As a follow up to that article, I’d like to discuss a specific topic related to website development that has a direct impact on cost: customized vs. custom development. While they sound similar, each offers a radically different approach to development that is important to understand in order to control a project’s cost.

Customized Websites

Customized web development almost always includes a software foundation such as WordPress, Drupal or some other open source or commercial content management system.  These systems often include themes or templates which give the site its structure and general appearance as well as plugins or add-ons that supplement the system’s capabilities. We’ll refer to a CMS, themes and plugins collectively as a framework.

As an example, the framework for this site includes WordPress as the CMS, Genesis as the theme and a variety of plug-ins that provide supplemental functionality such as social widgets and forms.

Using a framework means a developer does not have to start from scratch. Typically, a framework is preconfigured with a limited set of options. In creating  the design, for example, a developer can simply point, click and select a series of options that renders a layout and design in very little time. The developer can then focus almost exclusively on content. As the project nears its end, the developer can have reasonable assurance of functionality because popular frameworks are rigorously tested before being released.

By fundamentally decreasing the amount of labor in each step of production, the cost of developing a single website can be greatly reduced. The trade-off is that the customer needs to be comfortable with the constraints offered by a framework.

Custom Websites

A custom web site at its most complex is built from scratch. However, this is usually only in very specific cases.

Many times, custom websites are built on top of a framework. Custom code, markup, style sheets or design supplement the framework features with ones that do not exist. Developers can even opt to write their own themes or modify the core software of the CMS.

While there is no blueprint for when to go customized versus custom, the most reasonable reason to go with custom development is when a business need cannot be achieved with preexisting frameworks.

Here are a few examples for selecting custom development:

1. The layout or design requirements of a project are such that no preconfigured theme can produce the desired look or interactivity.
2. Interactive or technology elements of a framework do not provide the needed functionality.
3. The project must interact with third party systems and no commercial of software plugins allow this functionality.
4. The functionality of the CMS must be modified to adapt to specialized content.

Why Choose A Custom Vs Customized Site?

The two most popular reasons for opting for customized development are speed and cost. A customized site can be produced quickly and inexpensively but the project must conform to the limitations of the framework.

Custom development includes increased labor and cost, but also greater freedom. A consequence of custom development is that the framework may become incompatible with future feature and security updates offered by the developer of the framework, so long-term maintenance costs may also be increased.

What Should You Know?

Most developers understand these differences, but don’t explain them well. If a developer proposes a budget based on a customized project, this presents a challenge if the requirements exceed the scope of the project and the customer needs to come up with more cash.

A developer should always explain the limits of the project scope. Conversely, companies hiring a developer should ask up front what the development methodology will be. If the customer is expecting to have fine control of the layout and design, but the developer is expecting simply to click on a few widgets in the CMS administration tool, then each side is cultivating a recipe for disaster.

A Quick (But Relevant) Story.

Many years ago, a prospect approached my company with a web site project. Based on our discovery, the project was clearly a custom project. Our proposal included building a custom theme, integrating existing plugins and writing custom code to meet specific business needs.

The prospect received a bid higher than ours and one that was about 40% lower than ours. They picked the lower cost bid. Because the low bidder and my company both proposed using WordPress as a framework, the prospect assumed parity in our proposals despite our exposition.

The developer went to work, built a site based on WordPress using a commercial theme and plugins. While some of the required functionality was implemented, much of it was not nor could not be without custom work. The developer had to go back to the prospect to ask for more money, but had to restart the project because the work that had been competed could not be retrofitted to meet the customer’s needs.

In the end, the developer abandoned the project and was not heard from again. The customer spent more than we had proposed in additional fees and did not have the capital to start the project over with another developer.

So who is to blame here? Is this the developer’s fault for not explaining or knowing better? Is it the customer’s fault for not being diligent in their research?

That is a question for the ages and one that I’ll leave up to you in the comments.

Tell me your thoughts and experiences in the comments below and most importantly…

… thanks for visiting {Web.Search.Social}.

How To Run Your Business From The Ball Park

Written by Lou Bortone

Just in time for summer! Since I bet most of us would rather be hanging out with hot dogs and beach chairs than sitting at our desks, I thought this was a fun post. If you work online, you have a whole lot of freedom to work from just about anywhere, and Lou gives you a nice list of tools and apps that you can use from your mobile device to get your work done without anyone being the wiser. For me, one of the fun things about this post was getting to think up other useful tools to add to my own personalized “work from the beach” list. I’m partial to Skype these days, how about you? Check out the tools on this list then let me know which ones you would use or add!

Read the article at thefutureofink.com and follow Lou on Twitter @LouBortone

3 Ways To Keep Content Zombies From Eating Your Brains

Written by Sandra LeDuc

You know you can’t resist this title… and you know what Sandra is talking about when she says “content zombies”. Those are the blog posts, web pages and articles that read like someone’s high school term paper – the one they crammed 400 meaningless words into just so they could make it 500 words long. This post has some great tips for making sure that your content is relevant, readable and on target. While you’re there, amuse yourself with the Content Idea Generator (link in the post) and see if you come up with any fun titles for your next bit of content.

Read the article at portent.com and follow Sandra on Twitter @sandraleduc

Infographic: The Definitive Photo Size Guide For All Social Networks

Written by Jim Dougherty

This! I can’t say much about this post except go there, bookmark it and breathe a sigh of relief that you don’t have to figure this stuff out for yourself. Jim has shared the infographic to end all infographics right here. And you know you were just totally stressing out over that new, gigantic Google Plus cover photo, right? There are 7 social networks covered with dimensions for every conceivable configuration. I might even have to print and frame this one.

Find the infographic at leaderswest.com and follow Jim on Twitter @leaderswest

The Slow Death Of The Homepage

Written by Phillip Klien

I had to throw in at least one totally brain-busting post today. This one will get you rethinking your home page and giving some extra attention to the rest of your site. The problem with home pages is that we still consider them the entry point into our site. But as Phillip points out, that may not be the case. People can access our sites from any page so it’s high time we stopped treating our sites as a linear start-here experience and as a more holistic one – one in which a visitor may never actually see our home page at all! Read more for some great tips for turning your entire website into a branding and selling machine – not just your home page.

Read the article at econsultancy.com and follow Phillip on Twitter @pklien

4 Key Design Blunders That Can Turn People Off

Written by Ahmed Safwan

With four tips plus a bonus, Ahmed gives you five things you can get to work on right now. They’re not complicated but they can mean the difference between a site that draws people in and a site that sends them packing – to a competitor. I think my favorite line of the post comes toward the end with a warning we should all heed about our visitors: “Don’t piss them off.” Sometimes that’s all you need to remember! Read the rest of the post for some specific advice for improving your site design.

Read the article at basicblogtips.com and follow Ahmed on Twitter @ahmedsafwan10

Did you have a favorite this week? How about one of your own to share? Let me know in the comments!

