Helpful Blog Hosting Information and Services

Bloggers have taken the internet by storm, so it follows that web hosts would provide services directed toward their web sites. The best blog hosting companies should offer all the regular features that any web site would need with an emphasis on the needs of the blogger. What constitutes the best blog hosting sites? The best blog hosting services should make it easy for the blogger to set up a blog site. They should be able to start writing quickly without being knowledgeable about technology.

The best blog hosting sites will help you in this endeavor. If you do have some technological knowledge, you may wish to be able to customize your blog site, and even cheap blog hosting sites should give you these options.
 
You are hoping that your blog site is well read, so you may need add-ons as well as support for a more advanced blog site. Even free blog hosting companies should enable you to make money from your blogging, which is why choosing from the best blog hosting companies is so important.

Before you can begin to find the best blog hosting services, you will have to define your needs. Will you be using the blog site on a professional level of just for personal reasons? Are you willing to pay a few dollars per month for reliable but cheap blog hosting services or are you willing to work with free blog hosting sites? There are several ways to blog on your web site.

You can write of course, but you may want to incorporate video or photographs. If you intend to use these, your blog hosting service needs to be able to support your needs. Are you planning to get your own URL or use one provided by blog hosting sites? Can your blog host help you promote your site or will you need to have ads?

If you want widgets or other applications for your blog then your blog host will need to have them. Price may be a concern for bloggers, so it's important to get the most for your money. Some of the cheap blog hosting companies cost around four dollars a month.

Some free blog hosting services offer many of the same services, but others don't. They are not all created equal, so understanding your blog hosting service needs is crucial so you are not limited by blog hosting companies.
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 Useful Links for Small Businesses

BlogTalkRadio makes it easy for anyone, anywhere to produce high-quality broadcasts and share them online. All you need is a phone and a computer to get started.

Cloud9Living - This company is the U.S. leader in experience gifts, offering over 1,800 unique experiential gifts for men, women & couples in 43 regions.

BenchPrep -  This company creates interactive and social learning courses for the web, iPhone, iPad, and Android. BenchPrep partners with best in class publishers such as McGraw Hill. BenchPrep courses offer average savings of 200-300% off online courses.

Is There Value in Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing continues to be an effective practice for advertisers/merchants, but how much value is really brought by performance-based marketers (affiliates)? 

A recent survey from the Rakuten-Linkshare affiliate network indicates that despite the well publicized challenges, affiliate marketing spend is on the rise and is forecasted to keep pace with other areas of digital spend through 2016.

According to the study the affiliate channel is best for producing "new-to-file" or previously unknown customers and generating incremental customer acquisition. The customers acquired through performance marketing also tend to spend more than the average online shopper and are ultimately profitable for advertisers. Perhaps the most important revelation was that promotions in the affiliate channel have a positive impact on an advertiser’s brand reputation and loyalty.

Forrester, which conducted the study, forecasts U.S. affiliate marketing spending will increase by a compounded annual growth rate of nearly 17 percent between 2011 and 2016, growing to $4.5 billion.

There are several marketing affiliate network to choose from, however, the ones I have the most success with or seem to work well with others are Commission Junction, Empyre Media and Revenue Ads..
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Useful Links for Small Businesses

Western Union Business Solutions is a global leader in foreign exchange and a trusted payments provider to clients operating in international markets.

YouSendIt - Easily send and receive content with the comfort of email without the hassle of inbox limits.Get business done online. Sign documents online with your keyboard, mouse or mobile touchscreen.

ZipRecruiter - enables companies to post to all the major free job boards with a single submission and vet all applicants through simple-to-setup online question and answer.

7 Reasons to Add Video to Your Marketing Strategy

With everything small business owners have on their plate, it’s probably difficult to imagine finding the time to produce and post videos on your Web site. But there are some compelling reasons to do it:

