Posts Tagged ‘megastar media’

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5 Ways to Build a Community Online

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

Do you want to build a community online to promote your product? When you build a community online you not only are drawing in more customers for your product you are also making sure that they are loyal to your company because they will continue to buy from a company they trust. So how can you build a community online that will really help your business grow? Here are 5 easy ways to build a community online.

1. Use forums – Everyone loves to voice their opinion and discuss topics. Online forums really help to build a community because online forums give people a chance to interact with one another and build up relationships. Using a forum can be tricky because sometimes online forums can become very heated places but if you have a moderator that monitors the forums to make sure that forum threads don’t get too heated and conflicts don’t get out of control then forums can be a great way to build a community online.

2. Let users customize their profiles – People like to share a little bit of themselves with others and customizing their individual profiles is one way to let them do that. Social community software will often have customizable templates that will let you set an overall theme for the community but will let individual users customize their own pages.

3. Get everyone you know to join – In the beginning it can be tough to get people to sign up for your online community. No one wants to be the first person to sign up in a community. The more people your community has the more people you will draw. So if you’re creating a public community recruit friends, family and employees to sign up immediately to make it look like the community already has a strong base.

4. Post often – When a community is just starting out it’s important to let people know that it’s an active community. The best way to do that is to post often. Start new discussions, comment on people’s profiles, do anything that you can do to be visible and loud on the community site.

5. Give it time – Often it takes time to build a community online. People need time to find their voices and comfort levels on the site and there also needs to be a buildup of communal trust before people truly feel that they are part of the community. So even if it seems at first like the site is not progressing as fast as you want it to don’t shut the site down or stop being active on the site. Give it at least six months to grow before you reassess whether or not the community is meeting the goals that you set for it.

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5 Tips For Choosing a Business Web Hosting Company

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

Confused about how to choose a business web hosting company? It can be hard to know which hosting company to trust with your business website. After all, your website is your calling card online and it’s important that you choose a reliable, high quality web hosting company to make sure that your site runs smoothly. Here are 5 tips that can help you choose a quality hosting company for your website:

1. Don’t use free hosting services – You might be tempted to try out a free hosting service and save some money but remember the old adage “you get what you pay for”. That is definitely true when it comes to web hosting! That doesn’t mean that you need to rush out and get the most expensive hosting plant that you can find but don’t bother with the free hosting services, they will do more harm than good in the long run. Free services also often have a lot of add ons that you need to pay for like stats and website tracking info so even though the hosting is free the services that you need are not.

2. Check out how long the average help desk wait is – Somewhere on the site they will tell you how long it usually takes their help desk personnel to answer a trouble ticket submitted by a customer. The average help desk wait is 24 – 48 hours. If they say that the average wait is longer than that you should find another web hosting company.

3. See if they have live help available – These days most business web hosting companies offer live help through chat applications or instant messages during normal business hours. Live help isn’t always terribly helpful but at least you can talk with someone right away when you have a problem. If you can find a hosting company in your preferred price range that offers live help you should choose that company so that you’ll be able to get a hold of someone if you need to.

4. Check to see how many email addresses you get with your website – Any hosting company should offer you free POP3 email addresses with your website. Find out how many the company offers before you sign up and make sure that they offer more than you think you’ll need so that you can change email addresses or add and subtract email addresses as employees come and go.

5. Ask about their security protocols – This is important when you’re buying hosting services. It’s important for any business but it’s especially important if you’re going to be doing any ecommerce or asking clients or customers for personal information or financial information. Find out if the company allows you to install additional security and what security they offer as a standard part of their services.

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5 Things You Need to Build an Online Community

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

Building an online community is lot like a grassroots public relations campaign. Word of mouth carries a lot of weight, and the more recommendations you can get from other people the better your chances of attracting new people are. So once you start your own community site how can build an online community cheaply and effectively? Here are 5 things that you can use to spread the word about your online community without spending a lot of money.

1. Viral marketing – Viral marketing involves using videos, Podcasts, and other new media as a way of reaching people that might be interested in your online community. Sometimes you might have to pay for the opportunity, like if you want to be featured in a Podcast, but videos on sites like YouTube are free. You can make a video cheaply and use that to promote your online community site virally when you use a site like YouTube to spread the video.

2. Blogs – Blogging is very popular and getting features on one or two or ten blogs could be a great way to get people over to your social networking site. In order to get featured on blogs that have a lot of readers you have to do a lot of networking or make sure that your site is really different and unique so that bloggers will want to write about it.

3. Other social networking sites – Creating profiles on sites like MySpace and Facebook for your community site and pointing your friends on those sites back to your own community site can be a reliable way to get new people to join your social networking site.

4. Forums – Using forums can be a good way to get people’s attention but you have to be very careful when you’re advertising your own site on a forum. You don’t want to be accused of “trolling” or using the forum just for promotion. To avoid being a troll you need to be an active participant in discussions on the forum. Don’t just post a link to your website and disappear. Post about useful, relevant things and just include a link to your site as part of your signature.

