Tuesday, October 1, 2019

Time’s running out to save big! SMX East Early Bird rates expire this Saturday

If you’re planning to join us November 13-14 in NYC, why WOULDN’T you register now?

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

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Twilio SendGrid rolls out email validation API

Real-time API uses machine learning trained on SendGrid’s data set to detect invalid email addresses.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

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GoDaddy Web Hosting Review

Thanks to some eye-opening and somewhat controversial marketing campaigns, GoDaddy is one of the most well-recognized names in the web hosting industry.

Despite what you might think about their branding strategy, the company has some outstanding services that they offer. I recently named GoDaddy as the most popular web host on my list of the best web hosting providers.

GoDaddy has millions of customers worldwide.

They offer a variety of services ranging from website builders and professional email to domain registration and web hosting.

So if you’re on the hunt for a new web hosting provider, there’s a good chance that you’re already familiar with GoDaddy’s name.

But do their products live up to their reputation? Is GoDaddy a good web host?

These are some common questions that I hear on a regular basis, which is what inspired me to create this guide. I’ve taken the time to dive deep into everything you need to know about GoDaddy as a web hosting provider.

This review covers all of GoDaddy’s hosting plans and the benefits of using GoDaddy for web hosting. I’ll even discuss some of the downsides associated with their services.

By the end of this guide, you’ll be able to make an informed decision on whether or not GoDaddy is the best web hosting provider for your website.

GoDaddy Web Hosting Plans

Web hosting comes in all different shapes and sizes. GoDaddy offers a wide range of options to meet the needs of nearly any website.

There are plenty of hosting plans for you to choose from.

They have plans for basic sites, blogs, small businesses, agencies, and everything in between. Let’s take a detailed look at each of these plan options.

Shared hosting

GoDaddy’s shared hosting plans are very popular for new websites. Since shared hosting is the most cost-effective way to host a website, it’s best for those of you who are either creating a site from scratch or have a smaller website.

Here’s an overview of the shared plan options.

As you can see, the pricing here is very attractive. A new website that won’t be expecting too much traffic can be hosted for just $6 per month.

With that in mind, I’d recommend the ultimate plan, at a minimum, for the majority of you looking for shared hosting. This gives you the best bang for your buck in terms of resources, which will make it easier when your site grows and traffic scales.

All shared plans come with one-click free installation of more than 125 apps and 24/7 security monitoring.

You can always purchase additional resources like RAM and CPU with just one-click from your admin dashboard as well. Speaking of which, the control panel is easy for anyone to use, regardless of their experience with web hosting.

WordPress hosting

Since WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world, there’s a good chance that you might be currently using it or considering it for your website. If that’s the case, the WordPress hosting plans offered by GoDaddy should be on your radar.

To be clear, the WordPress plans are also shared web hosting. The only difference is that it comes with WordPress already installed.

GoDaddy also does nightly site backups and automatically updates you to the newest WordPress version if you choose one of these plans.

For these added benefits, you’ll pay slightly higher price-points compared to the traditional shared hosting plans.

Basic — Starting at $6.99 per month (renews at $9.99)
Deluxe — Starting at $9.99 per month (renews at $14.99)
Ultimate — Starting at $12.99 per month (renews at $19.99)
Pro 5+ — Starting at $29.99 per month (renews at the same rate)

The WordPress plans also come with pre-built site templates as well as drag-and-drop page editors. This is a nice feature to have if you’re creating a new website.

GoDaddy has a 99.9% uptime promise for all WordPress hosting plans as well.

These plans can accommodate up to 400,000 monthly visitors for just one site. Except for the Basic plan, they all come with a built-in SEO wizard. All plans include built-in signup forms too.

VPS hosting

GoDaddy offers both manged and self-managed VPS hosting plans. While the self-managed options come at a fraction of the rate, they are only recommended for advanced users.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the managed virtual private servers from GoDaddy.

Unlike some of the other plans we’ve seen, these discounted rates will continue when you renew your VPS plan.

With a virtual private server, you’ll get enhanced speed and performance due to allocated server resources specifically for your website.

GoDaddy offers up to 4 CPU cores, 8 GB of RAM, and 200 GB of storage. But in order to benefit from this, you’ll need to get their Expand package. The entry-level Launch VPS starts at 1 CPU core, 2 GB of RAM, and 40 GB of storage. As expected, the resources offered by the other plans fall in between.

GoDaddy VPS is best for those of you who have multiple websites or an ecommerce website. It’s also common practice for a GoDaddy VPS to be used as a test environment for both websites and apps.

You can also use a GoDaddy VPS as an email server or database server.

With all of this in mind, it’s worth mentioning that GoDaddy did not make my most recent list of the best virtual private servers (VPS hosting). While I don’t have a specific problem with their VPS services, I just think you can do better elsewhere.

Dedicated servers

Don’t be turned off by the fact that I didn’t rank this company so highly when it comes to virtual private servers. GoDaddy did make my list of the best dedicated hosting plans.

