Many webmasters prefer to create and build websites then add the content which is the hardest part, if we are talking from a view that we need high quality content that would attract visitors and search engines, and finally it comes another hard task which is to optimize and promote the website in the search engines. This task that can be a kind of easy if we have a good quality content available. Otherwise, there are other webmasters who prefer to buy established websites with or without traffic and revenue, websites that are ready to use and to market in order to provide information or services in exchange of something ( revenue from ads, sales, leads.. ). Whatever, in this post I’ll try to list some problems that would face you if you are trying to buy a website:

1. Dealing with a CROOK: A lot of sites are available for sale everyday, there are a lot of forums and market places where you can find thousands of websites that you can buy. The price of the website will depend on the quality, traffic and revenue that it generates, BUT you don’t have to trust everyone who says that my website makes $$$ per month or receive thousands of visits everyday.. My advice is not to buy a website based on this data, try to look for the site archive, check if the domain is dropped, check Page Rank, backlinks, Alexa rank.. Anything that can show you the real value and how much this site is worth!

2. Transfer your new site: When you’ll buy a website from someone, in 90% of the cases he’ll give you the site files and you have to transfer the site to your new hosting account if you paid for a new hosting plan. This is not an easy task, especially if you bought a large website, it will take time to transfer files to new server. You may ask the support to move the site for you but ‘be sure’ about the fact that they will ask you for the login information for the other host where the site is originally hosted so that they can download the backup and upload it again, which is not possible all the time.

3. Losing reputation: All the time and when buying an established website, you have to take in consideration that a niche that make $1000 per month can make only $100 in the next month, especially that when moving from server to server a website can lose ranking in search engines or what we call SERPs if it is transfered to a new IP class, visitors because of the downtime that you will expect when moving and also revenue as a keyword that pays $3 today can pay only $1 tomorrow.

All of this is based on my personal experience, you may have been in luck better than me and grabbed a nice deal but all what I want to let you know is to be careful and study the market and conditions before taking a new decision of buying a website, it’s real business. Did you faced any of these difficulties? Did you faced other problems when trying to buy an established website? Share with us!

Creating an attractive website is just the beginning and the easiest part. It is the promotion that makes a website successful. There are different ways of promoting a website and generating huge traffic.

Let’s take a look at some of these ways:

Yahoo Answers

This is one of the best ways of generating instant traffic to a website. For this you need to have a Yahoo account and it will only take a few minutes to create. Then you log on to answers.yahoo.com and use the built in “search” option to find questions related to the niche of your website.

Once you find a question you are able to answer, then answer it in such a way that you come across as an expert in the topic. You must leave a link to your website in the source field. Don’t restrict yourself to answering just one question, do this with as many questions as you can.

This works wonderfully and fulfills two things: sending direct and immediate traffic to the website as well as generating indirect traffic. Yahoo answers is considered as an authority site and all the threads are picked up by the search engines in a matter of hours. Imagine if you left your URLs there, your websites will also be indexed very quickly.

Digg

Whenever you publish new content, you can use digg.com to submit it to. Digg is an effective social bookmarking site where if your content garners enough interest, people will vote and you earn Digg points. Once you gather sufficient Digg points, it will be prominent for millions of people to see.

Blog Commenting

Make a note of the popular blogs in your niche and keep visiting them and leave comments, making sure to leave your link there. For this method to work, your comments have to be relevant to the blog post. How this works is, when visitors to that blog read your comment and find it interesting and useful, they will be tempted to click on your link. This method generates direct traffic, which means immediate visitors as well as indirect traffic to your web pages.

Technorati

Whenever you have a new post or article in your site, submit it to www.technorati.com. You should submit it under an appropriate tag. Here’s the best part – You can use any tag you want. You can make the tag one of the well-searched for keywords related to your niche or it can be an innovative tag that has never been used before. The newest submissions appear at the top of the site.

Wikipedia Link

This is not as easy as it sounds but if you can manage to get your link in Wikipedia, you are going to see a huge increase in traffic. Wikipedia is currently one of the hottest properties on the World Wide Web. See if you can add something useful that is not already there, related to your niche. You will be allowed to leave your URL as a link when you add content to Wikipedia. The only problem is, even if you manage to get your link in, there is no guarantee that it will remain there for any significant amount of time. But whatever little time your link remains there, it is going to give you incredible results.

These are some of the more popular strategies you can’t go wrong with and bring the results you desire. Even if it takes time, it is worth the effort to see your web pages ranking high on the search engines, in turn bringing in thousands of visitors. There are several other ways, which we will take a look at in a different article.

Wordpress 2.8.2 has been released, the new version include an important security update and some other minor bugs fixes. Anyone using or powering a blog using WordPress 2.8 or 2.8.1 should upgrade to this latest version as soon as he can. 

WordPress 2.8.2 fixes an XSS vulnerability. Comment author URLs were not fully sanitized when displayed in the admin. This could be exploited to redirect you away from the admin to another site. Download 2.8.2 or automatically upgrade from the Tools->Upgrade page of your blog’s admin

Only 10 files will be changed while upgrading and the database wouldn’t be touched. All what you have to do and required is a simple upload and replace, or you can simply use the auto upgrade feature built into the WordPress admin area.

Download Wordpress 2.8.2

Even having a great amount of information on modern technology and our daily use of computer hardware and software, most of us aren’t aware of the differences in the scripting language and web hosting services available. Many of us may not even realise what web hosting or scripting languages mean!

In the simplest terms when a company or an individual who’s determined to create a website they’ll most likely require access to a hosting company. Hosting your own server equipment, allowing all data and files requisite by the site to run, looks and acts as a site owner wishes. The data and all files ought to be written with special programs and language recognized by computers around the world. Presently, the two essential platforms are Linux and Windows.

There are several reasons that a business or an individual needs to know about the platforms, its host uses including the development of an existing plant, the need for certain features or applications and their own budget.

The benefits of utilizing Linux server hosting will typically include the following:

• Compatibility: Linux Web Hosting allows a complete range of integration and compatibility options with other operating systems or applications. These software can easily be run on a Windows server, while vice versa ain’t easily done. Additionally, many of the most common databases and applications work seamlessly in Linux. It also means lots and lots of stability.

• Cost: Linux software is completely free for developers to utilize or modify as they need. This doesn’t include just the software but all the other programs that have been written for it. This means that entire suites of server software that can be downloaded and used on the server without any additional costs.

• Ease of Use: Linux originally served a repute as a more complicated OS than the familiar Windows OS, but nowadays web developers and software writers have made the Linux programs extremely easy to use and modify for custom features.

• Security: The jury is still out on this issue, but most experts acknowledge Linux as the least prone to security issues and also the OS that delivers the most amounts of guaranteed uptime. Linux is ranked very low regarding the security issues.

There are undoubtedly many advantages of preferring a Linux server hosting, but the real key is to know if this is the optimum choice for your requirements is to simply compare it with the work that had all ready been done on your site, if it’s chiefly the Windows software or programs that you may prefer to choose a Windows, but with the beauty of Linux, it is quite possible to use the Windows language also.