Details below:

- Earn 25% upfront on any Web Hosting or Virtual Private Server (VPS) sale you send to LetsHost

- Referral cookie active on client machine for 90 days

- €25 minimum balance before withdrawal

- Pay outs available after 31 days of service purchase

- Activate via email to sales@letshost.ie or through your client area (Once logged in click ‘Affiliates’)

- Usage Sample:

http://www.letsho.st/shared/aff?aff=XXX (This links to our shared hosting plans)
http://www.letsho.st/vps/aff?aff=XXX (This links to our VPS plans)
http://www.letsho.st/aff?aff=XXX (This links directly to our homepage)

Key: XXX = your affiliate code

Terms and Conditions:

- Referral commissions are only valid on sales made from 31/08/2011 onwards

- Commissions not paid on Domain Registration, Site Builder, SSL certificates, Dedicated IP addresses, Anti Spam Service, Administrative Fees

- Commission is calculated on fee paid to LetsHost. If a coupon code of 30% is used on a purchase, you will receive 25% of 70% of the product value or in other words, 25% of the sale after any discounts are applied

We welcome any queries you have to sales@letshost.ie on our new affiliate program.

SSL stands for “Secure Sockets Layer.” Secure Sockets Layer is a protocol designed to enable applications to transmit information between each other securely. SSL is the most widely deployed security protocol used today. In today’s Internet focused world, we typically see SSL in use when a web browser needs to securely connect to a web server over the insecure Internet. For example, in the case of a browser, users are alerted to the presence of SSL when the browser displays a padlock. This is the key to the success of SSL, as the users know the site is valid and secure and it is an incredibly simple experience for end users.

How does SSL work?

SSL works by the sharing of encrypted keys, or passwords. The keys are created in pairs, one a public key and one a private key. When the keys are traded in a particular manner between two parties, this protocol assures the parties in communication they are transmitting with one another and not a hacker or phisher. It also assures the data being transmitted is not intercepted by someone else.

What happens when my web browser connects to a secure website? (SSL)

1. The browser requests that the web server identifies itself.

2. The server sends the browser a copy of its SSL cert.

3. The browser checks whether it trusts the SSL cert, and if it does it sends a message to the server.

4. The server sends back a digitally signed acknowledgement to start an SSL encryption session.

5. Encrypted data is now shared between the server and the browser.

SSL’s importance in E-commerce

When a customer visits a store they can see who they are dealing with. They can see the person and the product and make a decision on payment. When a customer visits your website they have no way of knowing who they are dealing with or who owns the ecommerce website from which they are about to buy. They are exposed to all the risks associated with sending data over the internet.

Using an SSL cert on your website enables a web browser (your customer) to communicate securely with your website and assures the customer of these three key issues:

1. That the website really is who it claims to be.

2. That credit card numbers, etc are encrypted and cannot be intercepted.

3. That the data sent and received cannot be tampered with or forged.

LetsHost.ie offer SSL certs from €89.99 + VAT per year. For more information on these GeoTrust SSL certs, please visit http://letshost.ie/hosting/packages/sslcert

Before we go into how you can use Facebook to promote your business, have a look at the following statistics:
- Facebook has more that 500 millions active users
- The average user has 130 friends
- The average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
- There are more than 250 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices
- People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook

What the above stats tell you is that there are a huge amount of people connected to Facebook, they spend alot of time on Facebook (both using a traditional computer and while on the move using their mobile devices) and they are connected to many businesses and events and share these with their friends.

So how can you get connected to all these potential customers? First step is to create your business page – this is free to do and you can start off with as little or as much content as you wish, adding in extra content whenever you want. You can then suggest this page to friends and other businesses and if they choose to ‘like’ your page, it will appear on their profile becoming automatically visible to all of their friends. They can then suggest your page to their friends and it continues like that.

The important part comes next – be active with your page. This can be with simple updates to your page, adding Facebook-exclusive promotional codes, creating events (such as a sale/promotion, open days, etc) or actively engaging with other Facebook users. Facebook users, and internet users in general, are fed such a huge amount of information constantly, it is important to be on their screen – ‘out of sight, of of mind!’

What if you have a website already – do you still need a Facebook page also? The answer is ‘yes!’ While your website can be a wealth of  information on your business, products and services you offer etc, this is often largely static content. Facebook, on the other hand, will have a certain amount of information on your business but its point is about being active – active and up to date content and information, getting in contact with customers, generating a buzz around your business. Also, there are more and more options to integrate your Facebook into your website so visitors can easily go from one to the other.