• It’s cheap. You can do it yourself with a cheap digital video camera or even a cellphone that has a video camera built in. You could also tap your local high school, community college or community radio station for talent to help you create low-cost but better-quality video.
• It attracts visual learners. As we’ve all learned in recent years, different people learn in different ways. Some people learn best by seeing things demonstrated rather than reading or listening to someone talk about it. Adding video allows you to better reach visually-oriented customers.
• It builds your search results. Google has added content such as blogs, video and images to what their engine indexes and returns in search. Recently, the company said such content is returned in one of every four searches.
• It promotes your products or services. For retailers, what’s more likely to make a sale – a static picture on your Web site of your chain saw, or a video that shows how quickly it can cut down trees? If you’re a service business, video allows you to interest prospects by offering free samples of your trainings or seminars.
• It gives good customer service. Instead of handing them a lengthy installation manual, customers can play a video on your site and learn how to set up your product.
• It’s personal. If you have a mediagenic company executive who could simply talk to the camera about what you do and why you’re better than the competition, it can be very welcoming. It feels friendly and makes customers feel more comfortable contacting you.
• It taps into the power of YouTube. Besides posting your videos on your own site, you can also post them on YouTube. Roughly one-quarter of all Internet users visits YouTube each day, viewing hundreds of thousands of videos. It’s an increasingly popular place to find how-to information, and using YouTube gives your business a chance to find entirely new customers from outside your existing network of contacts. 
•  There are several other video upload sites besides YouTube such as Vimeo, Yahoo! Video, Google Video and DailyMotion.

For more, read “A Guide to Video Search Marketing for Small Businesses,”by David Ingram of Search Engine Land.

Please send over your questions and comments
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 Useful Sites for Small Businesses

ClickMeeting - Easy to use online meetings for small businesses at affordable prices.

Entrust - provides a full range of security solutions for all type of organizations, governments and financial institutions.

MCM Electronics -  A premier distributor in the consumer electronics industry since 1976, and have had an online presence since 1999. They offer a wide selection of professional audio and visual equipment, cables and wiring, laptops and computer accessories and surveillance equipment.

5 New Twitter Tools to Boost Your Marketing

Are you seeing the results you want from your Twitter activities?

There are over 1,000,000 different apps for Twitter and a new one is added every second.

This means it is often quite easy to get confused finding those that actually add real value to your day-to-day tweeting.

I took a look at some of the latest and most promising Twitter tools to get you tweeting like a pro. So, if you think it is time to up your game with some new tools, keep reading.

Here are 5 tools to help you power up your Twitter marketing efforts.

#1: Twylah—Make Your Tweets Live Longer

One of the tools that can make a huge difference to your impact on Twitter is Twylah. Their tagline is “Make Your Tweets Shine” and that is exactly what it does.

According to research by bit.ly, your links on Twitter will only last 3 hours. With Twylah, however, you can give your tweets a much longer life—literally forever—displayed beautifully on a custom page.

Keep visitors engaged longer with your tweets.

When reaching out to Twylah founder Eric Kim, he mentioned to me:

“Because there is so much related content found on the page, visitors spend much more time with your tweets than they would do on Twitter instead—up to 40 times longer.”

A feature that is unique to Twylah is the Power Tweet. If you find a link, instead of sending people to that article, you can send them to a designated Twylah page.

Send a Power Tweet to show other related tweets.

If you want to give more strength to your tweets, be sure to get on the invite list for Twylah. It has had a tremendous impact for me.

#2: NewsMix—Discover the Best Twitter Content for Your Business

A great app I discovered recently is NewsMix. It solves a crucial problem I have with Twitter. If you are new to Twitter, there isn’t much value in your stream yet.

Imagine if there was a channel available for you, filled with great curators tweeting exactly about the topics you are interested in. That’s exactly what NewsMix does. It helps you discover great topics based on top influencers for any topic you are interested in.

 #3: SocialBro—Provides Powerful Twitter Analytics

SocialBro is an app that fits well into everyone’s toolbox. It is a dashboard designed to filter in the absolute best analytics for your Twitter account in an easily accessible way.

With Twitter, the quote “You can’t improve what you can’t measure” hits the nail on the head.

The first feature I greatly enjoy is to see your Twitter community in charts. You can group your followers by lots of different aspects, for example:

• Language
• Time zone
• Number of followers
• Tweets sent per day
  

Find out in which time zones your followers live.

In my case, what I discovered with SocialBro was that over 13% of my followers are in the UK, and I was only posting for US time zones. I quickly changed and moved some of my updates to reach the people in the UK as well.

You can go even deeper and localize exactly where each of your followers lives on a map

Get the exact location of all of your followers.

