Hello there savvy business owner. The last few years, you have labored to get a website up and running that shows a pretty good profile of your company and ranks well for searching customers.
Good work.
Now all you’re probably hearing is, “That’s not good enough. You need content. You need engagement, more pictures, content, tweets, high-fiber content, an Infographic-video-social-content-blogosaur!”
Google made headlines and angered bloggers worldwide earlier this year when they announced that their popular FeedBurner service would be shut down on October 20, 2012. While this does not mean that the service is unusable by current subscribers, they have phased out support for the product and discontinued offering statistics for its users and their blogs.
Luckily, all is not lost. There are still plenty of ways to integrate all or some of the same features you may have enjoyed with FeedBurner into your blog.
Maintaining social media accounts can be cumbersome for business owners. That’s why most of them hire social media managers and marketers to update these accounts regularly.
“92% of respondents use or plan to use social media for recruiting, an increase of almost ten percent from the 83% using social recruiting in 2010,” according to Job Vite’s recent study entitled, “Social Job Seeker 2012.”
“Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth,” said Erik Qualman, Socialnomics.
Whether business owners hire a social media manager or not, these five tools will help those in charge keep track of multiple accounts.
Much like the importance of having a high quality location for a brick and mortar business, having a domain that appropriately represents your business, and brings in high quality traffic is important for an online business. The infographic below shows the difference between a high quality domain, and one that doesn't represent your business nearly as well.
As always, VPS.net sells domain names inside of the customer portal. With volume, we offer tremendous discounts!
Find more amazing infographics on NerdGraph Infographics
It has happened to all of us. You visit a website to checkout a new video game or the benefits of a new air miles credit card. Then, for the next two weeks no matter how many sites you visit, you see highly targeted ads related to that exact product. The first thing that runs through our mind is, “how do they do that!?”. Well it’s called retargeting and their niche in the digital marketing space just got a little crowded.
Previously if you wanted to run this style marketing campaign you were forced to go with the pricey systems like Retargeter or Ad Roll with the huge minimum ad spends that only big brands could afford. However, it is now in reach for us small businesses thanks to Google’s Remarketing, an extension of Adwords.
Although released in beta in early 2010 it has finally been opened up to all Adwords accounts during the latest UI updates from Google. With this update it allows business that have small budgets but big ideas succeed. Here is an example/campaign that helped a small power supply company make the most of its ad budget.
Case Study:
With a recently launched redesign of their website they had a targeted conversion point for customers which was a request a quote form. Their current paid search conversion on this form was a measly 0.96%. After a little research we found that the majority of the customers were not comfortable with the amount of information that was needed to fill out the form. So in order to educate them more on the products, we re-engaged them:
Not only did this achieve a conversion rate of +6%, it only cost them $0.20 per click and an ad budget of $10/day. It really breaks down to three major pain points that Google solved for small businesses with Remarketing:
So my challenge to you is to go out and start playing around with this neat and easy to use tool. The possibilities and layers of engagement are endless. If you have any questions feel free to leave them in the comments below. I also frequent the Adwords/Analytics help forums as well as SEOMoz’s Q&As - so feel free to reach me there as well.
Cheers - Kyle
Kyle is a search engine marketer for a full service design and marketing agency out of Cleveland, Ohio. Throughout his career he has worked with brands including Purell, Cleveland Clinic, Fazolis, American College of Radiology, Cleveland Cavaliers and BMW. You can learn more about Kyle’s work at his personal portfolio, www.kyledchandler.com.
So you have decided that you want to start your own hosting company and become the next VPS.net? Congratulations for your enthusiasm! However, if your reasons for starting a webhosting company are ill-founded, then failure becomes a close reality, rather than an educated risk.
A lot of businesses fail before they have started, because they have been founded on incorrect assumptions, or simply founded for the wrong reasons. Incorrect assumptions could be rectified through business planning, which I will cover in the next articles. In this article, I will be focusing on the right reasons for starting your webhosting company.
In order to have a successful webhosting company, three factors should be present: Market need, skills, and passion:
Market need:
Before you start your webhosting company, you have to think if there is a real need for your service, that is, if someone is really interested in buying your service. If you’re trying to sell sand in the desert, then your idea is obviously a bad one, because sand is available everywhere in the desert, and for free!
For example, setting up a website which offers shared hosting, reseller hosting and dedicated servers while expecting clients to come in is a very bad idea. Why? Because there are thousands of reputable webhosts who are already doing it, are able to offer a better service, and can be profitable at a much competitive price. Would you rather buy a VPS server from vps.net, or from an unknown webhost operated by an unknown individual from an unknown place?
The answer lies in differentiating your services, while ensuring there is still a market need for them. You can differentiate your services by targeting a different group of customers (Engineers, non-profits, local clients, Spanish-speaking clients…); offering added-value with your services (Free website design, free marketing report, Basic SEO package…) or a mix of both. I will be taking an in-depth look on how to differentiate your services in later articles. For now, keep in mind that you will have to stand-out and shine in order to make a difference.