I like the GoDaddy dedicated servers because of the prices. For those of you who are looking for a low-cost dedicated hosting plan, GoDaddy is a top option to consider.

At first glance, these prices may not seem so appealing. But that’s only if you’re comparing them to shared hosting plans.

Overall, these are actually great rates compared to other dedicated servers on the market.

Dedicated hosting is not for everyone. If you’re a small website or building a new site from scratch, you’ll be just fine with a GoDaddy shared plan. The dedicated servers are best for bigger websites that need complete control and flexibility.

Your dedicated server comes with full root access and no resource restrictions.

GoDaddy offers self-managed, managed, and fully managed options for all dedicated servers.

You should only consider a GoDaddy dedicated server if your site is resource-intensive or has traffic volumes exceeding the limits of your VPS plan.

Reseller hosting

Reseller hosting is appealing for developers, designers, and agencies looking to earn some additional profits from their clients.

If you read my guide on the best reseller hosting plans, you’ll find GoDaddy on the list side-by-side with some of the other best hosting providers in the industry.

GoDaddy makes it easy for you to configure each hosting plan while providing tools for things like invoicing, payment options, and managing support tickets.

Pricing for the reseller plans:

Enhanced — Starting at $39.99 per month
Grow — Starting at $49.99 per month
Expand — Starting at $64.99 per month
Established — Starting at $89.99 per month

All GoDaddy reseller plans come with a free integrated WHMCS license for up to 250 accounts.

Furthermore, GoDaddy will let you sell additional products to your clients, such as other GoDaddy products as well as other third-party products. This is a nice way to provide an all-in-one solution to your clients while simultaneously increasing your margins.

Benefits of GoDaddy for Web Hosting

Now that you’ve had a chance to review all of the hosting plans offered by GoDaddy, let’s take a look at where this provider really excels the most.

Strong uptime rates

Uptime is always the first thing you should look for when you’re evaluating a web hosting provider. If your plan can’t deliver strong uptimes, then you better start looking elsewhere.

One of the reasons why GoDaddy has done so well over the years is because their uptimes definitely deliver. You can expect to see a 99.9% uptime rate on average throughout the year.

Sure, a couple of months might fall below average, but you’ll even mix in a few 100% uptime rates.

I recently saw a test that said the average monthly downtime rate for GoDaddy is about 13 minutes. That’s hardly enough to have a major impact on your website.

Fast loading speed

Typically, fast page loading speed isn’t associated with cheap web hosting plans. So it may come as a surprise to learn that GoDaddy has exceptional page loading times.

Loading Times

As you can see from the graph, GoDaddy has faster average loading times than a few recognizable names in the industry.

But with that said, this graphic was pulled directly from the GoDaddy website. So I’m sure they intentionally left off some competitors with faster times.

Are they the fastest web hosting provider on the market? No.

However, I’m confident that you’ll be satisfied with your website speed, regardless of the plan you choose. Obviously, choosing a higher-tiered plan will boost these times.

Easy app installations

As I explained earlier, GoDaddy also has its own website builder with drag-and-drop functionality.

For those of you who are looking for a bit more than this, then you can easily install more than 125 applications with just one click. This includes content management platforms like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla.

You’ll also have access to developer tools like MySQL, cPanel, Python, and several versions of PHP.

In short, GoDaddy’s app installations meet the needs of a beginner blogger, tech-savvy webmaster, and everyone in between.

Price

GoDaddy’s entry-level pricing wasn’t quite low enough to make my list of the best cheap web hosting providers. However, their rates are definitely competitive.

With plans starting at just $5.99 per month, GoDaddy is very affordable. Even if you choose their highest-tier shared hosting plan, it’s less than $240 per year.

That’s pretty good, considering the strong uptime and fast page loading rates that we just discussed.

So for those of you who are price sensitive, GoDaddy is still a viable option.

Other Considerations

Based on everything we’ve talked about so far, it’s clear that GoDaddy has plenty of positives. Their plans are a great option for lots of websites out there.

However, it’s worth noting that GoDaddy has a handful of drawbacks. So you’ll want to take these into consideration before you finalize anything.

Upsells and increased renewal rates

One of the reasons why GoDaddy has such affordable pricing is because they hit you with upsells along the way. So on the surface, the price isn’t exactly what it seems.

GoDaddy Hosting Add-Ons

These are just a couple of examples showing features that you’ll have to pay extra for. But I’ll discuss this in greater detail shortly.

In order to lock in the lowest possible monthly rate, you must commit to a 36-month contract. Some of you may not be willing to commit to that length.

Once your plan renews, you can expect to pay higher rates than what you signed up for. Although this is very common in the web hosting industry.

In fact, GoDaddy’s price-spikes aren’t nearly as high as some other providers on the market. Plus, some of their plans (like the Pro 5+ WordPress plan and all VPS plans) renew at the same rate that you signed up for. So that’s a positive.

