It's most certainly been a while since I've been able to write another post but the long wait is over! We've been pretty busy with some large scale projects as well as expanding or service offering and improving our existing services to be better suited for our clients needs. Our goal is to be your one stop shop for managing your digital presence and while we've been steadily improving over the years, we're far from our intended goal.

New Marketing Services Based on Your Business, Budget, & Strategy

For a long time, we've kind of shied away from the marketing arena because quite frankly we didn't have enough experience to brand our clients beyond web design and development services. And we've had to turn many opportunities away because we didn't want to provide a service that could be summed up as only par for the course.

Additionaly, I am not a fan of just outsourcing services that we've never used in-house before. Quality services and lean processes are extremely important to us! And we want to thank all of our new clients: The Reliable Moving Company and Radiology Affiliates Imaging for entrusting your brand in our hands!

SEO Campaigns That Are Trackable & Measureable

We now offer search engine optimization services that present measurable analytics and valuable data about the success of your digital marketing campaigns. Each campaign will include services proven to improve our clients digital presence. Now by no means are we making any guarantees to get your business listing in the number one spot on the first page and quite frankly if any SEO firm makes that promise, that should throw up an immediate red flag.

Why? Because while web design platforms and content management systems offer some degree of SEO friendliness, no one really knows how in the world Google's algorithm decides to rank pages. We only have a general idea as to what they deem to be worthy. Furthermore, depending on the competitiveness of your market, reaching first page results can be difficult.

Why Bother With SEO if it Makes No Guarantees?

Well the answer to that is quite simple. Would you market your business by simply doing nothing and relying on your business's potential? And I mean literally, would you do nothing? Let's calculate your odds of engaging your target market with nothing. Nothing is represented by the zero and business potential by BP below.

O * BP =

You're absolutely right, nothing happened. Just because you have a website doesn't mean visitors will come or even know you exist. We've got to spread the word some how and we're here to help you do it the right way. 

But I'm a New Business & Can't Afford a SEO campaign?

Completely understandable. We do offer a service that will allow you to manage your digital presence by first making sure your business is listed correctly. Over 70% of visitors lose trust in a business if they are not listed correctly. Therefore, accurate name, address, phone number, and email information (NAPE) are one of the most crucial steps to being able to be found and contacted online.

When you subscribe to our business listing service, you will be contacted by an account manager to correctly set up your listing (This process could take up to an hour or two so be sure to set aside some time). See how well your business fares below.

Scan your listing today

It goes without question that one of the most important decisions you can ever make before your website or web application goes live is choosing your hosting provider. Over the years, I have used several hosting companies for many web development projects (GoDaddy <-- my least favorite, Hostgator, Siteground, and Bluehost to name a few) in the past and while they all offer similar services, CloudAccess.net outshines their competitors by focusing on support, education and training, and optimization of the Joomla platform. Before I delve further into detailing why they are the best damn hosting provider for Joomla on the planet, let me talk about the main differences and a few caveats.

CloudAccess.net Brief Overview

Firstly, CloudAccess.net is a niche platform as a service (PaaS) hosting provider that caters their services to Joomla's and recently Wordpress's content management system (CMS). While they do offer other hosting services, these two CMS's are their primary focus. Each instance of a CMS on their server is cloud-hosted and optimized to specifically enhance the performance of either platform. So if your website uses either one, you're in luck! 

Furthermore, CloudAccess.net's hosting plans offer support and extend beyond the core features of each CMS depending on your subscription of choice, which is explained in their support service level agreement (SLA).

Secondly, as opposed to using cPanel, they have their own proprietary Cloud Control Panel (CCP) with an integrated application programming interface (API) that manages all of your hosting needs. Like anything new, it does take some time to get used to but the overall user experience and interface design flows naturally. Learn more about the CCP below.

CCP Caveats & Lack of 24/7 Phone Support

CloudAccess.net clarified recent changes with their SLA to offer more coverage and extended support. Read more about those changes below.

Just so you know, we recently made the transition to offering 24/7 phone support and we extended our 30 day demo trials to offer FREE hosting for WordPress and Joomla. Any one can launch an application and we'll host it for free, indefinitely, as long as the site admin stays active in the Cloud Control Panel. Users can upgrade to get additional site resources and a higher level of support from our team. CloudAccess.net

Just as there are features that I love about CloudAccess.net's CCP, there are some aspects yet to be desired that I wish were included as baselines from cPanel. For instance, rather than implement cPanel's ability to create separate FTP accounts that have access to a defined scope of a particular directory, you only have one FTP account.

In short, there are no access control options or limitations for the creation of additional FTP accounts. Therefore, if you needed to provide access to another developer via FTP, you would have to share your FTP password and give them access to your entire directory. Then you would have to change it afterwards for security purposes, which can most certainly get annoying after a while. I can barely remember the passwords for my bank accounts. 

Sidebar: If you are saving your passwords in notepad or excel spreadsheet, let me provide a more secure alternative. Check out Passpack. They're awesome!

