Why You Should Have A Blog For Your Business?

Best Cheap ASP.NET Hosting | There are a lot of blogs around the Internet representing different types of business and there are other types of websites such as presentation websites, online stores and forum community that don’t have an additional blog or that have a blog and are representing a business. Blogs can be used for various purposes, depending how you made the plan for your business so there are at least 4 reasons why you should have a blog for your business.

Why You Should Have A Blog For Your Business

Why You Should Have A Blog For Your Business?

1. Search Engine Optimization

If you have enough time and budget, you can start multiple blogs making a spider network or satellite blogs that send various links to your business website. A good idea would be to have more than one active blogs with several constantly posted articles which have as subject different subcategories of your main domain. This type of websites are called Private Blog Network (PBN), which built in the right way can help to boost your main website’s rankings. But you should beware that this is a risky strategy is SEO.

You need to write well planned articles like guides, advice, tips or tricks where you write a couple of links to your business website directly to a product or a service that is related with your written articles. To attract people you can use various formatting options like italic, underline, bold or color for important words and you need to use friendly permalinks, titles, headers, descriptions and keywords.

Additionally you can use different complex slideshows as banners placed in the sidebars, with images that represent the products you sell and each of the images sending to different product pages. You can use the same contact, about, terms and condition pages for every blog where people are sent to the business website’s specific pages. Also don’t forget to post links that redirect to your blogs, into your business website footer. As more websites are sending to your main website as more off-site SEO you make.

2. Establish Your Brand

Using a blog you can also increase your brand popularity and authority so don’t forget to put your logo together with a suggestive title somewhere on the header of your main website, but also at each blog related with your business you create. You can even make blogs under fictional names or anonymous where you recommend products and services from your own brand. The internet and the visitors of those blog will never know that you work for the specific brand.

If you have a page on your business website working as blog for announcements and news you just made the first step for branding your business. If you use a blog then you can engage your social media profiles and pages even more by automatically scheduling posts from your blog to your Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus pages so your brand gets another advantage.

You can use your blogs to subscribe in different directories from certain domains and you can give each blog a personalized and suggestive name and domain name either general like using the main domain of your business or something more funnier, entertaining and nice, both containing your brand name.

With a well-made blog, you can tell your story, your team’s story and your brand’s story where you can write why you are in business, why you choose this specific business and other interesting things making customers to know the man behind the scenes better.

3. Traffic Generation

If you already have at least three blogs with specific purposes one for SEO, one for branding and one for a ticket system you can increase your customers number three times having three different websites sending to your business one where they can buy products or select services. Customers will like a lot to have where to see opinions regarding your products and provided services, where to find support and information and where to read more about your brand so automatically traffic increases and visitors will become customers.

With so many blogs, your social media will also have a big influence in increasing even more your traffic. Think about having 3 blogs, each one with its own Facebook page, Twitter account, YouTube channel and so on, besides your business website and its social media pages. For even more traffic you can make link and banner exchange between your business website and your spider-network blogs sending traffic from one website to the other one increasing the chance that visitors stay more on your websites and return more often and also they can be attracted easier to buy from you.

4. Support And Help (Feedback)

A ticket system blog can offer you a lot of feedback regarding your customer’s experience regarding their order, shipment or product, but you can also receive feedback using contact forms, comments and reviews from your blogs or business website. A blog helps you to create a two way communication system with your customers, simple visitors or other interested people interacting, commenting and offering feedback to what you write.

You can make a special blog or you can use a simple blog for support where you can make a ticket system where people write you messages through a contact form and you reply them back via e-mail and via tickets. For this, you can use a WordPress blog with the plugins Contact Form 7, Flamingo or a better solution is WP Support Plus Responsive Ticket System where you can submit tickets through admin role, simple users or frontend, also you have other useful options like priority, status, category selection, multiple file attachment, reply, agents and supervisor roles, ticket assignation, mail notifications, guest ticket, Skype chat and call, phone number and captcha and so on.

If you just want to provide information you can use the same blog you use for your ticket system and the same one for branding and SEO, but is better to use a different one increasing the number of members of your own spider network.

Summary

With WordPress is easy to create a professional blog for your business. The not so easy part of running a blog is to come up with new blogging ideas and publish useful articles regularly. However, to never be out for words, you can just make notes about blogging ideas when something pops into your mind or ask your employees or co-workers to write a blog post. It is also important to have a reliable blog hosting, that allows you to update, manage and grow your blog. For hosting a WordPress blog, we highly recommend HostForLIFE.

