i look at godaddy and see "unlimited transfer" hosting $12 a month...

Does that include streaming video?

ive never clicked on a google ad in my life. i think only internet fish do. if u want to make money with google ads make sure your audience is fish.

Im pretty sure I saw the answer to this already but cant find it. Anyway, lets say im gonna start a website thats targeting two main keywords, lets say Headache and Migraine, i.e two kinda similar keywords. Its also gonna be a forum, what would be the best domainname?

HeadacheandMigraine.com
Headache-Migraine.com
HeadacheandMigraineforum.com
Headache-Migraine-forum.com
Other idea?

Im mostly wondering how im gonna structure the domainname to get the best options for good SEO.

Sorry for my bad english and sorry if this already been answered many times.

bump

The best option is the exact match for the best keyword in the topic.
So, MigraineHeadaches.com. If you're doing strictly online marketing and not worrying about word-of-mouth advertising, then the dash is OK (migraine-headaches.com) since search engines disregard them and people seem to be much better linking to them than they are talking about them and remembering to mention the dash.

If those names are unavailable to you, then getting an exact match for a secondary term is OK, as long as your content strategy is right. So, MigraineHeadache.com (singular) or Migraine-Headache.com.

Since most commercially relevant exact-match keywords are taken in all TLDs, just make sure that the exact matching phrase is somewhere in the domain for the SE benefit. So, MigraineHeadachesOnline or CureMigraineHeadaches, etc, etc. You won't get the bullseye-bump for exact match, but you will get + weight for having the search term in the domain.

The TLD debate rages on... I'm somewhat of a TLD agnostic as far as search targeted development goes (and the engines certainly don't care about them, save for the possibility of actual + bumps for relevant ccTLDs) but there's a lot of power in .com and if you're looking to build a brand, it's insane to not secure the .com.

Suggestions for cheapest & best quality web hosting?

tough to beat HostGator.com for an html/php/mysql website. Been using these guys for a few years now and have no complaints. Plans start at $5 a month.

I also use www.slicehost.com for my django sites where I need a full VPS with root access. Think it is around $20/month for the smallest slice.

Is this true or is that a better question for the legislation forum?

Lunarpages has a $3/month starter plan that includes mysql/etc. Pretty reliable host.

I personally use axishost.com for $5/month and LOVE them. The support is amazing.

I'm really enjoying this forum

i have some questions of my own
most are terribly broad but even just the best guess would be helpful

1. I want to make a website but i haven't done any serious programming in a long time - heard someone talking about using clone scripts? is it worth going this route? or better to just to put in the time to learn it myself - i'm pretty good with computers

(i guess obv. depends on how difficult a webpage i want to create: so assume i just want to make a fairly simple one with little user created content and mostly what i put up - sort similar to pokerroadradio)

2. How much money can i realistically expect to make from my site - i guess obv depends on what sector what sort of ads and how many people click on them - but

lets say its in the dating sector and i have 10k unique visitors? is that unrealistic? can i be making 1k? 2k? monthly? (i understand there is like a zillion factors but a really rough estimate would be nice)

3. How hard is it to get 10k unique visitors? (what percentage of actively updated sites get over 10k? 3% 5%?)

4. How long should i give it before i give up? if i'm getting like 1k unique visitors after 3 months should i just forget about it? i plan to put some time in advertising but...

thanks for the help

HTML/CSS for displaying static content is quite easy to learn. PHP is also pretty easy to pick up. The difficult part (for me anyways) is creating a design that doesn't look like crap. There is lots of decent templates out there that you can get for free or buy and then modify to suit your own needs. The other option is to hire a designer to tailor a site to your needs. If you are not a programmer but have a good business idea then it is almost always better to hire someone else to do the programming for you fwiw.

The short answer is realistically you won't make any money. The longer answer is there are a zillion factors. Since you haven't mentioned what your source of revenue is going to be I'm assuming adsense. If you have 10k visitors a day, you will likely make a profit, although it's not guaranteed.

Not sure on the % of the sites that get that many visitors but unless you have a very unique idea it will be very tough to get that many visitors.

Only you can answer that question really. Give up when you no longer feel it is worth the effort or you aren't having any more fun.

Also, don't pluck performance numbers out of your ass, like "10K visitors".
The goal is conversion. Obviously, to convert you first need traffic, but quality traffic with their wallets open is the goal, not some arbitrary activity figure.

There are situations where 10 (ten) type-ins are worth more than a thousand worthless social networking clicks or visits from the Mongolian penny farmers (as those experimenting with click arb usually learn at level one when they buy a bunch of shtty traffic for volume, throw it at their high cpc landers and wind up lighting money on fire or taking a headshot to their adsense account)

Generate good traffic. Good, property channeled traffic will click. Great traffic will buy. Content is what gets them there and filters out the wheat from the chaff. My longtail phrase visitors convert *profoundly* better than my short keyword visitors.

I agree completely with previous two posts.

