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The Wounded Warrior Project

With Memorial Day upon us, we wanted to find a way to show some appreciation for our veterans.  The Wounded Warrior Project provides programs and services to severely injured service members during the time between active duty and transition to civilian life.  HostGator would like to invite you to donate to the Wounded Warrior Project via our causes.com page , where we will match donations up to $5,000 (total). We hope we are able to hit this $5,000 mark in order to give back a small amount to the veterans who have given so much to the rest of us. We appreciate your participation in this effort, and we again thank our veterans who have risked their lives to protect ours. If you experience any difficulty in accessing our donation page, please use this direct link: http://www.causes.com/actions/1753343-hostgator-will-match-your-donation-to-wounded-warrior-project Thank you again for helping us support a great cause. Continue reading

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Do You Have A Content Marketing Strategy?

If you spend any amount of time on digital marketing blogs, you’ve probably noticed by now that content marketing appears to be the “hot promotional strategy” of 2013. However, what you may not have noticed is that content marketing is more than a fad – it’s a shift in online promotional paradigms that’s here to stay.  According to the Content Marketing Institute “ 2013 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends ” report, 86% of B2C companies plan to maintain or increase their content marketing investments throughout the year, with 54% of B2B companies sharing the same opinion.  If your website doesn’t yet have a content marketing strategy, it’s time to create one.  Here’s what your plan should include:   Element #1 – A detailed description of your target audience The first thing you need to know when planning a content marketing campaign is who you’re trying to reach.  The better educated you are about your target customers; the more likely it is that you’ll be able to develop content pieces that appeal to them.  Specifically, try to find out your customers’: Age and gender distribution Geographic location Average annual incomes Education levels Personal interests Belief systems and personal priorities Online habits and activities   Your website’s analytics data can provide insight into some of these topics, as can customer surveys or simply tracking the behavior of your followers on public social media sites like Twitter.   Element #2 – The content channels you plan to utilize As you learn more about your target audience, you should be able to get a feel for how they spend their time online.  Make note of the social sites on which they’re most active, as these key locations will provide the basis for your content promotion activities. While you might think that it’s safe to promote your content on Facebook and Twitter and call it a day, you’re always better safe than sorry.  If your customer research efforts determine that your target demographic is hardly active at all on Twitter and instead prefers a niche forum for online engagement, it’s better to find this out before you’ve committed to a new Twitter marketing plan!   Element #3 – The content types you’ll produce Another important component in a good content marketing strategy is a publishing calendar that details the types of content you’ll produce and when you’ll release each individual piece. As an example, your customer research might indicate that your target audience prefers to share infographics and list type blog posts with others in their networks, compared with videos or long form, editorial-style blog posts.  As a result, you could create a publishing calendar that involves releasing one infographic a month and weekly blog posts that periodically utilize the list format. Keep in mind that consistent engagement is critical when it comes to content marketing success.  By deploying content at regular intervals, you’ll expand your brand’s reputation and keep website visitors coming back for more.   Element #4 – The resources needed to create your content  As you’re building your publishing schedule, be careful not to get too ambitious! If you hate writing, you need to either focus your efforts on the kinds of content you enjoy producing or you need to hire an outsourced writer who’s familiar with your industry.  Similarly, if you love writing, but don’t have the time to commit to drafting regular posts, you’ll need to make the same type of decision. Be honest with yourself.  It’s fine to be optimistic about your campaign’s potential outcomes, but leaving yourself without the resources needed to develop high value content pieces will doom your promotional efforts from the start.   Element #5 – A metrics-driven plan for measuring the impact of your campaign Finally, be clear with yourself about what you want your content marketing campaign to achieve.  If you’re going to be investing either your time or your money, it’s important that you have a way to determine whether or not you’re achieving a positive ROI. Potential goals for your content marketing campaigns include: More sales More website traffic Increased brand mentions New social followers Viral content shares More email newsletter subscribers   Whatever general goal type you choose, be sure to create both target milestones and a method for tracking your progress.  For example, don’t just say, “I want to increase sales through content marketing.”  Instead, say, “I want to acquire 10 new customers each month through content marketing,” and then set up a system (as in, Google Analytics Goals combined with Advanced Traffic Segments) that will allow you to determine exactly which sales can be attributed to your content marketing efforts. Use the information your tracking program generates to regularly assess the success of your campaigns and to make adjustments as needed.  By continually measuring and reevaluating your content marketing initiatives, you’ll position your business well to see improved performance through this powerful promotional strategy. Continue reading

