I’ll just qualify post this as a bit of a rant right off the bat. Cheap hosting is killing small businesses by tricking them into thinking that their $5 or $10 is such a good deal, they don’t need to do anything else online. I have had meetings with numerous small businesses that basically brag on how cheap their hosting is. However, not one of them brags about how much business, leads or sales their website is bringing in. Do you see the correlation?

Hosting a website, at least the disk space and bandwidth is becoming almost free from many large providers. But only hosting your website will get you few results in today’s Internet marketplace. With millions of new pages hitting the web every day, you need additional Internet marketing services, tools and strategies to stand out online.

Here are just some of the additional website marketing services you should be looking into adding to your monthly fees of having a website:

• SEO - Organic search engine optimization can move you up the search ranks and produce traffic
• PPC - Pay-per-click advertising allows you to target terms, specific areas and even track it’s performance
• Email Marketing - Using permission based email marketing to stay in front of your customers is a must due to it’s cost effectiveness and ability to be tracked. It takes just pennies!
• Analytics - Your website can report to you just about everything going on with it. Data is king, leverage it!
• Business Blogging - Roll out new content, increase SEO, establish expertise, connect with customers and build a following.

Here at Five, we will never have a $10 monthly hosting fee or anywhere near that. We offer a monthly managed service that combines web hosting with a content management tool, web analytics (stats), support and basic SEO. From there we have further marketing services to customize what is best for our clients. It’s not our interest in hosting 10,000 websites that move little business, we’re into quality websites that make a difference to their owners.

Thanks for allowing me to rant.

Thanks to Jason in our office for sending me this link, I was made aware of Woopra. Watch the video embedded below.

GBTV #337 | Introducing Woopra from Neal Campbell on Vimeo.

Woopra is a new robust web-tracking & analytics tool. Currently in BETA, it’s mainly targeted for small to medium websites. Watching the video above you’ll see that it allows real-time stats in a fabulous interface, pushing some extensive data on the users visiting and moving around your site. Woopra features also include real-time chat with your visitors, visitor tagging and activity search. Small e-commerce websites should be lining up to get a version of this.

The killer part? Woopra would like to provide their service for FREE. The bad news is that while they figure out how to properly scale it, you need an invite to put it to use. A service like this will obviously spark some privacy issues, but I think that’s always a good thing for discussion sake. For those of you begging for more data and visibility into your websites performance, this seems like a winner.

I’ll keep you posted (so you should subscribe) on this web analytics tool being available to the masses for sure.