A new popular tool for promoting businesses is Facebook Live. Facebook Live allows you to record in the moment, live from anywhere and for any reason. Facebook Live is a great resource for businesses.  It does have several pros and cons to think about before you try it out for yourself.

Hashtags were invented by twitter to tie different posts together in a single stream.  Hashtags are now used on various social media sites including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Hashtags are used for various reasons like allowing someone to find your post, marketing, and awareness.

If content marketing is a new concept to you, don’t worry. It can be overwhelming with all the information that’s out there. Depending on your point of view, content marketing can either be a completely new concept or another name for something that you’ve been doing for ages. And no matter which case it may be, content marketing comes with a whole new set of vocabulary.

If you’re serious about growing your business and building brand awareness, there are many ways to do this in the digital age including SEO, email marketing, blogging, creating videos, etc. However, social media is by far the dominating force, and Facebook stands above all others in terms of reach. You simply cannot afford to ignore Facebook when it comes to marketing your business.

While many people still think of WordPress primarily as a blogging platform, the popular CMS has evolved to offer much more than that. Sure, WordPress may have started out as the answer to every blogger’s needs, but today it is so robust that even major sites like TIME and Mashable use the platform to manage their digital presence. In fact, as of January 2015, over 20% of the top 10 million websites are using WordPress.

So if big name brands like TechCrunch, the New Yorker, Variety, Quartz and Fortune are using this CMS to manage their sites, why shouldn’t you?

You don’t have to be told that creating a website is easy these days. But making something that sticks and stays relevant for years to come is certainly the exception rather than the norm. With so much competition across various niches, what does it take for your site to stay alive? That’s where Google Analytics, or GA for short, makes all the difference in the world. GA provides access to tools that help you better understand your audience, making it easier to tailor your site to what they want.

We have arrived at a point where businesses can no longer ignore social media. In fact, some profiles on popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram have even crossed over into the print medium. And it seems like nearly all ads now feature hashtags or accounts to follow too! So what does it mean? Well, in short, social media has transcended being just a platform for catching up with friends and meeting new people – it has become a place to do business!

In April, several members of the HostandStore.com team traveled to Austin to take part in a digital marketing conference called Pubcon. It’s important to us to attend conferences where we can learn from experts because we ultimately hope to share that knowledge with you. We are far more than a hosting company, so it’s important that we stay up to date on what’s going on in digital marketing.

After all, that is a key part of learning SEO or any other aspect of digital marketing. Pubcon was an opportunity for us to hear from many of the industry’s leading experts. So what did we learn? It’s hard to sum up such a useful event in a single blog post, but we’ve narrowed down six key takeaways that we believe can help each and every person that reads this post.

I recently read a  WebCopyPlus article that told the story of a copywriter who ended up paying $4000 in fines for using a $10 image inappropriately – all because he or she violated the image’s copyright. Unfortunately, this was caused by the writer failing to fully understand copyright laws on the web. As you can see, this turned into a costly mistake.

Don’t worry. There are ways to protect yourself.

Don’t Have a Blog Yet? Here Are 4 Reasons You Need One

You’ve been to all the presentations about how important social media is for your business, heard all the buzzwords, and listened to endless marketing experts tell you that you need to have a blog, yet you still don’t have one. If you’re not sure why you need one, and the idea of starting a blog and keeping it updated regularly is a little bit overwhelming, here are some of the main reasons why you should blog for your business.