Doesn’t it feel like you’ve barely got a handle on SEO period and now there’s this whole mobile-SEO thing, too??

(Hat tip to my friend Bob George, mobile expert, for pointing this out.)

In spite of my most recent rant, SEO is alive and well, and businesses rely on it every day for a major chunk of their traffic and revenue.

So what’s a person to do, especially a person who is not an SEO expert, who doesn’t have ten hours a day to study to become one and who just wants to run a business on the web?

The first thing you can do is stop obsessing about the big buzzwords like link building and domain authority and page rank.

Then you can check your basics to be sure you’ve got them in place. Use this guide to help!

1. Find Keywords

It’s the most fundamental bit of SEO yet so misunderstood and overlooked.

There’s really no such thing as “keyword density” anymore so get your brain unstuck from 2003 and forget trying to stick a keyword into every paragraph.

The important thing is that you use your keywords somewhere.

If you can get a keyword into the opening paragraph, the closing paragraph and somewhere in the middle of the page, you’re going to be ok.

If you overdo it, you’re not.

And you don’t need to use the exact same keyword every time. You can use similar phrases, singulars and plurals, all to good effect.

Try to stay away from single words – they’re usually too general. Instead of thinking literally of a keyword, think of key phrases and find those that relate most specifically to the content on your pages.

2. Check Your Page Titles

They only appear at the top of your browser tab and in search results. You can’t see them on your website, but search engines read and use them to help determine what your page is about.

If you want to please the search gods, make sure your titles include keywords relevant to your page. That means that each page has a different and unique title with keywords specific only to that page.

Stick to sentences or as close to sentences as you can get. Your title should not look like this:

Keyword, keyword, get your keyword, visit my site for keywords keywords

Using your keyword/phrase once is sufficient, and aim to put it as close to the beginning of the title as you can.

But pleasing the search gods is only half the battle in this case… you also want to appeal to real human beings who will see your title in their search results.

Consider that your page title may be the first, last and only impression someone has of your site. It has to be relevant, professional and interesting enough to make someone want to click.

And try to keep it to 60 characters. More than that and Google will truncate it, rendering the missing bit useless to searchers.

3. Check Your Page Descriptions

Much like titles, these don’t appear on your site and sometimes they don’t even show up in search results, either.

So why bother?

SEO is a bit like “death by a thousand paper cuts”. There is no “thing” you can do to improve your site’s search rank. There are a million billion trillion of them. That may even be an exact number.

Having a good description – one that’s written in a professional, relevant sentence using keywords just like your title does – is one of the myriad cues that search engines pick up to determine the quality and relevance of your site.

Aim for about 150 characters – that’s about all the space you’re going to get in search results before your description gets truncated.

The description should be a short sentence about your page that’s qualitatively different than the title – repetition isn’t useful and may appear spammy. Use a variation of your keyword/phrase so that when you read your title and description together, they present a pretty good idea of what someone can expect to find if they click the link to your site.

4. Optimize But Don’t Over-Optimize

There are so many little places you can put keywords, from headings to image ALT tags to links, that it’s easy to go overboard.

But when it comes to keyword optimization, there really is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

If you’re worried about overdoing it then consider using variations of your keywords and phrases instead. Or consider that maybe you really don’t need to repeat your keyword in every heading and every paragraph and every link.

5. Test Your Site Speed

This is a biggie. It’s relevant to your run-of-the-mill SEO. It’s vital to your mobile SEO. And it can mean the difference between someone visiting your site and losing a prospect when someone closes the browser window because your site took too long to load.

There are so many factors that contribute to the speed of a site that it would be impossible to cover them all here and a lot of them require some level of technical knowledge to manage.

But there are a few things you can do to speed things up and conversely, to avoid slowing them down.

Resize and compress your images. Never drop a 500 pixel-wide photo into your WordPress (or any) site and then manually resize it to 200 pixels. All those extra pixels create bigger, slower files that take longer to download. Crop/resize your photos and always “save for web” before you upload them.

Use a caching plugin. If you have a WordPress site, take advantage of one of the free options available. If you test your site’s speed before and after caching, you can see a tremendous speed boost.

Rethink your hosting environment. Some of a site’s speed has to do with the server it’s hosted on. If you’re having consistent slowdown issues with your site, it may not be your site at all. It might be worth a few extra dollars a month to upgrade to a better provider. Cheap hosting isn’t always cheap in the long run.

6. Pay Attention To Your URLs

This one is tricky because if you change your URLs after they have already been published and indexed, you’re going to end up with broken URLs in search results and that could do you more harm than good.

So my first suggestion would be: never change a URL unless there’s a really go reason to!

What’s a really good reason?

If you got a little keyword happy. A URL like mysite.com/keyword-keyword-anotherkeyword.html is going to look spammy. Keep them simple.

If the names are meaningless. Google specifies that you should avoid naming your pages things like “page.html”.

If your URLs are mixed-case. A rule of thumb for URLs is always use lowercase.

If you’ve got oddball characters. Question marks and even blank spaces should be eliminated wherever possible. This is a common mistake with WordPress sites when the permalinks aren’t changed to “friendly” links and still contain the dynamic string. Spaces can just wreak havoc so avoid them and uses hyphens between words instead.

If you think your URLs need to be changed, ask your developer about setting up a 301 redirect so that old broken links route to new good links without error.

Or else be sure to have a 404 error page (“page not found”) and then get yourself a Google Webmaster Tools account then get busy submitting your new links to Google along with a removal request for the old broken links.

7. Check Your Structure

One of the most overlooked yet most easily remedied problems for search engines and people alike is the “dump content and run” issue.

Putting together a good marketing site can be a lot of work. And so many times you’ll see one of those generic “services” pages where everything is crammed into a few paragraphs.

But unless you offer a service, then a service page isn’t enough.

On our company website we offer website development, hosting and social media management among other things. And each of those things has its own page, with its own descriptive copy and its own set of keywords. Now Google doesn’t have to guess: Is the page about websites? Or social media? Copywriting? Or something else?

Google likes structure, so take the time to consider the hierarchy of the pages on your site, how they relate to each other, and whether each page focuses on a single topic and idea. Unlike the headache that can come with changing URLs, you can move your navigation around as many times as you like with nary a problem.

Of course, try not to be so indecisive that you end up confusing your visitors with a different navigation scheme every time they visit…

Conversely, don’t split your content into multiple pages if all you’re doing is creating multiple pages with very similar content. On the flip side of “dump content and run” is the person who creates a whole lot of mini-pages just for the opportunity to use some more keywords.

These days, Google is too smart for that trick and they’ll tag you for duplicate content faster than you can speak the syllables.

8. Use Headings

Headings break your content up into easily scannable and digestible pieces for people. They also add structure and act as little markers for search engines.

When it comes to headings, it’s not good enough to swipe some text and make it bigger or smaller, bold or italics, and call it a heading.

