Credit: jaylopez

In the past 9 years, I have had the pleasure of working with a good number of web hosts. I can tell you from experience that no single web hosting partner that I have worked with has been perfect. But there is no question some hosting companies are better than the others. In this day and age, it is very difficult to identify fake reviews and people who recommend hosting services just to get an affiliate check. Many folks end up with terrible hosts by believing the reviews they read online. If you have ended up in that situation, you are not out of luck. There are ways to handle that.

Here are 6 ways to properly handle your relationship with your web host:

• don’t be unreasonable: before blaming your web host for everything, you first have to understand that no web hosting service is perfect. Every single web host I have been on has had downtimes. Things break from time to time. If you can’t handle rare downtimes, you are going to have a difficult time finding a partner that meets your expectations.
• try contacting the customer service: before making rash decisions, you should contact your hosting partner’s customer service to find out what is causing your server to be down. In many cases, you may be able to solve the issues your account is experiencing without having to make major moves.
• use social media channels: in some cases, you may not hear back from your hosting partner even after multiple emails. You should check out your hosting partner’s Twitter and Facebook pages and contact its representatives on those sites.
• always have a backup plan: you should always have all your files backed up in multiple offsite locations to be able to deal with disasters properly. If your site is down for days and you can’t access your databases, you can rely on your backups to move your site to a new host quickly.
• give your host a second chance: I am always for giving businesses a second chance, especially if they have proven themselves in the past. Those of you who have been following this blog have probably seen some of my rants on my current web host. One does not part ways with a company that has delivered years of great service for just a couple of bad weeks (as long as that does not become a trend).
• move on quickly if you must: some people get too attached to the businesses they are working with or feel too lazy about moving their sites to a new host. Let’s face it. Moving an established business to a new host can take a bit of time. But if your web host is terrible, you have no choice. Don’t waste your time overthinking it. If your web host has become unreliable, run as fast as you can.

No web host is perfect. No matter how much money you are paying for your hosting service each month, you may have to deal with occasional server outages. When that becomes a trend, you should move on.

As a blogger, you have to wear many hats. Those include a technical hat. From time to time, you’ll have to optimize your blog and find ways to keep it more secure against hack attacks. Improving the performance of your website should be at the top of your agenda too. Unfortunately, many of us don’t have the time to get too technical or spend too much time mastering PHP and other web programming languages. Outsourcing the whole process to a company that has the right experts to help you out would be a good idea. That’s what WebAppHelp offers. It’s managed by the people behind DreamHost and gives bloggers the chance to optimize or move their blogs without having to hire an employee to get the job done.

Nobody likes having a slow blog. Moving a blog from one service to another could be a hassle. What if you want to change your web server altogether (maybe to Nginx to make your site faster)? WebAppHelp has a dedicated team of professionals that can help you do it all. I would not be recommending them had they not helped me optimize my websites in the past (and done a good job doing that).

WebAppHelp has something for everyone. If you are completely new to the technical side of things, you can take advantage of the service offered by this website to outsource your blog management. These folks can backup your site, optimize its performance, and perform a security analysis of your website. They can also help you move your website from one host to another. I personally used the help of these folks to get my site up and running under Nginx. Nginx is very much different from Apache and has different rules and settings. Let’s just say I did not have to master Nginx at the time to make the move (with the help of WebAppHelp of course).

As you can see in the above table, you can use WebAppHelp.com to have custom plugins developed for you. The video library is nice to have too. Overall, this is a very useful service for those of you who don’t want to spend your valuable time learning the technical side of things and don’t want to work with an unknown freelancer. WebAppHelp.com’s team is always available for chat, so you are covered if things somehow go wrong. The service is pretty affordable for what it is. Well worth looking into if you run your blog using WordPress.

PostRank: one of the best blog search engines out there. It can help you figure out which blogs are dominating which niches. It is very handy if you are looking for quality blogs to follow as well.

Topsy: a powerful Twitter search engine that can find you the latest articles and blog posts on any topic. It even shows you which influential Twitter users have retweeted those articles.

CommentLuv Search Engine: a handy search engine that can find you those CommentLuv blogs. You can use those sites to get links for your blog and link your posts to related articles on other blogs.

