Writing Tips

Writing Tips

I recently attended a local Chamber of Commerce afterhours party where one of the discussions turned to Social Media Marketing as a business tool. An interesting point was made that prospects, cross-industry, aren’t as open to direct sales calls, but would rather search the Internet for information related to potential purchases for everything from shoes, cars, homes and restaurants - to web hosting.

Do you write content for your website or blog?

It only follows that if prospects (for your products or services) are keying in search queries to find relevant  information on the Internet, that you should be there. I guarantee this – your competition WILL be there.

Writer’s Block

Don’t know what to write about? Select anything you’re passionate about. What do you know about your product or service that could be beneficial to the reader? Very often, if you just start jotting down notes throughout the day, some topic will jump off the paper and hit you square in the middle of your forehead.  The real key here to just do it. There are NO excuses for NOT writing. All of us lead very busy lives, bombarded with demands on our time and energy.

Providing information relevant to the search query is paramount

Business Class Shared Web Hosting Search Query

Keep your paragraphs short 

I realize you’re excited about your stuff, but loooooooooooong paragraphs turn OFF most surfers. Break your content down into specific thoughts or steps, with one paragraph leading or flowing to the next. Try to compile some fashion of chronological order. Hopping around will only confuse the reader and cause them to lose focus.

Touch as many of the five senses as possible

Of the five senses, I mean sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing.  Obliviously, these won’t all apply to each article, but through a combination of graphics, and painting pictures with words, you’ll create mental images that will reinforce your call-to-action.

End with a recommendation

Recommendations can be tips, cautions or proposed solutions. Prospects are searching the Web to alleviate some pain or issue, grow their company or enhance their lives. Try to stay positive.

To your success

- Steve

Click Fraud

What is click fraud? I just did a quick Bing search for click fraud which returned over 17 million results. It’s actually a cybercrime dating back years that occurs with PPC advertising when a spammer or some program or script imitates a real user clicking on an ad for the purpose of generating an actual charge per click, even though they have no interest in the target of that ad’s link.

Have you ever noticed in your PPC advertising campaigns, the same IP address clicking on your ad, spending one or two seconds on your website and then leaving? And coming back again within seconds? If you’re spending $3.00 per click, that adds up quickly.

Click fraud has been on the rise lately, with third and fourth quarter ’09 seeing huge jumps. This is generally attributed to very sophisticated rings of click fraudsters leveraging bots to automate and coordinate high volume traffic from click fraud rings.

What’s the Motivation?

One motivator is competitor click fraud.  The motivation of the perpetrator here is to simply obtain higher-placed ad positions for lower bid amounts by depleting the advertising budget of their competitors. Other motivators of click fraud include financial gain, revenge and blackmail.

What can you do to detect and prevent click fraud?

This starts with being proactive – measuring your advertising results, analyzing trends in click volumes with or without accompanying increases in your website’s traffic or sales.

There are also anti-fraud softwares to protect your advertising dollars. A quick check on Google for FREE click fraud software returned over 1.3 million results.

Confidence

I’ve always heard that you need to believe in yourself first, if you expect others to believe in you. Scott Ginsberg, aka “The Nametag Guy” said, “When you believe in your value, they believe in your value.” I believe that self-confident people have qualities that everyone admires. When you’re self-confident, you inspire confidence in others, in turn finding success. On the other hand, low self confidence manifests negativity and self destruction.

Competence

Without an underlying competence, I don’t believe you can really achieve true self confidence. Rather, you lean to a sort of shallow overconfidence. Competency needs to be tied closely to reality. The reality is that you can’t be everything to everybody, and you can’t be an expert without logging appreciable hours learning your industry, and specifically your job, in achievable steps.

Perception

Confidence is a perceived value. How do your clients and prospects perceive you or your company’s products, services, ability to deliver, customer support and so on, as a solution that will ease their pain, or help their bottom line? Your confidence inspires the confidence of your clients and prospects, either positively or negatively.

Visualization

When I attended Victory 2000, one of the things I took away from Tony Robbins presentation was how dynamic “visualization” can be as a weapon in your arsenal to achieving success. Visualizing yourself as self confident will do wonders for your career. Think positive. Think – I can do it.

My Recommendation

To become truly self confident in a way that leads to ongoing success, first set some achievable goals – small battles that you can win, then build on those. Then celebrate your victories. Hold your head high and answer questions with assurance, and those you can’t answer, admit straight up that you can’t, but promise to get them an answer (and then do it).

To your success

- Steve

Featuring Fantastico De Luxe

Fantastico De Luxe is an autoinstaller for cPanel servers, automating and simplifying the process of installing lots of great scripts like WordPress and phpBB (see extended list below). The installation procedures take seconds and can be performed by novices without the need for setting up MySQL databases, importing structure, chmoding files and without the need of other tasks usually associated with installations. Fantastico De Luxe is accessed via the cPanel control panel and requires one MySQL database per installation.

