Posted on November 20, 2020by Perry Toone with No comments
The majority of business owners see social media as nothing more than another channel to broadcast advertisements. The power of social however lies in the two-way communication and the ease in connecting with real people, your customers.
In this post we’re gonna dive deeper than your standard “how to post” and discuss three social media marketing tips that web hosting providers need to get a hold off to really use social media to increase exposure and drive up sales.
If content is king, context is god
Every day we are exposed to hundreds of pieces of content through social media, resulting in content becoming a commodity. In order to stay above the noise, you need to ensure you are sharing valuable content with your social media communities — but doing it in a smart way.
The first way is to do a breakdown of your community which you can do via the insights in Facebook and a service like twtrland for your Twitter community.
Once you have some idea of the demographics of your community and who you are attracting it gets much easier to cater to this community and speed up its growth.
When it comes to content always look for an opportunity to connect with your audience on a personal level. Make sure you are communicating in a context that your audience can relate to. Oakley do a great job of this in the example below where they understand that their customers are into action sports like the X Games so they publish timely content around that subject.
The right content in the right context is gold!
Use social reviews to automate word of mouth marketing
It’s no secret that in today’s social world many of us turn to friends and family to get recommendations on what to buy, where to buy it, and how much to spend. In fact a recent report mentioned that 90% of people believe brand recommendations by friends.
With more online content being created than ever before and an ever-increasing amount of noise online, it’s getting harder to get your message heard. Recommendation marketing has never been more important than now.
One service that helps you leverage recommendation marketing is Yotpo Social Reviews. Yotpo is a free plug and plays social reviews solution for eCommerce sites. Yotpo helps store owners generate tons of product reviews and allows them to automatically share this user-generated content with their Facebook and Twitter communities. Yotpo is a totally automated service so after the initial set up you can sit back and the reviews, traffic, and additional sales will come rolling in.
Below is an example of the highly optimized mail after purchase emails that Yotpo sends to each customer after a specific number of days after making a purchase. These emails convert between 6-8% of customers to reviewers.
You need to be getting on Instagram and Pinterest
We are visual creatures. Almost 50% of our brains are dedicated to processing what we see so it’s not surprising that images play a huge part in increasing sales. With most online retailers selling tangible products, it is a no brainer that imagery to play a bigger part in our social media marketing.
Most web hosts are already on Facebook and Twitter but many haven’t caught onto Pinterest and Instagram. Pinterest has already grown into the top traffic source for many retailers and both networks are growing at rapid rates which means lots of new customers! If you have a female audience you’ll find Pinterest could be huge while Instagram is strong for teens and young adults.
Get ahead of the curve and start exploring other social networks to find new customers!
Conclusion
Social media is changing at a rapid rate but that doesn’t mean ecommerce businesses can’t adapt and take advantage of the changing landscape. Remember to always remember that engaging in real relationships with customers is the key to social media marketing and being proactive with trying new tactics can bear lots of fruit. Go forth and conquer!
Posted on October 03, 2020by Perry Toone with No comments
As the world becomes more digital, so too does the art world pursuing artistic projects have allowed it to be smoother for artists, designers, and people to create online identities for themselves. This then introduces the challenge of ensuring your art will stand out among the amount of registered domains on the web.
A secret to standing out from the rest, stems in giving attention to the small details. One of these details, often overlooked, but offers unique branding potential, is the .ART domain.
Benefits and strategy of a .ART domain name
Establish your niche with a domain that already mentions what you do. A unique and relevant, artistic domain name can easily show to users what you are all about as an artist.
For example, it then makes it easy for visitors to guess what your website may be about when someone sees a domain such as www.firstname.art or www.firstname.com. Because many .com domain names are already registered, it may be hard to find one that is suitable and available. .ART still has a lot of availability, this means you can likely find yourname.art is available and not need to enter extra characters to the domain name, such as younameart.com.
Shorter is also better
.ART is also 3 characters long, just like a .COM. There are benefits to keeping it short. Think about how many times you will need to enter your email address, as a username to login to websites when filling out online forms, and so forth. By entering fewer characters each time, you will take yourself valuable milliseconds that can soon add up to minutes, hours, and even days added to your life.
An example here would be the domain dis.art, which would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars as .com. With greater availability on the .ART extension, you can find shorter domains at a much more reasonable price.
Allow people to recall your name
By using a .ART domain with your artist name, you can better improve your name ranking and help people better identify your website and name.
