By Amy Armitage

Hi Lunarpages Webmasters! Our April issue has loads of helpful articles, interviews and tips:

• Lunar News for April

• Blogging with b2evolution

• SEO Tips: Step One of Ten - Keyword Research - by Dave Davies

• 5 Spring Cleaning Tips for Your Web Site

• Why Affiliate Marketing Matters

• Dealing with Web Site Feedback

• Design Contest - Series 2! Win $1000 & 5 years hosting

• In Depth with LPQuicksite: Menu Ordering

• Adding Video Content (on the cheap!)

• Best from the Lunarpages Blog

• Combining Feeds with Yahoo! Pipes

Enjoy!

Here are some of the recent happenings for the month of April. Make sure you didn’t miss any of these important hosting headlines!

March 2008 Web Site of the Month

The Web Site of the Month this time around is tensports.com submitted by forum member digitaldreamer. This is a great resource for sports fans who wish to follow more than just a couple of genres inside of the sports industry. If you want more information on how you can become the next Web Site of the Month - check out the LunarForums!

Lunarpages WordPress Theme Design Contest Returns!!!

OMG we are so excited!! Not only does Lunarpages love love loooove WordPress, but we also love giving away money for awesome WordPress Themes. Check out our featured article on the WordPress Contest for more information on how to enter the design competition and win $1,000 and 5 Years Free Hosting!

Spring Discounts!

Want to save $48 off your new web hosting plan? You’re in luck! Our Basic Hosting Plan has been reduced to $4.95/month for a special Spring Discount! Use the coupon code “spring” upon signup or just signup as normal and your discount will automatically be added to your account. If you’re an affiliate, you can use this coupon to promote Lunarpages and still receive your due commissions!

But be quick! This promotion will only last until the end of June, 2008.

Author: Tiara Rea

Here at Lunarpages Web Hosting, we take blogging pretty seriously… Okay, maybe not seriously, because blogging can be fun too!, but we love it. Whether we’re running the latest blog contest, offering helpful tips through our Newsletter, or explaining the importance and uses of a blog to new customers, we are really just interested in the potential blogging has for your website and your life.

There are about a gazillion blogging tools out there, but only a handful that are well-respected and renown in our industry. One of the ones we recommend most often to our customers is called b2evolution, and it happens to be one of the most important blogging tools out there. Fully-customization, easy to work with, and with advanced features that will blow you away, b2 is also a personal favorite of mine.

So imagine my delight when I got to have a quick chat with the one, the only, the amazing, astounding, incredible Francois Planque!!!!

Yes, he warrents extra exclamations, as he’s the creative genius behind this awesome blogging platform. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Dave Davies

Back in October 2004 I launched a series of articles outlining the ten crucial steps to a well optimized website. Well in case you’ve been asleep for the last few years on in case you’ve just recently joined us in the SEO-realm, I - along with some of my good friends in the web marketing world - have decided to re-write the series with new information and new perspectives.

In our updated series we’ll be dropping some of the articles and adding others to account for changes in the industry. Another major change in this series is that we were able to compliment it with a weekly segment on Webmaster Radio’s Webcology. If you missed any of the shows, you can always download the podcast free of charge afterwards.

The 10 steps covered in this series will be:

1. Keyword Research & Selection
2. Competition Analysis
3. Site Structure
4. Content Optimization
5. Link Building
6. Social Media
7. PPC
8. Statistics Analysis
9. Conversion Optimization
10. Keeping It Up Read the rest of this entry »

By Mitch Keeler

Before you clean out the garage, spruce up the attic or go through your desk drawers I have one project that needs some spring cleaning that you may have not considered yet. Your web site and hosting account can always need some tidying up from time to time, so why not set aside a weekend to do some digital spring cleaning?

Here are a few suggestions as to where you should start first:

404 Pages - Do you have customized 404 or general error pages? These can help people stay within your web site, even if they happen to stumble upon something that is no longer there or was never there in the first place.

Are You Using Those Images? - I have a bad habit of uploading images and not organizing them at all. If you need to clear away some disk space, then looking at which images you are or are not using could be a good place to start.

Give Your Site a New Style! - It never hurts to redesign your web site from time to time. You want to make room for improvements and listen to the needs of your visitors and the pubic at large. Now would be a good time to go through those “suggestion” e-mails to see what you can work in on your new design or fix on your old one.

Must Have Pages - There are a few pages that I think any and all web sites should have. They would include (but not limited to) an about us page, a contact us page, an advertisements page (in case you do take ads), and a feedback page.

