A2 Hosting unveiled new Virtual Private Server hosting packages yesterday. VPS hosting is perfect for those who need more hosting capability then what is offered with shared hosting, but can’t quite afford or need all the services that come with a dedicated hosting account. To visualize what a VPS server is like, imagine taking a full web server and partitioning it off into smaller, separate servers that act almost as a dedicated server themselves. With shared hosting, everyone on the server can impact the actions of one another, which doesn’t happen with VPS hosting because each person has their own partition.

A2 Hosting VPS accounts are powered by OpenVZ, which is a platform that ensures that the space allocated to you is always available. Instead of a cPanel control panel, VPS accounts come with HyperVM.

With our Value VPS Package, customers get all of the following and more for just $14.95 a month when you sign up for a year.

128 MB Dedicated RAM (256 MB Burstable)

5 GB Disk Space

100 GB Monthly Transfer

1 IP Address*

CPU Share: 1x

 And as always with A2 Hosting … FREE Setup!

One of the first things that I do each morning is check the Google analytic statistics for both this blog as well as A2 Hosting. The three main items that I pay the most attention to are the amount of hits received each day, specific websites that are referring traffic to both sites and what the keywords are that web surfers are using to reach these sites. One of the A2 Hosting keywords that has slowly risen the charts is webdav hosting. A2 Hosting is actually ranked number 2 under this keyword within Google. I decided it was about time to do a little research regarding webdav hosting as I am not well versed in the topic. I will try my best to explain it from a non-technical perspective which is this blog’s calling card.

WebDAV stands for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning. Don’t worry, that sounds like a lot of gibberish to me as well, so we will stick with calling it WebDAV. The goal of WebDAV is to make the World Wide Web a medium that can be edited by being both readable and writable. The purpose is to make easy creation and editing of documents on web servers as well as making those documents accessible from anywhere.

WebDAV can be viewed as a variation of FTP, but has certain advantages over FTP. An example is that it allows multiple transfers over a single connection as opposed to FTP which only allows one transfer at a time. It is also more secure because of the encryption capabilities.

For those of you that are interested in WebDAV hosting, it is certainly supported via the cPanel log in that A2 Hosting clients use.

One of the coolest affiliate programs on the web, besides A2 Hosting’s of course, has to be Café Press. Many of us are familiar with CafePress.com, but not too many are aware of the innovative business plan that this website employs.

When I look at Café Press’ business plan, it comes down to the loads of innovative pop culture memorabilia that they carry. When Andrew Meyer got tasered at a University of Florida John Kerry forum, it didn’t take long at all for the DTMB (Don’t Tase Me Bro) memorabilia to hit the metaphorical Café Press stand. The same can be said about I Love Famous People T-shirts that popped up after Jake Byrd crashed the OJ Simpson press conference.

So who is the brain behind Café Press’ memorabilia? Anybody and everybody. That’s right, Café Press is actually one gigantic affiliate program that allows anybody to upload their designs and in return receive a commission based on the designs that they sell. Even more, Café Press will even give you a free page to put those designs on, so the upstart cost is $0. I love free promotion, so I made an A2 Hosting CafePress store. Now everybody can sport apparel from their favorite web hosting company. I am always a fan of the A2 Hosting ringer T, but you should probably get something for the kids for Christmas. I suggest the A2 Hosting teddy bear.

One of the best ways to promote your website or business is by sending out regular newsletters from email addresses that you collect from your visitors on your website. Since your current customers and visitors already know who you are, it is a lot easier to convert them into a sale as opposed to people who are unaware of who you are. Ezines are a good opportunity to send out company news, new products, special deals etc. One of the most difficult tasks is coming up with content for those newsletters time and time again. The first few newsletters are generally easy to generate content for because there is probably a lot to be said. After those few newsletters, the content ideas may begin to sputter.

