- Cut website hosting cost by switching to affordable web hosting provider. These days the cost of web hosting has dropped drastically. Companies like Chime Host are offering professional level web hosting for a low monthly price. Just because a website falls in a business category doesn’t give the reason to pay higher prices. If a business website only has 10 pages, there is no need to pay $30-$50 per month for web hosting. If a company website is growing, it can always be expanded by moving the site to virtual private server or a dedicated server. There is no need to start from dedicated server if the website is only few web pages.
- Use free providers like Ratepoint to allow customers to rate your service and at the same time communicate with them via email.
- Offer Live Chat Support on your website by using free software by Volusion and Livezilla.
- Use free e-commerce solution from Magento. Magento offers e-commerce solution with catalog and customer management, central administration over multiple storefronts, support for multiple currencies and languages, and strong reporting and analytics. When it comes to accepting online payments, more money can be saved by switching to online merchant providers like Paypal
- If the business ships products on daily basis, they should look into getting an account with the shipping company like USP, Fedex etc. Having an account will save time because all packages will be picked up from the store by the shipping company. This will allow the employees to focus on the work at hand instead of making trips to the shipping store.
- Market your website online for free. With the introduction of web 2.0 that includes everything from video sites, social bookmarking and article submission websites, you can market your website to potential customers for free. Sites that provide useful content will rank high in search engines and can bring tons of free traffic. Some of the example of top web 2.0 sites include Hubpages, Zimbio, Wikispaces, Wetpaint, Goarticle, EzineArticles etc. Furthermore, setting up an company account with Twitter and Facebook for business will help stay in touch with customers. If you have a product or service website, setting up an Youtube account with product demonstration or tutorials can help bring in traffic.
- Businesses should look into VOIP phone service or virtual phone system to save money on monthly phone bills. Unlike traditional phone service, virtual phone system relies on internet and offers a lower monthly rate. Most of the voip companies offer features like toll free number for business, fax, extensions for staff, voice mail etc. Some of the providers include Nextiva, Ring Central, Phone Power, VirtualPBX and eVoice
- Use openoffice for documents, spreadsheets and graphics. With Openoffice, businesses don’t have to pay for licenses and it comes with MS-Office compatibility. For free business documents, Docstoc is the ultimate source.
- Need a computer? – Look into budget pcs or buy used. Again, not every business needs to order top of the line products. Purchases should be made based on needs of the business. For example, if the employees are expected to do only excel, word processing, powerpoint etc, there is no need to pay $1500 for a new pc. Businesses should be looking at a price tag of $500 for performing basic computer tasks.
- Businesses should call and ask for lower price. Simply by picking up the phone and calling suppliers can end up saving a lot of money. New deals are being introduced on regular basis and many businesses won’t bother to contact their customers if they are lowering prices. Therefore, it is crucial to contact every company that you do business with and at least try. It won’t hurt anyone. One can also look for deals online by visiting sites like Craiglist and Google Product Search.
Hack Your Way To Top Of Google
Don’t ask me why but I was bored on the weekend and decided to see who was ranking in top ten for the keyword “web hosting”. At first, it was making all sense except for webspacehosting.com. I have never heard of them, so I decided to visit their site and look at their incoming links. I used Yahoo Site Explorer to get the list of sites that are linking to that web hosting company. As I was going through the source code, the links didn’t look natural and they were using “margin-left” attribute with a negative value. Basically the negative “margin-left” value places the link off screen, thus making it invisible to the website visitor but the link is visible to search engine spiders. Also, when I tried to look up whois information for the domain, I wasn’t surprised to see whois information protected. Most of the sites that are linking to webspacehosting.com are using DotNetNuke CMS and I am guessing some kind of exploit is being used to inject links in the source code. It’s possible these website are selling text links and they are hiding those text links. If that’s true, I just wasted all my time researching
What surprises me is Google is not able to detect this and it’s allowing sites to rank high for competitive word like “web hosting“.
Below I have listed five example sites with their source code. If you look at the source, you will notice that they all have negative “margin-left” value. I am not advising anyone to go out and do this for their website because I am sure search engines will eventually figure it out (Hopefully!!) and penalize those sites.
Update (March 17, 2010) – Added IP address and hosting provider name.
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http://www.bikecycleshop.com/
IP – 66.235.111.172
IP Whois – Sage Dot Corporation
<p><div style=”margin-left: -467px;”>Powered by Texas <a href=”http://webspacehosting.com”>web hosting</a></div></p></span></span>
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http://www.faseb.org/
IP – 216.185.5.75
IP Whois – Allied Telecom Group, LLC
<p><div style=”margin-left: -467px;”>Website is powered by <a href=”http://webspacehosting.com”>web hosting</a> ultimate services</div></p></span></div></div>
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http://www.aspenpitkin.com/
IP – 216.157.205.70
IP Whois – Artemis Solutions
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http://www.fountainhillschamber.com/
IP – 66.29.198.159
IP Whois – MaximumASP, LLC
<p><div style=”margin-left: -434px;”>Powered by <a href=”http://webspacehosting.com”>web hosting</a> services</div></p>
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http://www.haart.co.uk/
IP – 89.213.252.200
IP Whois – NetServices Plc
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I just want to make it clear that I am not saying webspacehosting.com is trying to cheat the system. It’s possible some other competition is trying to give them bad name.