The following scripts can be autoinstalled using Fantastico De Luxe

Blogs:

b2evolution (3.3.1-stable) (website)
Nucleus (3.50) (website)
WordPress (2.8.6) (website)

Portals/CMS:

Drupal (6.14) (website)
Geeklog (1.5.1) (website)
Joomla 1.5 (1.5.15) (website)
Joomla (1.0.15) (website)
Mambo Open Source (4.6.5) (website)
phpWCMS (1.4.2 r345) (website)
phpWebSite (1.6.3) (website)
Siteframe (3.2.3) (website)
TikiWiki CMS/Groupware (3.3) (website)
Typo3 (4.2.10) (website)
Xoops (2.3.3b) (website)
Zikula (1.1.1) (visit site)

Customer Support:

Crafty Syntax Live Help (2.16.3) (website)
Help Center Live (2.1.7) (website)
osTicket (1.6 RC5) (website)
PerlDesk (4.012.2) (Commercial, needs license) (website)
Support Logic Helpdesk (1.2) (website)

Discussion Boards:

phpBB (3.0.5) (website)
SMF (1.1.10) (website)

**E-Commerce:

(These scripts only available with NPSIS Ecommerce Packages)

CubeCart (3.0.17) (website)
OS Commerce (2.2 Release Candidate 2a + buySAFE) (website)
Zen Cart (1.3.8a [Patched]) (website)

FAQ:

FAQMasterFlex (1.51) (website)

Hosting Billing:

AccountLab Plus (2.8 r14) (Commercial, needs license) (website)
phpCOIN (1.6.4) (website)

Image Galleries:

Mailing List:

PHPlist (2.10.10) (website)

Polls and Surveys:

Advanced Poll (2.03) (website)
LimeSurvey (1.85+) (website)
phpESP (2.1.1) (website)

Project Management:

PHProjekt (5.2.2) (website)
dotProject (2.1.2) (website)

Wiki:

PhpWiki (1.2.11) (website) 

Fantastico De Luxe

Other Scripts:

Dew-NewPHPLinks (2.0.1.0b SEF w/Thumbshots) (website)
Moodle (1.9.6) (website)
Open-Realty (2.5.8) (website)
OpenX (2.8.1) (website)
PHPauction (3.2) (website)
phpFormGenerator (2.09c) (website)
WebCalendar (1.2.0) (website)

For more information, please visit http://www.npsis.com.
**NOTE: NPSIS does not provide any support for these applications. You must use the included website links and the vendor support forums. NPS is not associated with these vendors and cannot provide application support. The fantastico scripts only provide auto-installation of these applications.

Language Translation

One of the great divides across cultures has always been the language barrier. Not only do I not know how to speak, read or write other languages, often I cannot tell what the language is just by looking at it – for example, Korean, Chinese or Japanese. I received an email in Chinese? today and went to my normal online translator to see what it said, but Chinese to English wasn’t one of their options.

Auto Detection

I’m thinking, what if this isn’t Chinese? Do I try multiple translators until one works, or is there a translator out there that simplifies this whole messy process? To my amazement, I found Bing Translator which has an auto detect option. Wow! I plugged in my email message and was able to instantly read Chinese spam in English. LOL.

Online Translators

Google’s language tools currently offers the following interface languages:

Yahoo also has it’s own language translator named Babel Fish, allowing you to translate a block of text up to 150 words.

Of course, there are variations of translators, like The Dialectizer. The Dialector can translate web pages and text into Redneck, Jive, Cockney, Elmer Fudd, Swedish Chef, Moron, Pig Latin, or Hacker. I just tried Redneck on our site and it’s hilarious.

Do Follow or No Follow Attribute

By default, WordPress blogs use a rel=”nofollow” attribute, so when you read of Do Follow Blogs, these are blogs that have used a plugin that removes the nofollow attribute. Comments then that contain links back to the poster count as backlinks for their sites.

To the Search Engines

These links then are simply links. It’s up to the search engines rather to follow that link and pass value to the poster’s site. There is no “do follow” attribute to instruct a search engine that these links must be followed or assigned value. Why DoFollow versus NoFollow? The NoFollow attribute was introduced in 2005 to discourage comment spam.

Quality Backlinks

To a large segment of SEO experts, a quality backlink is a one way incoming link from a relevant (respected) site with higher PR. It’s a link you earn via hosting a great site that delivers useful information (the stuff that people want to link to).  These are also known as natural (real) links. The theory is that more natural links help boost your site’s popularity and Page Rank.

