Tag Archives: social-media

The Best Ways to Advertise Your Website On a Budget

Posted on November 26, 2018 by Hosting

The post The Best Ways to Advertise Your Website On a Budget appeared first on HostGator Blog . The list of free ways to promote your website could keep you busy for years, but many small business owners will find it worthwhile to also include some website promotion tactics that require a budget. Paying to promote your website can bring results faster, requires less time, and allows you to be more targeted in who you reach. If you have a budget to work with, consider adding some of these tactics to your promotion strategy along with the free methods. 1. Use Paid Search Ads. SEO is a slow process that requires you to play the long game. But you can get your website on page one faster, as long as you’re willing to pay for it. Google Ads is relatively affordable. The platform has useful targeting options that allow you to narrow down who sees your ads based on factors like: The keywords they’re searching for Demographic details like gender and age Their geographic area And notably, you only get charged when someone clicks on your ad, so you’re paying for actual visitors to your site—not just potential ones. If you have some money to spend and want to reach new visitors sooner rather than later, paid search ads are a useful option.   2. Use Paid Social Ads. The social media marketing you do for free has a limited audience. On most sites, the only people who will see and interact with your updates are those who already follow you (and sometimes their followers, if they choose to interact with your posts). If you’re trying to build a social media following from scratch, getting people to follow you in the first place can feel like an uphill battle. When they can’t see your updates, how will they know to follow you in the first place? Almost every social media channel offers paid advertising options to help you get your messages in front of a wider audience. As with paid search advertising, social media advertising provides extensive targeting options to help you reach the most relevant audience for your website. You can promote your website to more people, and hopefully grow your following on the platform at the same time.   3. Try Native Advertising. When you’re perusing your favorite websites, you may have noticed that their feeds occasionally include content labeled “Sponsored” or “Promoted.” This is native advertising. It’s when a brand partners with a media property to create content that’s in character for the media site, but promotes the brand—usually in a subtle way. The goal with native advertising is to get attention and entertain, without making a hard sell. Native advertising tends to be pretty costly, so if you’re not a business with much of an advertising budget, this one’s probably not for you. But for the right brand, it can be a powerful way to reach a large audience and get more visitors to your website.   4. Use Paid Distribution Platforms. You probably notice paid ads around the web in your own browsing. When you get to the end of an article and see a few suggested links, those are ads websites pay for by using paid distribution platforms like Outbrain and Taboola. Paid distribution platforms partner with popular media websites and blogs to promote their content in an ad-like format. But instead of showing banner ads, which don’t perform well with most audiences , paid distribution channels recommend articles and other types content. You may have seen recommendations for “you may also like” at the bottom of an article you’re reading online. If your business does content marketing, paid distribution channels are a good way to get your content in front of new audiences that may care about it. Note that since these platforms don’t allow straight advertising—just links to content—they wouldn’t make much sense for any business not committed to creating content as a marketing tactic. Outbrain and Taboola are attractive because they give you a cost-effective way to show up on popular sites that normally charge top dollar for ads. You only pay for clicks, as with paid search and social. And if you manage to give your content a solid headline and an eye-catching image, you can drive some new visitors to your website that may just stick around to see what else you have to offer. These platforms allow you some control over the publications you show up on—you can exclude any you find offensive or don’t think are a fit for your target audience. And they allow for geographic and audience targeting as well, so you can better reach the right people.     5. Sponsor Relevant Events. Events of all types need sponsors. And you can find events for almost any type of industry or topic area. Sponsorship usually means getting mentions in most of an event’s materials, which can raise the profile of your brand. But more importantly (for our purposes), it also usually means you get a mention of your website on the brand’s site with a link back. Small businesses can gain a lot of goodwill in the community and build links and awareness at the same time by finding local events to sponsor. Even small towns often have events and festivals you can get involved with. To find events in your area that you might be able to sponsor, check out websites like Eventbrite and Eventful . You can look for events in your area and limit the results by categories like Festivals and Organizations. For anything that looks like a good fit, check out the website to see if they offer sponsorship opportunities and get in touch with the event planners for details. Be sure to ask outright if the sponsorship will come with a link to your site.   People who participate in the event will be exposed to your business through the sponsorship and may check out your website to learn more. And as an added benefit, you earn some local SEO authority with a new relevant link.   6. Host Your Own Event. Even better than sponsoring an event is hosting your own event. When you put on an event for your audience, you gain a lot of press and attention. You can start to develop a community that will, over time, attract even more members of your audience. You can keep things small, like starting a monthly meetup in your community. Or, if your audience is big enough, you can go big and set up a conference or weekend retreat for your followers. It requires a lot of planning and can potentially get costly (depending on how big it is), but hosting an event is a great way to connect more directly with your audience and drive more attention to your website in the process.   7. Support Charitable Causes. People increasingly care about the brands and websites they follow demonstrating that they stand for something. Showing your support for a charitable cause that matters to you is both a good way to connect with your audience through shared values, and a way to potentially reach new visitors. Many nonprofits will mention you on their website and include a link back to your site if you donate at a certain level. And if you go further than a donation and help put together a fundraising or donation drive, you’re likely to get the attention of media sites that see the event as newsworthy and relevant blogs that see an opportunity to help support something they also care about. And as a more obvious benefit, you get to support something that matters to you. That’s always worth it.   How Will You Promote Your Website? Creating your website isn’t enough. You need to make it easy for people to find. You don’t necessarily need to do everything on this list, but use it as a starting point to figure out the best tactics for you and put together a strategy that will ensure your website reaches more people. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