Luckily there are tons of sites on the web that have free ezine articles that allow you to use their content in your ezine. Now you won’t have to struggle to create content that readers will find tedious. Why would a site want you to use their content for free? Technically, the content on the ezine article sites is not original content. It is submitted by anyone who wants to submit an article, in exchange for a link back to the author’s website. With articles being submitted left and right, the ezine sites quickly become a large resource for information, which ultimately helps the ezine site to skyrocket in search engine rankings. Ezine sites also place ads on their site, making them quite profitable.

In an effort to promote A2 Hosting and this blog, I submitted some articles to various ezine sites. I just got notice today that one of them was accepted by the largest Ezine Site on the web called EzineArticles.com. My article named Getting Lots of Clicks - No Affiliate Sales - How To Increase Your Conversion Rate can be seen here.

Here is this week’s forum post:

If you don’t want to take our word that you will be absolutely happy with A2 Hosting’s web hosting services, listen to what our customers have to say about us.

November 6th, 2007
”In all of my years of experience with hosting (and medium-large service providers in general) I rarely came across such excellent and prompt service such as yours! Just know that I’m “selling” you to anyone who asks me about hosting, and giving you as a good example for service both to people I meet and to my employees.”

October 19th, 2007
”I just wanted to say that I was very impressed by the service and response time that Frank E gave me in Live Help a few minutes ago - I was comparing and contrasting your services with those of a few other hosts, and Frank’s knowledgeable answers and willingness to help me sealed the deal! I’ll be an A2 Hosting customer shortly.”

We have plenty of happy customers and this is a sample of just two of them. To give you an extra incentive to use our hosting services, use the coupon code a2forumhost07 and save 15% off all web hosting services. This coupon expires 12/31/07.

I’ll admit it. I’m a bit of a hypocrite. In one of my posts named 10 Easy Free Way to Promote & Optimize Your Site, one of my tips was going to be the following:

Make sure to name your URLs appropriately. If you have a page about kittens, don’t name the page /topic1. This means nothing to the search engines and more importantly it means nothing to your readers. Instead name the page /kittens so that the URL will appear something like www.Awesomesite.com/kittens as opposed to this www.Awesomesite.com/topic1. Not only does this help you with your search ranking, but it also adds to the usability of your website.

The reason that I didn’t include this in my Top 10 list was because I honestly couldn’t figure out how to change the URLs for each individual post. Instead of my “About
Adventures In Hosting” URL looking the way it does now as http://adventuresinhosting.com/about_adventures_in_hosting/ (cool) it looked like this adventuresinhosting.com/?page_id=2. (not cool). That’s how all of my links used to look. This is a problem because such a link means nothing to you or the search engines. I was fairly ashamed by this actually because that’s how all the links on this blog were formatted as.

Each time I tried to change the permalinks or add a plugin to change the appearance, the blog would get broken. Finally, I asked one of my fellow A2 Hosting employees for help. I know that this isn’t fair since I’m supposed to be just like you and not know how to create a blog, but you have me to help you so let’s call it even. Follow the instructions below and you too will be able to create search engine savvy permalinks for your Wordpress blog.

1.) Download this plugin and install it in the wp-content/plugins directory for your blog.

2.) Log into your Wordpress admin area and activate this plugin by selecting Plugin in the top menu and pressing Activate next to the plugin named “Permalink Redirect” under Action.

3.) Select Options and then Permalinks in the menu. Select the Custom option and paste in /%postname%/ into the text box. Click Update Permalink Structure.

All of the URLs on your page will now be named after the title of the post or the page.

When making personal referrals to A2 Hosting via the affiliate program, Please make sure the referral is a new customer, with a new account for each referral. Also, please refrain from self referrals.

To explain the reasoning behind this policy, I wanted to use a hairdresser with an offline affiliate program as an example. The hairdresser gives customers $10 for each new customer that they refer. Let’s say that one of those customers refers someone that already has seen the hairdresser before. This isn’t helping to build the hairdresser’s clientele list. The hairdresser also doesn’t benefit from paying a $10 referral free each time a customer refers themselves to the hairdresser.

