Tag Archives: small-business

Get Your Small Business Online Fast with a Website Builder

Posted on October 22, 2018 by Hosting

The post Get Your Small Business Online Fast with a Website Builder appeared first on HostGator Blog . For years, people have been saying your small business needs a website. You know it’s true, but you’ve been busy, you know, running a small business . Who has time to drop everything and throw a website together, especially when you know nothing about building or designing a website? Nearly a third of small businesses still don’t have a website. That makes sense if you think about how busy small business owners are and how overwhelming the skills required to build a website seem. But it makes no sense when you think about how much of our lives — and shopping habits — have moved online. 5 Reasons Your Small Business Needs a Website…Fast Maybe you’ve had good, understandable reasons for dragging your feet so far, but having a business website is no longer optional. Every day your business goes without one, you’re leaving money on the table. Still not convinced? Here are five important points that may sway you.   1.  The majority of people in the U.S. shop online. And we don’t just mean a few over 50%, a full 96% of people do some of their shopping online. You probably do it yourself. It’s easy and it saves time. Shopping online means avoiding crowds, traffic, and parking. And if you’re not giving consumers that option, your competitors are winning that business.   2. Even when they shop in store, consumers like to use online tools. That doesn’t mean people are done with heading to a store to shop. In fact 79% of people still do at least as much of their shopping in person as they do online. But even for the customers willing to come to you, the internet plays a role. When they’re trying to figure out where to go to buy the item they need, where do you think they turn? They go online. If they want to compare the prices of similar items at a few different stores or check if the store has an item they need in stock, same thing. A lot of people now take some time to do online research before heading out to do their shopping. Without a website, you’re at a disadvantage during the research stage.   3. A website makes you more discoverable. Right now, the people who can find your business are those who already know about you, those that they tell, and the people who happen to drive by. Maybe that’s been enough for you to stay afloat, but think about how many people those three categories don’t cover. How many potential customers never become actual ones because they simply never learn your business exists? If you don’t show up when they search online for businesses in the area, you might as well be invisible to them.   4. A website gives you a way to alert customers to your hours and specials. Have you ever showed up at a business ready to spend money, only to find they were closed? It’s a frustrating feeling, especially if the drive to get there was at all long. You can save your customers from that frustration when you have a website that lists your hours. Even better, you can entice them to come in at times they wouldn’t have otherwise by using your site to advertise all your specials and sales. You get more business, your customers get a better experience.   5. A business website makes you look more legitimate. People expect legitimate businesses to have websites. In a world where scams abound, the first place people turn to make sure a business can be trusted is Google. If they don’t find a website, it makes you look suspicious at worst, behind the times at best. Either way, it doesn’t help your case. Obviously, you need to get your website up fast. But how? That’s easy: you need a website builder.   What Is a Website Builder? A website builder is web design tool that makes it easy for anyone — even if you have no coding knowledge — to create your own website. Website builders typically come with a number of templates you can choose from so you don’t have to start from scratch and an intuitive website editor that makes it easy to make changes to the template. You can change out colors, add original text and images, and move elements of the page around, all without having to mess with html or learn complicated web design skills.   How to Get Your Website Up Fast With a Website Builder Here are the steps to take when creating your business website using a website builder.   1. Choose your website builder. You’ve got options here. A number of different companies offer easy-to-use website builders. A few are free, but most use a subscription model where you pay every month or year for as long as you have your website. One way to save money and time on choosing your website builder is to go with one that includes something else you need to run a website, such as web hosting. HostGator’s web builder plans come with our website hosting included, so you can launch your website as soon as you’ve built it.   2. Establish your priorities. If your goal is to get a website up as fast as possible, then you don’t need your website to do everything right away. That doesn’t mean it’s okay to throw together a sloppy website — it’s still needs to look and be professional — but you can create a good website quickly by figuring out the most important things you need it to do right away. Ask yourself: what are the most important things your customers need to know? That’s what your website needs to communicate on day one. This likely includes: Your unique positioning – what your business does and why customers should choose you over your competitors Your contact information Your address Your hours You can work on adding more valuable information and marketing elements to your website later, if you want. For now, make sure you have a website that looks good and covers the basics.   