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The type of business you are in will greatly affect who you host your website with and who will be your technical support partner. Choose wrong and it won’t take long for you to realize and regret your choice.
How to know you’ve chosen the WRONG partner:

1. Your site goes down (a lot more than wished) and at the wrong times. If you’re selling online and it is a busy season, a few hours of downtime means lost customers and lost revenue. It’s not good for your business.

2. Your Website goes down (or gets malware) and you’re on a self-maintenance program. Now, instead of running your business, you’re dealing with a general support number and doing all your own troubleshooting… which is never fun.

So, how do you choose the right fit? Below are three key to consider when it comes to your website hosting.

1. How Much Outage Will You Tolerate?

What kind of business are you? If you sell online and your site is the main generator of revenue, can you afford to be down? Or if your web is critical to customer support or lead generation, what does your website being down say about your brand?

Every minute down will affect your goals. But, how many “nine” do you need? To get an idea of what difference a single “nine” can make, let’s see some examples.

Four Nines – 99.99% Uptime. At 99.99% you could possibly sustain 52 minutes of downtime per year within the service level agreement (SLA) terms. This allows for you to sit comfortably and know that your website won’t be down for your customers.

Three Nines – 99.90% Uptime. Three nines gives you an estimated downtime of 9 hours throughout the year. Unfortunately, you don’t get to choose the downtime so even though this is pretty good, it can still affect your business in a negative way.

Let’s say you are a food company and you have a recall webpage. If you have a food recall, you need to make sure that your website can handle the amount of traffic it will take in during the recall as well as know your website will be up the whole time. With 9 hours of downtime, you do not have that guarantee. However, 99.90% might be enough of a guarantee for an informational website.

Two Nines – 99.00% Uptime. At two nines, you are at risk of experiencing up to 87 hours of downtime throughout the year. Wye highly recommend not choosing this for any business or brand who depends on their website for growth and revenue. Perhaps if you are a small hobbyist who gets less than a few hundred visits a month, sure; but if you’re a legit business, this level is not for you.

2. What Type of Service Do You Expect from Your Website Hosting Provider?

Are you looking for a high level of service that provides quick response time and constant availability? If not, then you can pay less for your service, however, you also cannot expect to call someone and have your issue be resolved right away.

There are many different support options available. You need to understand that higher levels of service will cost more, but afford a much faster response time. For the sake of comparing services, let’s use “threes” to demonstrate varying levels.

Three Minutes. If you are a business who wants immediate help when an issue occurs (24/7) and speak to a real person on the phone, then this is the option for you. This is the service where you can call the hosting partner 24/7/365 and they will answer to help. This is critically important if you want your hosting partner to be able to fix issues whenever they arise, even during ‘after’ hours and even if the issue is not that critical.

Three Hours. This is the service option where your web hosting provides a ticket for you to fill out online, and they will get back to you with a response within three hours or so. If waiting for three hours on any issue (small or big) relating to your business’ website is fine with you, then choose this. With this service, however, you should keep in mind that if you encounter a bigger problem, you won’t get a response right away. Instead, there will be downtime for a few hours while you wait for your response to resolve the issue.

Three Days. This level of service is when you submit your issue online and they will respond within 24-48 hours. The problem with this option is that even when you get a response, it might be generic and lead you to a game of emailing back and forth until you get the answer you need. In most cases, this service will take several days to get the issue resolved.

3. What Kind of Involvement Do You Want from Your Web Hosting Partner?

How much expertise does your own team have when it comes to the website and how much involvement do you want from your web hosting partner? Do you want your web host to provide full-service, where you can call them and have them not only put your website up and host it, but also perform other ancillary services?
A full-service hosting provider should be able to provide the following:

• Domain registration
• DNS hosting and management
• SSL certificate services
• Monitoring system levels
• Email service management
• Infrastructure monitoring
• Multiple backup tiers
• Source control (version control)
• Coordinate front-end and back-end development resources
• Security management and monitoring
• Patch maintenance of systems and applications

Three levels of service your web host can provide:

Monitor and React. This is full-service involvement. Your service provider will not only put your website up and host it, but will also monitor your site, notify you of any issues and react to those issues right away. This option is best for most businesses if they do not have the expertise to do this themselves. This level of service gives you the peace of mind that your site is taken care of.

Monitor and Notify. This is where your web partner will monitor your website and notify you if there is an issue, but not actually fix it. This is a good option if your team has the expertise to handle the issues, but not the time to monitor the website.