The final feature I want to highlight from SocialBro is their list-management option. A key to make Twitter work, especially as you grow your network, is to keep track of the most important people via Twitter lists.

SocialBro makes it much easier for you to copy lists from one account to another, save lists as a .txt file or specifically move larger groups of people into new lists.

#4: Ifttt—Connect Twitter with Your Other Social Activities

An app that can help you automate your social activities in a very powerful way is Ifttt, meaning “if this then that.” In short, it allows you to connect any two web services together, like Facebook with Instagram or Twitter with Dropbox.

The different ways you can use Ifttt in connection with Twitter are extremely powerful. By simply sending a tweet, you can trigger a large number of different actions for your other social accounts across the web. This is of course only to give you a taste of some of the things you can accomplish with Ifttt and Twitter. There are lots of other connections and channels you can explore for your Twitter account.

Above all things, this tool is amazing to discover your own creative ways of using the Internet and Twitter that no one else has done before.

#5: Tweriod—Find the Best Time to Tweet to Reach More Followers

The last tool I want to introduce you to is called Tweriod. This has a very powerful algorithm to analyze your Twitter account and then find out which times will have the most impact for you to tweet.

All you have to do is sign in with your Twitter account. The app then prepares a report for you and after a few minutes it sends you a direct message on Twitter with the results. It gives you a detailed breakdown of the most likely days and hours when your followers will be online.

Times when your followers are online the most.

Once you have your best times to tweet, you will also get a graph like the one below. A recent integration with Buffer allows you to start tweeting at these optimal times through your Buffer account.

See your optimal tweeting times in a graph and set them inside Buffer.

Tweriod’s algorithm analyzes the performance of your own previous 200 tweets, your followers and the performance of their past tweets and excludes automation apps such as Twitterfeed, dlvr.it, etc. This provides you with the data you need most.

Equipped with these 5 power tools I am sure you will be able to up your game on Twitter considerably.

What do you think? Which other tools do you use to make Twitter work for you? Which one of the tools mentioned above might be a great fit for your workflow? Please share your comments with me.

6 Tips to Improve Your Facebook Advertising Results

Would you like Facebook ads to be a regular part of your marketing strategy?

Wondering what you can do to tweak your ad strategy to get better results?

This article will give you six tips to help improve your return on your Facebook ad investment.

#1: Do Your Research

Watch other Facebook ads and take a look at their techniques.

You won’t be able to see a list of all of the ads that are out there right now, but you can watch the ones that are being served to your demographic. You can see all of the current ads that would target your profile by going to Facebook’s Adboard.

#2: Use Your Image Well

You don’t have much space to grab someone’s attention on Facebook ads. You have a 25-character headline, 90 characters in the body and a small 110 x 80 pixel picture (in reality it displays as a 100 x 65 pixel photo). The best chance you have to grab someone’s attention is with the photo.

If you are using Sponsored Stories, the ad defaults to your profile picture or the post picture if you choose to promote a specific post. But if you promote your Facebook page or an external website, you can select the image you want to use.

Make the image work harder for you by adding text.

Add text to an image to give a call to action or special offer.

 

#3: Craft Your Sponsored Story Post

If you choose to run a Sponsored Story post, craft your posts on your page to fit the ad space. Sponsored Stories can be cheaper to run than a traditional ad (see tip #4) but you will lose the larger picture and it will default to your current page profile picture.

Make your status updates fewer than 90 characters if you are going to use them as a Sponsored Story.

If you have a link in your post, make sure it’s going to your own site—ideally where someone can sign up for something (i.e., a free report, webinar, targeted opt-in page). You don’t want to pay to send traffic to someone else’s website!

If you include a YouTube link in your post, people will be able to watch the video easily from the ad

#4: Split Test Your Efforts

Split test all of your advertising! When you design your campaign, you can split test the variables between your ads so that you get the cheapest clicks and find out which ads are performing the best.

Here is a short list of things you may want to split test:

• Body of your ad
• Photo in your ad
• Headline of your ad (only for external URL)
• Bidding model (CPM vs. CPC—more on this in a bit)
• Sponsored Story vs. regular ad
  

Split testing the body, photo and title of your ad is fairly straightforward. Make sure you are only changing one thing at a time so you don’t confuse the results.