3. Decide on your color scheme. You want every page of your website to visually communicate a cohesive brand identity. One of the best ways to do that is to use the same color scheme throughout the whole site. If your Home page is yellow and blue and your About page is black and green, confused visitors will wonder if they’ve navigated away from your website. Does your store or logo already have a clear color scheme? If so, go ahead and stick with those colors when building your website. If not, decide now what colors you want to represent your brand. Make sure they go well together and are pleasing to the eye.   4. Choose your theme. Go through the templates your website builder offers to find one that’s a good fit for your website. Remember that you can make as many changes to the details of the theme as you want. It’s only a starting point for you to work from. Don’t worry if the example website in the theme is for a business in a different industry or they use different colors than you want — you’ll be changing all that. Pay attention instead to the structure of the pages and the visual style of the theme, if those come close to what you want, you won’t have to make as many changes to get your website ready to go.   5. Decide what pages to include. Let the priorities you decided on guide you here. It’s standard for business websites to include a Home page, an About page, and a Contact page. Beyond that, you may want to create pages for all of the main categories of products or services you sell. Over time, you may want to add in product pages for each specific product you offer or even convert your website to an eCommerce store, but since the goal right now is to get your website up fast, those plans can be on the backburner. But do consider now what your long-term hopes are for the website. It will help you create a solid plan for how to organize your website so it stays intuitive as it grows.   6. Edit the theme with your chosen colors and style. With a good website editor, this should be pretty easy. You can select the colors you picked for your color scheme and fill in different parts of the page with a few clicks. Once you do this on one page, you can make a copy of the page when you’re ready to start on the next so you don’t have to re-do your color changes.   7. Load and position original images. Your theme probably includes some stock images. Replace those with original images that are relevant to your store. Add your logo to the top right corner of the page. Add photos of your store or products, or illustrations that communicate something about your brand.   8. Add original copy. Take time to make the words on your website purposeful. Use them to explain what your business does and make a case for why visitors should buy from you. Make your copy customer-focused. When describing what you do, make it less about how that work looks on your end and more about how it makes your customers’ lives better or easier. With time, you may want to hire a professional copywriter to improve upon what you write now. Good copy can be powerful in getting your visitors to choose you. But today the most important thing is that it’s clear, it tells your visitors what they need to know, and it’s free from embarrassing typos and errors. To achieve that last part, make sure you proofread every page twice and see if you can get a friend to read over it as well to confirm that it’s all clear and looks good.   9. Create a website plan for moving forward. All of the steps here are focused on getting your website out there to begin with. That’s a really important step to take and one that already makes a big difference in how visible and accessible your business will be to people. But to get the most out of a website once you have it, there’s more work to do. Make a plan now for how to improve your website over time. That could be as simple as doing regular website maintenance , updating your hours for holidays, and adding information on the website each time you have a sale. Or you could create a full plan to launch an eCommerce store and start doing online marketing. Either way, don’t publish your website once and forget about it. Your website will need some care to stay up to date and do its job for you in the months and years to come.   What Are You Waiting For? Sounds easy enough, right? So no more excuses. Choose a website builder and get your website up and running fast. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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500GB cPanel Hosting [Unlimited Bandwidth ] $ 0.55 P/M

