I surprisingly often get questions on how to capture leads – and it seems like the answer is simple and obvious, but if you are a brand new online marketer without any HTML knowledge it might not be so easy to know all those obvious things.

In this article Cashrevelations gives you a few easy to follow tips on lead capturing – this article is for all those who are all new in affiliate marketing and without knowledge of HTML.

Capture Leads

If you want to capture a lead (name and email), you need an online lead capture page (or a landing page). There is a lot of landing page templates you can use on Internet, both premium and free. Some of the free templates you can find here:

Free Downloads

and here:

150 Free Landing Page Templates

Hosting

And then you need some type of hosting, and as always with Internet, there are free and premium hostings (search on Google). Personally, I prefer a premium hosting because it is less trouble with them and they are more reliable. We use and have good experience of One hosting.

A free alternative, yet very limited, to all that is for example Blogger. They have a very easy set up and they are completely free.

Lastly you need an auto-responder. One auto-responder we use in the past and have good experiences from is GetResponse (if I don’t remember wrong, they offer even a lead capture page). GetResponse is a premium service, but you can try it out for free if you go here: GetResponse Free Account.

The free alternative is this:

FreeAutoBot Free Autoresponders that follow-up leads automatically

I tested them for many years ago and the service works, but they are limited and cluttered with irksome ads.

If you wonder how to edit the landing page templates, then you can find some information here: How To Edit HTML Templates – Tutorial.

3 years back, the best solution to get a better ranking for your website was achieved by integrating right SEO techniques onto your webpages. Good ranking on search engines was the only solution to generate traffic. This gave rise to various Search Engine Optimization companies and specialists, even web hosting companies bundled SEO services as a part of their offering. However, today the times have changed and Social media is new and indeed a promising media.

The Need for Social Media Marketing

Social media is comprised of multiple social networking sites. Today every segment has its own dedicated social networking site. For example, if you are a photographer then Flickr is option for you, for video – Youtube and Vimeo are popular. For business professionals, LinkedIn and Xing are powerful networking tools. And not to forget, today Facebook is the king of all social networking sites.

With social media you have the option to reach your target audience in a shorter time. Social media is all about action, interaction and feedback. Social Media platforms have a visual appeal attached to them and hence they got popular so soon.

Search engines have understood the importance of social media and hence you will notice that for every keyword that you search, the search result page also includes entries from social networking sites. This rightly gives us an indication that for successful online business, social media marketing is also important.

Getting Started with Social Media Marketing

1. Depending upon your business segment, make a list of suitable social networking sites. Spare some time and read about these networking sites and try to understand how it works.
2. Create an account and make sure that your profile is at least 95% complete.
3. Listen to what people are talking. Try to understand the overall mood and discussion topics. Make a note of most popular topics, being discussed on these sites. Think about how you can contribute to these topics.
4. Do some research on points that you plan to discuss with the members on the social networking site. Make sure that you have the most updated information and also how it could help fellow members when you share it with them.
5. Once you start sharing your views, people might start questing you or ask for your suggestions. Be prepared to answer them. Give references, examples to validate your points and opinion.
6. By the means of above 5 steps, you have tried to create a niche for yourself and your business amongst your target audience. This will help spread awareness about you and your business. This is just the first step, and the journey ahead is truly promising provided you are on the right track.

Before it gets too late, make sure you get your hands on Social media marketing. Its indeed a new media – but a truly promising media.

Image: Gabriella Fabbri

This is our little jQuery roundup for July 2011 – This specific listing represents new jQuery techniques from late April until now – and contains some useful and screaming fresh jQuery techniques, including a beautiful and flexible gallery solution from Matteo Bicocchi and a fullscreen slideshow with HTML5 Audio & jQuery.

In our definition of jQuery techniques we include tutorials, plugins and similar – and in our definition of “new” we include released or updated during the actual period: and this particular time our actual period is between April 26 and July 19.