Add a New Script! - You might take this time to add a new script or service to your web site. Could your digital domain use a forum? What about a blog? Lucky for you, on the Basic and Business hosting accounts you have access to Fantastico - which has a slew of scripts you can install right from your control panel.

Spring has sprung, so lets up the cleanup has begun. What all have you done to make your web site better over the past few months. I would love to hear any and all suggestions on the issue if you have any other tips to share with your fellow webmasters.

Author: Tiara Rea

I absolutely love affiliate marketing. I guess I have to, considering I work with over 50,000 Lunarpages affiliates every day. But I really think there is amazing potential in every webmaster to offer some kind of affiliate marketing strategy on their website. If done correctly, you can make a lot of money and feel good about doing it. Read the rest of this entry »

By Mitch Keeler

Dealing with feedback, either positively or negatively via your web site, design or Internet project can be a hard thing to do. A lot of people say you should soak it in like a sponge, while others say you should reply to everything. Well, consider yourself checked in to Dr. Keeler’s therapy session on getting in touch with your feedback.

How to Deal with Positive Feedback?

Now this is the cream filled good stuff that makes you want to get out of bed in the morning. Myself, anytime I get a positive ‘bit of e-mail, web site comments, or anything else of that nature I save it - most of it in e-mail form. That is what I would suggest for you too. Create a new folder on your desktop or in your e-mail client and move the positive feedback and reviews you have gotten there so they are not forgotten. Now, next time you get a bad or negative review pull that folder out and take a look inside. It is solely there to cheer you up.

How to Deal with Negative Feedback?

First thing to remember is don’t get your feelings hurt. It might be hard to do more times than not, but you have to face the fact that people are more direct, bold and well.. meaner Online than they would be in a face to face confrontation. Now if the comment is just off the wall idiotic I would advise you to pay no attention to it at all. As I said before, some people consider an Internet connection the license to be really big jerks. Of course, some of it you could play to your advantage too. For example, if you have somebody who says something un-true or says you have your facts wrong - call them on it. Start up a section on your site for the neigh-sayers and address the ones that may have a point. Fix your flaws if you can, and ignore the morons. That sums things up without the need of a pink little bow.

You Have Gotten No Feedback at All?

Don’t get worried if your not hearing anything back (either positive or negative). The old saying, “No news is a good news” still rings true in your line of circumstances too. More times than not, if somebody is happy with your web site or services they usually don’t bother to let you know. It is always the unhappy ones that are the loudest in the crowd.

There is no cookie cutter solution for dealing with feedback. Some methods work better for some people, and the same advice can not be said for every type of Online business or web site.

Do you like to design WordPress Themes? Are you lacking $1,000? Want some free web hosting? Like contests?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, hold onto your hats because Lunarpages is running series 2 of our WordPress Theme Design Contest!! We are so excited that I can’t hide the exclamation marks anymore!!!!

Okay, calming down. But really, there’s a lot to be excited about. Last time we ran this contest, we provided our community with 95 incredibly awesome Free WordPress Themes for download via the Lunarpages Blog, watched our webmasters and friends truly shine, and gave away some huge prizes. So, we’re running the contest again, starting…hmm…now? Actually the contest is already in full swing, so here’s some further details for those of you keen to enter.

PRIZES

1st place = $1,000 + 5 Years Free Hosting
2nd place = $300 and 3 years free hosting
3rd place = $100 and 1 year free hosting

Some of the entries so far:

Interested in entering your WordPress Theme? First, read the Rules and schedule and then head over to our Entry Form! Good luck, everybody! Any questions, just ask.

Author: Tiara Rea

Last month I went over in brief detail about setting up your first website using one of our newest web hosting plans, LPQuicksite. I want to show this plan in a bit more detail, as our developers are adding more templates and more features every day. It’s a great platform for those of you who are new to ‘web hosting’ and just want to get your website online and make it look amazing.

So here is my first LPQuicksite Tutorial regarding Menu Ordering – you can follow along or try it out for yourself by trying our LPQuicksite Demo!

For this simple overview, we’ll use the example of running a personal website for yourself, your hobbies, and pictures for your family and friends.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Mitch Keeler

So you’ve had your web site for a while and now you want to add some dynamic video content to it? Well you could go download specific scripts, try to get them running, toss money at them and pull all your hair out. There is an easier and cheaper route to go though.

There are a number of video sharing services you could use. Here are a few:

• YouTube
• Revver
• Dailymotion
• Metacafe

You can find more in list form via this article on Wikipedia. As you can see you should have more than a few to pick from. The most popular would be YouTube, but services like Revver are getting interesting because they also include various ways of making money from your videos.

