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Enjoy  our ultimate server package – customize and configure your own Dedicated Server. Simply choose one of our popular plans or select your own Linux or Windows server and plan options. No long waits – your server is provisioned within hours. 2ndPeter.Com Web Hosting makes it easy!

Why Dedicated Servers

• Admin access: Install and run virtually anything on the server
• Manage multiple Web sites: Host multiple Web sites on one server account
• Versatility: A dedicated server/virtual dedicated server can be used for a wide variety of purposes, including gaming, virtual (i.e., shared) hosting, and hosting of traffic-intensive Web sites

Unlike normal hosting plans, which put many customers’ accounts on a single server, a dedicated server is reserved exclusively for the account and usage of a single customer. This means that the dedicated server customer has exclusive rights to their server’s bandwidth, memory, and storage space, and performance is not affected by traffic and the usage patterns of other customers.

When you purchase a dedicated server, you are actually leasing a server box that is configured and set up according to your preferences, but remains at our data center. A dedicated server account provides you with a dedicated IP address and full control of server usage and software installation, with admin (root) access to the server.

You can use a dedicated server for a wide variety of purposes, including gaming servers, database management, and traffic-intensive Web sites. Dedicated servers are particularly useful for companies and individuals who run very-high-traffic Web sites or applications and who need the bandwidth, versatility, and consistent performance of a dedicated box.

To learn more, visit our Dedicated Server Hosting Page.

Requires constant monitoring; consider being both merchant and affiliate

Andy Newlin works for Sierratradingpost.com, in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Sierra Trading Post is an ecommerce merchant that sells outdoor gear and clothing, and Newlin is its Online Marketing Manager. He oversees the affiliate marketing efforts of the site.

“Most any online merchant can utilize affiliate marketing,” says Newlin. “We’ve been using it for five years, and we are absolutely pleased with the results. It enables us to create partnerships with niche, high-traffic websites around the globe, and the results have been outstanding. We view these affiliate websites as strong business partners that together comprise a commission-only sales force. We have thousands of these affiliate partnerships.”

What is affiliate marketing?

Newlin’s analogy of a “commission-only sales force” may be the best way to describe affiliate marketing. Say a merchant, we’ll call her Sue, has an ecommerce site that sells gardening supplies. Say Sue’s friend, we’ll call him Bob, has a website that sells plant seeds. Sue strikes a deal with Bob. Sue asks him to place a banner ad on his site that promotes her gardening supplies. Bob does this, and links this banner ad to Sue’s site, and Sue pays Bob 20% of every sale that he generates from his customers who (a) click on the banner ad, and (b) purchase an item from her site. The arrangement makes sense because his visitors have an interest in plant seeds and she sells gardening supplies. It’s logical that folks interested in purchasing plant seeds may also be interesting in purchasing gardening supplies.

Sue could just as easily ask Bob to become an employee for her gardening supply company. She could hire Bob, and ask him to visit, for example, every landscape contractor in his town. She could pay him 20% of every sale he generates to these landscape contractors. Bob would be, in that example, a commission-only sales employee.

But Bob runs a website. He can still generate sales for Sue’s company, but he’ll use the visitors of his website to provide the sales. And Bob remains, pretty-much, a commissiononly sales person. He’s also Sue’s affiliate.

Andy Newlin’s employer, Sierra Trading Post, has thousands of affiliates similar to Bob.

Many facets of affiliate marketing

An industry has developed around affiliate marketing. It’s big business. There are companies, collectively called affiliate networks, that match merchants’ products with thousands of affiliates. These network companies also track commissions and pay the affiliates. There are companies who write software, known, simply, as affiliate marketing software, that track the commissions due to your direct (that is, outside of affiliate networks) affiliates. There are affiliate marketing trade shows. And there are affiliate marketing consultants.

Paul Colligan owns Theaffiliateguy.com, and consults with companies on their affiliate marketing efforts. “A merchant can’t participate half-heartedly in affiliate marketing and expect to be successful. It takes effort. A merchant must constantly monitor his affiliates to determine which are generating sales, which are not. He must vary the product offers to keep them fresh on the affiliates’ sites. He must monitor the placement of the offer on each affiliate’s site. He should eliminate offers that aren’t generating ‘click-throughs’ from the affiliates. Many merchants don’t do any of this, and they develop a bad taste for the process.”