Skills:
Do you have what it takes to operate your business? Being technical enough to run a webhosting business is no longer a qualifier. These days, with hosting providers like VPS.net offering 1-click hosting options, the barrier to entry has become much lower for non-technical people. Based on my experience as a previous 6-year hosting company owner, here are some of the most needed skills:
Passion:
If you’re becoming a webhost just for the money, then you’re doomed to failure. In order to succeed as a webhost, you’ll need to be doing it in order to create a difference around you, in a way which keeps you fulfilled and looking for more. Ask yourself the following questions:
If you can answer positively to the above questions, then you’ve got the passion needed to start your own hosting company.
Now that we have determined the reasons for becoming a webhost, the next articles will cover topics which will help you take your webhosting company from an idea to a real success.
Samer Bechara is a business consultant who specializes in business planning, online marketing and web-based technical solutions. He can be reached through his website, Thought Engineer.
We hear it all the time from prospective clients, “I’m willing to use AdWords for a while until the SEO takes hold; I’ll turn off AdWords as soon as we rank organically for our important keywords.” This has been a tried and true strategy for many years—pay for traffic until the free traffic starts rolling in. And, it’s how many Internet marketers actually sell their bosses/clients on getting started with AdWords. Everyone has the dream of not having to pay Google...just having your homepage at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs), kicking back, and watching the money pile up.
However, AdWords shouldn't be considered simply a bridge to the promised land of SEO. It’s a real contender and should be just one of the tools used to drive traffic to your site. Here’s why:
AdWords Often Clicked More Than Organic Results
AdWords is taking more and more screen real estate in Google’s SERPs. They are giving more and more tools to AdWords users to make their ads bigger and bigger: between location extensions, phone extensions, sitemap extensions, Google+ extensions, and image extensions, more and more ads are larger than just a headline, two lines of text and a URL.
Ever Expanding Screen Real Estate
More and more often, searchers on Google are seeing results that look like the screen shot
Screen shot on my 13” laptop for the keyword
“basement water cleanup.
to the right; the organic results are pushed lower and lower by the ever-expanding ad sizes.
WordSteam, a PPC consulting company, noticed this trend and decided to do some research. Their results were quite surprising. They found that for highly commercial keywords (example: “basement water cleanup”), “Clicks on paid search listings beat out organic clicks by nearly a 2:1 margin for keywords with high commercial intent in the US.” Check out their very nice info graphic on their results.
Highly Relevant Results
How can this be? If the screen shot above isn’t enough to convince you ads can get more clicks that organic, consider this: more and more people are becoming good at playing the “AdWords game.” As the competition heats up, the players’ skill level tends to rise. More and more of those using AdWords are starting to use best practices: small ad groups of highly related keywords paired with well crafted ads that point to highly relevant landing pages. All of this means that the ads are ever more appealing (“hmmm...that looks exactly like what I’m looking for...”) and more often provide the information the searcher is looking for. And reviewing my Psych 101 textbook, that positive reinforcement means that people begin to repeat the clicking-on-ads behavior more often.
WordStream points out many other reasons AdWords is winning the click war. However, they make the important point: on the whole there are more clicks on organic results than on paid results. However, they immediately point out that not all keywords are equal and that informational queries like “who was the 18th president of the US?” tend to not have many ads and organic gets the clicks. However, for people looking to find the closest place to buy self-leveling concrete may find the organic search results buried under a large number of Home Depot and Menards ads.
Positive ROI Required
But just because ads get a lot of clicks doesn’t make AdWords a good business decision; you have to keep the bottom line in mind. And the goal of a positive ROI is getting more and more difficult due to the increased and highly skilled competition.
However, if you know what you’re doing with AdWords, do excellent keyword research, organize your campaigns well, write compelling ads that point to compelling, highly related landing pages that do a great job of selling, you will make money. And make no mistake, there are a lot of companies that make a great deal of money with enormous ROI even in today’s competitive market.
So, if your AdWords account is making a positive ROI, why would you turn it off, even if your SEO is bearing fruit and you’re getting more organic traffic? We have never seen a client ever follow through on the “shut down AdWords after my SEO kicks in.”
Rod Holmes is a partner at Chicago Style SEO, a full service Internet marketing firm. You can read more of his thoughts at ChicagoStyleSEO.com/blog/ or on Twitter: @chicagostyleseo
By the number of flyers stuck to my front door, sticking out of my mailbox, and tucked under the wiper blade of my car... I think I’m safe in saying that my local restaurants, cleaning ladies, roofers, grocery stores, dry cleaners, window washers, painters, etc, etc, 
etc are desperate for ways to stay in front of potential customers.
There is a way to stay in front of potential customers online that likely costs less than paying people spam houses and cars in the neighborhood. Two well known companies give you the tools to put your ads in front of targeted audiences at very low prices: Facebook and Google.