Cashrevelations.com presents a selection of new and useful jQuery techniques – 12 brand new jQuery techniques released or updated during the period of April 26 until July 19 this year. All these jQuery techniques are presented with demo.

12 New & Useful jQuery Techniques – July 2011

1. Fullscreen Slideshow with HTML5 Audio & jQuery
In this tutorial you will learn how to build a fullscreen photo slideshow to illustrate a New York picture series. We will add sounds with the HTML5 audio element in order to give life to the gallery and try to recreate the ambient of this vibrant city.
View Demo

2. Floating Tweets – WordPress jQuery Plugin
This WordPress Floating Tweets plugin adds a floating, sticky tab containing a live twitter feed from any twitter account. The widget is easily set up via any widget panel and can handle multiple floating twitter feeds per page, each with a different twitter account.
View Demo

3. Page Loading Effects with jQuery
In this short and easy to follow tutorial you will learn how to implement a nice fade in page loading effect with the help of jQuery – you just paste a piece of script in the body and add your content in a div block with content hide.
View Demo

4. jquery.mb.bgndGallery – jQuery Plugin
With this jQuery plugin you can make suggestive slide show of images as background of your page; the images will adapt their size to the window size fitting always at the best. You can navigate the gallery with your keyboard or with a displayed control panel.
View Demo

5. Custom Button Icon & Data Icon – jQuery Mobile Icons
jQuery Mobile framework has built in icon sets needed for most mobile application. An icon can be added to a button by adding a data-icon attribute on the anchor specifying the icon to display.
View Demo

6. Supersized 3.1 jQuery Plugin
Supersized is a fullscreen background slideshow built using the jQuery library. Supersized just got rewritten from the ground up. It’s faster, with even more options, animations, and added Flickr support.
View Demo

7. Beautiful HTML5 Portfolio
In this tutorial you will learn how to build a beautiful, stylish HTML5 portfolio powered by jQuery and the Quicksand plugin. You can use it to showcase your latest work and it is also fully customizable.
View Demo

8. jQuery News Scroller
In this tutorial you will learn how to build a practical news scroller with jQuery. When the user hovers over the jQuery Scroller, it will pause so they can read the abstract and click the link if they are interested.
View Demo

9. Animated Text and Icon Menu with jQuery
In this tutorial you will learn how to build a slick menu with a nice animation feature on hover. The idea is to make some elements slide out, change and animate the background color of the item and then slide the elements back in with a different color.
View Demo

10. Social Stats, jQuery & API Goodness
In this tutorial you will learn how to build a simple tool to measure the success of your online campaign. This basic social statistics tool is built with the assistance of the APIs from Twitter, Facebook and last but not least, Vimeo.
View Demo

11. Facebook Wall – A jQuery Social Media Plugin
This Facebook Wall jQuery plugin allows you to display the Facebook wall of a user, a page or an app on your own website. The design of the wall derives from the Facebook design and can be easily customized with some CSS.
View Demo

12. Image Wall With jQuery
The idea is to scatter thumbnails with different sizes on the page and make a ribbon with description slide in when we click – when clicking again on the thumbnail, the ribbon will close and open a large version of the image.
View Demo

The different jQuery items presented here in this article are not in any particular order – and Cashrevelations is not by any means whatsoever affiliated with any of the authors.

Screenshots is an important part of the daily work of many bloggers, web designers and other creative Internet workers. There are many online services that can help you with screenshot capturing – such as WebShotsPro, Thumbalizr and Bounce to mention a few. The problem is that they don’t always work, or it is queue, or it is God knows what. I think a browser based screenshot capturing solution is far more convenient and effective.

So, in this post Cashrevelations presents 4 useful screenshot capturing tools – effective Firefox and Google Chrome extensions that will make screenshot capturing a lot easier.