Posted on October 21, 2018 by Hosting

cPanel Linux Shared Hosting US Our Shared solutions are designed for small business to large enterprise which are looking to estab… | Read the rest of http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1735667&goto=newpost Continue reading →

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How to Set Up an Email Drip Campaign for Your New Small Business

Posted on September 19, 2018 by Hosting

The post How to Set Up an Email Drip Campaign for Your New Small Business appeared first on HostGator Blog . The early days of running a small business are typically the hardest. Getting your name out there so you can start earning your first customers is a big hurdle when starting from scratch. And all the work you do to raise awareness of your business goes to waste if the people who hear about you once promptly forget. One of the most important things you can do for your new business right now is to start building an email list. An email list is one of the most powerful marketing tools a small business can have. Email marketing is nearly 40 times more effective than social media channels at turning leads into customers and delivers a much higher ROI than many other marketing tactics. Someone that takes the step of subscribing to your email list is showing an active interest in your business — that’s meaningful. But for email marketing to really pay off, once you’ve gotten someone to sign up, you have to work to keep them. Setting up an email drip campaign is a good strategy to do that. What Is an Email Drip Campaign? An email drip campaign is a series of automated emails sent at set intervals after they’re triggered by a specific action. Most frequently, that action is someone signing up for an email list. B ut you can also set up drip campaigns triggered by someone downloading a piece of content, signing up for a free trial, or making a purchase — to name a few examples.   Why Your Small Business Should Use Email Drip Campaigns You’re busy running a new small business. To add a new marketing tactic to your to-do list, you need to be sure it’s worth your time. There are three main reasons for a small business to consider using email drip campaigns.     1. They’re easy. Any good email marketing software makes it easy to set up a drip campaign. Because the emails are automated, once you write and design the emails in your drip campaign once, your software takes care of sending them out to your subscribers at the right time moving forward.     2. They build a relationship with your customers. When you’re browsing your inbox and trying to decide which emails are worth opening, what’s the main deciding factor? For a lot of people — 64%, to be precise — it’s recognizing who the sender is. For many consumers, all the work marketers put into crafting the perfect email subject line ultimately matters less than whether or not they remember who you are when your email lands in their inbox. Setting up a drip campaign for your new subscribers ensures that they hear from you a number of times within the first few weeks after they sign up.  Instead of being a business whose website they landed on once and then forgot about, you become a business they’ve interacted with enough to now see as familiar. That makes a big difference in how they’ll view all the future emails you send.     3. They’re effective. Drip campaigns get results. Various studies have found that open rates for drip campaigns are 80% higher than single send emails and they generate 50% more sales-ready leads. Drip campaigns nurture your leads. They’re your opportunity take someone from a mild interest in your business to a strong understanding of what you do and why it matters.   How to Create Successful Drip Campaigns Before you start setting up email drip campaigns for your business, take a little time to learn some basic best practices.   1. Clarify your goals. Every email drip campaign should have both an overarching goal, as well as specific goals for every email included. Before you start on your emails, sit down and figure out what you want your drip campaign to achieve. Then figure out what you want each email to achieve on the path to that overall goal. Your overall goal in a drip campaign will often be to get your subscribers to make a purchase, but you don’t want every email to make a hard sell. You wouldn’t want to be friends with someone who asked for a favor every single time you saw them, so don’t be that guy in your  emails. Some good (non-purchase) goals to have for specific emails in your drip campaign include:      Education (less about driving action than building a relationship)      A click through to a piece of content      A download of a piece of content      Getting a response with feedback Choose a mix of goals to focus on for your individual emails that all support your overall goal of gaining new customers.   