The Power of Fan-Driven Sharing

There are many ways you can promote and share updates of your HostBaby website. You can use Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, ListBaby, Digg and other services to update the online world with your musical comings and goings. These are all great things to do when you have time between gigs, but why not enable your fans to do some of this work for you? What if, with the click of a button, your fans could easily and quickly tell all their friends about the cool things they found while checking out your site!

Enter: the new “Share It” feature of the Hostbaby Wizard!

Now you can make your web pages shareable!  With a couple of mouse clicks, visitors can quickly share specific pages of your site with others.  The “Share IT” button allows visitors to make a Facebook post, share a bookmark through reddit.com, even tweet on Twitter without even leaving your website. Think about how easy it would be if your fans did your marketing for you? That’s the definition of “Viral Marketing” and that what the “Share It” button helps you do.  This is a great way to get your content spread far and wide across the internet – places you wouldn’t have the time and resources to reach alone.

How to do it!

Want to learn how?  We at HostBaby are happy to provide a tutorial:

CLICK HERE TO READ HOW TO SHARE YOUR PAGES!

Things to keep in mind

To share your page on different social networks, visitors will need to already be members of Facebook, Twitter, etc. Also, consider which pages you want to be sharing.  You may enable Share for all your pages or just a selection. Some people regularly update their home page, some their blogs; it really doesn’t matter which page you share. The key is to make your pages interesting enough that visitors to your site will want to share them with their friends.

We hope this help you help your site visitors spread the word about your website to their friends and neighbors. Happy sharing!

• Internet Explorer (those on version 6.x should seriously consider upgrading)
• Mozilla Firefox
• Safari
• Google Chrome
• Opera

Here is a list of browsers available for Mac:

• Safari
• Mozilla Firefox
• Opera

Here are some additional articles you may find helpful:

• Clearing Browser Cache
• Clearing Browser Cookies
• US Government issues IE security warning

A domain name is like a brand name – it identifies your website and helps make you findable on the internet. A domain name lets visitors type your domain name right into the browser’s address bar and arrive at your web pages directly, without having to search for you.

Shorter is better!

Try saying your proposed domain name out loud. Do you have to spell it out for people to get it right? Does it send you diving for a pen and paper? Imagine saying it into the microphone at your performance. Will your fans still remember it when they get home?

Try to avoid hyphens and abbreviations in the domain name, if possible. If you are going to use an abbreviation, use the most common version of it – don’t make one up.

Also type out the domain name and see how it looks in writing. Is it possible to misunderstand the words/meaning by breaking the words up differently?

For example – Mole Station Nursery – www.molestationnursery.com comes out reading like “molestation nursery” which is really bad. A hyphen would have helped that – mole-station-nursery.com might have been a better choice in that case. So check out your domain name in writing and make sure it reads ok.

.com or .net or …?

Ideally, you would get the .com version of your domain name. If the name that you really want is not available as a .com, you’ll want to look at the .com site before you choose .net or another extension. That is because people usually think of .com first, and if they are looking for you and put .com in by  mistake, you want to make sure they do not end up at some porn or scam site.

If you are a Hostbaby customer, or are thinking of becoming a Hostbaby customer, feel free to contact us for help brainstorming the perfect domain name for you. We are here for you!

We’re all about empowering our users!  There’s nothing sweeter than making your own site, and being able to make updates on the fly.  Plus, a lot of our templates are pretty darn sweet.  Making sites with the Wizard can be pretty darn easy.  However, there are some tools that just about every Wizard user should have at their fingertips.

OH THOSE DARN IMAGES

Some of you may have noticed that resizing images, and getting them “just right” can be a pain in the butt!  For example, a lot of our templates accept “Style Graphics” to show some cool pictures on your site.  However, the fields that house your images can be very picky about the proportions of your image.  Until there’s a fancy re-sizer built into the wizard, you’ll want to have a powerful resizing tool handy!  Granted, there’s no tool quite like Photoshop, but that can be awfully expensive!

For PC’s; some of us like to use the windows XP resizing tool, that’s free for download here!  Just keep in mind you’ll need to be running Windows XP to make this work!  It’s called the “Image Resizer”, which does exactly that!  It’s a pretty quick install, and super easy to use.  Simply right click on the image you want to resize,  select “resize pictures”, and chose the proportions you want.  Presto!

Mac users may want to check out iZoom! This is also a free application for download (go go Open Source!)  There are Linux and PC versions out there as well.  After installation, you simply drag the photo you want to re-size, tinker with the proportion settings, and export a new image!  This program will even allow you to modify the quality of your image, to make them more Email, or website friendly.  Pretty savvy tool, and the price is definitely right!

BRING ON THE TUNES!

Obviously, a lot of us are artists.  The majority of our users have music that they want to share with the world, which is great!  But how do you get the music from your CD, onto your computer in MP3 form, and THEN uploaded onto your site?  Enter iTunes!

Yes, it’s an apple application, no hating on this program you PC people.  It’s free for download for PC and Mac HERE. Click on the download button, and you should get prompted to download the right application for your PC or Mac.  Install that bad boy, because it is one powerful piece of music encoding software, that also happens to be free!

Importing Music on iTunes is really straight forward.  Once you pop in a music CD, you’ll have an Import Settings and Import button handy (at the bottom of the window).  This is assuming you installed iTunes 9, the latest version as of today.  You just want to make sure you adjust your import settings to produce MP3.  If you want to get really fancy, be sure to keep the sound quality at a good level; around 192 kbps.  Most people these days have high speed internet access, so having higher quality music shouldn’t bog down most systems out there.   From there, upload your music to your page via the Wizard, and you’re rockin’ the web!

WHAT ELSE SHOULD I HAVE!?

You should definitely be running the latest web browsers on your computer. For those of us that aren’t the most tech savvy, here’s the definition of a web browser:

An application used to view websites on the internet.

Common web browsers would be:

1. Internet explorer 8
2. Firefox 3
3. Safari 4
4. Chrome

To give you an idea of what people are using, nearly 50% of users out there are using Firefox (and for good reason too!).  You can see general web browser trends HERE!

Of course, there are more applications out there that lots of people find handy when making their sites.  If you have one you’d like to share, make a comment on this blog post!  We’d love to hear what you guys out there are using.  So, good luck with your websites and keep the internet rockin’!

Mixdown!