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Google Transparency Report: Government Removal Requests Continue to Rise

Posted on January 22, 2014 by Hosting

The post Google Transparency Report: Government Removal Requests Continue to Rise appeared first on HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing . Revelations surrounding government monitoring of heavily populated data streams and communications channels are on everyone’s mind as such news introduces a sea change of perception about our privacy rights. The simple fact is, our browsing habits and published content are no longer as “free” as they were once understood to be. But even beyond our the limitation of our own expression, what’s most concerning about these developments is the new and unprecedented level of authority governments are attempting to exercise over the world’s most important communications medium. With Google’s report as an accurate barometer, the situation is clear: the rights of Internet users are currently viewed as averse to efforts designed to shape public perception of governments, both local and international.   Government Takedown Requests Increase As mentioned, the issue with this new era of Internet monitoring lies not just in limitation of our freedoms of speech, but in the presumed authority that local and national governments have to censor content on the web. What was once thought to be a public domain, where anyone could post anything provided it respected the boundaries of international law, has become a curious combination of created content and concerted takedowns. A recent Google transparency report tells the tale better than any news narrative could. According to the company’s blog post on the data, Google received 3,486 take down requests regarding 24,737 pieces of content between January and June 2013; a 68% increase over the same period in 2012. Additional data provided shows the trend is rising exponentially , with approximately 2,000 requests in 2011, 2,500 in 2012, and nearly 4,000 in 2013.   A Troubling Trend What’s more stark about this data than the sheer volume of requests is the nature of such requests. According to Google, takedown orders were most often connected to stories about local government dealings and content critical of local and national governments. More often than not, these requests fell under the category of “defamation”, while some were even claimed to be copyright. The trend is startling. With more governments ordering more takedowns of critical content, the aim is clear: censorship for the preservation of public perception. Attempts to curtail public expression, particularly in the realm of government criticism, represents an unfortunate turn away from transparency and toward the limited exchange of productive, albeit challenging conversation.   A Powerful Ally Fortunately, while takedown requests continue to rise, Google’s established policy against censorship of the Internet represents a valuable ally in the protection of free speech online. The data cited earlier also features a list of US and international takedown requests, and whether or not those requests were met with compliance. According to data provided, the compliance rate for these requests has fallen dramatically from 2010 to now, likely in recognition of the danger of Internet censorship. While this practice of attempting to silence critical voices may not seem like a big deal for your business or personal blog, the implications are farther-reaching than you may realize. The power of the Internet lies in the free exchange of ideas, allowing for meaningful conversation that raises profound and important ideas and institutions to the top. This process is what breeds innovation, disrupts deleterious practices, and enriches society as a whole. Fortunately, Google’s transparency report shows that those in favor of a free and unedited Internet have a powerful ally and a strong ideological foundation on their side. Government takedown requests continue to rise, but those wishing to preserve the core of what makes the Internet such a powerful tool, are not going down without a fight. web hosting Continue reading →

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Make A Better First Impression On Your Homepage

