Billy the Human Billboard
Written by Brent Oxley on May 22, 2009 – 7:45 pm -I’m going to share some quick facts about our business with you. HostGator currently spends:
- More than $30,000 per month advertising with Google Adwords
- More than $350,000 per month on affiliate commissions
- And $100,000’s more per year on random advertising.
When you spend as much as we do on advertising, you start to run out of places to advertise online. This has left us with no other choice but to become a lot more creative and a lot crazier with our choice of advertising venues and locations. I present to you Billy the Billboard.
Billy proudly wears the first ever permanent HostGator Tattoo on the back of his neck. Billy, an accomplished boxer and entrepreneur who is currently located in Anchorage, Alaska, sold the first chunk of his body to Goldenpalace.com. The funds were used to purchase a flight to San Diego, where he donated his kidney to a complete stranger that he met off of MatchingDonors.com. Billy has even tried to donate part of his liver to patients in need (he was denied due to having already donated a kidney).
Billy’s current goal in life is to make it into the Guinness Book of World Records for having the most advertisements tattooed on him. He currently has six tattoos and won’t be stopping until every inch of his body is sold. “I guess I’m like a male prostitute; I sell my body,” he told me when we were talking one day.
So what does branding someone’s neck for the rest of their life go for?
We paid $3,000 for what will most likely be one of the best investments we’ve made to date. If we get one sale a year we break even. Plus, with all the media attention this will generate, we should easily be able to make back ten or even a hundred times our investment in Billy’s lifetime.
Billy still has plenty of prime locations available. In fact, he’s currently taking bids to sell his forehead! If you are interested you can reach him at BoxingChampAK-at-aol.com or at his blog: Billy The Human Billboard
I believe in the potential of tattoo advertising so much I had this awesome plan to pay the first 200 people willing to get a HostGator tattoo more than $300,000 combined. Within 24 hours of the word getting around our office, I had over a dozen employees offering to sell their skin. The plan was going to be huge and the media attention was going to be even bigger!
Everything was going great until we pitched the idea to our lawyers. They basically said that it would have been impossible to protect ourselves from lawsuits, no matter what contract we came up with. They went on to say that the fact that Billy is an entertainer is completely different than the average person in need of quick cash by getting a tattoo with our logo on it.
Since the HostGator Tattoo Stimulus plan had to be killed, we are just going to have to find other ways to get our name out to the public. In the spirit of more traditional advertising, we recently signed a deal for ten billboards on some of Houston’s busiest freeways.
And even more recently we bought some air time on The High-Tech Texan Show with radio personality Michael Garfield. You can listen to his show online if you’re not in Houston, and you can hear an audio clip from our advertisement here: HostGator’s Radio Ad. on High Tech Texan
We don’t want to stop here though. If you have a creative way for us to get our name out there, please let us know.
Posted in Advertising | 37 Comments »
RankSense Review SEO Software with Coupon
Written by Chad Bean on April 9, 2009 – 3:54 pm -HostGator has partnered with RankSense SEO Tools to give away a free 30-day trial for RankSense and a recurring 20% OFF discount, all with a 90-day money back guarantee. Use coupon code: hostgator and sign up now for the special offer. This offer is valid for all HostGator Web Hosting customers and blog readers.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is all the rage these days. There’s a whole market that has developed around SEO services and tools and a lot of hype and fluff that tends to confuse and complicate things for the average web site owner.
Simply put, SEO is the process of ranking higher in the search engines (Google, MSN Live, Yahoo) to increase traffic. For most websites, increased traffic translates into higher sales, so there is no disputing the importance of practicing good SEO techniques.
Since search engines have secret algorithms that determine where a website ranks in their search results, there are tons of myths and piles of misinformation out there on the ‘net. Time after time, I’ve spoken with customers who are angry and feel misled because an SEO firm or consulting company promised that the customer’s site would rank on page one in Google. Unfortunately, most of the time, this is just not possible, and the majority of these offers and promises should be quickly dismissed.
