Web Hosting Web Hosting

Web Hosting For Dummies

Starting your own website can seem like a great idea. The potential to make a passive income is huge – but only if you do things right. You might think that you have a great idea for a website which will fill an internet gap that other sites simply haven’t taken yet.

Unfortunately for you, the great idea is only the beginning. Building a great website doesn’t happen overnight, and there is a lot of work to do before you can even start adding content to your site. One of the first things that you need to do is choose web hosting.

What is web hosting?

Every single website is made up of some network of code framework which needs to be stored in an easily accessible location. The chances are that – unless you somehow have your own hosting system – you will have to use an external server to host your business.

These servers give you everything that you need to run your own website. They provide things like storage space for your code, files, and any other data that you have. They provide the computing power to keep your website up and running 24/7, and they often even provide tech support and things like that to help you when you get stuck.

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Black Hat SEO Online Marketing

Why Black Hat SEO Is A Ticking Time Bomb For Your Website

If you have been researching SEO for any length of time in the hope of boosting your company website’s search engine ranking you may have come across the terms ‘White Hat‘ and ‘Black Hat’. These are terms which identify SEO techniques, and strategies at either end of the scale when it comes to whether the search engines, and in particular Google, approve of them.

With white hat SEO, all the actions which you or your SEO consultant take will be those which Google, and in turn the other search engine companies, accept are legitimate ways to try to help your website’s ranking. These actions include:

  • Using an exact match domain or sub-domains
  • Publishing keyword optimized content
  • Setting up meta data correctly such as the page title and description
  • Posting content on other sites with links back to your site
  • Gaining backlinks from high ranked websites in your niche or industry

For one or two of these, some purists might claim they are ‘grey hat‘ but none of these will be seen by Google as trying to game the system. In truth, Google wants webmasters to use these techniques as it helps them identify what your website is about.

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Effective Branding Branding

Five Ways Your Business Benefits From Effective Branding

If you speak to several business people about branding many of them will tell you ‘We’re too small to think about branding ourselves’, or ‘It’s just fancy marketing’ or worst of all ‘Branding won’t help us sell more’. The sad fact is that people who think like this are preventing their businesses from reaching their full potential.

Effective branding doesn’t need to cost a fortune and the return on anything invested in branding your company properly will be enormous. Here are five ways effective branding can bring significant benefits in terms of customers and profits.

Customer Loyalty: If your customers have received an excellent buying experience, including a quality product or service, they are more likely to give you repeat business if your branding is memorable. They’ll feel an affinity with your brand if it is easily identifiable and are thus prone to purchasing again. Even better they’ll more readily recommend your products or services to other potential customers.

Memorable Identity: How many times have you had someone try to recommend a business to you and then struggle to remember the company’s name? Now, think of the all the hard work that’s gone into getting that person to become a customer in the first place and you’ll agree it’s a crime they have gone away without the brand being etched on their mind. Good branding will ensure anyone who encounters your business will remember its name, and share it with others.

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Building Website Web Design

Building Your First Website: Getting Started

Entering the internet as a content producer rather than a consumer can be a daunting prospect. However, the opportunities are vast, and are really only limited by your imagination. There is money to be made if you approach things in a professional and innovative manner.

Most people who make money on the internet use a website of some form. There is a lot of work involved in building your first website, including things like choosing a domain name, finding a web hosting provider to meet your needs, and creating your content.

Choosing a domain name:

Your domain name, or website address, will come to define your website. It will often be the first thing that people notice when they visit your website, and it needs to be simple, memorable, and related to the topic of your site.

Avoid choosing a domain name which is hard to remember or spelled in a weird way. A lot of people will come to your site by typing your website address into their browser, and strange addresses can prevent them from ever reaching your site. This can reduce traffic numbers and detract from your website’s effectiveness.

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Social Media Marketing Online Marketing

Why Your Business Needs To Use Social Media Marketing

One of the biggest phenomena that the internet has created is social media. Its use and influence are so widespread amongst the world’s online population that any business which wants to build its customer base and increase profits needs to ensure it has an effective social media marketing strategy in place.

Social media is a bit of a catch-all term for several sites and applications even though many people think it just refers to Facebook and Twitter. In reality, social media consists not only of these two but also sites like Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, SnapChat and many others that are too numerous to mention in a single article. Blogging can also be placed under the social media banner too.

Social media is essentially a means to interact with others on the internet and primarily is the sharing of information. This is done using text, images, audio, and video. The information shared can be as simple as a 140-character text message or at the other end of the scale a feature length video.

Where social media marketing can help you to build your business is by using the platforms that people send each other personal messages and information, to send similar messages about your business.

