Tag Archives: gator-crossing

Protect Your Brand Online

Posted on October 8, 2013 by Hosting

The post Protect Your Brand Online appeared first on HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing . One of the blessings and curses of the Internet is the utter simplicity involved in registering a domain and putting a website online; anyone can do it.  It’s amazing how simple the process is, but in the same breath it’s amazing how simple the process is .  There are also very few restrictions involved in how an individual exercises this freedom.  What we’re getting at is one of the back-alley facts of life online these days: anyone can register any available domain and put virtually any content they choose on that domain. Now through Octorber 31st, we are offering $9 .com /.net /.org domains using coupon code Domain9 at http://register.hostgator.com . The best way to protect your brand is to ensure you own all the popular Top Level Domains (TLDs) for the brand.  In other words, you want the .com / .net / .org for any domain related to your business.  Who do you think owns hostgator.org, or google.net?  Ever notice how amazon.net loads straight to amazon.com?  It is incredibly easy to forward multiple domains to your primary domain within cPanel.   That way whatever TLD iteration someone types into a browser, they will arrive your same website.  And it prevents a competitor from doing as they choose with any available TLD related to your brand. This logic can be applied in other ways as well.  For example, a quick WHOIS search for amazonsucks.com shows the domain is pointed to amazon.com nameservers, thus preventing any potential angry individuals from utilizing that domain for any nefarious purposes that might then show up in google searches for amazon.com.  It also forces any “haters” to have to scoot further off the beaten path before stepping up onto their virtual soapbox. One more example regarding the wisdom of owning multiple domains to protect your brand.  Type fcaebook.com into your browser and see what happens.  Clearly FaceBook registered that mis-spelling of their domain and pointed it to their primary domain. Whether to protect your brand from frontal attacks, or prevent others from attacking from the flanks, you best defense is to simply own any domains that could be used against you.  Be they alternate TLDs, or any alternate spellings or even “ sucks.com” as Amazon taught us. From now through October 31st, HostGator is offering all .com / .net / .org domains for just $9 per year, Domain9 is the coupon code.  Now is the time to scoop up those alternate TLDs and alternate spelling domains.  Choose your domains wisely, think through what domains you should own from a strategic standpoint, then head on over to http://register.hostgator.com (don’t forget to use coupon code: Domain9) and protect your brand! Continue reading →

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How To Connect With Online Shoppers This Holiday Season

