Heart Internet are constantly bringing in new features and facilities to help with managing your websites and domain names and I have recently found out that Heart Internet provide a free web hosting service for those individuals and companies are in need of ways of reducing costs, which is ideal for small start up companies.

Unlike a number of other free web hosting services Heart Internet does not need you to purchase a domain, does not have any popups and the free web hosting account is allowed for commericial use.  In addition to this the Heart Internet free web hosting account has a decent amount of websites, mailboxes, FTP access but is a little lacking in the bandwidth and does not have any database support but there has to be some incentive to upgrade to a paid for package.

As well as low cost web hosting they also provide cheap domain names and although I have found certain domain names cheaper elsewhere, I like the ability to manage all of my domains centrally in my reseller account so a few extra pennies here and there is fine for me.  You can often transfer .co.uk domain names into your Heart Internet account for free and Heart Internet run other special offers from time to time meaning you can save a few pounds if you keep your eyes open.

Heart Internet have a couple of additional features I have not had the chance to try out yet but I am very interesting in, including:-

• An iPhone application to manage your account.
• HeartDrive – An online storage services with 10GB free space for Heart Internet customers but this can be increased to 100GB+ for a small fee.

All in all you are getting a lot of features for a very small price and Heart Internet is a service I would recommend to anyone looking to purchase a domain name or hosting.

For Totally FREE Hosting with No Pop-Ups, Commercial Use Permitted, No Purchase Necessary, Instant Activation from Heart Internet click the “Free Web Hosting” link in the footer.

Affiliate Marketing is basically referring someone to a product or service that you feel they would like to (and hopefully will) buy, and for each sale you generate you will receive a “finders fee” for finding the customer.

There are so many companies that use affiliate marketing including some big names such as Tesco, LoveFilm, Sky, Skype and many many more. I think a large proportion of companies which advertise on TV also use affiliate marketing as one of there advertising methods.

I’m sure that most websites would be able to earn income from affiliate marketing but you just have to think carefully about what and how you want to promote the products.

For example… if you run a golf club website you may wish to advertise a company who sells golf equipment or a website that offers discount round fees, or if your website sells chocolates when why not set up an affiliates with an online of offline card company to allow your customers to send birthday cards to the people they’re buying the chocolates for.

What I wouldn’t suggest (which is quite obvious) is to promote an affiliate that is in the same line of business as yourself! If you take the chocolates company for example, you wouldn’t advertise Thorntons on your website as there is the possibility of driving the customer through to Thorntons and you will most likely receive less on the commission than you would have if they ordered from you.

Whilst building this website I’ve used several affiliate networks, some have been more successful than others but all have provided commission based income which has helped to keep this website free for everyone to use. The main ones I tend to use are listed below:-

AffiliateFuture – A fantastic UK based affiliate network. It’s really simple to get started, enter your details, subscribe to the programmes offered by Merchants, add them to your site and start earning today. Also includes a voucher section with great discounts you can offer to your potential customers!

AffiliateWindow – Another fantastic UK based affiliate network providing you with access to over 700 retailers and with a great specials blog to keep your customers happy with the latest discounts and trials!

TradeDoubler – This one is a little harder to navigate but one you get comfortable with its quirks its quite a good affiliate network. Lots of big names and available for a many different countries so lots of potential here!

WebGains – Great affiliate network with lots of big name brands and with a fantastic blog which can be received via RSS. I find the RSS feed very convenient as I can be kept up-to-date with any special offers (which can then be offered on my websites) without needing to check back to the website.

Over the next few months I’ll put together a more comprehensive list of the affiliate networks available for you right here so check back soon!

An additional problem to this is ensuring that the traffic generated is “quality” traffic and many clients fail to distinguish between general, incentivized and quality traffic, although I believe each have their own uses.

Quality traffic is essentially visitors that are interested in your product or service and there is a chance they will purchase, sign up or refer it on to a friend or colleague. General traffic could of traffic from countries that you don’t offer your services to, and incentivized traffics comes from people clicking on links or adverts in order to complete some kind of offer and this type is generally frowned upon.

Visitors arriving to your website as a result of incentivized traffic usually don’t want your product but are just there to meet the minimum requirements in order to achieve the incentive they’ve been offered. An example of this may be a website which has a section stating “Help keep our site free by click on one of our sponsors”. The visitor is only click the ad in order to keep the services on the referring site free and results in your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign paying out for a useless click… another $0.10 down the drain and each $0.10 will soon add up and cost you considerable money… none of this is any good for you!

Incentivized traffic usually occurs (but is not limited to) PPC advertising where the visitor of referring site will receive some sort of commission for sending you the visitors. They don’t care if the visitor genuinely wants your product or not; just that they will be paid for sending you the visitor which will result in your advertising campaign basically pouring money down the drain!

