As a small business owner and entrepreneur, you’ve probably heard a million times that in order to attract customers in the modern age, you need to be active on social media. But when you’re Chief of Everything, who has time to keep track of Twitter mentions?
With 350 million users on Facebook, 750 tweets being sent every second, and two new users joining LinkedIn every second, the social sphere is buzzing. Not being involved could mean missed opportunities for new customers. Having a strong social presence can also mean increased brand awareness and stronger SEO rankings.
Social media management doesn’t have to be a daunting task. There are plenty of tools – most of them free! – that can help you manage your social media presence without eating up too much time. We highlight some of our favorites here:
HootSuite
Whether you have a small marketing team or you’re handling it all yourself, HootSuite is a great tool that allows you to manage your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, MySpace, PingFM and WordPress accounts. The best part? The basic version is absolutely free! If you need a little more insight, paid plans – starting at $5.99 per month – allow you to add on Google Analytics and other analysis tools.
HootSuite’s user-friendly layout focuses on streams, constantly updating feeds of information, which are customizable by account, network or keyword. This makes it easy to keep an eye on all of your social channels in one place. The tool also makes it easy to connect with users, providing followers’ bios, Klout scores and links to their social profiles in just one click.
CrowdBooster
If you’re an SMB, you know the importance of tracking the ROI on your marketing campaigns. You don’t want to waste time on campaigns that don’t work, and you should be optimizing the ones that do. But when you’re dealing with something subjective like social media, how do you decide if your campaigns are working? CrowdBooster is a great tool that focuses on gathering data from your social profiles to determine exactly that.
It can provide analytics on impressions, total reach and engagement with your posts, allowing you to better target future campaigns. CrowdBooster will also send you alerts on Twitter users who may be a match for your brand and content. The tool also analyzes your posts and gives suggestions to improve your strategy based on when people are most likely to view your latest content.
The lowest plan of CrowdBooster starts at $9 per month and allows you to track up to 50,000 followers.
Feedly
When small businesses begin to build their social presence, they are prone to forgetting that broadcasting their own message is only half the battle. Sharing others’ content in order to engage your audience is also a crucial component, and Feedly is a great tool that essentially serves as a feed reader.
When you have several websites to keep up with, it can become cumbersome to visit each of them to stay updated on their content. Feedly aggregates all of the RSS feeds from these websites into one easy-to-manage tool that can be accessed via desktop or mobile. You can push content to your social media profiles instantly or save an article to share later. This makes the process of keeping up with and sharing relevant industry content much more streamlined and easy to manage.
Feedly plans begin at $5 per month, although you can save some cash with a $45 yearly subscription.
With the help of these social media management tools, creating an online presence for your small business doesn’t have to be overwhelming. With affordable and even free options, it doesn’t have to eat up your marketing budget either. As more customers turn to online research before visiting a business or making an online purchase, social media is a great avenue to connect with your target audience and build relationships. With 92 percent of businesses using social networks for marketing purposes by the end of 2014, you can’t afford to be left behind.
What are your favorite social media tools to use when building an online community for your business?
You’ve done all of the heavy lifting, and you’re nearly ready to launch (or relaunch) your website. But before you pass “Go,” it’s important to make sure you haven’t overlooked anything that will embarrass your company, damage your SEO or cost you money to fix.
You can often forget a number of things in your eagerness to make your site live, so it’s useful to have a checklist as you make your final touches. Some may sound simple, but the devil’s in the details, especially in today’s ultra-connected society.
Here are 12 things you should double-check before showing your website to the world:
While this list is comprehensive, there will be additional areas you’ll want to continue to test as visitors come through. A website should be a dynamic part of your business and should always reflect the latest content your company has to offer. Frequent reviews with impartial eyes will make your site the best it can be.
What tips have you learned from launching a new website? Share them in the content section below.
Link-building is one of the most important activities you can do to maximize search engine optimization (SEO) for your website; it's also one of the most daunting. Luckily, there are dozens of sites you're likely already familiar with that can get you started. These sites provide dofollow links – also called backlinks – which incorporate HTML markup that informs the search engines to follow the destination inside the link. With the ability to influence the target page’s PageRank, dofollow links require minimal effort and, for the most part, are under your control.