Firefox Webpage Screenshot Extensions

Screengrab – Firefox Extension
The Screengrab easy to use tool saves web pages as images either to a file, or to the clipboard – and it will capture what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame, and it can capture any Java or Flash embedded in a page.

LightShot Screenshot Tool – Firefox Extension
LightShot is a handy tool allowing you to easily make screenshots of any selected area in a browser tab. Just hit the Lightshot icon on the toolbar or status bar, then select area you want to make a screenshot from and click “Save”. You can also make some edits.

Google Chrome Webpage Screenshot Extensions

WebPage ScreenShot – Google Chrome Extension
With this tool you can take snapshots of any Internet site you are viewing. The snapshot can be saved to your computer and you can also make some basic editing like change the resolution, draw or cut. User friendly – one click to take the picture and then just save.

imgur – Google Chrome Extension
With this practical browser tool you can take a screenshot and upload it to imgur – it will save place on your computer and make your screenshot more accessible, and you can always download images from the imgur service when you need them in your work.

The browser extensions presented here in this article are not in any particular order – and Cashrevelations is not by any means whatsoever affiliated with any of the authors.

Most developers or established tutorial makers prefer to write technically advanced and glamorous tutorials like “How To Make A Mentally Disturbed Frog Jump Out Of Your PC Scream with The Help Of jQuery And Some CSS”, or something similar. Sometimes it can be really difficult to find relevant information on the basics – one of the most common questions we get here on Cashrevelations is “how to edit the landing page template”?

This is a short and simple tutorial on how to edit an HTML template – with the help of this tutorial and some practice you can edit landing or squeeze page templates all by yourself.

Finding An HTML Template & Unpacking It

First you need an HTML template you can practice on. You can search on Internet – there are both free and premium alternatives. Or, if you are tired to search the Internet, you can simply go to our Downloads section or to our article 150 Free Landing Page Templates.

Most templates, or any type of file downloads, come packed in a ZIP file and you must unpack them before you can begin to edit them. Right click on the ZIP folder and choose “extract all” – this will open your extraction wizard. Just click “next” and then select the location to extract your templates to. If you have problems with uncompressing (unzip) the templates you could try an online tool like WobZip.org.

Edit The HTML Template

First, make sure your template is an HTML template and nothing else – frequently we get questions from troubled people who try open a PHP page in their browser or try to install a usual HTML template on a WordPress blog or the opposite. The simplest way to test if you have an HTML template is to first locate you template and double click on it – if it opens in your browser and looks like a usual page, then it is an HTML template.

Locate your HTML template and right click on it – choose “Open with Notes” or “Open with WordPad”. By now, you see the source code for the template. Find the text you want to change – remove it and paste or write in your own text. In upper left corner, under File, click Save – it’s important that you save after any changes in your HTML document.

We Repeat:

• Right click on the template
• Choose “Open with Notes” or “Open with WordPad”
• Locate the text you want to change and remove it
• Paste or write in your own text to the template
• Under File (upper left corner), click Save

Open your HTML template in your browser by double clicking on it. If everything looks all right, then you are finished with your editing. But usually it doesn’t look all right at all.

One problem is that text lines often are too long. You can adjust the length of the text lines with a <br /> tag. Just put <br /> where you want to break the text line.

If you want to change the appearance of your template (body color, headline size or text size etc.) you need to change it from the CSS file – most modern landing page or squeeze page templates use CSS for styling. But editing CSS should not make you nervous.

If you make a copy of your template before you begin with your editing, then you can experiment all you want – and it is exactly what you should do. Don’t be afraid to play and change in the CSS code, nothing bad will happen – if something get broken, just make another copy from the original template.

To get information on CSS and how to edit CSS, we suggest you visit CSS Tutorial and CSS Reference by W3Schools. They provide you with information and coding examples in a very pedagogical way – they even have interactive example pages you can practice on.

