HostEntrepreneur

Social networking is one of the fastest growing trends in marketing today to generate website traffic. It is the means of creating a network of people interested in what you have to say. Like all forms of attraction marketing, the goal is to help encourage people to trust you so that they are willing to buy from you. Rather than cold calling, you are dealing with a warm market ready to respond to you. Social networking has opened the doors to millions of people not connected with many more around the world.

How Social Networking Works

Social networking is the means of using one or more online websites or services to find other people to chat with and to get to know. At the same time, you are creating a group of people who are interested in working with you and who respect you enough to buy from you. You are virtually creating a list of exclusive leads.

For example, perhaps you have a blog that promotes an eco friendly solution to cleaning. You are promoting a product specifically but rather than creating a blog that is just about that product, you are designing your website to offer great information, insider tips, perhaps even discounts on eco friendly products. You write a great blog post about how to get started with eco friendly cleaning. Using the link to that blog post, you can use your social network to attract more visitors to your blog.

There are several ways you can make this happen.

1. You can sign up for Twitter and send out a Tweet to all of your followers about the post you wrote. Anyone following you or looking for eco friendly information can easily visit your blog post.

2. You submit your blog post to http://Digg.com where people can rate it and further submit it. This helps more people who are not yet in your network to find you.

3. You can use Facebook to let all of those followers know what you are posting at your blog. They too can follow you over there.

It may seem like a lot of work and at first, the sign up process is a bit time consuming. You will need to work on building up a following on each of these websites. Yet, when you do this, you create a very powerful tool. You see, the people following you are people that either already know and respect you or will find your blog post and learn from you. They know you are not overselling to them, but rather educating them. This creates leads for your business that are highly effective when it comes time to buy from you.

After a few useful blog posts, or messages, your social network trusts you. Therefore, when you mention the product you are promoting, they are more likely to purchase from you. They may even do so just by visiting your blog and finding the link to do so there. Many people love to be social. Social networking has helped to create business for any type of online business out there.

Michael E Friedman has over 30 years sales and marketing experience in a business to business environment. He has rapidly become an expert in internet marketing. His personal directive is to study, practice and teach others to become successful internet marketers. For more information click here to visit http://financialfreedomleaders.com/?t=isnare3c

A successful web site or blog is always made meaningful by its domain name. The web address that you choose must suit the theme and tenor of the web site or blog. Make sure that your name matches the subject of the web site or blog. Almost all well-known web portals have a domain name that is short, easy to remember and type into the address window of the browser. You should understand the system by which a domain works and performs. An effective name is always catchy with a definite theme and subject. Your visitors will feel that the domain name of your web site is quite powerful as it can evoke very strong connections with something that is special to the web user.

As far as possible, use main keywords that connect to the theme and topic of your web portal. You may wish to avoid hyphens and underscores as they can confuse and mislead your site visitors. Complicated web domains are those that are very difficult to type and remember. Extra symbols and strange characters can put off web users.

Choosing a very meaningful and practical domain name is actually very simple and straightforward. You need to sit down and think over all possible combinations of good keywords and their phrases. If you want to choose a good name, you can start with a comprehensive list of prospective names and shortlist the best ones among them. When you create a list of good names, the next step is to check whether they are available for registration. To conduct this important search, you will need to use an online tool that tells you about the availability of names.

Domain ownership identification tool is a very simple utility where you will find out who is the owner of the domain is and whether the name of your choice is available or not. This tool provides you the complete details of domain ownership including the date of expiry. Choosing a domain name is a trial and error exercise most of the good domains are already in use and you may need to work hard to create a good name. Domain name tools provide you a number of alternatives when the name of your choice is not available. You can pick the one from the list that best represents your theme and business idea.