No Involvement. This is when your web host partner will simply stand your site up and host it. There will be no involvement from them in monitoring or reacting to your website needs. This could be a good option if your team has the expertise to do all the services as well as the time to monitor your website regularly.

Remember, You Get What You Pay For

You need to make sure you are choosing the right host that is going to support the goals you have set out for your business and your site. Take a close look at your business and decide what level of services and availability you need from your hosting partner in order to be successful.

In case you’re reading this, odds are your business need a new website, and you have to make sense of to what extent it will take and the amount it will cost. The good news for you is that I have the appropriate response; the bad news is it might not be as quick as you might want it to be. So, how long does it take to redesign a website? The short answer is, it depends.

Here’s a different way to look at it. Your family is growing, the kids are getting bigger, you adopted a dog, and it’s time to find a new house since you’ve outgrown your current one. How long will it take for your family to relocate? Are you hoping to move into the suburbs where your model home is indistinguishable to the majority of your neighbors and prepared for move-in? Or maybe you are looking to build your house from scratch, so that it can be custom built around your family’s needs? Or maybe your current house isn’t so bad and all you need is to expand the kitchen and add a coat of fresh paint? What more, remember the time to pack and unpack all of your stuff. My point here is, there are a ton of factors that can effect how long it takes to move from start to finish.

The same thing applies to redesigning a website. I get asked this question from business owners constantly. And I’m going to walk you through a very typical discussion that I have with every person who asks me, “How long will it take to redesign my website?”

John Doe (Business Owner): I’d like to redesign my website, is this something Splice Digital Media can do?

Me: Yes we can! However, can you tell me a little more about why you are looking to redesign your website?
At this point John Doe gives 10 minutes overview of how his website was built five years ago and that it’s third site in eight years. He enlightens me about how his business used to rank in Google in the top two positions. For some reason, that changed and now their competitors are ranking better than they are. John Doe think his company should have a blog and that they need to work on their Search Engine Optimization. He additionally realizes that they should probably pump up their social programs and that they’ve yet to see any great results from PPC advertising.
 
Me: Yes, it definitely sounds like redoing your website is a smart investment for you. Can I ask you what some of your goals are for your new site?

John Doe: It needs to look current, it needs to be easier to use and it needs to incorporate with our back end system. It could likewise needs to work on mobile. It could also use some new imagery and some updated content. Again, it’s been five years since the last time we updated it.

Me: (while looking at John Doe’s site) Hmm…Your website looks like it has around 110 pages, nine different major sections, a blog that hasn’t been updated in 12 months and it’s built on an older CMS. Are you planning to keep all of the content?

John Doe: Probably. We are thinking about adding a few new pages.

Me: When is the last time you have updated your site pages to be sure you have the right content?

John Doe: Most likely the last time we did our website…five years ago.

Me: Ok…a couple of more questions: Do you have any board members or other stakeholders that will be engaged in this process? Who will facilitate the new content creation? Do you have an in-house person who will coordinate the content migration? Also, is there any special integration that should be considered?

John Doe:  I don’t know. Our CEO and one more person will be involved, but mainly in the beginning of the redesign. I’m not sure about the content. We will most likely do this without anyone’s help since we know our business best and can presumably spare cash on the project if we keep that in-house. But the main thing is that we want to have the new website up and running by the end of March.

Me : (scratching my head and pausing for about three seconds) John, that’s in five weeks. What if I told you that with the extent of your website, your situation and your goals, you’re looking at about a two to three months project?

John Doe: Oh. It will really take that long?

Me: The short answer is yes. We’ve been helping companies rebuild websites of all sizes for years. It can easily take two to three months and sometimes much more for strategically planned sites. For an ecommerce website, this is more like four months to five months, sometimes even longer. For a basic business website, say for a small Ma and Pop business that only needs their website to show up when people are searching for the closest florist, we can have a site done for them in about three weeks to two months. On the other hand, we’ve been working on some websites for months. These sites being major multi-language, highly customized ecommerce sites with a lot of integrations. Keep in mind the time spans I am giving you are from kickoff to launch. You should remember that you would still need to share more information about the project for us to prepare a proposal that precisely diagrams the extent of the project and the services we would be providing (for example are you writing the content or are we?). You should consider that the process of picking a strategic partner might take a few weeks when picking your target launch date.

John Doe: Well, we’re not Mam and Pap or ecommerce or ecommerce business, so you’re saying it will still take longer?