Affiliate networks

Colligan believes that affiliate network companies can help. “Network companies bring a lot to the table,” says Colligan. “The obvious benefit is that they have a line-up of thousands of potential affiliates. I don’t know many ecommerce merchants who have time to run down this number of potential affiliates by themselves. But, the affiliate network companies also bring management expertise. They monitor affiliates to make sure the click-through rates are acceptable. They physically prepare the commission checks. They resolve disputes between affiliates and merchants. Those jobs alone could require several internal employees. And they advise on product offers, commissions, and new ideas.”

Affiliate networks themselves work on a commission basis. Most charge a fee ranging from 20% to 30% of the affiliate commission or a percentage of the gross sales an affiliate generates. That is, if a merchant pays his affiliates a 15% commission on sales, a network company would typically retain 20%- 30% of that 15%. Thus, for an affiliate commission of, say, $10 on a $100 sale, an affiliate network company would typically keep $2- $3 above what the affiliate is paid.

In addition to the transactional fees, many network companies charge a one-time, up-front fee to their merchants, ranging from a few hundred dollars up to $20,000 or more. For most network companies, affiliates sign up for free.

eCommerce companies as affiliates

Heidi Messer is President and COO of Linkshare.com, the first and one of the largest affiliate network companies. LinkShare’s customers include hundreds of online merchants (that is, the companies selling the products and paying the commissions) and hundreds of thousands affiliates. (Sierra Trading Post, Andy Newlin’s employer, is a merchant for LinkShare.) Messer believes that there’s great opportunity for smaller ecommerce companies to become affiliates of larger ones.

“We’ve seen smaller ecommerce firms grow very quickly after they join our network,” says Messer. “To do this, however, they need products with a popular appeal. And smaller ecommerce firms must realize that they are competing with some very large companies for the affiliates’ web space. Large merchants, such as Target, Avon, Overstock, Dell and Walmart, for example, have strong affiliate marketing programs. Smaller companies can pick and choose non-competing products that these larger merchants offer, and earn affiliate commissions from selling them. It’s an opportunity that many smaller ecommerce companies fail to develop.”

“For example,” says Messer. “We know of a company that sells steaks online who’s an affiliate of an online wine company. Buyers of the steaks subsequently see a confirmation page and on this page is the offer to purchase wine. The two products go together, and, since this offer is after the purchase, it doesn’t result in the steak customers leaving for the wine site until after they’ve made their purchase. Smaller ecommerce firms could become affiliates like this in any number of ways.”

Indeed, there are online companies whose total source of revenue is affiliate commissions. There’s FatWallet.com and FabulousSavings,com, both larger sites comprised entirely of offers from other merchants. There’s also Tony Beaudion.

Beaudion’s company, tnpsc.com, offers free screen saver and desktop-wallpaper downloads. But Beaudion’s real business is simply earning affiliate commissions. “We started in 1997 and learned as we went along,” says Beaudion. “People come to our site to download the free screensavers and the free wallpaper. About 1.0% of them will also click on an affiliate offer and about 1.0% of that 1.0% will actually buy something from the merchant. That 1% of 1% makes us a very nice living.”

Commission percentages

Commission percentages paid by merchants to Commission percentages paid by merchants to affiliates vary. Typically, products with relatively higher prices receive smaller percentages, and, conversely, lowerpriced items receive higher percentages. Take the example of Sue’s gardening supply site and Bob’s plant seed site. Sue might pay Bob a commission of, say, 2% for each of Bob’s website visitors who purchases a lawn mower from her. And, she might pay him a commission of, say, 15% for each visitor that purchases gardening gloves. That’s because the lawn mower is a higherpriced product than the gardening gloves.

But, merchants can change the percentages from time to time and competition among merchants for the affiliates’ screen space can be intense. A merchant could, for example, temporarily increase the commission on a product to make it more attractive for affiliates to advertise it. Higher commission percentages will attract more affiliates. And affiliates who work with network companies can compare merchants’ products and commission percentages and choose the offers that best suite them.

TheAffiliateGuy.com’s Colligan, “It’s key that merchants offer products with decent profit margins so that they can afford to offer the affiliates attractive commission percentages. I once taught a seminar where an attendee, an ecommerce merchant, said that his products have extremely thin profit margins and that he couldn’t afford to offer his affiliates attractive commission percentages. I told him his problem wasn’t the affiliate commissions. It was his product selection.”

