5 top tips for starting a New Brand

A company brand is pivotal to you and your business. It helps both position yourself in the market place as well as distinguishes you from your competitors.

Branding is everything within a company from the look and feel right through to its personality in terms of the type of service the customer can expect and how this packaged up.

So whether it’s a new business or an existing company re-brand here are our 5 top tips for starting a New Brand.

1) Start with a Great Logo!

Every brand has to start somewhere and a great place to start is to design a fantastically memorable logo. There are obviously other activities that supplement a logo design in the grand scheme of things, but a logo design will either make or break a company brand, depending on how it is received in the market place.

2) Make all Branding Consistent

Once you have a great look and feel you ideally need to keep this consistent. It does not mean everything needs to be exactly the same, but it does mean that there needs to be a visible ‘theme’ running through everything that the business does. There is nothing worse than a company that has a very disjointed brand, which in turn can confuse customers.

3) Stand out from the crowd

There are plenty of great ideas, brands and companies out there that you can take inspiration from, however this is your opportunity to make a stand! It’s your chance to be really noticeable and to stand out from the crowd. So go one better and make your brand something that others aspire to be like!

4) Ensure everyone is bought into the brand

There are brands that everyone wants to be a part of and then there are brands that people want to steer clear of. Ensure that everyone within the company is involved and is fully bought into the brand and the message that you are conveying. Make it something that everyone wants to be part of and allow this momentum to promote the brand for you.

5) Spread the word

Once you have a great brand, everyone has bought into it, wind it up and let it go! Start spreading the word via every media channel you can, be proud of your brand and let it carry the company through to success.

If you have any questions or queries regarding branding then please get in touch with My Hosting Bubble.

How effective is Email Marketing?

 

Email Marketing has gone full circle when it comes to its perception and effectiveness over the past decade.

It originated as a great way to push good looking, relevant messages via email to a targeted audience. But over time it was somewhat hijacked by spammers as well as unsolicited and unwanted emailers that created a lot of negative connotations when it came to email marketing solutions.

However, over the past few years it has regained its place alongside other favourable marketing channels as a very useful and potential opportunity gathering method of keeping potential customers informed and educated.

Email Marketing is basically being able to leverage the speed and convenience of email to communicate important messages, updates, tips and promotions to recipients that have opted in to receiving such messages, but what are the key steps required to ensure you achieve this effectively?

Here are our 5 top tips to send a compelling email campaign:

1. Clean Data

This is probably one of the most important points and it revolves around the data that you start with. By ‘data’ we mean the contact information and email addresses you have in place to send your email marketing to.

Rather than sending your emails out to random people in the hope that they will read it, it is much more effective to gather contacts over time via a system that allows them to ‘opt in’. Usually this can be achieved alongside other marketing channels or your website and should be aimed at people that are already warmed up to you slightly.

As you build your ‘clean database’, you will see incrementally desirable results as opposed to a hit and miss method.

2. Clear Objectives

Again, another important factor when it comes to your email marketing is the main reason you are sending it. This may seem like an obvious point, but it is surprising how many businesses send an email as a kneejerk reaction to a bit of news, an offer or just a random message.

The best way to look at it, is to start at the end and work back, so what are you ultimately trying to achieve with this email? What do you want the recipient to do as a result of receiving this email? Do you want them to contact you, buy an item, download a file, sign-up for an event? Is it just a way to keep your contacts informed of what you are doing? Is it to promote a new product or service? Or will it just become a regular ‘touch base’ style newsletter?

Having a set of crystal clear objectives in place will not only help you position the email correctly but it will give you a means to identify whether the email campaign has been a success or not.

3. Compelling Campaign

Once you have a clear set of objectives, this point will become a much easier task. To create a compelling campaign will not only keep the recipients interested in what you have to say, but it will prevent unsubscribes.

The email not only needs to be compelling, with great use of quality, interesting content, but the layout and good use of imagery will aid the message you are trying to convey. Remember, that even though the recipients may have opted in, they may still be extremely fickle when it comes to receiving email marketing, so ensure that you can get your message across quickly and succinctly making full use of the subject line of the email (as the hook) and the ‘above the fold’ segment of the email, meaning the top quadrant.