You must use the actual HTML heading tags, which are h1, h2, h3 and so on.

Think of using headings as you might if you were creating an outline. Your primary heading should be an h1. Secondary subheadings an h2… and so on as you may need them to designate different “levels” of content.

Lots of people use the h tags just as a style element and that can be a problem. If you have a WordPress site, your theme probably came with a bunch of default h tags. And your h3 may be visually smaller than your h1, so what do you do? Wherever you want a big heading, you use an h3… and of course that’s usually the first heading you want on the page. Then you use h1s for the small headings somewhere in the middle.

Structurally, that’s backwards. Heading tags have nothing to do with the size of the font (although it may appear that way) and everything to do with the relative importance of the heading.

If you don’t know how to make your h tags look the way you want them to, get help from someone who does. Be sure that your h1 headings are the primary headings on your page and diminish from there.

Then use keywords and phrases appropriately in your headings to give them more or less importance. Remember not to overdo it!

9. Get A Sitemap

Not the one that’s a page on your site with links for someone to click through. I’m talking about an XML sitemap.

It’s basically a directory of pages for search engines to crawl.

How do you know if you have a sitemap? Type your URL into a browser and add /sitemap.xml onto the end of it.

It may look like a bunch of mumbo jumbo to you but it’s important for telling Google what pages exist and that you want indexed.

WordPress has plugins that you can use easily. Otherwise you will need to create an XML document that follows standard protocols. It’s a simple step but it’s important.

10. Get Your Technology In Order

If your site is still in Flash… get it out! Search engines cannot read or index the contents of Flash. Unless the Flash adds a necessary component to your visitor’s experience, consider eliminating it altogether even if it looks really, really cool.

Avoid excessive use of JavaScript – that’s often what makes your dropdown menus drop and your sliders slide. And it’s the technology behind a lot or WordPress plugins.

It does let you do some pretty cool stuff but it can also get in the way of ranking and sometimes it conflicts with itself in a way that breaks your site.

Beware video technology! With the rise in popularity of video, it may seem like a no-brainer to pop a few on your site but with Google’s recent stance on mobile, video that only works on a desktop will get you in trouble.

Remember that link I posted earlier about mobile ranking? If technology is preventing your site from working properly on mobile, your ranking will suffer. So test your tech out not only on desktops, but be sure it’s functional – and speedy – on mobile, too.

SEO can seem like a big, complicated mess. But not every business can throw their hands up and dismiss it then run off to post on Facebook.

So we have to work with search engines and feed them just the right amount of the good stuff so they’ll keep coming back for more and then share it with people who are searching for us.

Nothing I’ve listed here is complicated and implementing them won’t come back to bite you after the Panda 12.0 update. They’re all basic, fundamental pieces of SEO that you can try right now – or grab your nearest developer and let them know what you need!

Do you have any questions about what does or doesn’t make a good SEO practice? Any of this still sound like mumbo jumbo? Let me know and I’ll try to help!

Don’t fret!

You can still make small tweaks and incremental improvements to your website – the kind of improvements that can mean the difference between a high bounce rate or a lower one, a converting site or a doorstop, more page views and time-on-site or bored visitors.

Best yet, most of these can be done without a bit of technical know-how. If you’ve got a WordPress or other self-managed site, these will be a piece of cake. In fact, you can probably do them all even before you finish eating a slice of cake!

If you have no management capabilities you can still make some of these changes off-site, visualize the rest and have your developer take care of them in about half-a-slice-of-cake time.

1. Delete Something

Most websites can stand to lose a few parts. It could be that extra graphic. Those random links on the sidebar. The repetitive stuff stuck in the footer.

It’s easy to get fixated on a particular layout but overlook the contents of the layout. Especially when it comes to WordPress themes, many come standard with a header, footer and sidebar or two. Instead of showcasing your relevant and important content, you stuff content into whatever open holes wait to be filled.

It’s time to undo that.

Take five and look at your site. Could you eliminate the extra ad, the list of links, the floating photo, the repeated navigation?

If your contact info is at the top of the page, do you really need it again at the bottom? Do you need that sidebar at all?

It might not be easy – we get very attached to those little snippets and boxes! But ask yourself whether that snippet or content is vital to the experience on your website and to furthering your goals.

No? Delete it. White space never lost a sale. Clutter did.

2. Increase The Font Size

Try one point or pixel more. See how it feels.

I bet you could stand to increase the font size a bit, especially now that so many visitors are using much smaller mobile devices. More often than not I find myself using the browser’s zoom function because I just can’t read without squinting and slouching closer to my monitor.

If your body font size is anything below 14 pixels then your website is in crisis mode. And that can change depending on the font – some fonts look at lot smaller at 14 pixels than others.

Remember though, that there’s more than the body font. There are headings, too, and those should increase in size relative to the body content and to each other. Check yours for scale – body copy at 14 pixels and a Heading at 48 pixels is going to look completely out of balance.

3. Add Headings

Once you’ve designated h1s, 2s, 3s and so on… use them!

Visually, headings add structure to the page, segment important concepts into chunks your readers can scan and make the overall page more open, organized and readable.

Consider the headings on this page. What if I told you there would be ten tips in this post but didn’t number or designate them? I bet you’d be a lot less inclined to stick around.

Take a good look at your page content and figure out how you can create at least one subdivision on each page – however short it is – to improve the readability and organization.

4. Break Up Your Paragraphs

Remember in school your English teacher taught you to start and end a paragraph with a single thought? Whether that was one sentence or ten, each paragraph meant one idea.

Well, it’s time to forget what you know, and think web instead. Short paragraphs work.

Single sentence paragraphs work.

Even single word paragraphs work.

See?

If your paragraphs are more than 2-3 sentences, unless they’re super short sentences, reconsider and break them up. Shorter paragraphs are easier to scan. They’re easier to digest when our eyes are taxed by bright screens and plenty of distractions. And they’re a whole lot easier to read on mobile.

Better yet, aim for short and shorter paragraphs of unequal lengths. Three sentences here, one there. The asymmetry is more visually engaging – your readers’ eyes (and brains) are less likely to tire and the varying attention required will keep people reading longer than a monotonous string of the same.

5. Fix Your Page Titles

Take a look at the title of your home page – the one you see at the top of the browser and the one that searchers will see in search results. And yes, the one that matters to SEO.

Does it say “home”? Is it a string of keywords separated by the | symbol? Is it more than 60 characters?

If you said yes to any of those questions then do this now! Your page titles may be the only chance you have to make an impression on someone. Searchers who come across your site will click only if your title appeals to them and gives them reason to. That means it has to say something relevant to a complete stranger who only happens on your site by chance.

No pressure!

First of all, get rid of superfluous words like “home”, “about” or anything generic that means nothing to anybody.

Unless you’re an international phenomenon and you can trade on the value of your name, get it out of your title. Nobody cares about “John Smith’s home page”. But they may care if you’re a certified electrician serving all of northern New Jersey.

