Archive for November, 2010
How to Maintain High Traffic Websites no comments
So, you’ve worked hard building your website. You’ve created tons of interesting, well-written content, optimized for SEO, and designed a stunning series of pages. Finally, all your effort has paid off with the one thing most people only dream of: traffic volume. Now that you have lots of visitors checking out your site, you have to be smart about how to keep them there. Keeping your content fresh and new is only one of the many challenges you now face. Consider each of the following ideas carefully. The success of your website depends on it!
Communication
In addition to plying your visitors with interesting articles, you need to keep in touch with them more closely. Start a mailing list and a site newsletter. Each time you have a new article, interview, top 10 list or review, let your audience know about it. Check out TurnKey Newsletter for a comprehensive newsletter platform with autoresponders, easy contact management and hundreds of great design templates.
Monetization
You don’t just want to have a website, you want to make money off it. There are many ways to do this when you have traffic, including: selling ad space, selling products and ebooks. But you have to be careful. These days, people are inundated with advertisements everywhere they look, and tend to feel alienated when a favorite site suddenly fills up with ads. You can keep your ads in one section only, like on your front page, and keep them off the rest of your site. You can also come up with clever alternatives to traditional banner advertising. Offer a few prime forum threads for paid ads. These can become extremely lucrative if you have a hopping forum, and they don’t impinge on the rest of the discussions. If you’re looking for a great ecommerce solution, check out TurnKey Website. This service offers complete store set-up as well as a huge selection of tools, apps, templates and value add-ons to give your site all the functionality you need for making money off of your blog.
Syndication
If you have a popular website, you probably already know about syndicating content. However, not all syndication tools are created equal. Make sure you choose one that can accommodate unlimited growth. Look for functionality: video, audio, ads and images. Your feed is one major way you connect with your audience so make sure it looks as slick as the rest of your site.
Monitoring
It doesn’t matter how hard you work at making your website interesting when your server is down. Chances are you’re too busy to be monitoring your site 24 hours a day. Check out TurnKey Monitoring, a complete 24×7 monitoring service (that’s completely free, I might add). TurnKey Monitoring will ping you if your site goes down, so you can relax and worry about other things.
Handling Spikes
With popular websites, traffic spikes are inevitable. If you post a particularly newsworthy article, or a review of a brand new product, your going to get lots of visitors… fast. It’s important to make sure your site infrastructure can handle the spike in traffic, so you’re not brought to your knees when you should be flying high. Purchasing a dedicated server is a safe and affordable solution—you’ll have lots of extra bandwidth and managed support if anything goes wrong. You’ll also have the peace of mind of knowing that your server is yours alone. There is no other content on there to slow you down, and you can add more space as you go.
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Why Host Your Blog on its Own Domain? no comments
Anyone with a blog faces this conundrum at one time or another. Some people start out with a free blogging service like typepad or blogger, and, as they grow their audience, decide they need their own property. Others start out managing their own blog and get mired in the wordpress updates or spam and bail for a free, fully managed option. Before leaping right in, there are several items to consider when deciding which arrangement is right for you.
What are your Goals?
Are you planning on world domination or is your blog primarily for your friends and family? If you’re aspirations are modest, there is no reason to invest your time and money into a privately hosted blog. On the other hand, if you have loftier goals and think you might, one day, want to become a pundit or amass a million followers, hosting your own property could pay dividends.
Design
Are you a designer? Does it matter to you to have your blog look just so? With free blogs, you have severely limited options design-wise. You can pick colors and templates, but you can’t go much beyond that. If you want to design your blog from the ground up, a privately hosted blog is right for you.
Maintenance
How good are you at computers? Do you understand how to configure a database? Do you understand PHP, blog software installation stuff or server-side configurations? None of this is particularly difficult, and it is very possible to learn it all with a little elbow grease. But, if you haven’t got the time, or don’t want to be bothered, a free blog is the best choice.
Branding
Generally, a blog with its own memorable domain name is much more brandable than a free blog domain (that includes .typepad or .wordpress within the URL). A private domain projects a professional image and sticks in people’s minds. Name your blog something clever to really capitalize on the memory factor. If you have big dreams, think about the promotional materials and business cards you may use in the future. Your own domain will look smashing on both.
Making Money
If your blog is popular, you can sell ads and make money, regardless of what format your blog happens to be in. Arguably, advertisers may be more inclined to take you seriously with your own domain name, but numbers talk. If you have the traffic, they’ll be interested.
Ready to Get Started?
If you’ve decided on hosting your own blog with your own domain name, look no further than TurnKey Website.
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Announcing TurnKey Vault–Secure Online Backup Solution no comments
This month we are pleased to announce Turnkey Vault, our new online backup service. It’s remarkable to me how many business people don’t take the time to back up their office computers. I’m not being high and mighty here, I’ve been guilty of not backing things up too. So what’s wrong with all of us? It’s kind of like flossing–you know you’ll be paying significantly less money in the future if you floss today (not to mention saving yourself a world of pain)–still, most people would rather just not think about it. Instead, we pay dentists a fortune to fix our teeth when they fall apart. Similarly, we pay computer techs a fortune to salvage our hard drives with our computers crash. Unless you happen to be a dentist or a computer tech, this isn’t an ideal arrangement.
Why don’t People Backup their Data?
I think part of the problem is that people think backups are time-consuming, expensive or otherwise difficult to manage. And in the past, that has often been the case. Today, that just isn’t an excuse. TurnKey Vault is one of our most exciting products, bar none. It is more robust, configurable and flatly better than any other backup service available today. We offer a free version FOR LIFE, up to 2GB, and that’s enough for most people to backup everything they need. We also offer much larger versions for a fraction of the price of our competitors, for hard drives of any size. Backups run while you work and automatically update themselves with any changes you make to your files.
How Comprehensive are Your Existing Backups?
Maybe I’m preaching to the converted here and you already backup your computers at home and at work. If so, good for you! You’re a smart business person. But consider this: how easy would it be to restore your PC from those backups? Do you have your settings saved? Will your PC still look like it does now, complete with a desktop background picture of batboy? If not, please read on.
Restoring Your PC
You can set TurnKey Vault to save all of your PC settings, so you can fully restore your computer from scratch. This is a lifesaver if your computer crashes, but it’s also great if you get a new PC. You can set it up with all your work right away, just the way you like it. For those of us who get used to working with our settings in a particular configuration, system restores can save us hours of time and a good deal of angst.
Add that on to the piece of mind you’ll enjoy knowing your business data is safe and sound, and TurnKey Vault starts to sound pretty good.
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