4. Track & Measure

Before you send your email it is essential you are able to track and measure its activity. We would recommend you use an email platform to send your email to not only ensure you are not black-listed, but to allow the platform to manage the tracking and reporting for you. Some great platforms on the market are the likes of MailChimp, iContact, Pure360 or Dotmailer.

5. Report & Refine

After you have sent the email campaign, you will want to ensure that you run regular reports on its performance to see what is going on in terms of recipient activity.
This report will need to contain vital statics that will help you ascertain how well your email has been received. For example:

• Number of Email Opens
• Number of Email Forwards
• Hot Prospects
• Number of Unsubscribes
• Most Active Recipients
• Most Clicked Links
• Number of Bounced Emails

Once you have a comprehensive set of statistics you will then be able to see what has worked and what hasn’t. This picture will become clearer the more emails you send and track, over time giving you a crystal clear idea on how to improve the effectiveness of your campaigns.

If you adopt our advice above then you will most definitely be able to reap the rewards of sending a well-planned and executed email marketing campaign.

If you would like to find out more about Email Marketing then please get in touch with My Hosting Bubble or visit our site: www.myhostingbubble.com.

Our Top Website Optimisation Tips..

Having the best looking website online is a great start but unless anyone visits it, it will remain a shell of a site that does not provide any value to you or your business other than a dormant internet presence.

So the obvious question is how to work towards getting a website that not only looks good, but gets visitors to your site with a view to getting them to covert to customers.

Well here it is, our top 5 tips for giving your website the best changes of doing well in the Search Engine Rankings.

1. Keep your website fresh & updated (on-site)
Once you have a site in place  it is important to continually keep the website fresh with material, case studies, articles, blogs, and probably most importantly great quality content. This is so that not only do you keep your audience interested and engaged at all times but so that search engines re-index and respect your website. Some of the pros and cons of updating (or not updating) your site are as follows:

 

Stale Content	Fresh Content
Outdated and uninteresting	Engaging and up to date
Lower search engine rankings	Higher search engine rankings
Low or no website traffic	Increase in website traffic
Higher Bounce Rate	Lower Bounce Rate

 

2. Establish yourself far and wide (off-site)

Don’t be afraid to shout from the proverbial rooftops about your website, your products and what you are offering. Utilise online but off-site methods to promote your site far and wide. Whether that be in the way of good quality, unique and genuinely interesting articles or content that you post to other external websites and have the content pointing back to you via descriptive anchor text through to quality links built from relevant external websites that hold some good gravitas or high page rank for you to benefit from.

3. Continually generate Quality Content

The flavour of the month term is ‘content is king’ which in essence refers to the fact that good quality, relevant and unique content has become one of the most important factors when improving rankings within search engines. The content you generate should not be duplicate, stale, uninteresting or irrelevant, it should be written to engage and to interest visitors as opposed to pleasing search engine algorithms. Quality content does not necessarily mean quantity of content either, you can have good quality content that is succinct and meaningful without needing to pad it out with an unnecessary amount of keywords.

 

4. Optimise your pages for conversions

When we say optimise your pages for conversions we basically mean break down all barriers for potential customers doing business with you, or contacting you, or buying your product online or whatever it is you need them to do on your website. You need to think like one of your perfect customers and tailor your landing pages to suit these ideal visitors so you can secure the desired action as quickly and as easily as possible.

 

5. Optimise your website structure 

The fact that you now have a great looking website with engaging content and regularly updated material you may also need to think about the fundamental way that the site is put together to ensure you are ticking all of the structural boxes. Some of the key factors here include:

• Sitemap - Sitemaps can be either HTML or XML. HTML sitemaps are visible webpages that have the structure of the webpages on so users can click on the links to get to specific pages if they need to. An XML sitemap sits on the server and is more to help search engines understand the structure of your website. You can easily create an XML sitemap by using one of the many websites out there such as www.xml-sitemaps.com to generate it for you. Once you have created your XML sitemap then you will need to submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.