Secondly, get some keywords in there. It’s a small but important thing you can do not only to entice people to click your link in search results but to get your site into the search results in the first place.

Finally, shorten them up. You get about 60 characters of display space in Google before your title gets truncated. And while there’s no real harm in going long, if people can’t read it, what’s the point?

6. Add A Testimonial

I know, you’ve been meaning to do it forever.

It’s time!

Forget the full-on testimonials page and aim for a few dropped strategically into your content. One right before an important call to action. Another as a pull quote in between two paragraphs on your service page. A short one in a sidebar.

People may not bother to visit your testimonials page (long? boring? narcissistic?) but they’ll certainly browse through a few well-placed words of praise, especially as they relate to the content or product or service you’re offering.

7. Check Your Forms

Sometimes they stop working. Check yours periodically to be sure they perform as expected – that means they work for the user, are delivered properly to you and trigger any appropriate auto responses.

But beyond that, take a critical look at your form and see if…

• It has required fields and that if someone fails to complete one, an appropriate message is displayed.
• The user knows that the form has been submitted, by way of a thank you page or message that appears after they hit “submit”.
• The fields are relevant and don’t require too much or too little information.

And include an introduction. Plunking a few fields on a page doesn’t really say “Contact Me”. It says “I know how to build a form.”

Marketing doesn’t stop at your contact page. Tell people why they should contact you, tell them what to expect when they do and encourage them to do it.

8. Change The Color Of Your Opt In Box Or Call To Action

Sometimes you never know what will improve your website until you try it. Will a red box convert better than a blue one? A square button better than a round one?

Who knows! That’s why you’re going to take five minutes and change the color.

Look for a color that compliments but does not blend in with the color scheme of your site. Some studies have shown that red buttons convert better than green – which is easy to say unless the color scheme of your site is red and then that red button gets completely lost.

Any important call to action, including opt-ins, should be differentiated from the rest of the page and the easiest way for you to try improving your conversion rate right now is to try a new color. While you’re at it, try a new color and a bigger “buy now/sign up/hire me” font!

9. Punch Up Your Benefit Points

Whether you cranked out your content over a pizza all-nighter or spent months agonizing over every “of” and “the”, you can still probably find a way to improve.

Take a look at how well you’re focusing your content on your customer – not your skills, your experience, what you can do and how you do it.

Give you’re website a good old-fashioned WIIFM look. Make sure you’re spinning every sentence you can into a reason for your visitors to buy from you/hire you/trust your product or service.

Read the first sentence on your home page. Ask yourself, “Why does anyone care?” Answer it. Do that for every sentence on the page. Keep going.

10. Add A Photo

Surely you’ve got a new headshot? Some photos from a recent event? A bit more work for your portfolio?

Ditch the stock photos and go for something real. Even if you only add one photo today, that’s one more point of interest you’ve created for your visitors, one more way for them to connect with you (so much of our connection is visual) and one more sensory point that can engage them in an experience with your brand.

Now, how many of these do you think you could work into your day? Even if you only tackle one each day for the next ten days, that’s only a few minutes of your time each day (ok, maybe a few more if you really want your copy to shine…) and you won’t need to blow your budget or get swamped with a long or costly redesign project.

Which one can you start with right now?

And do you sometimes have a nagging suspicion that you could be doing more than being an unpaid research assistant, digging up cool factoids, interesting links and must-read news stories for the benefit of your followers?

Yes, there is more to social marketing, but sometimes we get stuck on the little things, like what the heck to say and how the heck to get anyone to care.

Here are four simple, engaging ways to put a bit of zing into your social marketing and maybe even get something out of it, too.

1. Ask A Question

Never underestimate the power of a question.

Or better yet: if someone in your social streams asks a question, do you answer it, even if only in your head?

I bet you answered that question right now!

The trick to a good question is to make it easy to answer with a single word or no more than a short phrase.

“What’s the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to you at a client meeting?” Requires way too much thought and too much exposition. People may answer it but it’s more likely the answer will never leave their heads and make it to the status box. And if you’re working with Twitter, forget it!

“Have you ever walked into a client meeting with lettuce stuck between your teeth?” Is a whole lot more answerable with a yes, no, grunt, groan or perhaps even a bit more exposition than you might expect… “…no but I did have toilet paper stuck to my shoe!”

Yes/no questions do double-duty on Facebook because they can be answered with words or simply a click of the Like button. Either one means your audience read and responded.

Another bonus of questions? If you use them wisely you can even learn a little something that may help you with your marketing.

I could ask you: “Would you rather learn more about increasing your Facebook following or your Twitter following?” And your answer would help me come up with my next blog post idea!

2. Play With Photos And Quotes

If there’s one thing that’s pounded into our brains day in and day out it’s that photos get attention and increase engagement.

Nice to know, but what’s a person supposed to do with that knowledge?

This goes beyond the mere product shot – after all, how many times are you going to bombard people with that very cool new set of earrings you designed?

Coming up with photos can be a piece of cake if you’re in the travel or hospitality business, any kind of artistic or creative business and yes, a retail or product-centric business.

But what if you’re in a service business, like a coach, consultant, accountant or dryer-vent cleaner? That’s going to require a little bit of imagination.

Photos of your employees, office and any events you may host, attend or sponsor can be a great source of visuals. All it takes is you remembering to whip out your smart phone and snap a few at the right time.

But simply posting a photo of the painting on your office wall isn’t likely to be very exciting for your followers, and that’s where quotes come in. Call it a quote, call it a caption – you need something to tie the photo to your business and to your audience in a way that’s both interesting and relevant. Tell your audience it’s the sunset your dear Aunt Sophie painted while she vacationed in the Mediterranean. Tack on an inspirational quote by Ernest Hemmingway or a funny one by George Takei, or just make one up.

If someone sends flowers to your office for administrative assistant’s day, you can snap that photo, thank the sender (tag them if you can, of course) and extend similar wishes to all the other administrative assistants out there. In fact, you should never wish anyone a happy anything without an accompanying visual! That’s a whole lot more interesting than a text update and you’re bound to get more eyeballs and more reactions.

3. Create Irrelevant Controversy

You might have heard advice along the way to “create controversy”. No doubt, taking a side on an issue can get attention. It can also get you in trouble.

That’s why I’m qualifying the statement with the word “irrelevant”. You probably don’t want to start a flame war by asking your followers how they feel about the legalization of marijuana but you can get a good, friendly rivalry going by asking whether the correct way to eat a slice of pizza is to fold it in half or eat it flat.

You can find faux controversy everywhere, from whether you should put the toilet paper in the holder paper-over or paper-under, to whether men or women hog up more space on the shower shelf.

This goes hand-in-hand with questions because you want to ask (“what do YOU think?”) rather than tell (“Here’s what WE say!”)