Heidi Messer, with Link Share, “We see commissions in the 1% to 30% range though they can be even higher. Products with lower margins and higher purchase prices tend to carry lower commission percentages.” Andy Newlin, with Sierra Trading Post, “We typically pay between 5% and 10%, depending on the product. And, we pay our affiliates each month.”

Click-thru rates and conversion rates

Spend any time in the affiliate marketing community and you’ll hear both merchants and affiliates discuss “click-thru” rates and conversion rates. Both terms refer to the percentage of a site’s visitors that actually click on an affiliate offer and then purchase an item from a merchant. The terms are used interchangeably and can be confusing. For example, 2% of visitors to Bob’s site may click on an offer from Sue’s gardening supply company. That’s a 2% “click-thru” rate. Perhaps 10% of that 2% may actually purchase a product from Sue. That 10% is typically referred to as a purchase “conversion” rate. The affiliate marketing business revolves around click-thru rates and conversion rates. Both merchants and affiliates closely monitor those rates and adjust and juggle products, prices and other factors to improve upon them.

Andy Newlin, “Our affiliates pay close attention to their click-through rates. The good ones analyze it and test constantly. They’ll move the placement of the offer and change up the offer. Visitors that come to our site from an affiliate typically convert at a rate upwards of 13 percent. That is, over 13% of the visitors that our active affiliates send us actually buy something from us. That is very high for our industry. The average is closer to 4%.”

The management of offers from merchants to affiliates can be complex. Newlin continues, “We offer data feeds and other creative ideas to our affiliates. Many of them have Javascript that analyze this data and adjust their offers accordingly. For example, we’ll track the top selling items on our site each day, and feed that information over the Internet to our affiliates. They could automatically adjust their offers from us the next day to reflect the most popular items based on how they’ve programmed their internal scripts. We’ll also place most of our inventory in a database and feed that to our affiliates. The information in this database always changes, and can include sale items, new items, discontinued items and so forth. Many of our affiliates have scripts that analyze this data, and pick and choose products that best fit their site. We’ll even set-up some of the scripts for our affiliates since many of them do not have internal programmers. Once a script is established, the offers from us to our affiliates change automatically based on our affiliates’ specific criteria.”

Data feeds and programming scripts can make the offers from a merchant to an affiliate dynamic and constantly changing. Say an affiliate is only interested in hiking shoes that are on sale. That can be programmed into the affiliate’s script, so that when a merchant’s database changes to reflect hiking shoes on-sale, the affiliate’s offer automatically changes on its site. Perhaps an affiliate, for example, is interested in offering hiking shoes from a certain manufacturer for a certain price with a minimum commission percentage. That can be programmed into the affiliate’s script, so that when a merchant actually offers those hiking shoes at that price and commission percentage, the offer automatically appears on the affiliate’s site.

Changing the Internet

The ability to micro-manage offers from merchants to affiliates is changing how merchants advertise their products. Some say it’s revolutionizing the Internet since most all online offers are commission-based, the offers can be easily changed and a merchant pays the commission only when a sale occurs.

Dave McCarthy is Senior Director of Advertising for Miva Direct. Miva Direct helps merchants find suit- able affiliates and affiliate networks. “The industry has evolved so that the merchants pay on a cost-per-acquisition only. In many respects, it’s no risk advertising for the merchants and it can be a nice source of additional earnings for the affiliates.”

Everyone agrees that both merchants and affiliates should actively monitor and manage the process. Says McCarthy, “Merchants and affiliates should have analytics software installed on their site. Merchants should monitor, for example, those affiliates that generate the most sales. And merchants that use affiliate networks should use the analytics software to confirm what their affiliate network is telling them. If an affiliate network company claims that it’s generating a given level of sales for a merchant, that merchant should have the software installed to independently confirm it.”

Sierra Trading Post’s Newlin encourages merchants to work with affiliate networks as well as seek out direct relationships with other websites. “Search the Internet for companies that offer products, services or even editorial content that is similar to your products,” says Newlin. “If those sites have ads already on them, then they probably have experience with affiliate marketing.”

Newlin’s employer, Sierra Trading Post, utilizes both a network company, LinkShare, and also manages direct affiliates outside of the network. To monitor the direct affiliates, Newlin uses affiliatetracking software that his company has developed internally. This software will tally the commissions due each affiliate and otherwise track traffic and sales that each affiliate generates. There are many independent software companies that offer such tracking software, however, and many third-party shopping cart providers have it built-in with the cart.