Posted in HostGator, Hosting, VodaHost | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Best Ways to Advertise Your Website On a Budget

10 Ways to Get Your Website in Shape for the New Year in 2019

Posted on November 12, 2018 by Hosting

The post 10 Ways to Get Your Website in Shape for the New Year in 2019 appeared first on HostGator Blog . A New Year should come with new goals for your business . As you work through your end-of-year to do list – reevaluating your finances, hiring new employees, and deciding which tactics to embrace or toss aside in the year to come – it’s important that you make plans to maintain your website along with your larger business. Your website is the main way a lot of people interact with your brand, after all. “One of the most often overlooked components—yet one of the most critical—to any successful website strategy is ongoing maintenance. While the initial website project is critical to creating the right foundation, the ongoing maintenance and upkeep is where you’ll really see your website shine,” writes Don Cranford , principal and director of technology at Katalyst Solutions. If you’ve tended to let general maintenance of your website slide over the years, make it one of your goals moving into the New Year to correct that. Here are a few action items to add to your to-do list now to get your website in shape for 2019. 1. Evaluate your analytics. Analytics are the ultimate tool for examining the health of your website traffic . It’s vital for your team to understand how your visitors and qualified leads find your business. Knowing whether people come to your website from organic search, paid search, or Facebook tells you a lot about how your online marketing efforts are working. And keeping an eye on your analytics as part of regular website maintenance can save you trouble down the line. Kim Garst , founder and CEO of Boom! Social, offers the following suggestion, “Compile a bunch of blog posts on a particular topic, and promote them as a multi-day e-course. Each day, send one email (blog post) to your new subscribers to help them accomplish whatever goal you have promised to help them achieve.” Don’t be afraid to revisit your content archives and promote your old content anew. Your audience that’s been with you for a while may appreciate the refresher, and your new audience will get to see some of your old hits for the first time.   5. Revamp your homepage. Your website’s homepage will be the first impression you make on many visitors – you’d better make it a good one. Your homepage should accomplish a few main goals:   Clearly communicate your brand’s positioning (why should a customer choose you?)   Look professional (you don’t want to scare new visitors off by looking like you’re still in the 90s )   Answer the main questions people may have (where you’re located, contact information, etc.)   Make it easy for people to know where to go next Update your design by tweaking the navigation of your site. Anticipate where consumers will click and provide clear calls-to-action to help them locate what they need. Eliminate any wording that doesn’t benefit the visitor. Too many words can distract customers from their intended reason for checking out your site. In the example below, HostGator customer  Hiatus Spa + Retreat  uses their site to say more with less. The website looks clean and professional, has a clear CTA, and provides an intuitive menu for those who want to find more information. A few words and vivid imagery can go a long way. Make the best first impression by showcasing a modern, uncluttered homepage. It’ll give clarity and accessibility to your visitors.   