In my opinion it would be better to get 100 quality visitors and month and get maybe half a dozen sales from that rather than 10,000 incentivized or irrelevant visitors a month and no sales at all.

I don’t condone incentivizing traffic and I take the opinion that this activity is essential a scam run by an online version of a con man and I can bet you each one will have their own way of trying to justify their actions. Although this may seem like extreme opinion the goal of a con man is to cheat you into parting with your money and isn’t incentivized traffic basically that!

However, I do believe that general traffic does have it place. Traffic originating from outside your target audience i.e. traffic from the US when the product is based in a UK market may not result in sales but it will help with your search engine ranking which in turn will increase the visitors from your target audience. Search engines not only take into consideration the contents of your websites, but also how many sites link back to your website and the higher quality the site the better. Although a link to your site from a personal website would count, it would be much more beneficial to get a link back from higher profile websites that attracts visitors from far and wide.

There as several methods you can try to increase the traffic to your website and to increase the chances of success I would advise employing several methods rather than just trying one. The methods you try will depend on the type of site you are running and the budget you have available.

Banner Exchange Programmes
Banner Exchange Programmes require you to place a piece of code on your website which will show banner advertisements for other sites. Usually you have very limited control over the type of adverts that are shown on your website or which site your advert is shown on. For example if you sign up to a US banner exchange programme and you’re UK based company then you’re advert is going to be shown to the wrong audience. For that reason I would suggest that you sign up to exchange programmes that are geared towards your target audience… a UK exchange programme if you’re a UK based company.

Another downside is that most work on a ratio basis, something like 4:3 so for every 4 adverts shown on your website your advert is shown 3 times and could be on any of the websites in the system. As most people who are trying banner exchange programmes are trying to get websites up and running this often means they don’t have enough visitors to make the best use of banner exchange programmes and are therefore wasting valuable space on their pages. I believe only sites with a reasonable visitor count can use banner exchange programmes effectively and therefore, as with many things in life, it is the people who are already better off that are benefiting and the little guy loses out.

If you wish to consider using banner exchange program please check out the sites listed below. Many offer high return ratio or initial credits which may help you to get your campaign kick started.

UK Banner Exchange – The UK’s Largest Advertising Exchange

Link Exchange Programmes
Link exchange programmes are very similar to banner exchange programmes except you are adding a hyperlink to your website rather than a banner. These are generally shown all the time on the other website (as is the link that you place on your website) but your link is often mixed in against lots of other links… often others that are maybe trying for the same audience you are which dilute the traffic getting through to your site.

In addition to this the site you are exchanging your link with often require you to have their link displayed quite prominently on your site and some even request that it be displayed on the homepage and ALL of them require you to place this link on your site before they will even consider your requested. As a result I would be very careful to monitor the sites that are supposed to be exchanging links with you to ensure that your link is actually displayed. If the link to your site is not live within say a week or 2 at most I would consider removing the link as you would essentially be providing them with free advertising. You may wish to contact the company prior to removing the link to see if you can resolve the matter first.

I’ve seen too many instances where someone has put up a link on their website using a link exchange and has forgotten about it and isn’t actually receiving a link back. This link then remains on their website for months, even years without further thought and is using up space on their website which could be used for a link exchange which actually provides them with new and genuine visitors.

Link Market – Free Link Exchange, Link Swap & Link Trade Directory

Autoclick
This is a type of incentivized traffic. Although there is no financial incentive someone using an autoclick system clocks up credits which can be used to show their site to other users of the autoclick system. This is not that great as the autoclick system can be minimised, hidden behind other applications, or left running when the user is not at the computer so although your website is getting traffic there is no-one actually there to view your site. I don’t know about you but I don’t find that very useful!

Google Adwords
One of the best advertising mediums I’ve used is Google Adwords. Although you have a financial investment as this is a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) system you can quickly build up quality traffic and often offset the cost by using Google Adsense (this will be discussed in a future article). It seems to be true what they say… “you have to spend money to make money” but as with any expense I would ensure you have thought it through thoroughly and stick to your limits.

The keywords you select are not set in stone so feel free to play around a bit. Pick some keywords that you feel suit your site and its contents and set up Google Adwords to use these and then after a few weeks, a month or so review them… see what works, bin what doesn’t and add in some new ones to replace the ones you’ve binned. As the keywords usage and number of sites bidding on the same keywords continuously changes I would suggest to keep repeating this process to ensure you have the best click through rate (CTR) possible for your site.

You can even get a free Google Adwords voucher from various websites which will allow you to try out the service for free. One site I know that offers you these vouchers is UK2. Just take out a hosting account with UK2 and you can get your free voucher to test drive Google Adwords and see what I can do for you!