Questions.com: an interesting search engine that digs up questions and answers on any topic. Great way to come up with new ideas for your website.

Addictomatic: a complete search engine that searches blogs, video, and news sites and finds you the content you are looking for. A great tool to use to see what is going on in your niche.

Have you got any suggestion? Which of the above sites have you used in the past?

tweetvite: one of the best tools to create tweetups and find the ones going on in your area. Makes it very easy to organize and promote a meeting with your Twitter friends and followers.

dingbee: looking to network with even more people? Maybe you are just bored and want to attend a local event. Whatever the case, dingbee has you covered. It’s a very easy to use tool that can be used to discover and share local events.

Socialseek: Socialseek is a handy tool that shows you what’s going on all around you. It’s a powerful social media tracking tool that can help you discover top players and upcoming events in your area.

Aloqa: a powerful mobile platform that keeps you informed on interesting events and activities in your local area. It works on all popular mobile platforms.

tatweet: if you are hooked on Twitter, you can use this service to share your upcoming events with your tweeps. It lets you integrate your events into your website too.

What’s your favorite social event tool?

I have always believed that the more you give, the more you get back. Everything I have learned about blogging and business, I have learned from others. I didn’t suddenly discover the knowledge. Whether it was reading a book, attending a conference, or going through message boards, there has always been someone on the other side to answer my questions/concerns. So it’s always nice to be able to give back to those who are just getting started with their journey in the business world. I was a big fan of ideablob as it was a service that let people share their ideas with the world and get advice on how to proceed with their projects. Unfortunately, the service was shut-down when the parent company filed for bankruptcy. Startups.com is another service that lets users ask their questions and have them answered by the community fast. If you want to make it big as a blogger, you need to treat your blog as a business. If you have never run any business in the past, you are going to have issues and concerns to deal with on a daily basis. Thanks to Startups.com, you can get some of those issues answered.

The idea behind Startups.com is noble and something all entrepreneurs need to pay attention to. At the same time, Startups.com can be more than a Q&A forum for you as a blogger. Not only you can help other bloggers have their questions answered, you can also find out what people are curious about and write posts about those issues. LinkedIn Q&A has been a great source of blogging ideas for me and Startups.com can help as well.

The tags feature is very useful as well. It can give you a quick overview of the topics and sub-topics that people are interested in finding more information about. Startups.com is not the only game in town, but it’s a decent place to look at what people are asking and how you can provide value to them on your blog. If you are stuck and have no idea what to write about next, spending some time on Startups.com might help.

Backupify is an intuitive online backup system that lets you backup your Twitter, Flickr, and other online information for future references. The service currently allows you to backup the below services:

Backupify, which is free for a limited time, is expanding its services beyond the above list and will be supporting Tumblr, Gmail, and YouTube in the future.

You can use Amazon S3 or Backupify’s own storage to back up your accounts (they use Amazon’s service as well). You also get a few options to keep you informed on your backup information:

All in all, Backupify is a very handy solution for social media junkies who want to protect their online information at all times. It not only addresses a vital need, but it’s very cheap as well. Well worth a try, especially since the service is for free for now.

Is your blog growing fast? Maybe you are going global faster than you can handle. Or maybe you just want to give your readers a chance to navigate through your content in a more effective fashion. Whatever the case, you can count on Wibiya toolbar to make things that much easier on your blog. Wibiya is an innovative service that lets your users go through your content in a more effective fashion, translate your work, and even share it with their friends on Facebook or Twitter. Wibiya makes it so easy for your readers to connect with you on social networking sites and share your work with others.

Once you install Wibiya’s script on your blog, the following footer-bar is going to show up in your footer. As you can see, it gives you readers an easy way to check your latest posts out, read a random post, connect with you on Twitter, and even connect with you through Facebook connect. They can also sign-up for your RSS feed in the process. So any way you look at it, Wibiya gives your readers yet another way to go through your content.

What I like about Wibiya is the report that it provides to you once you start using it. It tells you how many folks have used the toolbar and what they have done with it. Wibiya essentially allows you to build a more solid community around your blog, so you can attract and retain more readers over the long run. Best of all, you don’t have to be a genius to get this toolbar to work. All you have to do is copy & past the code provided to you by Wibiya, and you are all set.