Me: (smiling) Correct. Does that time frame seem reasonable to you?

John Doe: Not really. Why does it take long?

Me: There are many stated to a website redesign project. Our process includes discovery, planning, user experience design and testing, development (both in terms of website content and programming), fit and finishing, content review, Search engine optimization considerations, and much more, but you get the idea. Did the other company talk with you about their process?

John Doe: Not really.

Me: Beyond the basic requirements of the website task there are different impacts that can broaden the project timeline including:

• Development of your brand message, tone and positioning of your content and design, and usually rewriting content that actually sounds good to your audience.
• Any system integrations your business may have or need.
• Content. Content is hands down the main reason sites are delayed. Product data and written content, that is. Once you’ve made the commitment regarding a new site, content ought to be the main thing on your to-do list.
• Your internal approval process. What board members need to make decisions on the new website? How long will it take to get an answer back from them?
• Your availability. Clients who aren’t involved tend to slow down the process. But that will be normal, after all you’re not going to be lounge around solely dealing with your new website.
• Content migration takes time. If you’re not already on a modern platform, each page needs to be moved over manually.
• Depending on the content, it can take anywhere between four to twenty minutes per page. And you said you have 110 pages, right?
• And user experience research. You need to dedicate time in understanding who your audience are and how they want and need to interact with your website.

John Doe: We don’t have any integrations other than MailChimp.

Me: Let me share a little bit about our procedure. The discovery phase usually includes competitive research, basic usability testing, SEO planning, design concept planning, navigation planning, and so forth. It’s imperative that you don’t skip this early step, otherwise you’ll end up with a site that you don’t like and worse yet, a website that won’t meet all of your goals that we discussed earlier. We ask a lot of questions so we completely comprehend what the requirements are to build your website. Our discovery stage can take up to a month and is typically accomplished with a few meetings and a couple phone calls.
I will send you over this graphic on building a website.

John Doe: I guess I didn’t understand there were such of significant number things to consider when redesigning a website.

Me: Basically a website redesign project takes time than most people expect. But since we know the majority of the elements that go into a website design, we like to be upfront with clients before starting projects so that their expectations are met. Even small sites can be big tasks with many moving parts. This is your site, and you’re going to invest a considerable amount of time and money into this, so you should really do this right the first time.

John Doe: Thank you for your insights. This gives me a lot to think about.

Conclusion

There are a lot of choices and factors that go into building a site. If you’ve done this previously, you will acknowledge why it takes this long. If you’ve never done this before, consider choosing a web/marketing partner who will hold your hand and guide you to making sound judgment and concentrate less on the speed and more on what the end result will bring you.

Do You Need it Built Faster?

Consider building your site in stages over a period of time. Trim down your underlying requirements to get to a minimal “loveable” site. Then plan out and implement updates every three months with your website partner. You might find that you can have a new site up in two to three months with an initial smaller investment. In the big picture, it might cost the same or even more, but this approach sometimes enables you to adjust your website and marketing needs as you go, giving you much better product at last.

A ping tree is a sort of lead distribution programming that is utilized as a part of the online lead generation industry. Ping tree application distributes and sells posting leads or direct traffic from the sites to various buyers. Ping trees can be utilized when leads can be sold more than once to various purchasers and when leads are exclusive and just sold once.

What Is A Ping Tree Tech Savvy Leads

In the most straightforward model a lead generator will post leads to buyers arranged by the price (from top to low) the buyer will pay. All it takes is passing filters before any buyer purchases a lead. In verticals, for example, payday or any other financial verticals anyway it is basic practice for the buyer to look at the data fields and reply with an accept or decline with reason. The Auto (car loan) vertical goes above and beyond and conducts real-time ongoing simultaneous auctions to find buyers. In all verticals the lead generator’s software will only wait for a short time between 1 second to 30 seconds for responses before moving on.

Experienced online lead generators such as Splice Digital Media will go beyond this basic model for ping tree programming, for instance:

Validate the quality of the lead before entering the ping tree. Apply some filter rules and check for quality before posting garbage leads to buyers. Is the provided email address even in a valid format? Is there an MX record supporting it (i.e. does the domain of the email distribute to the world that it does in certainty get email for its users)? Is the telephone number or ZIP code or State substantial? These are only a couple of illustrations, there are more.

Keep up with duplicates. Try not to bother your buyers with traffic they have already seen recently.