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5 Ways to Get More Out of Guest Posting

When it comes to website promotional techniques, there’s almost nothing better than a good quality guest post.  Not only does this powerful marketing strategy send traffic to your website and confer upon your brand the implicit recommendation of the hosting site, a well-crafted guest post also gives your website the benefit of a natural, highly-relevant backlink. But that said, not all guest posts are created equal.  There’s a big difference between securing a guest post spot on a well-known authority blog in your industry and posting your content to a no-name blog orchestrated by an SEO spammer.  If you really want to take advantage of the power of good guest posting, keep the following five guidelines in mind:   Tip #1 – Post to relevant websites  Plenty of websites accept guest posts – but that doesn’t mean that they’re all good targets for your guest publishing campaign!  For best results, stick with publishing to websites in your industry or in fields that are closely related.  Trying to shoehorn your area of expertise into an unrelated article results in content that won’t encourage visitors to visit your site (as they likely won’t be interested in your on-subject content) and diminishes the SEO value of the link you receive.   Tip #2 – Post to well-known websites  At the same time, even sites in your industry might not represent ideal guest post targets if they’re new and/or un-trafficked.  If you post to a site without an established audience base, it’s unlikely that you’ll receive any significant referral traffic for your efforts.  In addition, because the search engines tend to value links from well-known sites over their younger competitors, the link equity you’ll receive from this type of arrangement isn’t as strong. While you might not be able to land any “big fish” guest post spots at the start of your campaign, you can work your way up by leveraging high quality articles published on smaller sites to prove your worth to bigger targets.   Tip #3 – Deliver the best content possible It should go without saying, but if you happen to land a guest spot on any website, the content you send over should represent the best of your abilities.  This is important for two different reasons… First, the search engines have made it their mission to reward high quality web content.  While their algorithms aren’t sophisticated enough yet to ensure that the best possible results turn up at the top of every search result, they’re constantly striving towards this goal.  As a result, it’s in your best interests to create great content – whether it’s being published on your site or on another website altogether. But you also have to remember that most web communities are surprisingly small.  If you deliver an awful guest post to one site, word could get out that you aren’t one who upholds your end of the guest author bargain, making it more difficult for you to secure high profile guest gigs in the future.   Tip #4 – Drive visitors to custom landing pages Typically, when you’re offered a guest posting spot, you’re able to include 1-3 links back to your website.  And while most guest authors use these links to point back to their home pages, you can increase the likelihood that any newly-acquired visitors will stick around and engage with your brand by driving them to custom landing pages. These landing pages could include any of the following elements: An acknowledgement of the referring site A hand-picked list of similar posts on your site that new visitors might enjoy Links to your social profiles An email newsletter sign-up form Encouragement to take any other action that supports your business’s bottom line   Though this might sound like a lot of extra work, it typically only takes a few minutes to create a new custom landing page once you’ve built an initial template for this purpose.   Tip #5 – Use Google+ authorship to claim your guest posts One last way to get the most out of your guest posts is to claim the authorship of your posts using Google+. In some cases, the hosting site’s owner will use a website plugin that adds you as a site user and uses your Google+ profile link to automatically form an authorship connection.  But if this isn’t the case, you can still claim authorship by including a link to your Google+ profile (marked up with the “rel=author” tag, as described here ) and then linking back to the hosting site from within the “Contributes to” section of your Google+ account. While this second strategy requires a bit more work on your part, the benefits of Google+ authorship make your efforts well worth it.  When combined with the tips described above, it’s a vital part of ensuring that you get the most value possible for every guest post you submit. Continue reading

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The Adventures of Snappy: Ryan Scroggins & The Trenchtown Texans Edition

