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January 2010 Newsletter
Posted by Blaze in Newsletters on January 15th, 2010
Happy New Year!
It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these. And, for that I apologize. But it’s not (entirely) because I’ve been lazy. Nope! I’ve been busy. In the past few months, our client base has grown–and grown quite well, I might add. We’ve lost a few clients, and we’re sorry to see them go, but that’s the way business works. The main thing is that we’re moving forward and getting bigger.
The Good
As I said, we’ve been growing. We’ve also been adding to our services and tweaking the ones we already have. A large part of our growth has come from the launch of our Small Biz Niche package. The Small Biz Niche allows businesses to enter the world of company websites, without a huge overhead or time commitment.
Just today, I was reading an article that says “46 percent of small businesses surveyed said they did not have a website“. My question is “Why not?!” For only $120, you can have a powerful, easy-to-use company website. That’s less than a small ad in a weekly newspaper.
The Bad
Google still hasn’t offered us a bazillion dollars to buy out our company. {sigh} Maybe next week.
We’re not perfect. On occasion, things go wrong, and we don’t always catch them when they do. That’s where we rely on you guys. If something isn’t working the way you think it should be (or has in the past), drop us an e-mail or send an IM. Let us know.
Recently, an upgrade to our system software caused a strange glitch in webmail. A customer got a hold of me over IM and let me know. It was fixed within a few minutes. No problem. Later that day, I was talking with another client, and she mentioned that she’d been having that problem for “a while”. Ack! Had we known about it, we could have fixed it earlier.
Please please don’t be afraid to give us a friendly nudge to let us know if something’s wrong. Sometimes it’s a quick fix, sometimes it’s a serious issue–either way, we want to fix it! And… to be honest, sometimes is your fault. But we’ll let you know, and maybe we’ll even be able to help.
The Ugly
We’ve also been dealing with some not-so-pleasant stuff.
Y’know how I said “sometimes it’s your fault” a few seconds ago? Well, that can be a bit problem. We had been having issues with repeated infections of a couple sites. Paul was right on top of it and stamped out the nasty bugs as quickly as the cropped up. But they kept cropping up! He was finally able to track down the problem: one of our clients had her personal computer infected by a virus that was stealing her passwords (and who knows what else!). The black-hats kept getting in because they had the keys. This is our worst nightmare (okay… not the worst–that would be the one where we’re forced to watch a musical remake of Twilight starring David Hasselhoff and Rosanne Barr–but it’s pretty high up the list).
Please make sure that your anti-virus is up to date. We don’t want to have to cut off your service.
And the Frog Prince
Hey, we can’t end on an ugly note!
A lot of our ideas come from our users, and a lot of the improvements we make are are inspired by questions, suggestions, and yes, even complaints our customers have. We like that! We like to hear from you–and not just when things are wrong. 
During some random conversations with friends and co-workers, we’ve come up with a couple ideas for new products. Since you already know who we are and how we work, I thought I’d ask your opinion.
Kid’s Niche:
A very small, very inexpensive website built on WordPress and designed specifically for the 10-to-15-year-old market. We’d price it low enough to encourage parents to get the kids to pay for it with their own money. And we set up the parent as the site admin–full and complete control of the site–so that they can keep track of what their child is doing. There’s a lot of concern about social networking sites and kids; parents are afraid of who’s out there, and how little control they have. This would give the kids something of their own, while allowing the parents to watch what’s happening and step in if need be.
Freelancer’s Clearinghouse:
We know a lot of geeks. A LOT of geeks. And, like everyone, those geeks are often looking for a way to pick up a little extra cash. We’ve been tossing around the idea of bringing these freelancers under our roof and letting them put their services up for bid. Is this something you’d like to see: Designers, coders, artists, photographers, and techs available for hire through a list provided here on Geek Niche?
Let us know what you think. Let us know what you want (from us–hopefully that’ll cut down on the smart-ass replies).
A Few Policy Changes
Posted by Blaze in Uncategorized on September 27th, 2009
Security
Security is a big issue for us–and we think it’s important to you.
As any of you who have been with us for a while know, we work hard to keep our servers–and your sites–secure. Unfortunately, our superhero-like abilities have their limits.