The above is only a introduction on what you can do on Facebook and, more importantly, what Facebook can do for your business. The above alone can generate interest in your business, awareness of the products/services you offer and ultimately bodies through the door and real sales at the end of the day. And that is before you consider spending a penny on paid advertising!

For more statistics on Facebook, please visit http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

To create your own page for free on Facebook, please visit http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php?ref_type=sitefooter

However, the effectiveness of an advertising campaign is only as good as the ads.

A powerful ad is one of the most important aspects of your success. And, the secret to a successful ad is your HEADLINE. You only have a split second to grab your targets attention. Your potential customer will most likely scan the ads and only read one if it catches their attention. Write your ads with passion, excitement, and benefits.

When writing your headlines, keep in mind, you only have a few seconds to grab your potential customers’ attention. If your headline doesn’t immediately catch their attention, they’ll simply move on and never return.

Being able to advertise with Google is not at all complicated as new users should find the AdWords pay-per-click platform fairly easy to use.

Those who want to advertise with Google but are new to the world of internet marketing are often afraid of starting because they don’t exactly know what to do or what to expect.

The truth is, the Google AdWords pay-per-click advertising platform is fairly easy to use and can play a very crucial role to the success of any online business or internet marketing campaign

Placing ads on the social networking website Facebook is one of the best opportunities on the Internet for targeted advertising. Because Facebook users provide information about their age, gender, location and interests, you can target your ads directly to the demographic you want to reach.

Affiliate marketing is a form of online advertising where advertisers place campaigns with a potentially large number of small (and large) publishers, whom are only paid media fees when traffic to the advertiser is garnered, and usually upon a specific measurable campaign result (a form, a sale, a sign-up, etc.). Today, this is usually accomplished through contracting with an affiliate network.

There are 3 main types of Advertising Plan
– CPV (Cost Per Visitor) is where advertisers pay for the delivery of a Targeted Visitor to the advertisers website.
– CPV (Cost Per View) is when an advertiser pays for each unique user view of an advertisement or website (usually used with pop-ups, pop-unders and interstitial ads).
– CPC (Cost Per Click) is also known as Pay per click (PPC). Advertisers pay each time a user clicks on their listing and is redirected to their website. They do not actually pay for the listing, but only when the listing is clicked on. This system allows advertising specialists to refine searches and gain information about their market. Under the Pay per click pricing system, advertisers pay for the right to be listed under a series of target rich words that direct relevant traffic to their website, and pay only when someone clicks on their listing which links directly to their website. CPC differs from CPV in that each click is paid for regardless of whether the user makes it to the target site.

But while including images and text on your site is very straight forward, including video can be a little bit trickier. This is because video files can come in different file formats (.mp4, .flv, .avi etc) , video formats (MPEG-4 or H.264 are the more common), can be displayed using different techniques/viewers (YouTube viewer, Flash viewer, Quicktime viewer etc) and some options above are compatible with some broswer but not others. Also, video files are greatly larger in size than images so bandwidth is a major consideration.

When designing your website, you will want to code it to work with the broadest audience possible. And when you are including video on your website, a little more work is involved to achieve this. For example, Flash (which is a very popular choice for implementing video) is not compatible with iPhones/iPads/iPods and Apple have plans to remove built-in support in their Safari browser. And the major browsers (Internet Explorer and Firefox) do not offer across the board support, but this can be remedied quickly with addons and plugins. Up and coming browsers like Google Chrome do offer across the board video support, but with only approx. 10% market share it isn’t wise to bank solely on this option. The good news is that you can code video on your site to be viewable to more than one of the above options. Code to suit different browsers/platforms can be used in conjunction to offer cross-browser support.

So now that you have your video on your site and have set it up to be available to the broadest market, your next step is to make sure people can find it. Ensuring search engines can find your video is called video SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and follows many of the same techniques of standard website SEO. You might be familiar with the usual keywords, descriptions, descriptive file names but what is also helpful is having a transcript of your video (search engines cannot search the contents of a video, but they have no problem searching through text), including links with the video to allow your visitors share your video on their website/social network, including a thumbnail image with descriptive file name – there are many tricks to make your video search engine friendly.

The internet is fast becoming a lot more interactive (with the incredible popularity of networks such as Facebook and Twitter) and websites are very media/content-rich so it’s important to be able to keep the attention of your visitors. And just as important, you need to ensure your traffic increases, or at least continues, and to do this you will need to have your video content search engine friendly.

