Hosting a site or hosting your own blog is a critical thing to do to generate more leads.

Many marketing people don’t understand that website hosting of just one company website, or getting a free blog, is not enough.

In fact, a better variety of ways website visitors might land on your site the better your Internet marketing will do. If your websites have good information, are beneficial and help your visitor, your website sales and site referrals will improve.

This article is about different site hosting options that are in line with any level of costs in your budget. This article will cover free website hosting, low cost site hosting, premium website hosting and we will cover why you should choose one of these options.

Keep in mind no matter which hosting option you pick to host with, if you have not launched a blog or site before, you could try it by yourself, but if it is not an activity you will keep doing regularly, then you should pay people or hire a web design firm. It will cost more money but it will free you up to focus on what you are good at. Many web designers can create a free CMS site very fast when you just are looking for the minimum to get started.

There are basic things new online marketers should know about contracting consulting with open source solutions and also hosting options .

Software that is open source is in some version freely available and hosting, if required, should be nearly free. I could be cliche and comment that you will get what you pay for, but that is not exactly fair. Open source software is usually excellent, but finding an experienced expert that can install it for you and make it possible for you to customize it is not free. Unless you are related to a technology person, you are going to need to pay for some guidance and you must not assume it should be cheap just given that it was open source and free.

Also, website hosting can be very affordable. You can set up a set of dedicated servers and pay $2,000 in an average month in hosting when you need your own servers. What is the difference? One difference is sharing. Your cheap hosting will be on a machine that is shared with a lot of people. It will go down more frequently and if you obtain a sudden burst of traffic, it will slow down and maybe stop.

But consider this, when you only have an average site and normal website visitors, there is nothing wrong with this very cheap hosting solution. Just do’t forget you should be certain you make a backup of your website given that these hosting businesses are probably not making backups of your site.

Low Cost Domains – It is critical to realize that registering a domain for a website can cost a little or a lot, depending on where you register the domain name. I use a cheaper registrar for domains you can visit at Outstanda Hosting. True they have hosting as well, I typically select the hosting at BlueHost. Bluehost costs more for domain registration though. So if you are comfortable pointing domains in one place to servers on other servers, this is the cheapest way to set things up. You just set up the domain name server to the Bluehost Name Server and it will be easy.

Doteasy – free web hosting – I had a representative email me about Dot Easy and the opportunity seems like it could help some people. You can do up to 10 sites for free on their site – which is a great offer. One place they make this money back up is in the higher cost of registering a domain. If you do plan to host no more than ten websites, this really could be the best hosting company for you.

Bluehost – Low Cost Hosting – My sites have been hosted by Bluehost for a long time and the low cost of hosting 100+ sites is a bargain. Of course, Bluehost has the an occasional outage. But they have been good and addressed issues when appropriate.

For high end hosting use Rackspace Cloud Hosting. Rackspace Cloud will cost you about 10 times inexpensive shared hosting but they have very good support, bandwidth that is scalable and the sites you set up are on multiple servers, which can mean minimal outages and less risk of data loss.

There are lots of companies to host. You will want to compare hosting packages and consider the features. Some hosting companies will give you a free 6 page starter website, but these are often just to get you started as a customer and they are not worth much. Take some time to figure out what your future website needs will be and choose the best website hosting package for you.

I know that a lot of people that read this either have books out that they have written or they want to write a book.  Promoting a book is not easy.  While I consider it easy to sell a few hundred books, I also consider it hard to sell a lot of books and make a best sellers list.  This is one area that quality and understanding your market is critical.  Quality is not necessarily the quality of your prose, but the books ability to entertain, inspire or enhance the life of the reader.  And you cannot do that for everyone – which is why you need to understand your market and what they want.

Chris Brogan has a good post on new media and marketing for books.  I often tell authors they need a blog, but his point with this is how people want to interact with an author that they enjoy.  It is a different angle.

What is obvious from his post is that you really need to approach writing like a career choice, not as a one hit jackpot.  Chances are you are an unknown author and you do not have a big following one the web or in real life.  You first need to start building that following right away.

