In honor of our fifteenth birthday, we present to you a timeline of our favorite milestones in HostGator and Snappy's history.

A birthday gift for you!

Did we mention we're hosting a BIG sale on our cloud, shared, and managed WordPress hosting plans today? Head over to our home page to enjoy your special birthday discount (ends Sunday, October 22nd, 2017 at 11:59pm Central).  

October 22, 2002

HostGator is founded in a dorm room at Florida Atlantic University. Fun Fact: The company was almost called gatorhost.com instead of HostGator.com! Snappy is born.  

2003

HostGator celebrates our 100th customer in February. Snappy celebrates his first birthday and says his first word: “web site.”  

2004

Just one year later, HostGator reaches 1000 customers. Snappy reaches his terrible twos and accordingly has his first temper tantrum when he loses his favorite stuffed teddy bear. Order is restored once he realizes it was hidden under the covers all along.  

2005

HostGator gains customers in the tens of thousands, and gets recognized for our award-winning reseller hosting with a Best Reseller Hosting Award from Hosting-Review.com. At age three, Snappy starts riding a tricycle around his neighborhood. This will come in handy later when HostGator sponsors the Tour du Rouge for five years from 2010 to 2014.  

2006

HostGator launches our first international office in Toronto, Ontario. Oh, Canada! The company relocates our headquarters from Boca Raton, Florida, to Houston, Texas, where we've been ever since. Now four years old, Snappy learns how to tie his shoes and discovers his favorite candies are blue M&Ms. He also adopts his first dog!

 

2007

The HostGator blog publishes its very first post. In international news, HostGator opens an office south of the equator in Brazil! Five-year-old Snappy graduates from kindergarten, where he quickly became the class pro at playing leap frog (the big alligator tail helps).  

2008

HostGator reaches our first 100,000 customers in the summer and starts offering unmetered space and bandwidth as part of all hosting packages. Snappy joins a Little League team. The six-year-old loves playing shortstop!  

2009

Just a year later, HostGator reaches 200,000 customers. We also begin offering toll-free numbers with all Business-level hosting packages for no additional cost. Now aged seven, Snappy gets into comic books and decides he wants to be a superhero when he grows up.  

2010

HostGator opens our second Texas office in the state capital, Austin. We also win a Customer Service award from The Best Web Hosting Service. At age eight, Snappy spends a lot of time building forts with his friends and learning to play basketball.  

2011

HostGator reaches over 500 employees and our support team receives its 5 millionth LiveChat. HostGator India launches! Nine-year-old Snappy goes to his first summer camp and discovers his passion for painting. Check out his self-portrait below. (Just kidding; this was drawn by a child of one of our customers.)  

2012

HostGator is acquired by Endurance International Group. Snappy reaches his double digits and throws a pool party in honor of his tenth birthday!  

2013

Endurance International Group, HostGator's parent company, goes public. Aged eleven, Snappy debuts a new look at the Houston Aquarium. He found the stingray exhibit fascinating.

 

2014

HostGator stretches its global reach, launching HostGator China and HostGator Russia. Snappy stars in his first live-action advertisement!

2015

HostGator launches managed WordPress hosting and integrates MOJO Marketplace into our QuickInstall platform. A teenager at last! Snappy gets his first cell phone.  

2016

HostGator announces our cloud hosting and website builder products. Now that he's fourteen years old, Snappy suffers from teenage angst. He regularly puts a KEEP OUT sign on his bedroom door. We think he's developed his first crush, but he's too busy Snapchatting to let us know who it is he's dreaming of.

2017

HostGator launches an upgraded dedicated server platform and is putting the final touches on our new customer portal. Snappy starts high school and is now the big man on campus! He even made the Junior Varsity football team.

Bonus Offer! Get Your Free Snappy Gift Today!

The coveted Snappy plush. It's our most requested item on social media. Customers and Snappy fans often tweet us asking for their own. In honor of Snappy's birthday sale, we are giving away free Snappy stuffed animals for a limited time! Tweet, like or share to get access to the Snappy giveaway link!

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Marketing Automation: Get More Out of Your Efforts

Marketers give automation a bad reputation. As you look through your Facebook posts, you’ll notice dozens of articles about how automation doesn’t work or how it’s not helpful. Well, that’s not necessarily true. Marketing combined with automation offers an opportunity for you to connect directly with your audience in a more efficient manner. Not only can your business save time with routine tasks, but your team can also gather new insights about your customers. So, don’t subtract marketing automation from your strategy. There’s a chance to nurture your audience and increase your revenue. Here are 5 refreshing ways to optimize your business processes.