If there is a domain name available for purchase, you can pounce on it and buy before someone does it. Domain name industry is a highly competitive industry and you never know when someone is going to buy your domain name ideas. While searching for a domain name think of all possible keyword phrases and wordings because most web users have their way of choosing products or services. Keywords play an important role while searching for domains by using domain name ownership online tool. If you do not find the domain name of your choice, you can always sift through the alternative list to choose the best one. Most of the online tools are efficient in providing a listing of most probable choices that eventually allow you to find a domain name that best represents your business theme, topic, style and tenor. Another emerging trend is to buy expired domain names from registrars. You will need to be very careful while buying an expired domain because the name that you wish to buy may have a shady past. However, expired domain market is a very good place to find those domain names that are not available in the fresh domain name market.

The general rule of thumb is to buy a domain name immediately when it is available in a domain ownership tool. It is always better to buy the domain name of your choice even if you are not creating your web site right now. Never ever, allow someone to buy your domain name. You may regret your decision of not buying your domain name when it was available.

John Khu is an author and also a seasoned professional with vast experience in expired domain name business. He is also the owner of the path breaking web site called www.expireddomaingain.com which provides complete and up-to-date information on expired domains and their eternal secrets.

Straight from the horse’s mouth…

 

What: V7Network RoundTable
Where: http://www.v7n.com/chat/
When: Wednesday Oct 7 at 1:00 pm and an encore session at 7:00PM CDT
Discussion: How to identify problem areas on your web site.
Cost: FREE to all V7N members.

Win A Free Listing In The V7N Directory For Attending Our First RoundTable Live Chat!
 

 

 
“If at first you don’t succeed; call it version 1.0″
 
As many of you already know, our first attempt with this service crashed down around our feet when we experienced unforeseen technical difficulties. Those issues (knock on wood) have now been corrected and we are ready to get to hit the ground running offering V7Network RoundTable live training chats to the community. To thank you for your patience, we’ll be giving every person that attends a discount coupon for the V7N Directory! And two lucky winners will get free directory listings!
 
These will be structured interactive text chats covering a wide range of topics for webmasters and small business owners, focused 100% on helping our members build a highly successful online presence. At this time, our plan is to offer this training 2-4 times a month based on the response from the community.
 
The next live training chat is scheduled for October 7, 2009 at 1:00 pm CDT. We will be discussing ways to evaluate your site (and the tools that I personally use) to determine what types of changes you may need to consider making in terms of SEO and marketing techniques. Afterward, we will be opening things up for questions and answers. We will repeat the session that night at 7:00 pm CDT.
 
If what you are currently doing is working, please do not consider changing a single thing. In fact, you probably don’t need this type of training. If however you find yourself not getting the results that you have hoped for, then perhaps it is time to think about sitting down and spending some time with us at the V7Network RoundTable and see if maybe we can brainstorm through some ideas for you!
 
We will open the chat area approximately 30 minutes prior to the start of the training session. If you are not already logged in, you will need to log in using your V7N user name and password. I expect the training session to last 1-2 hours, based on the number of member questions.
 
 
 Please let us know if you will be able to attend!

I’ve been watching the forums for a product we’re interested in… the next version is supposed to include a feature we’d have to have to be able to use the product. So I’ve been checking back pretty frequently to see when the next release occurs.  But here’s the problem… on the 2 main computers I use (home and office), both anti-virus programs consider a javascript file from tynt.com as “malicious”. I’m not really positive it is, but the fact that every page I go to in the forum pops up a warning, both claiming the code is “high risk”.

Tynt if you’re not familiar with it watches for people copying your content to another site. While in theory, this isn’t a bad thing. I trust the 2 a/v program manufacturer’s to judge safe vs. not, more than what a company is claiming they are doing (or not doing). So I’m not willing to make an exception in the a/v program for this site. This means my options are 1) stop going there – which is an option. There are alternatives to the product, and if they are unwilling to listen to the (potential) users, do I want the product? I have to wonder what’s “measures” it contains as well.  Or 2) I have to find a way to stop the annoying pop up without endangering my pc.