Both McCarthy, with Miva Direct, and Newlin encourage ecommerce firms to test a product before they offer it to affiliates. An ecommerce firm could advertise a product using Google’s AdWords, for example, to determine its “click-thru” appeal. Moreover, ecommerce firms that are interested in becoming affiliates could sign-up for Google’s AdSense program as a test. AdSense is Google’s own affiliate marketing network, whereby website operators can pick specific offers from Google’s “AdWords” advertisers, and display those “AdWords” offers as a method to earn “click-thru” commissions. In that manner, an ecommerce operator can pick which offers from Google to display on his site and then gauge whether his traffic responds to those offers. That could indicate whether visitors to his site would respond to other affiliate offers.

Says Miva Direct’s McCarthy, “There’s a huge opportunity for merchants right now. To determine whether their products will move on an affiliate’s site, they can put a product up on Ebay or even CraigsList.com for free. If it sells there, it will probably sell on other websites.”

Source: Practical eCommerce

The need for an overall FAQ of the abilities of 2ndPeter.Com (and the owner Pete Dutcher) has been expressed by clients, and it struck me as a great idea.

What Are Our Abilities?
2ndPeter.Com is able to design complete web sites & print projects. We do not do actual printing of the projects, but we do provide the necessary files for the printer to use.

On websites, we set up databases for 3rd party software to make use of, however we do not customize databases or create database solutions. For example, we can set up a database for WordPress to use on your web site.

Our website designs make use of the latest methods of website promotion in regard to SEO Marketing. We create WordPress templates from scratch. Non-WordPress websites are also created by us, as is the case of most of our clients up until most recently.

On the Print Design side of things, we have designed everything from stationary to brochures to catalogs to magazine ads to exhibit graphics for clients. For a rough list of possible print projects, see : Print Design. The extent of our services is not limited to the list.

Willingness To Learn
Every week, it seems 2ndPeter.Com is learning new ways to improve our services. We believe that to remain stagnant would not help our clients at all. When time allows, we seek out such knowledge in order to improve ourselves.

Working With Clients
Every project relies on a sharing of knowledge between the Client (you) and 2ndPeter.Com. Our specialty is design, just as yours is related to your industry or business. Even so, new, important methods and websites are popping up on a daily basis. If a client comes to us with information we make use of it. Note: If you call and share such knowledge, and we seem sort of quiet about it, it is likely because we are thinking through the potential for such knowledge. We are quiet thinkers. Rest assured, we will look into such knowledge…especially if you email the information to us.

Marketing
2ndPeter.Com (or the owner Pete Dutcher) has created complete marketing campaigns that combined both Internet and Print Promotions. If you have the budget, we can create a Marketing Campaign that includes magazine ads, Newspaper ads, Exhibit Graphics for tradeshows, Catalog Design, Post Card Design for mailouts, Branding, Brochures and Internet Marketing.

In the past, we have handled several large corporations with large marketing budgets (surpassing $40,000 annually) such as Zeagle Diving Systems and DVT Sensors (now called Cognex). We have also managed smaller marketing campaign design projects with such companies as Diverse Specialties (which included multiple ad designs and a website on retainer).

Marketing and Presence Related to WordPress
We are able to fully create customized WordPress solutions. Our focus is to give websites less of a template appearance whenever possible. To this end, we edit the WordPress coding directly to insert specially created design elements. Our website at www.2ndpeter.com is a prime example of this.

We install multiple plugins to WordPress that we have found useful in the promotion of websites, including Google Analytics, Share This (which enables visitors to share with over 20 social bookmarking web sites) cForms, Simple Tags and more. We insert custom metatags into the header codes, in addition to assisting in the setup of Autotags for posting new content.

The more sites that contain links back to your own web site, the higher yor search ranking. The ShareThis plugin allows users to submit posted content to such social web sites as:

• Reddit
• Digg
• Facebook
• MySpace
• del.icio.us
• StumbleUpon
• Technorati
• Google Bookmarks
• Yahoo Bookmarks
• Yahoo! My Web
• Windows Live
• Propeller
• FriendFeed
• Newsvine
• Xanga
• Mixx
• Blinklist
• Furl
• ma.gnolia
• Mister Wong
• And more!

