Howdy Do, TurnKey Lovers?

It’s your favorite technician, back with another delightful treat. Haha, okay, maybe I should tone down the favoritism. I could be your favorite technician, or it could be any of our other wonderful techs. For the sake of this article, let’s just assume that I’m your number 1 guy.

Another year has come and gone, and what a year it was. That’s what I want to speak to you about today. If you don’t mind, let’s do a bit of reflection for a moment. Let’s take a step into the TurnKey time machine to look at this past year. (No, you can’t buy mine. Get your own.)

2012 has been one hell of a year, and I will give you the TurnKey Top Plays. Think of it like SportsCenter’s Top Plays, but with TurnKey. All of you sport fans should appreciate the top plays. I mean, why else do you watch SportsCenter at 3 in the morning? Okay, okay, I digress. Jeremy, stay on topic. Ah, yes, our Top Plays of the past year…

Let’s begin the countdown at number 5:

5. Welcomed new staff into the TurnKey family

Yes, this makes the Top Plays. We’ve added a few new members to our TurnKey family. I’m sure you’re already familiar with one, Emily Wegener. She’s the lovely lady who edits all of these posts; making us writers/technicians look better at this blogging thing than we are. Another new member of our TurnKey family—even though he doesn’t always stay because of something called “college”—Is Jared Rutnik. Jared helps Emily keep our TurnKey name out there in this delightful world of the Internet. Last but not least, we welcomed another technician, Chris Day.

4. Launched new products across our product lines

While we did launch several new products this year, I would say one of the most fun—yet frustrating—products has to be CloudFlare and Attracta. These services are now included with every sign up for one of our reseller or SEO accounts. It helps our customers not only attain higher page rankings, but it also gives redundancy with CloudFlare, should you need it.

3. Complete overhaul of our Reseller system

Okay, you might be saying, “Why is this in the top 3?” Well, have you ever used ZamFoo? It can be a pain, if you’ve never had the pleasure. While yes, it did provide additional functionality to our resellers, it became very clear that an in-house or custom-built reseller platform would be the way to go. Our new reseller system is a lot easier for end users to navigate, and also provides additional functionality that isn’t included in ZamFoo. For example, changing a site’s IP via ZamFoo can be a confusing process for a reseller. He or she would have to upgrade the account, assign the IP, and then downgrade the account. Our new reseller platform streamlines that process so you can just use the IP manager to change IP’s.

2. Survived Hurricane Sandy

Now, you may be wondering why this made the list, as our data center is in Upstate New York and not down by the coast. Well, many local businesses in our area had severe wind and rain impact. There was flooding all around, and some of our clients were deeply affected by the storm. Providing top-notch support across the board in billing, customer service, and technical support helped to keep some customers’ minds at ease about their hosting. While this might seem trivial, it made a tremendous difference to many of our clients. We were contacted numerous times, to confirm that our data center would survive the storm. Special accommodations were made for users who needed assistance with their billing or support during this difficult time. I’m proud to say that the TurnKey family pulled together and that we all did our best to help by any means we could, even if it was just letting customers pay their bill later so that they could focus on other things.

1. Moved into our new datacenter.

This is easily number one for me. Moving into a new data center while building it can make things a bit hectic. Users’ servers go off-line to be moved, and servers get transported from the old data center to the new one. If you had been here to witness the sheer amount of work that went into the project, you would have been amazed. Well, I know I was. The way the staff pulled together to migrate servers while dealing with the support issues being raised was nothing short of phenomenal. Sure, there were bumps along the way, but we all pitched in, as a team should, and got the job done. It made me proud to be a member of this TurnKey family.

Well there you go, TurnKey lovers. While it may not be a Top 10 list like SportsCenter, it doesn’t diminish the importance of each point.

Until next time…

Is Facebook really Free?

As many of you have probably noticed, certain aspects of Facebook are beginning to cost money. How do you feel about it?

Since we all started using Facebook we have enjoyed the free social media interaction, the no cost way of communicating. We have had a brand new way of keeping in touch with old classmates, high school sweethearts, co-workers etc.  Being able to reach out to all ends of the world in a split second, and see how everyone that you care about is doing, without having to actually speak to them.  It has had its perks.

Over the last year or two businesses have been able to start using Facebook as a way to reach out to more people. What better a way to gain awareness than word of mouth, and there’s no better online word of mouth source than Facebook.  Still, always free.

