As the internet continues to take hold of more and more of our everyday life, there are some things which do not change with regards to the thoughts and actions of webmasters.  If you are looking for help on a marketing or a blogging subject where would you look? Who do you trust?

Let us show you an interesting scenario which we will all have been guilty of at some time in our online life time:-

Let us imagine that you are having trouble getting your website ranked for particular keywords, and you don’t have enough experience in this field to be able to resolve your problem.  You begin to look around the internet and you spot two sites offering advice on keyword density, search engines and SEO, etc.

Site One

A basic site which is packed with Google Adverts, but has a very impressive information section and free eBook download.  The site is nothing special and the eBook “100 Ways To Pack Your Site With Keywords And Win” looks ok but nothing startling, a little icon allows you to click and download the eBook for free.

Site Two

This site is much more impressive and offers the full all singing all dancing website, giving a detailed page for each problem you may have getting listed on the search engines, as well as a download of the “100 Ways To Pack Your Site With Keywords And Win” eBook which costs $29.99(the same eBook as on the free site, but the icon is better).  These boys are a real slick outfit offering keyword services for $100 an hour, upfront with guaranteed search engine success.

Question

Which one would you go for? Which one gives you the most confidence?

The crazy thing about the human mind and the way we think is that we are all concerned if something is free! How can they give the eBook away and the other site charge $29.99, “it can’t be the same eBook, it does not look right”. 

The majority of people who are looking for the advice shown on both sites would probably feel more at home buying the eBook from the second site, because “it feels right”.  Too many people get hooked up on cost and value for money – if someone is offering you an eBook for free with no strings attached, what is wrong with trying it?  Just because you are paying for a service does not make it better than general advice given in a forum – a forum which is probably visited by a number of experts in search engine optimisation anyway.

Conclusion

The next time you are looking for information or a service for your website, do not forget that just because you are paying for something, or you are paying more at a particular site, it does not mean the quality of the information or the service is better.  The internet has turned many business rules full circle with more and more sites offering free services and eBooks, etc to attract our attention.  They then make their money when you click on highly optimised Google Adverts, at no cost to the reader.

Just because it costs more does not mean it is better quality, paying more may give you confidence in the service or the information, but it will also leave a hole in your pocket.

I’ve noticed that we get a lot (read “more then I expected”) visitors to our IOU PDF form at pdf.xaviermedia.com from search engines like Yahoo! and Google. Since the I Owe You form seems popular we’re going to add a few more forms you can fill out and download directly from our site. So if you have any ideas what kind of forms we could do, please let us know by commenting in this post

As you may have seen on Twitter we moved our blog (blog.xaviermedia.com) to another server yesterday due to poor response times at the old server. So how did we know that the response times where poor? I’m using a service called mon.itor.us where you can setup web site checks to monitor up time and response times of web sites from three different locations in the world: US, Austria and Germany.

I like mon.itor.us because it’s free, easy to use, got nice graphs and you also get a weekly report with average load times and how much down time your site(s) had. When I for example wrote about the down time Entrecard.com had I used graphs from mon.itor.us to show the actual down time Entrecard.com had.

As you can see on the graph entrecard.com had horrible loading times for several hours on the 3rd of February. The uptime was as low as 75% which means that during 6 hours (25% of 24 hours) the visitors of entrecard.com couldn’t access the site or the time it took for the site to load was extremely long.

Here you’ll see the graph for adventure (the server hosting this blog) and entrecard.com from yesterday. Notice that the maximum response time for adventure is only 463 ms while entrecard.com got a maximum load time of horrible 8982 ms! If you study the graphs you’ll notice that Entrecard must have done something with it’s server around 4 since the load time improved dramatically.

Another example is winningtheweb.com with an average load time of 649ms which is bad. It’s especially bad for a blog about making money online since that’s a highly competitive niche. If the site is not loading fast the readers can get almost the same content from a much faster blog

Why do you need to monitor your web site?

Simply because if your site constantly goes down or is loading slow you will not be able to make any money and I guess most of you want to get some kind of income from your web projects. You will also be able to figure out if you need a new server because you’ve out grown your current hosting solution. Even if you don’t have your own server (you’re on shared hosting for example) you need to monitor your server status since some hosting companies fill their servers with thousands and thousands of sites. If all those sites grow, the server will pretty soon start acting slow which leads to less sales for you.

By using a service like mon.itor.us you’ll also get an idea how slow or fast your site loads from other locations then your own. In my case I can check the load time from US, Austria and Germany in the same graph

In these Internet days we need to update the phrase “time is money” to “server response time is money”

This month the Site of the month is a really useful Entrecard (read more about Entrecard here) related site I visit (almost) daily: Powerdropping.com. The site is simply just a list of Entrecard blogs sorted by loading time with the fastest loading site at the top.

So what’s so special about a site with just links to other sites? If you like me are trying to earn as many Entrecard credits per day as possible while you have a lot of other things to do, then you can’t spend 1 or 2 hours dropping Entrecards . The solution is simply to visit Powerdropping.com where you got 250-280 of the fastest loading Entrecard sites with the widget at the top of the site. This way you can drop 250 Entrecards in just 20 minutes instead of spending hours. I even got a few minutes to spare so I have time to find new exciting blogs to add to my RSS reader.

If you’re an Entrecard member, but haven’t checked out Powerdropping.com yet: Check it out now!

If you’re a blogger, but haven’t joined Entrecard yet: Do it! Visit Entrecard.com here.

Site of the month sites
Do you know of a good quality web site or blog that should be mentioned as Site of the month in this blog? Contact me and we’ll see if I also think the site is useful

This week we’re running the same contest as last week: write a recommendation for this blog at Entrecard and get 50 EC. You’ll also be included in the random draw next Friday (the 29th) for another 100 EC to one lucky winner.

The winner

In last weeks contest Yimto Affiliate Marketing Blog won 100 EC for writing a recommendation. Congratulations!

A big thanks to random.org for helping in the random draw

More contests

Don’t forget that you still have a chance of winning 700 Entrecard credits by writing about CreateBanner.com in your blog. See this page for more information about this contest.

You can also still win $50 by writing about our affiliate program. See this page for more information.