With .ie domains you have virtually no cybersquatting, less cybercrime and minimal poaching of domains.  You get Higher Search Engine Rating with .ie domains and greater Security.

Registration is Simple. If the domain is for Business use, all you need to provide is an RBN/CRO or Registered VAT Number. If you dont have any of these, dont worry, you can provide a letter from your Bank Manager Solicitor or Accountant confirming you are a Sole Trader along with a document from yourself outlining your connection to the domain.

If the domain is for Personal use, all you need to do is send in a document outlining what the domain name means and what it will be used for along with a copy of your Passport or Driving Licence.

Following the IEDRs announcement of registering the 150,000^th .ie domain, they have launched why.ie, a site detailing further why to go .ie. Please visit https://www.why.ie/ for more information.

For detailed information/examples of the IEDR registration policy, please visit http://www.letshost.ie/domains/domain_irish_domain_names.php

Traffic -- photo via Burning Image on Flikr

We’ve heard it time and time again… how web success is defined by traffic. The more “hits” your website gets, the more successful it is, right?

It’s a common misconception that there’s a direct correlation between the number of unique visitors or page views a website gets and how successful that site is. The thing underlying, but often overlooked, truth is that unless you do something with web traffic once it arrives all it does is eat into your monthly bandwidth allowance.

Traffic without conversion doesn’t benefit your business

Unless you can persuade a significant portion of your website visitors to do whatever it is you want them to do when they arrive on your site (your conversion goals), then the volume of traffic your site attracts is a meaningless number. It’s like Brown Thomas counting the people who walk past on the pavement on a Saturday — pointless.

To build a really effective website you need targeted traffic. To get the maximum ROI out of your web marketing investment, attracting people who want what you have to offer is crucial.

Goals, keywords, content, conversion

What do you want to achieve from your website overall? What about the individual landing pages?

Having clearly defined goals is important. If you don’t have a destination in mind it’s impossible to plan the journey, and you’ll never know when you’ve arrived.

Once you have clear goals, you need to choose relevant, properly targeted keywords based on achieving those specific goals

• Pick general keyword phrases and you’ll end up fishing in a bigger pool of potential visitors, so there’s huge volume potential, but there’s also likely to be more competition and a low probability of conversion.
• Pick very specific keyword phrases and your probability for conversion climbs exponentially, your competition falls but the size of the pool shrinks, so potential traffic volume is much lower.

Ideally we need to strike the happy medium between these two extremes, selecting  good mix of relevant goal-focussed keywords. You’ll find a good overview of keywords and how to pick them in an earlier post.

Once you’re targeting the right keywords, the next step is to ensure your content delivers. Once your highly targeted visitors arrive on your site, give them what they’re looking for (based on your target keywords for the page) and guide them gently (or perhaps not so gently) towards your chosen conversion goals.

Make your call to action clear. If you want them to buy… ask them to buy, and make it easy for them to do so. If you want them to sign up to your mailing list, give them a form to fill in… and ASK them to submit it. Don’t beat around the bush… state what you’d like your visitors to do clearly and concisely, and make taking action easy for them.

Real website success isn’t about traffic volume; it’s about return on investment.

Choose traffic quality over traffic volume, align your online marketing accordingly and focus on improving conversion with more focused content and landing pages. Do that, and you’ll soon see a marked improvement in your website performance.

1) The Basics
The greatest invitation you can give a hacker to compromise your blog is a failure to ensure that your WordPress installation is running the most current version. Older versions of WordPress suffer from numerous security vulnerabilities which the more current versions have patched. Upgrading WordPress is a simple process, log in to admin area and select ‘Updates’ from the Dashboard.
At the time of writing you should be running version 3.0.1
It is also important to keep all your plugins and themes up to date. The Updates area of the Dashboard will tell you if there is a newer version available. It is recommended that you regularly check this page to keep on top of the latest releases.
A strong password is a must. The use of special characters will make brute-forcing your password a much less appealing method of attack for a hacker. A simple password can be made quite strong by using numbers to replace letters as shown in the example below. Instead of ‘hosting123′, use ‘H0$t1ng123′

2) The less information you give a hacker the harder his job will be
A default WordPress installation will give away certain information that a hacker can use to formulate a plan of attack against your blog.
WordPress by default broadcasts what version it is running in your pages meta-tags. This information lets a hacker know what attacks your blog is vulnerable to.
The default username is admin. This can be used in conjunction with a brute-force attack that if successful will give a hacker full access to you blog and can do with it what ever they wish.
The default database prefix is wp_. This should be changed to something more unique.
While making the above changes may sound like a daunting task especially to users who may not consider themselves “technical”, there are many plugins that can be downloaded to do the job for you.