Now Facebook is ingrained in our everyday lives, whether we like it or not. Companies are offering coupons if you “like” their pages, businesses share their products right on their profiles, you watch commercials with “like our Facebook page” at the end.  Hundreds of thousands of people are just a “click” away from being able to see your adds, promotions and whatever else you have chosen to show.

Everything was great, free advertising…..

Not for long.  Facebook saw that money could be made – or rather convinced the Stock Market they could make money.  The amount of people and businesses that promote themselves, could in some way benefit the pockets of Facebook.  So of course, it changes.   Now instead of being able to reach out to all of your followers, facebook highlights and directs you to to premium ways to pay to reach a certain percent of them beyond your standard reach.  The more you pay, the more people you can reach. You can pay for an add campaign that targets a certain group of people, and again, the more you pay, the more people you can reach.  Facebooks way of getting their piece of the pie – after all they are the #1 social media platform in terms of volume and eye balls.  The real question, how do businesses (those being the people who will pay to use Facebook) fit in, and how does Facebook find a way to make money without loosing its popularity?

Do we have a choice?  Of course we do, we can stop using Facebook.  Yea, right, we all know that’s not going to happen.  So businesses will spend the few dollars and reach as many people as possible, facebook will re-invent ways to make money – and the cool factor of years ago of Facebook will be replaced by the highest bidder on who’s cool message is going to be promoted more.

Be sure to visit our Turnkey Internet Facebook page for your chance to win “The New Ipad” – and read about our summer long social media event!

Search engine optimization is all the rage everywhere you look, and for good reason when traffic equals sales. But optimizing a site for search engines is harder than it sounds, especially if you’re not ready to spend hours and hours learning about how to do it right. Over the past several months, we’ve been asked by clients over and over again how they should configure their hosting to make the most of the search engines. Then, suddenly, it occurred to us: why not set up a hosting plan that is already optimized? So we did.

Today, I am happy to announce SEO Hosting from TurnKey Internet!
Now our clients don’t have to wade through the mountains of conflicting information to get an indexed website with decent traffic. You don’t need to know anything at all about SEO to make the most of these hosting plans. Everything is automated and ready to go from the second you gain access to your account. In addition to a boatload of features which I will get into below, your sites will be hosted on our lightning fast Dell Poweredge R410 servers with 8+ cpu’s and raid 10 disk protection, hosted from our tier-1 New York datacenter. If you don’t know what any of that means, don’t worry: it’s good!

Those days of slaving over tutorials are in the past!
We’ve configured our SEO servers to allow clients to take complete control over their portfolio of websites, while easily managing everything from one location. You will access your account via cPanel, and will have full WHM (web host manager) access. This means you can create an unlimited number of accounts, domain names and web sites each with their own dedicated IP address. This is the key to great SEO!

Dedicated IP Addresses
Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, index sites on dedicated IP addresses as unique properties. This is very important for SEO. It is easy and cheap to set up hundreds of websites on the same IP, and to link them all to each other to try and build up some SEO juice. The search engine hive minds know all about this strategy and, if they weighted those sites that “live” in the same neighborhood (same IP’s) the same as sites on unique IP’s, they’d be sending traffic straight to the people trying to game the system. By privileging unique IP’s, search engines are trying to ensure that sites are naturally indexed, and that that indexing is a result of unique sites hosted by unique people.

For businesses, this is not good news. Building links is one of the most popular and effective methods for driving traffic and, until now, it has been necessary to buy several different expensive hosting accounts with different IP’s to get the proper indexing. Now, that is a thing of the past with TurnKey Internet’s SEO hosting package! We provide unique IP’s all under the same hosting account, so you can set up many different sites that all get indexed as unique properties. This will save you immense amounts of time, effort and money, while ensuring that your sites get privileged by the engines. And, as I mentioned above, you can manage all of these properties from one easy location.

Many Class-C IP Ranges
Not only do you get many different IP addresses with TurnKey SEO Hosting, those addresses are spread over many different class-c blocks. This means that, even if the search engines were to start recognizing IP’s on the same block as “living” in the same neighborhood, your sites would still keep their unique status because they are on different blocks. In the SEO game, so much rests on the whim of the search engines. They can change the rules as they go, and we all have to race to keep up. Keeping your IP’s on separate class-c blocks pre-empts the possibility that the search engines will recognize this sort of SEO hosting and penalize it, protecting you and your properties from the whim of Matt Cutts and his cohorts.