Pay attention to the disagreements that pop up over the dinner table, in your staff meetings, at the checkout counter at the grocery store. Think about how your customers feel about your products or services and the differences in their preferences. Steer clear of anything that evokes the urge to throw something and get your audience heated up about something ultimately irrelevant and fun. Provoke – don’t incite!

4. Talk Directly To Someone

Instead of trying to engage your followers, try engaging just one. The great thing about talking to a single person is it affords you the opportunity to really get to know someone, to personalize your marketing and perhaps even to convert followers into leads or referral sources by providing a little extra nudge.

I don’t mean solicit someone – no product links hidden in personalization (“hey @Joe, what do you think of these awesome golf clubs?” – is just a cheesy way to sell your products.) No dopey and generic stuff (“How’s the weather in Wisconsin today, Joe?” – sounds pretty lame unless there’s some good reason to be asking about weather.)

I mean actually talk to someone. Respond to something they posted. Mention something you noticed that caught your attention in their profile or photo albums. Promote one of their blog posts with a bit of praise.

Do be careful not to cross the line from friendly to creepy. Opening a conversation with someone for the first time by mentioning how cute their mother looks in her straw hat in the vacation photo album is just going to make someone wonder why you’re stalking their vacation album.

Start small, like you would in any social setting where you’re “meeting” someone for the first time. Answer one of their questions, reply to one of their witticisms, find a way to expand on a thought they’ve shared, or thank them for sharing a link to something you found interesting or helpful. Move cautiously on to straw hats.

If you actively engage one individual every single day, that’s only a few minutes of your time to start a habit of truly being social. You never know who you might meet or what opportunities might arise.

You don’t need to wrack your brain or spend hours coming up with content in order to interest and engage your social followers. You just need a few of the right kind of tricks up your sleeve and a reminder to practice listening, watching and paying attention to how you can spin the ordinary – from photos to squabbles over cocktails – into fun, unique and engaging content.

Social Media Marketing: 4 Warning Signals Of Overuse

Written by Ryan Biddulph

Do you occasionally wonder what on earth you did with all those hours in a day before social media came along? Imagine a time before posting, checking status updates, “engaging” and building online communities in a 24/7 world. I bet you feel a little sense of longing for all that open space. Well, the good news is that you don’t have to trade one for the other. You can work and play online and still have a life. But first you have to recognize the signs that you’re overdoing it. In this post, Ryan gives you four great reasons to unplug and rethink your methods. First he tells you how to recognize when you’re crossing the line between productive social media use and obsessive overuse. Then he gives you some ideas for how to approach your social media instead. If you use social media for your marketing, this is a post you need to read.

Read the article at dukeo.com and follow Ryan on Twitter @RyanBiddulph

10 Ways Strengthen Your Twitter Community With Commun.it

Written by Kristi Hines

I created a Commun.it account a long time ago – or it feels like a long time ago in internet years – and I admit that I never really got it. It just seemed like another thing I had to manage. So when I came across this post I decided to give it another look and see what I’d missed. And I’m glad I did. Part of the problem with new tools is that there’s a learning curve that requires you to sit there and tinker blindly for a long time with little instruction until you uncover what can be done. Sometimes all you need is someone like Kristi to tell you what can be done. She highlights some interesting features and make it easy to understand why you’d want to use a tool like this. My favorite perk? The ability to see a history of your engagement with specific followers. With thousands of them and growing, that’s worth the price of admission. Take a look and see how this tool can help you grow your Twitter community.

Read the article at kikolani.com and follow Kristi on Twitter @kikolani

Beat Writer’s Block – 6 Tips From Writers

Written by Cate Conroy

Whether you’re writing a blog post, advertisement or sales page, writer’s block doesn’t care – it can strike whenever you attempt to put word to page. There are plenty of tips out there to get you over this frustrating hurdle but when it comes to avoiding that stare-at-blank-screen-of-death mentality, you can never have too many. Plus Cate gives you a few to play with that aren’t as common, collected from writers across a variety of industries. I especially like her tip about (strategically) reading other blogs and collecting headlines that catch your interest, whether or not they apply to your topic or industry. With a little bit of wordplay you can substitute your own keywords into a self-made “formula” and come up with a headline that will be just as catchy. And isn’t the headline half the battle anyway?

Read the article at conroymediagroup.com and follow Cate on Twitter @cate

Top 10 Video Marketing Mistakes

Written by Nicole Munoz

It’s great to read posts about how to tackle video marketing, pick up some tips and tricks and then get out there and work on your next “viral” masterpiece. But sometimes you need to know what not to do. Sometimes, even with all the good advice, if someone isn’t giving you a good whack over the head with the dumb stuff, you may never even realize you’re missing opportunities or losing your viewers. Nicole lays out 10 pretty big deals when it comes to video marketing and then gives you advice for how to fix or avoid these mistakes. Some are things you’d expect to see that are relevant to any marketing you do (mistake #5: failing to know your audience) and others are not-so-obvious but can really throw a monkey wrench into your efforts (mistake #9: ignoring YouTube’s built-in analytics). There are more goodies in this post, so if you’re doing video marketing, thinking about doing video marketing or know you haver to jump in one of these days, read more to find out how you might sabotage your efforts and then act on these tips to improve them.

Read the article at nicolemunoz.com and follow Nicole on Twitter @NicoleMunoz

Improve Your Facebook Page With The Facebook Page Checklist!

Written by Louise Myers

This post is the cherry on the roundup cake. It’s short, sweet and comes in pretty colors – namely in the form of a handy infographic that you will probably want to print and hang on your wall so that when you get bogged down in the daily grind of keeping up with your quadzillions of followers, you can always get back to basics and make sure the details of your social presence are in line with your brand. And like cake, there’s always room for more… and Louise serves up more by linking many of the key points to further reading and additional in-depth instructions. So whether you just want the icing or are looking for a big bite of Facebook help, check out this post and make sure your Facebook page and profile are ready for business.

Read the article at louisem.com and follow Louise on Twitter @Louise_Myers

No matter what the weather is like outside your window, I hope you have a sunny weekend!

Unfortunately, if you’ve never considered yourself a writer (or even if you have), you’ll find that BSOS doesn’t often extend itself to your blog or your marketing content.

In fact, if you haven’t spent a lifetime practicing the writing thing, it can feel damn near impossible to put together a coherent blog post, let alone one that people would want to read.

But don’t fret, my friend. Others have gone before us and have come back with many tried and true tips on how to find inspiration when it eludes you.

Here are five you can use. Just be sure to approach them from a playful point of view…

5 ways to creatively jump start your next blog post idea – and that you can use to inspire your other marketing content, too.

1. Interview Someone Famous

Preferably someone fictional or no longer in the land of living. This does two things: it helps keep your reader from being confused about whether or not you’re joking (hint: these kind of things should be funny, not serious). AND it helps you have more fun with the content. What would Julia Child say about your new book? What would Tinker Bell tell us about your business? Step inside their shoes and talk from their point of view. If they’re dead, you might have to hold a seance, but hey — that could add to the fun of the whole thing, right?