We pride ourselves on paying a 300% commission because of the new business that you, our affiliates refer and are very appreciative of the work that you do. We feel as though paying 300% of the first month’s sales negates the need for a recurring commission.

If you have any questions, comments, concerns or hate mail regarding this policy, I am more then happy to address those with you.

A2 Hosting Featured Reseller Coupon

With A2 Hosting reseller packages, you can setup client accounts instantly at your own convenience as well as make your own custom packages all under the ease of use with cPanel. So we ask you, are you ready to become a web hosting provider, manage clients with ease through our advanced control panel, and develop your own business with the assistance of an industry leader, A2 Hosting?

If not, maybe a coupon code will give you the boost you will need. Sign up for any package, including our impressive reseller hosting, use the coupon code (only for forum users) and save 15% off all web hosting services. This coupon expires 12/31/07.

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I think that anyone associated with affiliate marketing would agree, getting that first sale is definitely a boost to any affiliate’s psyche. However, there are some affiliates that receive a ton of clicks to their website, have made a sale here and there, but have such a poor click-through rate that they want to quit affiliate marketing altogether. I have some advice for people with such a problem. My first bit of advice is…Don’t Quit. My second word of advice is to read further on.

I have always told affiliates to evaluate their website as if it were a magazine. Not many people can afford to publish their own personal magazine but that doesn’t mean that just because the ease of entry into a website is a lot easier than a magazine that you are going to get readers. Take a step back when evaluating your own website. Would you read your own website if you weren’t the creator/writer of it? I see many affiliate sites that are pages and pages of just banner ads. I can only sit and ask myself what is that affiliate thinking? I don’t approve any sites like this into our program and I hope that I am not in the minority because those sites certainly do not add any benefit to the web. An affiliate site should not be 95% ads and 5% content. This formula should be switched. A site should be 5% ads and 95% content. The ads should be a nice accent to your content. Ads shouldn’t be your site’s content.

In my experience, successful affiliate sites contain three very basic characteristics. They stick to a specific interesting niche, they have useful content and they have unique content. For example, if you want to create a sports site, I wouldn’t suggest creating one that covers every sport and every team unless you have the writers to be able to cover all these topics correctly. Pick a specific team that you want to focus on or a specific city. This takes care of the interesting niche characteristic. Secondly, make sure to offer your expertise on the matter. Don’t merely post scores or paste an article that was written in the local newspaper. People are going to look on ESPN.com or in the local newspaper for this information. Instead, give your own opinion of the game, what went right, what went wrong, what needs improvement etc. This takes care of both of the useful and unique content characteristics.

This brings me back to the original topic of receiving a ton of clicks to a site but having a low conversion rate. If you have taken care of creating a site that sticks to a specific interesting niche, has useful content and has unique content, you are bound to get traffic to your website, but it doesn’t mean that you are going to have a good conversion rate.

How do you improve your conversion rate? Presell. Presell. Presell. This is an extreme case, but think of those late night infomercials. They make you want to purchase something that you normally would just walk by in the aisle of a store without a second thought. How do they do this? By making it sound like the product is a MUST buy. You need to convince your readers that they need to purchase a rotisserie that will cook an entire chicken in 5 minutes, so that it is the moistest chicken that they have ever eaten. In other words, telling someone to click a link for the purpose of clicking a link is not going to do the trick. Why are they clicking that link? What is there? Why is it so great? Your readers should know this information before it is clicked. Make sure that they don’t walk right by that product on the aisle.

Here is a great preselling job of A2 Hosting by 43 Folders. He is telling you that he is a client of A2 Hosting and is extremely happy with the service, explains what A2 Hosting is, gives a coupon code as an incentive to visit and eventually purchase and gives a great explanation of what you should look for once you are on A2 Hosting’s website. If you are looking for an example of the quintessential presell, look no further.

According to the latest Alexa Rankings, A2 Hosting is the 664^th most visited site in the country of Guam. This is a heartfelt thank you to the 173,456 residents of Guam for stopping by!