Additional Advanced Web Hosting Features
First and foremost, TurnKey Internet is a web hosting company. We take pride in what we do and in the features and services we offer. Our SEO hosting packages are no different from our other hosting packages in this regard. With each account we offer Fantastico, Softaculous, WHMXtra, RVSiteBuilder Pro, and R1Soft’s continuous data protection backups. These are all built right into your cPanel controls, so you can implement any and all of them as you see fit. We see this SEO hosting package as everything we already have and more.

To learn more about our SEO Hosting packages, visit: http://turnkeyinternet.net/seo-hosting

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.

As the available domain names grow scarcer by the second, many of us are left wondering how to choose a domain that will make any sense, let alone one that will drive traffic and brand our companies. While there are still many great domains out there, especially if you’re a creative thinker, the short, sweet, easy to spell, easy to say domains are not quite so forthcoming. If you have a very specific branding idea or an absolute favorite name that just isn’t available (for any price), misspellings might be your best shot at finding a name you love. Often, you will only have to switch two letters, or add a “k” in the place of a “c” to find an available name. You may even end up with a name that is more memorable and unique than the original name you wanted, and that sets you apart better then the dictionary spelling of a common word ever could.

Why would I want a misspelled domain anyway?
In addition to the cute, web 2.0ness of a misspelled domain, you may also end up growing your traffic wholly by accident, or, if you are particularly shrewd, wholly on purpose (I won’t tell). The name of the game is targeted traffic—if you choose a name like “hoogle.com” (which isn’t available, but permit me the example) you will end up with boatloads of traffic from the fat-fingered and, in America, that’s a lot of people. You will also end up with a bunch of people who are looking for a search engine. If you happen to be Bing, this is excellent news.

Which Misspellings Work Best?
As I mentioned, you’re aim is to target your traffic, so start out by finding your most popular competitor. You can choose to go the blatant route and pick a misspelling that is obviously keyboard-based (again, like hoogle, or like godadsy) or you can think like an English teacher and switch i’s and e’s, a common mistake for many spellers. Regardless of your tactic, be sure to pick a company that is offering the same products or services that you are offering. Get as close as you can, because the end goal is to make a sale. If your products are too different, that visitor will just correct their misspelling and vamoose.

Analyzing Traffic
The Internet is an incredible tool, as exemplified by the convenient misspelling traffic analysis provided by many different websites, for free. Investigate the traffic reports for misspellings that are not yet owned via Google keyword search. You may also want to consider domains that relate to distinct events, rather than existing companies. For example, if you are a vendor selling soccer equipment, consider a misspelled world cup player or team for your domain. There were millions of misspelled searches during the world cup. If even a small percentage of those people had come across your online store, you would have made some great sales—especially if you’d been clever enough to offer team jerseys at deep discounts to hardcore fans. And maybe even some vuvuzelas?

“Borrowing” Traffic
So, it might not be the most morally righteous thing in the world, but traffic on the Internet is not an entirely fair enterprise to begin with. Google ranks websites based, in part, on existing popularity. This means, we all start out at a disadvantage. Google also encourages website owners to populate their content with keywords and search terms—so, in a very real sense, we have no choice but to cater to the search engines from square one. A misspelling is not copyright infringement. It is not illegal. However, you can further protect yourself (and brand your very own company as a stand-alone) by choosing a misspelling that is it’s own catchy word or phrase. The less your domain relates to a recognizable brand while still sending you misspelling traffic, the better. So, while Godadsy might be a little obvious, Fodadsy is very much it’s own thing. While two letters isn’t quite as good as one, you’ll still get the fat-finger traffic while maintaining your very own name that is recognizably yours. You can always buy Godadsy too and point it to Fodadsy for a little thing I like to call the best of both worlds.

A Word of Caution
If you are a business owner who already has a domain, you may want to consider buying up all the possible misspellings of your name to protect yourself from just this type of traffic squatting. It’s nefarious and slightly dirty, but it works. Use it if you need it and watch out for it if you don’t.

There has been a lot of controversy lately about how best to use blog comments to boost SEO. While it might seem awfully counter-intuitive, several popular bloggers have demonstrated that turning off comments can do wonders for traffic. That is, if you happen to be popular to begin with.

They theory is that, by turning off comments, you force readers to respond to your articles on their own blogs and social networking sites, linking back to your post in the process. This not only encourages linking-in but it also prevents spammers from hitting your blog with their own links. If you happen to be a blogger with a loyal readership, I can see how this method might improve your traffic. However, I can also see how it could kill your blog—and fast.