6. Review and improve your calls-to-action (CTAs). Every page on your website should be designed with a clear goal in mind. You should always know what you want your visitor to do next, and it should be obvious to them how to do it. The CTAs you include on each page have an important job to do , but you shouldn’t just assume they’re all doing that job. Check your analytics to see how often the people who visit your pages are taking the action you most want them to. Then do some experimenting. Work up different variations on your CTAs – try different visual designs, different wording, and different locations on the page. Try out different CTAs on different pages to see if some work better when paired with specific content. Do A/B testing to confirm which of the CTAs you try work best. The more data you have, the more you can refine your website so that people are more likely to take the steps you want them to.   7. Fix any checkout process issues. Everything else you design your website to accomplish leads back to the main end goal of sales. If you’re not driving revenue, you won’t last. To meet your sales goals, your checkout process must be frictionless. Jeremy Said . If you discover that customers hate creating member registrations, one solution is to try a social login. This one-click alternative will help consumers move through the checkout process faster. If you’ve noticed the checkout seems to stop at the moment the customer sees the cost of shipping , think about offering flat-rate shipping or free shipping for qualifying orders. Anything that stops the sale from happening is bad for business. Figure out what roadblocks are in your customer’s pathway and remove them.   8. Make sure your security’s up-to-date. Every time a story about a data breach makes waves, people get a little more nervous about handing their credit card information over to businesses. You can’t help what happens in the news, but you can take steps to keep your own website secure and ensure all the private information your customers give you is protected. Go through our web security checklist and make sure your security measures are up to date. There are some easy ways to reduce vulnerabilities in your website to make your customer data safer. You owe it to your customers to do your part in protecting them.   9. Check your domain registration. This is a simple step to take, but one you have to remember to do every year. Contact your hosting provider to learn when your registration will expire. If it’s due soon, go ahead and pay for the renewal, and consider signing up for auto-renewals for future registrations. And remember to update any contact information—business name, address, and phone number. It also may be time to purchase a new domain for upcoming brand changes . So, ask your provider for details about availability and prices. Sometimes the smallest things in your business are overlooked. Make sure your domain registration continues so you can offer uninterrupted service to your customers 10. Reinvest in your brand community. This is less something that you do to your website, and more something that you do for it. As your business grows, it’s essential to keep your brand community engaged. Make a plan this year to give your consumers the engagement they deserve. Respond promptly to comments left on your blog posts. Take time to say thanks in response to positive reviews and ensure that no complaint goes unanswered. Interact with users on social media – plan to be quick and polite at least, but if your social media manager is up to it, try to be clever or entertaining as well. Experiment with starting a new loyalty program or making improvements to the one you have. Brand ambassadors serve as an extension of your company. If they’re not satisfied, you may expose your business to unwanted negative publicity. Get reacquainted with your target audience. A dedicated community opens the door to business opportunities.   A New Year, A Better Website It’s time to roll up your sleeves. The New Year is a time to reflect and reassess your business’s needs, and that includes your website. A better website is part of running a better business. A few tweaks now could garner you better results in the year to come and ensure your website can continue to do the important job it does for your business. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