2. Be Random

Open a book and put your finger on the page without looking. Turn on the TV and flip to a random channel. Use a Random Word Generator. Have a friend or family member pick a word, phrase or idea for you. Then? Noodle these around until you’ve got metaphors that tell your story or explain your topic.

3. Debate The Other Side

If you’re like most people, you notice after awhile that most folks blog about the same things — give the same advice. Listen to what others are saying and then turn it around. Ask questions like, “What if the opposite of this were true?” You might find that you agree with that opposing viewpoint and can then stand behind it 100%. But if not? Then perhaps you’ve found a new way to approach the topic: by stating the opposite and then refuting that.

4. Use Deadlines

Give yourself a limited amount of time to take an idea and run with it. Some people just work better under pressure — maybe that’s you? If you had to say something about your topic right now, what would you say? Set the timer for 30 minutes and crank out an outline. Don’t worry about polishing or fleshing it out. Just start writing and don’t stop until the buzzer rings. What did you create?

5. Use A Particular Genre To Tell Your Story

Are you a scifi nut? A fan of CSI type stories? Maybe you love the Food Network? Whatever channel or genre you’re most drawn to can be a great source of inspiration for your own series of blog posts. I’ve written more than a few blog posts based on television dramas. There was this one for Doctor Who, and this one for Downton Abbey. Even the reality show, “Chopped” helped me talk about branding in a new way.

In fact, that last blog post got me thinking about ways I could extend the “Chopped” format. And what I came up with was a competition called “Creamed!” (The Ultimate Marketing Content Showdown). If you’ve ever seen the Food Network show, you know that the competitors have to work with some of the same elements I’ve listed above: randomness (ingredients), genre (styles of cooking), and compressed timing (deadlines).

They’re judged on three areas: creativity, presentation and taste. Pretty much the same things we judge content on, right?  (Taste being a mixture of things like texture, depth of flavor and whether or not there was enough on the plate to satisfy an appetite.)

I thought we could do the same thing with marketing content, so I created “Creamed!” And yes, Carol Lynn Rivera (your host here on Web.Search.Social) is one of our esteemed judges. If you think you’ve got what it takes to create content under pressure, I’m sure she’d love to have you apply to be a “chef.” But hurry, the deadline is June 15th. Learn more about all the ways you can be involved at Creamed.tv.

What about you? How do you jump start things when you’re not feeling creative?

I can probably guess the top three responses. You need to have your own point of view! You need to be creative and clever! You need to be original!

Yes, having a unique point of view is critical if you want to stand out from the heaping pile of “content” that fills our computer and mobile screens. You need to have a voice that other people don’t have but try to imitate.

Yes, creativity helps, especially in your headline, if you want to lasso someone’s attention for more than five seconds while emails, texts, tweets and Facebook updates light up their mobile phone like a Christmas tree.

Yes, originality helps because people won’t read something they’ve already read a hundred times. If you’re not bringing something new to the conversation, what’s the point?

But none of these take the top spot as the single most important characteristic of great marketing content.

That’s because a unique point of view, creativity and originality cannot succeed without clarity. Clarity must come first.

Without clarity, your marketing content is doomed to be overlooked, misunderstood or just lost in the noise. This applies to everything from a 500-word blog post to a 30-second elevator pitch to the six-word headline on the home page of your website.

The Definition Of Clarity

According to Dictionary.com, clarity is defined as “clearness or lucidity as to perception or understanding; freedom from indistinctness or ambiguity.” Synonyms include intelligibility, exactness, lucidity and transparency.

When you break that definition down a bit, it’s easy to see why clarity makes the content world go round.

Clarity creates accurate perceptions. “Perception is reality” may be one of those clichés that makes me cringe, but it’s 100% true.

Clarity enables a true understanding of your company and illustrates why someone should do business with you by minimizing ambiguity.

Clarity provides an exactness that can highlight points of differentiation and answer basic questions your business, which helps to remove obstacles to a sale.

Clarity promotes transparency, which conveys honesty and builds trust. If people don’t believe you, your content is useless.

The Key To Achieving Clarity

Simplify everything. Cut the fat and strip down your content to the nuts and bolts. Then, cut a little more. If you can take 200 words of content and make your point just as effectively in 100 words, do it.

The quickest way to simplify your content is to lose the fluffy adjectives and adverbs you found in the thesaurus, and focus on the nouns and verbs. Ask yourself:

What makes this this content useful, relevant and valuable to readers? How will they benefit by reading it?

Who are you? What do you do? Who is your target audience?

What results do you do deliver? How do you deliver those results?

This will help you create one core message for each piece of marketing content. If you can’t explain that core message in one simple sentence, you’re trying to say too much. Be clearer.

When you achieve clarity through simplicity, you make it easier for readers to comprehend and absorb your content. Creativity is great, but not if the point of your message is lost. Originality is great, but if you can’t clearly communicate your original thoughts, they won’t sink in.

The days of selling the sizzle are long gone. We don’t have time or patience for sizzle. In fact, we don’t trust sizzle and can see right through it.

Don’t try to prove what an eloquent writer you are, or how smart you are. Just tell us about the steak.

Agree or disagree? If you disagree, what characteristic of great marketing content trumps clarity?

This discussion isn’t just about price, but also value. Hosting can range from free to a few bucks a month to tens or hundreds of dollars a month. That’s an extraordinarily large range. How do you know which service and price level is right for you?

Web hosting isn’t as commoditized as many people think. While on the outside all hosting seems similar, the way hosting providers do things behind the scenes can be radically different. These differences are the factors that could make or break your business’s success and make the hosting of your business’s website trouble-free or a complete nightmare.

Website hosting should not be shopped on cost alone. This discussion should serve as a guide to understanding the hosting landscape so that you can make a smart decision to purchase hosting that matches your needs as opposed to simply buying the cheapest hosting.

Cheap Hosting: What’s In It For The Provider?

As a matter of economics, companies that offer very cheap hosting rely on a critical mass of subscribers. A lot of hosting accounts bringing in a little bit of money adds up to a lot of cash.

However, some hosting companies are more unscrupulous than others.

Some providers offer cheap or free hosting and then intercept client pages to inject advertising, badges or affiliate links. While most of these providers disclose this information in the fine print, most consumers don’t bother to read the fine print.

Some providers inject invisible information in order to measure the performance of their system. While this is not strictly unethical, it’s reasonable to ask up front if this is something your provider does so you’ll know whether your website is being altered in any way as it is served to your audience.

How bad can this get? A company in recent news found that when they performed a Google search using their company name as a keyword, their hosting provider’s links would appear as a subsection. The provider was injecting links into each page as it was served and although it had disclosed its actions in its terms, the customer had not read them.

This type of injection can have negative SEO consequences, especially as Google is cracking down on unrelated links and anything appearing to be spam. It can also create adverse perceptions for the brand, as searchers find the company website confusingly associated with a hosting provider’s links.