Estimating traffic numbers is virtually impossible without knowing what your website will do, and once you've narrowed it down (a wine forum, let's say) it will be highly improbably to correctly estimate your traffic.

It used to make sense to develop high traffic content and generate money off of advertising, but not any more.

I read an article on this a long time ago - I tried to find it but couldn't so I'm posting some other article I came across after a brief google search. Don't take this link as "fact" but it's pretty similar to what I remember reading about:
http://texvc.com/2009/10/26/web-adve...ls-are-brutal/

So basically 10k visitors per day = 300k per month equals $100 of income. Even if this article is wrong by a factor of 10 you're only at $1000 per month.

In terms of traffic estimates, I've been using a site called "Crunchbase" to help figure out how much my site can expect to get in terms of visitors by comparing similar sites- but mine is a software application.

http://www.crunchbase.com

A large part of the reason cpm is so inexpensive is because there are a ****load of eyeball goldmines that aren't 'selling' anything marketable and can furnish volume on the cheap, but more importantly, enough moron buyers out there who are still dumb enough to value quantity over quality (traffic inferiority complex... They'd rather have 100,000 uniques and 23 sales than 1000 uniques and 50 sales).

The days of indiscriminate traffic-buying are coming to a close. The people with money are sick of trash and have learned that lesson the hard way over the past five years; they now want quality. They don't want a bunch of 14 year old menstruating myspace ******s coming to look at their site selling prospective applicants on the advantages of the 30 year fixed rate jumbo loan. They want 34 year old men who are navigating to act. cpa has always been the most reliable way to meter the quality of traffic, whereas cpm either yields truckloads of absolute garbage or isn't lucrative enough to generate the needed filtering architecture to vet for quality (and ppc is just a giant ****** game of fiction to begin with)

Agreed with all of the above.

In fact, I believe average CPC prices in 2009 were starting to come down / flatline compared to 2008.

This is the first indication that people are finally starting to get smart about their ad spends.

Watchmaker - do you know of any good resources that compare conversion rates?

I personally know some numbers from my old lead gen dot com ( home services, b2b, medical/legal, and a few more), but it's always good to have other data points.

Us publishers mostly only sell ads on CPM because it's just a nightmare to deal with collecting revenue from people using CPA. In short though, the advertisers are the ones that should be calculating the final CPA to determine if the ad spend is profitable or not.

Thanks for the great replys
I'll digest it and comeback with some better questions

WHT is the place to go to look for web hosting. This is what they'll tell you on those forums, but I'll just mention it here as well. Be wary of hosts that offer unlimited resources. It's likely that you will either be limited in some other way that's mentioned in fine print in the T&Cs, or you will get the boot when you actually try to take advantage of those "unlimited" resources, or the host can't sustain it and will shutdown.

I'm thinking about making my next SEO project is going to focus on a real pizza business. Unfortunately this pizza business does not exist yet. My primary seo goals will be to lead the Local Business Results and to dominate the regular search results. I feel like LBS hasn't been optimized by any of the competitors. I am currently building a customer list of reciepts, with all of their information including what they ordered. My marketing plan will be targeted toward each customer and their tastes. I will use this database of customers to spontaneously send customers a free pizza. Conveniently this pizza is one that they have ordered before.

Another focus point will be efficiency. I am going to make money on volume with all pizzas priced at $10 and be flexible down to $5 for large orders. Which brings me to my next strategy. In this particular pizza industry there is no effort to seek out large orders. For this I will have a sales department to constantly seek out new opportunities.

Great thread to read!

I in some way, shape or form would love to run an adult website. For a young male with limited funds any recommendations on where to start? I'm willing to learn and attempt things but I really have no idea how to start.

First step would be to have a solid idea of what type of site I want to run. Since I have limited funds it'd be best to start from scratch no?

Why start from scratch when there is unlimited content on the internet already. You don't need to make your own content. You will not make money, unless your lucky, but if you want to own an adult website just so you can own one you could get it done for under $50.

any methods/comments/ideas on getting sites to link to you?
-link exch for example

Link exchanges are virtually worthless now. Social media still seems to be the main source of building backlinks, but are becoming less valuable.

Please quote a source or example to back this up.

So this thread has inspired me to start learning about this stuff and hopefully something will come of it.

I found this site:

http://www.w3schools.com

It is really good for learning HTML, CSS, PHP, etc.

What do you guys recommend learning? Are some forms of coding obsolete?

What are, or are becoming, the dominant language to use?

w3 schools is an excellent resource.

PHP will remain the dominant server side language for a long time imo. It has a very low barrier to entry, a huge user base and is capable enough to power any website.

Another hot language is Ruby whose popularity is fueled mostly by the Ruby-On-Rails framework. My personal favourite language for the web is Python and the Django framework (my www.evplusplus.com site uses Django /shameless_plug) but it has a steeper learning curve than PHP.

The .NET framework is also quite popular although I don't really know enough about it to comment. It's definitely a viable option but means you are tied to Microsoft technologies and hosting expenses are usually greater.