Tag Archives: traffic

4 Tasks That Will Save Your Email Marketing Campaigns

Posted on August 18, 2015 by Hosting

The post 4 Tasks That Will Save Your Email Marketing Campaigns appeared first on HostGator Blog | Gator Crossing . On the internet, email is like having a mobile phone, with the difference that on the internet — you can almost always get anyone’s phone number, at any given time. Sometimes, you create something and ask users to enter their phone number (email) in for you, so that they can be notified when you share and publish more of the amazing stuff that got the interested in the first place. We now it by the name of email marketing. The reasons for creating an email list have long been known and understood by expert marketers, and we recently published a post ourselves, about the reasons why a small business should invest in an email marketing strategy , and how rewarding it can be. It’s without question the leading way of staying in touch with your customers and peers of interest. If you’r new to email marketing, or have done it a few times before, you will be familiar with email marketing campaigns — in simpler words, it simply means to send out a carefully crafted message and/or announcement to everyone who has signed up to be on your email list. And more often than not, we want these emails to be of highest quality so as to retain the subscribers, but also to convert leads where possible.   1. Talk to Your Customers Marketing always was and always will be about the customer, there is no denying that. These days there are countless ways of connecting with your customers, social media and content marketing being a few of them, but email is usually the one that plays on the more personal level. And there is nothing more dissatisfying than a corporate email that only wants to sell you something. When sending a new campaign: Always greet your customers by their first name, which means you have to find a way to collect their name as well. It’s a nice and personal touch. Don’t drag the email for too long only to try and sell something at the end. Bring value to the table. Give them a good initiative to continue reading the email at the top, rather than the bottom.   2. Optimize the Email Experience The mobile experience can now provide just as many features and possibilities as a full-blown desktop computer, and with that in mind, the usage of mobile devices for business and personal needs has increased dramatically over the last few years, even months some would say. And with that in mind, we need to make sure we’re catering to our mobile users the same way we are to desktop users. A mobile device is usually going to require a responsive email design that can naturally adapt to the needs of the mobile device. The impact of responsive emails in terms of open rates, and conversion rates, is too huge to miss out on.   3. Test What Works In development, programmers test their applications against common errors and performance optimization, in email — we can use testing to test what works best for us and our subscribers, including the email design, the titles we choose to have, and the overall email experience we provide. It’s easy to get started . Testing allows you to compare and contrast different elements of your email campaigns to see how they impact your subscribers’ reactions to them. You can form a hypothesis about what you think will occur, and then formulate a test and find out what really happens .   4. Email Campaign Frequency The last task on our list is actually less a task, but more of a reminder to those who are eager to build their email list quickly. It’s easy to get carried away with having access to so many people at any given time, and sometimes we may feel that sending out a few emails a week is going to increase our conversion rates significantly, that simply is not true. Even before you begin sending out your first emails, you should get clear about the email marketing strategy that you’re going to be using, and whether sending out multiple emails on weekly basis is going to yield you the best result. It’s possible to ask your new subscribers to select the frequency of emails they’d like to receive, but then you’ve to be completely clear about the message you’re trying to convey over your email campaigns. Sometimes as frequently as twice a month is enough to capture the attention of your customers, and customers-soon-to-be. MailChimp fully agrees that more is not always better .   ***** Alex Ivanovs is an online entrepreneur who has been writing about technology, business and developer topics for over a decade. He currently manages CodeCondo — an aspiring community for designers and developers. web hosting Continue reading →

Posted in HostGator, Hosting, php, VodaHost, vps | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 4 Tasks That Will Save Your Email Marketing Campaigns

Why WordPress Is The Best Choice For Non-Technical Business Owners

Posted on June 23, 2015 by Hosting

The post Why WordPress Is The Best Choice For Non-Technical Business Owners appeared first on HostGator Blog | Gator Crossing . When the time comes to create your website, you’re going to have no shortage of options to choose from. In fact, the decision-making process can be very overwhelming. It’s hard to cut though all of the marketing messaging to truly find a platform that works for you. Luckily, there’s one platform that outshines most other platforms when it comes to an intuitive platform, that will help you build a beautiful website in no time at all. In this post we’re going to dive into why WordPress is the best choice for business owners with little to no technical know-how. WordPress began as simple blogging software, but it has now grown into a full-fledged website builder with a massive and interactive community.   1. Easy To Use Backend WordPress has a very easy to use backend. They’ve had the same backend for a number of years, which means there are a number of tutorials to guide you through anything you may be unsure of. The backend is straightforward and doesn’t require any knowledge of code to actually customize the look of the theme as well as implement many additional features.   2. Small Learning Curve Customizing your WordPress theme couldn’t be easier. Most themes also come with easy to follow documentation that will allow you to set up and populate your theme rather quickly. A lot of other website building platforms require little technical knowledge to get up and running, but the curve increases very quickly. WordPress is easy to setup, and also requires little technical knowledge to customize.   3. Massive Theme Selection There are literally thousands of WordPress themes available for you to download, both free and premium. The free themes are great for getting started, but if you really want to take your website to the next level you should consider upgrading to a premium theme. Most premium themes cost less than $50 and can leave you with a truly customizable, professional website.   4. Great Plugin Selection Plugins add increased functionality to your theme without having to outsource plugin creation, or invest a ton of money. There are thousands of WordPress plugins , both free and paid, that add things like increased payment support, homepage sliders, upgraded security and much more. If you want to add a specific feature to your website chances are there’s a plugin for it.   5. Large Support Community Since WordPress has been around for such a long time there a large dedicated support community. Most premium WordPress themes come with dedicated support, while the large free theme community has a very active user base. If you keep running into a problem, chances are someone else has faced the same problem, and the solution already exists.   6. SEO Optimized When you’re relying on search engine traffic to send you new customers, then your website must be optimized to rank. Luckily, most WordPress themes are primed to rank in the search engines right out of the box.   7. Very Inexpensive Like we mentioned above you can get a WordPress theme up and running without too much of an investment on your end. Aside from purchasing a domain name and hosting, you can even get by with a free theme. As you can see, WordPress is a great choice for business owners looking for a beautiful website without having to learn to code first. web hosting Continue reading →

Posted in HostGator, Hosting, php, VodaHost, vps | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Performance Testing: Latency, Load, Stress, or Soak?

