Custom Email Address For Your Business

Are you looking for custom email address like your name @ your domain .com ? [name@domain.com] Something which works like gmail but has an email address with your domain name – that you can even distribute to your co-workers i.e., create custom email address for all your co-workers or employees. Also you wish to have a custom URL to log into emails, like – www.yourwebsite.com/email or www.yourwebsite.com/communication ?

Business Needs
If you’re running a business you must have your own website, and for all your business communication its preferred to have your own custom email address which looks and feels professional to your clients/customers instead of simply having a general @hotmail.com or @gmail.com emails.

Also having a business/custom email gives a sense of security to your clients/customers or potential clients/customers, that the mail they’re sending will indeed reach only the authorized person within the company. Mailing to a general email address doesn’t bring in such sense of safety.

What we Recommend and use ourselves?
We have been using Google Apps for all our email needs from past 8+ years and we proudly/confidently recommend it to all other budding businesses. You also get a lot of tools to run your business with ease – tools like Calendar, online Docs, unlimited file storage etc to a few. Also you get all the Google Services with your Google Apps account that you’ll get while using Gmail. With Google Apps, you’ll have your company branding and premium service and customer support.

With the calendar we schedule all our meetings in real-time, it merges with clients and employees calendar in real-time lets us know who is attending and who is not and lets us see their schedule as well – of course the schedules which they’ve made public. These tools are such a productive ones for our business so far.

How much time we need to get used to?
Zero. Yes, if you’re comfortable using Gmail, then you’ll get started with Google Apps instantly. Everything looks and feels the same but you’ll have your company logo and name inside.

20% discount Rest assured, it has reduced the cost of our business operations and we do not mind paying a small amount every year. If you wish to make use of Google Apps then you can use the coupons we have got and get 20% discount for the first year. Here are the Google Apps coupon codes / discount codes with their expiry dates!

69YFFGCCM6KRTM – Expires on 09/2016
4RRX7MCDVEMYJG – Expires on 09/2016

Free Google Apps Account

How to set up?
It’s very easy with Google Apps. Once you create Free account(No Credit Card required – you can try it for months, after that you can decide if you want to continue or not), you’ll get some settings which you need to configure at your domain registration account. Everything will be present in the document provided by Google and if you do things as shown in the document it’ll take less than 5 minutes to configure it. But if you think its out of your hand to do those small technical things – you can simply copy the settings provided by Google and mail it to your domain registrar. The technical support team will do it for you in less than 5 minutes and you’ll be up with your custom email address and custom email login URL.

Top 7 Technical Mistakes Bloggers Make

This is a guest post by Ishan Sharma. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

It’s easy to get lost when you are new. After all, there’s too much to manage! You have design, content and what not. In all this mess, it is easy to make small mistakes.

Recently, I had a very bad experience when a friend’s blog got messed up because of some configuration problems and we had to setup WP and design from scratch! So I thought about writing a post that would save bloggers from making common mistakes and here they are:

Using A Free Service
Using a free host like Blogspot and WordPress.com seems good from far. But there’s a big problem with this option! You don’t own your content, the host does! Recently, blogger blocked and even deleted a lot of blogs. Among the victims was a customer who had 60,000 subscribers! Now, blogspot team is either nuts or using bots(which is likely high, considering it’s a property of big G) for blocking blogs.
In any case, the point is that you can loose a lot if you use a free platform. Consider getting a self hosted WordPress blog and while doing that, avoid the following mistakes:

Using “Cheap” Hosting
Many bloggers would move to a hosting company but would look for cheapest or worst – a free host. And the features they get are:

Regular outages.
Awful support.
Slow loading times.

Remember, you get what you pay for. Do not fall for the “unlimited bandwidth” and other tall claims! Before buying hosting, research well and shortlist 2-3 hosting companies and then compare them. It is also advisable to contact friends using different hosting companies.