Injection of this type has other potential pitfalls. If the provider is injecting content into your site and they get infected, that infection could present itself as malware on your site. This could have the longer repercussion of having your site blocked by browsers or worse by search engines.

So what should you do? Before you’re enticed by words like cheap or free, read the fine print.

Is There A Difference Between Website Hosting And Email Hosting?

Yes. Website and email hosting have almost nothing in common. They use different technologies, different types of software servers, different types of delivery mechanisms, and different types of consumption mechanisms.

Most people believe that web and email hosting are interconnected because usually both are packaged and marketed together. These services do not need to be tied or purchased together. As an example, my company uses Google Apps for email hosting and Rackspace for website hosting.

It’s ok to have your email and website hosted at the same place, unless your provider happens to be good at one and not the other. Often times, I hear people suffering through bad service because they have the perception that they can’t move one of the services.

I always recommend to clients that they get the best email hosting for their needs and the best site hosting for their needs; even if that means two different companies. There is an increasing number of email-only providers; Google Apps and Microsoft Outlook.com are two examples. Both services provide rich cloud-based email service that can be accessed anywhere from any type of device.

Does Unlimited Really Mean Unlimited?

Many cheap hosting companies offer unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, or both, making the cost that much more enticing. However, most sites don’t need unlimited storage or bandwidth. Most web sites are small so the provider has nothing to lose by offering large volumes of storage. It’s a balancing act; some sites will use a lot of storage and bandwidth but most won’t.

Think of it this way: if you work in a ten story building you have the illusion that you have unrestricted and unlimited access to your phone. After all, every time you pick it up, you can make a call. The catch comes when every person in that ten story building picks up the phone at the same time. Then it becomes apparent that the building has limited capacity.

It’s the same thing with bandwidth. There is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth. Every server has a threshold, but every provider knows that most sites won’t come anywhere meeting that threshold.

So what’s the catch? The catch is that web hosting doesn’t consist of only storage and bandwidth.

Another element of hosting is computing power – generally a combination of processor speed and memory. The more processing power a server has, the more it can do. Better processing means more expensive servers for the hosting provider. As a result, many hosting providers have smaller processing capabilities for shared environments where many sites are hosted on one physical server.

Your business website may become slow or unresponsive if the server has limited computing power regardless of storage or bandwidth. Your website may also be affected if another site on the same server is utilizing a disproportionate amount of computing power.

Sometimes hosting providers do not disclose their processing capacity and almost never disclose how many sites share the same server as yours. If you’re doing math in your head right now and coming to the realization that the more sites there are on a server, the less computing power yours is getting, then you’re beginning to see the point.

So what should you do? Monitor and analyze your site analytics. If your site’s traffic grows, but the performance degrades, then your problem may not be storage or bandwidth. It may be computing power.

And remember that site speed and performance not only has consequences for your visitor’s experience and your ability to convert sales and leads, but also for your SEO.

When Are Backups Not Backups?

Backups and disaster recovery are common topics that are usually discussed and then promptly ignored. Unfortunately most people don’t know what makes a good backup and disaster recovery plan. Not all backups are created equal. Sometimes backups aren’t backups at all.

Recently, a client asked me to evaluate a hosting provider that claimed to have “Full Mirrored Backups”. To most people that sounds great. It implies that there is a “mirror” of their data available in case of a disaster. As it turns out, this is clever word play.

After reading the fine print, I found that the provider’s servers have mirrored hard drives. This means that every hard drive is paired with a second hard drive that maintains a real-time copy of all data. If one drive fails, the server keeps chugging along as if nothing happened and the bad hard drive can be replaced. Once replaced, the data is immediately “mirrored” again and life goes on.

This is good for uptime, so that one hard drive failure will not take your site down, but mirroring a drive is not a backup. What happens if the server fails or both drives fail? What happens in the case of human error when you accidentally delete or overwrite a file, or in the case of a natural disaster that takes out a facility, as happened recently during hurricane Sandy? Where do you restore your data from? In this case; nowhere.

I see a lot of variations on this where a “backup” is implied in the language, but no true backups exist.

For the record, a backup is considered valid if the data being preserved is stored onto a different location than the server where it is hosted. This is key because if you are backing up your data onto the same server and that server fails, you’ve lost everything.

Another aspect of backups is retention; your data should be preserved for a period of time such as two weeks. For example, if you overwrite a file on your hard drive, but don’t realize it until a few days later, you should be able to go back in time to retrieve that file at a specific point prior.

If you don’t have these two things at a minimum, then you don’t have backups.

Finally, the best backups not only store a copy of your data on a separate server, but at a separate location. If your backups are on two servers in the same building and that building burns down, or again, if there is a natural disaster like the one witnessed recently, then you will still lose everything.

What About Self-Managed Hosting?

One of the most common ways that hosting providers lower their costs is by providing self-managed hosting. Self-managed means that the provider will give you space on a server and you handle the rest.

For people who know what they are doing, this can be a tremendous cost savings, but for the vast majority this leads to unintended consequences. The most common one that I see is when people who don’t know what they are doing install a site and assume that everything is working when it isn’t.

I have seen countless companies come to me and report that their sites are not generating leads only to find that their forms weren’t set up properly and weren’t being delivered. Broken forms mean no leads and creates the perception for your prospects that you simply failed to respond.

Aside from errors and omissions, there is also the ongoing maintenance to consider. If you have a content management system that uses plugins, themes or templates, eventually that software will need to be maintained. In a self-managed environment, the burden falls entirely on you.

Another potential pitfall of self-managed services is that providers typically draw a hard line on support. They will provide support on their infrastructure and perhaps offer some additional support as a courtesy, but for the most part, you will be on your own.

Hi, My Name Is Steve. How Can I Help You?

While we’re on the topic of support, not all support is the same. Some companies have good support, some don’t.

A common strategy that providers use to reduce costs is to outsource their support.

Sorry non-American readers, I know that may imply that “outsourced” means “not in America”, but that’s not what I mean. I mean that the support is being provided by an organization that is outside the hosting provider’s company; even if both are geographically in the same region.

Outsourced support is usually not as connected to the day-to-day machinations of the hosting provider. They also tend to be script-based. We’ve all had that experience where you call tech support only to find that the person on the other end of the phone is reading from a script and nothing on that script is helpful to you.

The end result is that you may not get the support you need; at least not without investing a lot of time on the phone.

That’s A Nice Domain You Have There. Is It Yours?

Your domain is your property. Or is it?

If you go to any name brand registrar, you can purchase a domain yourself. However, almost all hosting providers have domain purchasing integrated into their services.

It all sounds great until you discover that some providers purchase domains on your behalf, but register those domains to themselves. In that case, they own the domain and license its use to you.

Typically, this doesn’t become an issue until a business wants to move its site to another hosting provider. At that point the business is presented with a bill for the purchase of the domain that is typically a premium charge.

