Hosting Your Website

When you create a website or blog you need to host it somewhere. Hosting a website means that all the files and the software for running your website reside on a server somewhere. Maybe across the globe.

Everyone and their relatives have a webhosting business. A lot of tech people – when deciding on a business choose a web hosting business because it’s easy for them to set up and they envision big profits.

It rarely works out that way.

Right now the industry has a few major players – and in our opinion you want to go with a major player for your business website.

We’ve used Godaddy.com for a number of years – and can highly recommend them. They have great prices for huge bandwidth and server space options. They have been doing webhosting for more than 10 years.

Right now between us and our webmaster we host 31 sites on Godaddy.

To say we trust them – is an understatement.

In 10 years we’ve not lost so much as a file once uploaded to Godaddy’s servers. We’ve had hundreds of web sites over the years.

If you don’t know anything about setting up your web hosting and need a primer we’ll be offering it as part of our eBusiness PRIMER 34 course and also as a single elearning course.

If you know about webhosting and want to see what Godaddy has to offer in the way of Domain Name registration, Hosting, and premium web services click the link below:

www.GoDaddy.com

Imagine Not Needing a Webmaster

There’s been a revolution taking place over the last few years. The one I’m speaking of refers to the way websites are developed from scratch.

Having developed over 100 websites during the past 12 years I can tell you that it’s never been easier ever to start a website and get it online and available to the public… selling whatever it is you want to sell.

In the past with using DreamWeaver, FrontPage, or some other website development software it would take a couple of months to create a good site of 50 pages and get all the buges worked out of it.

It took a good year to learn the ins and outs of the web dev. software packages I used and it took 10+ years to learn SEO and how to be found in Google on the keyword terms I desperately needed to be found for.

The sites I made before were limited by my own creativity. I don’ t have an endless supply of templates running through my head and an endless variety of choices to present to clients. I usually chose one of about 15 styles of website and went with that.

In short – web development was a humongous undertaking before and only  people that had dedicated themselves to it 100% could figure it all out.

Times have REALLY CHANGED.

Today you can sign up at Godaddy.com for a domain name and server space (shared hosting), download the latest version of Wordpress.org software. Upload the WordPress files to your server by FTP, install, and have a live website in a matter of about 2 hours.

The variety of templates you have to choose from is almost infinite – there are thousands and thousands of WordPress “themes” as they’re called, to choose from.

If you wanted to learn how to maintain your site built on the WordPress platform it would take about 30 hours of time to really get into it and figure it all out. We offer a WordPress elearning course here on site for those of you that want to learn all  you can about it -and never need a webmaster again.

If you learn the WordPress platform – and then learn a little bit about tweaking CSS and PHP – the code behind the websites you’ll be much farther down the path of self-sufficiency and it will be a huge cost you no longer need to outsource.

Oh, did I mention that WordPress is VERY search engine friendly? It’s optimized right from the start – AND, there are additional plugins you can get to tweak your SEO (search engine optimization) even more – to really max out your Google rankings. This too is included in our WordPress elearning course.

Seriously consider using WordPress for your business website. We use it here and at more than twenty of our other sites. It just makes a lot of sense.

Using Twitter for Your Business

Twitter is one of the more recent tools to come out and the public is just getting started with it. It’s more than a chat program, but on first glance it doesn’t seem like it’s going to help you do anything at all.

Go to twitter.com and join, it’s a free account.

Then go to Tweetdeck.com and download their free software. Tweetdeck is a program that helps make twitter a lot more GUI (goo-ey) (in tech language this means graphical user interface – or colorful and fun to look at and play with).

Install tweetdeck and sign into your twitter.com account through Tweetdeck.

You’ll see three columns that pop up -

All Friends, Replies, and Direct Messages.

• All friends is everyone that is following you.
• Replies are those that wrote to you directly and you can write back to directly.
• Direct Messages are those that sent you a private, direct message.

You’ll need to add some friends that you follow. Eventually people will “follow” you too.

When they follow you and send messages they’ll be shown in your Tweetdeck. When you send messages (tweet) you can do that by clicking the upper left most icon that says “Tweet”. A box will open up where you type your tweets.

Anyway – so that’s basically how it works and you’ll have to play with it quite a bit to familiarize yourself with everything you can do in the Tweetdeck interface…

Using Tweetdeck for business is rather easy.

Go to the 7th icon from the top left called “Twitter Search” and click it.

It will open a pop-up that allows you to search the twittersphere for all chats involving your keyword. Type Canon gl2 and you’ll probably see some results. This search is saved and becomes a new column in your Tweetdeck. It will be updated every so often (changeable in the settings icon in upper right) and you’ll see all the tweets related to whatever you want. Search on business products or services you sell and bam – you’ve got instant people to contact about your product or service. Add them to your friend list and send them a reply that is not pushy at all – just let them know you have some of whatever they were looking for. Maybe don’t contact them again if they don’t reply as it would be rude and Tweeters are quite considerate so far – lets not hasten it’s demise with spam.

If you have any questions about using Twitter for your business we have a training module you can purchase at our partner site that will teach you everything you need to know about Twitter for your business and personal pleasure.

Best Regards,

Dean Harrington, Owner