A Word of Caution

Blog spam is rampant, especially for Do Follow blogs. There are some “do follow” plugins that allow you to set how many comments a visitor needs to leave (with the same domain URL and/or email address) before their comment link will follow. The DoFollow Plugin for WordPress options: 

My Recommendation

• Use a Do Follow plugin for your WordPress blog if you enable comments
• Do not add the “NoFollow” attribute to inbound links.
• Only add the ‘NoFollow” attribute to outbound links in widgets like Subscribe or Bookmark Me.

To your success

- Steve

I am a HUGE fan of cutting edge technology, so when I stumbled across this video http://www.wimp.com/sixthtechnology posted on a web hosting forum, I had to watch it – from start to finish (approximately 15 minutes).

Why?

Time after time, my jaw dropped as new innovations were presented, linking objects in the physical world to the digital world. The video started with a simple upgrade to a two roller mouse, enabling the user to mimic finger movements on his monitor. And it kept getting better – taking pictures by framing objects with his hands, making outbound calls via a projected keypad on his palm, projecting live weather information onto his newspaper map, and on and on.

I’m Excited

The future is here today, and Hostirian is proud to share its contribution to innovative technology with services that compliment the delivery of new ideas and broad vision.  Our infrastructure, staff and delivery systems are solution oriented – to solve today’s issues AND provide for dynamic growth.

Anti-Virus

“Microsoft Security Essentials provides real-time protection for your home PC that guards against viruses, spyware, and other malicious software.

Microsoft Security Essentials is a free* download from Microsoft that is simple to install, easy to use, and always kept up to date so you can be assured your PC is protected by the latest technology. It’s easy to tell if your PC is secure — when you’re green, you’re good. It’s that simple.

Microsoft Security Essentials runs quietly and efficiently in the background so that you are free to use your Windows-based PC the way you want—without interruptions or long computer wait times.”

I wonder how this offering from Microsoft will impact paid anti-virus software vendors? I know I’ll be installing this on all of my personal computers this evening.

I just read a post on Seth’s Blog about embracing lifetime values, and was immediately able to relate this to any number of industries. When I was selling security systems in Miami, my employer had years of data highlighting the lifetime value of every new client. Think about it – who changes alarm vendors once the system is installed? Their monitoring ran $24.95/month, but clients routinely stayed with them from six to seven years. Value adds were additional motion sensors, control panels, remotes and door contacts. 

I wonder how many sales or support reps understand the real value of each shared, dedicated or colo sale, and how that drives the business as a whole? In the post, the lifetime value of new cell phone clients (on two year contracts) was estimated at $2000.00. I’ve been with my cell phone provider since 1997, and have grown from one to four phones.

Lifetime Value

Is there a lifetime value in web hosting? 

What do you estimate the lifetime value is (on average) of a month-to-month dedicated server client? What about the new 2U colo client, who someday grows to a full rack, or a cage?

Could you increase your client’s lifetime value?

The answer is, absolutely – under promise and over deliver. Empower your staff, from sales reps to the billing and support departments, to go that extra one percent in every contact they have with each client. Your goal should be to exceed your client’s expectations. This is the stuff of long term business relationships.

Bottom Line

If one of your clients left in a huff, would you surmise, ‘there goes a $20 client’ or ‘we just let $2000 walk out the door.’

Steve-Hostirian was selected as the Most Valuable Member of the Month (October 2009) by the web hosting forum, Hosting Discussion. This marks the sixth time Steve has been honored with this Award since last March.

Web hosting forums like Hosting Discussion are online communities devoted to sharing knowledgebase, where members openly discuss issues, requests and opportunities with other providers and prospects in a variety of topics such as promotion & marketing, business & legal issues, VPS plans, dedicated servers, colocation, domain names, website design, hardware & server configuration, software & control panels, billing & accounting, customer service & support and legal issues.

Hostirian participates in these forums to stay abreast of the industry, and to provide leadership by example in sharing the wealth of knowledge we’ve obtained over our years in helping businesses just like yours, with hosting solutions for small and medium sized businesses.

From Hosting Discussion

“As much as Steve-Hostirian dominated the discussion (deservedly becoming the month’s winner once again) during the month of October 2009 (why is it not surprising? ), I was left very happy with the month’s results. Why? Because not only did we see some good posting coming from HD’s loyal contributing members such as IkY0294 and rumsfo, I also saw the roots of new competition getting through the door!

If we go back and review the essential idea behind this competition – it is to provide and share valuable information and be as helpful to other members as possible. At the end of each month we fairly celebrate and award one of its most active members. Sounds simple enough. However, on the grand scale of things, this competition also allows us to take note of members who participate in creating an incredible amount of new and refreshing knowledge. And that’s what making me so excited.”

Steve-Hostirian contributes to the Hostirian blog under the username of Steve’s Insight. He brings to Hostirian’s blog and web hosting forums – industry experience dating back to the days of 300 baud acoustic couplers and BBS’s.

Some of the topics Steve-Hostirian addressed in October were website design tips, marketing, selling on emotion and attention to detail.