Enhancements to Our Website Hosting Service
We, at Lost Peak, are constantly updating, enhancing, and making better our products and services so that we can better serve you and meet the needs of your unique small business. As part of this, we have recently made some major enhancements to our web servers that will provide better security, optimization, and redundancy. Here is a breakdown of our recent changes:
- Security: We have enhanced our security by blocking the top countries known for spam and hacking from accessing our web servers which greatly reduces both spam and malicious activity. We have also implemented a system that flags and stops stops malicious activity by requiring any threat to enter a code before accessing our clients websites.
- Uptime: We have increased our uptime by mirroring websites hosted by us on four different servers around the world. If for any reason our main servers goes down, the static portion of our clients websites will still be accessible.
- Redundancy: We backup the static portion of our clients websites to four different servers around the world so in the event that our main server goes down, the static portion of our clients websites will still be accessible. We have also added redundant DNS at four locations around the world.
- Optimization: We have optimized our server with our four redundant servers around the world so that our clients websites load faster, in some instances up to 75% faster.
- Large File Hosting: We have come up with a cheep way to host large files up to 5 TB in size for large projects or software that you need to get to your clients.
How Your Marketing Efforts Could Be Hurting Your Small Business
If you have a small business, you know that you need to market whatever product or service you are offering and always make sure that you do it effectively. You can do various forms of marketing from traditional to online means. Traditional marketing may be too expensive for a small business but marketing on the Internet can be more cost effective and some times more powerful. Which ever you chose, there might be some marketing efforts that could damage your small business. How could this happen? Here are some common issues:
Marketing To The Wrong People
You may have the best product, you may have the perfect solution to an existing problem or you may be able to provide the best service there is. However, if you are not marketing your products or services to the right customers, your efforts will be ineffective. You will hardly make any sale or people won’t even notice you and what you have to offer. This happens when the business owners or those marketers themselves don’t know who their target audience actually is or that they were advertising to the wrong people. For instance, selling a new smart phone to an audience of individuals over the age of 60 will probably give you less sells and wast your time and money. On the other hand, if your audience was college students between the age of 18 and 25, you will have a much easier time selling the new smart phone.
Not Doing The Right Thing
As a small business owner, marketing your product or service can be one of the hardest things you can do. If you do not know how to market your product or service effectively, you will be wasting time that you could have used in doing other essential tasks such as improving your product or service and connecting with your clients. Many small business owners believe that they are effectively marketing their product or service when in fact, their efforts are far from it. If you would not sell your product or service to just anyone, why would you follow everyone that you can find on a social media network? This is something that I often see and this could not be more wrong. No matter what product or service you sell, you never want EVERYONE as your client.
Going For Quantity Rather Than Quality
Another way for you to hurt your small business is if your marketing efforts are concentrated on quantity instead of quality. You might think that having 10,000+ followers/following on Twitter or Facebook is already considerable and an impressive feat. While it’s true that you should be commended for your efforts, that large following is meaningless if most of them are not genuinely interested in your products, services, or your entire small business. Quality traffic or, in the case of Twitter and Facebook, quality followers are those who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer and will most likely respond to your marketing efforts by purchasing your products, subscribing your services, or asking questions about your small business.
Those are some of the ways on how your marketing efforts can damage your small business. While you have the desire to do the marketing tasks yourself, perhaps it is best to leave it to a marketing professional before you slowly destroy your small business by doing marketing the wrong way. Why not search for a marketing professional that you can trust?
Read MoreBrian Thanks Lost Peak
Brian, a small business owner of a software company, sent us this great video thanking us for helping his business. We did not expect him to do this as he was a small side client of ours but we are very thankful he sent us this wonderful video.
Read MoreFair Opportunity For Small Businesses – Reasons Why We Started Our Own Printing Service
Maybe you are thinking that, at this modern day and age wherein technology and Internet seem to have been embedded in most people’s lives; business cards are already a thing of the past. Well, you’re wrong. In fact, small businesses like us are still making use of business cards. You may not be able to fully understand it but traditional marketing such radio ads, TV commercials and print ads (magazines, newspapers) or print materials (flyers, posters, brochures and of course business cards) still work. They may not be as fast or as broad as the online media or the Internet marketing method but they are still a pretty solid marketing strategy.
The Business Card Printing Issue
We are a small yet fully functional business and we have included business cards in our marketing plan and campaign. There should be no problem with this because we just have to find a certain print company and strike a deal with them to print our business cards for us and that’s it. But there’s always an annoying issue. Most print companies don’t provide fair charges when it comes to their business card printing service.
Don’t you know that print companies can charge you a markup of up to five times the costs associated with the printing of your business cards? In short, their services are way too expensive and this is not fair. What makes it more aggravating is that we have had a lot of issues with this in the past and could not find a reputable printing company that could accommodate our needs at a reasonable price. This is one of the reasons why we started our own printing service.
Unfair Costs Of Print Companies
Just like what was mentioned earlier, the unfair costs of print companies regarding the printing of business cards have prompted us to launch our own printing service. We think that the markup for printing business cards should be no more than two times the cost to the print company. Not only that, those print companies are putting up additional higher costs if you want to use paper with higher quality and if you want to print something at the back side of your cards. Isn’t that markup that’s five times the printing cost that those print companies are charging not enough for them? There’s also extra charge if you want to use your company’s logo.
Fair Printing Opportunities Are What We Need
Aside from the pricey printing services, what made us decide to come up with our own printing service is the fact that print companies will not do small runs on business cards. For instance, if you only plan on using 50 cards and not 250, you won’t find a print company that will make a deal with you. We are constantly asked, “Why would a small business only want 30 business cards instead of 250?” The answer is that a lot of small businesses that are just starting up have details that are constantly changing (such as their phone number, email address, logo, etc.) and when their information changes, their old business cards are deemed useless so it’s not that practical to spend on 250 business cards right away. Also, some businesses simply do not have the money for 250 cards.
Our small business has decided to make a change by starting our own printing service. We aim to provide fair costs and printing opportunities to other small business like us, something that those print companies fail to offer us. This is a step worth taking.
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