Summary Of How to Edit An HTML Template

Editing HTML templates – all the process, from downloading and all the way to the ready template – consists of six easy parts:

1. Download A Template
2. Unpack Or Unzip The ZIP Archive
3. Right click on The Template
4. Choose “Open with Notes” Or “Open with WordPad”
5. Paste Or Write In Your Own Text To The Template
6. Under File (Upper Left Corner), Click Save

You have now edited the HTML template all by yourself. It is easy, and you sure will save some money when you don’t need to hire someone to do it for you. The only you need is practice and a bit of patience – and it also doesn’t harm to make a copy of the original template before you start editing.

If you are an online marketer or a web designer, you will sooner or later need resources like images or logos, videos or whatever – things you are not able to create yourself. Hiring people to work for you can be costly. With one obvious exception. Fiverr. Fiverr by Micha Kaufman and Shai Wininger is a micro-job site, where anyone can post random jobs that they are willing to do for measly $ 5. And as the two founders themselves point out, everyone now has a chance to monetize their talents, skills or digital valuables.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Fiverr Also Offers a Free iPhone App: Fiverr Alerts gives you the ability to track your sales earnings and purchases in real-time with push notifications, messaging and more.

As a digital entrepreneur you can find some surprisingly talented people with highly useful job offers. In this article in the “Tips & Tricks category” we will present some examples of qualified resources you can find on Fiverr and use in your marketing or web designing.

Useful Resources For Marketers & Webmasters

Remember that all these job offers, or Gigs as they are called on Fiverr, cost only $ 5 – a price that is affordable to almost anyone. The quality of the delivered product is often unexpectedly good and useful for your different marketing projects or your website.

Turn Your Color Photo Into A Pop Art Cartoon
Fiverr user Mousetivity will turn your color photo into a pop art cartoon you can use in your social marketing or website. You will get 3 files (popart, a white background in jpg and a 3rd in png formats) and the default size is 8×10 & 300 DPI.
More Similar

Design Of A High Quality Logo For Your Company
The Fiverr user Holozo can design a high quality logo you can use on your website or in marketing campaigns – you can see some example of earlier works on This Page. Files you will receive are PSD, EPS, JPG and PNG and up to 3 logo design concepts.
More Similar

Realistic Video Testimonial For Your Product Or Website
Video testimonials are a very good way to promote your product. This Fiverr user claims to have great acting skills and if you don’t like the result she simply will redo it. You can see an example of how she looks in front of a video camera right HERE.
More Similar

Positive Video Testimonial Or Review
Spreknz will create a positive video review or testimonial for your business, website or product – and he will send you a video link to download or embed code to put on your website. You can see an example of how he looks in front of a video camera right HERE.
More Similar

Customized Twitter Or YouTube Background Image
One of the keys to being popular on Twitter or YouTube is presentation. Having a unique, informative, eye-catching background image could very well convince people to follow you. You can see an impressive example of his work on his YouTube Channel.
More Similar

Professional Letters, eMails And Product Reviews
The Fiverr user Grayj25 will write letters, emails, product reviews and cover letters and more. He is a professional writer with over 10 years of experience in writing. He can write whatever you need and everything is tailored to your specific needs.
More Similar

As you can see from our few examples, it can be profitable to search a little bit on Fiverr – with some patience it is possible to find something really useful. And if you want to take advantage of these offers you need to create an account – it is easy and absolutely free, but you also need a PayPal account since all payments are made through PayPal.

• Visit Fiverr Marketplace

Ambition, determination and commitment are the three strong pillars of successful online marketing. On those pillars you build your business with marketing tactics that attract visitors and drive sales. You will fail, you will make misjudgments, you will loose money – I would say that 10 out of 10 business projects fail. But those who try the 11′th time are those who succeed – you will need all your ambition, determination and commitment.

The good news is that there have been many people who have tried, failed, tried again, failed again, and finally succeeded in identifying the most effective marketing tactics for an online business. Learning from the mistakes and also the successes of other marketers are necessary if you want to have a future in online marketing.