When requested, we also set up WordPress to automatically notify site update services. Update Services are tools you can use to let other people know you’ve updated your blog.  Once set up, WordPress will automatically notify popular Update Services that you’ve updated your blog by sending a XML-RPC ping each time you create or update a post. In turn, Update Services process the ping and updates their proprietary indices with your update. Now people browsing sites like Technorati or Sphere can find your most recent posts!

Uploading to the website
2ndPeter.Com makes use of FTP programs such as FileZilla to upload files and pages to your website, however we can also create a custom Upload/Download section on your website that is powered by paFileDB 3.6, a great file management program for your website.

HyperLinks On Your Website
If we have created a custom, non-WordPress web site for you, adding links is as simple as calling us or emailing us (we prefer email so there is a recorded request). If we designed a WordPress web site for you, the ability to add links is contained within the program unless the custom soluion required special coding in the design (in which case use method one).

Blogging
WordPress is the best blogging system out there, and we install and customize WordPress Solutions for you. We will make sure the proper options are set also.

SEO & Other Analytics
Through our hosting services, we offer a tool called Traffic Blazer. We can work using that program or any other to set up your search engine optimization (seo) plan. We have experience within Analytic frameworks such as Google Analytics.

If within a clients budget, we can also manage Pay-Per-Click campaigns. Such campaigns are riddled with click fruad, so choosing the right 3rd party system is important.

Most Projects Are a Joint Effort
2ndPeter.Com will do everything within our power to provide on time, quality service, but a large part of that requires proper resources provided by the client. Such resources you can provide to help things along is web site text, photos (your own, nothing owned by someone else) and access information. It is also important that a simple, easy to manage Web Site Hosting Control Panel is in place. This is one of the reasons we offer web hosting services to our clients. In most cases, clients pay far less while hosting with 2ndPeter.Com.

A Relaxed Business Relationship
With 2ndPeter.Com you can expect an open and honest relationship in regard to your website or print projects. If we feel there are better alternatives on certain issues, we will advise you. If you have concerns, we are willing and able to listen.

Other Links: Web Design - Web Design FAQ - Print Design

The Bradenton, Florida-based website and advertisement design agency 2ndPeter.Com has launched their new website. The website features more than just a new look…it makes complete use of all the methods of Search Engine Optimization available, and in the two days since the relaunch of the website, search engine referrals have nearly trippled for the company.

“We wanted to demonstrate the methods we promote in action,” says the owner. “Understand, it takes time for these things to fully kick in, usually at least 2 weeks, sometimes as much as 2 months with some search engines. The fact that we’ve seen results this quickly just goes to show what a well-designed, optimized web site can accomplish.”

The new web site makes use of WordPress software for simple updates and placement. 2ndPeter.Com can now publish articles with a few mouse clicks, and each article can be submitted by anyone to numerous social bookmarking websites, including Google, Facebook, StumbleUpon and more. Keywords are also a strong part of each article now.

On the homepage, viewers also see a slight change in focus for the 2ndPeter.Com design team. The first thing you see is an ad that promotes the use of WordPress for new clients. In the past, 2ndPeter.Com only offered minor customization of WordPress.

Says the owner, “The improvements made to WordPress in recent times has made it the ideal tool for promoting a web site. It has even reduced overhead for many businesses due to the ability to publish new content on a daily basis without relying on a web designer. Designers are still needed, but not for minor updates such as publishing articles, posting specials (for eCommerce sites) and more.”

2ndPeter.Com web hosting packages now include Google Webmaster Tools as a free option. These make optimization simpler. In addition, creation of sitemaps are a breeze through the Hosting Control Panel.

On top of all this, 2ndPeter.Com has maintained it’s sale price of $1.99 Domain Names…a price that is even lower than Godaddy…when web site hosting is ordered at the same time. Web Hosting Packages begin at $6.99 monthly ($5.00 monthly if payed annually).

2ndPeter.Com is based in Bradenton, Florida, but serves businesses throughout the United States.

For those who have installed paFileDB 3.6 through the Value Applications in the Hosting Control Panel, and are encountering an error that informs you that not all fields are filled, this is the fix:

In the Hosting Control Panel, go to the File Manager in the Content Menu area. It takes a few seconds to load. Once there, navigate (by clicking hte folders on the left menu) to the paFileDB 3.6 program folder.