Many of you are running sites built on the WordPress CMS. It’s a great program and allows you to do great things with your site. There’s a small downside, however: Because it’s so popular with users, it’s also popular with hackers.
Automattic–the company that created and maintains WordPress–is constantly on top of things. As soon as a security hole or flaw is found, they fix it and release an updated version. That makes it simple to keep ahead of the bad guys. However… it requires that you actually install the updates.
That’s the first issue.
We’ve done our best to keep people up to date with upgrades. It’s getting to the point, however, that we just can’t afford to do it anymore for free.
If you’re handy with computers at all, it’s very simple for you to do your own upgrades. When you see a notice to upgrade on your dashboard, simply go to www.wordpress.org to download the latest version. Then use FTP to upload it to your account. Overwrite the old files with the new ones, and it’s all good to go.
There are also ways to automatically update right from your dashboard.
If you’re not comfortable doing that, however, we’ve got a solution: Our new Upgrade Service.
Upgrade Service works in 2 ways (well… 2-1/2):
1) Per-incident: When there are major version changes or important upgrades, we’ll let you know. For $5 we’ll upgrade your site. In most cases, we’ll wait 7 days after the release of the new version to make sure that any new bugs are found and fixed. We’ll also pay attention to information regarding any plug-ins you might have, and make sure that upgrading won’t break your site.
2) Annual Service: If you want to just keep on top of things without having to worry, you can sign up for annual security protection. For $35/year, we’ll automatically upgrade and update your WordPress installation AND all plug-ins every time a new version comes out. We’ll wait 7 days on non-emergency upgrades to make sure that any bugs are found and fixed. For high-priority security upgrades, we’ll have them in place in less than 48 hours. This means your website will be as up-to-date and secure as it can be.
2.5) When your website is compromised, it doesn’t just affect you; it affects everybody else on the server, and our entire company. Because of this, if we find that you haven’t upgraded in a long time and your site presents a severe risk to other clients or the server as a whole, we will immediately upgrade your site and charge you the $5 fee. We don’t like having to do this, but we’re simply not willing to risk the security of our clients. We hope you can understand.
This brings me to the 2nd major aspect of our new security policy.
Cleaning Services
Up until now, Paul and I have taken a very understanding and forgiving attitude towards sites that have been hacked. As I’ve stated previously, we’ve put in hundreds of free hours of support for you guys. Some of it, however, simply can’t go on.
If your site is hacked because our security wasn’t up to the task, or because nobody knew that an exploit existed, then it’s our responsibility and we’ll do what we can to make it right–for free. This means it’s up to us to keep on top of things and let you know when there are dangerous beasties roaming the internet.
If, however, your site is hacked because you’ve been careless and left the door open? We’re going to have to start charging. Most webhosts, when they find a hacked site, simply shut it down and tell you to fix it. They don’t care what happened or whose fault it is. We’re not that callus. There are limits, however.
We will do our best to keep you informed of security vulnerabilities and help you patch them before they become a problem. If you fail to heed our warnings–or (shame on you!) continue with actions we’ve told you to stop–then we simply can’t deal with that for free. In these cases, we’ll will now be charging $50/hour to clean and restore your site if it’s hacked.
Now, if all you do is update your posts and write new pages, this won’t be an issue for you. If you’re going in and playing with the advanced toys, we expect you to know what you’re doing–at least enough to be safe about it.
As always, if you have any questions about what to do, feel free to ask. We’re more than happy to help you do thing right and keep it safe. That kind of help is always free. That’s just good business sense, after all. And we’re not going to come kicking in your (metaphorical) door if you make an honest mistake.
All we’re saying is: If we tell you there’s a problem, and you refuse to fix it… you’re going to end up paying for it.
If you’re going to be playing around with advanced options, just fire off a quick e-mail and ask us if we think it’ll cause any problems. If we tell you to go ahead, it’s on our shoulders.
Over the next couple weeks, we’ll be posting a few quick pointers to help you decide what is and is not safe to do.
We should have the Update Service “officially” in place starting October 1st. If you want to sign up before that, just let us know; we can get it all set up for you.
If you have ANY questions about any of this, PLEASE ask. We’d really rather help you avoid problems than have to fix them.
–
M Blaze Miskulin
Security Goon
Geek Niche, Inc.