Snappy recently had the pleasure of hanging out on-stage and backstage with Houston’s own Ryan Scroggins & The Trenchtown Texans. The band’s namesake and frontman is a veritable renaissance man; artist, multi-instrumentalist, song writer, professional tattoo artist and former herpetologist for the Houston Zoo.  Mr. Scroggins originally made a name for himself in the music world as the organist for the well-known ska band Los Skarnales. The Trenchtown Texans play a unique mix of Americana/Ska/Roots/Reggae/Swamp music and have released three albums and toured extensively, however these days the band only makes appearances sporadically.  As such, it was truly a pleasure for Snappy to be able to share the stage with them at Houston’s Continental Club: After the show, Snappy was fortunate enough to spend a few minutes with Mr. Scroggins.  Having again been a former Herpetologist for the Houston Zoo, Ryan is very familiar with gators, however this would be his first encounter with a blue gator: If you have a keen eye, you’ll be able to spot Snappy in the video below of the band performing “Too Tired to Fight”: A quick YouTube search will return lots of videos of this great band, and if they happen to come to your town do make it a point to check them out live. If you have an event in the Houston or Austin area that you would like for Snappy to attend, please get in touch with us by emailing feedback@hostgator.com ATTN: Blog. Continue reading

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How to Be a Better Webmaster

You’ve put tons of effort into building your website – so don’t let your hard work go to waste by slacking off on your webmaster responsibilities! As a site owner, you owe it to yourself and to your business to be the best possible webmaster you can be.  The following are just a few of the activities that separate run-of-the-mill webmasters from great site managers.  Add them to your weekly routine and you’re sure to see a difference in your website results.   Tip #1 – Update your website regularly Having a website is great, but if you never update the site that you built initially, you’re missing out on two very powerful webmaster benefits. The first is that regularly updated content – whether published through an articles section, a blog or some other format – helps to form a connection between your business and your target customers.  People feel much more confident interacting with and buying from sites that are regularly updated, versus those that clearly haven’t been touched since their initial launch. At the same time, adding new content to your site on a regular basis confers a powerful SEO advantage that could lead to your site ranking higher in the natural search results.  This, in turn, leads to increased traffic and sales, providing a tangible benefit for your investment into updating your site regularly.   Tip #2 – Run periodic usability tests Whenever you make changes to your website (even if it’s something as simple as changing a font color on your home page), you introduce the possibility of coding errors that can take down part or all of your site. For this reason, it’s important to run periodic usability tests that identify any errors that may be inhibiting your site’s functionality.  Usability tests can be as simple as previewing your website in different browsers using a tool like Browser Shots or as complex as navigating through every page on your site in order to manually detect errors.   Tip #3 – Manage broken links appropriately In particular, keep an eye out for broken links when running your usability tests.  Internal or external links that refer visitors to pages that are no longer live (whether due to the movement of the page, the closure of the site or some other circumstance) both frustrate users and prevent the search engines’ indexing programs from effectively cataloging the pages on your site. The easiest way to monitor for broken links is with the use of a plugin that automatically scans your pages for these failed connections (as in the case of the Broken Link Checker plugin for WordPress), though you can test your links manually as well.  If you encounter broken links on your website, you can either remove the links or redirect your link to a different page entirely.   Tip #4 – Engage your community on social sites As a webmaster, you can’t live in a bubble and assume that all’s well in the world just because your website is functioning properly.  Engaging in social media marketing is now a “must do” for all webmasters, given the expectations of today’s consumers and the SEO value that can be derived from social networking interactions. Fortunately, you don’t need to be a social media guru to enjoy the benefits this type of marketing can bring about.  Start small by building a profile for your business on one of the top social media sites (including Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or Pinterest) and make a commitment to post new content and engage with followers once a day.  Once this becomes routine, expand your social presence to other networks or delve more deeply into marketing strategy recommendations for the site you’ve chosen.   Tip #5 – Solicit user feedback to drive website changes Finally, good webmasters recognize that their opinions on their websites are just that – opinions.  Instead of building and managing their sites from this narrow point of view, these business owners ask their users for feedback and make changes based on this advice. As an example, a webmaster running an online jewelry store could send out a customer survey asking past purchasers about the products they’d like to see added to the shop next.  Not only does this provide the webmaster with valuable market research on the products his customers are most likely to buy, it also demonstrates to customers that their opinions are valued – making them more inclined to buy from the shop in the future. Truly, website management is an ongoing process that requires continuous commitment from site owners in order to maximize performance.  While it may sound daunting to add all these different tasks to  your webmaster “to do” list, you’ll likely find that the increased website traffic, higher sales and better natural search results rankings will be well worth your efforts. Continue reading

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