Honor Schedules. Try not to bother your buyers with leads on days and times they don’t need them.

Honor Limits. In the event that your buyer will only take a certain number of leads per day, stop posting after the limit is reached.

Automatically deactivate a misbehaving lead buyer interface. If a lead buyer response isn’t formatted as you expect, or it fails to return a redirect URL, or the price is out of range, then system automatically deactivate the channel.

Automatically block bad IP addresses and networks. Do you think a quality lead for your buyer will come from an IP address in Taiwan? No? Then block that country entire set of IP addresses.

Learn and constantly update filters for each lead buyer. Find out what your buyers need and don’t need and don’t post leads that don’t meet the requirements. Routinely ask whether the filters are valid by temporary relaxing them and observing what happens. Pay heed to 100% declines for certain buyers and lead attributes and ask whether another filter should be included.

Score validated leads before posting. After the validation have passed and you’ve screened for duplicates you might need to pay an outside service to score your leads and additionally remove fraudulent leads. This is essential if your buyers trust you to do this kind of screening ahead of time. If the score is powerless at that point avoid your top-notch buyers that will be disappointed to see low quality traffic.

Don’t just arrange buyers in order of price – This model creates risk and insecurity in your ping tree. Rather spread your “first looks” around a bit. Disseminate your leads on a tier basis, from top to bottom, and inside every tier randomize your first looks on a weighted premise. Where two lead buyers guarantee a similar payout give them a similar weight and put them under a magnifying glass to see which one is truly better.

Oversee time wisely. Always remember that you have a live lead tending to the next end to be connected with your buyers. Do all of the above to remove even pinging your buyers in any case because pinging and waiting for a response is the most tedious movement inside a ping tree. You’ve done that? Awesome! Now take it a step further. Put timeouts everywhere. Only give a buyer a few seconds to respond. Put a time limit on each tier to keep leads posting down the tree before the customer or lead give up waiting for a response.

Regardless of higher aggressiveness for top search rankings, organic traffic is as yet giving as much an incentive as ever for websites who know how to get found. As per this blog entry by Gazel, organic results are producing overall, 8.5 times the number of clicks as paid results are for any given keyword. Actually, organic search alone is directing more effect on traffic than paid search, social media, display advertisements, email, and referral traffic combined.

The issue is that there are more than 200 ranking elements that Google uses to figure out who the organic search champs and failures are, and no one can be the best at them all. Nonetheless, in case you’re searching for the most smack for your organic search optimization buck, at that point you will need to look toward backlink building. Not every ranking component are created equal, and backlinks are the most compelling factor.

Their effect on Google’s choice grid is somewhere in the range of 18-23% — depending on who you ask.
Indeed, building backlinks is the long game of SEO and is exceedingly dependent on the quality of content you’re putting out. However, there are some smart strategies that can significantly lessen the time spent gaining ground on backlink building, while rapidly expanding their effect.

Backlink Building Tips

In case you’re searching for tips on how to build backlinks and don’t know where to begin, look no further:

1. Create a Google+ Account

This one is good in light of the fact that you have finish control over the entire procedure from beginning to end. In the event that you have a business with a blog, you ought to dependably post that blog on your business Google+ page, and make sure to incorporate interlinks to different pages on your site within said post. Google regards the vast majority of its products as more legitimate than the normal blog in spite of giving them nofollow links, which can in any case be extremely significant. This is the reason you should also…

2. Have a YouTube Channel

In case you’re posting videos on YouTube, at that point you can post links to relevant pages on your site inside the description section of every video. YouTube is simply the second biggest search engine after Google itself and can be utilized as a simple approach to create backlinks from your own company controlled platforms, as well as make it simple to find your products if the videos produce interest. This technique can also apply to any posts you make on LinkedIn, and so on.

3. Content Updates

Find outdated content and offer its makers your edits or fixes in return for being referred to as the source of said new content. This offers some incentive for them too, because you’re giving them more exact content. A simple approach to do this is to discover blogs in your niche and sort their blog entries from oldest to newest, looking out for information or facts that have since changed. When you find a few, send them an email alarming them to it and offering yourself as an answer, you won’t generally get a response, yet volume here is anything but difficult to get a hold of.