Posted in HostGator, Hosting, VodaHost | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 10 Ways to Get Your Website in Shape for the New Year in 2019

7 Benefits of Google Advertising

Posted on November 9, 2018 by Hosting

The post 7 Benefits of Google Advertising appeared first on HostGator Blog . Everyone with a website has likely spent time thinking about Google and how to improve your visibility in the search engine. While SEO  gets a lot of attention (and rightly so), it’s not the only game in town. The fastest way to get your website right at the top of the SERP is with Google advertising . If your website isn’t getting as much traffic as you’d like and you want a fairly quick and easy solution (and are willing to pay for it), Google advertising is well worth considering. 7 Reasons to Use Google Ads Any business with an advertising budget has a lot of tactics and channels to choose between. Google Ads offers a few key benefits that can set it apart from some of your other options.   1. It’s a fast way to get noticed. SEO is an important way to build your website’s visibility and get more visitors, but it’s slow. Most businesses can expect to spend months of continual work before they start to see much progress – and sometimes longer. Not all businesses can wait that long for results. If you want to start gaining traction and getting people to your website faster, Google advertising works as a shortcut to getting the kind of visibility and results you want from SEO faster and with less work.   And with Google Ads, your ads usually show up above the natural results and can sometimes include images as well, which makes them that much more noticeable and likely to earn a click.   2. Google’s reach is vast. Google gets over 3.5 billion searches every day . Advertising on Google gives you access to one of the largest audiences you’ll find anywhere. But the Google Ads platform goes even further than that. In addition to buying ads on the search engine results page itself, you can also buy ads for Google’s other properties – including the extremely popular Gmail and YouTube – and for all 2 million websites and 650,000 apps that are included in Google Display network. All of that adds up to Google Ads reaching over 90% of all internet users worldwide. That’s a bigger reach that you’ll get from just about any other advertising channel.   3. You can target ads for relevance. The possibility of reaching a lot of people is nice, but what’s even more important is figuring out how to reach the right people. Google Ads offers two main types of targeting that are both very important for getting your website in front of the people most likely to click to visit and buy your products: Keyword targeting – The best visitors and leads will be the people who find your website when they’re in the process of looking for what you sell. With Google Ads, you have a direct way to reach those people and get them to your website. Choosing the right keywords to target is one of the most important parts of getting good results from Google advertising, because it’s the best way to ensure your ads are consistently relevant to the people who see them. Demographic targeting –  Google has a lot of data on user behavior and demographics. When you advertise with Google, you get to tap into that data in order to better get your ads in front of the people most likely to be in your target audience. You can target your ads based on gender, age range, and general online interests. Google Ads’ targeting options are a powerful way to make sure your ads have relevance and reach the potential visitors that are most valuable to your business.   4. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad. Advertising is often useful for brand awareness, but your goal is usually less about just making people aware of your business and more about getting them to actually engage with your brand. A visit to your website is much more valuable than someone seeing an ad and scrolling past. The main payment model for Google Ads is pay-per-click (PPC) , meaning you don’t pay anything just to get your ad to show up – you only pay when someone clicks on it. You’re not paying for exposure; you’re paying for actual visitors. For marketers who have long had to struggle with figuring out how to show results for hard-to-measure ad campaigns, the PPC model means that you always know you got at least a website visitor out of the money you spent. And if you use Google Analytics (and you should!), you can track what happens with the visitor once they land on your website as well.   5. It’s easy to control your budget. You don’t have an unlimited budget. When you invest in a paid marketing channel like Google Ads, you have to know that you can stay within the limitations of the budget you have. Luckily, Google Ads has no minimum spend, so even small businesses that can’t spend much can use it. And the platform makes it easy to set your daily maximum budget. Once you go over it, Google will simply stop showing your ads so you never spend more than you intend.   6. Remarketing reconnects you with relevant leads. Every visitor that comes to your website is a potential customer, but many will visit their first time without making a purchase. Between the busy lives people lead and the ad saturation we all face both on and offline; a visitor could easily forget your brand completely after that first visit. Google Ads provides remarketing , which lets you serve relevant ads to past visitors that make them more likely to come back and engage with your brand again (and hopefully buy). You can even use the data on what a visitor did on your website to further tailor remarketing ads by highlighting a product they viewed or content related to the pages they visited. Remarketing gives you a way to keep a relationship going after that first marketing touch point and continue to reach your most valuable leads.   7. You can improve campaigns over time with useful analytics. No one gets everything right on the first try. Google Ads provides useful analytics that provide a detailed view of what works in your PPC campaigns and what doesn’t, so you can continually improve your ads and the results they achieve over time. The longer you run campaigns with Google Ads, the more data you’ll have on what your target audience responds to. By continually making updates to your campaigns as you learn, you can count on a higher ROI.   Get Started with Google PPC When your budget’s limited, accepting the need to dive into paid channels for online marketing can feel like a tough sell. But even for the types of online marketing that are technically free, like content marketing and social media, the amount you spend in time or on hiring professional help quickly adds up as well. The extra boost you get from investing in Google Ads can make your other marketing efforts go further and help you get greater visibility and more traffic faster.   Ready to get started with Google advertising? HostGator’s team of PPC experts can work with you to develop a strategy for your website and execute your campaigns. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

Posted in HostGator, Hosting, VodaHost | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 7 Benefits of Google Advertising

