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.

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.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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?

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.

Have you bought a tutorial product that was totally crap in your eyes?

Did you try out a service that was top notch but the support was very dismal?

Was the design service you used an excellent investment?

…that’s exactly what you can tell everyone!

Your experiences are valuable to other people, especially those providing the experience (product, service, etc.). We want people to come to the website in order to find out what other people are saying…before blowing their money.

Register for free, create listings and write reviews. www.MarketingCheckpoint.com

There’s also a nice community feature including groups, walls, messages, profile area, “friends”, and forum. It will continue to grow – if you’re smart, you can get free traffic from it by participating!

Enjoy.

~Matt

Could you do me a favor and give me some feedback on our website?

Kosh Enterprises

Do you find it hard to navigate? Easy? User-friendly?

Thanks!

There seems to be some phenomenon that people believe website/blog visitors are ignorant or stupid. Manipulating the number of people that appear to be following your blog posts so that you look “Cool” and popular is disgusting. In this Internet marketing industry we’ve had trouble with new people in the industry getting ripped off. The notion that making yourself more popular is unethical and should not be condoned. Do you think it’s OK because you haven’t got caught? Here’s some news for you, it’s really not hard to figure out if you’re “cheating” the numbers. Have you ever been on a website, “viewed the source” of the page and checked out the code? That’s all it really takes to expose those faking their popularity and “coolness” as Alejandro put it.

That lead to Alejandro discussing the “Fake it ’til you make it” strategy which I brought up to him during his video cast tonight. You see, there are “fakers” and there are those who act the part – a big difference! Donald Trump probably didn’t lie, cheat, make-up stories, or just tell people want they wanted to hear when he was starting his business. Did he act like he was a professional? Probably. Was he making the right steps to appear to have lots of experience? Most likely. Did he learn, read and study other business professionals to understand what to do? Chances are, yes!

When you’re starting out a business the last thing to do is lie, be dishonest, cheat, and make-up stories. It is one thing to sell yourself but it’s another thing to tell people what they want to hear so they’ll listen to you. Imagine if you lied to get 1000 subscribers to your newsletter and then all of a sudden 500 of them figured out you made up a story about your success. What do you think would happen? I’d bet money that news would spread faster than a flash flood…and on the Internet it would be nearly impossible to reverse.

Case in point, be careful what tactics you take to appear as a “big wig” in this industry, especially on the Internet. When you tell people things that aren’t true which is purely to gain their trust and belief, you’re making a big mistake. Nobody likes a liar, at least anyone with decency.

What baffles me is the lack of guilt. If I were to fake something for popularity sake (and especially get caught) I’d feel extremely guilt, broken, torn, and I know it would hurt my integrity…even if nobody explicitly said it. Is it just me or is this truly a sign of lack of respect?

Before I say it, until today, I actually hadn’t integrated any social bookmarking tools – hypocratical? Not quite.

If you look at the bottom of this post you will see about 15 little icons under “Bookmarks“. The icons have dramatically increased in numbers and for good reason. You see, social bookmarking is a way to let your readers “bookmark” a page which may be on a specific topic such as how to properly change a car tire. Think it’s a little overkill? Think again.

You see, having a flow of visitors is one thing but having return visitors is also important. What better way to keep visitors coming back than to give them the easy tools of bookmarking what specific content/page they want directly on their favorite sites. I’m sure that sounded a bit confusing but let me clarify.

I’m going to use Facebook and MattKoshko.com as examples.

A reader who enjoys an article on my blog may want to share it with others and/or save the location of that post. The reader may use a variety of websites such as Google, Yahoo and Facebook. Then the reader sees the ability to quickly click on the Facebook icon at the bottom of the post and in a matter of seconds, that link is added to their Facebook account. Now, the reader can quickly access the specific blog post through their Facebook account whenever they want to refer back.

Sounds good, right? Check this out. If the reader decided to make their Social Bookmarks public, all of their contacts (given they “all” have permission) can also access that Bookmark link. And, in fact, if their profile is public, then anyone can access the link as well! Do you see how you can get traffic from this now?

Imagine if 10 people Bookmarked a post from your blog every month…and that’s only 10!

If you haven’t already done so, you should seriously consider adding Social Bookmarking capabilities to your blog.