Posted on January 9, 2014 by Hosting

The post Make A Better First Impression On Your Homepage appeared first on HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing . There was a time when having a website was quite the accomplishment, but since the days of AOL and dial-up Internet, everyone from the pet shop down the street to the multinational conglomerate has a website. In this crowded ecosystem, it’s important to stand out, and that means building a strong first impression. In an increasingly web-based world, the homepage has become the “handshake” of sales, and a firm, confident grip and winning smile will do a lot to improve your brand perception and comfort customers in the process. In this post, we’re offering a few recommendations on how to make a better first impression on your homepage.   Be Available Creating a website is an excellent first step toward better contact with your customers, but it is by no means the end of your work. As a matter of fact, the presence of a business website actually establishes expectations for basic functionality and information that you’re required to fulfill in order to convert sales. Doing so takes many forms, from the rudimentary to the complex, but in all efforts, creating the understanding that customer needs will be met is job #1. This begins with contact information. When customers view your business, they bring with them certain fears. Fears of buyer’s remorse, fears of being scammed, and fears of missed opportunity. As profound as this ordeal may sound, it’s very real and putting your contact information on the homepage of your website will help immediately quell them. This way, if customers have worries, they know how to get in contact with you, and that trust will go a long way in the future. In addition to human contact, customers want to know that assistance will come even after business hours. For this reason, having a clear organization and working links to the information on your website on the front page will help allay their fears and improve their experience. With more companies recognizing the importance of quality web design, creating a site that’s usable will become just as important as delivering a quality product.   Establish Expectations But quality is still a part of the picture, and using your first impression to communicate its importance to your business is excellent practice. The initial visit to a website, just as with first meetings with human beings, determines a lot about customers’ future perceptions, so establishing expectations prior to purchase will help sales conversion and develop customer relationships. This means using aesthetic and tapping into web trends to demonstrate that your company has an ear to the ground and a modern approach. Start with eye-catching visuals . Inundated readers have become scanners , which means that our content, and our websites, must change to curry their favor. Attractive and descriptive photographs and graphics more effectively communicate information, and establish the kind of first-impression we’re looking for much more rapidly than text. What’s of note in employing visuals, however, is the importance of content. Irrelevant visuals, butterflies for a software company for example, are more likely to turn customers off than appeal to their sensibilities. Visuals should describe your business and set standards, not come off as contrive. With the newfound nature of Internet readers, the front-page has evolved, from a gateway to more information, to the residence of your primary sales pitch. Instead of waiting for visitors to bite and click further down the site navigation, savvy developers have seized the bull by the horns and put key product specifications, demo videos, and testimonials of satisfied customers right up front for people to see. Doing so helps avoid the small, but significant, down time between initial viewing and product research, leading to better conversion rates and happier customers.   Communicate, Communicate, Communicate At this point, you’re being asked to put quite a bit on the front page of your website. From visuals to product specs to copy, there’s a lot going on at first glance. In order to prevent this torrent of information from becoming an unintelligible mess, designers have developed ways to effectively organize content, gleaning the aforementioned benefits without taxing the patience of hesitant users. Two methods have developed that have seen widespread adoption. The first involves what are called large “hero areas”. The term harkens back to the days of print media, when a large visual and accompanying typography presented a powerful first-impression, justifying the occupation of extra space with the resultant impact. These days, it’s not uncommon for the entire screen of a browser to be filled with a single image and impactful tagline. Doing so creates a strong impression, without compromising the integrity of the following content. The reason this practice resonates is due to the accompanying, second method: scroll-based layouts. Conventional web design focused on dividing content between pages, but new designs are dividing pages into browser-sized sections, delineated by common typography, background color, and a large, distinguishing visual. By dividing your homepage vertically into sections, you can effectively deliver a presentation of your product or brand’s benefits without the risk of lost traffic, catching eyes and attention in the process. Web design has grown by leaps and bounds since the days of dial-up, and with it, the expectations placed upon business websites. But your firm can keep up with, and surpass, the Jones’ with a little know-how and some modern design techniques. Make your company available to your customers with contact information and working navigation. Establish your first impression with optimized content and relevant information. Finally, consider implementing some higher-level design that keeps your customers reading and puts your site on the cutting edge of the evolving web. You’d wear a suit and carry business cards to a sales meeting, and applying the same concept to your homepage will have similar results, making the ironing and tailoring worth the work. web hosting Continue reading →

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A Beginner’s Guide to Using Psychographics to Improve Your Marketing Efforts