For example, one of the leading banks, Bank of America uses www.bankofamerica.com as its commercial website and www.bankofamerica.art for its artistic initiatives website.
Create domains for individual products
Perhaps you have a new arty product or service that you are looking to sell online. You can use a domain name to give the art its own unique web identity and minimize the probability of it getting left behind in the endless sea of domain names.
Let’s assume that you are a graphic t-shirt company that goes by the name of FastTees. You are now venturing into artist submissions bearing your most popular graphic prints. To promote the new range of artists, you can use a domain name such as www.fasttees.art
Make .ART targeted marketing campaigns
Any campaign with its own .ART domain name often comes across as more legitimate, it also makes it easier for you to redirect people to it from other websites. An example here would be to include your name or first name in your domain name such as www.iphone.art
Protect your trademark
Some brands are simply registering .ART to redirect to an existing website. Here are some .ART domains that currently redirect to well-known internet brands.
facebook.art
bankofamerica.art
hugoboss.art
swatch.art
iphone.art
amazon.art
tate.art
pixar.art
instagram.art
Improve branding on social media
Facebook and Reddit contain plenty of links that come across as anonymous and can also pose a threat. These are usually strange links with random combos of letters, numbers, and characters such as t.co/my723e3.
Now let’s say that you are a cat clothing brand called Peerfect and you’re coming out with a new line of cat t-shirts. You are promoting this line on your social media sites and forwarding people to the page on your website that showcases the cat tees.
Consider these two links:
⦁ bit.ly/a23fgh ⦁ peerfect.art/tees
Which of the links have a higher likelihood to be clicked on?
Using the new .ART domain extensions to create memorable links can truly boost your brand and help you make the most of your artistic activities. Dynadot currently has a special promo for .ART domain at just $3. Our affiliate link will take you to page and include your domain discount.
Posted on July 19, 2020by Perry Toone with No comments
SSH, or Secure Shell, is a network protocol which is used to connect to a server and perform different tasks via a command line. The protocol is preferred by many knowledgeable users, due to the fact that the information transmitted over it is encrypted, so it cannot be intercepted on the way by a 3rd party. SSH access may be employed for lots of things with regards to the type of web hosting account. With a shared hosting account, for example, SSH is one of several ways to import/export a database or to upload a file in case the hosting server allows it. In case you have a virtual or a dedicated server, SSH can be used for pretty much everything – you may install software or restart particular services including the web server or the database server that run on the machine. SSH is used primarily with UNIX-like Platforms, but there are clients that permit you to use the protocol if your computer system is working with a different OS as well. The connection is created on TCP port 22 by default and the remote web server always listens for incoming connections on that port even though lots of providers change it for security reasons.
Posted on May 06, 2020by Perry Toone with No comments
As the world moves closer towards an online world, the need to get setup and accepting payments online is becoming increasingly more important.
With so many businesses offering many different products and services, with variations and types there is usually not a one size fits all solution when it comes to accepting payments online.
The payment form on your website is the most important part of a website for a business. What Annie Leonard referred to as the “golden arrow” on the now famous “Story of Stuff” video.
This needs to be as easy as possible for people to complete payment. They have already found your website, decided to purchase and now are about to complete payment. The last thing you want now as website owner, is to have the user have a problem filling out the form or decide that is too time consuming to complete. Resulting in lost revenue.
PayPal is great choice for many reasons, one being that most people and businesses already have a PayPal account. The other is that is easy to use, people like it because they don’t need to fill out their payment information each time they complete a purchase. It is also trusted by millions of merchants and buyers around the world.
More recently, PayPal has made improvements to its API that allow for seamless integrations into existing applications like WPForms. Getting WPForms for your WordPress site is great way to quickly to start accepting payments online with all the customization’s required for any business.
Conditional logic is your key to customizing payments
By enabling conditional logic to your form entries, you can build custom features such as giving users the option if they would like to pay with PayPal or credit card. You could also offer them the option to subscribe with PayPal or make a one time payment.
Passing users over to PayPal to complete the transaction also means that PayPal will take care of the security side of an online payment. This minimizes the risk for the website owner and helps the buyer rest assured that the online payment is secure.
Posted on March 04, 2020by Perry Toone with No comments
For many businesses that have a website, the contact form could be the single most important element as that is where the leads come in. Maybe you are already using the advanced drag and drop form builder by WPForms.