Note: In the new Facebook ads layout, you can no longer change the title of your ad for your Facebook page with the workaround of advertising it as an external URL.

#5: Watch Your Results

As with everything, it’s the return on your investment that matters. Watch how much it costs you to achieve your objective and make sure you have realistic expectations.

The ads that perform the best on Facebook typically are either promoting a Facebook page or advertising something free. Advertising something free that requires an email opt-in can be a great strategy. You can then start connecting with those people via email and social media.

Set your expectations correctly. A typical click-through rate on Facebook is 0.04-0.05%. You may see better results if you pick an ad model that works well for you and do your testing.

Local businesses can benefit from Sponsored Like Stories because many people have a lot of local friends on Facebook, as shown in this example from Vernon Area Public Library.

Vernon Area Public Library only spent $0.44/per Like to acquire 158 new connections.

Analyze your results so you can make adjustments. In this example, I split test the CPC bidding model and the CPM bidding model, keeping all other variables the same. Even in this limited example, you can see that the CPC model cost me $1.39 per Like (connections) vs. $6.50 per Like in the CPM model. I would suggest a longer testing period, but you should be able to see a favorite after 10-20 clicks.

Even though this is a small sample size, you can see that CPC is outperforming CPM.

#6: Get on the List for Facebook Offers

Facebook Offers are starting to roll out to smaller businesses. Facebook Offers appear in the news feed and have great potential for going viral. You can find out more about how this works at Facebook Offers.

Offers will be free to create, but are still in the beta stage as of this writing. You can sign up to be on the list to enable Offers on your page.

Back to You

I hope this gives you some great tips to take your Facebook marketing efforts to the next level.

What do you think? Are you advertising on Facebook? What has been working well for you? We’d love to hear about it in the comments section below.

If you have any questions on this article, please send me comments.

Navigating the SEO Puzzle: Small Business Advertising Tips for Small Business...

Navigating the SEO Puzzle: Small Business Advertising Tips for Small Business...: Advertising with Facebook doesn't have to be a major chore, even if you are an extremely busy small business owner. Here are some easy-to-do...

Navigating the SEO Puzzle: The Relevance and Sensibility of Using Keywords

There are hundreds and hundreds of SEO solutions out there that small businesses can review and determine which work best for their business.

A keyword search solution that really works well for me comes from a fast growing company in British Columbia, Canada called, Jaaxy. They help businesses locate effective keywords to use to help their Web sites gain higher rankings in the search engines, and track competitors.

Jaaxy has done extensive research through comparative data testing and have come up with an algorithm that utilizes data from all Search Engines (not just Google) to reveal search data that is far closer to the “real” numbers.

When looking over the results of keyword searches, Jaaxy will provide detailed information in the following areas:

Monthly Searches: This is traffic, this is the estimated traffic, and if you can get a top 3 search result in the Google rankings, you can acquire a good deal of Monthly Searches that is outlined (up to 60%).  One thing that I want to emphasize is the fact that traffic is not the be all end all…I often times seek out competition metrics before traffic ones.  If you can’t get a good ranking, traffic has absolutely no meaning…that is, it is better to have 10 first page rankings under keywords that get 100 searches per day, than it is to have 2nd page rankings under keywords that get 1,000′s of searches per day.  People rarely make it to the 2nd page!

QSR: This is the competition. Jaaxy has an innate ability to find your exact competition quickly and deliver directly to you within the tool. Your goal when doing research is to aim for keywords with under 400 QSR, this means less than 400 competing pages in Google. In the above case, the search term “best keyword research tool 2010” is a wonderful keyword because it only has 41 competing pages in Google. This would be an easy to rank keyword.

KQI: And for those of you that want quick visuals, Jaaxy has included an extra column called KQI, or Keyword Quality Index. I love using this as it allows me to quickly scan a list of keywords and visually find the ones that are more likely to be better keywords. KQI is based on traffic volume, competition, and estimated ranking results thus giving you a powerful and quick way to interpret keyword lists.

Within minutes using these keyword metrics alone, you can put together awesome keyword lists, ones that will get ranked in Google with ease. Traffic and competition, and maybe a little KQI is all you need to efficiently find keywords.

I hope this helps small businesses move forward with marketing their Web site(s) on the Internet. Please send me your comments or questions.