Posted on January 3, 2014 by Hosting

The post A Beginner’s Guide to Using Psychographics to Improve Your Marketing Efforts appeared first on HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing . In marketing practice, buzzwords are as ubiquitous as copy. Some come, and some go, but the ones that stay are of far-reaching, intrinsic value that better your efforts and customer satisfaction in some way. With this in mind, it’s a fair bet that psychographics are about to demonstrate some impressive longevity. Through a more comprehensive understanding of what drives customer actions, using research and analytics to fuel the endeavor, your materials and distribution can see greater permeation than ever before.   What They Are Despite the curious title, psychographics are not as bewildering as their name might imply, and understanding their nature, use, and acquisition can breed a great deal of success in marketing efforts. At their core, psychographics are profiles of individuals that focus on lifestyle, habits, and tendencies, reaching beyond traditional demographic information and seeking more valuable data from user behavior. For a better understanding of exactly what comprises one of these profiles, let’s look at a hypothetical user and see what we can learn from them. We’ll begin with John, a 32-year old office worker from Los Angeles, California. For the sake of thoroughness, let’s assume that he’s married with two children, has an income of approximately $60K per year, and owns his own home. While all of this information has some kind of use, it doesn’t tell us much about him outside of raw data. What we want is information about interests and habits in order to better understand his motivations. A look at John’s Facebook page shows likes on pages related to fantasy football and an application that tracks player injury status. His Twitter page shows pictures of his family in a snowy location, holding ski poles and wearing goggles. Each of these social channels has some kind of activity, but a look at his Google+ page shows that most of his time is spent there. What we have now is a wealth of information regarding John. He lives in Los Angeles and probably commutes. He enjoys fantasy football and skiing. He has a wife and two kids, all of whom are also active and athletic. He spends most of his time on Google+, and is young enough that he probably uses multiple devices to access information on the Internet through various media channels.   How They Work The power of this profile is manifold. As marketers and business owners, you want to understand where to put what information and when, so that the right people see the right things and think better of your brand or purchase product. To this end, John’s psychographic is a boon to our work. First of all, as a working commuter with multiple channels of access, we have a better understanding of John’s browsing habits. He likely checks social networks and news channels in the morning and at night, before and after work, possibly stopping during the day to check his mobile phone during breaks. He uses Facebook and Twitter but is mostly found on Google+. Therefore, assuming John is the type of customer we want to recruit, our marketing is best published across multiple social networking channels, preferably Google+, during the morning (before 8 AM), afternoon (around lunch time), and evening (after 5 PM). But logistics aren’t the only use of psychographics. A better understanding of user behavior gives us the added benefit of what kind of content should be published. As we noted, John likes to travel, ski, and play fantasy football. In terms of sales deals, airlines could offer discount tickets around wintertime, restaurants can offer deals for customers with a valid lift ticket, and sports magazines can offer price cuts on subscriptions around fantasy draft season. In terms of content, a travel magazine could create a review of the best ski slopes in Colorado, a sports website could offer insider information on sleeper picks, and an eCards website could offer templates for email postcards incorporating winter sports. The incredible thing is, all of this came from a better understanding of customer behavior. Multiple industries, multiple businesses, and multiple aspects of marketing all arose from discerning the interests and habits of a target customer. With this kind of information available from only a judicious application of research, the last question that remains is how to obtain it.   How to Get Them Start by leveraging the information you already have. Website analytics, past purchases, and social networking activity provide a sort of “back end” approach to customer research. Pay attention to what articles or offers performed well, what channel has seen the most success, and what kind of engagement your current topics are seeing. By looking at past successes and drawing some ideas from them, you can save money and build a decent bank of knowledge. But customer behavior isn’t limited to online engagement. A thorough understanding of user interests and habits requires a great deal more insight; insight straight from the source. Customer surveys are a good place to start since they offer a large sample size. The key is to ask the right questions, looking specifically for behavior and interests, offering the chance for open-ended answers where applicable. In your approach, be honest about your intent. Personal information is more guarded than ever in an increasingly privacy-aware society, but explaining your intent is an excellent way of disarming respondents through trust. Furthermore, most customers are more than happy to share this kind of information if it improves the relevance of information and product offerings. Reinforce this broad-base data collection with customer interviews and focus groups. By inviting customers to meet or offering to converse with them over the phone, you’re providing an opportunity to ask responsive questions and delve further into fruitful areas, instead of relying on rote questionnaires. In addition, putting a human face on your efforts (and including refreshments if the meetings happen in person) is an excellent way to show customers that you care, increase engagement, and build relationships in the process. Between these methods of research and an intelligent understanding of the worth of the data obtained, your business stands to expand its reach and its relevancy through psychographics. Focus on the characteristic behaviors, habits, and methods of communication that drive customers’ day-to-day lives and use that information to better craft content and logistics of publication. With an open ear and an aim toward seeing people instead of numbers, your content, relationships, and bottom-line, will all benefit. Register a cheap domain name at HostGator.com Continue reading →