So here’s how to do option number 2 in this case. Since this javascript it being pulled as a linked file, it’s a normal http get request. All we need to do is get rid of the ability to resolve the hostname for it. In this case the host is wau.tynt.com   This is an XP machine so I go to c:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc  and edit the file named “hosts”, adding the line:

127.0.0.1  wau.tynt.com 

Save the file then from the command line, ping wau.tynt.com   and the address should come back as 127.0.0.1  which should ping fine as it’s the local loopback address. But any request for the file shouldn’t work, unless you happen to have a web server running on your local machine and it happens to have that file in that directory which would just plain be wierd.

Now to get the browser to pick up the change, close ALL of your browser windows and reopen them. If you typed the url into the browser window, you should get an error message that the page is not displayable.  You should now be able to surf without the annoying popup.

For Windows Vista and Win7, the fix is basically the same, but there is a gotcha on it. You won’t be able to edit the file directly as the directory is protected. You will need to copy the hosts file outside of the system tree, to say your Documents folder, edit the file and then copy it back.  When you copy it back, it’s going to complain, and ask you if you really want to do this. Since you are really meaning to change the file, it’s ok in this case. Normally, unless you’re specifically meaning to make a change to Windows like this, you’d want to say ‘No’.

There is another way to do this was well… Turn off scripting in the browser. This has an unfortunate side effect of stopping some features of some sites as well. The above is easy, and works fine, so that’s my choice (until I hear back on their thoughts about the reasoning behind using tynt anyway).

Considering how easy this is to get around, it’s really not protecting much. And it’s a major inconvenience to the users (not to mention how it looks to them)… And finding your content isn’t hard… embed your domain name, name phrase, etc. in the content portion. Then use Google’s Alert feature, http://www.google.com/alerts, to find it. I’d think twice before using it.

Recently I’ve seen a few people refer to their domain name, like “myname.com” as a “top level domain” or TLD. The short answer is that it is NOT a TLD. The term Top Level Domain has a very specific meaning, and anything you can register does not fit the definition… Per RFC 920,

The domain system is a tree-structured global name space that has a few top level domains.  The top level domains are subdivided into second level domains.  The second level domains may be subdivided  into third level domains, and so on.
…

While the initial domain name “ARPA” arises from the history of the   development of this system and environment, in the future most of the top level names will be very general categories like “government”, “education”, or “commercial”.  The motivation is to provide an   organization name that is free of undesirable semantics.

Notice their words: “top level names will be very general categories…”  Recognize the categories listed, it’s .gov, .edu and .com TLDs. There are also ccTLDs with are country specific such as .us and .ca for the USA and Canada respectively. As of this moment right now, here are ALL OF the top level domains per IANA:

AC, AD, AE, AERO, AF, AG, AI, AL, AM, AN, AO, AQ, AR, ARPA, AS, ASIA, AT, AU, AW, AX, AZ, BA, BB, BD, BE, BF, BG, BH, BI, BIZ, BJ, BM, BN, BO, BR, BS, BT, BV, BW, BY, BZ, CA, CAT, CC, CD, CF, CG, CH, CI, CK, CL, CM, CN, CO, COM, COOP, CR, CU, CV, CX, CY, CZ, DE, DJ, DK, DM, DO, DZ, EC, EDU, EE, EG, ER, ES, ET, EU, FI, FJ, FK, FM, FO, FR, GA, GB, GD, GE, GF, GG, GH, GI, GL, GM, GN, GOV, GP, GQ, GR, GS, GT, GU, GW, GY, HK, HM, HN, HR, HT, HU, ID, IE, IL, IM, IN, INFO, INT, IO, IQ, IR, IS, IT, JE, JM, JO, JOBS, JP, KE, KG, KH, KI, KM, KN, KP, KR, KW, KY, KZ, LA, LB, LC, LI, LK, LR, LS, LT, LU, LV, LY, MA, MC, MD, ME, MG, MH, MIL, MK, ML, MM, MN, MO, MOBI, MP, MQ, MR, MS, MT, MU, MUSEUM, MV, MW, MX, MY, MZ, NA, NAME, NC, NE, NET, NF, NG, NI, NL, NO, NP, NR, NU, NZ, OM, ORG, PA, PE, PF, PG, PH, PK, PL, PM, PN, PR, PRO, PS, PT, PW, PY, QA, RE, RO, RS, RU, RW, SA, SB, SC, SD, SE, SG, SH, SI, SJ, SK, SL, SM, SN, SO, SR, ST, SU, SV, SY, SZ, TC, TD, TEL, TF, TG, TH, TJ, TK, TL, TM, TN, TO, TP, TR, TRAVEL, TT, TV, TW, TZ, UA, UG, UK, US, UY, UZ, VA, VC, VE, VG, VI, VN, VU, WF, WS, XN–0ZWM56D, XN–11B5BS3A9AJ6G, XN–80AKHBYKNJ4F, XN–9T4B11YI5A, XN–DEBA0AD, XN–G6W251D, XN–HGBK6AJ7F53BBA, XN–HLCJ6AYA9ESC7A, XN–JXALPDLP, XN–KGBECHTV, XN–ZCKZAH, YE, YT, YU, ZA, ZM, ZW

