Gregory's Online Business Blog

I've updated the list of inexpensive Web hosting for $10 or less.

What's Out:

• Dreamhost - I've been a Dreamhost customer for over 7 years. They were fantastic for the first 5 years or so, but the service has gotten slower and slower over the years. I can no longer recommend it with a clear conscience.

What's In:

• HostNine - I've been hearing more great things about this plucky little Web hosting company. Fast servers and a very cheap $3.95 starting price make for a winning combination.

Also check out these helpful articles when you're shopping for Web hosting:

• How to Find the Best Web Hosting
• Seven Levels of Web Hosting
• 7 Reliable VPS (Virtual Private Server) Web Hosting Providers

Teamwork Project Manager is a Web based project management tool designed for freelancers and small teams doing client work.

Because it is a hosted service, you don't have to install anything on your own server. You can start using the service within 5 minutes (and without a credit card).

Best of all, there is a fully-featured, free-forever plan that lets you test drive the service. The free plan allows up to 2 active projects and 5 Mb of file storage. For some consultancies, two active projects is enough, and they may never have to upgrade to a paid plan.

Bottom Line: Teamwork PM is a great alternative to Basecamp. It has more features and a friendlier pricing structure (more pricing levels means you can slowly ramp up to the plan that fits your current needs).

Read the full review of Teamwork Project Manager

This week in online business: eBay reduces fees associated with fixed-price listings. It's rare that we get to report about eBay lowering fees, but they did this week!

This week's roundup links to 18 awesome resources, including:

• Blogging Lessons From The Daily Show's Jon Stewart
• Is Google finally integrating AdSense data into Analytics? Rumors abound. There are even screenshots!
• Six Ways to Get Instant Links to Your Website
• Free Legal Documents for Raising Funding for Your Startup
• ... and a dozen other useful links!

If you have a tip for next week's roundup, email me at onlinebusiness.guide@about.com. Thanks!

Read more...

How can I rank higher in search engines?

That's a question I hear often. I also hear a lot of questionable answers being offered in response.

Because Google and other search engines don't publish their methodology for ordering search results, there are a lot of theories floating around on how websites can improve their search rankings. Some are sound; some may actually hurt your rankings.

SEOmoz, a leading consultancy and website dedicated to SEO, has asked the top 37 search engine professionals what were the most important factors that affect a website's search rankings. Thanks to this survey, we have a list of the top 10 factors we should be focusing on when we optimize our websites for search engines.

The full results of the survey is fascinating, but lacks practical application tips. In this article, I explain the top 10 factors in easy-to-understand terms and offer a few tips for applying it to your online business.

Read it: How to rank higher in search engines? Top 10 Search Ranking Factors

This article comes from guest expert and Web designer Naomi Niles of Intuitive Designs.

As a Web designer, she knows what it takes to have the most pleasant, best resulting Web design process. It all boils down to good collaboration between designer and client.

In this article, Naomi walks through the three phases of a Web design project, and offer tips for maximizing your designer each step of the way.

Continue reading: How to Get the Best Out of Your Web Designer

While I was at the BlogHer conference in San Francisco, I got a chance to talk to Camille Wright, bookkeeping consultant to small businesses. Her firm, Wright Solution, teaches small business owners how to keep track of their finances and get a better picture of how their companies are doing.

She said three things that really struck me:

1. Most small businesses (especially sole proprietors) have no idea how their business is doing financially because they don't have well maintained books.
   
   
2. Many users of financial software, like Quickbooks, are not fully utilizing the power of modern day accounting software.
   
   
3. Intuit has a ton of different versions of their Quickbooks (business accounting) and Quicken (personal finance) software. There's probably a version specifically for your company profile.

After the conference, Camille graciously answered a few more questions about small business accounting.

Read the interview: 13 Questions for a QuickBooks Expert

Part 2 of Scott Fox's series on do-it-yourself SEO is now live.

To finish off the series, Scott offers 6 tips for using keywords wisely on your site. He also writes about two dangers to watch out for.

Continue reading: Top 11+2 SEO Practices You Can Do Yourself (Part 2: Using Search Keywords)

Despite lots of hype by SEO consultants, the basics of search engine optimization are actually pretty straightforward. In this guest article, Internet Riches author Scott Fox recommends against hiring SEO consultants until you have tried the DIY strategies for improving search engine rankings in this article.

DIY SEO not only saves you money, it makes you a smarter web marketer.

Continue reading: Top 11+2 SEO Practices You Can Do Yourself (Part 1: Building Links and SEO Friendly Design)

Social news websites like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon are a force to be reckoned with on the Web. Having your website featured on one of these sites can send massive amounts of traffic.

These are 3 key features of a social news site:

1. Users submit links to interesting content around the Web. Could be articles, pictures, videos, etc.
2. Other users vote on stories, usually via a +/- voting widget. StumbleUpon uses a browser plugin that integrates voting with your normal Web surfing.
3. Top rated submissions (those that get the most votes, fastest) are featured on a "popular" page or the homepage.

Getting linked from the "popular" page of a social news site can bring upwards of 50,000+ page views in just 24 hours. But lots of traffic is just the beginning of the benefits of social media marketing.

Continue Reading: Six Reasons Why You Should Care About Social News

Cuil, pronounced "cool", is a search engine that made its debut last Monday to much hype.

The early assessment from around the Web is that Cuil is nowhere near as useful as Google, so maybe it wasn't worth all that hype. A lot of tech bloggers were quite disappointed. But still, checking out these new search engines is interesting because it gives us a glimpse of what might be in store for us in the future.

My initial impression: Cuil still has a long way to go

One thing you immediately notice about Cuil is a the sleek black background. Very anti-Google.

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