Basic features not included

To piggy-back off of our last point, GoDaddy has lots of upsells because some basic features aren’t included in their plans.

Most hosting providers will include a free SSL certificate, even in the basic plans. Other providers usually offer free backups and security with every plan as well, but GoDaddy does not.

Again, these can be purchased separately, or you can upgrade to a higher-priced plan, which is likely a better value for your money.

GoDaddy does not offer free site migrations either. This service tends to be hit or miss with other providers. But usually, it comes free with some plans. It’s also worth noting that the site migrations can take up to 10 days to complete. So not only are you paying, but you’re paying for a slow service.

Customer support

Customer support is a critical feature of website hosting. If you have a question or a problem, it’s nice to know that you can get in touch with someone.

GoDaddy advertises 24/7 support for its plans, but overall it’s pretty disappointing.

I’m not going to sit here and bash them. I just went on their site now to speak with a live chat agent and was connected almost immediately. So it’s not all bad.

With that said, review websites and customer forums are full of complaints related to GoDaddy’s support and customer service. Granted, people are more likely to complain after a bad experience, but the volume of complaints is still high.

Domain registration

It’s funny; GoDaddy is best known for its domain registration—not its web hosting services.

But I honestly would not recommend GoDaddy as your domain registrar. You might be tempted to bundle it with your hosting plan, but you can find better options elsewhere.

Check out my guide on the best domain registrars for more insight on this.

Conclusion

Do we recommend GoDaddy for web hosting? Absolutely.

GoDaddy is one of the most well-known names in the industry, and they have millions of customers worldwide. While you may not agree with all of their marketing tactics, their web hosting products are solid.

There are plenty of hosting plans for you to choose from.

Personally, I’d say GoDaddy’s shared, dedicated, and reseller options are the best.

So if you’re looking for a web host, GoDaddy deserves to be on the list for all of the benefits that we listed in this review. Just make sure to be aware of any potential drawbacks before you make a final decision.

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Creating a Brand Name That Sticks

Creating a Brand Name That Sticks written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Jeremy Miller
Podcast Transcript

On today’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I sit down with serial entrepreneur, writer, and branding expert Jeremy Miller. He is the founder of Sticky Branding and the author of several books, including the forthcoming Brand New Name.

Miller first became interested in branding when he took on the task of rebranding his family’s struggling business. After launching a successful rebrand there, he sold that business and started Sticky Branding, where he now helps other business owners create names for companies, products, or services that resonate with customers and generate long-lasting success.

Questions I ask Jeremy Miller:

What does a brand name need to do to be successful?
What do you have to invest to turn an empty vessel name (like Hulu or Verizon) into a household name?
Does everything need a brand name?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

How to go about inventing an empty vessel business name.
Why you need a process for naming your company, product, or service.
How to address the need to change the name of your brand.

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Jeremy Miller

Learn more about Jeremy Miller and Sticky Branding
Pre-order your copy of Brand New Name
Follow on Twitter
Follow on Instagram
Follow on Facebook

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Intercom. Intercom is the only business messenger that starts with real-time chat, then keeps growing your business with conversational bots and guided product tours.

Intercom’s mission is to help you provide simple, quick, and friendly service for your customers. When you can give your customers the one thing they’re looking for, you’ll generate amazing results for your business.

Want to learn more and take advantage of a 14-day free trial? Just go to intercom.com/podcast.

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Transcript of Creating a Brand Name That Sticks

Transcript of Creating a Brand Name That Sticks written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Back to Podcast

Transcript

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Jeremy Miller. He is a brand strategist speaker, founder of Sticky Branding and the author of Brand New Name: A Proven, Step-by-Step Process to Create an Unforgettable Brand Name. So Jeremy, welcome to the show.

Jeremy Miller: Thanks John. It’s a pleasure to be here.

John Jantsch: So I have to tell you, I’m going to have a confession. You know my brand name is Duct Tape Marketing.

Jeremy Miller: Yes.

John Jantsch: But my original company name was Jantsch Communications.

Jeremy Miller: I love that you changed your name then. It’s one of my favorite marketing names that has been unforgettable, and following you for eight years, it’s in that range that it just sticks.

John Jantsch: Well, Jantsch Communications was terrible as a name, because it was-

Jeremy Miller: Well, it’s your name. You can’t knock your family name, your parents worked hard on it.

John Jantsch: It was my name, but people thought I sold long distance or something, I don’t know. I’m dating myself, right? What’s long distance? But anyway, yeah, we’re going to talk about that. Let me ask you the first question. What’s the job of a brand name? What does a brand name need to do to be successful?

Jeremy Miller: Well, I think of a brand name as a label in a file folder in your customer’s mind. It’s that thing that people refer to when they have a need. When you go to a grocery store, when you are talking to someone, we think in words, we think in names. It’s the way we identify something. There’s this classic scene in the Simpsons, I don’t remember if you recall, but Mr. Burns loses his power plant and he becomes a normal person, he has to do his own grocery shopping. He’s sitting in the grocery aisle and he’s looking at catsup and ketchup, and just back and forth, “Ketchup, catsup,” and everyone down the aisle are looking at him, “What’s this crazy person doing?” He doesn’t have the words to know how to buy something. And that’s the purpose of a name. It’s that thing that gives you meaning.