September 2009 Newsletter
Posted by Blaze in Newsletters on September 1st, 2009
OMG!! A NEWSLETTER!!
THE END IS NIGH!!
yeah yeah. I know. It’s been forever.
That doesn’t mean we haven’t been working for you. Actually, we’ve been working quite a bit, but none of it was anything sexy or exciting (unless you have a fetish for billing software updates…)
Doing Business
Many of you are business owners–some large, some small. You understand that running a business involves making difficult decisions–and then living with the consequences. When we started this business over 4 years ago, we did so with the intent of making things easy for our customers. (Okay… we did it with the hopes of getting filthy stinking rich, but we wanted to get that way by making things easy for our customers.) One of the choices we made was to go with the Plesk Control Panel. Plesk wasn’t one of the more popular control panels out there, but we felt it was the best choice for our clients: powerful, but simple to use.
Plesk was a small company and experienced some growing pains. Then it got bought up by another company–which also bought up our billing software company. Now, Parallels is working very hard to make Plesk a single-source solution for webhosting. But… this has meant more growing pains. Paul has been working continually with the Parallels team to work out the kinks in the system. You haven’t seen any of this. For you, things have been running along like they’re supposed to. And that’s exactly the way we want it.
A Two Man Cavalry
I had an incident today that–after the fact–made me stop and look at what it is we do.
I got a call from Pat, the local computer fix-it guy. A local business discovered that their website had been hacked. Severely. These people know very little about computers, but they know that they depend on their website to bring them business. They called their webhost to ask for help, and were told “that’s not our problem, fix it yourself”. They called Pat, and he called me to say that the was sending their buisiness my way. I stopped by their office, talked to the owners, and told them that we could have their site cleaned up and transferred in a couple days. The only hold-up would be getting login information from their current host.
Most webhosts don’t care about your troubles. If your site is hacked, that’s your problem, not theirs. They will, however, be quick to turn off your site if they feel that it’s going to hurt their servers. If they offer any help at all, it’ll certainly cost you a fat hourly fee.
Paul and I don’t work that way. If your site is hacked or down, you lose business. We want you to be successful and make a lot of profits (because that means you’ll need a bigger website, and we get to make more profits from that). Geek Niche gives away thousands of dollars in free tech support every year. And not just basic stuff; Paul has spent long hours digging through security logs and site code to find diabolical hacks that are affecting our customers. Other hosts charge up to $100/hour to do this–if they’ll even do it at all. On more than one occasion, we (okay… mostly Paul) have put in 10 to 15 hours tracking down hacks, cleaning code, patching the holes, and letting the customer know what’s going on. We’ve spent even more time taking what we’ve learned and protecting our other clients before they fall victim to these hacks.
I’m not saying all this just to brag. Many of you have never had a website before. You’ve never had to deal with other webhosts. So you may not realize that the way we work isn’t normal. Yes, we’re abnomal–but in a good way!
We’re a small business. We know all of you by name. We appreciate that you’ve chosen us to host your websites. We just hope that the appreciation goes both ways.
A Babe in the Mix
We’ve recently added a new personality to the mix here at Geek Niche. We now have an accounting department: and her name is Michelle. Michelle has graciously volunteered (yes, volunteered) her services as our accounting department. She loves playing with numbers and actually knows what she’s doing (she has far more experience and knowledge than I do). She’s already helped to find places where we can reduce costs without affecting service at all. That makes us very happy.
On the other hand, she’s also going to be our new billing enforcer. If you’re naughty and don’t pay your bills, she’ll be the one who’ll come knocking on your (electronic) door. Oh… did I mention that she likes to wrestle for fun? We like Michelle: It means both Paul and I get to play “good cop” on the rare occasion that we have a problem.
Gettin’ Googled
It hasn’t been officially added to the order forms yet, but we’re working on a new service for those of you who are running business sites. The “Google Pack” sets up a suite of Google applications for your website. We will create a Google account (which is yours to keep if you should ever be so foolish as to leave us). This account will include:
- A Google calendar embedded in your website so people can keep up with regular goings on and special events.
- Setting up your business in Google Maps, so you’re included in map searches and business searches
- A custom Google map embedded in your website so people can instantly get directions to your place of business
- Share documents with employees and others with Google Docs
- Instantly communicate with employees, customers, vendors, and others using Google Talk.