Dofollow links offer a wealth of benefits:
Many sites alternatively use nofollow links, so it’s imperative to understand the difference between the two. Every URL on a webpage is either a nofollow or dofollow link. A nofollow link means that the HTML code instructs search engines to ignore the link, meaning the link’s target page will get no benefit.
Because the vast majority of social media sites only provide nofollow links, it's important to concentrate only on those sites that allow dofollow links. Here’s a guide to getting those backlinks:
With the sites above, you will have a great start to your link-building efforts. Don't have time to post to several different sites? Social media management tools can help you manage many of them. Once you get started and begin to see results, it will become a habit that's worth continuing.
Edit: Entry was edited to reflect Google+ capabilities changes.
If it sounds too good to be true, chances are it is.
That's what TextDrive's "lifetime" customers had confirmed earlier this month, when the company announced it would shut down March 14, 10 years after its founding. Though many of the stranded customers got a great deal over the course of their membership, it doesn't change the inconvenience of their situation: left scrambling for a new host with a limited timeframe.
For those TextDrive customers, the circumstances can appear quite daunting, but changing web hosts is often not as hard to do as one might imagine, as long as they have their data backed up and on a temporary solution.
Follow these step-by-step guidelines for the best method of moving your Web site from one host to another.
Step 1: Select a new Web host.
For the TextDrive refugees, it's probably a priority at this point to choose someone that won't simply disappear at any moment. Look for a firm that's been around a while and has a record of getting the job done.
Step 2: Set up at the new host.
Although they won’t yet be able to send or receive, set up your email accounts at the new Web host. If you use sub-domains and/or a MySQL database, also set these up now following the host’s instructions. Use the same email addresses, database names and passwords that you used at your old host.
Step 3: Upload to the new host.
Retrieve all of your backed-up files including images and databases. Don’t delete any files, just copy them. If you use Web mail, now is also the time to backup your emails, or forward them to a different email account as they will not move to the new host. Log in to your FTP account using the temporary login information that your new host has provided and upload all of the files you previously backed up to the new server. (You cannot log in with “ftp.yoursite.com” as the domain name is still pointing to the old host.) Be sure to keep the directory structure of the files the same as at the old host. In the case of databases, import backed-up files using phpMyAdmin from the control panel.
Step 4: Test, test, test.
Using the test URL provided, make sure your Web site is working and viewable. The only thing you can’t test right now is email.
Step 5: Change DNS settings.
Log in to your domain name account, find the DNS settings, and update both of the name-servers. Your new host should have already emailed you with the information to input here.
Step 6: Wait 48 hours for the settings to change.
It usually only takes a few hours for the migration to occur, but it can take up to 48 hours for everyone, everywhere in the world, to catch up. During this 48-hour period you actually could have one visitor viewing your Web site on the old host and another viewing the Web site on the new host.
Step 7: Check that everything has updated.
Using a WHOIS domain tool, check the name servers. Are they the servers of the new host? Also, check that your email is working on the new host and check to see if any email went to the old host during the DNS update.
Step 8: Ask for help.
If the above steps are Greek to you, don't fret. Your new provider will be happy to walk you through the process if needed.
After all, it’s easier to move on your terms than it is on a webhosts'. Find yourself a dependable, stable partner and get back on your feet.
Online shoppers are looking for the fastest, most secure way to get to your product. According to an Akamai Technologies survey, 47% of consumers expect a page to load in 2 seconds or less. Here are ten ways to keep your website speed up to standard:
This summer (July 2020) we released our brand new Managed WordPress solution - designed with the sole purpose in mind to provide the industry's best Managed WordPress solution - with a specific aim at boosting client website speeds.
We're offering Month #1 for completely free (meaning we won't charge your credit card until 30 days).
We'll also migrate your website (or multiple websites!) from your current hosting provider to the new solution for absolutely, 100% free - taking care of the end-to-end migration process for you.
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Own a jewelry store and looking for a way to stand out among the thousands of websites that also sell jewelry? Move over .com, as .diamonds is in town.
Last month, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which oversees Internet domains, went live with a long-drawn-out plan to massively expand the number of Internet generic top-level domains (gTLDs) available to businesses.