John Jantsch: Well, and full disclosure, I lucked on to Duct Tape Marketing. I mean, I just thought that that sounded like a good name, but I didn’t do all kinds of extensive research. But what everybody kept telling me every time I would say it is like, “I get it. It tells a story.” And so without really knowing, I think I kind of lucked onto really one of the key attributes of a great brand name, isn’t it?

Jeremy Miller: I think so. And I think a great name absolutely does tell a story, and that’s what makes it memorable, that we understand it. Now, not all names have to tell a story. A name could be an empty vessel. When you look at Kodak, George Eastman’s vision was to create a name that meant nothing, that he could breathe life into so that it became a story of the Kodak moment. So you took a descriptive metaphor and were able to apply it to marketing. We understand what duct tape is, we understand what marketing is, but by putting them together, it creates this aha moment. But it all depends on the entrepreneur’s strategy. What do you want your business to be? And then you choose the name that fits it.

John Jantsch: Let’s go to that Kodak example, because yes, in hindsight, huge brand name, everybody knows what it meant or what it stood for at one point, but when you come up with a name like that, does it require then that you’re going to invest so much energy in having to explain to people and describe it and maybe even spend years getting it to become a household name?

Jeremy Miller: Yes, absolutely. So when you choose an empty vessel such as a Kodak or a Verizon or Hulu or any of those types of names, then you have to breathe life into it and make it your own, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s your opportunity that when people interact with your business and your products and your service and your people, that’s how you’re inserting meaning and value into that name, but you’re going to have to work harder to promote yourself. So you have that balancing act, but that’s actually part of the strategy too. The biggest reason why we are going towards empty vessels is that there’s a trademark issue.

Jeremy Miller: There’s actually a naming drought. In the United States alone, we are registering 564,000 new small businesses every single month. That’s 2% of the United States population starting a company at any given time, and that’s just a mind boggling number for me. Now, not all these businesses are going to survive, but they all need names and they all need websites and then a chunk of them are going to do trademarks. And so we’re, today, experiencing an issue where all the available .coms, if you’re going to go buy a website, chances are you’re going to have to buy it from someone else. It’s like real estate. But if you throw the trademark element to the mix, now we’ve got really complicated things.

Jeremy Miller: So being able to register something like Duct Tape anything today, it’s going to be really hard. You got in at a moment in time that allowed you to create this powerful brand story.

John Jantsch: Well, and I love the Hulus and the names that you threw out there when they really evoke emotion for me. Even if I don’t know what it means, I like the sound of it or something, or even then when it’s explained to me what it means, sometimes. But can we also get too clever? I mean, I see a lot of people doing stuff where I’m kind of like, I can’t even say that, let alone spell that.

Jeremy Miller: Well, I think there’s absolutely that. So my advice if you’re inventing a word is focus on something that is a phonetic spelling versus a Latin or Greek spelling. It’s a lot easier to say Hulu than Verizon, and it’s a lot easier to remember that, same thing with Uber and other things, even though they’re short. Acura is an example of a phonetically spelled word that was invented or Swiffer is another one. We speak and think in sounds, whereas something that has more of, say, a pharmaceutical type of nature is a lot harder to remember. So there’s that element of our programming as people.

Jeremy Miller: But I would also just say this, that name is strategic. What you choose to name something should represent your brand, your positioning, what you’re trying to create. So if you called, say, a chain of retirement living centers, purple taco, you probably have got the wrong strategy, even if it sounds kind of cool. So the name has got to fit what you want to create. So your strategy is where everything starts.

John Jantsch: The name thing is hard, because you can come up with and test some names … I’ve found over the years, you’ll get feedback, people, “Oh, that’s terrible. That’s awful.” But then you go with it and 10 years in it’s like Frisbee. Probably a stupid sounding name the first time somebody heard it, but then became … And again, not everybody’s looking for naming a whole category of a device, but isn’t that a good example of sometimes you got to throw stuff out there at first maybe doesn’t just sound right?

Jeremy Miller: I’m going to come back to the Frisbee story in a second, but yes, a quirk, something that is odd or doesn’t quite fit, like Slack. How could a product focused on team collaboration have all these negative connotations? But the name is just great. Same thing with Banana Republic. If you look at the history of what banana republics are, calling a clothing brand that, is a pretty risky, bold move. But those quirks are what makes something so memorable. You mentioned Frisbee, that’s actually a story I tell in the book. Fred Morrison, who was the inventor of the Frisbee, hated that name. He thought it was the dumbest thing. The original name was called Pluto platters.