• Descriptive URLs - the URL that a visitor gets when he or she lands on a webpage is also very important. The display URL not only helps users identify at a glance what they can expect to see on that page but also helps search engines identify the relevance of that page in conjunction with the content it contains.

• Domain Name - Even though you may have had the same domain for many years, there is no harm in understanding that a domain has a part to play in an SEO friendly structure. A domain name that is relevant to the product,  service, location or keyword you are trying to pitch at will certainly go some way to helping your ranking factors and if this domain has some ‘authority’ online already in terms of age your onto a winner.

• Canonicalization - Ensuring that your URL’s all confirm to a standard structure is very important. Preferably a structure that is meaningful as opposed to a string of characters.The URL’s below all refer to the same page but have been written and are dealt with slightly differently by the server:
• http://company.com
• http://www.company.com
• http://www.company.com/
• http://www.company.com/?source=asdf

• Site Speed - Even though there has been a remarkable improvement in internet connectivity and the ability to have image hungry sites are all the rage now, do not turn a blind eye on the loading speed of your website. There are many free diagnostic tools and freeware available that will help you not only diagnose any bottlenecks in website loading times but allow you to optimise imagery and content on the site to improve it.

• Mobile Friendly - If you haven’t heard or thought about it already, then you need to address whether your website is mobile friendly. It may not necessarily mean a total overhaul of the site but a slight restructure of the code to accommodate various resolutions or devices. If you would like to see how ‘mobile friendly’ your website is, then take a look at Googles Mobile Friendly checker: www.google.co.uk/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly

We hope that this article has gone some way to help you understand the basics of website optimisation. The SEO landscape is forever changing and improving however the bottom line is, that if you want search engines to respect your website, then write and design the site for you ideal user, not for the robots and search engines that technically crawl your site.

We would love to hear from you and your experiences when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation, so please get in touch with My Hosting Bubble or visit our site: www.myhostingbubble.com.

How many IPv6 addresses are available?

 

An IP Address or an Internet Protocol Address is the unique identifier for a device either on a network or accessible the internet.

IPv4, IPv6’s protocol predecessor, was the fourth iteration of the Internet Protocol and was launched in the early 1980’s. IPv4 had the ability to supply a total of 4 billion unique IP addresses, which back then was an unthinkable number and it was far from anyone’s thoughts that we would ever run out.

Organisations and users that required IP addresses were often allocated far more than they needed and by the late 1980’s the exhaustion of the IPv4 addresses was on the horizon as being an issue.

From the early 2000’s IPv4 was nearing depletion, however, luckily, organisations had already started the transition to IPv6. The top-level exhaustion of the IPv4 actually occurred during 2011.

IPv6 of which has now superseded the IPv4 is built on a 128 bit model as opposed to the 32 bits of the older IPv4.

This means that there is a mind boggling number of available unique IPv6 addresses for organisations and networked devices to use moving forward.

So actually how many Internet Protocol addresses are there under the new IPv6

Well, the total number of IPv6 addresses is a staggering 340 Undecillion !!

That number looks like this: 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456.

To put that number in context, it has been said that we could assign an IPV6 address to every atom on the surface of the earth, and still have enough addresses left to do another 100+ earths.

If you have any questions or are interested in having your own IPv6 address then please get in touch with My Hosting Bubble or visit our site: www.myhostingbubble.com.

POP vs IMAP

POP (Post Office Protocol) and IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) are both email protocols that allow users to access their emails, however due to ever changing work styles and the ability for people to access their emails via a range of different devices whilst on the move, one method has somewhat superseded the other.

The History of POP

POP was originally developed back in 1984 to allow people a simple means of accessing and download their email from a remote server.

With the POP email protocol the emails get downloaded onto the device that logs on to view them, most of the time without retaining the original message on the server, therefore potentially no other device logging on would know there was a new email.