If the time has come to start accepting payments online, it can be overwhelming to sort through the various eCommerce platforms and perhaps it may not be needed. If you have setup with Stripe, the easiest and most popular payment processer and use WPForms on your WordPress website, then perhaps the WPForms Stripe integration will be enough for you.
Many small businesses have a website for the simple purpose of having a web presence. Once that presence becomes more established, spammers often exploit any exposed email addresses, making an upgrade to something like WPForms an increasingly important requirement.
Now that a website is running with a great contact form and site, comes the question about accepting payments online. Many small businesses may be put off by things like setup costs, fraud, complicated systems, etc.
The solution is simple. Stripe. It saves a ton of time on paperwork for setting up with a payment processor. Customers are often amazed when they get set up processing credit cards the same day.
Having a premium website form like WPforms and Stripe is very valuable for a business, they allow a business to collect money for a fraction of the cost/hassle than anything else. Before services like Stripe existed, a merchant would have to spend weeks scanning, signing and sending documents back and forth. Some processor applications also include questions that you might not expect to be on a payment processor application. Questions like how far are all the people that have server access sleeping from the datacenter?
Stripe does make it smooth and after filling out a short application form with some basic financial information, you will be up and running with Stripe on your forms.
Accept various payment types
With the easy integration with WPForms it allows you to collect various kinds of payments, such as:
Payment for a product
A subscription
Donation amount
Conditional amount based on form selections
Buyer enters an amount
No monthly fees and flat-rate pricing
Another advantage of getting set up with Stripe for payments is that they do not charge a monthly fee. You are only charged 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. This makes it easy for a business to predict the pricing.
Using Stripe and WPForms together is an easy and fast way to get set up accepting payments on a website exactly how it may be required. It can be configured to suit and can have a new user signed up and processing payments the same day. There is nothing else available that would allow such an efficient setup process for processing payments online.
Posted on January 26, 2020by Perry Toone with No comments
CentOS is short for Community Enterprise Operating System. This is one of the best Linux distributions for servers and it is well known as one of the most dependable and risk-free Operating Systems on the market. CentOS is open-source software, so you’ll be able to personalize it in whatever way you see fit, adding and removing packages or changing the program code of any of them. It’s also free to distribute and use, so you won’t need to pay any kind of license fees, meaning that the total price that you will have to pay for a server making use of CentOS will be more affordable as compared to the price for a server working with an alternative OS. What makes CentOS unique among various other Linux distributions is its huge developer community, that will help you discover the reply to any question or problem you may have. In addition, each version that’s released officially is supported for ten years, which is a lot longer than with any other operating system. What this means is regular safety and stability updates that provides a dependable software environment for all your web applications in the long run.
Posted on January 26, 2020by Perry Toone with No comments
If you decide to build a website, but you don’t have a personal computer or you have one, but you simply don’t want to pay for web design software or install any third-party program, you can use an online site builder. With such an app, you will be able to set up a website and update it from any location and any device provided that you have access to an Internet browser. Everything will be done online, so you’ll never have to download or install anything. If you go on vacation, for instance, or you use Internet cafes to access the Internet in general, you’ll still be able to change or include text and images in your site easily. Furthermore, online website design tools usually come with web themes that will allow you to create a gorgeous website even though you may not have any previous experience.
Posted on January 21, 2020by Perry Toone with No comments
While getting an email account is easy – sign up with an ISP, register with Google, buy a web hosting account – but free and standard packages won’t always deliver the reliability that professional users need.
Email hosting plans are an easy way to get a more efficient and reliable service. Exactly what’s included depends on the provider, but you might get support for larger attachments (up to 50MB), 25GB or more storage space for your inbox, online storage for easy file sharing, bundled apps like Microsoft Office online, Exchange and Active Directory support for business users – not to mention 24/7 support if anything goes wrong.
Your email will work with a custom domain (name@yourdomain.com), and it’s typically straightforward to set up. You can use an email hosting plan to effectively replace your web host’s service, or you can try one without having any hosting at all.
With quality services priced under $5 per user, it’s easy for anyone to check out the email hosting market. Whether you’re after an individual account or would like to cover your entire business, read on for five great providers that you might want to check out first.