2. Make sure your emails provide unique value. Your email subscribers are extremely valuable. Your emails should reflect that. Don’t just send them the same content and offers that every visitor to your website gets, find ways to provide them with unique value. That could mean creating exclusive content for your drip campaigns that only subscribers get or providing a special discount code or a free gift with purchase for subscribers only. Think of ways you can use your drip campaign to give your subscribers the VIP treatment.   3. Segment your lists. Getting a new email subscriber is a big deal. The last thing you want is to lose them soon after they’ve signed up. If a visitor to your website signs up for your emails because of an interest in content about dogs and your first few emails are all about cats, then they’re not getting what they expected and are more likely to unsubscribe. Receiving irrelevant content is the third biggest reason for unsubscribes. But if you own a pet supplies store that sells items for both cats and dogs, what can you do? Email marketing software like Constant Contact makes it possible to create a number of different email lists so you can better target your emails to the people interested in them. You can either let people select which topics they’re interested in when they sign up, or make sure they’re put on the right list based on how they signed up. For example, the person who signed up by downloading a guide on dog training would go on your Dog People email list, rather than the Cat People one. Make sure the drip campaign you create is relevant for the specific list people join. And just as importantly, make sure that the way you describe and promote your email list to future subscribers accurately communicates what they’ll get. When your subscribers know what they’re signing up for, they’ll be happier with what they get out of it.   4. Use a consistent design. The emails in your drip campaign are all part of a series. You can signal their connection to each other visually by making sure they all have a consistent design. Make sure the style of your emails fits in with the style of your website. Include your logo and go with a similar color scheme. Many people are visual learners and will more easily be able to associate your different emails with each other and your overall brand if they’re all linked with a familiar style.  In most email marketing software programs, you can create templates you can use when creating each email to keep them within the same general style and structure.   5. Include CTAs. We already covered the importance of making sure every email you write has a clear goal. Anytime the goal of your email is for the recipient to take an action, explicitly ask them to take that action. In each email, include a CTA to help your subscribers know the next step you’d like them to take. Even if the goal of a particular email is to raise brand awareness, you can add in a CTA like “Contact us if you have any questions” to provide an option that encourages further engagement. But make sure each email is focused on only one CTA — you don’t want to confuse your list or muddy your focus.   6. Make sure your emails look good on mobile. People frequently use smartphones to check their email. About half of all email opens now occur on mobile devices. For the emails in your drip campaign to achieve their goal, they need to work at least as well on mobile devices as they do on desktop. Design your drip campaign with mobile in mind. Test out the emails on your own mobile devices to make sure they look good and the links are easy to click on. If you have employees or friends that own different types of mobile devices than you, ask them to check how it looks on theirs as well. Your emails need to provide a good experience on mobile or you’re alienating a lot of your audience and could lose subscribers over it.   7. Pay attention to your analytics. Because it’s automated, a drip campaign is in theory something you can create once and then leave on autopilot. But if you care about the results you get, you need to commit to tracking the analytics that show how people interact with your drip campaign so you can make it better over time. Your email marketing software will provide analytics on the number of opens, clicks, and unsubscribes you get with each email. Analyze what’s working and where there’s room for improvement. Test out different approaches in your drip emails. Try out different CTAs, wording, and images. Or see if shaking up the order you send them out in makes a difference. The more data you gain, the stronger you’ll be able to make your drip campaign.   Engage Your Small Business Customers with Email Drip Campaigns When your small business is new, getting those first followers and customers is hard. An email drip campaign will help you develop a relationship with the leads you gain in your early marketing efforts, so you can begin converting them into your first customers. For more tips on email marketing for your small business, check out these  email marketing best practices . Are you a HostGator customer? Learn how you can save on email marketing from Constant Contact! Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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cPanel Hosting 500GB Space Unlimited bandwidth $ 0.55 P/M

