Category: Blog

When you create a WordPress blog most of the time you open it up to comments and you add a contact us form for people to interact with your site. The problem with this of course is the issue of spam. Other sites, human advertisers, phishing and spamming bots all begin to find your site and start to add comments.

Every time a comment is sent to your page, especially if you have approvals on you get emails to say that a new comment has arrived. Sooner rather than later, especially with popular blogs you get sick of seeing the constant emails telling you that a comment has been posted telling you to click on their link to find the best product ever. Some comments even pretend to be human complementing you on how good your blog is, then of course you notice the link used for the person and it links to whatever site wants to hijack your page as a backlink.

Stopping Spam
There are various ways to stop spam, one of these is to add CAPTCHA but even that can be worked around now but there is a powerful add-on available for WordPress called Akismet. What this plug in does is identifies if the comment is real, spam or as it terms it “ham” which is suspected spam but worthy of checking just to make sure. Setting up the plug in is very simple; the first thing is to load up the dashboard for your WordPress blog. Select to add a new plugin and in the search box put in Akismet. You should find it’s the first one on the search results.

Once it is installed you should find that under plugins you now have an Akismet Configuration option which will take you to the configuration. Click on this and you will notice that it is asking for an API Key. To get this you will have to go to akismet.com and sign up for the service. This will provide you with the API Key that you enter into the configuration page. Once it is up and running you will also have Akismet Stats under the Dashboard menu. This is where you will be able to see exactly how much spam has been caught by the system.

Once the Akismet plug-in is installed and the API ID is added you will find that the amount of spam will be very minimal sometimes non-existent if you are lucky. This makes it a lot less annoying when you are checking your comments to see if anything interesting has been posted.

Cloud computing is when you use an offsite IT service to monitor and maintain your companies data information. Instead of investing in more servers and hiring more technical professionals to govern your important crucial information, a cloud hosting company will protect your vital information.

Cloud computing will add functions that you can do with your information and give you the space on your computers for your daily routines. Your company will not need to train more personnel or take out new software licenses when you partner up with a cloud hosting company.

Technical hardware usually needs to be upgraded at least every three to five years. Your cloud host company would take on the added cost of upgrading technical equipment and training the personnel needed to protect your vital information. Your IT department would then have the time to handle the smaller problems with the in-house equipment and work on new applications to enhance your business. Your business would have no need to design floors plans, set up storage areas, or install IT equipment if your company moves to a new location. Your company would be up and running in a matter of a few minutes when you have a cloud host for your technical services.Your

cloud hosting

company will store all your applications and protect your information against spammers and anything trying to infiltrate your company’s important data. As your business grows, more virtual servers can be added to host all you business needs. Your informational operation requirements can be handled by virtual servers with dependability and be cost effective. You will no longer have the problems of flakey memory, crashed hard drives, or power failures to contend with during your working day. All these problems will save your company working hours that are put to the better use of building your business.

Clusters of virtual servers can handle those businesses with large volumes of demanding applications, users, and services. When integrating more then one virtual server host, the virtual server cluster will allow you the ability to create a private cloud computing system that will grow with your business. The virtual cluster will provide uninterrupted service at a very fast pace.

You will have no interruptions to your informational flow if one server goes down in your cluster. The other servers will immediately take over the tasks with no performance or quality lost. You will constantly have your information available to all your users. Virtual Server Clusters can be designed for your environment so they meet your needs for your applications, services, and users. Security for your applications and services will be enhanced by being set up on their own virtual server hosts. You will have no downtime when you have a cluster of virtual servers. Your applications and critical information will always be at hand.

Many organizations are discovering that storage of all their vital information has become a problem. A more cost effective and efficient way to store all you data, emails, and private media applications is with virtual storage. Your private cloud computing service can virtually store all your data no matter how much you demand for storage. Virtual storage is backed up; secure and available for your use if you should ever need the information.

Getting loyal fans is a difficult task for brands of all sizes, especially smaller retailers who don’t have the big marketing budgets of their corporate counterparts. The importance of being able to connect with fans through social media is quickly becoming an integral part of every online marketing strategy. And while providing good content and conversation will organically grow your fans, offering fans exclusive offers, will result in quicker fan growth over a much shorter period of time. Venpop has developed a Facebook fan offer application that allows retailers of all sizes to collect customer info, grow fans up to 200%, and get sales, in as little as 2 short days.

The reason behind the success of the fan offer application lies in both the retailers’ ability to exclusively reward just their fans and the ability to identify those genuinely interested in the brand. The Venpop fan offer consists of a like-gate feature, which when clicked on unlocks an offer. Visitors to the page must become fans in order to access the deal. When fans buy the deal that information is shared in their newsfeeds; making it easy for their Facebook friends to also benefit from the deal and for the deal go viral. Information about the customer – including their email address – is also collected by the application and made available to the retailer.

Venpop’s fan offer also works in connection with hyper-ta rgeted Facebook ads. Venpop identifies people on Facebook that are interested in the retailer’s offer and shares it with them. The targeted ads make it so retailers gain fans that have a genuine interest in the brand who are much more likely to convert to customers.

Retailers can provide their fans with a deal of their choosing. It can consist of a product, download, or coupon code that retailers aren’t forced to take a loss on, which is often the case with other deal sharing platforms such as Groupon. This makes an especially big difference for small retailers who too often cut prices or take losses in an attempt to acquire new customers.

Green Feet Case Study: Fan Offer Seeking to increase fans and exposure, Venpop and Green Feet, an eco-friendly store teamed up to reward Green Feet Fans with an exclusive fan only deal. In two days, this small business that normally gets 11 fans a week grew 161 fans during the same period. That is more than 14 times the usual fan growth; extraordinary growth to any retailer but especially a small retailer. And this fan growth carried over for the next three weeks after the campaign had ended. The two day campaign allowed Green Feet to jump start its fan base by a total of 261 fans or over 10% of their overall fans.

In two days, Green Feet also sold over half of the discounted deal it offered. This was a set of environmentally friendly lunch tins offered at 40% off the retail price.

Venpop fan offers make it possible for small business on a very limited budget to collect valuable customer data, get sales, and boost fans.