Open: includes/admin/ folders

Selct the files.php file and click the edit button at the top of the screen.
 
Find:
//Check………..
if (!check_input($_POST, array(’creator’, ‘version’, ’ss’, ‘documentation’, ‘upfile’, ‘posticon’, ‘license’, ‘pin’))) {
smarty_error(lang(’emptyfield’));
}
 
And REMOVE exactly this part. This tells the program not to require any fields at all.

What you can do to capture the “Long Tail” of SEO

Search engine optimizing for the “Long Tail” is fundamentally different from optimizing for the head. Therefore, it’s important to initially point out that the strategies and tactics for “Long Tail” SEO are more automated and extensible than for traditional SEO.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of the “Long Tail,” it refers to the extremely long right-hand portion of the distribution graph, usually of an online retailer’s product inventory. The term was coined by the Executive Editor of Wired Magazine, Chris Anderson. In comparison, the head occupies very little of the X-axis but is full of the “top hits” and best sellers. Put another way, the head represents the “vital few” and the tail represents the “trivial many.” Anderson argued that the tail could actually add up to as much business as the head for an online retailer with unlimited virtual shelf space and therefore seemingly infinite selection, as is the case for Amazon.com and Netflix.

There are “Long Tail” distribution graphs when it comes to SEO too. Consider the distribution of a keyword portfolio or the distribution of search-delivered traffic among indexed pages of a website. A handful of your search terms are your vital few, driving much of your business — in terms of paid and organic search. A handful of your web pages pull in most of your search visitors. For an online retailer, I purport that the “Long Tail” is where the growth potential in search lies, due to less competition and higher conversion rates. In other words, it will be easier to rank for an esoteric search term containing a model number or a string of keywords, and the visitor brought in through such a query is more likely to turn into a sale.

Typically, there are the several “trophy terms” that the CEO always checks first in the morning. Assuming those search terms are popular with search engine users too, which is not always a given, then these represents part of the “head.” If your rankings drop for a trophy term, I bet you’ll hear about that — probably from the CEO himself/herself. The thing is, trophy term watchers aren’t seeing the big picture. Sure, the head is important, don’t get me wrong. But the tail is just as important, in fact perhaps more so.

Let’s contrast optimizing for the head with optimizing for the “Long Tail.” When optimizing for the head, the home page and secondary level pages represent your best opportunity, because those are the pages most highly endowed with link juice (PageRank). Therefore, you’d focus your energies on optimizing these top-level pages first, targeting no more than three keyword themes per page. The more popular the head keywords are with searchers, the better. You’d place the targeted search term in the title tag, in the H1 tag, and high up in the body copy. You’d further reinforce that page’s PageRank by building inbound links direct to that page and through your internal linking structure. With the internal links, you’d want to consistently incorporate the targeted keywords into the anchor text. With the inbound links, you would not always want the same anchor text, as that doesn’t look natural.

But what should you do to capture the “Long Tail” of SEO? That requires a different plan of attack.

You’ll need to cast a much wider net. Individually optimizing thousands of pages by hand doesn’t make sense; it just won’t scale. Instead, channel your energy into optimizing your HTML templates, your URLs and your internal linking structure because your efforts there are capable of creating cascading effects throughout your website.

Focus on unbranded keywords, as those offer much greater growth potential.

Treat your consumers as content co-creators — populating product reviews, discussion forums, blogs, wikis, and so on with content — thus incorporating your consumers’ vocabulary into your site.

Employ a “Long Tail” SEO approach that we at Netconcepts call “thin slicing.” It involves touching key elements such as title tags and heading tags across thousands of pages quickly, monitoring for impact, and refining based on those results.

Incorporate tag clouds in your site to flatten your internal linking structure and interject keyword-rich text links.

Syndicate your site content (and links) via RSS feeds, as the “Long Tail” is determined in part by the efficient distribution of pages.

And finally, identify your “freeloaders” — the pages in your site that drive no search traffic. Most e-commerce sites are comprised mainly (e.g. 80 plus percent) of “freeloader” pages. Most merchants don’t even know this, or recognize it to be a problem. No JavaScript-based analytics package will tell you this either. It’s an indication you lack a “Long Tail” of unbranded keyword traffic.