This is big news in the Internet world; over the past 30 years, only 14 new generic top-level domains had been created. This new plan will introduce hundreds and perhaps thousands of domains per year, and the first few – including .singles, .camera, .clothing and .bike – are already being rolled out by a company called Donuts, which has submitted more than 300 potential names to ICANN for approval. Google has also submitted for more than 100, including gTLDs to protect trademarks such as .google and those that have “interesting and creative potential,” such as .lol.
Businesses owning a trademark were allowed to submit a claim during a sunrise period before the names became available to the general public. More than 20 new gTLDs are now generally available from Donuts, with a handful of new ones coming out each week. Other domains will become available soon from other companies approved by ICANN.
Although a new name may be approved, it doesn't mean anyone can register a new domain in it. There are three phases of approval for each domain:
So what does this mean for SMBs, and why might they be interested in these new domains? First and foremost, it gives small businesses the ability to get in on interesting and simplistic domain names because of the sheer number of possibilities becoming available and the specificity of many, such as .plumber and .limo.
It also helps visitors understand what your company does just by looking at your URL – if you’re not a limousine company, you probably haven't grabbed a .limo domain. However, a company stuck with www.jonesandsonsjewelryco.com can add in www.jones.diamonds as its URL with prices starting at $40 per year.
Still, a number of questions still need to be answered before this becomes a no-brainer for SMBs. Because they are so new, there is not yet enough information on these gTLDs to understand how search engines will view and rank them. Unless it can be proven that they are given as much SEO weight as .com addresses, small businesses will likely take a look at what's available and may invest in one or two if the price is right, but steer clear of using them until the situation crystallizes. Until then, much of the land grab of new domains might be restricted to bigger companies looking to protect their brand.
It also might require a bigger marketing spend to get customers who are set in their ways to visit the new URLs, and SMBs with minimal marketing budgets may find this an insurmountable hurdle. Until mindshare is established for the new domain, SMBs will likely have to bear the cost of maintaining two domains and employing redirects to the new domain from the old site.
Consult your web hosting provider to learn more about the pros and cons of pursuing a new gTLD for your SMB.
Just when you thought you could breathe easy with Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas behind you: The next holiday season for online retailers is right around the corner: Mother's Day, Father's Day, and graduations.
While these holidays won't come close to the traffic experienced on Black Friday – when a record 66 million shoppers spent a whopping $1.2 billion – they will spread a little mid-season cheer for online retailers who experience the majority of their sales between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Is your e-commerce website – and your web hosting company – ready for another spike? Let's take a look at three things you can do to get ready for your next big holiday season:
1) Be aware of your page load times and take steps to reduce them. Reducing image sizes and implementing content delivery networks (CDNs) are two of the best things websites can do to deliver pages faster. CDNs bring your content closer to your global customers by continuously pulling and caching content from your server and distributing it to secure servers around the world. The recommended page load time is three seconds or less.
2) Make sure your web hosting provider can support your need to burst. Many e-commerce websites have dedicated servers to support their traffic, but in slow or booming times those dedicated servers can be under- or over-utilized. Creating a hybrid hosting scenario can ensure you have high base capacity with fixed costs through dedicated hosting, while providing elastic traffic handling on a pay-as-you-use model through cloud hosting.
3) Ensure your data is backed up, preferably in a secondary location. Data backup is like an insurance policy: you hope you never have to use it, but when you do, you're happy you made the investment. Having your website crash is traumatic, and losing customer data in the process is catastrophic. You can rest more easily knowing that your customer data is protected and can be restored quickly in case of an outage.
It's important to know the cost to your business if your website is not ready for the masses. A recent report from the Ponemon Institute and Emerson Network Power indicates each minute of an unplanned website outage can cost companies $7,900 per minute, on average, up from $5,600 in 2010. Can your business really afford to lose out on that kind of revenue? Making sure your website is ready to go will ensure you don't miss out on a single dollar.
Website designers have been using Search Engine Optimization to lure visitors for nearly 20 years. These days, it’s mandatory practice for businesses. So, does implementing SEO to the best of your abilities even tilt the playing field in your favor anymore?