The Best Ways to Advertise Your Website

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Hosting

The post The Best Ways to Advertise Your Website appeared first on HostGator Blog . You’ve put a lot of time into creating an awesome website. Now you need people to find it. Frankly, that’s the hard part. The web is huge. With millions of websites on just about every topic you can imagine, you’ve got a lot of competition to capture people’s attention. You can’t expect to launch your website and wait for your audience to find you. For people to visit your website, you have to work to get it in front of them. Luckily, there are a lot of different tactics you can use to make that happen and some of them are even free! If your website doesn’t have a budget to put toward promotion, you still have some powerful ways to start reaching new website visitors. The catch is that, what you save in money, you should expect to spend in time. Most of these tactics will require a significant time commitment (although notably, you can save the time if you have money to spend on hiring a professional to do these for you). 1.     Prioritize SEO. Google is the main way people find most of the websites they visit. Over 90% of all web searches start there. One of the best ways to make your website easier for people to find is to get it showing up in the search engines. To be clear, this isn’t easy. Search engine optimization is competitive and requires doing a variety of tasks on an ongoing basis, including: Doing audience research to identify the people you most want to reach. Doing keyword research to learn the terms and topics your audience is interested in. Optimizing each page on your site for your target keywords. Creating relevant, high-quality content on a regular basis. Promoting your website and content to bring in more visitors and gain the attention of influencers. Performing link building campaigns to increase your website’s authority. It requires creating a strategy and putting in the work, but SEO is one of the most valuable tactics for making your website more discoverable online. We know that SEO can feel intimidating. Maybe you know that you need SEO, but don’t know where to start. Check out the HostGator Business Cloud package . It comes with a free SEO tool that will generate a personalized step-by-step SEO plan for your website. The SEO tool will show you how to improve your search ranking, and will send you real-time updates to your website rankings and monitor your competitors’ rankings as well.   2. Do social media promotion. Creating accounts on the various social media sites is completely free, as is sharing your content with followers on those sites. You don’t have to be on every single social media channel—for most website owners that would be overwhelming. Take some time to research where your audience is most likely to be and how they use the different sites. And consider which social channels are a fit for your website . If your audience generally prefers written content over video, then you may not need to be on YouTube. A photography website should definitely be on Instagram, but one that’s light on images may do better on Facebook and Twitter. Whichever social media channels you decide to go with, there are a few best practices worth keeping in mind: Tailor your messaging to the channels. If you promote your website on both Instagram and LinkedIn, you’ll need to take different approaches to each. Promote your content more than the general site. Including your home page in your social media bio makes perfect sense, but tweeting out a link to just the homepage usually doesn’t. You’ll get more results if you drive people to pages on your website that include helpful content. Do more than just promote your site. A common mistake people make on social media is to treat it only as a platform for promotion, when it’s supposed to be social—it’s right there in the name. Do drop your website link into your bio and share your awesome content with your followers, but also devote some time to interacting with other people on the site. Share and respond to their stuff and look for opportunities to join conversations and communities. Think before you share. Social media faux pas are far too common. Don’t let the fast, transitive nature of social media make you lazy. Proofread your social media posts and make sure everything you share is something you’re willing to stand behind. Social media is one of the most powerful free tools for promoting your website, but getting something out of it without sinking all your time into it can be a challenge. Be thoughtful and strategic about which sites you use and how you use them.   3. Create high-value content. Consistently producing great content is useful for both SEO and social media promotion , but it’s also good for drawing new visitors to your site in and of itself. The more content you create that helps people, the more reasons they have to visit your website. Blogging is a great tool for consistently producing fresh content that shows Google your website is current and relevant, while also giving visitors something useful to read and return to. And you can use especially high-value content like an ebook or course to stand out in the crowded content space, draw in new visitors, and potentially get email addresses for your list.   4. Start guest blogging. Creating content on your own site is a smart strategy for giving people more reasons to visit, but usually it works best if you combine it with creating content on other relevant websites that give you the chance to reach a new and bigger audience. Many websites accept guest blogs because it means free content for them. For you, it means an opportunity to build links (good for SEO) and drive new visitors to your website. Be strategic in your guest posting to make sure you get the most out of it: Look for websites that cover similar or related topics to yours, whose audience will overlap with the one you’re trying to reach. Prioritize pitching websites that have a large or dedicated audience (ideally both). Take some time to get to know the website before you write a piece for it. You want to be familiar with their audience and the types of posts that generally perform well there. Include relevant links in your guest posts back to your own website, along with the link you include in your bio. Make sure your guest posts are high quality—you want to make a good impression on the new audience you reach. Guest posts help you build up the authority of your website and attract new visitors at the same time.   5. Join and participate in online communities. Online communities are valuable on a number of levels. They give you the chance to connect directly with your target audience. You can learn how they talk and the kinds of questions they regularly ask. You can turn that knowledge into a content strategy that ensures you’re creating content you know your audience needs. And then you can go back and share that content in the communities the next time someone needs it, driving people back to your website. But as with social media, it pays to spend time participating in the community and becoming a valued member before you start pushing out your stuff. Depending on where your audience hangs out, you could find worthwhile communities to join on Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, Facebook, or in industry-specific forums. Decide which ones to join and start spending a little time in them each day or week to learn from your audience and start becoming a part of the community.   