The best email hosting services of 2020 are…
1. Thexyz Email
Thexyz remains one of the top email hosting provider in the market
Offers something for everyone – even the most demanding users
Well-specified plans
Quality technical support
Not the cheapest service
Canadian-based cloud computing company Thexyz has a wealth of hosted business-oriented email products for all levels of users.
Even the bottom-of-the-range Basic plan is well-specified, with 25GB mailboxes, spam and virus filters, and it’s accessible via Outlook, webmail, or by mobile users. Mailboxes are priced at $2.95 (£2.45) each per month with no minimum order and there are no long-term contracts, just monthly bills which you can cancel whenever you like.
The next-step-up MobileSync account brings 30GB of cloud storage, ActiveSync support, Office-compatible apps and instant messaging for $4.95 (£3.50) a month, which is also better value than most.
An extended MobileSync account adds unlimited storage space via archiving. That might be handy if you think a 25GB inbox is too small, but we’re unsure if it’s really worth the $6.95 (£4.85) price tag.
More demanding users can check out Thexyz Hosted Exchange 2016 plans. Specs include 100GB inboxes and support for 50MB attachments, and the starting price of $7.99 (£5.70) a user looks good to us.
There are cheaper services around, but quality matters, too, and Thexyz does better than most. All plans include a 100% uptime guarantee, and top-quality 24x7x365 support via chat, ticket or phone to quickly solve any issues that might crop up.
2. Fasthosts
Fasthosts is part of the formidable United Internet family which also includes 1&1
Ideal for those on a budget
Fasthosts Standard Email $2.83/mth
Fasthosts Exchange Email $4.26/mth
Fasthosts Office 365 $11.38/mth
Great value-for-money
Free domain with Exchange Email plan
Not the most powerful service
Email hosting can seem expensive, and that’s largely because the big companies are forever competing to offer the largest amounts of inbox and file storage space. That’s great if you need it, but not so much for light email users looking for a bargain.
Fasthosts Standard Email plan is a stripped-back email hosting plan which offers the bare essentials for a very low price.
Signing up gets you five Mail Lite accounts with a tiny 100MB inbox and a maximum of 10MB attachments, and two Mail Extra accounts with 2GB inboxes and support for attachments of up to 15MB. Both products give you webmail access only. That’s limited, but look at the price: just £1.99 ($2.80) a month on the annual plan. If your users genuinely don’t need the gigabytes available elsewhere, Fasthosts more basic package could make a lot of sense.
Fasthosts also offers a more capable Exchange Email product with a 15GB inbox, access via Outlook’s web app, and even a free domain for the first year. It’s priced at an initial £3.99 ($5.60) per month per user with the annual contract, dropping to £2.99 ($4.20) for five or more users. As before, Fasthosts is focusing on price more than power, but if you only need a basic Exchange account, there’s plenty of value here
3. Microsoft Office 365 Business Essentials
Office 365 is a surprising third in our email hosting provider shortlist
You’ll get much more than just email hosting…
Office 365 Business Yearly $8.25/mth
Office 365 Business Monthly $10/mth
Support for large attachments
1TB of online storage via OneDrive
Plenty of extras
Microsoft Office 365 isn’t just a powerful suite of productivity apps. It also throws in a very capable email package, and for less money than some providers charge for email alone, which could make the service worth a place on your shortlist.
Microsoft Office 365 Business Essentials offers support for 150MB attachments, for instance, three times the size allowed with even some premium competitors. 50GB of storage per user (and a custom email domain address) means you’ll be able to keep your messages for a very long time, and there’s 1TB of online storage available in your OneDrive account.
Access to Office Online enables working with Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint documents from within your browser, and there’s a whole range of business-friendly extras: calendars, online conferencing, intelligent search, workflow automation and more.
If you don’t have Office 365 already, the Business Essentials price of £3.80 ($5.30) a month (for annual billing) looks like good value to us.
If you’re solely interested in business class email, though, Microsoft’s Exchange Online Plan 1 provides Exchange accounts for £3 ($4.25) per user per month on the annual plan.
India-based Zoho might not be a household-name but its offerings pack a lot of punch.
Boasts a range of options, with a free plan to boot
Zoho Standard $2/mth
Zoho Pro $5/mth
Zoho Enterprice$8/mth
Zoho Mail – now known as Zoho Workplace – is a hosted email service with a bundled online office suite, and a stack of other extras.
A free plan gives you 25 mailboxes with up to 5GB per user, a 20MB attachment limit and webmail access. A referral scheme could get you support for a further 25 mailboxes.
