Read my posts. Lead/list building is very important to maintaining AND growing your business. Each day I am building my list without physically doing the work to do so. Don’t believe me? Think that’s not possible? Hear me out.

When you build a website that allows people to download, purchase, read, access or use a service/information, you’ve set yourself up for a great list building process. The difference is whether or not you’ve created an incentive for those people to share your website, such as a sale commission. The easiest way to get your website growing on a daily basis is by allowing other people to share it as well, giving them value back for their efforts.

Depending on how you’ve built your website, this may be a challenge. One simple way to build in a “referral” system is by adding a field to your signup/registration form that lets people add the name of who sent them to the website. Of course this would be a very manual process to track…but it provides a simple integration of incentivizing your customers/members.

Lead generation is important. If you’re not doing it every day, you need to as an affiliate and/or network marketer. Contact me if you need help and I’ll assist in any way I can.

Simply put, to have a website on the internet (viewable by the public) you need to have website hosting. There are dozens and dozens of hosting companies I could list out here for you but that would not help you. Instead I’d like to take the opportunity to briefly discuss why free or “cheap” hosting is anti-success.

Yes, I just said “anti-success”. There comes a point in your entrepreneur life when you realize that cutting costs in areas is a poor decision – web hosting is one of them. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you need to spend $300 a month for dedicated hosting but if you’re not willing to invest a SMALL cost per month to keep your website public and online, it’s not worth your time and effort.

People will tell you “You should use so-and-so for your website hosting because they are cheap and good”. Sorry, but this is NOT a reason to use “so-and-so”. If you have a budget for website hosting that’s understandable so long as you keep in mind spending $6 per month is reasonable (for shared servers).

I’m not here to tell you what to do or who’s best. You can do your own research and find a website hosting company you’re comfortable with, along with a cost.

Here are the facts:

1:  Stay away from free hosting.

• You get very little
• It’s not going to allow you to expand without costs
• There’s no “real” guarantee
• Chances are you’ll get very little support from the company
• Feature wise, you’ll be lucky to get half of the standard features
• They have no obligation to you – you’ve paid them nothing, why would they?

2:  Always go with Paid Hosting

• Average costs can start as little as $3 per month to $20 per month for shared hosting
• Dozens if not hundreds of companies to choose from
• Usually 24/7/365 support – that’s what you want anyway
• Can be scalable – if you grow, they’ll grow with you
• Lots of great server features for your websites
• Some offer unlimited domains/websites on one account
• They have a commitment to you – you’re a PAYING customer

The point of the matter is if you cut corners by going cheap/free, expect to get what you pay for…

I’ll be posting more about this subject soon. Set yourself up for growth because if you don’t in the beginning you’ll probably run into issues later on.

Yesterday, May 28th, I heard about Google Wave. When I first saw the name (unaware of what it was) my initial reaction was “Another Google service – they’re doing everything!”. Let’s get one thing clear, I think Google has an amazing creative team and ingenious ideas but it’s a bit scary to see them getting into so many services – they’re like Miscrosoft, except more clever and better at being evil (I mean that in a nice way, I think).

Anyway, back on subject.

As my recent post shows, Twitter and Facebook have been gaining some serious momentum. They’re both steadily growing now, stomping on Myspace quickly. The unique communication method that Twitter is about is captivating. Millions now use Twitter and it will continue to grow. Facebook has made some serious changes/improvements over the past couple years that has helped skyrocket its popularity, hence being a bigger catch than Myspace. On top of that, Google has a slew of services that are excellent such as Gmail, document sharing and of course Youtube.

The recent silent display of Google Wave looks quite impressive and eye-catching. It combines the most popular service and social networks with the power of Google’s sharing (documents, youtube, etc..) to one place.

Could this damage Facebook, Twitter, AIM, Yahoo IM, Myspace, and others? I would not be surprised if they are all starting to shake in their pants. This is a POWERFUL communication tool which brings nearly ALL of the tools to one place…

Personally I’m pumped about it, despite not using Google services too much, yet at the same time I’m a little scared. Google seems to have absorbed the idea of having their foot in practically everything. Is that a good thing? If you ask me, I definitely say “I think they’re very creative but they need to relax!”.

What are your thoughts?

It isn’t surprising news to say that Facebook has been growing rapidly over the last several months. When they first started out with just a college audience the growth potential was in the millions of users – thousands of colleges and all you needed was a college email address to register on the site (basically). Today it has grown into a mega social network as it is open to the public allowing young teens and up to join.

Before we had Facebook, Myspace was the the only major social network that existed (in it’s field). There were many small competitors but nobody could touch Myspace at the time. Now, it’s a different ball game all together.

Looking at the below chart we see three dominate players; Facebook, Myspace and Twitter. All three are in the top websites in the world and compete with one another. Though, despite the success of Myspace, things are changing. They are losing the battle. Twitter and Facebook are rising while Myspace is slowly declining over the past year.

You can see that Twitter is just starting to gain a curve like Facebook but only over the past couple months. This is expected since it has only recently gained serious attention. Major news networks, newspapers, celebrities and even politicians are using Twitter to connect with their audiences.