Write articles.
Writing articles is an excellent way for you to get free publicity. Getting an article published is free and some publications even pay for your contributions. The publicity you receive by having your article published in a newspaper, magazine or website can be worth thousands of dollars in equivalent advertising space. Well written articles yield better results than advertisements and earn you respect from customers, who see you as an expert in your field.
So what exactly is an article???

Speculation in the search industry is rife this week with claims that Google Search Personalization has changed the SEO playing field. But has it really? Or are people freaking out for no good reason? To find out, we’ll look at how it impacts SEO in the negative and positive. But first, let’s have a quick refresher on how Personalized Search works.
What is Personalized Search?
For the past few years, Google has been monitoring what you search for when logged into your Google account and in particular, what sites you click on in the SERPs. If you favor particular sites, Google takes note and customizes future searches to show you more results featuring your favorite sites, more often and in higher positions.
For example, if you like t-shirt shopping online and are a regular visitor to Threadless as a result of logged in Google searches, Google would feature pages from Threadless more in the SERPs you see for t-shirt related search queries than would normally be featured in SERPs shown to others for the same search queries. Likewise, pages from Threadless would be pushed higher up the search results than they would normally be.
Personalized Search has been in place for signed-in users for years, but this month Google rolled out personalized search to users worldwide, whether they are signed in to a Google account or not.

One of my all-time favorite tv shows is The Twilight Zone. I particularly like Rod Serling’s memorable opening narration:
“There is a sixth dimension, beyond that which is known to newbies. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, and it lies between the pit of newbies gullibility and the sunlight of their naiveté. This is the dimension of smoke and mirrors. It is a dimension known as SEO Scams and Newbies Realm of Gullibility.”
Okay, so I took a little poetic license with Mr. Serling’s classic narration. But I did it to make a point, and the point is, everyday thousands of naive and gullible newbies are targeted, and ripped-off by common SEO scams – mostly scams that have been around since the advent of the Internet. You may even have been a victim yourself.
The question is, why do these seemingly obvious scams continue to thrive year after year after year? My guess is, because most of the victims are newbies who have entered the newbies realm of gullibility.
Hopefully, this article will prevent other newbies from entering this undesirable realm, and being unnecessarily victimized. Anyway, following are some of the most common SEO scams:
1. E-Mail Solicitations