Source: Practical Ecommerce

Bradenton Web Design and Development Specialists

2ndPeter.Com has provided Bradenton Web Design since 2002, designing cutting edge websites and small business marketing. Our custom designed websites are designed to have high search engine optimization (SEO), and to give our clients a global presence.

Time and time again we hear from local businesses looking for website design, re-design, Search Engine Optimization and Marketing, e-Commerce, eMail, Graphic Design, print design, and/or website hosting that are frustrated with their current designers because they can’t get a hold of them! We keep in constant communication with all of our clients and make it a focus to always be available for your needs. Because we are local and specialize in Bradenton Web Design, you get in touch with us any time. Don’t forget you can also email us at sales@2ndpeter.com.

Web Site Design Services we provide in the Bradenton Area

• Website Design - Web Site Design
  Bradenton is a beautiful area to live and own a business in; our web site designs reflect that. 2ndPeter.Com designed websites are built using a combination of html or asp in combination with PHP (when required). We assure that they are exactly what you, our client, desires.
•  Web Site Redesign
  As your business grows, so will your desire to make sure your website looks fresh and makes use of the latest technologies and search engine placement methods. We will work with you every step of the way. Whether you feel your website needs a completely new design, or a fine-tuning of your existing design, 2ndPeter.Coms’ professional staff will provide the assistance your website needs.
• Custom WordPress Design
  WordPress is a blogging system unlike any other blogging system. First, it allows such customization that it does not have the appearance of a template design, even though it is. Second, WordPress is unique in that it helps improve a web site’s rankings with search engines each time you post new content. And finally, posting new content is easy. By logging into the website, you use a very email-like interface to publish articles…and in some cases people set it up to post using their email.

  2ndPeter.Com specializes in WordPress customization and design, assuring you of an original, highly effective website that meets your every need.

• Logo & Print Design
  Before we did Web Design, we focused on Print Design. Our graphic designers can design your business cards, logos, post cards, brochures, and more.

  2ndPeter.Com has provided advertisement design services that have been published in newspapers, trade magazines, catalogs and other sources to maximize income potential for our clients.

• eCommerce Development Solutions
  2ndPeter.Com provides a customizable Quick Shopping Cart that is hosted by us, and if you desire something else, we also provide custimization of other shopping cart systems that can put your products in fron of your customers 24/7. Using a 2ndPeter.Com eCommerce Solution, you can start accepting online orders, help manage inventory, calculate shipping and even generate gift coupons or cards.
• Web Site Hosting Packages
  Starting at $6.99 US, 2ndPeter.Com provides quality web site hosting that is dependable. Our 99.9% uptime promise assures your website will constantly be available to your targeted market. Our United States-based hosting places control in your hands with 24/7 tech support and more.
• Web Site Maintenance
  An active website is a highly-ranked website. Customers demand new content on your website on a regular basis, and 2ndPeter.Com is available to design custom solutions to your web site needs. The more relevent and current your website is, the better the ranking you can earn with search engines such as Google, MSN Livesearch, Yahoo and more. Once a web site design project is complete, we make ourselves available to perform updates at a reasonable rate (the most reasonable in the area). 
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Marketing
  If you build it (right) they will come. Nearly anyone can build a website with the right programs and knowledge, but at 2ndPeter.Com we understand what it takes to keep your website search engine rankings high. More exposure on search engines means more money in your pocket. We specialize in meta tags, keyword optimization and search engine submission.

  Our Traffic Blazer software will optimize your website for search engines, than will submit to them in a few easy steps.

  We do a keyword comparison to assure you that only the best, most effective keywords are used to promote your web site. All of our hosting packages come with the free option of having Google Tools built into them for easy promotion.

While website architecture, link building, and template coding all affect search engine optimization, keyword research and placement is perhaps the easiest SEO attribute to implement. It is often the low hanging fruit of an SEO campaign. To that end, a few months ago, I wrote about Google Suggest as a quick keyword research tool for situations like SEO copywriting where many pages need to be swiftly optimized. Another free tool to consider, with a few more bells and whistles, is Wordpot.com.

Launched in 2005
Wordpot.com is a Canadian keyword research tool that came online in 2005. The tool stated its primary focus as being “on finding niche advertising keywords and optimizing Google AdWords.” The company claims 80 million terms in its database, and growing.