- As an add-on: Creation of a Google AdWords campaing. Advertise your site on Google for pennies a day. AdWords sites show up in the side bar of Google searches as well as on other sites showing Google ads. (Google AdWords requires extra payments directly to Google. Talk to us about how to budget your advertising. As little as $10/month can greatly increase your business exposure.)
If you run a business, Google can provide some very powerful tools to help promote it. Let us help you make your business grow online.
Referral Program
Just a reminder: If you refer someone to us, you earn a reward. If you refer someone to us and they stay with us for at least a year (or pre-pay for an entire year), we’ll take 10% of their bill off of yours. So, if they’re paying $5/month, you get a 50 cent credit. If they’re paying $20/month, you get a $2 credit. Sign up enough friends, and your site will be free.
Sick of spam?
So are we. No, really. We’re working on a plugin that will trace a spam message back to the guy who sent it to you and smack ‘em in the head. But until that’s functional, we have the next best thing:
Auto spam learning!
Yes, your friends here at Geek Niche are just about as fed up as you are, and we’ve decided to do something about it. If you want to take advantage of this, all you need to do is send an email to paul@geekniche.com and let me know a) that you want to have your spam auto-learned and b) which email addresses you want to have included in this.
There are a couple of pre-requisites though. First, you need to be using IMAP for email instead of POP3. If your eyes just crossed, no worries. IMAP means that your email stays on our servers, and you just read it in Outlook/on the web/whatever. With POP3, the email is actually downloaded off of our servers and stored on your local PC. Once it’s off our servers, there’s nothing we can do about it; we’re good, but we’re not that good. If you’re unsure which you’re using, drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do to help you.
The second requirement is that you create a folder under your inbox titled “Spam”. Nothing more, nothing less. Once we get everything set up, you’ll receive email as usual. Some of the email will be prefixed with the term “***SPAM***”. This is good. This means that the system has correctly identified this email as spam, but hasn’t deleted it, since we’re still in the process of fine-tuning your particular spam setup. Some of your email will NOT be marked with “***SPAM***” despite the fact that it clearly is. This where you come in.
When you get an email message that is clearly spam, but not marked as spam, just put it in the “Spam” folder. That’s it. No, really. Nothing more to it. Every hour, our Spam Learning Awesome Patent Pending Internet Thing (SLAPPIT) will go through that folder and if it finds a message there, it will mark that email as spam, learn from it, and delete it. After roughly a week (slightly longer at higher altitudes) the system should be trained well enough that we can turn on the auto-delete feature. This means that anything the system thinks is spam will be deleted before it ever hits your inbox. Nifty, eh?
So as soon as you’re ready to reduce the amount of offers for reverse mortgages and Reservatrol (EDITOR’S NOTE: seriously, is there anything that drug CAN’T do?) drop me a line and I’ll get you taken care of.
For the technically-minded: this solution leverages our use of Plesk and spamassassin along with a fairly robust custom script that we wrote. Want it? Be my guest. Comments/criticisms/improvements welcomed.
July 2009 Newsletter
Posted by Blaze in News & Updates on July 27th, 2009
It’s been a long time since I’ve written one of these. That’s mostly because nothing very exciting has happened. Things have just been chugging along like normal.
Well, a few changes have been made recently, and a few more are coming. Most of them aren’t very exciting, but they are important.
First of all, we changed the site. If you’ve been with us for more than a few days and haven’t noticed the new look, then… umm… You might want to talk to your optician–or start using a browser other than lynx. The new look is the biggest change but it’s not the only one. Over the next couple weeks, we’ll be going over all of our content to update it, make it cleaner and more relevant, and make it easier for our customers to navigate. We’ve gotten a lot of comments on the site–both possitive and critical–and we’ve listened. We can’t please everyone, but we’re working to make the site more friendly to the majority of people.
Secondly, there are quite a few changes going on behind the scenes with the control panel and billing software. A while ago, the company that produces Plesk Control Panel bought the company that made Modern Billing. Now… on the surface, this sounds like a good thing–both aspects of your account are now handled by a single company. In reality, it’s been a bit bumpy. The integration has been less smooth than we’d like. However, we’re getting to the point that most of the issues are small and rare.