This becomes chaotic when multiple devices are logging on to download their latest emails from a shared mailbox and not able to gain access to read emails.

The History of IMAP

IMAP came about in 1986 and allowed remote access to emails stored on a remote server. This method, unlike the POP method, allows multiple users to manage the same inbox as a copy of the email is downloaded and cached on the device but the original is still stored on the remote server (possibly for a specified amount of time, to prevent too much of an archive).

The Main Differences between POP & IMAP

The main differences between the two methods is that POP actually permanent downloads the emails from the server to a local device for storage whereas IMAP leaves the emails on the server and just temporarily caches the email messages locally on the device.
IMAP has become the chosen method of mailbox set-up as it allows the flexibility to work, download and keep track of emails on multiple devices.

The fact it’s a synchronous system makes it much easier to ensure there is no confusion as to which device has downloaded the messages as they are always accessible again via the remote server, the central location upon which they are stored.

My Hosting Bubble can provide business and personal mailboxes, whether it be IMAP or POP. Please get in touch with My Hosting Bubble or visit our site: www.myhostingbubble.com.

What is Dedicated Hosting?

Unlike other commonly used hosting services such as shared, dedicated hosting (also known as dedicated servers) are powerful, high spec, standalone computers that allow the account user or hosting customer to use the platform without being effected by other customers. This is unlike shared hosting whereby other customer’s websites and files are placed on the same cluster of servers and all end up using the same set of server resources.

A shared environment is heavily restricted by the available bandwidth, memory, and storage space due to the nature of the set-up, whereas the dedicated hosting platform allows the customer to actually lease a part of the server for their own use, giving them the advantage of unaffected space, bandwidth and resource.

The dedicated server can come managed or un-managed, either way it remains in the actual data centre, however managed gives the customer all of the benefits of a dedicated platform but without the need to manage and support the machine at a granular day to day level. The unmanaged however, allows the customer to actually get right down to the software layer to configure and support the server exactly how they would like to.

Dedicated hosting is ideal for websites that are expecting particularly large volumes of traffic or are very resource hungry in terms of usage or throughput. Medium, large or complicated database driven websites would benefit from the dedicated hosting due to the increased security, speed, flexibility and scalability.

Just some of the pros and cons of using dedicated hosting are listed below:

Dedicated Hosting Benefits	Dedicated Hosting Drawbacks
Gives you Full Control of the Hosting	Most Expensive Server option
Supreme Performance and Speed	Requires you to maintain the platform
Complete Flexibility of the Management	Possible additional support costs

If you would like to find out more about dedicated hosting or are thinking about purchasing this service, then please get in touch with My Hosting Bubble or visit our site: www.myhostingbubble.com.

What Makes a Good Website Great?

 

Website design has come on leaps and bounds in the last 5 - 10 years, websites have become a vital tool for any business looking to reach out and engage with either their target market or avenues they never thought they could reach before.

Also with the improvement of internet connection and bandwidth speeds over the past decade, websites have been able to become more vibrant, image rich, functionality driven and accessible.

So we all have great access to great websites right? Well not quite. Even though accessibility is no longer an issue (or though some would argue this, depending on who your provider is), the difference between a good and a great website is still a chasm that is there for the closing.


Optimise Every Page to Convert

Now there is online, but off-site optimisation which includes paid search, social media advertising, organic SEO, link building and all of the other elements that create a great marketing campaign. Then there is the online, on-site optimisation, which is pivotal for any website looking to not only gain traction but to achieve key goals such as conversions, enquiries, click to calls, downloads, sign-ups or form submissions.

Optimisation of the web pages to convert does not mean inserting the right keywords or making sure the meta tags are optimised, it means, is the page optimised so that when the ideal visitor lands on your site are they seeing everything they need from the second they land on the page in order to:

1) Be immediately engaged.
2) Know they are in the right place.
3) Understand at a glance what you are about.
4) Help bring the reason for visiting to a conclusion as easily as possible.

All pages should be optimised to an extent, as visitors may happen to land on a page that you had not intended them to enter the site through, for example about page, or terms & conditions page, so you need to give them an easy route out of that page to the location they do want to be, without making it difficult.