Wikipedia: The concept of revenue sharing predates affiliate marketing and the Internet. The translation of the revenue share principles to mainstream e-commerce happened almost four years after the origination of the World Wide Web in 1994.

What you need, except ambition and determination, are adequate marketing tools and a basic business plan. It doesn’t need to be something fancy and extremely complicated – avoid complicated things that are hard to understand. The simple outline could for example look something like this:

1. Take action
2. Establish goals
3. Define your business
4. Basic marketing tactics

There is absolutely nothing new or sensational about this information, but it will give you the basic structure you need for your future work with your online marketing business.

In this article we will briefly go through some proven affiliate marketing tactics used by the most successful marketers on the net – and in the end of the article Cashrevelations presents some highly useful marketing tools that you can use already today.

Take Action And Establish Goals

One of the first rules of online marketing is to take action. Internet is a dynamic, growing medium where businesses are created every moment. If you just sit and think about what you are going to do and never take action, you will never ever get where you want to go. Marketing tactics are totally useless unless you take action and execute them.

This takes you to the next critical stage of online marketing. You must truly know and understand where you want to go before you begin your journey. Without a really clear understanding of where you want to go, how to know what you need to do? How do you create tactics and take action? Would you build a house without using a blueprint?

You need to establish goals. Goals lead to strategies and then to tactics – plant your goals firmly in your mind and envision yourself succeeding with your online business.

Define Your Business

Starting your online business means understanding what your business is all about. What do you need to do to reach your goals? What marketing tactics will help you succeed? As you can see, there is a lot of questions you have to ask yourself.

Success is dependent on your ability to dissect and understand your business. You must be somewhat authoritative in your own niche and you must carefully evaluate what your future customers want. Once you identify what they want and need, it is very essential to determine how you can deliver those results for your potential customers.

Basic Marketing Tactics

Now that you have your business outlined and clarified, deploying basic marketing tactics is next on the list. And that starts with knowing how to market what you have to offer.

Basic marketing tactics include:

1. Creating a ‘brand’ or identity around your product
2. Creating a simple marketing message
3. Establishing a credible website
4. Creating a presence as an expert in a niche
5. Defining the benefits or value of what you have to offer
6. Developing your site content to drive traffic
7. Deploying SEO (search engine optimization techniques) to drive traffic

Build your business step-by-step and do your homework to evaluate the most effective marketing tactics. Learn from other marketers (read their blogs) and save weeks, months, and years of effort by taking advantage of proven techniques whenever possible.

A word about SEO. For many years ago, as an Internet newbie, I tried just about every SEO trick there is. I was reading the words of those big SEO gurus like a sacred text – I really tried hard to be a hit on Google. Of course it didn’t work. Finally I decided, “Google gives a shit about me, and I give a shit about Google”. I stopped using any type of SEO (I’m still very minimalistic in my SEO efforts). Since then, my relation to Google search engine has improved dramatically – and now it feels like we have a good working relation.

My point is, use all the SEO you are capable of, perhaps it works for you, but don’t get fixated and spend all your time on SEO tricks. There is no SEO trick that can replace good site content. If you want web traffic, you need good content. And if you must choose, spend your time on developing your content before spending it on SEO.

Marketing Tools You Might Need

Apart from things like landing page templates, blog platform and other necessary tools, there is a few more handy tools that might make your online marketing a lot easier.

Business Planning

Here are some examples of business planning tools you can find on Internet. There is more planning tools you can use for free, but if you are really dedicated you could, or maybe should, choose to invest in a more flexible premium service (but test a few free services first – do not invest in anything before you are sure that marketing is for you).

Ganttic – Resource Management & Planning
Ganttic is an online project management software for scheduling business resources and projects. The handy online scheduling software provides user friendly graphical interface and interactive Gantt chart for real time collaboration.

Business Calculators – Bplans
Bplans, a site with a large collection of free sample business plans, offers a set of online business tools you can use to quickly and easily evaluate different aspects of your new online business. These calculators can also be added to your own business website.