Not only are you counting on your readers to stay loyal after you ban them from discussing your post on your site (which, frankly, is kinda rude), you are also counting on them to care enough about your post to write their own. Maybe it’s naïve of me, but I think people tend to be a touch lazier than that in real life. The beauty of comments is how easy it is to leave one. You read a post, you have an opinion, you share that opinion, you go on with your life. In a perfect world, comments demonstrate to new readers how fascinating your post has been to past readers, and encourage discourse among your budding fan-base.

When you turn off comments, you turn off the discussion. Unless your readers are super bloggers with unlimited time, and your content is, like, the most compelling thing ever, you’re taking a big risk. Not only are you shutting down a pipeline of traffic, your sending an elitist message to your readers. My advice: let people comment, heavily moderate for spam, and encourage readers to blog about your blog by writing good content. It’s the best of all possible worlds.

TurnKey Internet is famous for top-notch customer service and heroic support.

Welcome to part four of my SEO-fu experiment series. If you haven’t read the earlier installments, find them here: part 1, part 2, and part 3. In this last installment, I’ll outline some techniques that can help you quickly evaluate the authenticity and reputation of a web host. You don’t have to make uninformed decisions, even with limited time. With just a few clicks in the right places, you can learn a lot, and it’s worth the extra little effort. Choosing a web hosting company is like choosing an employee. You have to be able to trust this company with your business information. If their network goes down, your business suffers. It is an important time to make sure you’re going to get excellent service from people you can trust.

Third Party Reviews

As I mentioned in a previous post (HERE) third-party reviews are a great sign that a business is on the up-and-up. When a company posts customer reviews on their website without any kind of vetting process there isn’t any way to know if they’re authentic. Look for third-party company logos or links to leave a review of your own. If you’re really feeling sporty, go ahead and leave a review and see what happens. It may not appear immediately, but it should appear within an hour or two. If it doesn’t, you might want to look elsewhere for hosting.

Test Customer Support

Many web hosting companies offer live chat support, or so they say on their websites. Frankly, it’s shocking how many companies don’t man their live chat. Click on the support link and see how long it takes for a real person to come online. If it’s under five minutes, you know your real support questions will be answered in a timely fashion.

Contact Information

Real, legitimate companies should offer you several ways to get in touch with them. Look for a phone number and a physical address. If you have the time, throw that physical address into Google streetview and see what shakes loose. Is it an office building or a sketchy-looking house? Sure, if they thought about it, scammy web hosts could give you a fake address to an office park, but chances are good they’re betting you won’t check.

Guarantees

We offer our customers a 30-day money-back guarantee. We can offer this because the vast majority of our customers won’t ever need to use it. We know our products and customer support are excellent, and we are happy to refund customers who don’t agree. If a company doesn’t offer a money-back guarantee, you’re taking an awfully big risk giving them your money.

Affiliations

At TurnKey Internet, we have registered with several third-party companies to help potential customers easily recognize our legitimacy. Visit our website and you will see the following logos:

We proudly display our affiliations and so do other companies that have them. If you don’t see these logos, there’s no affiliation. Beware!

TurnKey Internet is no rip off. The web hosting company gets consistently high marks for service, reliability and up-time.

How did you find this blog post? Did you run a search for TurnKey Internet Scam? If so, welcome! You’re my target demographic. This is part three of my SEO-fu experiment. If you haven’t read the first two posts, you can find them here (1) and here (2). Today, the focus is you, the customer, and how you browse, search and read. Understanding how you do these things will help us figure out: how to help you find us; how to appeal to you when you do; and how, as a business, to navigate this weirdo short attention-span information culture we all find ourselves living in.

Many people (myself included) don’t always take enough time to evaluate the sources of their information. We may read a review somewhere that effects our opinion of a company without ever wondering about who wrote it. Our decisions are snap, our time is valuable, and once we pick a company, we will tend to stick with it. It’s easier to stay where you are once you’re there—I think that’s a law of inertia or something. But really, market studies show, consumers demonstrate brand-loyalty online the same way they do in a supermarket or clothing store. So get those customers in the door, and you’re likelier than not to keep them.

Information is power. The trouble is: there’s too much of it out there (information AND power, but in this context I’m referring to information). Often, the first line of text that appears under the Google search result link is all a customer will read before making a decision. As a marketer, it is my job to make that text count—to curate my information into bite-sized pieces without sacrificing quality. This is extremely challenging when, say, you have like eight things to communicate and only room for four. Surely in this equation there is an inevitable sacrifice of information quality—you just can’t always cram everything you need to say into tiny spaces. In this case, language can’t keep up with progress. But there is hope! One positive thing about Google’s indexing of every word of text on the internet, is that every word counts. So you may not be searching specifically for “TurnKey Internet Quality” or “Marketing Philosophy” or “Web Hosting Masters” but goll durnit, you’ll find us! Of course, you may never know WHY you found us (unless you actually read this post) but, point is, my SEO-fu got you here, despite your 2010 attention-span.