How To Keep Your WordPress Site Secure (Several Mistakes To Avoid)

Best Cheap ASP.NET Hosting – WordPress is very popular software, which powers millions of website worldwide. When starting WordPress website, maybe the last concern of every webmaster is security. If you can’t keep your website safe, you will be losing business and all your hard effort can be ruined in just a second. The development team of WordPress is constantly maintain and updating the software to improve and fix all security issues. With all this great effort and time that is dedicated to WordPress, there are still lots of mistakes that webmasters commit. In this article we will present you how to keep your WordPress site secure by knowing the most common WordPress security mistakes that can make your website a victim in this endless ocean of cyber-crime.

How to keep your WordPress site secure

Outdated Core And Plugins

WordPress is very well built and tested software, however there are some versions where is a tiny security hole in the source code that can represent a high risk for many websites. You should pay attention to the back-end of your wordpress site, and whenever there is any news about security update of the core software you should perform and update right away.

It is  important to keep an eye on the plugins as well. These can also represent a risk to your website if any of them has a vulnerable code. If there is a new version available for any of the installed plugins, do not hesitate to update. These updates will usually take couple of seconds only.

Bad Web Hosting Provider

If you are using WordPress you should pay extra attention to the web hosting provider you choose. If you choose an unreliable hosting provider, most likely you will end up switching to a new host after you go through a lot of problems. If the people who are behind the hosting company do not have the necessary experience and knowledge to secure and optimize their servers, even if your site is running on latest version, it can still be hacked. Another problem that comes with poor hosting is that your website will always be slow, due to poorly optimized and configured servers and old hardware, and website visitors will never return to a slow site. So make sure that you pick a hosting provider that supports WordPress and has all the necessary tools to help you with installation, security and updates.

Use Of Default Admin & Generic Password

This is the most common mistake that is exploited by hackers. In many cases, WordPress sites are developed offline, and because the developers don’t want to spend much time on website setup and can easy forget complicated password, the choose to go with the simple admin/123456 combination. After the project is finished, it will be transferred online, everyone is happy that the website is finished and works as the client wants but nobody cares about changing the login information. Another common mistake is when users use their birth day date, name family member names as password, because it is easy to remember. They also link their website to their public facebook profile, where all this information is available. Guess what will happen next.

To be safe, you should change the default admin user and if you can’t come up with a strong password, use an online password generator that will create a unique password for you. Do not use the same password on all of your websites, social or email account. This way if one of your accounts get compromised, all others will be safe.

Malicious Plugins And Themes

t is phenomenal, that WordPress has so many contributors and that there are so many people out there who are willing to spend their time to develop free plugins and themes. There are, however, many cases when developers abuse the system and they insert “features” to the add-ons that are actually bad for the user. For instance there are theme provider websites, that force links into the themes and you cannot remove them. Having links on your website is all right, however if you have unrelated links in the footer of your page, could result in a penalty from Google.

To avoid this you should always download wordpress themes from trusted websites. Plugins are also abused, there are cases when a plugin opens a back-door to hackers to access your website, in other cases a plugin will insert ads on your site or even change your ads. If you are downloading free plugins, always use plugins from WordPress.org because these plugins are verified and tested.

Some Tips To Keep Your WordPress Site Secure

Use of security plugins
Install a security plugin to your website. For example Wordfence, is one of the best security plugins for wordpress, which not only will scan your website but will also provide protection against bots, malicious activity and hackers. It will also make your site run faster.

Sucuri.net
This is a globally recognized company in terms of website security. This service can be easily integrated to any wordpress site, by installing their plugin. The Sucuri service provides lots of security features to your site: security activity auditing, malware scanning, blacklist monitoring, post-hack security actions, security notifications and firewall as well.

Two factor authentication
These types of plugins are also a great defense against brute force attack. While you login to the wordpress admin area, you will receive an email with a link to verify your identity. Once you are verified, you can login to your wordpress site by only entering your password next time. However if you try to login from another device, you will again go through the verification process.

Captcha authentication
Using a captcha plugin for the admin login area will prevent brute force attacks. This is the most common type of hacking, it is usually done by a software, which tries to login to your site with different usernames and passwords.

Remove version and generator name
By adding two lines of code to the function.php of your theme, you can remove the wordpress version number from the source code, and even the generator name. Hiding these information, hackers will find it more difficulty to figure out what software and what version you are using for your site.