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8 New Year’s Marketing and Web Design Resolutions For 2014

Posted on December 30, 2013 by Hosting

The post 8 New Year’s Marketing and Web Design Resolutions For 2014 appeared first on HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing . For many, New Year’s means a new start; a chance to make things even better than the year before. But your body and your mentality aren’t the only things that can benefit from this outlook. Around the world, businesses are looking for opportunities to shape up and ring in the New Year with positive change, and setting the right resolutions can mean big returns in 2014. Here are eight ways to usher in a New Year, and new potential, for your business.   Know Your Goals Success on the Internet is a nebulous thing. For some, it’s 5 million YouTube hits that ultimately translate into no material gain or following. For others, it’s understanding the aims of your content and website and gearing efforts toward fulfilling analytics that indicate success. The latter are the ones you should listen to. Google Analytics, Facebook likes, Twitter retweets, and myriad other Internet kudos can give the impression of accomplishment, but without knowing what your ultimate aim is, little will come of these digital atta-boys. If your goal is retention, focus on the percentage of new visitors versus returning visitors. If engaging content is your goal, focus on bounce rate and time spent on page. Know what you want and watch your barometers to determine whether it’s happening instead of chasing vanity metrics to nowhere.   Produce Content Welcome to the new world order. The marketing wisdom of the past simply does not cut it anymore. New users, bombarded by information and cheap sales pitches every day, are becoming wise to the tactics of salesmen and want something more substantial from their brands and their browsing. What do they want in their place? Content . This means informative articles, slideshows, presentations, and infographics that enrich their lives and demonstrate an understanding of their needs in a real way.  With more businesses adopting this innovative new strategy every day, it’s clear that content is here to stay, so plan on engaging your customers and leveraging your know-how to great effect.   Build User Profiles These same users demanding greater value from the firms that supply their needs are doing so with increasingly high standards for personalization. With social networking, news feeds, and browsing experiences tailored to individual needs, it’s no wonder why customers are driving this paradigm shift. But while you can’t cater to the highly specific whims of every member of your consumer base, you can develop an understanding of their personalities. Intelligent businesses are creating  buyer personas  that drill down to the circumstances, interests, and mentality of the types of users that frequent their site in order to help fulfill their specific needs. This not only helps guide content, but also can shed light on why particular products, methods, and sentiments are, or are not, increasing sales.   Go Multi-Channel The modern customer sees the world through a multitude of lenses. Tablets, mobile phones, television, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest are just a few of the channels through which content is delivered. Behind us is an era when a single ad spot on a prominent TV program meant sales and here is a greater challenge: grabbing the attention of the perpetually distracted. The solution, as it turns out, lies not in shining a spotlight on one piece or another, but in creating a coherent and intelligently tailored brand experience on all channels. Your organization should have profiles on all major social networks with content optimized for the particular platform. The aesthetic and messaging between them should be uniform in order to imbue the same sentiments consistently. Doing so builds brand perception and association by working with customer habits instead of against them.   