Error Pages - Do You Customize Them to Build List or Make Money?

I have several blogs that I visit and read occasionally. One day when I visited one of those blogs, I couldn’t access it. It gave me error message, “Internal Server Error”. So I left. I returned there again the next day. It still couldn’t be accessed and gave the same error message.

Coincidentally, the owner of this particular blog is a member of a same forum that I’m a member of so I told her about this problem. She didn’t know why this problem occurred so she contacted her web hosting and it took another day to have the problem resolved. In total, her blog couldn’t be accessed for almost 3 days.

Imagine how many visitors were lost? How many possible RSS feed subscribers were lost? How many possible new loyal readers were lost? You know what I mean, don’t you? You can lose possible prospects because of some accidentally errors! How much money do you lose?

Fortunately you can turn these error pages into money making machines.

By default, these are the common errors and their corresponding messages:

• 400 Bad Request: Invalid request.
  The default page that handles this error is name 400.shtml.
• 401 Authorization required: Invalid login credentials?
  The default page that handles this error is name 401.shtml.This happens when someone try to access a password protected page or folder but he doesn’t input the correct username or password.
• 403 Permission Denied: You do not have permission for this request.
  The default page that handles this error is name 403.shtml.This happens when you set the wrong permission for your pages or folders. For example you use CHMOD 644 when you should use CHMOD 755.
• 404 Not Found: The requested URL does not exist.
  The default page that handles this error is name 404.shtml.This is the most common error. Mostly happens because your visitor types the wrong URL or made a typo.
• 500 Server Error: A misconfiguration on the server caused a hiccup. Check the server logs, fix the problem then try again.
  The default page that handles this error is name 500.shtml.This can happen due to a wrong htaccess configuration or bugs in the program scripts (such as Wordpress plugins).

Any of these errors may happen and you’re just not aware of it… but you can make money with these error pages instead of losing prospects!

Here’s how: customize your default error pages into money making pages. For example:

• Opt-in page, or
• One Time Offer, or
• Recommended resources page, or
• Redirect it into your other site.

If you don’t know how to do it, here’s a simple guide to do it.

Change the content of each page that handles this particular error, namely 400.shtml, 401.shtml, 403.shtml, 404.shtml, and 500.shtml.

• If your web hosting has cpanel, you’re in luck. You can easily accomplish this by going to “Error pages” in your cpanel.

  

  In the “Error pages” menu, click each of this error numbers (400, 401, and so on), and modify each of them with your custom error page.

  

• If you use BestHostGator.com as your web hosting, there’s a much simpler way to customize your error pages Simply add these lines of code into your .htaccess file to redirect them into your customized error pages:
  

  ErrorDocument 400 http://yourdomain.com/customerrorpage1.html
  ErrorDocument 401 http://yourdomain.com/customerrorpage2.html
  ErrorDocument 403 http://yourdomain.com/customerrorpage3.html
  ErrorDocument 404 http://yourdomain.com/customerrorpage4.html
  ErrorDocument 500 http://yourdomain.com/customerrorpage5.html

  Where http://yourdomain.com/customerrorpage.html is the URL of your custom error page.

• If you use BlueWebHost.biz as your web hosting, you can make different custom error pages for each of your domain that you host there so that your custom pages are more targeted.
  
  Just create your own 400.shtml, 401.shtml, 403.shtml, 404.shtml, and 500.shtml for each of your domain, then upload them into their corresponding domain folder in your BlueWebHost.biz web hosting.

Note: to change your Wordpress default error 404, modify the “404.php” page of your Wordpress blog theme.

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