Newsletter and Small Business

All you small online business owners or bloggers who are doing the marketing for your site on your own may have heard about Newsletter during your research. For all those who haven’t heard or yet to start with marketing, here’s a brief explanation. Newsletter service is a service which enables you to send updates and other emails related to your website to various lists of subscribers who have subscribed to the service in some way.  (They are different ways to add subscribers to your newsletter, will discuss this in the next segment.)

If you are still not using any newsletter service, you may be finding it hard to bring back your visitor once they leave your site. You may be using various options for driving traffic to your website. No matter what way you do it, all the effort is not really worth unless you can bring the visitor back again and again to your site.

Yes, we all know ‘Content is the King’ in terms of driving traffic and you may claim your content to be the best. But people these days do not remember their own cell phone numbers, they save it in their contact list so that they can read it to those who ask for the number, do you really think you can make your website remembered by everyone who visits your site? Okay, you may say they will bookmark your site or save it somewhere so that they can access it again later. But after all your effort marketing your site and bringing a visitor to the site, can you just sit and expect them to bookmark your site and come back again and again? No definitely not.  That’s where Newsletter comes into picture.

Not every visitor visiting your site subscribes to your newsletter. But even if 10% to 20% of the visitors do subscribe, on an average you can expect them to come back to your site atleast for 5 more times when they receive an email about the update in your website. This makes your website traffic (10 to 20) % x 5 which will be (50 to 100) % more than earlier. Without a newsletter you lose all these recurring visits. I’m trying out some newsletter for my site. I will update soon with my experience on which worked best for me. 

What is Hosting?

Most of them realize the importance of a good content. They hire a good web-developer to create a beautiful website or sometimes develop it themselves. But once it is done they think rest of the things don't really matter. This is not true. The actual business starts then. You will need to choose a good hosting provider to get your website online. Hosting provider are basically those who provide a space for your website on their server, so that it can work online.  They are responsible for your web services like file management and server space because it is practically impossible for everyone owning a website to have their own servers, since all can't afford one. Constant working of the server is very important for an undisturbed business, since the downtime can cause you loss of traffic and decreased page ranking. There are different types of hosting meant for different requirements.

There are too many hosting providers promising 100% uptime and cheaper prices. But not all keep up their promise. If you are a newbie for webhosting, you may end up choosing a service where you will later have to compromise with lot of things. Not all services suit all the websites. So depending on the type of your website, you will need to choose a hosting type and a provider. What exactly you are willing to do with your website matters when you choose a provider. To decide what exact type of hosting you need, it is important to know the types of available hosting.

Types of Website Hosting based on server type.

Shared Website Hosting

Shared hosting, a single server is shared by multiple websites. A shared server allows a user to get hosting space to store their files online, so that others can access them online.

Dedicated Website Hosting

In Dedicated web hosting, a web server is entirely devoted to your site. You may purchase your own server or pay for access to a server owned by someone else.

Virtual Private Server Website Hosting

A virtual private server, like the name says is a server shared by multiple users. However, each is maintained separately. This type of hosting is something of a combination of dedicated hosting and shared hosting.

Types of hosting based on Operating System

UNIX Hosting

The hosting means your website will be running on the UNIX operating system. This is the first and knows to be most reliable operating systems for the servers.

Windows Hosting

The hosting means your website will be running on the WINDOWS operating system. This is the service to choose if you are using ASP for server scripting and if you want to use databases like MicroSoft Access or MicroSoft SQL.