Then you need to produce a book people genuinely like and the word of mouth will help you build a bigger following.  If you keep repeating this cycle of book publishing and book promoting – and building your fan base, you could end up with a respectable career as an author.  But that is not an easy road to go down for most people that give up when they see their first book fail to take off.

The truth is, the more you do something the better you get at it usually.  (Assuming you are trying to improve on past efforts)

These are things to consider.  It probably seems obvious as you read it, but how many of us authors approach it like a career choice?

I would love to say that I have never lost a customer.  However, with hundreds of customers over the years, we have obviously lost some.  Usually it is just a matter of wanting to try something new.  In one case recently, we were generating leads for a company but when the sales person that was getting the leads left, the company decided not to continue because they were “changing strategy”.

I perfectly understand and I keep in touch with past companies in most cases, because often we can get them back or they provide referrals to others in the future.

Here are reasons people might come back or refer people to you in the future:

1. Grass is not always greener.  Sometimes they find out the hard way and want to work with you again.
2. Timing – Sometimes they will be ready to use your product or service again in the future when some other factors change.
3. Cost – maybe if you offer a sale later on, they may want to work with you again at the sale price.
4. Loved your work but forced to move in another direction – still happy to refer you.
5. Outgrew your product or service – or decided to do it in house.  You could still end up with future consulting, opportunities or referrals.

It is usually not fun to find out you lost a client, but assess the future possibilities and keep a friendly relationship with them and you might find future work with them.

Lately I have been hiring more and more people that are very different from me.  I love technology, writing, SEO and marketing.  When I look at most small business owners, I think many of them are held back because they can easily hire people like them (a similar skill set) but they are very bad at hiring someone that is different from them.

I failed miserably the first few times I hired sales people.  This was many years ago, but I spent a lot of time hiring sales people and they never produced sales.  I actually gave up for a little while until a very successful Uncle told me, “Well, you just have to keep trying.”  Sage advice, let me tell you.  A light bulb went on for me, not just in regards to hiring sales people but in general.  You do not have many choices in life.

You can:

1. Keep trying – but learn from failures
2. Keep trying and hope to get lucky
3. Give up
4. Give up but move to something that is a better use of your skills and time.

In both cases, there is a good and bad “keep trying” and a good and bad “quitting.”

For the first time I have built a really good nucleus of a sales team that looks like it is going to grow fast and be very successful.  This time I read books, talked to people and committed to keep building it despite the certain setbacks that would come along.  I also found very talented people to help me that have a proven track record.

If you are hiring sales people and you are a small business, I hope this is helpful.  I wish I would have read it years ago, but then who would have wrote it?

I recently talked to someone I have known for a while and he told me about a recent project.  It is interesting because this person has made a lot of money in Internet Marketing and knows what he is talking about.

What is most interesting about this is how he is so different than the average person I work with.  Frequently, the people I work with ask my why they are not getting big results yet.  Then we look at what they are doing and they have written a few blog posts and not done anything else.  The biggest problem in Internet Marketing is giving up too quickly.

Now back to this person I was talking to.  He understands Internet Marketing and he has made a lot of money with it.  So he decided to build and monetize a coupon website – even though he knew the competition is fierce and it would take a long time.

He told me he had 3 full time employees trained in SEO work on it for 2 full years and now it is really doing well for him.  (He did not disclose the numbers, so I am not holding anything back)

That even seems excessive to me – but it makes perfect sense.  He does not just want to be competitive in the niche, he wants to dominate it.

What is shocking to me is the difference in the Internet Marketing Attitude between someone that has experienced success and someone that has invested a few hours and wonders why it is not working.  I have a restaurant client, for example, that we help with Internet Marketing.  After about three months they started getting good results, and eventually decided it was worth while to hire a writer to write regularly.  They started skeptical and ended up hiring a restaurant blogger – think about that transformation.

You have to have the right Internet Marketing Attitude.  You have to know what success looks like.  You have to measure progress and you have to not give up too quickly.