But remember that people will be deciding whether or not to join your social networking site based on your posts in the forum so always keep your posts on topic and polite. Be professional.

5. Email – Email lists can be powerful tools for getting customers or for getting people to join your new social networking site. Break out your email lists of customers, clients, anyone that you’ve ever worked with and send out a newsletter with the information about the new site.

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Don’t Forget About Small Business Web Hosting For Your Website

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

When it’s time for you to set up your company website there are several components that you need to have before your website will be ready to go and will be accessible to the general public. The first thing that you need to do is purchase a domain name. You might want to purchase the domain names for all the variations of your company name as well. Often you can get good deals when you purchase more than one domain name and if you own all the variations of your business name you won’t have to worry about another company with a similar name putting up a website that might confuse your customers.

After you have your domain name you have to purchase small business web hosting for your website. Small business web hosting is usually available from the company that you use to purchase a domain name but you should look around and compare the prices of small business web hosting at several companies before picking one. Often you can get small business web hosting more cheaply from another company.

There are other factors that you need to consider when picking small business web hosting beside price though. You also need to look at other things like the amount of bandwith and storage space that comes with the small business web hosting. Many companies will offer different plans that have different amounts of bandwidth and storage space for different monthly fees. If you don’t know how much storage space and bandwidth you will need you should ask your web site design company what they would recommend that you get. They can tell you what you need in terms of storage space and bandwidth.

If you have a website that will be taking up lots of storage space and needs a lot of bandwidth or if you are going to be having more than one website you might want to consider not getting a small business web hosting plan and buying your own server instead. But getting your own server is not something that many small businesses need to invest in, especially if you are just putting up a website for the first time.

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5 Questions to Ask a Web Design Company Before You Hire Them

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

If you don’t know a lot about web design it can be intimidating to hire a web design company because you might not know what you are suppose to ask in order to judge if they are really qualified to build the kind of website that you want for your business. When you’re interviewing prospective web design companies here are 5 crucial questions to ask that will help you decide if they are the right company for you or not.

1. What other companies have you built websites for? This question is important because it’s a good indicator of what types of websites the company has built in the past. If you are wanting them to build you an ecommerce site that you can use to sell your products on the Web and they have never worked with any companies that sell products online then you’ll know that the company probably isn’t experienced enough to build you the kind of ecommerce site that you want.

2. Do Web marketing techniques do you use? If you ask this question and they stare at you blankly then you will know right away that you need to choose another company. A web design company doesn’t necessarily have to know a lot about Web marketing in order to build you a functional site but a good website design company will stay informed about the latest trends in Web marketing so that they can make sure the sites they built are compatible with Web marketing techniques and are optimized for web marketing.

3. What other services are included? If you want the company to do additional website work for you like regular updates, website hosting, website maintenance and so on you need to clarify that up front and make sure that those services are including in the initial price quote.

4. How long will the building of the site take? If they can’t offer you a specific time table for completion they should at least have an outline of benchmarks that they can offer so that there is a definite beginning and a definite end to the completion of the project.

5. What are your rates? You will need to find out if the company works on an hourly rate or if the price is per job. Some website design companies charge per designer, per hour and other charge a flat fee for the entire project. If the fee is a flat fee per project make sure that you ask if revisions, maintenance, or any other “extras” are included in that price or not.

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Posted in Social Networking Services, Website Design | 3 Comments »

How To Build an Online Community

Monday, July 28th, 2008

When learning how to build an online community, it is essential to first know your target audience. You will want to have an idea who you want to frequent your community because this will help you determine how to get those people to your website.

An online community is only as good as the ways they are able to interact. The next question to ask yourself on how to build an online community is how do you want to disseminate information? You can choose to have forums where participants can come and chat with each other. You can have bulletin boards where people post new threads and reply to what others have to say. Do you want to create a large resources section so that your community can find more information that they are looking for? Do you want to create a mailing list where you send out more information on a particular topic?

Deciding upon how to interact with your online community must support the ways in which they want to interact. This can be observed by visiting other forums your target audience visits and seeing how they interact with each other. You can also create a survey on a website you have to see what your target audience wants and then offer a prize such as a free e-book in return for the input. This can be very valuable.

Can you run the online community yourself? You need to determine what type of resources it will take to build the online community you want. You may want to see if you can partner with a company who will offer you discounted services for the opportunity to put their name in front of your client base. You may even want to decide to use your own networking software or to look at the networking software of companies like it was previously mentioned in this paragraph.

You then need to look at which networking company to work with. This is important because they will host your online community. You want a company which has good technical support at all hours of the day in case of emergencies. If you have a company which does not work on the weekend, think about the damage to your client base if you do not have a web site running for an entire weekend.

After setting up your online community, it is then essential to market your web site. How will anyone know to visit your web site if you do not help them see the benefits of using what you have to offer. No one will change their online habits to help you but rather because they see the benefit to them. You have to find and communicate that one true advantage which shows you have what they are looking for and that sets you apart from your competition.

This should give you a good starting point on how to build your online community. There are more details but much of it comes down to understanding what your target audience wants and giving it to them.

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