So unless you somehow managed to register one of those (not a domain WITHIN one of those but one of those actual TLDs), you don’t have a TLD… It’s not open for discussion, you don’t. You have a “second level domain” according to the people who designed the dns system. Please stop telling people you do, or trying to sell a TLD. You just sound stupid to people who know better.

If you’re a webhost and have less than 10 employees, you may be eligible for Microsoft’s WebsiteSpark Program, http://www.microsoft.com/web/websitespark/. If you’ve been in the hosting business a long time, you might remember Microsoft’s Certified Hosting Partner’s program, where MS provided some support and leads for customers. This one appears to be the new incarnation of that program. 

You get software:  Microsoft Windows Server 2008 (or R2 if available) Web Edition plus SQL Server 2008Web Edition… so you’ll actually be in license compliance, something I bet most small Windows hosts are not. You also get Visual Studio Pro, Expression Studio 2 (or 3) or Expression Web 2 (or 3) to design and develop websites. 

Plus you get Support and Training from Microsoft and the network partners, and best of all, sometime in the future you’ll get “Visibility & Opportunities” – meaning probably a directory or providers and sales leads.

You can be in the program for up to 3 years, but one thing to note,  a $100 fee is due at exit. So it’s not totally free, but pretty dang close.

What a simplistic title huh?  But lets look closer at it…

I recently was in a discussion with someone who had made a political statement about a proposed law and I didn’t agree. This isn’t the proper forum for the discussion, I have a couple others better suited for that. When I presented an opposing viewpoint, I was told that I misunderstood the “intent” of the bill. This sent me back to day one of the a business law course at a prestigious university I attended. This professor was a lawyer as well. He walked in and stated very plainly that if we remember anything then remember this “Words have meanings”.  His point was “intent” is very rarely ever considered in law. And if a lawyer wrote it, you can forget about the stated intent… the wording used will have been chosen for a very specific reason. Once a law is passed, the intent is all but irrelevant. It is the wording that we must live with, not they claimed they were trying to do.

Now to bring this back into light… any agreements you have with your customers, suppliers, or even the public in general, you need to be very aware of the wording you use. And you need to be willing to be bound to the meaning of the words. If you intended something else, you needed to state something else.  Another point to remember, a lot of times businessmen think like amateur lawyers… they’ll try to say one thing and make you think they’re saying another. Be on guard for that… This is one of the reasons we pick the providers we do… We like to work with “real people” instead.

When choosing a hosting partner, what is the most important thing to consider? Price? Feature? Disk Space? Bandwidth?  I’d say it’s none of these… the single most important feature you need to consider is partner themselves. You should be asking: Are they open with their customers? Do they treat their customers like numbers, or partners? Are they honest? Most importantly… Is this a company you are going to want to stay connected to for the long term?

All the other questions, bandwidth, price, features, etc. are details that can be addressed. None of them should factor into a decision to partner with them or not, provided none of them are out of line. But then if they are out of line with industry norms, they’re probably not going to measure up well with the other questions anyway.

