We’ve already put together a list of tips and resources for Twitter beginners, and Part 2 is focused on those who are familiar with Twitter and don’t want to waste time trawling through hundreds of applications which all do the same thing. All resources mentioned were free at time of posting.

Time-saving Twitter tools

• Twitter Tools for Wordpress – This handy plugin automatically creates tweets from your blog posts, so your Twitter followers can grab a link to your new entry straight away. Optional bit.ly URL shortening is included, and you can also post your Tweets as blog entries. If you don’t have a blog yet, you can take advantage of our one click WordPress install and web hosting to get set up in less than a minute.
• Twitoria – This website allows you to unfollow people who haven’t tweeted in the past week, fortnight, month, two months, six months or year. A great easy-use tool which will keep your follower base fresh.
• Hashtags – Just enter a search term to get a list of tweets, trends and people tweeting about that topic recently using a hashtag. Hashtags also displays a popularity graph. This is a useful tool to find out how popular a word or term is so you can get in on a conversation or monitor a trend.
• Friendorfollow – displays your relationships with your followers, i.e. people who follow you but you don’t follow and vice versa, and reciprocal following.  You can also look up the stats for other tweeters simply by entering their username and export data.
• OneForty is a directory of Twitter applications along with ratings and comments. Currently approaching 3,000 tools, it’s a good solution for checking up on apps you’ve heard about and finding the right software for you e.g. the right mobile phone application.

Twhirl is a good choice for those requiring a simple, unobtrusive client whilst HootSuite offers a lot of features ideal for business users. It’s also important to keep an eye on the development plans for each application so you’re aware of what features are intended for the near future. Just because you’ve found a suitable client doesn’t mean you have to stick with it – it’s an area which is increasingly growing and increasingly competitive – but consider the impact on any stats or analytics you may be tracking to avoid confusion or loss of information.

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We’re pleased to announce that we’re now offering one-click installs of WordPress’s forum software, bbPress. Message boards are a great way to promote visitor interaction and can be a useful tool to discover what your visitors are interested in, who they are, and what else they want to see from your site.

bbPress is open source and focused on speed and security, meaning you don’t have to worry about slow loading pages or the risk of being hacked. The streamlined software is also lightweight and efficient for better use of space and bandwidth. bbPress is easy to install thanks to our one-click install solution, and the user-friendly control panel also means less work for admins and moderators once you’re up and running.

bbPress enjoys many similar customisation elements to WordPress so you can develop and install themes and plugins (e.g. for ratings, video and private forums) to customise your forums. Furthermore, bbPress can be integrated with WordPress so it has access to your blog’s functionality and users signing up to your message boards can also be users on your blog. This is especially useful for multi-author blogs, blogs with regular commenters and those looking to build up integrated site communities from an existing WordPress blog.

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With only five days to go until general release of the .co domain name, here are five top reasons to pre-register your .co domain name before it’s too late!

1.    70% of the world’s top 500 brands have signed up for their .co name already, and WorldTrademarkReview.com has discovered that some big brands intend to provide new services and products just from their .co website, cementing its popularity.

2.    It’s a good way to get a generic domain name that describes your brand or field rather than just having to stick to your company name, e.g. webdesign.co or slimming.co.

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Twitter in itself can be very overwhelming, and that’s without worrying what tools and resources you need to manage your account properly. So we’ve done the hard work for you and compiled a list of our favourites.

Twitter for Beginners

We’ve divided our list into two parts; this one for fledgling tweeters and one for fully-fledged users (keep an eagle eye out for more advanced tools in Part 2, coming soon), but it’s worth checking them both to make sure there’s nothing you miss.

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With more and more social media sites popping up everywhere, the craze to have the next Facebook or Twitter continues to be relentless. Wikipedia lists ‘some notable, well-known’ active social media sites  – ‘some’ being 190 – and even has a separate page for defunct websites, showing that this competitive trend shows no mercy.

So with almost two hundred ‘notable’ options out there, how do you know which to use for your site and how? Facebook and Twitter are the most obvious choices, but it’s essential to take time to create a strategy and see what works best for your particular needs.

Take time to find the sites relevant to you
Don’t just jump on the bandwagon. Investigate what’s out there, and make two lists of potentials – one for pages that require very little maintenance (e.g. a StumbleUpon link), and one for sites that require frequent updates and monitoring (e.g. Facebook).

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At the start of the year VeriSign, who operate a number of the Internet's top level domain names (including .com and .net), announced that they would be increasing their domain name registry fees on 1st July 2010.
Due to this change, we are having to increase our prices. Domain prices have been changed effective immediately. The new prices are as follows: 

.com, .net, .info, .org, .biz, .name, .eu:  (£12.99 Per Year)

We did not want to have to increase prices for domain names, but due to VeriSign's increase we are left with no choose, But we are still one of the cheapest domain name suppliers!

Selling web hosting is a very lucrative business and the ROI for a successful reseller is an attractive proposition for many entrepreneurs. For only £18.99 a month (with us:)) anyone can resell web hosting packages at prices and specifications of their own choosing. If a reseller creates a package priced at £4.99 per month (which is cheap) they only need 6 customers to break even each month, and then each new customer beyond that becomes a profit.