Another caveat with CloudAccess.net is not having a 24/7 support line to call in the event your site runs into any issues. While their hours of operation for telephone support are between 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST) 7 days a week, they do offer a 24/7 ticket system in which they will respond between 8 to 24 hours depending on your service level agreement. And honestly, any time that I have ever needed to submit a support ticket, they haven't taken any longer than 2 hours to respond to issues covered outside of their SLA. Now, let's get into why they are the best damn host for Joomla sites on the planet.

Try Before You Buy

CloudAccess.net offers an indefinitely free 30-day trial of Joomla hosted on their platform so you can try out their services before opening your wallet. When you decide to start your trial, they will install your Joomla instance for you so there's no need to worry about creating a separate database and linking it to your site.

Outstanding Support of All-Things-Joomla

If you are new to Joomla or are considering your site to be developed on the Joomla platform, there's absolutely no better hosting company. If you have never designed or developed a website or used a content management system before, learning Joomla may be somewhat difficult initially. But this is where CloudAccess.net's support for Joomla, amazing customer service, great company culture, and dedication to providing informative tutorials and training outshines any other hosting provider by far, which is why I love them!

When I say CloudAccess.net's support for the Joomla platform is absolutely amazing, it's freaking amazing! They offer a multitude of training material catered to users of all experience levels and are always coming out with new content. They even provide live webinars to learn more about Joomla and in-depth reviews with developers of popular 3rd party extensions (which is supported in their Business Hosting plan) and if you can't attend one, you can always view it later on their YouTube channel.

I don't know about you but sometimes watching a video from subject matter experts is much easier than sifting through the minutia of documentation. This benefit alone played such a pivotal role in choosing them as a hosting provider for our clients because certain topics are just not covered very well in the Joomla Docs community as yet. Not to mention, many developers of popular extensions don't even have video tutorials and if they do have any, there is no audio most of the time. There's something a little weird about watching someone click around on their screen with no audio if you ask me. 

Additionally, you can always check out their training tutorials page for specific topics. And do you know what is the best part about all this? They offer it all for free without any hassles or landing pages to capture your information. 

Another benefit of their service is their site replication feature. Once your site is public, it's never a good idea to make updates to any applications (components, plugins, etc...) on a live site without initial testing. CloudAccess.net's CCP makes creating a copy of your Joomla instance so easy even a caveman can do it. And to make matters easier, if everything tests out well with updating your site's copy, you can overwrite your live site with your copy in one click.

Great Company Culture & Powerful Story

Gary Brooks, CEO and founder of CloudAccess.net, certainly did not become the owner of the best damn hosting company for Joomla websites overnight nor did he grow up with a silver spoon in his mouth. In an interview with Andrew Warner of mixergy.com in 2012, Gary discusses his personal story of being an adopted child to starting his own business, constantly overcoming adversity, and getting involved with the Joomla community. Check out the video below if you're interested in learning more. It is a bit lengthy, however I enjoyed it.

Final Remarks

If you can overlook the lack of standard FTP features with cPanel, 24/7 phone support, and would like to try out Joomla on your next project, consider CloudAccess.net as your hosting provider. 

When running any kind of website, blog, store or anything else the one thing that you need – and that you will thrive upon – is traffic. Without traffic, nobody will ever see your website. Traffic is literally the people arriving to your online location and checking it out, and without it you will never use your online profile for anything other than making your business card look more professional!

If you have a website at the moment and aren’t getting many – or any – hits, you aren’t alone in this. Many people struggle to make the impact they want to online due to the teething problems they find with bringing themselves traffic.

If you are finding that getting people in the old fashioned way (SEO/PPC etc.) isn’t going to viable financially, then these more out-the-box methods may help you find some traffic coming in organically;

Provide Freebies

This might sound counterproductive, but if you are currently selling a product or a service one of the best things you can do is offer out this service for free to someone influential. Let’s say, for example, that you run a business that sells quality hats. You might want to find some high traffic Instagram and Facebook pages, and message them to see if you could send them a sample.

If these connoisseurs of the industry like what you can offer, they might just provide some kind of insight, review or promotion about your products on their page. This might sound like a lot of work for very little, but even the most outlandish of niches that you could be selling in will have some kind of high-profile social media network that you can get involved in.

Create Power Content

One of the easiest ways to up your SEO rating these days is to provide two things – length, and quality. The quality is easy enough if you are a talented writer and you can easily impart your knowledge and passion, but for others the length can be the problem.

At the moment, any kind of content over 1,000 words is known as “Power Content”. This is because it provides extra length for additional reading quality, and this type of content sprinkled with relevant and intelligent use of keywords is going to do very well.

Keywords being used naturally in power content is a great way to draw users to your website through providing long and balanced webpages full of interesting information and insight. This is going to do well in the rankings, and is going to be useful to the readers so it will receive more positive traction than a simple 200-300 word blurb with a keyword quota being reached.

Flaunt Your Quality

One thing that many people can find extremely beneficial to boost their website traffic is to take some time and actually interact with other websites, podcasts, blogs and other popular media formats. Going on to do a guest appearance on a podcast, or provide some insight in a written/recorded interview with a popular blog in your niche can be a great way to advertise yourself for free.