If that’s too basic, the Standard plan gets you IMAP and POP support, 30MB attachments and 30GB of storage, 5GB file storage space, and support for working with multiple domains. That’s more capable than some of the premium competition, and includes the same productivity tools as the free suite, yet still only costs $2 ($1.45) per user per month, billed annually.
Zoho’s Ultimate plan lives up to its name with 1TB of storage (that’s for your documents and inbox), 40MB attachments, support for Active Directory groups, and more. It’s yours for $8 ($5.70) per user per month, not bad at all for the storage space and features you’re getting.
5. Liquid Web
Liquidweb is based in the US and provides with an attractive low price for its offering.
Easy to set up with some pretty neat extra features
Liquid Web Standard $1/mth*
Liquid Web Plus $2/mth
Liquid Microsoft Exchange $10/mth*
*Plus $10 per month charge for email account access
Liquid Web is probably best known for its comprehensive managed and dedicated server packages, but the company also provides an interesting email hosting service for what could be a very low price.
Note that you will need to buy LW’s Premium Web Hosting in order to get their email service. They do not sell a stand alone service.
The baseline Starter plan offers POP, SMTP and IMAP access, supports 50MB attachments and gives you a decent 25GB of storage space. The ability to import contacts from Gmail, Outlook and more gets you set up quickly, spam protection is handled via top quality Cloudmark technology, and you’re able to set up custom email filters and rules as required.
Liquid Web charges a flat $10 (£7.15) a month fee for your account, but after that, each Starter plan mailbox costs only $1 (£0.70) more. If you need five or more mailboxes, that’s going to be very good value, especially for the high level of support on offer.
The Plus plan enhances the service with 30GB of cloud storage, mobile sync for contacts and calendars, and online editing of spreadsheets and documents. This also includes a one-off $10 (£7.15) service fee and is $2 (£1.40) per mailbox, potentially a very good deal if you’re catering for a lot of people.
A final Microsoft Exchange plan gets you 100GB mailboxes, ActiveSync compatibility and Active Directory support, and even throws in a free copy of Outlook.
Its price of $10 (£7.15) a month isn’t quite as impressive value as its low-end cousins, but Liquid Web does allow you to include Exchange and Starter or Plus accounts in the same order. You could have 10 Starter mailboxes and two Exchange for only $40 (£28.55) a month, for instance, and that competes well with even big-name budget providers.
10 things to look for in your next email hosting
If you want to host email accounts together with your website, then you should look at these email features before signup.
Most hosting companies will offer the ability to host your own email (something like email@yourdomain. com). Your package will include a number of email accounts – usually between 1-10 for basic hosting.
You’ll be given access to your own email control panel to set up your accounts. Using email requires two things: an email server and an email application, this could be an email client such as Outlook, or alternatively access to Webmail like Gmail or Yahoo.
The email server is a piece of software that runs on the server and is constantly connected to the internet. It receives and processes any mail sent to it and sends out any mail you send.
The email client is an app that runs on your PC, phone or tablet and enables you to send, receive and organize your emails, e.g. Microsoft Outlook. The client checks the mail server for messages and downloads them for viewing. It is a control panel for reading and writing messages.
The good news is that most email clients can connect with most email servers, you can even connect multiple email servers to work with multiple email accounts.
So your work and personal emails can be accessed from the same email client. The more popular email clients such as Outlook give you more features (calendars, tasks etc.) than using webmail.
Webmail is a web-based email interface that can be accessed in a web browser is often faster and more convenient because it accesses the stored data more directly without the user having to download software locally.
Emails can be checked from any device with access to the internet. Email protocols are a set of rules that help the client to send the information to or from the mail server. Two of the most common email protocols are POP and IMAP:
1. POP (Post office protocol) Applications like Outlook will use POP to download emails from the server to your computer and then delete them on the server.
2. IMAP (Internet message access protocol) IMAP is more advanced than POP, with IMAP, emails are stored in the mail server and can be accessed from any clients anywhere if they all use IMAP.
Mail data is kept on the server as well as your computer, until you delete the mail. When comparing hosting packages, be sure to choose one with full IMAP support.
Exchange Exchange is the gold standard email protocol – the most expensive option of the three, but for good reason. It’s a Microsoft protocol that gives you the power to sync tasks like IMAP does, but with the added ability to share contacts and calendars among employees.
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