Even with all of the myths and wrong information out there, there are still some generally accepted rules and tips on how to best optimize your website to rank well. On our SEO Blog, you’ll find many articles discussing some of these proven techniques.
Not everyone can afford a reputable SEO consultant, especially for smaller websites, so most web site owners resort to the DIY methods.
One method that comes in the form of a tool and caught our attention recently is RankSense. RankSense is a piece of software that has gained a lot of popularity recently (and for good reason). This software is able to cover just about every aspect of SEO and will save you, as a site owner, tons of time.
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SEO Tools included with RankSense:
- Discover Site Rankings – See which keywords bring users to your web site and see how many conversions they get for your site.
- Search Engine Coverage – Analyze your site’s search engine visibility.
- Detect Problem Pages – Detects, follows, and checks all links and shows broken links, dynamic pages, denials in robots.txt, and other errors that may be hurting your site.
- Sitemap Builder – Creates and submits an XML sitemap for search engines to discover.
- Keyword Selection – Identify and test potential keywords.
- Keyword Appraisals – See which keywords are better based on traffic, value, search volume, and conversions.
- Competitive Intelligence – Discover your top competitors for each and every keyword.
- Analyze Competitors – Analyze competitor web sites and learn what is working for the competition.
- Analyze My Site – Understand how search engines view the keywords on your site.
- On-Page Optimization Editor – Optimize your pages to maximize search engine leads.
- Link Structure Analysis – Learn from the structure of your competitors’ backlinks.
- My Link Structure Analysis – Understand the structure of your site’s backlinks.
- Link Text Analysis – See what anchor texts link to your competitors.
- My Link Text Analysis – Analyze the anchor texts linking to your site.
- Link Research – Find the URLs that to target for link exchange, sub-categorized by type (blog, directory, article, etc).
- Task Scheduler – Allows you to schedule and automate tasks.
- Search Analytics & SEO Progress Reports – Powerful, data rich reports providing detailed filtered report providing data on every aspect of your site’s optimization including search engines, rankings, landing pages, keywords, on-page metrics, off-page metrics, keyword, competitors and much, much more.
- Advanced Preferences –Identify preferred search engines, search the API, access market analysis keywords and competitor metrics, on-page keyword analysis metrics, common words, HMTL tags weight, keyword groups, human emulation filters, report header and footer and more.
Even if you’re not sure exactly what every feature listed above does, RankSense makes it simple by offering two modes: Smart Mode (easier) and Classic mode (advanced) and it’s great at walking novices through the wizard step-by-step.
Sign up today for your free trial, and if you decide to stay, use coupon: hostgator at sign up for a 20% recurring discount, and good luck on your rankings!
Tags: ranksense, SEO
Posted in Promotions, SEO | 14 Comments »
Google AdWords Coupon Promotion Code
Written by Chad Bean on March 16, 2009 – 12:46 pm -10/12/2009 Update: The Google AdWords Coupon code for HostGator Shared clients is now $50 (used to be $25)! Reseller coupons coming soon.
Ever run a Google search and notice the “sponsored listings” around the search results? Ever click one of those sponsored links? It’s likely that you have already visited a link that was advertised through the Google AdWords program and now HostGator is giving its shared web hosting customers the opportunity get started with Google AdWords by giving them $25 $50 in free marketing credits*.
HostGator has partnered up with the Google AdWords pay-per-click (PPC) advertising program and is now offering an AdWords Coupon voucher good for $25 $50 in credit with all Hatchling, Baby, and Business shared web hosting plans.
What is Google AdWords?
Google AdWords is a pay-per-click advertising program by Google. With AdWords, advertisers can promote their website’s products and services on Google.com’s search results in the “sponsored links” section. Quality ad text and relevant keyword buys will give you an edge over your competitors. And with AdWords, you can set your own budget and change your campaigns at any time – there are no commitments or spending requirements of any kind.
We at HostGator currently use Google AdWords for our own internal marketing efforts, and we truly believe that most businesses can benefit from the highly targeted traffic that this program can yield.
Great, how do I sign up?