To avoid such catastrophes, I always recommend buying a domain with a reputable domain vendor and bringing it with you to a hosting provider. This guarantees your ownership of the domain.

You Can Edit Your Site For Free. Isn’t That Great?

Sometimes.

If you use a platform such as WordPress or Drupal, content management is built in. However, some hosting providers offer their own homegrown content management systems and tie you to those systems.

I’ve seen a few and have been impressed, but I rarely recommend them. The problem with homegrown content management systems is that your data may be stored in a proprietary way that doesn’t allow the site to be moved. When you want to switch to another hosting provider, web developer or generally revamp your site, you may find yourself locked in with no way out but to start from scratch and rebuild everything.

With a system such as WordPress or Drupal, if you don’t like your hosting provider, you can simply move your site to another facility that supports that technology.

If you are going to host your site with a provider that offers a proprietary content management system, inquire about the portability of your data. Can it be exported and what will that export look like? Armed with better information you’ll be able to make better decisions.

So What Else?

There are countless other factors that can distinguish the right hosting platform from the wrong one such as security and the impact of speed on search marketing.

The most important thing any business can do is reasonably insulate its domain, site hosting, email hosting and content from creating a roadblock to the overall marketing of the business.

The best course of action may be to work with a good and reliable web developer who can advise on the right course.

So How Much Should You Expect To Pay For Web Hosting?

Cost = Free

If you just don’t care go with free hosting and may God have mercy on your soul. But in general, no business should be using free hosting.

Cost = Less than $10/month

If you have a competent developer who can maintain a copy of your site and your site requires infrequent changes. Go with one of the “few bucks a month” providers that offer solid service but little business continuity. In the event of a failure, your web developer can push a backup copy to the hosting provider. Your risk is then tied to the developer’s ability to maintain a good backup. You can also run and manage backups yourself using a third-party tool or plugin, but remember the burden still falls on you, and most effective backup solutions aren’t free, so add that to the cost of your hosting.

Cost = $30 to $100

Now this gets tricky.

Your web developer may need to maintain your site periodically. For example, if you are running a CMS such as WordPress or Drupal, your developer should be updating the software and plugins as well as maintaining the overall health of the site. In this case, the basics may result in a hosting fee plus a fee from your developer for maintenance. For most business websites, this is where you should be unless you have someone on staff knowledgeable enough to perform the maintenance.

Cost = $100+to $A Billion Zillion

Once you get into a range where you have sophisticated needs in any category (bandwidth, processing power, etc.), you’ve got a custom need and should really be talking to your developer. Large ecommerce sites, sites with intensive database needs or high-traffic sites will likely need a dedicated and fully managed hosting environment.

And The Grand Finale… So what’s the right answer? Ultimately there is no right answer. Every business has unique needs. Hosting should be structured around those needs.

Have you had hosting nightmares? Do you have hosting questions? Feel free to fire away in the comments section below. I promise to answer each one.

And if you have a friend or colleague who is struggling with any of the topics above, please pass this article along to them. Hopefully it will help.

Do You Buy Hosting From A Reseller?

This is an all too frequent occurrence; you pay your hosting bill on time and wake up one morning to find your email, website or both gone. If you are buying your hosting from a reseller, you should have a reasonable guarantee of service that not only includes the technical aspects, but also includes an assurance that your reseller’s account is current with the hosting provider.

I don’t want to steer you away from resellers because there are good reasons to hire a reseller instead of hosting with a provider directly. For example, there are lots of companies that resell Amazon Web Services. AWS is a fantastic service, but not for the non-technical. AWS is an ideal scenario for hiring a reseller because AWS provides the infrastructure and the reseller takes care of your service and technical needs.

But if the reseller fails to pay the bill to the provider, then it’s you who are out of luck.

Many thanks to Sharon Hurley Hall (@SHurleyHall) for bringing this up.

Use These 8 Twitter Tools Now Or Hate Yourself Later

Written by Rebekah Radice

The question “How do I grow my Twitter following?” has come up a few times this week and like magic, Rebekah’s post appeared with the answer. I’ve tried a few of these, but not all, so I have some homework to do, too. Twellow has been a neat tool for me, especially for finding local people. And I’ve been interested to try Follower Wonk so it looks like this is a good kick in the rear for me. Take a look at these tools and give them a shot. You never really know what will work until you try!

Read the article at rebekahradice.com and follow Rebekah on Twitter @rebekahradice

How To Dominate A Boring Industry With Content Marketing

Written by Ross Simmonds

This one is chock full of great examples of brands doing content marketing right and plenty of tips for tackling your own. You may think that there’s nothing much to say about your product or service. Maybe you’re even afraid of “giving away the farm” so to speak. But Ross shows how you can turn that thinking around and into a great marketing campaign. I especially love the example he gives of Realtor.com because  they’re a great example of a company embracing a new customer paradigm.

Read the article at rosssimmonds.com and follow Ross on Twitter @TheCoolestCool

5 Reasons You Just Lost The Deal

Written by Kathy Mammon

This is one of those posts that you can’t read without nodding your head through the whole thing saying, “Yup. Yup. Exactly. Yup.” We’ve all been there – on the other end of a bad sales call. Kathy makes five excellent points that any company would do well to remember. If four out of the five could be forgiven, the one that absolutely can’t be is #4: talking more about yourself and your company than what your prospect needs. This should get you fired up. When you’re done reading I’d be interested to hear if you have other deal-breakers to share.

Read the article at lattice-engines.com and follow Kathy on Twitter @MarketingMammon

7 Reasons Why Facebook Doesn’t Give A Sh*t About Your Business Page

Written by Daniel Zeevi

This is the rant I want to have. As someone who has a Facebook business page and helps clients run and promote theirs, I’m often frustrated by the slow squeezing-out of small businesses. Daniel catalogues these frustrations well, from that darned EdgeRank to the very obvious fact that Facebook “demotes” posts that link outside of its ecosystem. And while I adhere to the belief that Facebook gets to do whatever it wants with its platform and is no way obligated to help us market for free – I’m finding myself recommending Facebook less and less as an effective marketing channel for small businesses. I enjoy the debate though, so I’d be interested to hear what you think.

Read the article at dashburst.com and follow Daniel on Twitter @DanielZeevi

What Exactly Is Meant By “Retargeting”?

Written by Lionel White

And now for something really different  - advertising. Do you know how sometimes an ad for a specific product or service seems to follow you around the internet wherever you go? That’s what’s commonly referred to as retargeting. But Lionel points out that there’s a general misunderstanding about what retargeting really is and then goes on to explain the different types of retargeting and how they fall into the grand scheme of your marketing plans. This is worth a read if you’re confused about the phrase or if you’re interested in doing a bit of advertising for your business.

Read the article at searchengineland.com and follow Lionel on Twitter @lioneljwhite

Have a great weekend!