6.     Connect with influencers. A lot of getting your website in front of other people depends on other people wanting to share it. That’s part of what makes successful promotion difficult. You can share content on your own site all day, but people are more likely to care if someone else they follow and trust shares or links to it—giving it their endorsement in internet terms. And people who have a lot of authority or followers online are more likely to share content from people they know and trust. You want to be one of those people. You can pinpoint some of the influencers in your space by using tools like Buzzsumo or Followerwonk to find the people with the most followers in your niche. Follow those influencers and pay attention to the people and websites they share. Over time, you’ll become familiar with the top websites in your topic area and the personalities behind them. Look for ways to interact with them. Share their content, respond to their status updates, or leave comments on their blog. If you notice them participating in Twitter chats or social communities, join and participate as well. By interacting with them, you can start to get onto their radar and, ideally, begin to develop a relationship with them. This step takes time, and you need to be careful not to get pushy or ask too much—your interactions need to be genuine. But relationships are a crucial part of promoting your website and content, so this is an important step to incorporate into your strategy. Plus, you may get a few friends out of it!   7. Become a source. Journalists and bloggers often look for quotes and anecdotes from sources to add depth to the stories they write. If you can position yourself to be that source, you can gain a link back to your website and some attention from a new audience. The easiest way to become a source is to sign up for Help a Reporter Out . You can select the topics relevant to your expertise, and receive emails daily that collect all the requests writers around the web have for sources. When you see one that’s a match for you, follow the instructions and share your knowledge, along with the name of your website and a link. If the writer uses a quote from you, they’ll often (but not always) include a link back to your website in the piece.   8. Use expert sources. When you quote somebody in the content on your website, they’re more likely to take an interest in what you’ve written. Even better, they’ll often share it with their network of followers. When you’re working on a new piece of content, consider if it could be strengthened by a quote from an expert—bonus points if you can identify an expert on the list of influencers you’ve been working to connect with—and reach out to ask them for their insights. Try to keep your ask small. Most people that make a good expert source are busy. A quick answer by email or a 15-minute phone interview should do the trick. Work their insights into  your piece, and then let them know once it’s published.   9. Do email marketing. Email marketing isn’t exactly a strategy for finding new customers since it requires someone to have already visited your website and signed up for your email list. Keep in mind that people signed up for your email list because they already liked something on your website or something from your business. This is where email marketing comes in handy – getting them to come back to your website or business. Look for places around your website and in your content to encourage people to sign up for your email list. If you created an especially high-value piece of content like an ebook or course, you can put that behind a form that requires a visitor to provide their email address in order to access it. You can even promote your email list on social media . Once people start to sign up for your list, you can use your emails to drive them back to your website whenever you add new content or, if you have a business website, new deals and products. If you use email marketing, make sure you send emails consistently to keep your website top of mind for your subscribers. Make your emails as valuable and entertaining as possible. And, as with social media, don’t make them all about promoting yourself or your website. Fill your emails with information that will be genuinely valuable to your audience. A note on email marketing: many email marketing software services have a free version , but as your list grows, you’ll likely need to upgrade to a paid version. This is a tactic that can be free to start, but may require a budget with time.   10.  Do link building. This is part of SEO, but also worth mentioning on its own. Link building provides two key benefits: It makes your website look more authoritative to Google—links are widely considered to be one of the top ranking signals for the search engine. It drives more traffic to your website from people who follow the links from other sites. You have to be really careful with link building that you only use legitimate tactics. Links on low-quality sites could hurt rather than help you in the search engine rankings and wouldn’t drive much traffic your way anyways. But including some smart white-hat link building tactics in your strategy can help boost your rankings and raise awareness of your site to readers around the web.   Conclusion Creating your website isn’t enough. You need to make it easy for people to find. You don’t necessarily need to do everything on this list, but use it as a starting point to figure out the best tactics for you and put together a strategy that will ensure your website reaches more people. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