Finally, we’ve been working on some changes to the way we do business. We started Geek Niche a little over 4 years ago with the idea of providing simple services to a niche market. That market has faded away. In the mean time, we’ve found new niches to work with. This means we’ve had to take a look at how we work with our clients and change to meet their needs. Instead of trying to provide everything to everyone all in one site, we’ve decided to create “Geek Niche Projects”–different websites that focus on specific areas of interest. This allows us to focus attention and resources on presenting information specific to a particular niche. It’s all still us doing the work. We’re not trying to hide anything or pretend we’re someone we’re not. We’re just making better and more focused decisions on how to present the products we have without being distracting or overwhelming.
One of the aspects of the Geek Niche Projects is that it can be expanded almost without end. If you have a niche that you think would be popular, let us know. If we think we can support it, we’ll create a new Project site and design packages to meet the needs of that niche market.
Hopefully, we’ll be moving forward with new projects on a regular basis, and I’ll have more interesting things to talk to you about.
March 2009 Newsletter
Posted by Blaze in Newsletters on March 8th, 2009
Happy New Year!
No… it’s not January. But it is almost 1 year since I’ve posted a newsletter.
Okay… before you start yelling at me, let me explain:
Nothing really happened during the spring and summer. And while I may like the sound of my own voice, I didn’t think you’d want to listen to me ramble on about utterly irrelevant stuff just so that I could fill up space. In the late fall, we started a slow migration to a new Data Center and new servers. Except for a few people who have special requirements, we didn’t advertise this. It has been, however, an upgrade for everyone. After that, to be perfectly honest, I’d gotten out of the habit of writing newsletter posts. Sorry.
But now I’m back! And I even have news!
New Servers
As I said, we’ve moved to a new Data Center and new servers. On a day-to-day basis, this really doesn’t mean anything to you. Things will continue to chug along as they have in the past. However, the move has opened up some great new possibilities for all of you.
The new DC allows us to offer dedicated servers at a very affordable rate. What’s a dedicated server? It’s a room of your very own. Right now, most of you are on a shared server. That’s typical for web-hosting. It means that you’re sharing space and resources with other clients–like roommates in an appartment; you each have your own room, but you share the kitchen, bathroom, laundry, etc. That’s not a bad arrangement. Everyone gets their own space, but the expenses are shared. The problems arise when things aren’t shared equally–or when one person needs more than everyone else.
On a shared server, everyone shares the resources. If one person hogs the bathroom, everyone else suffers. On the flip side, in order to make it fair for everyone, we have to limit how much time each person can spent in the shower.
A dedicated server solves that. It’s your own place. Yes, it’s a little more expensive, but if you really need your own space, it’s more than worth it. A dedicated server means that it’s all yours. No sharing with anyone. Use it however you want, there’s nobody to complain. That’s right… the bathroom is all yours!
The other advantage of a dedicated server is scalability. As we grow, we have more and more customers who don’t fit into the pre-fab boxes that most web-hosts (including us) provide. If you’re operating multiple websites or websites that are–or might be–growing, a dedicated server might be what you’re looking for. Going back to the “house” metaphore, a dedicated server is a “stretchy” house. It can grow when you need it to. Need more room? Need more utilities? Not a problem. We can take care of it in a matter of minutes.
Dedicated servers aren’t for everyone, but if you think you might want one, let us know. We’ll work with you to find the best solution.
Tweet?
Are you on Twitter? If so, you might want to follow us. We’ve set up a Twitter account under the name “geekniche”. We’ll be using Twitter to send out quick updates about server status, maintenance times, and other issues (but NOT what we’re having for breakfast).
Empire of the Geek
For a while now, Geek Niche has been working on projects besides our basic web-hosting. Both Paul and I have projects that we want to pursue, so we’ve expanded our range to include the Geek Niche Projects. If you–or someone you know–are looking for something special, but don’t now where to go, take a look at the Projects page. We just might have something that fits. And if not…? We’ll create it!
There’s more news, but I’ll save it until next month.
April 2008 Newsletter
Posted by Blaze in Newsletters on March 30th, 2008
Yep, it’s time for the monthly newsletter (published semi-randomly).