All in all, Wibiya is a cool blog add-on that makes it easier for your reader to find your best content on your blog and share it with their friends and followers. If you are hoping to build a solid community around your blog and keep driving traffic to your blog, Wibiya is a great service to try.

This past few days, I have talked about a couple of tools that you can use to develop new post ideas for your blog. But there are other ways to come up with blogging ideas and improve your blog besides using fancy tools. One of the best ways to learn new blogging tactics to take your blog to the next level is by watching what other top bloggers are doing with their own blogs. AllTop is an innovative service that gives you access to a large list of top blogs on almost any topic. So no matter how narrow your niche, there is a good chance you can find other blogs around in that niche on AllTop.

AllTop has 3 ways to help you find the blogs that interest you the most. You can use the search function to come up with a list of blogs around your keyword phrase. You can also search through blogs by category. That’s especially helpful if you are trying to do some market research and find top blog that could be potentially challenging in your market. You can also search through AllTop blog alphabetically. That is useful if you have a very specific topic in mind and want to find out what angles other bloggers are using to tackle your niche.

All in all, AllTop is a great place to learn about other blogs and pick up killer blogging tactics. Getting listed on AllTop also helps as well as you’ll get decent traffic from your AllTop listing. So whether you are looking for more traffic or blogging ideas, AllTop is a great place to explore.

So you spend a lot of time creating content to provide as much value to your readers as possible. That doesn’t mean you are going to get a lot of traffic. You still have to work on promoting your blog to make sure you get the exposure your blog deserves. One of the best ways to get more exposure for your blog and drive traffic to it is by getting involved on social bookmarking and networking website. Sure. Everybody tweets and participates on Facebook. But you need to do more if you want to maximize your social media opportunity. There are hundreds of websites that you need to be present on to keep driving traffic to your blog. These sites not only help drive traffic to your blog but some help you climb the SERPs as well.

So being involved in the social media is a no brainer. But submitting your content to hundreds of social bookmarking and networking websites can be too time consuming. As a blogger, you have got more important things to worry about. That’s why you should try outsource business processes that are not your core competency. And I can tell you social media submission is not a core competency for a blogger. That’s where Social Maximizer comes in. It’s a wonderful service that lets you submit your blogs to hundreds of social media websites, while giving you the control over your listings. It can save you a lot of time while giving your blog a chance to gain some traction and go viral.

How It Works

Working with Social Maximizer is very simple. All you have to do is figure out what pages you want to submit and what your listings are going to be about. You want to pay extra attention to your title and description. Other than that, there is no reason you can’t complete the process in less than 5 minutes.

Don’t worry. You know exactly what site you are submitting your pages to. In fact, you can pick and choose as Social Maximizer gives you control over all aspects of this process.

All in all, Social Maximizer is a wonderful service that lets you submit your blog pages to social networking and bookmarking sites without you having to go through the process by hand. You may be interested in doing the process all by yourself, but it’s better to invest your time in creating viral content. Don’t be afraid to delegate and outsource tasks. You can’t do everything, and thanks to services such as Social Maximizer you don’t have to.

If you haven’t heard of HitTail before, it is a graphical analytics tool that is made for people who are not necessarily into crunching numbers but would like to track how searchers get to their sites. But what people miss about this excellent service is the fact that you can use it to find ideas for your future blog posts. Take the example below for instance:

This is what HitTail shows me for a tech blog that I have been running for quite some time. It tell me that tech deals or western digital hard drives are the main area of interest for my readers. So if I am a smart blogger, I try to stay on topics that interest my readers. This is very useful if you are stuck and don’t know what to blog about. By knowing exactly what you need to go after, you can save yourself time and spend more of it on research and development.

Another very useful feature that HitTail has is graphs that you can get for your longtail keywords and top ten keywords. You can get the graphical representations for all search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and MSN (see below).

These graphs not only show you what the hottest keywords are on your blog, they can also give you an idea how to use longtailing more effectively. Longtailing SEO is very underrated these days but with the low level of competition out there, you should definitely take advantage.

HitTail is very affordable and does cost about $99.95 a year for their introductory service. If you want to get really deep within your data, you can pay them about $300 a year to get features such as “organic vs. paid” searches and adwords integration. But this service has been so useful in generating ideas for me that even at $300 a year, it is a steal.