Results are gathered from multiple search engines (though they don’t name which ones) and are then aggregated to come up with the Wordpot results. This is a common model also use by Wordtracker, KeywordDiscovery and other keyword tools. Wordpot.com claims to collect its data consistently (“24/7,” to quote them), though updates to its search information occur only on a monthly basis. The company plans to increase the frequency of these updates in time.

Both Wordtracker and KeywordDiscovery have free versions of their services that are not unlike Wordpot. One of the great advantages of Wordpot, however, is that unlike the free version of KeywordDiscovery (which offers similar information), there is no captcha to get through in order to access the information. While the free Wordtracker doesn’t have the captcha, the information that Wordpot offers is more detailed.

Identify exact matches, search terms and more
There are other cool and useful features, too. Once a query has been made, Wordpot offers both Exact Daily (searches for the exact term) and Total Daily (searches that contain the search term) numbers. To the left of those results are synonyms, related words, and associated words, which are all clickable links if any of them strike your fancy for further research. Though more detailed, “long-tail” phrases often don’t trigger these alternative terms, this is a great feature for research that I’ve not seen any other free tool offer. Hopefully, Wordpot will continue to hone this to include these extended results for more phrases and terms.

A monthly graph appears to the right of those results reflecting month-to-month differences in queries for terms. This is handy especially when researching seasonal terms. The small graph links to a larger one-year graph, which is not only handy for seasonal research but also pay-per-click campaigns and other paid advertising.

Wordpot also offers free registration that upgrades you to additional bells and whistles, the most important of which is the ability to collect keywords and export them. Once logged in, words can be added to Projects, which are essentially collection folders to collect keywords for a given need. Once a collection is complete, it can then be saved within Wordpot and exported to Excel or a text file at any time. The Project screen also allows for the ability to import a list of keywords, which are then added to a given project (it could be a new project if you like) with results added en masse. This is particularly handy when revisiting an existing list of keywords or repurposing words and phrase form secondary sources.

While Wordpot is still not a replacement for full-fledged versions of KeywordDiscovery and Wordtracker, it gives its free counterparts a good run for the money. Wordpot claims to have much more on the horizon, and perhaps that means they will eventually become a pay service, but if they choose to maintain the free model, they could quite possibly dominate the free keyword research market. For the moment, though, consider Wordpot for your basic keyword research needs like large copywriting projects and optimizing secondary pages. For the budget-minded, the tool may even suffice as a primary keyword research device. My hope is that Wordpot will just get better…and stay free.

Source: Practical Ecommerce 

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The issue is only one factor to consider

Click fraud has been a popular topic of discussion for a number of years, and it doesn’t appear the issue will fade away anytime soon. The industry is full of various numbers thrown around putting the click fraud rate anywhere from .02 percent (claimed by Google) to 30 percent or more. Who should you believe about click fraud, and how much should you be worried?

First of all, it’s important to understand the real rate of click fraud can vary significantly from one company to another; thus, you should take any click-fraud rate numbers with a grain of salt. The percentage of click fraud will depend on a dozen different factors, such as ad position, bid price and specific industry type. The more competitive the industry and the more you pay per click, the more incentive there is for others to try to defraud you.

Second, it’s very important to understand that click fraud by itself is not the determining factor in whether your pay-per-click (PPC) campaign is a success. I have seen many clients afraid of trying PPC because of fraud concerns. However, the truth is click fraud only affects your campaign to some degree. Unless you have razor-thin profit margins, your campaign’s success depends much more on the quality of your ads, the targeting of your landing pages and the overall campaign effort. Granted, nobody wants to lose 10 percent to 15 percent (or more) of his/her advertising budget to useless clicks (and remember there are ways to minimize them).

Third, it’s important to be aware of the role of search engines and other companies involved in the whole issue. Search engines, in general, are very protective of their anti-fraud technology and don’t divulge information about it; thus, people turn to third-party services for assistance in detecting and preventing fraudulent activity. If search engines were willing to share some basic information about what they charge an advertiser for, with a breakdown of each click along with the IP address and the referrer (somewhat like a phone bill), it would be much easier to detect fraud and receive refunds. Hopefully, we will see changes along this line in the near future.

Ultimately, you should be aware of the issue, take action in order to detect it and prevent it, and ensure that you’re billed accordingly. But click fraud shouldn’t scare you off from advertising on PPC search engines altogether. That would be a much bigger mistake.

Source: Practical Ecommerce