Posted on August 20, 2018 by Hosting

cPanel Linux Shared Hosting US Our Shared solutions are designed for small business to large enterprise which are looking to estab… | Read the rest of http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1726428&goto=newpost Continue reading →

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4 Killer Ways to Convert Your Blog Posts into YouTube Videos

Posted on August 6, 2018 by Hosting

The post 4 Killer Ways to Convert Your Blog Posts into YouTube Videos appeared first on HostGator Blog . 4 Killer Ways to Convert Your Blog Posts into YouTube Videos Producing and publishing great blog posts is not enough to grow your business . You also need to promote those blog posts to attract visitors. Don’t stop at sharing a link on Facebook and Twitter, you can also turn that blog post into a video to get more traffic from YouTube. With over 1.5 billion monthly active users watching 1 billion hours of video content per day, YouTube is one of the most effective platforms you can leverage to generate traffic and promote your business online. You spend days writing and crafting the best content for your blog. Yet most of those blog posts often go unnoticed. Repurpose those old blog posts by turning them into videos and easily get started on a video marketing strategy. There’s no need to buy expensive video camera equipment or invest in video production agencies. You can create videos all by yourself without having to spend any money. We’ll show you how. How To Turn Blog Posts Into Videos Surveys show that 81% of businesses who use video marketing in their promotional strategy see an increase in sales. Needless to say, video marketing can bring incredible results for growing a business. However, if you’re a small business or a blogger, finding the time to develop videos can be difficult. You need to write a script, record a presentation, do voice-overs, editing, and much more. Frankly, it’s a lot of work. But you don’t have to go through that process. Simply use your existing blog posts as the foundation to create your videos. Here’s what you should do to get started. Pick a great blog post. Make a list of the key takeaways from the blog post. Create a short script for your video using those key points. Use free stock video footage or images to create the video. Add a free background music track. Then insert your script into the video using text effects. Here are a few ways you can use that process to convert your blog post into a video.   1. Use Microsoft PowerPoint If you don’t have any experience in creating videos, the easiest way to turn a blog post into a video is by creating a slideshow and then convert it into a video. You can do this very easily using Microsoft PowerPoint . Simply create a presentation as you normally would. Add new slides using your blog post text paragraphs and subheaders. Add images and animation effects to your slides. Once your slideshow is complete, go to File > Save & Send > and choose Create A Video . From here you can select a video quality (up to 4K) and export your slideshow as a video. It’s as easy as that.   2. Use an Online Tool If you don’t have PowerPoint or prefer a different approach to creating your videos, there are plenty of great online tools you can use to turn your blog posts into videos. One of the most popular online video creation tools is Lumen5 . Lumen5 is a beginner-friendly tool that helps you convert your blog posts into videos with minimum effort. What’s great about this tool is that you don’t even have to write a script, this AI-powered video creation tool automatically grabs the key points from your blog posts and add them into the video within minutes. The free plan offered by Lumen5 allows you to create videos using your blog posts and export them in 480p quality. You can use your own logo and custom brand colors in your videos as well. Lumen5 makes converting blog posts to video extremely easy. But, it has limits. For example, you can’t customize the effects used in Lumen5 videos and the free plan also adds Lumen5 branding to your videos.   3. Use a Free Video Editing Software Even though it takes more work, creating the video by yourself is the most effective way to promote your brand the way you want. You get to customize the effects, add and edit content as you prefer, and add your own custom branding without having to pay for a tool or a video editor. There are plenty of free video editing software which y ou can use to create amazing videos all by yourself. For example,  Lightworks  is completely free to use. Even the big Hollywood directors are using it to edit big-budget films such as The King’s Speech, The Wolf Of Wall Street, Road to Perdition, and more. There are a lot of tutorials available online on how to use Lightworks. You can use those tutorials to quickly learn the basics and start creating videos. Here are some more resources for creating videos by yourself: Pexels Video (Free Royalty-free stock video) Videvo (Free Royalty-free stock video) Unsplash (Free Royalty-free stock photos) Bensound (Free Royalty-free music) HookSounds (Free Royalty-free music)   4. Hire a Freelancer If you don’t have the time to use any tools or create videos using blog posts, you can hire someone else to do that for you. Freelancing platforms like Fiverr features plenty of freelancers who specialize in creating different types of videos from explainer videos to product videos, animated videos, and more. You can find a freelancer to convert your blog post into video for a price as low as $5. Of course, the price will differ based on the quality of the video. But, it won’t cost you more than $150 to create a high-quality and entertaining video based on a blog post.   Over to You Using these strategies, you can convert your blog posts into videos within minutes to upload to your YouTube channel or Facebook page. Make sure to also embed your videos into your blog posts to give you visitors a choice on how they would like to consume your content. Remember, much like growing a blog, growing a video channel also takes time. So, be patient and keep producing videos consistently to attract more subscribers to your YouTube channel and generate more views. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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