Jeremy Miller: So Frisbee was bought by Wham-O. They were the guys who created Hula Hoop and Silly String. And so [Fred Knerr 00:00:22:52], who was one of the founders, went out and he visited Fred Morrison in Connecticut near Yale, and he saw all the kids were calling this thing Frisbee. And it turns out Frisbie was a pie company in Connecticut, and what the kids did before Netflix and internet and iPhones, they would take empty pie tins and throw them around the quad. So they took the name of the pie tins and applied it to these flying saucers. And Fred Knerr was just a brilliant marketer and he saw what the customers were already calling it and took that.

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John Jantsch: So tell me this. Does everything need a name? In other words, should we be naming our processes and our products and our divisions and our job titles? Brand it?

Jeremy Miller: Yes, 100%. I think you can go probably a little too crazy on it, but I would say for something to exist, it needs a name especially in the professional services world, if we’re selling thought leadership. You look at just how you name your systems, how you name your services, not only does it give it gravitas from a customer marketing perspective, it gives it gravitas from an internal perspective. So that if you are talking about your efficiency and the way you deliver customer service, simply by giving that thing a name creates value. And so naming is probably the most important construct of language, because once something has a name, it gains meaning. And if you are deliberate on this, you are making choices of how you are going to grow your business.

John Jantsch: Yeah. And I think sometimes, you said gives it meaning, but it also makes it tangible. It’s almost like, “Oh, here’s proof that we have a 37 step process to make sure that your product or your service gets done right.” Where everybody else is just saying trust us.

Jeremy Miller: Exactly. And in the world of differentiation, especially if we’re looking at small businesses, often we are selling something that somebody else is already selling. So how you describe your services, how you describe what makes you unique and why you do what you do, those simple things of giving them names are what affects meaning and give you credibility when you describe your 37 step process for delighting your customer, then people go, “Oh, that’s why you do that.”

John Jantsch: And I know the answer to this is yes, is there a process for coming up with a name?

Jeremy Miller: 100%.

John Jantsch: You want to share that with us?

Jeremy Miller: Sure. Let me tell you a bit of where it came from. I’m a serial entrepreneur and you are too, and we work with lots entrepreneurs, and naming is one of those vexing things that consumes so much time and every time you find a great name you find someone else has taken it. And so the reason why I wrote this book was I tried to answer the question of, what do I wish I had when I went through that naming process? And so Brand New Name draws on the ideas of the GV sprint and agile project management. And the idea is over the course of two to four weeks, it gives you three stages to build your strategy, generate lots of ideas and test and select the right name for your brand.

Jeremy Miller: And so in stage one we need to build a strategy, what does it mean to have a great name? And how are you going to know it when you see it? And step two, I believe in employee co-creation, which is how do we get everybody on our team to participate and generate as many ideas as we can over the course of five days? And then the hardest part of naming isn’t coming up with ideas, it’s that vetting process. How do we find one that resonates, fits the brand and most importantly, we can own it? And so that’s what the book does. In the span of that book, everything you need to name something, whether it’s a company, a product or service is all there in those pages.

John Jantsch: Go back to number one for me, because I think that’s actually the hardest part for a lot of companies, because they don’t have a strategy anyway. And so a naming strategy is like a subdivision of strategy. What are the actual steps in that?

Jeremy Miller: So what we start off with is defining, what is it you’re naming. And so it’s the simple question of, what are you naming? Is it a company? Is it a product? Is it a service? And then describing it. My first book, Sticky Branding, I talked about this idea called simple clarity, which is the ability to describe who you are, what you do and who you serve in 10 words or less, and so we build on this a little bit. Part of what we look at in developing your strategy is to be able to answer those basic questions. What are we naming? What are the criterias? Who are our customers? How do they buy? Who are our competitors? What are the naming trends in that space? And what is it going to take to stand out?

Jeremy Miller: And so we go through those questions so that you could set some naming principles. But what you said was very interesting, it’s a subset of strategy. Oftentimes though, when we are doing a naming strategy or when I introduce this to somebody, this is the first time they’ve actually ever considered some of these questions as brand, because we’re not necessarily thinking about brand all the time. So naming is the first step for many people to actually ask the deliberate questions of, who are we? Where do we play? How do we win? How do we want to be known? And by simply getting that down on paper, starts to set the guidelines for what it’s going to take to find a brilliant name.

John Jantsch: I’ve worked with a lot of small business owners and we go through the whole strategy thing, and just like Jantsch Communications, I talked about, was a lousy name, I have to deliver the really bad news that we need to change the name of your business. Is that something that … I mean, you’ve probably faced it before, and if the name’s wrong, I mean, I suppose we can live, but we’re not going to get the message across, we’re not going to get the differentiation across. How do you address or approach that idea of maybe the name now is going to be sort of the leading edge of our strategy, because it’s going to be something that we’re going to have to change everything about? I mean, how do you address that?