3) Security Plugins
WP Security Scan

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-security-scan/
WP Security Scan will check you WordPress installation for the most common vulnerabilies and give suggestions as to how you can improve your security. It will ensure that your files are using the correct file permissions, remove the version of information from the Meta tags and test the strength of your password. It is recommended that you preform regular security scans of your Wordpress installation.

Login LockDown

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/login-lockdown/
This plug-in will record any failed login attempts. It records the IP address of the copmuter used along with a timestamp of every attempt. Too many failed attempts results in that particular IP address being blocked from connecting to your blog.

Stealth Login

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stealth-login/
Change the default login page to one of your choice. The first place a a hacker will attempt to enter a password is the default http://www.exampleblog.com/wp-admin

At the end of 2007 global online population statistics put the number of internet users worldwide at about 1.3 billion. By 31 December 2009, there were 1.8 billion people across the globe with regular access to the internet.

That’s an additional half-a-billion people, and means that today more than a quarter of the global population has access to the internet. Couple that growth with the regional breakdown of internet penetration, and you start to see just how crucial it is for businesses to connect with their customers online, no matter where in the world they operate.

Percentage of population online

In North America more than 75% of people are online, in Australasia / Oceania it’s 60% and in Europe 53% — although within that subdued European figure you have Scandinavian states sporting 80%-90% penetration, and the UK with over 76% and Ireland wit 65.8%.

Asia’s internet penetration figures stand at a shade over 20% — but that doesn’t give the full picture either, because there’s a massive swing from a high 77.3% penetration in South Korea to a very low 0.4% penetration in Bangladesh. Percentages can hide the sheer scale of the potential online market in some of these countries too.

Take China as an example. Only 29% of Chinese people have internet access. That doesn’t sound like much, but translate it to actual individual internet users and it represents a massive 384,000,000 people, giving China the world’s largest online population by quite some margin.A global phenomenon, local impact

In its report “Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users, 2010 and Beyond: A New Balance”, analyst firm Gartner predicts that by 2014 over 3 billion people — or a significant majority of the world’s adult population — will have the ability to “transact electronically via mobile or Internet technologies”. That’s a staggering statistic that the firm says “represents a fundamental shift in the foundation of global commerce”.

Widespread internet adoption and the use of electronic media to facilitate commerce is a global phenomenon… but it’s one that even local businesses can’t afford to ignore. Whether people are looking for a plumber to fit their new bathroom suite, or using a smartphone to pinpoint peer-recommended Italian restaurants near where they’re staying, consumers rely on the internet to guide their international, national and local purchasing decisions.

Ready or not, that’s already having an impact on your business.

Image by Ben Sutherland via Flickr

When you sit down to write content for your website, who exactly are you writing the content for?

It’s very easy to fall into the trap of writing your web content to please yourself as a business owner – or if you work for a larger company, to please your boss, or the person who’s going to sign off on the finished article.

STOP!

If you want your website to deliver results, your web content should be written to appeal directly to just one group of people: your site visitors.

Know your web audience

When you built your website your web designer / web development team will have spent time researching the online audience your site is designed to appeal to (or at least they should have). That information is just as crucial… if not more so… when it comes to writing effective content for your website.

Take a bit of time to re-acquaint yourself with your online audience. Work out who you want to reach out to online, and tailor your content accordingly.

Here are a few tips to help you write more effective web content:

1. Grab attention: web users are impatient – forget flowery introductions and verbose descriptions, make your writing clear, concise and to the point from the start.
2. Make it scannable: avoid large blocks of uninterrupted text. Use headings, sub-headings and bullet points to break up the text into manageable, scannable stand-alone chunks.
3. Make it original: unique, original content is a great way to engage your users, establish your relevance and authority, and search engines love it.
4. Use the inverted pyramid: the inverted pyramid writing style, often used for newspaper stories, tends to work well on the web. Aim to deliver the most important points of your story/information first, going on to deliver supporting details in order of decreasing importance down the page. Ideally, the user should be able to stop reading at any point and still get the gist of your content.
5. Be consistent: use a simple, easy to read writing style, and keep things consistent across the site. If you have a number of people creating your content, consider developing a style-guide or house-style to help maintain consistency.
6. Engage with your reader: use a conversational style, and write as if you were talking to an individual rather than a large audience. It will help your writing to engage with the reader on a much more personal level.