But this all relies on a reseller being able to attract traffic to convert in to customers, and that is the tricky bit. Search engines are most sites’ primary source of traffic, and one of the most important ranking factors for a high position is the quantity and quality of links pointing to a domain name. If you have aspirations of setting up a dedicated web hosting business your marketing strategy must include search and link building. Here are a few ideas to apply, some are quick wins and others are medium to long term commitments.

Quick wins
CSS gallery submissions
CSS and web design galleries are a great source of traffic and incoming links but there are literally thousands of them to consider. There is a solution with CSS gallery submission services which will do it all for you (for a fee). The three I am aware of that have a good depth and breadth of sites on their list are http://www.thecssgallerylist.com/, http://galleryrush.com/ and http://www.cssgallerysubmission.com/.

Online press release
Announce your launch, promotion or new product through an online press release to raise both awareness and build incoming links from web hosting news resources. Generic PR distributions services such as prweb.com ($200) are picked up by web hosting news publishers and http://www.pressadvance.com/ specialises in distributing web hosting news ($85) and will even write it for you ($135).

Free resources
People love free things and a lot of companies have used this to create link bait by giving things away with no catches. Areas to look at as a web host to attract relevant incoming links are free icon sets, a WordPress theme, CSS template etc. If you do go down the free web template path add your URL in to the footer as well.

Get involved with the forums
Research the relevant web hosting and domain name forums that do not add “nofollow” to links or signatures and get involved in discussions. In no way are we recommending creating spammy posts, in fact they will backfire on you from a branding perspective. Become a genuine part of the conversation but use your domain name in your signature.

Write an article for a high PR site
There are more web design blogs that anyone man could count, many of them with a high PageRank and quite a few open to contributors writing for them as long as it is original and useful content. As part of the deal the author will often get a small biog and a link back to their site.

Directory submission
As with anything when it comes to SEO, directory relevance is key here. Generic directories that will take anyone for a fee will pass next to no link juice but niche/ industry specific directories who care about creating a genuine resource are definitely worth submitting to.

Long term link building
Write a blog
Blogs with useful and insightful articles are a fantastic source of building links, blogs with dry content, nothing new to say or full of press releases are a waste of time. If you have the time and the drive to commit to writing regular content, go for it, if you don’t, stay clear.

“Hosted by…” buttons
If you provide a great service some customers will be happy to associate themselves with you and carry a “hosted by…” button or link to you in their footer. Not all customers will go for this, but if you don’t make it available then none definitely will.

Being known as an expert and/ or leader
You would be amazed how many sites will link to a service recommending them or using them in a “top x” list having never used them themselves. The old saying “success breeds success” is true for link building. If you become well known enough within your niche people will link to you because you are perceived to be a market leader.

In this article I will point out a new way of marketing your business website by using a blog. Why should you care about blogging, that’s just something web designers or egotistical teenagers do to look cool in class. If Microsoft believes that business blogging is important then who are we to ignore it?.

Non Compete culture

Companies worldwide, and from my own personal experience especially in the UK, are very scared of giving away the smallest hint of what they actually do for their clients. Their perspective is often that any information they make available could be valuable to their competitors; they could get an edge over them if they knew their prices.
The Less Customers Know, The More We Can Charge

UK companies have a tendency to hide their prices and instead give an awkward quotation form for their services, even though they may supply competitive prices and a reliable service. If you picked up the phone they can probably give you a quote straight away.

Be Personable

There is an attitude that the less the client knows the more we can charge and to a great extent this is true. But these companies are missing a new wave of marketing, one that is transforming companies images and actually making business approachable and personal, even Microsoft, the brand tarnished with the evil corporation badge for so many years, has seen the error of its ways and is using blogging to become more personable.

Blog Marketing Gains Trust

The blog marketing scheme works by creating something that is mostly lost on online trading; trust. That website could be run by anyone with a few services to throw your way, you cannot actually judge what the company staff are actually like and there’s no way you can truly estimate the level of integrity the company has and how specialized they actually are.

These are all trust issues affecting paying customers choices every time they look at your website.

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You can now pre-order the brand new international domain name .CO with us and for only £55.99! .CO is the new domain extension that offers a truly global, recognizable and credible domain name for individuals and organizations to build their businesses and brands.

The benefits of .CO:

• Global: The .CO domain is set to become the new big global domain name
• Memorable: .CO is easy to remember and type
• Flexible: Perfect for .COmmunity, .COmpany, .COnnnect, .COmmerce, .COmmitte, .COrportation websites.
• Short: Ideal for the era of 147 characters
• Protect your brand: Stop cyber squatters stealing your brand identity and traffic

Make sure you take advantage of this great opportunity to grab a truly premier global domain name. Click here to pre-order your .CO domain name.

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A couple of weeks ago we looked in to Google’s announcement that they are using a page’s load time to rank a sample of sites (1%) and what it meant for your website.

One of the most resource hungry ways of creating a website is WordPress. With its multiple CSS, JavaScript and PHP files and a heavy reliance on calls to databases a WordPress site can easily become bloated and slow. Web masters who use WordPress need to look at how they can decrease their website‘s page load speeds. Here is how.

How do I find out how fast my website is the first place?
To see how your site is performing and to get a list of recommended changes I would start with looking at “Site Performance” within the Labs section of your Google Webmaster Tools.
To check out your site on spec you can also install Google’s page speed plug-in for FireFox here http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/download.html. This site within Firebug (also required) and gives a page a score out of 100 along with what you need to improve.

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