Posted in HostGator, Hosting, VodaHost | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Best Ways to Advertise Your Website

How to Create a Social Media Holiday Marketing Plan

Posted on October 31, 2018 by Hosting

The post How to Create a Social Media Holiday Marketing Plan appeared first on HostGator Blog . The holiday season is fast approaching, it’s time to get ready for shopping, spending time with your family, big meals, and… social media marketing? Yes, this time of year is perfect for developing a top-notch social media marketing plan! Marketing doesn’t have to be a challenging task anymore. There are plenty of different ways to reach a wide range of audiences. The most difficult decision you have to make now is deciding which sales methods you’re going to use this year. Fortunately, we’ve made it easy for you. Here are four top ways you can add some seasonal spice to your social media marketing campaign. 1. Link Your Social Media to Your Holiday-Themed Emails First, spread the cheer through your emails! You can use a tool like Constant Contact to build wonderful holiday-themed marketing emails. Make sure you take advantage of all of the holidays, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and small, fun, social holidays in between. Email marketing is successful because you can reach a large group of people almost instantly. Typically, marketing emails have a 21.80% read rate and a click through rate of just under 3%. Initially, these numbers may not seem impressive. However, take the time to consider that if you send emails out to 10,000 people, about 280 people are going to click through. Those are now 280 people that are much more likely to purchase a product from you. One great way to boost your click-through rate is to increase your email personalization. You can do this by segmenting email lists based on previous behavior. For example, if someone clicked through on a previous email, send them more of that type of email to incentivize them to make the purchase.   2. Use Festive Hashtags If you’re looking for a way to boost your marketing reach with Twitter or Instagram, start paying attention to  holiday hashtags . When people use hashtags, all of the same hashtags can be viewed on one page. For example, if someone uses #EmailMarketing, anyone can click the phrase and see what everyone who used that particular hashtag is talking about. You may be wondering how this fits in with the holidays. It’s simple. If you use hashtags for the holidays such as Christmas, New Years, or Thanksgiving, your posts will appear when someone searches #Christmas or #NewYearsDay. When you use hashtags, you increase your visibility, especially when the topic you choose is being widely discussed, like during holidays. Don’t stop at just the mainstay holidays. There are plenty of fun “secondary holidays” that often start trending, like #NationalCocoaDay. Take advantage of these holidays by checking out an event calendar and scheduling your upcoming posts accordingly.   3. Incorporate Buyer Keywords Into Your Content Did you know that Google’s algorithm prioritizes certain content and businesses during the holiday season? This is because a user’s intent usually changes around the holiday season. They are more likely to buy. The first thing you have to do is make a list of keywords you’re going to target throughout your content. Google Keyword Planner is an ideal resource for looking up keywords and seeing how popular they are. If you are an eCommerce business, this is a great time to focus on creating content with targeted buying keywords. Some example of buying keywords to target this holiday are: Best holiday gifts this year Best gifts for entrepreneurs Cute holiday dresses Don’t forget: it’s normal to start working on holiday keywords months in advance. By the time the search volume is in the thousands, you’ll already be in a comfortable ranking position. Use Google Keyword Planner to find low competition, high search volume keywords to create content with less competition. If the competition is low or medium, you have a much better chance at ranking towards the top of Google.    Once you’ve decided on keywords, it’s time to put them in your content. SEO Yoast is a tool that lets you target specific keywords and ranks how well you use them on each page. Make sure you follow all of the suggestions at the bottom of the Yoast plugin, and you’ll increase your chances of ranking for your chosen keyword.   4. Add a Retargeting Pixel to Your Checkout Page Why is a retargeting pixel important for your checkout page? Shockingly, up to 80% of people who start filling up an online shopping cart will leave before making a purchase. These are people that were obviously close to buying but changed their mind for one reason or another. You can use a retargeting pixel to bring them back in and secure the conversion. There are multiple types of ads you can use to target these folks. One of the best ways to convert is by offering them a discount, as in this example from  Cole Haan : If they’re browsing the internet and see your add with “Get 10% off now” on the banner, it may be enough to bring them back to complete their order. You don’t have to worry about people who complete the checkout getting these ads. You can program the pixel to “burn” upon completion of their order, which will take them off the “audience” list.   Social Media and Your Holiday Marketing Game Plan Having a game plan is important in any marketing situation.  The holiday season is perhaps one of the best times to draw in new customers and get old customers to come back and try new products. Your social media is important in determining how much traffic comes your way. If you use the tips and tools provided, you should be able to get a steady flow of high-quality traffic to your business page, which translates to more sales. Happy holidays! Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

Posted in HostGator, Hosting, VodaHost | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How to Create a Social Media Holiday Marketing Plan