Tap Into Video With mobile phones, tablets, and even laptops connected to televisions, video has become more available than ever. But the medium’s potential isn’t fulfilled simply by its ubiquity. Showing your organization in motion quickly conveys information, emotion, and a human appeal. A well-crafted YouTube channel can house everything from product demonstrations to documentaries to quick, viral clips, presenting effective marketing without the arduous task of reading lines of text on a small screen. Furthermore, posting video enables comments, feedback, and video replies that get the conversation going and engage customers in the process.   Be Responsive Tablets and mobile phones have been mentioned multiple times already, and for good reason. According to research, mobile Internet usage is  surpassing desktop Internet usage  as we speak. And while pinch-and-zoom browsing capabilities are available on phones, the more elegant approach to addressing mobile needs lies in responsive web design. Responsive web design uses media queries to determine the size of the browser viewing the page and adjusts the layout to optimize the experience on respective platforms. Why make the change? Simple. Mobile customers have a distinctly limited interface and form factor context that makes viewing of desktop sites difficult. By creating large-format text for easier reading, large navigation buttons for more accurate selection, and a layout optimized for vertical scrolling, customers are not only more likely to view content, but build a positive brand association in the process.   Location, Location, Location As our understanding of mobile increases, the capabilities of mobile devices follow suit. Mobile applications have already put deals and product catalogs in user pockets, but the next wave in commercial innovation is being ushered in by location services. By implementing new technologies at brick-and-mortar stores, customers passing by or entering businesses can receive coupon codes and information about special deals. Not only does this take the bargain hunting out of their hands, it adds extra incentive for in-person and post-visit sales conversion. Offering the right deals remains your responsibility, but these new solutions will make distribution much easier.   Focus on the Customer With evolving technologies, increasing demands, and new challenges for meeting consumers’ changing lives, it’s a buyer’s market. With the ubiquity of firms vying for attention (and money) and the ease with which customers can find other shops offering similar wares, the onus lies with you, the business owner, to fulfill their wishes. Savvy shoppers are no longer interested in cheap ploys for attention or sales, but instead want real deals, real communication, and a real relationship with the establishments they patronize. Above and throughout all things listed here, make the customer priority number 1, and rest assured that the New Year will be a happy one indeed. After hitting the gym and pledging to drink more water in 2014, focus on improving your business with a little know-how and elbow grease. Know what you wish to accomplish in the New Year and develop enriching content that helps facilitate those goals. Focus on your customer and know who they are and what they want. Tap into new technologies through responsive web design, location services, and video, and make your presence known everywhere that customer attention is directed. Much like a gym membership, it takes time to see results, so prioritize your business’ success and enjoy the dividends in turn. Register a cheap domain name at HostGator.com Continue reading →