For those of you who are using WordPress as your CMS, there’s a new version out: 2.5 It was just released this weekend. I’ve upgraded one of my sites to use WP 2.5, and I’ve been poking around to see how it works. This upgrade includes some major changes, so I’m going to suggest that you not upgrade unless you really know what you’re doing. It’ll take a while before I’m ready or able to offer any tech support for this version, so if you do choose to upgrade right away, you’ll be on your own for a while.
Speaking of WordPress and upgrades… I couple weeks ago I said I’d be doing some upgrading of this site and pulling it all into a WP CMS. Well… I got distracted and spent my time helping clients, so that didn’t get done all the way. Today is a cold rainy day with nothing going on, so I’m going to work on getting that completed today. If you find any problems with the site, please let me know. Also… If you have any suggestions on how to improve the site, please send them my way. One of the suggestions that we’ll be implementing is a page for current customers. This will have links to log into your control panel and billing accounts.
Over the past few years, we’ve gained a couple customers who are infamous for “breaking things” or finding the limitations in our system. This happened again last week. We discovered that the system breaks down if you try to purchase 2 packages on the same account. If you would like to do this, don’t worry. We can accommodate you. We just have to go in and tweak a couple things by hand. Just let us know you want to do this, and we’ll make sure that it’s set up and ready to go for you. And, of course, that goes for any problems or “non-standard” situations you might find yourself in with our service. We’re more than happy to tweak things in order to make it work better.
One big piece of news from behind the scenes: Parallels (the people who make the Plesk control panel we use) have just bought ModernBill (the billing & sign-up software we use), so there’s a good chance that the integration will improve and make things faster and easier for both us and you.
Thanks to all of you who’ve chosen Geek Niche.
–
M Blaze Miskulin
President & Town Crier
Geek Niche, Inc.
Getting Google to Love You
SEO
No, it’s not a secret government agency, a corporate job title, or the latest muscle car from Ford.
It’s an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. What does that mean? It means “Getting Google to love you”. And Yahoo!, and MSN, and all the rest of the search engines. It’s a catch-phrase for “getting higher on the list”.
Search engines are a way of life on the internet. People rely on search engines to point them in the right direction when looking for information online. Getting to the top of the list is important. The higher you are on the list, the more likely that people will click on the link that brings them to your site.
Importance means money. And money means scammers. There are hundreds of people and companies out there who will tell you that they can “make you #1 on Google”–for a fee, of course. In my personal experience, I’ve seen some rather significant disparity in this fee. I’ve had one company tell me that they could do it for a mere $10,000 plus $300/year. I’ve had a client tell me that another company promised the same for $65/year.
SEO firms will throw a lot of catch-phrases at you. They’ll tell you all about their perfect plan for making you number one. Don’t trust them. There are no magic tricks to make you #1 in the search engine results. The “get rich quick” kinds of tactics are known as “black hat techniques”, and the search engine companies know all about them. Try using them, and you’ll get caught. Then you’ll be banished from their index. That means you won’t show up on any searches.
Honest SEO is based on 2 primary concepts: link-backs and content. The search engine companies are constantly tweak their programs to make them better understand what’s on your website and how real people view it. This is the key: build your site to be interesting to real people, and it will become interesting to the search engines.
Back-links
A “back-link” is when another website includes a link to yours. Sites can link to you for a number of reasons: reviews (“This widget from XYZ, Inc. is really useful.”), referrals (“hey, check out this great article”), forum signatures, web ads, and many other sources. Every time a webpage has a link that points to your site, it makes the search engines pay attention to you. The closer the topic of the the other site is to yours, the more attention the SEs pay to you. If your site is about blue widgets, the best links you can get are from sites that are talking about widgets.
Talk to your supplier or retailers. Offer a link-exchange: you put a link to them on your site, and they put a link to you on theirs. Purchase web-ads on related sites. If you’re active in online forums, put a link to your site in your signature line. Almost anywhere you can get a link pointing to your site is good.
Almost. The exception are “link farms”. These are sites which offer to give you a link in exchange for money. These are different from ads that link to your site; these are sites that do nothing except list links. The SEs know who these sites are, and they know what they’re doing. Those links won’t do you any good.
Content
“Content is king”. That’s a very popular saying among those who create and maintain websites. And they’re right. Content is king. Your website is an extension of your business. It needs to speak to your customers and tell them what they want and need to hear. The more friendly and informative your website is, the more people will like it. And the search engines like what people like.