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Quality Backlink Online Marketing

Elements That Determine A Quality Backlink In Google’s Eyes

Getting backlinks to your website is one of the most basic actions needed to improve the SEO of your website. In the past, the measure was purely how many backlinks you had so webmasters would obtain thousands of backlinks that were nothing more than spam.

Google got wise to this so now the amount of links you have going to your website is not as big a ranking factor as the quality of those links. Nowadays, if you have two identical sites, the one having a thousand backlinks from insignificant sites will be outranked by a site with maybe only 50 links, but with those links all being of high quality.

There is no single element of a backlink that determines whether it is considered by Google to be any stronger a link than another. Instead, it is the accumulation of all the traits that a backlink has that will establish its power.

So, let’s look at some of these factors and whether you can influence them or not.

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Logo Design Branding

How to Ensure Your Logo Design Boosts Your Branding

Logos are everywhere. Global corporations have them. Medium sized companies have them. Small businesses have them. Logos help with branding and marketing a company as well as creating an easily recognisable identity.

But simply having a logo isn’t enough, especially if it is poorly designed and has no impact when seen. It must be designed and created so that it is effective in promoting your brand in all manner of ways and mediums.

The first step in designing an effective logo has nothing to do with graphics or text. It is research, both internal and external. Identify what you want your company branding to convey, and what its mission is all about. Also, think about the sort of customers you are targeting and what appeals to them.

Externally, look at what is working well, both within your industry, and within others for potential ideas. Never copy another company’s logo, but by all means ask your designer to adapt design elements of other logos that have proved to be successful.

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Good Web Design Web Design

How To Make Visitors To Your Website Stay Longer With Good Web Design

Having spent time, money or both attracting visitors to your website the last thing you want to happen is for them to click away almost immediately because of poor web design. This can be avoided by ensuring some basic web design elements are implemented when building or updating your business website.

Firstly, you want to ensure when anyone clicks through to your website, that it loads in their browser quickly. Nothing makes visitors click away faster than having to wait for more than a couple of seconds for the page to load.  To help loads times media elements such as video and images should not be overused when designing your website and their file sizes should be minimised where possible.

Another way to quicken your site’s loading time is to avoid the use of scripting languages which create visual effects. Some scripts are not compatible with certain web browsers and are even prone to crashing, which is something you definitely don’t want to happen to your visitors.

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eCommerce Platforms Web Design

Using eCommerce Platforms To Start Your Online Business

The internet has given the world many benefits and one of the most significant is to make it easier for anyone wanting to start their own eCommerce business to do so.

Just 30 years ago, if you wanted to start a business selling physical products your only option was to acquire premises, purchase stock, pay for advertising, employ staff, and then open the doors hoping to turn a profit. Often this could take months or even years to achieve. Unfortunately, in many cases the returns proved insufficient to cover the large outlay already invested and the business folded.

With eCommerce today, the risks and upfront investment required are minimal compared to what was previously required and incredibly the time taken to get started can be as little as 24 hours.

Firstly, there is no need for premises or at least physical ones. With eCommerce, your store is hosted online on platforms that cost just a few dollars per month. Some of these even offer free trials when you start so your first month costs you nothing.

Platforms such as Shopify and WooCommerce are more than just places to host your business. They give you a range of functions and applications which help you to run, organise and analyse your eCommerce business from day one.

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Email Marketing Online Marketing

The Benefits Of Email Marketing For Businesses

Since entrepreneurs first started selling their products and services on the internet, numerous marketing methods and tools have come and gone. Today there is one strategy used by online businesses which continues to be highly effective and that is email marketing.

The benefits of email marketing are such that many business gurus say it should be essential for all businesses and if your business does not use email as part of its marketing armoury then it is greatly disadvantaged compared to those competitors who do.

The first benefit of email marketing is that it’s very cost effective compared to most other forms of promotion. Other than a monthly fee to your email service provider there is normally nothing else to pay, even if you send out emails every single day. Compared to media advertising, social media marketing, or mail shots, the cost of email marketing is a fraction of the cost in comparison.

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Hackers Web Hosting

Keeping Your Website Free From Hackers

Hackers are a website owners worst nightmare. They can steal personal and sensitive data and can destroy the reputation of a business or website overnight. If your website security isn’t top of the range, then you are exposing yourself to attack.

Hackers can steal things like customers’ credit card details, email addresses, and log in details. They will stop at nothing if they sense a breach in your website’s security. Choosing a good web hosting provider is often a good first step when it comes to keeping your website free from hackers. However, it usually isn’t enough on its own.

Some other things that you can do to keep hackers at bay include:

Make sure that you are using an up-to-date anti-virus software:

Hackers will often plant viruses on your computer in an attempt to gain access to your personal information. This information may include things like usernames and passwords – information which will allow the hacker (or anyone they pass it on to) to gain access to your website.

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