the internet ideas blog

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Like, Follow, Share! Phase 2 is here!


If you haven't read my first blog on Like, Follow, Share, you might want to go back and read if first.

Now that you have your friends and employees following you, it’s time to get your clients, customers and potential customers to follow you. Hopefully, if you’ve had a website for a while, you have printed your website on everything from invoices to Frisbees to get it out in front of people. Getting people to your social media isn’t quite as subtle a message and you don’t want it to be.

Adding “Follow us at twitter.com/yourcompany” and “Like us at facebook.com/yourcompany” to all your forms, letterhead, and promotional items is kind of overwhelming and somewhat tacky. If you have a store or office where your customers visit you can very easily create a sign to sit out with your social media addresses on. Another option for stores is brightly colored bag stuffers.

There are other great options that everyone can use. If you are a company that sends out paper invoices, you can include a brightly colored slip of paper (a 1/3 a sheet of paper will work) with your social media information on it. If you have a physical or email newsletter you send out to your customers, include not only your social info, but an article getting them excited about your social media.

Watch for Phase 3: Gaining followers outside your friends, employees and customer base.

Dan on Google+

Monday, September 12, 2011

Frequent Question #2: What is hosting anyway?


Even thought the Internet is now in her teens, new people are placing their businesses online daily. There is often confusion about hosting and how it relates to a domain name and a website. Here then, is an answer that hopefully will make the relationship more clear:

Think of a billboard on the highway, not the new digital kind, the regular vinyl or paper covered billboards. Now take away the paper. All you have is naked space along the highway and THAT is hosting. Naked space on the world wide web.

When you buy the "paper" (have the website built) you need a place to display the wonderful work your money has purchased so you rent the billboard (pay for hosting space).

When does the domain name come into play? Well think about that highway where your billboard is placed. The highway has a number and then there is a mile marker so the billboard might be on 135 at mile marker 120.

Well that would be easy to find if you really were on a highway but on the web the numbers look like this: 92.135.76.130 - and that's not so easy to find. In fact, with up to 12 numbers in all, it's hard on the memory. Can you imagine trying to remember all your favorite websites by number?

The domain name then is an alias, an "aka" for the number of the host server (billboard location) where your website (paper art) resides. When you want your website to be visible you must 1) have someone program a website, 2) contract for hosting space and 3) register a name so it's easy to find the web.

And that's the answer to what usually starts with "what is hosting anyway?"
Powered by Blogger.

from our blog

FeedWind

internet marketing articles