Business Marketing Show

Hosting isn’t something that gets a lot of attention until its broken. This is unfortunate because your hosting forms the foundation of many of your online assets and we often find that very little thought or consideration goes into choosing a hosting provider other than looking at the price tag.

In this episode we explain the four separate components of your hosting, who our preferred providers are and some of the key points to be mindful of when choosing a hosting provider.

This episode is really for anyone in business because your hosting will have a flow-on effect to many other parts of your business, for example if your email is unreliable or suffering downtime your staff productivity will suffer or if your website is suffering from regular outages its going to hurt your Google rankings and you’ll miss out on sales enquiries.

Listen to this week’s show and learn:

• why cheap hosting is false economy
• the 4 separate components of your hosting
• our preferred hosting providers and what is different about them (sidenote, you should really not have all 4 components with one company)

Highlights, Notes and Action Items from this episode:

1. Domain names or domain registrar

• namecheap.com
• cheapdomains.com.au
• crazydomains.com.au
• you MUST know who your domain registrar is
• make sure your domain names are in your name or business name otherwise you don’t own them!
• generally you should only be paying $10-20/year per domain name

2. DNS Hosting

• know where your DNS hosting is
• Cloudflare.com is one of the fastest DNS hosting providers in the world AND free
• slow and unreliable DNS hosting will make your website slow, can cause a lot of downtime and can cause email problems

3. Web Hosting

• your website load speed should be under 5 seconds – test it with tools.pingdom.com
• WPEngine for high performance WordPress hosting
• Vaultpress for backups
• Cloudflare is a great way to speed up sites on slow hosting

4. Email Hosting

• Google Apps
• Office 365

Listening options:

Click here to listen on iTunes or click the Play button below to play from your web browser.

In this episode Ed and Brendan talk about the process for building a website and the several steps involved.

If you’re considering getting online or redeveloping your website this is one to listen to.

Listen to this week’s show and learn:

• the common trap many businesses fall into with the “website redesign loop”
• the discrete 6 step process for building a more effective website

Highlights, Notes and Action Items from this episode:

1. Define the Website Purpose & Target Market

• who is your target market?
• what the is specific purpose your website serves?
• what is the main problem you’re solving for the customer?
• what’s the offer?
• what is the action you want the visitor to take
• what is your USP or unique selling proposition

2. Content writing & sitemap creation

• in most cases using a professional copywriter is better than DIY-ing it as you’re often too close to the business
• the step is often ignored in favour of focussing on design -> bad idea

3. Imagery and photography

• the era of stock photography is over
• make sure people are in your photos
• photos are about feeling, stock photos feel fake, is that how you want people to feel when they visit your website
• stock photos should only be used for “things”, Ed uses dollarphotoclub.com for stock photos
• some excellent examples of different types of website photography: http://www.photographyproject.com.au/portfolio/website-photography/

4. Web design

• this is the step that usually gets the most focus but is actually optional – a predesigned template can be used instead of a custom design where budgets are tight
• a web designer does design and not sales and marketing, don’t be confused about that

5. Web development

• a website developer is a programmer who takes design files created by a designer and turns that into a fully functioning website

6. Online Marketing

• if coming from an existing website, three core SEO considerations you need to make to ensure your traffic and rankings don’t drop:
  • redirect old pages to the relevant page on the new site
  • make sure your Google Analytics is transferred across to the new site so you can properly track performance
  • make sure page titles and meta descriptions are set correctly

Listening options:

Click here to listen on iTunes or click the Play button below to play from your web browser.

This week we talk about content and content marketing. A strategy that is generally under-done by most small businesses.

Content is at the core of your website. If you’re unhappy with how your website is performing, this is a show to listen to.

Listen to this week’s show and learn:

• how by simply adding a page of content to your site you can rank higher
• the answer to the question “how often should I be updating my website”

Highlights, Notes and Action Items from this episode:

• You need a page of content for every keyword you want to rank for
• Thin content will hurt you, aim for 1000+ words of content on important pages
• Key content types:
  • monthly newsletter
  • blog articles -> here’s a perfect example of a content strategy in play, a blog article on coffee cup photography: http://www.perthproductphotography.com.au/coffee-cup-product-photography-sip-imports
  • pillar content or core website content, for example you services page
  • photography and video, unless you’re going to hit a minimum acceptable standard this is better done by professionals. Here’s some examples of online business videos: http://www.photographyproject.com.au/portfolio/video-production-perth/
• Sales and marketing automation tools like Infusionsoft are the next step up from email marketing
• Taking the first step of your sales process online is an excellent way to super charge your website

Listening options:

Click here to listen on iTunes or click the Play button below to play from your web browser.