Facebook - Targeted Advertising on the Cheap
Facebook allows you to choose the people you want to target very carefully. You can select gender, age, location, and even get into what they like and don’t like. If you know your target market’s demographics, using Facebook’s simple system, you simply focus in on those people, create a very simple ad that even has an image in it, and your ads begin appearing in the right-hand column of the targeted people’s Facebook pages.
Yes, you do have to pay for these ads, but like most online ads these days, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. And, part of the reason Facebook’s stock has slid nearly 20% in two days is because people know that the only 5 in 10,000 people click on those ads. That’s potentially 9,995 people seeing your ad without you paying a dime!
Bonus Info: People burn out on Facebook ads very quickly—they literally stop noticing them because they see the same ad dozens of times a day. To prevent ad burn out, rotate your ads. Facebook ads are easy to make, so make several and rotate them regularly.
Google’s Remarketing – Visibility for Pennies
Google has a great AdWords product that allows you to put a cookie on the browser of anyone who visits your site. This is referred to as putting these visitors into your remarketing audience. When these visitors go to another site that has advertising delivered by Google—there are over 1 million websites and hundreds of millions of pages that have ads delivered by the online advertising giant—Google can see they’re in your audience and will display your ads to them.
What could be better than staying in front of people who have been to your site—they are in some way interested in your products and services. The vast majority of people do not become a customer on their first visit—stay in front of them and encourage them to come back.
Like Facebook, Google gives you some great tools to make very powerful ads. And like Facebook, they only charge you if/when someone clicks on the ad. Maybe one of the reasons Google’s stock is doing better than Facebook’s is because on average ads on Google’s display advertising system are clicked on 40 out of every 10,000 views.
Bonus Info: Your ads only begin showing up after 500 people are in your audience, so get the code on your website ASAP to begin building that audience. Don’t let creating the perfect ad hold you back. Make a really simple ad to begin with—you can build the real ads later.
Visibility Still Matters
Any kid who moves her lemonade stand to the corner of two busy streets can tell the GM geniuses, you need to be visible to sell.
The high-paid marketers at GM don’t seem to understand that staying in front of potential customers is important. Last week they very publicly announced that they were going to stop advertising on Facebook because it wasn’t selling cars.
Internet marketers tend to focus on the aspects of online marketing that are quantifiable. It’s what they love about Internet marketing—everything can be measured. This measurability tends to blind Internet marketers to the fact that visibility and branding still have an important role to play, even it can’t be measured to tenths of percents.
Thanks to Todd Bates for sharing the sandwich board photo and Geoff Sowery for sharing the lemonade stand photo via the Creative Commons license.
BIO
Rod Holmes is a partner at Chicago Style SEO, a full service Internet marketing firm. You can read more of his thoughts at ChicagoStyleSEO.com/blog/ or on Twitter: @chicagostyleseo
We're excited to be able to announce that we'll be holding our first webinar next week to show off our new Hosted Apps product. Even better, we're able to do the webinar together with our friends at Standing Cloud.
The webinar, titled "Ease the Burden of Application Deployment: Hosted Apps on VPS.NET and Standing Cloud", will show you many of the ways you can make deploying applications an absolute breeze. We've scheduled two times for the webinar; the first, Wednesday, May 30th at 10 AM EDT (GMT -5) and the second, Wednesday, June 6th at 12 PM EDT. You're able to register for the webinars at http://www.standingcloud.com/webinar-signup
By using the Hosted Apps at VPS.NET, you're able to easily deploy applications in just a few minutes. Not only does this make the deployment of applications easier and faster, but they also continue to save you time in the long run, as the applications are automatically updated.
Standing Cloud, which provides the software making it possible to do the turnkey application deployment, has an extravagant and thorough application marketplace. Once inside the market place, you're able to choose from over 100 different applications, made to solve a wide variety of problems. Some of the most commonly deployed applications include Drupal, MoveableType & WordPress. There are many other applications available in the Standing Cloud market place, aimed at making life easier for the small businesses out there.
All of these applications and many more can be automatically installed using the VPS.NET Hosted Apps option. You're able to strategically place your server closest to you or your customers, choosing between either a US or UK VPS.NET Cloud Server.
We're really excited about this webinar, and we happy to be able to show you several different ways the Hosted Apps can make your life easier. Registration and attendance of the webinar is totally free.
We hope to see you there!
As VPS.NET breaks the 1000 nodes barrier in less than one month, we are thankful to all the users who have spread the word and told their friends and family about us, without you we could have not done it.
We want to show you guys our gratitude by giving you one month of free hosting (max 3 nodes) for every review you write about vps.net on established forums/blogs/etc (one per blog/forum/etc).
The terms are as follows:
I want to emphasize that we are looking for *real* reviews, not just praises - so, please be as honest as possible when reviewing us. Spread the word - but be truthful to the experience you've had at VPS.NET...
The way we will monitor the review is via twitter (as we have it on our homepage), so to qualify you simply write your honest review, and submit a twitter post that incl. the url to the review and 'vps.net' and then submit a ticket with the same info! ...
Thanks for your support - we really appreciate it!