Interviews can be handled online with the likes of Skype with ease these days, making providing your insight and getting your message heard – and website noticed – is much easier than it once was.

You can easily provide yourself with far more visibility and traffic without spending a dime if you just use the power of communication and reach out into the community, looking to provide your knowledge & services to hungry and interested individuals.

Sign Up For Marketing Services

If you're a newly established business, consider registering your company in a business directory such as the Google My Business, YellowPages, Yelp, Manta, or MozLocal. Some of our clients have acquired new loyal customers through these business directories because their business model is catered for business listings. The great thing about the majority of these companies is that they offer a free and a premium service so it won't hurt to try them out and pay for what you like.

After assisting many of our clients with achieving their brand identity goals, we began to make a list of common problems that we’ve encountered with startups or company’s who were looking to brand or rebrand their identity. One of the most important decisions that you can ever make prior to forming your business as a legal entity is failing to conduct thorough research and analysis on what you plan on naming it. Think of your business name as your baby because in all actuality that’s exactly what it is. 

Sure, you want your business to be profitable and provide a sustainable income, but what is going to set it apart from competitors? What are some of the core values that your business should embody? Choosing the right name for your business can make all the difference between establishing trust with new clients or completely losing them altogether.

Furthermore, first impressions are lasting impressions and bad first impressions are difficult and costly to curtail especially if your company is gaining momentum in the wrong direction. Don’t believe me? Have you ever wondered why Comcast changed its name to Xfinity? Over the past few years, their rapport with customers began to dwindle due to a multitude of complaints with service, deplorable support, and unprofessional correspondences technicians had with their customers.

Prior Planning Prevents Poor Everything

There’s a popular quote that I remember my drill instructor repeating every morning when I was in basic military training. Prior planning prevents poor performance! Everyday we had to stretch, hydrate, and learn basic combat readiness to prevent physical injury, heat stroke or dehydration, and gain insight on how to engage threats. Why? Because mistakes are costly! And no, choosing a business name may not result in such serious repercussions, however I am a firm believer in preventative maintenance.

So what’s the point to all this you ask? Well let’s delve deeper into how important choosing a name can be for your business. I gave the example of Comcast so that we can analyze how a not-so-good reputation of a business can adversely affect its culture, values, and trust for a reason. If we conduct thorough research we can analyze trends of businesses and words.

A Little Analysis Goes a Long Way

First let’s break down the name Comcast as a means of keyword analysis and relate our findings to search engine optimization. The name Comcast is a portmanteau of two generic words: communication and broadcast. The two generic words by themselves are quite common and I am willing to bet that these two words generate a substantial amount of volume or queries on search engines.

Now let’s play a small game of pretend. What if Comcast was really called Communication Broadcast, Inc. Now let’s say that you are starting your own telecommunications business and want to name your business The Communications Broadcast Network, Inc., but Communications Broadcast, Inc. (Comcast) has already commenced saturating your prospective market with a bad reputation for years. Uh oh? Now do you see the problem here?

Since your business is fairly new to the market and your business name shares keywords that are already in use with an established company with a bad reputation, you have really hurt your chances at successfully branding your business with a good first impression.

As a result of neglecting research, if a prospective client searches for “communications broadcast,” the search engine results page (SERP) links would more than likely show Communications Broadcast, Inc. (Comcast) with negative reviews and consumer complain reports along with their products and services. Thus making a successful first impression an even more toilsome battle for your new business to get a chance to rank on the first page let alone convert viewers into loyal customers. This issue becomes even more prevalent and increasingly difficult to solve when several businesses share the same keywords or too many generic keywords because you would have to compete with all of them.

We’ve Identified the Problems, Now Let’s Provide Some Solutions

Consider what are the goals and objectives of your company. You are clearly creating a business because you see a demand in your industry for a specific product or service. Come up with a list of descriptive words that align with the kind of company culture that you may want to create. Try and keep your business name unique and between a maximum of one to three words. And if you can only think of generic words try coming up with a portmanteau of your own. I know this sounds easier said than done so let me provide you with our business as an example.

When I started iCandy Webs, LLC in 2007, it was actually named Eye Candy Webs because I wanted to design websites that were beautiful and clean.  Eventually, my aspirations for Eye Candy Webs grew with a core focus on functionality and multimedia design (graphic design, logos, print etc…). I didn’t want to just create beautiful sites because I began to notice an unpopular trend with websites that looked great but were difficult to maintain.

I used the letter “i” in iCandy Webs as an amalgamation of the words idea, innovation, and eye to represent the perfect synergy between beauty and functionality.

In addition, my goal at iCandy Webs has always been to create solid business relationships that are like friendships. When you decide to entrust us with your brand, we will attempt to identify similar problems prior to designing a solution for you because good friends should be involved in helping you succeed.

I hope this article has been helpful. If you’re still stuck, read the following article: How to Name a Business or read a variety of topics pertaining to business names from Entrepreneur.com for some additional insight. Personally, I am opposed to paying someone else to come up with the name for your business, however there’s nothing wrong with getting expert opinions.