4. Replacement

Compare to the above, however for this situation it isn’t their onsite data that is outdated, just the links to their sources. Broken links happen constantly and can be utilized for your advantage. Essentially search for websites related to yours that have changed names or rebranded. Search “rebrand as” in Google news and you’ll get a decent rundown of rcent changes to work from. Next, find the websites that have connected to them, using a free tool like OpenLinkProfiler, and get in contact to present comparable content keeping in mind the end goal to have them link to you instead. This will take some work, so don’t waste time contacting low authority sites.

5. College Bound

This is my top choice in light of how exceedingly Google rates backlinks from .edu pages. If our company funds any sort of grant, you can frequently persuade college or high school websites to link to you by adding your grant description to their directory of grants listing page. As you can envision, there are many high schools and universities you can rehash this procedure with. In like manner, if your organization has done any intriguing research or published white papers that could be viewed as significant to any school area of focus, you can regularly get a link inside their academic resources page too.

6. Testimonials

Utilize product for your business operations that you truly cherish? Contact the creator of said product and offer to give a testimonial about how it worked for you. On the off chance that they post your testimonial on their site, they will for the most part link to you to prove you are a real person. These ought to be deliberately done to stay relevant, don’t offer a product review for your coffee maker. Or maybe, in case you’re a digital marketing service, writing a blog post about how you utilize a specific digital marketing service for a product review can serve both content creation and backlink generating purposes.

7. Refer to Me

In the event that your brand is sufficiently huge, you’re presumably mentioned periodically around the web. You can utilize a tool like Buzzsumo or Mention to find out when somebody has said something in regards to your brand. When you find a brand say where they have failed to link to your site, contact them and suggest they link to you. Frequently you’ll get ignored, but a couple of good mention links in popular spots can help both traffic and backlink profile.

8. Spread the Wealth

Make sure to present your webpage to blog aggregators because despite the fact that they don’t pass much link juice, there are many site feedback forums you can post to.

Digital Marketing Strategies: Splice

While there are hundreds more, these are only a few simple and successful backlink strategies that can be used to support your site’s backlink profile. In the event that you are searching for more far comprehensive digital marketing strategy check out Splice for Content Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, or Pay-Per-Click Management solutions.

As of late at Google Marketing Next, a conference hosted by Google, the search monster declared that the new AdWords interface would be taken off before the finish of 2017. As a Google Partner, Splice digital marketing has access to the Alpha form of AdWords and have been getting acquainted with the overhaul.

The big advantage we’ve recognized in the new AdWords is the dynamic data representation now available on the outline page. It’s just as Tableau or Domo attacked AdWords and the outcome is noteworthy data in six foreordained “cards”, each of which can be changed to demonstrate distinctive KPIs, date ranges and comparisons.

Here are the four advantages these “cards” bring:

1. See Cross Device Behavior More Clearly

How frequently have you attempted to explain how mobile traffic is advancing, yet have been hindered in light of the fact that the conversions are as yet occurring on desktop? Or, then again, attempted to demonstrate how you can utilize mobile to modestly drive conversions across devices, just to get blocked by data in the visuals? No more. In the new AdWords, the gadget card says a lot about attribution, significantly more than a traditional attribution model.

2. See When Traffic is Converting

Moreover, the Day and Hour gadget enables you to see when you drive the most traffic, have the best ad position, or spend and gain the most. You can utilize the drop down to see day and hour information for twelve distinctive KPIs in only a couple of moments. Have you at any point addressed if bringing down bids amid low conversion times affects high conversion times? You can utilize this tool to rapidly assess day-parting attribution tests.

3. Use Demographic Information More Easily

In the old AdWords, arranging expansive demographic data across campaign was hard. You’ll instantly see that data like family household income is currently promptly accessible to you without going into Locations>advanced search settings for each and every campaign. Additionally, in the event that you need next-gen control, you can apply these bid changes in accordance with each and every ad group.

4. Target Device-Specific Bidding easily

The new AdWords interface likewise use device bid changes at the campaign and advertisement group level without digging into settings for each campaign as well as ad group, and toggle between the two. This saves time “big time”… in other words, the sooner you can move up to the new interface, the better!

Try not to leave AdWords senior in your past altogether! You will need it to apply audiences across advertising groups, for creating extensions, for making a lot of the accessible bid modifications, overseeing dynamic search ads, and application install and engagement capacities.

In the event that you can hardly wait to get your hands on this new form of AdWords, remember access is allowed at administration account level, or to particular individuals.

To check whether your account is qualified, click the settings cog. If you see the “Try the new AdWords BETA” line, you can flip between the two interfaces voluntarily.

https://support.google.com/adwords