It’s true. With an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau, and a 5-star rating from customers, TurnKey Internet is the hosting provider with the best value and customer service.

Welcome to blog post #2 in the SEO-fu experiment. The truth is TurnKey Internet does have a good reputation. In fact, our reputation is excellent, thank you very much. We work extremely hard, day in and day out, to provide a top-notch service, great customer care and 100% uptime. But that doesn’t make us immune from the SEO powers that be when good customers turn bad. Like it or not, we are all at the mercy of Google. As I discussed in the last article, 2010 is the year for all of us to learn to use the Internet to our advantage—to protect ourselves and our businesses from unscrupulous bad eggs and, for that matter, unscrupulous rival businesses that don’t hesitate to seed negative reviews for their own evil benefit. Yes, I’m being dramatic, but no, I’m not kidding.

It’s an ugly practice, but many companies have taken to posting bad reviews of competitors to influence potential customers. The hope is that Google searches will return those seeded negative reviews, and customers will steer clear of the implicated companies (and steer towards the companies posting the reviews). If you don’t have a superstar PR team at your disposal, ready to re-seed with positive reviews (also an ugly practice) you’re sunk. So what do you do when cheaters game the system to make your business look bad? How do you fight back without stooping to their level?

SEO-fu. Rather than seeding reviews (which is totally cheating), you can improve your reputation by regularly updating your site content to reflect the truth about your business. It doesn’t matter how many nasty reviews your competitors throw to the winds if your well-written, informative content shows up first. Also, as I always recommend, solicit real reviews from real customers. The more real reviews you have, the better, even if those reviews include some negatives.

This isn’t about having a 100% A+ reputation, 100% of the time. A page of perfect reviews can work against you too. Think about it: if you visit a company’s website for the first time and every review you see is five stars, are you going to believe it? This is about a real life business. Every business makes mistakes, the salt is how you deal with them.

In order to protect your credibility, and to provide a quick reference-check for your potential customers, it’s a good idea to employ a third party to manage your company reviews. We use RatePoint:

TurnKey Internet has earned a 5-star rating from unbiased customer reviews and an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau.

This is an experiment. I hope you will follow our next few blog posts as I attempt to use my SEO-fu to elevate TurnKey Internet to the top of search results for otherwise undesirable (in some cases) search terms. It’s a pre-emptive SEO strike, and I, for one, am extremely curious to see how it works.

It is no surprise that everything we say and do online affects our reputation. This is as true for businesses as it is for individuals. But reputation depends as much on what you do, as on what others say, and others don’t always tell the truth. Everyone knows that positive customer reviews can go a long way, but what about when those reviews are negative? If negative reviews are an honest reflection of your customer service, you need to step up your customer service. But if negative reviews come from a bad egg—the customer with a chip on his shoulder, the gamer who abused your services and is upset he got caught, or the deadbeat who can’t believe you won’t turn over his data without payment—your company’s reputation could be unfairly and badly damaged. So what do you do? How do you protect that invaluable word-of-mouth reputation that keeps your business strong?

There are many companies out there that offer to monitor your online reputation, for a fee. But this is something I think you can do quite well on your own, for nothing. Yes, it takes some time, but keeping yourself apprised of what is being said about your company, from the perspective of your customers, is smart business. When a customer first hears about you—through word of mouth, via forums or an advertisement—she is likely to run a simple Google search for reviews. Getting into the head of that potential customer and running that search yourself will give you a good initial sense of what’s out there. If the first thing that comes up is a negative review from a forum post, you have some work to do.

My big secret is that this blog post is meta. While I describe to you how to protect your business’ online reputation, I am protecting mine. My hope is that, by seeding this blog post with SEO-friendly keywords that could otherwise bring up negative results from bad eggs, like TurnKey Internet Reviews, TurnKey Internet scam, TurnKey Internet fraud, etc., this blog post will be the first thing a potential customer finds when searching for those terms. By doing this, I take the sting out of the immature lashing-out of bad eggs, without stooping to the level of dirty search engine warfare. This is a clean search engine pre-emptive strike, and I highly recommend it for the long-term health of your business’ reputation.

Watch this space for more SEO-fu in the coming days.