Jeremy Miller: Face forward and deal with it head on. So we deal with name changes all the time in our practice. And so for example, a large part of my work is with multi generational family businesses, and we did a naming project a couple of years ago where it was called A-1 Shipping Supplies. It was made for the yellow pages basically, but 35 years later, there is no yellow pages and A-1 looks cheesy as hell. Oh, by the way, they’re doing food packaging, primarily not shipping supplies. And you deal with it. When your name is causing dissonance or hurting your credibility or preventing growth, you change it. Now, in their case, they changed their name to Rocketline, and they created a quirky, whimsical name that didn’t have a lot of meaning, but it allowed them to shape what they want to be.

Jeremy Miller: But the key in changing a name is that all that meaning and all those experiences people have had with you are associated with the one name, you have to deliberately pour those contents into the other vessel. And so you have to have a marketing strategy and a communication strategy of how you’re going to convey what your new name is and why you’re changing it to customers, prospects and whoever it is. The nice thing is as a small business, you could probably call up all of your customers and tell them face to face or over the phone why you did it, whereas if you’re talking about a large global or multinational company, it’s a lot more complicated. But generally speaking, it’s not that hard, and so if your name hurts you, change it.

John Jantsch: Is there a place for a transition? In other words, go through two name changes or something? You’ve seen people do that, where they blend the logos or something like that. Does that make sense or does that just make it harder?

Jeremy Miller: I guess you would have to tell me what the strategy is. I think within mergers, that sometimes makes sense, but those are probably larger entities with a larger communication strategy. What I would suggest is go with the name for the brand you want to be. So whatever you look at three, five, 10 years, don’t worry about what’s happening in the next 18 months, think about where you’re going and choose the name for that. What you need, though, in your communication strategy is … Where most people underestimate is how long they should be communicating the change. So they do say a 90 day or a six month campaign to communicate the change, but-

John Jantsch: “We did a press release.”

Jeremy Miller: Yeah. It’s 18 months minimum. 18 months.

John Jantsch: Yeah. You already mentioned this idea of domain names. I mean, have you ever come up with a name, and then first thing you did was look for the domain and just said, “No, it’s a nonstarter, because we can’t get a good name.” I mean, are we at a point where that is dictating branding?

Jeremy Miller: If you asked me this question five years ago, I would have said yes, 100%. Today, no. I think domain names are losing a little bit of relevance. So now, we add a descriptor. So for example, say you wanted to call your company Grant, and you want a grant.com, well I know that’s available right now, but it’s $10,000 a month on lease. I don’t know about you, but I got better ways to spend that kind of money on an annual basis. So what you look at is … So Tesla was Tesla Motors until very recently, or Buffer ran as Buffer app until their second round of funding and they could afford to buy the .com. Focus on creating a great name, and then put a descriptor on it or get creative.

Jeremy Miller: One of my favorites is Zoom, they have zoom.us or Zoom us, so they made their name a verb. The only place people are seeing domain names primarily today is in your marketing collateral and your business cards. When you go to a browser, you type in the word not in the URL, and when you see it on a website or somewhere else, you click the link, or more likely you’re going to be talking to Siri or Alexa and not even saying the URL.

John Jantsch: Yeah. Well, and there’s, as you just mentioned, .us and .ios and all those I think have become pretty … People are very accepting of those. And I think you’re right. I’m sure there’s a zoom.com, I haven’t Googled it, but I’m sure there’s a zoom.com, and so then if somebody has the exact name and a .com, that probably could lead to some confusion.

Jeremy Miller: It could, but it’s like trademarks, are they in the same space and the same category? Like you have Pandora, which is jewelry and Pandora, which is a streaming music service. So you can have multiple companies using the same names, but because they operate in different places, they can get away with it, and especially small businesses. Chances are we are local, and so the fact that there’s someone else named what you’re named in another state, it may not be all that relevant.

John Jantsch: You’re right, the behavior has changed. It used to be .com or nothing else, and I think that now, as you said, it’s not so important that people are typing it, as long as you do the fundamental SEO stuff with it.

Jeremy Miller: Here’s my most fundamental comment to branding, and this is a bit of a flippant, but build a great business. The classic example is you see a restaurant, comes out with brilliant marketing, brilliant ad campaign, beautiful restaurant, great everything, and then you get food poisoning. So the brand is, “Don’t go back to that place, I got food poisoning.” None of the marketing mattered. And I think you could actually start a small business with a terrible name, but do such great work that people love you and they come back and they refer you, and that’s your brand actually. It’s two parts. A brand is based on what you’ve done, so the results that you have delivered to your clients, and branding is what you’re going to do.

Jeremy Miller: Now, if the name starts to hurt you or you grow beyond it, now you need marketing that needs reach and that crappy name doesn’t work for you anymore, absolutely change it, but never lose sight that the quality of your business is the number one predictor of the quality of your brand.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I’ve often said, and listeners of my show will recognize this, that every business has a brand, I think it’s just whether or not they are directing it intentionally, so that goes so much to that. Jeremy, where can people find out more about you and your work and of course, pick up a copy of Brand New Name.