New and old HostGator customers on qualifying plans can redeem the coupon code by visiting their HostGator control panel, navigating to the “Google AdWords Offer” link on the left hand side and clicking the “redeem now” link. It’s as simple as that.
If you don’t already have a HostGator web hosting account, take a look at our Shared Web Hosting plans, sign up today, and get started promoting your site!
* (the fine print our lawyers asked us to include): To read the terms and conditions as well as to learn more, visit the HostGator Google AdWords Coupon page.
Tags: adwords, marketing, SEO
Posted in Promotions, Shared Hosting | 28 Comments »
Google SearchWiki Kills SEO
Written by Chad Bean on January 2, 2009 – 7:09 pm -In October of 2008, Google announced a new feature known as SearchWiki. SearchWiki allows anyone with a Google account to change the order of search results and make notes about each result in Google.
Once logged into a Google account, you’ll notice that the search results have two small icons next to the listings that can be used to promote or remove a result. By promoting a result, you can bring the site above other results on the page.
You can learn more about the SearchWiki by watching the Google SearchWiki team’s video.
Now, this is hardly news to many of you out there. We covered Google’s Promote Feature in early December.
What is interesting though, is the idea that Google’s index of results will be swayed by user input on the SearchWiki. On Google’s Official Blog announcement for SearchWiki,it mentions that: “The changes you make only affect your own searches.” While this is true directly, it’s not hard to imagine that Google will collectively use user input to influence search results and page ranking.
Currently websites are listed in order on Google’s web page according to their super-duper secretive algorithm. Those in the search engine optimization industry have been trying to figure out this algorithm for very obvious reasons. If you can cheat the search engines and get a website listed on the front page for certain keywords, than you are able to get more traffic to your site, which generally equates to more revenue for web site owners and businesses.
Microsoft’s search engine, although behind both Google and Yahoo, has something similar setup known as U Rank. Microsoft is also researching a system known as BrowseRank – which measures page importance by the number of visits made to a page and the time spent on each page by a user.
I predict that Google will, in fact, use information gained by SearchWiki to calculate how web sites are ranked in the future. It’s easy to see how showing users web sites listed in order ranked by other users, with similar browsing habits and interests, would be beneficial. Overall, by taking in user feedback, Google should be able to provide more relevant information to its users.
It will be interesting to see how this affects the search engine optimization industry, who has built itself around tricks and techniques to rank websites higher in the search engines.
Tags: google, search engine optimization, searchwiki, SEO
Posted in SEO | 19 Comments »
Prevent Your Site from Being Hacked
Written by Paige Filler on June 27, 2008 – 4:55 pm -A Growth Industry
Recently the number of sites being hacked or infiltrated has risen rapidly. We see a lot of distraught site owners who have had their sites damaged, experienced a loss of rankings, or had data stolen.
Use Protection
Although most good hosting companies will protect their servers (and usually your site to some degree) it’s important to understand that you are responsible for your own site.
Take this analogy: You can use the strongest safe in the world, but if you leave the door open and someone empties it, you can’t blame the safe manufacturer.
Hacked Huh?
Before we offer you some simple tips, it’s worth understanding a few basics about the different kinds of hacks, their purpose and how they can affect you.
We won’t go into detail at this stage, but the number of exploits and the number of different types are increasing. Some of the most common include: XSS, SQL Injections and defacing
Staying up to date is a full time job, but like most types of crime, being prepared and protecting yourself should give you a better chance of weathering a storm should it happen.
So without further ado, here’s a basic primer on protecting your site from being hacked when it’s on shared hosting.
Simple Security Tips
1. Keeping Software Up to Date
If you are running old versions of software chances are it’s insecure, make sure you upgrade to the latest release. Most updates to software are security or functionality related, which means if you aren’t running the latest version you are likely to have missed a few security fixes.
2. 3rd Party Scripts and Code
Plugins, widgets or any other code (including free templates and themes) you install are written by other people under unknown circumstances. Some may be great, some may be full of holes. Be sure to research any code you want to use that you didn’t write yourself. Even a few Google searches should help you find out how secure the code you are using is.