Posted on October 7, 2013 by Hosting

The post How To Connect With Online Shoppers This Holiday Season appeared first on HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing . It seems like only yesterday that we were kicking off summer. Now the holiday shopping season is almost upon us. If you’re like a lot of online retailers, the holiday season represents a huge source of potential revenue. According to the National Retail Federation, that number is as much as 20-40% for many businesses. If you want to take full advantage of the busiest shopping season of the year (and who doesn’t?), it’s important to know how to connect with your potential customers.   Analytics Power If connecting with your customers on a more personal level is your goal, then your analytics can be a great indicator of how to go about it. You can use your available metrics and demographic information to create a number of approaches. Your creativity really comes in handy. You can geo-target customers and create special offers based on their location, email deals based on popular items among people in the customer’s age range, or create targeted holiday deals based on past purchases. Use your knowledge of your customer base and the power of analytics technology to find ways to personalize your offers.   Optimize for Mobile It’s no secret that mobile web surfing is more popular now than it ever has been. According to the IBM Online Retail Index, consumer online spending in Q2 2013 went up 15 percent since Q2 2012. Mobile shopping accounted for 20% of those sales. In light of this, companies are increasingly turning to mobile apps as a way to market their businesses. IKEA successfully did this last year by creating an app for the iconic IKEA catalog. The app-version of the catalog was interactive and allowed customers to unlock exclusive content by scanning pages. Creating a seasonal app can go a long way in promoting a business during the holidays.   Connecting via Social Media Data has shown that web surfers are more likely to use social media for inspiration rather than a buying portal. In other words, someone is more likely to visit Pinterest to look at shoes before going to the website or store to buy them later. However, this isn’t keeping companies like Express and Gamestop from transforming their Facebook pages into virtual storefronts. Facebook is perhaps the best way to connect with customers during the holiday season both because of their large user base and the ability to share different media. You might also find creative ways to connect with customers on visual-centric websites like Pinterest and Polyvore while they’re searching for inspiration. How you integrate social media into your holiday marketing will depend on what you feel your customers will respond best to. Maybe it’s time to try something new, or perhaps it’s best to stick to a tried and true approach.   Cross-Channel Marketing While online shopping revenue is expected to increase overall this year, the majority of shoppers still plan to visit stores for their holiday shopping. If you have a brick and mortar store, add an online element to your in-store advertising. You can advertise exclusive deals available through your website, or follow Nordstrom’s example. One of their most recent in-store campaigns featured shoes that were the most-pinned on Pinterest . Also, due to the rise of cross-channel marketing, Black Friday and Cyber Monday have pretty much become the bookends to one long shopping period. Data from the National Retail Federation showed that last year, online sales rose 17 percent year-over-year between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. You can expect to see something similar this year, making the days following Thanksgiving ideal for discounts, sales, and more time-sensitive specials that create a sense of urgency for the buyer.   Refine Your Customer Service The importance of customer service for a B2C business can’t be expressed enough. According to a survey conducted by American Express in 2012, two thirds of U.S customers said that they were willing to spend more with a company that they believed provided excellent customer service. The survey also showed that one third of surveyed respondents felt that businesses were paying less attention to customer service than in the past. Now is a good time to review your customer service practices and refine them if necessary. What are the response times for customer emails? Is there a certain website feature that people have been asking for? Conducting follow up surveys is a good way to gauge the health of your customer service, and see where things could use some sprucing up. The holidays are a time where spirits are high and people are gearing up to give and be given to. As technology improves and becomes more widely available, the Internet will continue to play an increasingly important role in the holiday shopping season. Those business owners who stay on top of and act upon trends like mobile usage and cross-channel marketing will see the biggest gains during the holiday season 2013. Continue reading →

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PRISM and Changes To Google Search

Posted on October 5, 2013 by Hosting

The post PRISM and Changes To Google Search appeared first on HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing . Google has always valued the privacy of its users, and privacy has long been a platform on which it has operated. In 2011, the search giant began protecting logged-in searches with SSL encryption, so as to keep unauthorized third parties from seeing what search terms were being used. If a search term was deemed too private, it would show up as “not provided” in Google Analytics. Last month, Google began encrypting all searches, both logged-in and not logged-in. This change was performed without any announcement, though the update was later confirmed by the company. They told the Washington Post last month: “We added SSL encryption for our signed-in search users in 2011, as well as searches from the Chrome omnibox earlier this year. We’re now working to bring this extra protection to more users who are not signed in.”   Why Now? Though it’s not entirely clear why Google started ramping up these efforts just last month, it’s apparent that the overall campaign is in response to the NSA and PRISM. After it was revealed that the national security administration had been secretly collecting data on U.S citizens (as well as other countries) via their PRISM program, accusations were leveled against Google that they’d been participating with the NSA in collecting said data. Seeking to maintain its pro-privacy reputation, Google has since strongly denied any involvement with PRISM. In response they also began a campaign of transparency when it comes to the number of disclosure requests it receives from the government. They also planned to increasingly encrypt data being transmitted between their data centers. Though the program was initially approved in June, they began quickly implementing in December. According to Not Provided Count, a website provided by internet marketing agency ClickConsult, the number of “not provided” search terms across the 60 websites they monitor has increased more than 80% since last March. The number began to spike in the last week of August.   Does This Hurt Search Marketing? A large number of search marketers depend on Google Analytics to collect data on what their audiences are searching for and when. A big part of that is the referrer string, which is a sort of identifier that your web browser records of the last web page you visited before arriving at your current web page. The previous page is known as the referrer page, and your web browser sends a record of it to Google as soon as you arrive on your destination page. When a user uses Google search as a referrer page, the string URL also includes the keywords they searched. Now that Google is encrypting its searches, getting referrer page data won’t be so straightforward for all searches. Search marketers will see more of the “not provided” message when a user uses Google as a referrer page. It’s worth noting that not all search terms will be encrypted, only ones that Google deems “too private” to be shared. It’s not clear at this point as to what extent this will affect search marketing (what countries will be affected, what “too private” means, etc.).  Hopefully Google will offer more clarification in the days and weeks to come. Although some search data will be restricted because of the new privacy measures, “private” search data isn’t withheld completely. Data encryption only keeps the data traveling between data centers from being transmitted for everyone to “hear.” Webmasters and search marketers can see these terms by accessing Google Webmaster Tools, though they can only see the top 2,000 per day for the past 90 days. Webmaster Tools users must archive the information to access it again in the future, or else it’s lost. However, the company made a change in August that will allow users to access the data easily, but only if they’re also Google Adwords customers. Advertisers can also still access data sent when a user clicks on an ad, regardless of the search terms they used to arrive at the ad. Although Google has essentially taken these encryption measures to make it more difficult for the NSA to spy on their data, it won’t make search results completely immune to spying. Google must also still comply with any order of cooperation that the government may give. However, experts say that the increased use of encryption makes mass surveillance more difficult for third parties. Google is a company that prides itself on being a responsible keeper of private information, and rightfully so. Privacy is a major concern among internet users today. This may or may not be a setback for search marketing on the whole since only Adwords customers can access full search information for now. On the other hand, the changes won’t affect all search data. Again, hopefully Google will offer more clarification in the weeks to come. Continue reading →