With video production, try grabbing your video camera (or even your digital camera may work) and record a short video of yourself talking about the topic of your choice. From there, sign up for a web site like YouTube and upload the video. It might take a while to convert it from the format it was in to a format that can be played on the Web. This way though you don’t have to worry about using too many server resources or having the right embed code to play. All of these video sharing services do a good job at making it nice and simple for you.

Getting in a little deeper, you can really get fancy with some of the desktop video editing programs out there. If anything I would suggest slapping your domain name on the video somewhere. That way, just in case somebody stumbles upon it via YouTube, they now know where to get more of you and what you do. Oh yeah, that is the best part of it all - this cheap form of content creation also becomes a great marketing tool too.

So now the question is, how have you gotten this unique form of content creation working to your advantage?

By Mitch Keeler

In the span of a month, there are tons of great articles and helpful posts on the Lunartics blog that deserve a little extra attention. Here is a highlight of some of the best of the best from the past month there.

Best of April Fools Day (thus far)

I have to say there have been a lot of “creative” stories Online today. Here are some of the best (or maybe the worst depending on how many you have seen) April Fools 2008 stories so far…

Typewriter for the Web?

Move over Google Docs and Zoho Writer, there is a new word processing application online. Feast your eyes on Writer, the Internet typewriter…

WordPress Theme Design Resources

Now that the WordPress Design Contest (version 2!) is on its way I have been getting a lot of questions that sound a lot like this one: I want to enter the contest, but I am not sure exactly how to create a theme for WordPress…

Using Social Networks to Build Your Brand

There is no doubt in my mind that social networks of all shapes and sizes help, not hurt, you when it comes to building your own name, presence and fan fallowing with your web site. You have your MySpace, your Facebook, your Twitter and more…

Domain Name FAQ

From time to time we do receive a few frequently asked questions about our domain name registrations. I figured I would tackle a few of the most often asked ones here to help out any other current Lunarpages customers with questions or new ones who may not know yet…

Also did you know you can add the Lunarpages Newsletter, Lunartics and the Lunarforums all to your own personalized Netvibes tab?

By Mitch Keeler

If you find yourself having multiple Web sites, it can become very hard to track everything that you do. Sure you have an RSS feed for this project and and RSS feed for that project, but wouldn’t it be nice to have one super RSS feed - if only for your own egotistical reasons? Gather your RSS feeds and head over to Yahoo! Pipes and I will show you how to get it done.

Create Your Pipes
First thing you need to do is point your browser towards Yahoo! Pipes and click on “Create a Pipe”. After doing that you will see a big confusing interface you can not make heads or tails from. Don’t worry. Just click on “Fetch Feed” and drag it over to your right (onto the grid).

Grab Your Feeds!
Next you will want to click on the “+” graphic next to URL to add more feeds to the list. Click it once for every feed you would like to group together as one.

Sort by Publication Date…
After that, you will need to sort your mega feed by date, so it looks like a regular ol’ RSS feed. To do that, click on “Operators” on the left sidebar and then drag and drop “Sort” onto the grid. Don’t worry if this looks messy, you don’t get any points for making it look nice yet.

On the box that says “Sort” you are going to want to select “Publication Date” on the drop down box. In the next drop down box you see (to the right of the first one) you need to select “descending” as the order you would like your feed to be displayed. That will cause all of the newest entries on your feed to be displayed at the top.

Link Your Boxes Together
Next, you see that little circle under each of the boxes you have created? You need to connect them all together so they will work as one. Start with the “Feed Fetch” box. Drag the little circle down to down to the top of “Sort”. If you did it correctly you should see a blue line connecting the two now. Next click on the circle under “Sort” and connect it to the circle on top of “Pipe Output”.

Your almost done! In the upper right corner you should see a button that says “Publish”. Click that. A new box will come up and give you a lot of information to fill out about your feed. You can name it, put a description and some keywords. After doing that, click “Publish” at the bottom of that box.

Finalize Everything
Now click on the link that says “Back to My Pipes”. If everything was done correctly you should now see your newly created pipe listed there. Click on the name of your pipe and you can see a lot of information about it. The next thing you want to do is hit the “Run this Pipe” link.

Almost Done!
Now you should see a Web page representation of your mega feed. Click on the link that says “Subscribe” and you will be given a list of options to choose from. There are a great number of ways you can keep up to date with this feed.

Still a little lost? Check out this video tutorial on the topic!