Cheap Web hosting services are everywhere, and many of them offer unlimited or unlimited bandwidth and server resources. David Mercer explains what you really get from low cost hosting packages and how to find good value hosting packages that will save you time, effort and money in the long run.
Lessons I Learned When My Blog Got Hacked
This is one artist’s story of getting hacked, cleaning her blog after the hack, and what she learned in the process: Lessons I Learned When My Blog Got Hacked. Although Lori’s site is powered by WordPress, most of her article can be applied to any web site.
7 Elements of a Well Converting Subscription Page
More and more sites and services are focussing attention on their subscription pages and discovering that a well-designed page is very important to new user sign ups. For subscription pages, the decision making process can’t be avoided. But the good news is that you can design a better subscription page that will almost make the decision for them – while still offering them choices.
How to Use Google+ for Business and Professional Branding
WordTracker.com shared a very well written and illustrated PDF document that guides you through building a Google+ personal profile and then a business page to help with your personal or professional branding.
Facebook Timeline: 9 Best Practices for Brands
Facebook Timeline officially rolled out to Brand Pages on March 30, but many marketers still don’t know how to take the full advantage of it. A recent study found that fan growth after Timeline has “slowed slightly”– is your company experiencing a bit of a slowdown? If so, Lauren Drell has some good tips for you and backs them up with credible data:
2. Make the Most of Your Cover Photo — It’s Prime Real Estate
3. Pay Attention to Insights
4. Highlight or Pin Your Best Posts
5. Get Your Apps in a Row
6. Make Use of Facebook’s New Ad Suite
7. Run Contests to Boost Engagement
8. Drop in Those Milestones
9. Embrace Your Fans
BONUS: 10 Innovative Uses of Facebook Timeline for Brands
24 Eye-Popping SEO Statistics
SEO isn’t the most understood medium in online marketing. People aren’t too sure what SEOs do exactly. Then there is talk about how SEO is converging with social media, content marketing, usability, and more. As a business owner, you don’t have much time to sort any of that out. But even doing the basic SEO tasks regularly will benefit you.
Eric Slu offers 24 SEO statistics that help to understand the importance of SEO and buyers’ behavior online. For example, did you know that 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine? Or that search directly drove 25% of all online U.s. device purchases in 2010?
Don’t make the same mistake many other business owners make and invest more in SEO.
15 Powerful Reconversion Opportunities for Your Welcome Emails
Marketers have a huge opportunity with welcome emails. According to Skyline Technologies, welcome emails have an average open rate of 50-60%. With an open rate that high, are you doing all you can to keep people interested in you and your offer?
We all remember to include useful information like information about future content and privacy policy into welcome or confirmation emails, but you can help your subscribers in so many other ways!
10 Essential Things Your E-Commerce Site Should Have
Sure, there are no universal features or design options which guarantee that your online shop will become popular but there are several general essentials and desirable things which should be taken care of when creating an online store. Those things are especially important for the home page because often it forms people’s opinion on your store and your products. It’s no different from a brick and mortar store.
So what’s essential? Building your store with sales in mind, helping your visitors make the decision about their purchase, building trust with them. It all starts with grabbing people’s interest quickly and keeping them interested while they go from your home page to the rest of your store.
Ann Davlin suggests several design features which will probably help you improve your web store usability and increase its profitability.
8 Creative Ways to Use Embeddable Tweets
What if your Twitter conversations could expand to include more people from your online community?
Now you can thanks to embedded tweets, a new feature from Twitter.
Embedded tweets allow you to take a tweet or a conversation and post it on your website or in a blog post. You can use this feature to share your Twitter conversation with a larger audience.
But more than that, the embedded tweets have interactive features. Charlene Kingston shows what a visitor to your website or a blog post reader can do from an embedded tweet, walks you through embedding a tweet to the web page, and gives examples of creative use of embedded tweets.
Defying Brute Force Attacks on WordPress Logins
There is a technique known as brute-force attack. Like the name implies, access is gained to your environment through brute force. Often conducted by bots, these attacks will run through a compiled list of common passwords and their variations. Using this method the attackers are gaining access to your admin to send spam from your web site, deface your pages, or inject malicious code into your WordPress installation.
Your first line of defence against these attacks is changing the admin username to something other than the default “admin” and creating a strong password that is hard to guess even for a bot.
Lorelle VanFossen explains how to create a strong password that is not terribly long and is easy to remember. Her technique is a little unconventional, but stick with her through the article and you will end up with multiple passwords based on the same word