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Why Backing Up Your Website Is So Important

Posted on October 3, 2013 by Hosting

The post Why Backing Up Your Website Is So Important appeared first on HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing . You’ve heard a lot of talk about the importance of backing up your hard drive just in case something should happen to your computer. There are few things more painful than knowing that all of your precious files have been lost forever. The same holds true for websites. It seems like every day there is a new headline about the latest high profile website crash. Unfortunately, website threats are very real. Backing up your website helps you to safeguard against those threats.   Website Hackers Unfortunately, hackers have become commonplace on the web. While the aim of a hacker may be to steal credit card numbers and other sensitive information, often people hack websites merely to prove themselves or cause trouble. If your website is online, there is always the chance that it may become compromised.   Computer Catastrophes Storing a copy of your files on your computer is a good idea, but should your machine crash, get lost, or fall off a cliff, then your files will be gone with it. Backing up your files remotely is a more practical option in the event that something happens to your machine.   Updates Gone Wrong Regular updates refer to updated features and increased security, but they don’t always go as planned. This is why WordPress always tells you to perform a backup before updating. Websites have multiple components, including plugins, themes, software, and back-end programming. An awry update to any of these can take an entire website offline for any amount of time.   Malware and Viruses Viruses, trojan horses, and other malware can find their way into your website even via third parties that are normally safe. You can download them unknowingly with a theme or plugin, or they can slip in through a chink in your firewall’s armor. Having backup files means that you’ll be prepared just in case your site starts acting mysteriously weird.   Employee Errors The truth is that people make mistakes. It’s perfectly possible that an employee or contractor might click a wrong button or delete a necessary file by accident. When you backup your files, there’s less chance that human error will mess up your operations.   Minimize the Damage Say you log onto your website one day, only to be greeted with an unfamiliar error page. You try again and again, but it still doesn’t come up. You get a sinking feeling in your stomach as you realize that something has gone wrong. You could either a) Go into an all out panic as you try to figure out what went wrong, and whether or not you’ve lost all of your precious content, or b) Become a bit annoyed that you may have to spend some time reloading your website, but you won’t have reason to go into an anxious tailspin.   How to Backup Your site If by now you’re convinced that backing up your website is the right thing to do, there are a few ways you can go about it. Find out if your web host provides website backups as a service. Contact the person who designed your website and ask them to do it for you. They should have enough knowledge of how content management systems work that they would be able to manually backup your files. Use an additional “just in case” backup service. Many of these services exist, so do your research. Some are more cost effective than others, while others have software that’s more or less user friendly. Install a backup plugin on your site. Some plugins allow you to schedule backups, as well as send your files to cloud services like Dropbox. If you have a smaller website, you might just choose to compress your files in a ZIP folder and email them to yourself. Again, this works best for small websites. So if the size of your files is bigger than your email provider allows you to send, or if you expect that the size of your site will expand, then look into one of the other backup options. It’s a good idea to also save a copy of your files on your computer, though you should also do this in addition to one of the other techniques. Having two copies of your files isn’t a bad idea. As the old adage goes, better safe than sorry.   Backing up your site doesn’t take a lot of time or money, and it it’s a worthwhile investment considering all of the threats that exist online. Backup your website today, and avoid becoming one of those anxiety-ridden business owners who must reluctantly restart their website from scratch. Continue reading →