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A Pocket Guide to Small Business Content Marketing

Posted on December 27, 2013 by Hosting

The post A Pocket Guide to Small Business Content Marketing appeared first on HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing . Marketing is a fickle animal. The multi-headed hydra of analytics, theory, and outright instincts leverages our understanding of human perception to the betterment of brand perception. With an explanation like this, it’s easy to understand why copious, dense volumes of information and thousands of pages of research exist to help explain the science of crafting sentiment and currying favor. But as a small business, you probably don’t have time for this kind of in-depth reading. You need answers that will positively affect your business and you need them now. With content marketing demonstrating its potency as one of the most effective methods of appealing to customers, here’s a quick reference that should get you marketing faster than you can say “multi-platform brand identity integration”.   Know Your Value Content marketing is, at its core, the delivery of your unique value in multiple formats in order to dynamically engage customers and shape brand perception. The linchpin of any good content marketing strategy involves understanding what you have to offer; what you give to your customers that no one else can. If you haven’t identified this yet, the process is actually quite simple. For B2B businesses, your value likely lies in your authority as a center of knowledge and know-how to your industry. For B2C businesses, your value lives-and-dies with your ability to fulfill a particular lifestyle that resonates with your customer base. If you feel that you don’t, at present, offer a significant value in either of these sectors, do some research and look for space in the market to fill with your expertise or unique identity.   Know Who You’re Writing For Once you have this value established, you’re ready to take the first steps in creating content. But before you begin, it’s important to understand how content marketing works. The act of putting out valuable information or photos that enshrine some lifestyle or ideology engages customers based on fulfillment of their wishes. The key is to deliver the value you identified initially to your customers in real and tangible ways. To this end, it is essential to always remember who you are creating for: the customer. For a B2B business, self-aggrandizing posts or rote description of your current practices focuses far too heavily on yourself. Try branching out by offering industry insight and case studies on successful members of the industry community. For a B2C business, any content you release that doesn’t somehow enable the lifestyle you prescribe is wasted space. For clothiers, for example, effective content marketing may include style showcases incorporating your pieces alongside items from other retailers. Doing so not only enables the creativity of your customers, but demonstrates your desire to help them, not simply push product.   Format Matters Now that you understand what your content should contain, the next step is understanding how to express it. For many, it may be tempting to simply start a blog and push helpful and knowledgeable pieces of information or fun posts about trends and news. Unfortunately, while all of this may be enjoyable to write, or even engaging to view, the Internet reader is extremely fickle, distracted, and picky. Knowing how to play the game is vital to making good content stick. A simple rule of thumb can help guide your decision: video and photos rule. This rule is comprised of two facts. The first is that video has an  immense impact on sales , driving engagement and fueling customer sentiment due to its digestible format and capacity for expression. The second is that photos, both by themselves and used in tandem with text pieces, resonate. Since browsing eyes tend to skim, photos offer a quick infusion of communication that can rapidly lead to engagement. In fact, photos receive  53% more Likes, 104% more comments, and 84% more click-throughs  than any other format, both by themselves and as a hook for a text post with the link in the caption.   Building Volume The bustling din of the Internet poses a real challenge for businesses trying to make their voice heard. Creating unique content with specific promised and fulfilled value are a start, but the visibility is not simply determined by quality. To a large degree, what determines the visibility of items on the Internet is a sort of game. When someone types something into Google, results are returned based on a number of factors, including popularity, number of inbound links, and relevance based on keywords on the page. Blogs and YouTube channels function through organic traffic, which comes from search queries that ping terms contained therein. In order to appear in the top part of Google’s page rankings, blogs and YouTube channels must build a sufficient volume of content, reinforced by strong keywords, so that the search engine values them as relevant. The topics of search engine optimization and search algorithms could span volumes. For the sake of your endeavor simply understand that building a following for your business blog or video content takes time. Constructing a volume of work sufficient to garner organic traffic is the name of the game so keep chugging away with this in mind.   Understanding Metrics Finally, once all of your hard work is out in the universe, it’s essential to identify hits, busts, areas for improvement, and so on in order to tailor more successful content in the future. The problem is that most analytics don’t offer the kind of insight we think they do. In general, site traffic and specific page views are seen as the holy grails of metrics, but knowing the value of other, more nuanced statistics can steer your ship to greater effect. For the sake of brevity, we’ll highlight three particular metrics of note: bounce rate, average time spent on page, and click-through rate. Bounce rate is a percentage that indicates what fraction of total visitors to a particular page viewed the content and then immediately left the site. You want this metric as low as possible, since consequent visits to other parts of your site means that your content was engaging enough to inspire further exploration. Average time spent on page is pretty self-explanatory, demonstrating whether or not visitors actually viewed the content or simply made a snap decision based on an element they didn’t like and left. Finally, click-through rate relates to your requests that customers check out product information, subscribe to your YouTube channel and so on. In order to encourage engagement, good content should inspire action, and this metric demonstrates whether or not that call was heeded. And that, as they say, is that. Content marketing’s capabilities are astounding, provided that the concept is leveraged correctly. Identifying your unique value and delivering it to customers will help build your image as an involved, human, resource. Using attractive formats can help motivate content views while building a volume of work will help drive organic traffic. Finally, understanding the value of particular metrics will help formulate strategies more effectively moving forward. While more in-depth resources exist that help enlighten the concept further, knowing even the basic framework of content marketing can get your efforts moving and your business growing in dynamic and exciting new ways. Register a cheap domain name at HostGator.com Continue reading →

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