Attracting visitors has always involved more than SEO. But as companies grow more sophisticated with their SEO practices, it becomes imperative to engage in other types of online marketing to drive traffic to your site.
There aren’t really shortcuts, either; making your site worth visiting is the concept behind most of the traffic-driving methods.
Here are six ways your website can be more useful, and more likely to generate new and return visitors:
Better, More Interactive Content: The written word is the heart of any site. No simpler advice exists than constantly improving that – your text has to be concise in addressing topics on visitors’ minds. Bolster it with other media.
Create a series of brief instructional videos – how-to content excels when you can visually demonstrate what you’re describing. SEO systems love video content. Is your industry more audio-friendly, or would video eat up too much bandwidth? Post interviews and explainers as sound files.
Every little bit helps, but what helps most is excellent information in your specialty. The best websites produce valuable well-written insights, bringing people useful data that’s difficult to find elsewhere.
Build A Responsive Website: Increasingly, business is being conducted on mobile devices; it’s becoming the norm for companies to build responsive versions of their websites catered to the mobile viewer.
A responsive design allows a website to fit whatever screen size loads it: desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone. Visitors appreciate a site that’s simple to navigate via phone, providing the most essential information in an easy-access manner. Determine what mobile users are most likely to seek – directions, your phone number, your hours, inventory – and put that front and center.
Start a Loyalty, Referral or Brand Ambassador Program: It’s fairly straightforward to make existing customers feel appreciated, and keep them from migrating to a competitor.
Incentives rewarding repeat business come in different shapes and sizes. Customers who write positive reviews on third-party sites can become “Brand Ambassadors” with some special privilege. One-time rewards can be offered for customers who refer business. Repeat purchases themselves can be discounted or used to accumulate reward-program points.
Conduct a Webinar: The expertise people seek from you doesn’t need to come in the same old format. Engage readers with something interactive.
Offer a free instructional session to display your know-how. Many webinars are now built around the idea of attending during part of your lunch break. Give customers a face and voice to associate with your company, and a forum for interaction via Q&A sessions, polls and special offers.
Make Your Case (with Case Studies): Potential customers want to see how your product works in a real-life setting. The closest thing you can offer, in many cases, is a case study.
Pick a satisfied customer using a product you want to promote, and co-author a story about your business relationship and successes. Co-market whitepapers or webinars with partners who build complementary products.
Few things are as potent a marketing weapon as getting your success out there in the words of a successful, satisfied customer.
Declare Local Ties: Even if your business is entirely online, don’t ignore local directories and mobile mapping applications. For brick-and-mortar stores, it’s even more crucial.
Many consumers will see value in buying local, boosting their own economy. If local customers go looking for you, ensure you’re found – submit your location to online mapping services. Don’t frustrate customers driving around unable to find you.
Once your website’s as useful as it can be, it’s about luring people in. Here are four ways to get more eyes on your content and offers.
Social Media, Used Strategically: Building an online audience is a huge piece of the puzzle. Use social media outlets to discuss promotions, new products, industry news – everything you can offer. Provide customers an extra avenue for feedback, technical or customer service questions.
Link up with an influential social media site or personality for additional promotion. Friends in social places can put you in new customers’ good graces.
Compile a Newsletter Audience: First-time visitors may never return, so use newsletters to find them instead. Strong newsletter material reminds them of your website’s value.
Via your newsletter platform, introduce some of the loyalty program ideas mentioned above. Show your frequent customers some love. Make it easy for them to return by providing links back to your site.
Try PPC Campaigns: Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can be a cost-effective medium, but the management of these campaigns is both an art and a science. It’s important to make sure your key phrases, ad copy and landing pages are all cohesive and relevant to your business as this will impact your bids and placement.
The goal for PPC is to get top placement on search pages so that your company is seen first. Paid visitors will click on your ad if your message and promotions are relevant and timely.
Hosting Add-Ons: Your service provider is there to make it easier to for your website to succeed – it’s how they make you a return customer. So research the options they have available. Many will offer these tools through a unified control panel, for simplified management.
In Hostway’s case, we’ve built several utilities that help websites grow: Newsletter Broadcast gets email marketing up and running, while Website Builder can handle mobile and social presences. Social Media Integration tools provide a convenient avenue for communicating with your customer base.