Jeremy Miller: Well, Brand New Name will be sold wherever books are sold. It comes out on October 8th, so Amazon for sure. And the best way to find me is just to Google Sticky Branding. Stickybranding.com is my website, and I’m on all the social networks @stickybranding, and I’d love to connect with everyone.

John Jantsch: Awesome. Thanks for taking the time, Jeremy, and hopefully we’ll see you out there on the road soon.

Jeremy Miller: Awesome. Thanks John.

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How I Beat Google’s Core Update by Changing the Game

Google released a major update. They typically don’t announce their updates, but you know when they do, it is going to be big.

And that’s what happened with the most recent update that they announced.

A lot of people saw their traffic drop. And of course, at the same time, people saw their traffic increase because when one site goes down in rankings another site moves up to take its spot.

Can you guess what happened to my traffic?

Well, based on the title of the post you are probably going to guess that it went up.

Now, let’s see what happened to my search traffic.

My overall traffic has already dipped by roughly 6%. When you look at my organic traffic, you can see that it has dropped by 13.39%.

I know what you are thinking… how did you beat Google’s core update when your traffic went down?

What if I told you that I saw this coming and I came up with a solution and contingency strategy in case my organic search traffic would ever drop?

But before I go into that, let me first break down how it all started and then I will get into how I beat Google’s core update.

A new trend

I’ve been doing SEO for a long time… roughly 18 years now.

When I first started, Google algorithm updates still sucked but they were much more simple. For example, you could get hit hard if you built spammy links or if your content was super thin and provided no value.

Over the years, their algorithm has gotten much more complex. Nowadays, it isn’t about if you are breaking the rules or not. Today, it is about optimizing for user experience and doing what’s best for your visitors.

But that in and of itself is never very clear. How do you know that what you are doing is better for a visitor than your competition?

Honestly, you can never be 100% sure. The only one who actually knows is Google. And it is based on whoever it is they decide to work on coding or adjusting their algorithm.

Years ago, I started to notice a new trend with my search traffic.

Look at the graph above, do you see the trend?

And no, my traffic doesn’t just climb up and to the right. There are a lot of dips in there. But, of course, my rankings eventually started to continually climb because I figured out how to adapt to algorithm updates.

On a side note, if you aren’t sure how to adapt to the latest algorithm update, read this. It will teach you how to recover your traffic… assuming you saw a dip. Or if you need extra help, check out my ad agency.

In many cases after an algorithm update, Google continues to fine-tune and tweak the algorithm. And if you saw a dip when you shouldn’t have, you’ll eventually start recovering.

But even then, there was one big issue. Compared to all of the previous years, I started to feel like I didn’t have control as an SEO anymore back in 2017. I could no longer guarantee my success, even if I did everything correctly.

Now, I am not trying to blame Google… they didn’t do anything wrong. Overall, their algorithm is great and relevant. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be using them.

And just like you and me, Google isn’t perfect. They continually adjust and aim to improve. That’s why they do over 3,200 algorithm updates in a year.

But still, even though I love Google, I didn’t like the feeling of being helpless. Because I knew if my traffic took a drastic dip, I would lose a ton of money.

I need that traffic, not only to drive new revenue but, more importantly, to pay my team members. The concept of not being able to pay my team on any given month is scary, especially when your business is bootstrapped.

So what did I do?

I took matters into my own hands

Although I love SEO, and I think I’m pretty decent at it based on my traffic and my track record, I knew I had to come up with another solution that could provide me with sustainable traffic that could still generate leads for my business.

In addition to that, I wanted to find something that wasn’t “paid,” as I was bootstrapping. Just like how SEO was starting to have more ups and downs compared to what I’ve seen in my 18-year career, I knew the cost at paid ads would continually rise.

Just look at Google’s ad revenue. They have some ups and downs every quarter but the overall trend is up and to the right.

In other words, advertising will continually get more expensive over time.

And it’s not just Google either. Facebook Ads keep getting more expensive as well.

I didn’t want to rely on a channel that would cost me more next year and the year after because it could get so expensive that I may not be able to profitably leverage it in the future.

So, what did I do?

I went on a hunt to figure out a way to get direct, referral, and organic traffic that didn’t rely on any algorithm updates. (I will explain what I mean by organic traffic in a bit.)

I went on my mission

With the help of my buddy, Andrew Dumont, I went searching for websites that continually received good traffic even after algorithm updates.

Here were the criteria that we were looking for:

Sites that weren’t reliant on Google traffic
Sites that didn’t need to continually produce more content to get more traffic
Sites that weren’t popular due to social media traffic (we both saw social traffic dying)
Sites that didn’t leverage paid ads in the past or present
Sites that didn’t leverage marketing

In essence, we were looking for sites that were popular because people naturally liked them. Our intentions at first weren’t to necessarily buy any of these sites. Instead, we were trying to figure out how to naturally become popular so we could replicate it.

Do you know what we figured out?

I’ll give you a hint.