Things to look for include checking that they have (and update) a customer news/announcements site or forum. You should also ask the support crew a question or two before signing up. It doesn’t have to anything special or even difficult. What you are looking for is a timely, courteous and accurate answer. One of my early customers asked a question he already knew the answer to… JUST to see if we’d be straightfoward in the answer. And they’re still a customer today.

One of the things you may need to develop, and we probably all stand to improve it some, is time management. This is true even more so for small business owners. There are many methods or techniques to explore, and I plan on going through some of them with you, but today I want to show you the method I like best. It’s commonly referred to as the “Eisenhower method” after the President who used this technique.

It’s a simple method, and works well for managing many aspects. Divide everything up based on the above table into 1 of the 4 quadrants.

1:  Important and Urgent – These are the fires! Put them out right away!
2:  Important but Not Urgent – These are important, but don’t need addressing now. Schedule them for later.
3:  Not Important but Urgent – Delegate these to someone else. Have them do them now.
4:  Not Important and Not Important – Iif you can’t do everything, these are the ones not to do.

Your attention as a small business owner should be on the tasks in boxes 1 and 2 primarily, and sometimes on 3. The 4′s are the ones to ignore for now. They may be “nice to haves” or “nice to dos”, but the time they take is taking away from the more important and/or more urgent matters. Leave them on the list for a while, but don’t be afraid to let them go if need be.

Also realize that items can move from one quadrant to another, especially between 2 to 1, 4 to 3, and 4 to 2 . But they almost never go from a 4 to 1 directly. They almost always go over only 1 direction at a time, either between Urgent and Not, or between Important and Not. Often things move from one to the other because of being neglected, at which time they become either more important or more urgent, and rarely both.

So you may ask yourself, if I’m focusing on the 1s, why not just ignore the rest? Because almost no task can be completed in 1 session. Often you will find yourself blocked by some outside force that limits what you can work on and actually make progress.  Don’t work on something that you’re not going to be able to move forward on, just because it’s a 1.  If you can take care of a 2 or a few of them, you’ve moved forward more than working on a 1 and not going anyway with it.

.. Or why you should pay attention to your use of grammar, style, and punctuation in your  correspondence.

I’m often amazed how some will complain about not being taken seriously or referred to as a “kiddie host”, those hosts stated typically by teenagers that get into hosting thinking they’ll make millions sitting at their desk while doing homework. There are some great hosts started by young people, HotGator was started while Brent Oxley was in college. He dropped out and went to work full time for his company. So, yes, even ”kiddie hosts” can be taken seriously and make a success of it.

I suspect that part of the problem is they manner in which younger folks will communicate in their day to day business dealings.  If I was looking for a provider and started a chat session, and got something along the lines of “How r u?”, I would say that it would be hard for the company to regain the trust that they were a serious host that they just lost.  You may be thinking that it’s “not fair”, or “shouldn’t matter”, but the fact is that it does. There’s no face, no intonation in the voice, no firm handshake so to speak with purely internet based dealings. So any little reason is brought to the forefront.  In this case, if they’re too lazy to type 4 extra keys, one begins to wonder what else are they too lazy to do?

You may not agree with this thinking, and that’s fine. However, others are going to judge you and your company based on your writings in chat, forums, company website, and emails. So you need to adjust your thinking and take the time, and care, to represent yourself and company in a professional manner if you are wanting your new hosting business seriously. I’m not saying you have to be a “grammar nazi”, there’s no need for that. Minor mispellings, slightly off grammar, and some incorrect capitalization isn’t going to have the same effect as using “u” instead of you, “r” for are, or a sentence in an ad like “hi come try our services we r the bestest in world we beat all pricez wit unlimited space and traffic we hav l33t h0st1n t00″. That would be fine on some forums, perhaps some frequented by the apparently intended market, but on the more respected forums such a WebHostingTalk, that ad just isn’t going to fly.