The best strategies are likely to mix in several of the ideas above as businesses see what works best in their individual cases. As long as they stay vigilant – always doing something to bring in more visitors and always testing their solutions – viewership should keep rising.
Small companies are increasingly seeing the competitive advantages that come with blogging. According to aggregated data from a ContentPlus infographic, blogs on company websites result in 55 percent more visitors, companies with blogs receive 97 percent more inbound links than others, and blogs are 63 percent more likely to influence purchase decisions than magazines.
Because of this, WordPress – a personal publishing platform – has experienced an astronomical influx in adoption rates. According to WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg’s annual “State of the Word” presentation, the platform received 46 million downloads over the last 12 months – an incredible 126,000 downloads per day. WordPress enables small businesses to easily create and share content that is Google-, mobile- and media-friendly, a significant help for those who need to blog to stay competitive.
As small businesses sharpen their WordPress strategy, though, they should evaluate their WordPress hosting environment. As WordPress explains on its website, there are currently hundreds of thousands of web hosts out there. For the small business, the perfect hosting option will be hassle-free, hacker-proof and offer exemplary customer support.
Is it Time to Move from WordPress.com to WordPress.org?
WordPress.com is the publically hosted version of WordPress’ blogging platform, which is hosted by WordPress itself. Meanwhile, WordPress.org requires users to register their own domain name and to find their own web hosting firm, who will install the program. As small businesses begin to use WordPress more and more, they must assess if it’s time to move from a shared hosting option to a dedicated server or cloud for their WordPress site.
Because a shared hosting environment does not afford full access to the full landscape of WordPress features, a dedicated, cloud-based server boasts an extra incentive. Dedicated server options are flexibly priced and can help lift your small business’ WordPress initiative to previously unattainable heights.
But how do you know if your business should move its WordPress hosting to a dedicated server? Here are a few tell-tale signs:
Frequent Outages or Performance Glitches: An outage usually occurs when a company’s shared server, virtual private server (VPS) or database gets overloaded. Performance glitches can also be a result of this, causing one’s website to nearly stop to a crawl. Research shows that American consumers don’t have time to wait for companies’ slow servers. In fact, one in four people abandon a webpage that takes more than four seconds to load, according to data from a recent infographic. Keep this in mind when measuring the performance of your existing server.
Influx in Traffic: A shared hosting platform can only handle so much traffic. Once your blog starts experiencing traffic spikes, you’ll need to support that growth with a server dedicated specifically to your company. WordPress acknowledges this on its own website, explaining that such things as processor and network limitations can prevent sites from functioning under a high volume of traffic. Click here to check out some of the company’s default requirements as well as network transfer speed examples. Individual sites may require additional resources.
Need for Customization: A common reason companies move to a dedicated server is for customization purposes. There are plenty of perks to going dedicated for meeting unique WordPress needs. For example, shared web hosting plans do boast a defined list of software; however, users need to wait for the web host to add an updated version as the change impacts every website on the server – not just yours. This can cause downtime and latency which customers don’t have time for. A dedicated server enables users to customize their sites on their own time to meet their specific needs.
Company blogs secure customer loyalty, boost brand awareness and—seeing how the average person digests at least 10 pieces of online information before making a purchasing decision—can make a lasting impact on revenue. It’s time you support your blog with the right hosting platform.
We live in an increasingly Internet-savvy world, one in which consumers want answers and expect to find the information they’re looking for the moment a question pops into their head. In addition to those who access the Internet from desktops and laptops, more and more people are doing so from mobile devices as well. Recent research indicates more than half of American adults now own smartphones, and more than one-third own tablets. These people carry their devices around with them wherever they go, and many of them surf the web throughout the day. Shrewd business owners are wise to capitalize on the fact that accessing the Internet is easier than ever, and with that in mind, ensure they establish and maintain a strong web presence.
And according to recent research, 52 percent of small business owners don’t have a website. If you find yourself in that majority, consider the following:
Establishing a searchable online presence is no longer a difficult task thanks to web hosting providers. By acquiring such services, business owners are able to have their hand held through the process of setting up a strong web presence. To read about even more great reasons to have a website, check out our infographic that shows the value of establishing and maintaining a strong online presence.