Understand Your User Journey, No, Really understand it.

When we say understand your user journey, we really mean understand your user journey. From who will be actually landing on your website and the different personas you will need to appeal to, right through to getting the visitors to do exactly what you need them to as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

It’s one thing to have good navigation and an easy way to actually move around the website, however it’s another thing entirely to think like your ideal visitor would, in order to both appeal to them as well as giving them a proverbial ‘pathway of breadcrumbs’ to follow to achieve what they are after whilst they are there.

Write Content with a Passion!

Content is not everybody’s bag. Most find it monotonous and a task they would rather not have to carry out. However this is probably the most important part of any website. It’s the part that engages potential clients and can excite existing customers.

Most treat content writing as an afterthought or as huge chore that someone has to pick up at the back end of a large website design project in order to replace the masses of ‘Lorem Ipsum’ scattered all over the site.

There is a slightly different way to think about this however, and that is that it does not have to be a lengthy and painful task at all. Write with a passion about your business or your product and only write information you feel is relevant to that page. It doesn’t need to be a ten thousand word essay, just short, succinct, descriptive and meaningful portions of well written text.

If you write with this in mind you’ll provide compelling, relevant and unique content in no time at all!

Remove All Barriers for potential Online Customers

The single most important thing you should have in the back of your mind when building, re-vamping, rebranding or refreshing a website is to pull down all barriers in the way of potential customers doing business with you. You may not initially think of barriers in the same way as a potential client will do when they reach the site however you will need to ensure you emulate standing in their shoes in order to understand and tackle these barriers.

These barriers are able to come in many forms, from poor navigation and user experience, to illegible text, bad image or colour choices, not having any Call to Actions or not having them in the correct position on the pages, the list really does go on and on.  The best way to eliminate these barriers is to test your site on new friendly ‘guinea pigs’ or visitors with little or no idea what you are about, in order to see if they can navigate with a pair of fresh eyes as they will see far more barriers than you can ever imagine..

You will never be able to remove all barriers from the outset as potential customers have a great way of finding holes you never thought were there, however with continual, timely and meaningful tracking and measuring in place, you should iron out any remaining barriers in no time.

Keep things fresh and different

Once the website has been completed don’t sit back and relax quite yet. You should always have a plan in place to ensure that there are large parts of your site dedicated to fresh, exciting and changing content. These sections of the site can come in the way of many things, just to give you an idea:

1) Integrated & regularly updated Social Media.
2) Engaging news & updates.
3) Engaging Blog articles and interesting information.
4) Exciting competitions, weekly events, giveaways and offers.
5) Guest writing or articles from other well-known industry names.
6) RSS Feeds from useful resources.
7) Regularly updated & informative case studies.
8) Integrated videos and rich media.
9) Giveaways and reasons to make visitors travel to your site.

Please people not machines

For the best part of a decade now, the term Search Engine Optimisatim (SEO) has had people crawling over themselves to try and outwit the likes of Google, Yahoo and Bing in order to gain an advantage in the search engine listings and push their website up the rankings when someone searches for a certain keyword.

There have been many underhanded (or black hat) techniques used in order to achieve higher rankings and it has always been an issue the search engines have always been keen to stamp out.

It’s for these ‘black hat’ reasons that the likes of Google have constantly updated their algorithms to combat this form of practice. Search methodologies combined with algorithms provide what’s called ‘semantic search’ which are ways that search engines seek to improve result accuracy by understanding searcher intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they are typed.

All of these improvements in the way the search engines are being developed help, although developers, designers and SEO consultants still think that you can fool a search engine, well don’t. It simply will not benefit you or your website if you approach the design, content, look and feel or any of the customer experience side of things from a search engines perspective.

If you want search engines to respect your website then write and design the site for you ideal user, not for the robots that trawl your site.

We would love to hear from you and your experiences when it comes to web design. Please get in touch with My Hosting Bubble or visit our site: www.myhostingbubble.com.