Using Your Host As Domain Registrar And Vice Versa
Keeping both hosting and domain with same company is a really bad idea. Yes, there may be some discounts involved but it’s a bit dangerous.
Imagine something bad happens with your hosting company and there servers crash! Now, if you have both domain and hosting with them, your site will be completely down.

If you have domain with a different registrar, you can at least redirect it to a new page explaining something bad has happened. It won’t retain all the visitors but hey, a bird in hand is worth two in the bush!

Wrong Permalink Structure
No explanations for this one, just a quick question: Which one is better and easy to remember out of the next two URLs?

http://myblog.com/?p=123
http: //myblog.com/my-post

Of course it is the second one unless you have got a super photographic memory! Not to mention that it is also better for search engine bots(and they don’t have photographic memory even if you have! 😉 ).

You should always use a informative permalink structure for post. In WordPress, this can be easily changed by going to Settings → Permalinks. Set the structure to custom and in the text box, enter /%post-name%/ for structure like the second example. For more permalink structures, see WordPress Codex.

Using Too Many Plugins
Plugins add lot of functionality to WordPress. But the main problem with them is that it is easy to get carried away with them.
This was a mistake I made when I was new to WordPress. I fell in love with lot plugins and in first month, I had some 60 plugins active at one time. Now, you can imagine how slow the blog would have been. Thankfully, I realized it soon and uninstalled several useless ones. Now, I have around 30 plugins and performance is better.
As a rule of thumb, you should not install more than 25 plugins unless absolutely necessary and delete the inactive ones.

Not Tracking Stats
If you don’t know your stats, you are missing a lot. Using stats you can know where your visitors are spending more time on your blog, from which page they are leaving the blog, bounce rate etc. With all these data in hand, you can tweak the blog and significantly improve your blog and your readers experience.
And another thing is tracking feed subscribers. For this, you can use FeedBurner. You can use your platform’s default feed without any problems but FeedBurner has lots of advantages. First of all, you can track number of readers(although inconsistently). You can offer free e-mail subscriptions and also add AdSense to monetize your feeds.

Not Taking Backups
Taking backup is something you should start doing today.
Anything can go wrong at anytime and having a backup locally(i.e. on your hard disk) may be the only security measure. You should setup a automatic backup for your blog using a plugin like WP DBManager. For detailed tutorial, take a look at this tutorial: How To Backup A WordPress Blog.

These were top 7 mistakes that new bloggers tend to make. Do you have any tips for new bloggers? Do share with us in comments.

About Author: Hi, My name is Ishan Sharma. I am a teen entrepreneur and I love blogging and WordPress. I blog at Blogging
With Success about Blogging Tips and WordPress. If you need any type of help with your WordPress blog/website, I can be found at WordPress Blog Experts.

HostGator New Discount Coupon: Valid For Any Hosting Plan

As always we try to bring discount coupons / offers / coupon code / promo code for valuable products and services.

Use “TECHNOTIP01” (without quotes) to get $9.94 off of any hosting package that you purchase from HostGator. And use “TECHNOTIP25” coupon to get 25% off on any package.

What I like the most about HostGator?

24×7 Live Chat with support team/Billing department.

Quick response to support tickets.

Their “Hatchling Plan” costs $4.95 per month.

And with “baby plan” which costs $7.95(if purchased for 3 years) you can host UNLIMITED Domains and have UNLIMITED databases– This is the number one reason for me to prefer HostGator.

Update: You will also get $100 Free Google Advertising Coupon / Adwords /Google Search Marketing Coupon code along with the hosting. After signing up for the hosting, visit your cpanel and claim your $100 Adwords coupon(There is a link at the top left sidebar to claim your coupon).

If you have hosting needs, then its a good idea to give HostGator a try. You have nothing to lose, after-all your first month bill can be exempted by using the coupon code “TECHNOTIP01” and “TECHNOTIP25” (without quotes), if you like it – you can continue or else there are many other hosting companies.

HostGator

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