Posted on October 2, 2014 by Hosting

The post Performance Testing: Latency, Load, Stress, or Soak? appeared first on HostGator Blog | Gator Crossing . How well does your web hosting perform? Are you sending web pages in a timely way to visitors to your site? Is your application correctly handling simultaneous requests? Do you actually know what can be measured – and which measures are relevant to your situation? Web hosting performance testing can give you valuable information that can let you keep visitors longer on your site, make sure you can accept the right number of simultaneous visitors, handle overload situations and detect possible design or programming deficiencies.   Latency or How Long It Takes to Get Back to a Visitor Let’s start with the case of just one visitor (naturally, you’ll probably be aiming for rather more, but we’ll discuss this below.) Normally, you want the response time for that visitor to be as fast as possible. In other words, between the moment when the visitor clicks to send you a request and the moment the visitor sees your response, the least time possible should elapse. This ‘latency’ can however be determined by several different things, including the power of your web hosting platform, the size of your network connection and the power and network speed of your visitor’s computer. You can improve the first two, but the last two are out of your control (although keeping your web pages simple may help.)   Performance Under Load Ideally, you should have an idea of how many visitors are likely to access your web hosting platform at the same time. If this is not feasible, then you should at least know how many average or typical users can actively work with your site simultaneously, and plan ahead for options to increase capacity if you need to. Different solutions, either free or paying, online or in-server, are available for conducting load tests with up to a few million simulated users or more. Whichever solution you choose, make sure your test is representative of both user numbers and types of activity, including number of pages called per hour, number of requests for database information, ‘think time’ and so on.   When It’s All Just Too Much If your web site is significantly more popular than you imagined, your web hosting facility may not be able to cope with all the traffic. Then what happens? Does your site send out a polite apology about lower performance while stopping any new connections, or does it just crash without warning? Stress tests are designed to find out what (really) happens under conditions of excessively high loads. How much this affects you will depend on what kind of website you operate. A web site for a bird spotting association that simply crashes may just be an irritation. A web site selling hot new fashion articles that simply crashes could lose you important revenue and customer loyalty.   A More Technical Test The soak test is done by starting your web site or application and leaving it to run (normally) for an extended period of time to see whether this produces any abnormal conditions either in the application or in the web hosting platform it runs on. One example would be memory leaks, a common enough problem when an application uses some main memory, but fails to return it for general use when it’s finished with it. Testing for these kinds of conditions typically requires technical expertise, for example by the person or team designing the application in the first place.   Finally, Who is the Judge of ‘Good Performance’? Performance, ultimately, is all about making sure customers or end-users are satisfied with what they experience. Your web hosting platform may be supercharged in processor power and memory, yet they may still complain. Or it may be far more modest and still reply adequately to user expectations. Falling traffic and user comments on your blog (or similar) may indicate a problem, but prevention is always better than cure. There’s only one way to find out what users really want, and that’s to ask them. Armed with this information, you can then do the right performance tests and confirm or tweak afterwards, as appropriate.   ***** Author Bio: Natalie Lehrer is a senior contributor for CloudWedge . In her spare time, Natalie enjoys exploring all things cloud and is a music enthusiast. Follow Natalie’s daily posts on Google Plus , Twitter @Cloudwedge , or on Facebook . Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/video4net/4102797678/in/photolist-7fxUP1-csmoYf-7C3yps-9RCj9C-ahC6R9-zhLTR-65ho4J-65hog3-65d6Gc-65d7Ex-65d7ug-65d7i6-9ME8p3-aWJPyZ-65jBWR-7C3ypb-7C3yoN-7BYKHv-7C3yoY-4Whues-9oXHMe-4So2a5-wEq41-6F8avn-xvcic-dzZjrH-4So2pQ-9kzTZu-ayfSbd-zhMYn-ahCo27-8KtMnD-5NFE6D-9ME8pd-8kQ3b-4So2Zo-4SiPLi-8p1sAC-hYuBDZ-9ME8p9-9ME8ph-deYPPh-ahzkA6-zhMYj-xvcia-enp8Um-ahC7HY-ahCnjS-ahzA8t-ahCns5 web hosting Continue reading →

Posted in HostGator, Hosting, php, VodaHost, vps | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Half of Total IP Traffic to Originate from Mobile Devices in 2017: Cisco Study

Posted on May 29, 2013 by Hosting

May 29, 2013 — Global IP traffic is expected to reach an annual run rate of 1.4 zettabytes by 2017, with nearly half of total IP traffic originating from mobile devices, according to the Cisco Virtual Networking Index Forecast. Keep on reading: Half of Total IP Traffic to Originate from Mobile Devices in 2017: Cisco Study Continue reading →

Posted in HostGator, Hosting, VodaHost | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Is there a way to prevent your site from being hi-jacked?

Posted on June 29, 2012 by Hosting

Good morning folks, I posted a thread asking what to do to recover traffic after your site has been hi-jacked. Continue reading →

Posted in BlueVoda, Hosting, php, VodaHost | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment