When it comes to free, two questions pop to mind: Why pay more?

The other question is: What’s the catch?

You’re likely here because you don’t want to pay more than you need to for web hosting. That’s smart.
You also want to know what you’d be giving up by going with a lower-cost host, and if it’d cost you more in the long run — in sales, man hours, frustrations, etc. You’re in the right place. We’ll walk you through the best free web hosts, answer what the catch is, and point out a few other free options you should consider.

Full disclosure: Free web hosting only makes sense for a pretty narrow scope of customers.

If you have small a website without much content and very little traffic, or if you need a temporary website, like a page for an upcoming event, you can definitely get what you need for free.

You can probably get what you need from some of the best free hosting plans. However, if all you need is a super simple page — AKA the only kind of site that should run on a free host — we recommend trying a free website builder that hosts custom domains.

What’s a custom domain? A custom domain is what switches your url from www.MyBrand.WebHost.com to www.MyBrand.com. If you’re serious about your business, you need to use a custom domain — free subdomains just scream, “I didn’t pay for this,” which sends customers lots of buyer beware signals.

If you have a super simple site, use a free website builder that hosts custom domains:

• Ucraft
• Google Sites

Or, check out our recommendations for no-cost hosts:

• Awardspace
• Atspace
• Freehostia
• Agilityhoster
• Byethost

For everything else — especially a small business or an online presence you want to grow, we recommend paying for hosting. Some of the best web hosting services start for as little as $4/month. For the price, you’ll get increased functionality, more reliability, and better customer support. For $50 a year, it’s an investment we think is worth it for just about every website.

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When it comes to anything done on the Internet, Google is king.

It’s the most popular search engine in the world, with a global market share of 89%.

Each day, 3.5 billion searches are performed on Google. That’s more than 1.2 trillion searches annually.

With so many people using Google to search for information online, it’s more important than ever for businesses to understand the Google algorithm. That knowledge will help them use SEO tactics to drive ecommerce sales.

But Google is much more than just a search engine. The Google Play Store is the official app store for all Android devices. It’s developed, owned, and operated by Google.

Understanding the app store and how it works will help you improve the ranking of your business mobile app.

While you may know how important Google is for searches, you might not be aware of everything else it has to offer.

Google has tons of free tools available for people to take advantage of. As a business owner, you can use these resources to improve your marketing efforts.

I’ve narrowed down the top 15 free Google tools your business can use for marketing. Here they are.  [click to continue…]

To survive in today’s competitive digital landscape, businesses need to focus on their content strategies now more than ever.

You need to understand how your target audience consumes content and figure out what they’re looking for. It’s not effective to produce random content at a high rate if it’s not valuable.

Everything you publish across all your distribution channels needs to benefit your audience, or it won’t be successful.

In addition to producing high quality content, you also want to make sure it’s SEO-friendly.

The key factor of your content production needs to be relevancy: 78% of consumers say relevant content increases their intent to buy.

Your content must be relevant to your brand and relevant to your audience while still appealing to Google.

Blindly producing content without a strategy won’t help you. You need to keep up with the latest trends and see how other brands approach content marketing and SEO.

Today, and in the future, marketers must have a content strategy compatible with the way people discover new content. Creating content that doesn’t drive results is expensive and inefficient.

That’s why you need to get familiar with topic clusters.

Surprisingly, many business owners and marketers I’ve spoken to recently don’t know anything about this. That was my inspiration for writing this guide.

This is the perfect opportunity for you to gain a competitive advantage.

You can learn how to implement topic clusters today and use this tactic moving forward before your competitors have a chance to catch on.

As a result, you’ll be able to produce high quality engaging content. This will help you improve your SEO strategy, drive more traffic to your site, and increase conversion rates.

I’ll explain everything you need to know about topic clusters and how they are revolutionizing the marketing industry.  [click to continue…]

How successful are your marketing campaigns?

Believe it or not, this seemingly simple question puzzles many marketers and business owners I work with.

You’re running ads, and customers are buying what you’re selling, so your marketing efforts must be working, right? Not necessarily.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying this means your strategies have failed. In fact, some of your campaigns may be working great. But you can’t make any assumptions.

The only way to know for sure whether your campaigns are working is to measure the results.

By tracking certain metrics, you’ll also be able to save some money. You don’t want to dump money into campaigns that aren’t working.

Here’s the problem. Sometimes it’s difficult to directly tie one promotion to a sale.

That’s why you need to track several metrics and infer based on the results.

This statement holds true for all marketers, regardless of your industry or the size of your business. It doesn’t matter if you’re running expensive campaigns or using tactics to market your company on a budget. You need to track the results.

As I’m sure you know, there are dozens of business metrics you could be tracking. But not all of these will benefit your marketing strategy.

That was my inspiration for this guide. I narrowed down the top 11 metrics every marketing manager needs to track to be successful.

Use this guide as a reference to measure the success of your marketing campaigns moving forward. Based on the results, you’ll be able to tell what’s working and which strategies need improvement.  [click to continue…]

Artificial intelligence has created a lot of buzz lately, and for good reasons.

Whether your company has adapted or not, this technology has already penetrated our world. Marketers are using AI to improve their businesses.

I know what some of you are thinking. Sure, some companies use AI, but you don’t need to yet, right? Wrong.

I see this mentality far too often when I’m working with business owners.

The reality is machine learning is reshaping marketing. Think about the marketing strategies you were using ten or even five years ago. I’m willing to bet they have changed over the years.

Well, those strategies will continue to change and evolve based on new technology. AI is the next big wave.

If you do some research on AI in marketing, you’ll see lots of information geared toward companies targeting mass consumer audiences. But what about the B2B industries?

AI is penetrating the B2B world as well. In fact, 80% of B2B marketing executives believe artificial intelligence will revolutionize the industry by 2020.

But this new technology comes with its fair share of challenges.

Even though the majority of these marketing executives know how much of an impact AI will have on their industries, only 26% of respondents say they are confident in their abilities to use AI for marketing.

That was my inspiration for this guide.

Artificial intelligence is a broad term with many different aspects. I’ve already shown you the marketing skills you need to survive in the age of AI.

Now, I’ll explain what B2B marketers are expecting from AI as we close out 2018 and enter 2019. You can find ways to leverage AI by applying the same strategies in your own business.  [click to continue…]