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10 Reasons Why It’s Time To Update Your Social Media Strategy

Posted on October 1, 2013 by Hosting

The post 10 Reasons Why It’s Time To Update Your Social Media Strategy appeared first on HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing . In the ever-changing world of social media, it’s quite easy to fall off the wagon with your social strategy. The steady stream of new updates, features, and websites are enough to make anyone business owner’s head spin. Still, staying on top of social media trends has its rewards. Is it time for you update your social media strategy ? Read on to find out.   1. You Haven’t Been Paying Attention To New Trends Changes in consumer technology, like the relatively recent explosion in mobile web surfing , have a direct effect on how people use the internet. For instance, Facebook launched a mobile-only ad program last year, something that could be very lucrative for a company who knows how to use it. Since social media tends to adapt to trends in technology, these trends will ultimately affect your social media strategy.   2. You Haven’t Taken Feature Updates Into Account Anyone who has been on Facebook over the course of a year knows that things change all the time. Recently they implemented the social graph, which is a detailed way of searching for people on Facebook with like interests. More recently, Facebook gave their page analytics feature an overhaul to make it more detailed. Changes like these can impact your social marketing efforts, so try to stay on top of them.   3. You Don’t Know Why You Use Social Media Do you know why you’re on social media in the first place? If the answer is “because everyone else is,” then that’s the wrong answer. Why? Because it’s not a solid enough reason to drive your social marketing. Do you want to improve customer service response? Increase brand awareness before the opening of a new location? Social media can help you do this, but you have to define your motives first.   4. You’re Not Branching Out If your company or organization has yet to find a way to utilize social networks beyond Facebook and Twitter, you could be missing out on new opportunities to connect with prospects. Sites and apps like Pinterest, Youtube, and Instagram get tens of millions of hits each day. If your social media activities have been limited to only one or two social sites, it might be time to investigate how to expand your reach. Be creative. Picture, video, and location-based social sites have exploded in popularity, so be sure to go where the trends are leading.   6. You Aren’t Interacting With Followers Do you post content without really paying attention to what people have to say about it? If so, then you’re taking the “social” out of social media. It’s important to interact with fans and customers via your channels. It’s a good way to get feedback, address complaints, and see what you’re doing right.   7. You’re Being Too Spammy The age of sales talk is slowly dying on the internet. Today’s internet is more a conduit for conversation and information than anything else. Go over the last few things that you shared on your social media accounts. If you sound more like a robot or telemarketer than an accessible human being, then it’s time to figure out how to better relate to your audience.   8. You’re Not Managing The Interaction Should any unacceptable behavior or language make its way onto your business page, you should consider laying down some house rules. Create a document that clearly spells out disruptive behavior—such as inflammatory posts and spamming—and make it accessible to everyone who interacts on your social sites or blog. If anyone breaks any of the rules you’ve set down, you can either give them a warning or block them from your pages altogether.   9. You’re Wasting Too Much Time Posting Updates Updating each of your social networks one at a time can be tedious. If you’re still posting updates one at a time, consider simplifying the process with a scheduling tool like HootSuite. This program lets you monitor multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts and pages from the same interface, and even lets you schedule posts and tweets ahead of time.   10. You’re Not Being Original Anyone can share, retweet, and rehash news that they’ve read elsewhere, but do you have anything original to say to your audience? Sure retweeting and sharing valuable information is great, but you should also take time to create and share original content. If you need help in the content creation area, hire outside help. A professional writer, photographer, or social media consultant can help you create orginal, sharable content for your online communities.   If any of the above applies to you, then don’t worry. You’re not alone. As mentioned before, social media moves fast, and it can be hard to keep up. Ever business should look at their strategy every few months to make sure it’s still working for them. No matter what, there is always room for improvement. Continue reading →

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