3. Your Own Fault
One of the biggest causes of Identity theft and an easy way for someone to get details to your site(s). Your own computer is likely to be a weak link in the chain. Whether it be from poisoned powerpoint files or someone phishing your account details, the vulnerabilities are limitless. No matter how secure your site is, if the machine you access it from (including logging in and editing etc.) is not secure you stand a good risk of being compromised and it may affect more than just your site.
Use virus scans, clear histories, secure your passwords and be aware of general security issues (try not to let your shiny new MacBook air be stolen). Open and Public wifi spots are an obvious security risk. If you give everyone access to your PIN number for your bank account, expect to be robbed.
4. Secure Passwords
A secure password goes a long way to slowing down a potential infiltrator (real ‘hackers’ do not tend to be people that destroy sites, but ethically search for security holes in technology). Put simply passwords should always be a combination of letters and numbers, uppercase and lowercase. The longer the password, the better (though conversely the longer it is the harder it is to remember).
No dictionary words, no family names and no easily guess-able information either.
You can also generate a random password which is even more secure.
5. Checking Your Logs Regularly
Without watching who is visiting your site, what you are ranking for and similar you could be compromised and never even know it.
If you spot any unusual traffic (ranking for gambling, pharmaceuticals and sex terms is a common one) try working out where it is coming from / going to. From there if you are sure it is a hack you can get some quick help. (Send us a message, we’ll do what we can).
6. Outsource a Little Prevention
Using high quality software, a good coder (one who is security aware), hiring a professional security agency or using an automated method like the Firewall script or Hacker safe will help to reduce your risk. What you outsource depends on your needs (and resources of course).
7. Backup, Backup, Backup and Then Backup Some More
While this tip won’t protect you from being hacked, it will be very beneficial to you should it happen.
Send copies of your backup to your gmail, and auto forward them to your yahoo mail. Download copies to tape, your MP3 player or Iphone, it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that in the case of a hack there will be a couple of things you want.
a. Records of IPs accessing your site.
b. A clean (pre hack) backup of your site (hopefully, including the latest updates)
Here is an easy DIY way to back up your whole site with cPanel.
If you use Hostgator then you’ve already got weekly offsite backups and they will restore your site(s) at no charge should it does become compromised or “cracked/ hacked”.
8. Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket
Site hacking, Search engine rankings, DOS, account closures, viruses, there are a whole list of reasons your site may suffer in some way. With hosting being so cheap, grab yourself a multiple site (reseller) account and spread that risk. You can even have your sites hosted on different C Class IPs.
9. Learn MORE
Nothing beats knowledge. The more you know the easier it becomes to spot problems (not just hacks) and resolve them. So, kick back, grab a soda and start reading (it could be worth more in the end than all of the search news and blogging tips you have in your RSS feed).
Here’s a couple of useful starting points and interesting articles to checkout.
Trend Micro
Apache Security
MySQL Security
Security Focus
ha.ckers.org
Tips to Protect Your Wordpress Installation
How Wordpress Blogs are Hacked
10. Find Yourself a Gator
We take our security very seriously, there is nothing worse than seeing all of your hard work being destroyed. If your site is hosted with us and you think you may have been hacked, click the chat link (top of the page), and contact us anytime to let us know. Not only will you be looking out for the other sites sharing your server, but you give us a better chance to recover your site. Even if your site is not hosted with us, we’ll do what we can to help, we’re just like that.
11. Bonus – Be Careful of the Company You Keep
Anyone with enough time, an Internet connection and some intelligence can find ways to cause you problems online.
Revealing too much, boasting or insulting others online is a good way to attract the wrong kind of attention. In the real world, having fewer enemies just makes life easier.
Until Next Time…
This is the first in a series of posts that should help your site sing even on the darkest of days, there’s nothing we want more than for you to wake up safe and decide to build another new site.
The least we can do is try and make that as easy as possible.
Posted in Web and Hosting Tips | 14 Comments »