NEBS Business Plan Tool
This is a handy interactive tool you can use to write your very own business plan in a comfortable and easy step-by-step fashion. Just read the instructions and suggestions accompanying each section and then answer the questions posed.

DoubleClick Ad Planner – Google
This is a free online media planning tool by Google that can help you identify websites your target customers are likely to visit – you can easily build media plans for yourself or your clients. Access unique users data for millions of websites from over 40 countries.

Plan Cruncher – Easily Create A Small Business Plan Online
Plan Cruncher creates a standard one-page summary of a business plan for a start-up company. You do this by choosing icons that represent some of the standard answers that a business plan must provide.

Tracking & Executing

Tracking the result of your marketing efforts is important – especially if you for example spend money on advertising. VendorSeek has a nice article, Tips for Online Marketing Analysis, where they explain the importance of tracking you marketing actions. Below you have some online marketing tools that are all free of charge (at least on basic level).

Marketing Return on investment (ROI) Calculator
This user friendly online tool lets you find out if Twitter, Facebook, or other campaigns are making you money. Calculate if you are really making or even losing money on your online marketing – and discover how much you need to spend to earn every $1.

Tout – Track & Organize Your Repetitive Emails
Tout is an online service that lets you create custom marketing email templates that you can track, organize and schedule. You can send a maximum of 7 emails per day with the free account – with a premium account you get features like tracking and scheduling.

SampleWords – Free Business Forms & Templates & Planners
Browse and download printable documents including premium and free business forms, accounting forms, personnel documents, communication documents, sales organizers, letter templates, planners, basic organizers, calendars and much more.

BitNami – Open Source Simplified
Bitnami offers open source installers or software packages for web applications as well as Virtual appliances. You can for example easily install WordPress on your PC to test new functions (landing page templates etc.) of your marketing blog before going online.

Google Analytics – Web Analytics
There is a lot of analytics services you can use, but Google Analytics is free, effective, flexible, easy to use and reliable. Track sales and conversions and measure your site engagement goals against threshold levels that you define for your affiliate marketing.

Clicky – Web Analytics In Real Time
Clicky is a real time web analytics service. This means that when you login and view your stats, you are seeing up to the minute data on the traffic to your web site. There is a free version and premium versions – you can see a demo of the service HERE.

Your Personal Online Presence

Creating a strong online personal presence is essential if you want to be successful in Internet marketing. Luckily there is a lot of really useful (and even free) tools you can use. Here we present just three good and effective alternatives.

AboutMe – Online Personal Profile
This stylish and free online tool allows you to quickly build a personal and dynamic splash page that points visitors to your content from around the web. Statistics over how many persons see your profile – but slow downloading of the profiles is a problem.

SocialURL – Showcase Your Web Profiles
This very easy to use and free online tool allows you to organize all of your social network profiles in one link that can be accessed in one click or link – very suitable for email and forum signatures. You can also keep track of people visiting your SocialURL page.

Retaggr – The Definitive Online Profile
This easy to use online tool lets you aggregate all your online social profiles and contact details into a portable interactive profile – rich with content. You can have a look at the different solutions they offer HERE.

Final Words & Warnings

Online affiliate marketing is very much a question of trial and error. Your first try will probably fail, but you shouldn’t be discouraged by that – just try again. But don’t spend money on extensive advertising campaigns, eBooks with affiliate marketing tips, expensive memberships in different guru jippos, or whatever – remember that you can find almost everything free on Internet. There is no reason for you as a marketing newbie to spend a lot of money. And, most of all, watch up for people who promise you incredible wealth and economic independence – statistically those wonderful guru proposals almost never work. In many cases, a “marketing guru” is a shark on a hunt for a marketing newbie just like you, and your meeting will leave you with a thin wallet and disillusioned mind.

