Recommendations

The best recommendations come from the tools and services successful people use.

I know how to pick great tools. I’ll tell you why. My training and profession for years was in project management. Evaluating the best tools, services, and partners that a company should invest in was my forte. And when we didn’t buy or license stuff, we made it, and I’ve made dozens on high-end, some multi-million dollar online services. Before starting my online businesses in 2004, I worked as a project manager and manger for online publishing companies such as CareerPath (now CareerBuilder), Barnes and Noble, Microsoft TechNet along with a number of start up the go go 90′s such as Direct Stock Market, and confusing work for Entrepreneur Magazine, among others.

Providing recommendations isn’t much use, in my opinion, unless the other services and products to avoid and why. It allow some insight into the logic and the quality criteria you use to say this is good, and this is not-so-good, and this one here stinks. There’s a lot of offerings out there that are really on the cusp of fraudulent. It’s what the CEO of Google might call the cesspool. You can’t figure out what to use and what not to unless you try a bunch of stuff and you make a few mistakes along the way. I’m going to share that with you.

This is going be an ongoing article that is added to and updated when I update it with new tools. I suggest stuff here with and without affiliate programs. If I find a best of bread product or service, sometime, it is the best because they keep their costs down by NOT offering affiliate commissions. Like Name.com for registering domain names. Simply a great service, with great customer service, and very reasonable prices, and if you are really watching the pocketbook, happy hour prices. So, when I link to them, I don’t earn a single penny, I just like their business, and it is my best interest overall to help them out. For bloggers, they have a GREAT deal. I mean GREAT. Register a domain name, but then host your blog for only $1.99 a month. You don’t have to have to pay for a full blown hosing account. And it is easy.

The quality of your tools, especially when you prefer to keep your overhead, expenses, and workforce small and and like to leverage all that into great margins and ROI, make all the difference in becoming successful and competitive online, even when you are competing against much larger companies with more workers and more capital to waste.

I recommend what I use and I link directly to it. I’m not an Internet Marketing Guru by any means.

Domain Registration Recommendations

Name.com – Just great services, great prices, nice people, and the do right by the customer. In addition to what I wrote above, they don’t ding on stuff like private registration service. GoDaddy (one of my suggestions to avoid, does.)

Domain Name Registration Services to Avoid

GoDaddy – GoDaddy’s got the reputation as the domain name register leader. I have an account there for hosting, and their whole system from hosting to domain registration is clunkly cludgy and confusing. They charge more then they need to for Domain name registrations, their back navigation is just a mess. And they want to up-sell you and cross sell you on everything. It is confusing enough to get up and going when you are new, but all the crappy distractions they have in their order process is just annoying, and to top it off they try to ding you on almost every little thing. While I host some sites on GoDaddy, and I don’t move them from them becasue I’m lazy and it isn’t worth it, my head ache is your gain.

They are expensive, and they do offer affiliate commissions, so guess what, you pay higher prices so all the nut jobs out there who have never dealt with Go Daddy’s back end recommend them just to get the commissions on the recommendation.

1 & 1 - I love 1 & 1 hosting. They are great, and domain name registration is easy to use and nicely set up. I have about 70 domain names registered through the, but they only allow you to register one year at a time. You can’t get 5 or 10 years registeration. And for SEO purposes, for sites that are doing well, one of the best ways you can signal to the search engines that you are committed to domain and it isn’t a speculation or a thin affiliate site, is to pony up on your domain name registration. So, while I’d say thumbs up to Hosting with 1 &1, I’d say avoid their domain name registration services until they allow multi-year registrations at one time.