Think of it this way: Google doesn’t get the majority of their traffic from SEO. And Facebook doesn’t get their traffic because they rank everywhere on Google or that people share Facebook.com on the social web.

Do you know how they are naturally popular?

It comes down to building a good product.

That was my aha! moment. Why continually crank out thousands of pieces of content, which isn’t scalable and is a pain as you eventually have to update your old content, when I could just build a product?

That’s when Andrew and I stumbled upon Ubersuggest.

Now the Ubersuggest you see today isn’t what it looked like in February 2017 when I bought it.

It used to be a simple tool that just showed you Google Suggest results based on any query.

Before I took it over, it was generating 117,425 unique visitors per month and had 38,700 backlinks from 8,490 referring domains.

All of this was natural. The original founder didn’t do any marketing. He just built a product and it naturally spread.

The tool did, however, have roughly 43% of its traffic coming from organic search. Now, can you guess what keyword it was?

The term was “Ubersuggest”.

In other words, its organic traffic mainly came from its own brand, which isn’t really reliant on SEO or affected by Google algorithm updates. That’s also what I meant when I talked about organic traffic that wasn’t reliant on Google.

Now since then I’ve gone a bit crazy with Ubersuggest and released loads of new features… from daily rank tracking to a domain analysis and site audit report to a content ideas report and backlinks report.

In other words, I’ve been making it a robust SEO tool that has everything you need and is easy to use.

It’s been so effective that the traffic on Ubersuggest went from 117,425 unique visitors to a whopping 651,436 unique visitors that generates 2,357,927 visits and 13,582,999 pageviews per month.

Best of all, the users are sticky, meaning the average Ubersuggest user spends over 26 minutes on the application each month. This means that they are engaged and will likely to convert into customers.

As I get more aggressive with my Ubersuggest funnel and start collecting leads from it, I expect to receive many more emails like that.

And over the years, I expect the traffic to continually grow.

Best of all, do you know what happens to the traffic on Ubersuggest when my site gets hit by a Google algorithm update or when my content stops going viral on Facebook?

It continually goes up and to the right.

Now, unless you dump a ton of money and time into replicating what I am doing with Ubersuggest, but for your industry, you won’t generate the results I am generating.

As my mom says, I’m kind of crazy…

But that doesn’t mean you can’t do well on a budget.

Back in 2013, I did a test where I released a tool on my old blog Quick Sprout. It was an SEO tool that wasn’t too great and honestly, I probably spent too much money on it.

Here were the stats for the first 4 days of releasing the tool:

Day #1: 8,462 people ran 10,766 URLs
Day #2: 5,685 people ran 7,241 URLs
Day #3: 1,758 people ran 2,264 URLs
Day #4: 1,842 people ran 2,291 URLs

Even after the launch traffic died down, still 1,000+ people per day used the tool. And, over time, it actually went up to over 2,000.

It was at that point in my career, I realized that people love tools.

I know what you are thinking though… how do you do this on a budget, right?

How to build tools without hiring developers or spending lots of money

What’s silly is, and I wish I knew this before I built my first tool on Quick Sprout back in the day, there are tools that already exist for every industry.

You don’t have to create something new or hire some expensive developers. You can just use an existing tool on the market.

And if you want to go crazy like me, you can start adding multiple tools to your site… just like how I have an A/B testing calculator.

So how do you add tools without breaking the bank?

You buy them from sites like Code Canyon. From $2 to $50, you can find tools on just about anything. For example, if I wanted an SEO tool, Code Canyon has a ton to choose from. Just look at this one.

Not a bad looking tool that you can have on your website for just $40. You don’t have to pay monthly fees and you don’t need a developer… it’s easy to install and it doesn’t cost much in the grand scheme of things.

And here is the crazy thing: The $40 SEO tool has more features than the Quick Sprout one I built, has a better overall design, and it is .1% the cost.

Only if I knew that before I built it years ago. :/

Look, there are tools out there for every industry. From mortgage calculators to calorie counters to a parking spot finder and even video games that you can add to your site and make your own.

In other words, you don’t have to build something from scratch. There are tools for every industry that already exists and you can buy them for pennies on the dollar.

Conclusion

I love SEO and always will. Heck, even though many SEOs hate how Google does algorithm updates, that doesn’t bother me either… I love Google and they have built a great product.

But if you want to continually do well, you can’t rely on one marketing channel. You need to take an omnichannel approach and leverage as many as possible.

That way, when one goes down, you are still generating traffic.

Now if you want to do really well, think about most of the large companies out there. You don’t build a billion-dollar business from SEO, paid ads, or any other form of marketing. You first need to build an amazing product or service.

So, consider adding tools to your site, the data shows it is more effective than content marketing and it is more scalable.

Sure you probably won’t achieve the results I achieved with Ubersuggest, but you can achieve the results I had with Quick Sprout. And you can achieve better results than what you are currently getting from content marketing.

What do you think? Are you going to add tools to your site?

The post How I Beat Google’s Core Update by Changing the Game appeared first on Neil Patel.