That ends our brief roundup of proven affiliate marketing tactics and useful marketing tools. Good luck with your online affiliate marketing and be prosperous.

First Image: Gabriella Fabbri

One of the most annoying things I know is to wake up one morning, start up my old PC and discover that my website is down. In fact, except from being transmitted by extreme sudden obesity, I think nothing could irritate more in that moment. And it is not only the irritation – all downtime means a more or less serious loss of revenue and reputation.

Do not underestimate the importance of online reputation. According to Wikipedia, one study found that a good reputation added 7.6% to the price received – imaging what a bad reputation could do considering we have high impact social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. One significant factor in your websites online reputation is downtime.

But there is no need to lose your face – there are website monitoring services you can use for free and they will help you to easily keep an eye on your site 24 hours a day.

Free Website Monitoring Services

The monitoring services presented here are what we consider as effective and useful – but there are of course many more competent monitoring alternatives. We choose these because of user experience (we like easy-to-use things), effectiveness and of the simple fact that they offer free alternatives alongside with premium features – it is a good idea to test before purchase, and these services allow you to do that thoroughly.

In user experience we also count in the sign-up process – an extensive and complicated sign-up process is almost always a reason for us to reject a service. We follow a simple principle – the request of information shall be fair. And many services sign-up forms have more a character of personal profiling or market research than an honest sign-up.

UptimeRobot by Umut Muhaddisoglu and Daniel Rimille monitors your websites every 5 minutes. The robot asks for your websites headers and gets status codes and if there is a downtime problem, you get an alert by e-mail, SMS, Twitter or RSS. This service is free and you can also monitor up to stunning 50 websites. It is represented here because of a combination of function, flexibility and price – a true functional budget alternative.

BasicState checks your website status every 15 minutes and you get problem alerts by e-mail or sms. You can add as many sites as you like – and tailor default, backup and emergency alert schedules to your preferences. There is also a pro version of this service for more demanding users. BasicState is maybe not the most visually appealing service on the market, but offers effective protection from costly and lengthy website downtimes.

100 Pulse monitor service checks your websites for downtime and response time as well. Problem alerts by E-mail, SMS ($10 per 50 SMS) RSS and Twitter – weekly and monthly periodic reports. Up to two websites can be monitored entirely free, and the monitoring frequency is selectable between 15 min – 3 hr. The free alternative feels a bit limited but it covers the basics – for $5 per month you get a more extended and relevant version.

Pingdom by Sam Nurmi lets you monitor only one website for free, but has also a 30 day free trial on paid premium accounts. The problem alerts are sent through E-mail, SMS (20 per month), Twitter and via a handy iPhone app you can download for free. The free account covers the most basic needs (uptime, response time and error analysis) and for many website owners that could be enough. Also available as a WordPress plugin.

Keep Your Visitors Updated

To keep your visitors updated of downtime problems or maintenance (or anything else affecting your site performance) is good manner and might save you from losing visitors or potential customers. It seems to be obvious and unnecessary thing to point out.

But the fact is, even big service providers and major websites are sinners in that case.
A frightening example of that is a major Internet services provider in Sweden which had a more than 10 hours downtime on all services – and they didn’t care to give any type of information to their customers about the downtime problems. And the really frightening thing is; this is not unusual – there is a nauseous sea of examples, and for an ordinary Internet entrepreneur this type of ignorant complacency can be devastating.

There is no need for some fancy and extraordinary apologizes – a simple note is enough. Just learn to inform your visitors when something way above the normal happens on your website. It proves that you are a dedicated actor on Internet – and that benefits you.

The Simple Conclusion

Downtime happens. The President will have downtime. You will have downtime. Everybody will have downtime. Do not panic and have a well defined plan for handling problems like that in a correct way. Remember three things – monitor your website, solve the problem and inform your visitors. As simple as it sounds, that is actually one difference between a somewhat successful website and a poor Internet nobody.

Image: Fercozzz