Don’t write your site to make Google happy. Write your site to make you customers happy. Google isn’t buying your product. You know who your customers are. You know what they want to know. Use your site to give them that information.
And don’t just do it once: keep giving them new information. The more you update your site–the more you add new and timely information–the more your readers will come back. AND… the more that the search engines will pay attention to you.
If you’ve been set up with a site that uses WordPress as the CMS (which many of our customers have), you have a great tool at your disposal: the blog post. You can write a new post every week (or every day!) to let your customers know what’s going on with your business. Keep your readers coming back. Remember: your website isn’t just a big newspaper ad, it’s a powerful and interactive tool that you can use to entice and educate your readers. Don’t just say “all widgets 50% off this week”. Share your knowledge with them. Tell them about the history of widgets. Explain the difference between widgets and do-dads. Educate them on how to tell a good widget from a cheap one. Teach them the “7 qualities of a superior widget”.
In other words, write information that is interesting. That interesting information will not only keep your readers coming back, but it will remain on your site forever, so that other people can find it. Suddenly, you may find that the Widget-Fancier’s Club of America is looking to you for information–and buying from you because you obviously know what you’re talking about. And if those people like your articles, they’ll link to them on their sites. They’ll tell their friends about you. Those friends will link to you on their sites…. and so on.
Content is king. Give people something interesting and informative to read, and they will bring business to your door.
This post is getting long, and I want to save some of my information for another post or two (See what I’m doing? I’m giving you some information, and then giving you a reason to come back later to get more!).
In future articles, I’ll talk about some of the tools you can utilize to help you make your site more search engine friendly (and people friendly). I hope to see you then. And, as always, if you have any questions about your site and how to improve it, just ask. If I don’t know the answer, I can at least try to point you in the right direction. All of us at Geek Niche want you to be incredibly successful with your websites. After all… if you get really popular, you’ll need to upgrade your account, and that means more profits for us! (Hey… at least we’re honest!)
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M Blaze Miskulin
Old Man on the Mountain
Geek Niche, Inc.
A Work in Progress
Posted by Blaze in News & Updates on February 23rd, 2008
Over the next couple of weeks, our site will be undergoing a slow process of change and update. There won’t be a whole lot of change in the look, but there will be change in the content and the functionality.
Currently, GeekNiche.com is a series of php & html pages written by yours truly about 3 years ago. The news section (what you’re reading right now) is a WordPress blog. WordPress has come a long way in the last 3 years. I’ve been recommending WP as a great CMS (Content Management System) to for new clients. Well… I’m going to put my money where my mouth is: I’m converting the entire site over to a WP-driven site (well… not the [i]entire[/i] site; there are some areas that need to remain as they are).
Why am I telling you this? Because over the next couple weeks, you may see some strange things (such as duplicate pages), and I just wanted you to know why.
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M Blaze Miskulin
Chief Tinkerer
Geek Niche, Inc.
February 2008 Newsletter
Posted by Blaze in Newsletters on February 11th, 2008
Okay… I’m a little late. But at least it’s here!
We’ve been busy while we’ve been gone. We’ve been adding new clients, helping existing clients expand, and doing the stuff we normally do. We’ve also been expanding. There are two new Geek Niche projects out there. Both are fledgling projects, so there’s not much there, but they are up and running and ready for customers.
The first project is PhotoNiche.org Photo Niche is a specialty site designed for photographers and models. It currently has 2 versions: the Gallery and the Light Table. The Gallery is for showing off photos to everyone. It’s a great way for models and photographers to have an inexpensive site where they can store and display their work. The Light Table is a special storage site that allows photographers to upload images for specific clients only. If you don’t now the name of the file, you can’t see it.
The second new project is VoteNiche.org (are you sensing a theme here?) Vote Niche is a political site dedicated to local and state elections and candidates. Candidates can create a well-crafted and easy to update web presence without needing any knowledge of code. Integrated blogs allow the candidates to present their ideas and platforms, while the public forums allow both candidates and voters to debate the topics at hand.
These projects are just two more ways we’re tying to take over the world provide useful niche products for our customers.
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M Blaze Miskulin
President
Geek Niche, Inc.
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