UK2 – Get a free Google Adwords voucher when you take out one of their hosting packages!

Site Listing
Get your site listed in every directory you can think of… and then some! The more sites that you can get to link back to your site the better for your search engine rankings. This can include a variety of sites including search engines, directories listings and business portals… many of these offer free listings which will give you a simple listing, although you can consider their paid listings if you are interested in their premium services. Some of places I submit my sites to are listed below:-

Google Site Submission – Submit your site to Google
DMOZ – Open Directory Project
Hot Frog – Your UK Business Directory

Signatures
If you haven’t already then add a signature to your email messages which includes your company website and possibly a small phrase or slogan describing what services you offer. If you do that then every email you send is potential advertising. The same can be applied to forums and newsgroups but please pay attention to the rules and regulations of the forums & newsgroups as they may not allow signatures and your posts may be edited, removed or even you account suspended if you continue to violate their rules.

Networking & Offline Marketing
If you’ve done any sort of research into this you will probably have heard someone (or many people) mention networking. Word of mouth can be a powerful advertising medium and a recommendation in this manner can often receive far more weight than finding a listing in Google or some business directory.

Make the most of your stationary!… even if you are an online business only and don’t normally use business stationary. Every letter is a chance to advertise who you are so instead of printing a letter on a blank piece of paper why not print it on a page with your company letterhead, web address etc… it doesn’t matter if it’s a professionally designed letterhead or one created using clipart from Microsoft Word… it’s the fact that you’re advertising your company that matters!

If you’re paying for an item on eBay with a cheque then add a letter with your letterhead in along with the cheque, or a compliment slip, or simply just a business card… even if you buy from the same person multiple times you should always include a business card so that they become familiar with your company name and services and the more likely they will remember you when they do require your product or services.

Conclusions
These are all meant as helpful pointers and hopefully will help you to make an informed decision about how you wish to go about advertising your website. I hope you have found this article useful and I would appreciate any comments you may have. You can leave me your comments via our contact us page.

I my honest and blunt opinion… no! While I’m sure someone along the line is earning that income from the programme I’m also sure that 99% of people who use these programs end up of out pocket rather than rolling in money.

If you’ve been using the internet for a while you’ve probably come across a good few of these sites and they follow a general formula

• Title – Tells visitor how much they can earn using their system
• Proof it works – Screenshots of PayPal payment records or cheques
• Tell you what you could do with they money… buy a car, go on holiday
• Insist it’s not like all the others you’ve seen
• Tell you it’s 100% guaranteed
• And finally how much the program is going to cost!

Now looking at that list there I find that there is one major thing missing… what is it that you do? You know it’s a system but you’ve got no idea what the system is or what it is to do!

I don’t intend to tell you how you should go about trying to earn extra money but I’m hoping to help you avoid some of the pitfalls a lot of people get caught up in. When I see these sites there are a few red flags that go off in my head:-

• No indication of what the system is
• You need to pay for the programme
• The website itself – surely if the program is earning them $5000 a week then they can afford to pay someone to do a decent website
• and why are they willing to tell you all their secrets? You don’t see Microsoft or Apple giving away the secrets to their success!

A lot of the time you have to invest a lot of your time to earn enough from these programmes just to break even and that not even including paying yourself for the time involved.

In my opinion the best way to look at his is “Does it sound too good to be true?” If it does then it is probably true!

Within a split second any professional image you had built up in your mind about their company is destroyed and now all you can picture of some guy invoicing you for 6 hours work for a job that should have taken just 1 and being overcharged for inferior products. All that because they opted to use a free email account rather than paying a few pounds a year to have their own domain name.

With the cost of domain names these days there is no need to bring down the impression of your company by using free email account and even getting a basic web page developed doesn’t cost a fortune.

With domain name registrations available from only a few pounds and website design services available from companies like UK2, UKHost4u and Namesco, getting a basic, informative website and a good company image is more affordable than you may realise!

To make choosing your domain and hosting provider a bit easier I have created a list of some of the popular domain and hosting providers and you can find this listed below. If there is a provider you is not listed here but you feel it should be then please let me know!

My advice would be to visit each site to see what they can offer you as UKHost4u is currently offering a free domain name if you pay for the whole year in one go rather than paying monthly, but UK2 is offering a discount on hosting if you pay 2 years in one go. By spending a little time shopping around you could find a deal which would save you a good few extra pounds.

It may also be worth noting that you do not have to stick with the same company for both the domain and the hosting so you can mix and match i.e. purchase your domain from UK2 and your hosting from UKHost4u but please bear in mind that the website builder is dependant on who you choose for your hosting service.

Please note that all prices are stated per year and some companies may include VAT on top of these prices.