business.creativity.life.

Originally posted on: Social Media Ottawa

If you’re in the market for setting up a new website, and you’re in a pickle about whether to go with a Wordpress installation or not here are some tips to keep in mind as to why hosting your site independent of wordpress.com will help you in the long-run.

1 – Credibility for Your Brand

By purchasing and using a domain name specific to your brand customers and viewers of the site recognize credibility to the brand; as there is a financial input to its maintenance. Using a personal website domain instead of ‘www.wordpress.com/companynamehere’ also maintains consistency for your brand, thereby minimizing the effort needed to to recognize and remember you.

2 – Full Integration

With the standard, free Wordpress installation integration with custom themes and plugins are limited. These are the very features that set your site apart from the rest, so why would you not want it?

3 – Additional Flexibility

There is also potential to create a ‘second layer’ of functionality with unique domain and web hosting purchases. For example your own company emails ie: dave@oakcomputing.com rather than dave_oakcomputing@gmail.com. This is another simple way to establish and create brand credibility.

Also, let’s pose the idea that your wordpress website ‘takes off’ and becomes one of the internet’s hottest websites. If your site is hosted with Wordpress and you want to later transition to a custom domain name and hosting, wordpress will charge you per megabyte of information transferred over 2MBs. The charges associated with this transition will cost well over the mere $70/year it would have cost you to use a custom domain name with independent web hosting.

4 – Revenue Possibilities

Even with all of these incentives to independently host your new Wordpress site, there is more motivation: a chance to create monetary revenue. The world of internet marketing and banner ads is a simple and easy way to have a steady cash flow with minimal work. Plentyoffish.com itself makes over $100 000 a month by giving space on its site to web banner advertising companies. Well-known companies like Pepperjam and Chitika are established in the ‘web banner business’ and partnering with them is a good way to make easy money.

5 – Minimal Cost for Bountiful Benefits

Yes hosting and domain name purchase cost money, compared to the $0 you need for a basic Wordpress install. But with as little as $70 a year, you can establish credibility, brand consistency, while having all the latest website ‘bells and whistles’, with full site flexibility and even create additional revenue. So is $70 really a large enough barrier to set you back from all of this potential?

This morning I had the privilege of attending Ottawa’s Social Media Breakfast, a monthly early morning event where Ottawa’s social media experts and beginners come together to eat, share and learn about the emerging trend of social media. At today’s event Toronto rogue entrepreneur, David Crow(@davidcrow), shared his thoughts on the growing craze giving not only insight on the topic but also how we can each tap into it and have it work for us. Encouraging quotes and thought provoking questions, both included below, were interspersed throughout his one-hour talk. 

“the future exists today. It’s just unevenly distributed” – William Gibson

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it” – Alan Kay

From the get-go I’ll admit that I was expecting to see an older gentleman standing before us, educating us on the wisdom he gained over the years, etc, etc. But instead Mr Crow was a fun, fresh, intriguing character who talked openly about current viral companies or ideas like: WillItBlend? and mentos + coke on David Letterman. He spoke candidly about his beginnings in kinesiology at Waterloo, and his reasoning for the degree being its higher female population, onto his days at Carnegie Mellon to now being at Microsoft and helping budding Canadian entrepreneurs in parallel. But sprinkled among his personal information was truly insightful information about how to capitalize on social media mainly through establishing meaningful experiences for users. At the root of all examples and inspirational stories, Mr Crow made it a point to repeat the point: stop accepting mediocre, build awesomeexperiences and always strive for greatness. After all the majority of social media outlets are available as the ‘digital glue’ for anyone and everyone to use as a means of converging advertising, marketing and customers. So how do you make your idea stick? Mediocrity is no longer an option; “don’t just sit back and [observe], take the leap, know you might fail but that you will learn [in the process]”.

The following are a few key points taken from this morning’s event:

• The essence of marketing (continuous cycle)
  • Attract > engage > excite
• Mankind extends by
  • Amplifying tools
    • Tools that help you ‘reach’   
  •  Goal cloning
    • Building tools that motivate people to do one thing (ex: how do you get the world to watch football on television?)
• Social media is one of the media facets, it is the digital glue
• The marketing landscape is no longer a ‘push’ method
•  There are millions of websites, it’s about the ‘data’
  • How do you track the site?
  • How do you manipulate it?
  • Need to track and understand what people are doing
• Markets are conversations
  • Need to engage
• Every business has 2 functions
  • Marketing
  • Innovation
  • **social media touches both sides of this equation
• social media tools don’t make conversations, they support it!
  • By understanding how social media supports human desire for conversations , businesses can open vibrant interactions with individuals and communities
• Generate memories and an experience, build an emotional connection
• Social media is:
  • The connection point
  • It is the glue
  • Is isn’t one channel, it’s all channels
  • It’s where your audience is
• 5 Principles of Social Capital (excerpt from Tara Hunt’s The Whuffie Factor)
  • stop talking, start listening
  • become part of the community you serve
  • create amazing user experiences
  • embrace the chaos
  • find your higher purpose

David Crow (@davidcrow)

•  www.linkedin.com/davidcrow
• www.davidcrow.ca
• His initiatives
  • DemoCamp
  • Founders & Funders
  • StartupEmpire

Recently I went out for a ‘night on the town’ in downtown Toronto with my friend and a group of her friends, whom I had never met before. As I introduced myself to this new group of people we engaged in a variety of conversations and a few of us ‘hit it off’. We soon began joking around and discussing topics as if we were long lost girlfriends. As I got to know a little bit more about each person, their educational background, their current careers, etc. I soon realized they were very accomplished individuals all in the early stages of accelerating up their respective corporate ladders. The thought did cross my mind ‘these would be great business contacts’. But I quickly shoved the idea out of my head because how could I befriend these lovely people and then ‘use’ them as business contacts? That would be dead against the ‘business 101’ rulebook, right?

I find we are often given this preconceived notion that business and networking is a regimented, serious affair whereas socializing is where you can ‘let loose’ and not necessarily be ‘professional’. Now a days with so much networking, and each person we meet holding value as a business contact, it can be difficult to remember everyone. Often it is the contacts that we befriend that stick in our minds most prominently. But why is it that these friends are higher up on our ‘go to’ list of contacts as opposed to that big wig CEO your boss just introduced you to? Maybe we feel they are more trustworthy because we see and interact with them in more vulnerable situations, or maybe it’s because we enjoy spending time with that person so using them as a business contact is just an excuse to engage with them more often.

Whatever the reasoning in this day and age there is a need for meaningful relationships between people in order to be remembered. Networking in itself is a means of socializing, but it is a more active form. Both parties in the newly forming relationship need to take initiative to follow-up with one another as well as find and use the other person’s valuable attributes while still maintaining a friendly, conducive relationship. This may sound simple when considering making and maintaining just one contact. But I met on average twenty new people in one evening’s social interactions. So let’s say I meet roughly 10 new people each time I go out for a night on the town, and I average 2 social events per week. That results in 20 new people per week, and up to 80 new potential contacts that I have to maintain per month. Suddenly hanging out with the girls sounds like more work than fun!