1. Share Relevant Social Media Posts

Research shows that 97% of online adults have visited or used a social network within the last month. If your business is aiming to earn new leads, social media is your destination. However, most companies fail to maximize the potential of their social media presence. You’ve probably scrolled down your favorite brand’s Twitter timeline and noticed all the tweets referencing their products. When brands focus solely on themselves, customers get annoyed. They don’t like that icky feeling of being sold something 24/7. Instead, companies must gear their social media efforts toward educating and entertaining their audiences. You can share unique experiences from customers, post a vintage employee photo for #ThrowBackThursday, or even share funny GIFs during the holiday season. Social media is all about giving your brand a vibrant personality that customers can relate to. Once you build that trust, your audience will feel more comfortable purchasing from you. You’re thinking: that’s going to take several hours. Not exactly. With social media management tools like Buffer, you can now automate your posts days in advance. You’ll reach your audience at the right times and drive more engagement. Explore how you can share more relevant posts, and don’t forget to automate your social media tasks.  

2. Track Visitor Behavior

Do you follow your website visitors? Are you monitoring how they interact with content on your pages? If not, there's a possibility your team is missing an opportunity to really learn about your consumers. Some businesses find it creepy to watch their customers, and it makes their teams feel like a bunch of stalkers. If you feel that way, perhaps you’re taking the wrong approach. Tracking visitor behavior helps you understand the customer. When you know more, you can create better online experiences. “By analyzing where your visitors come from and what content leads them to your site, you can better track your content ROI, learn more about how effective your efforts are, and create more of what your visitors find most valuable,” states Ashley Kimler, a communications specialist at Heroic Search Tulsa. For example, if you set up Google Analytics on your site, you can observe which channels lead visitors to your products. You can learn how much time each visitor spends viewing a specific page. Your team also can track specific interactions on your website, such as video downloads. More importantly, you gain all this data automatically. Monitoring your visitors helps you serve your customers. When you focus on that goal, you eliminate the doubts of whether to track your visitors or not.  

3. Capture Interested Buyers

Brick-and-mortar businesses are notorious for luring shoppers into their stores with catchy sales signs and window displays. And once a customer enters their doors, they grab the person’s interest with a friendly sales clerk and limited-time promotions. As an online retailer, you can replicate this strategy for your business. All you need is a landing page, a content asset, and a pop-up box. Landing pages work as a tool to earn your visitor’s attention. You’re not selling them on your product just yet. Rather, you want to encourage them to give you their email address in exchange for a content asset. The asset can be a five-part email course or a coupon for a future purchase. “The content on the landing page primes the reader for what your asset will give them. It should provide a quick, digestible summary of what they’ll learn if they download it. This is the ‘exchange’ point in the process, where they decide if your asset is worth their time and their contact information,” writes Ben Silverman, marketing writer at Brafton. But how will you collect their contact information? Will someone need to be online operating the site? Of course not. You’ll add a pop-up box onto your website. So when someone clicks a specific link or button to sign up for your content asset, they will have the option to fill out a form. Below is a pop-up box from ThriveThemes. You can capture interested buyers any time. That’s the advantage of marketing automation.  

4. Identify Qualified Leads

You are thrilled when new prospects come through the pipeline. It’s a sign your marketing strategy is working. Yet, most business strategies stop here. They have interested buyers and immediately start selling products to them. That’s not quite how you want to do it. Instead, you need to create a system that moves consumers down your sales funnel. You want to turn prospects into qualified leads. Work with your team to define activities that signal when consumers are ready to buy your product. These actions may include opening three promotional emails, visiting your product page five times within a week, or contacting a customer support member. “Marketing automation provides a framework for your potential customers’ progress as they traverse the buyer’s journey, and makes it easy for marketers to manage leads. You define characteristics, such as a title or industry, and behaviors, such as attending a webinar, that indicate when a prospect will likely become a buyer,” says Chris Hardeman, vice president of sales at Act-On Software. If you had to manually qualify leads, this labor-intensive task would take forever. Marketing automation platforms, like Pardot and ActiveCampaign, offer lead scoring that track customer engagement over time. You have the power to improve team productivity and increase sales. So, start figuring out how to qualify your leads today.  

5. Send Targeted Email Campaigns

Communication is important when it comes to online marketing. It matters how and when you send messages to your audience. In the past, businesses dominated the communication with their customers. Companies made unilateral decisions about what they would say. With advances in technology, the brand-customer relationship favors the buyer. Customers control when and where they want to receive sales messages. As a result, businesses deliver multiple emails to their customers every day—all vying for their attention. To separate yourself from the pack, it’s imperative that you send targeted email campaigns. These personalized messages fit each customer’s shopping behaviors and specific product interests. Customized emails ensure that buyers read your content and pay attention to your services. Plus, your subscribers get the sense that your business understands their needs. Email marketing software makes it easy to deliver personalized automated messages to your list. For instance, with Constant Contact, your team can send automated birthday emails to each subscriber. You want customers to listen to you. To do so, send targeted email campaigns to strengthen the consumer relationship.  

It’s Time to Automate

Automation isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for all your marketing challenges. However, it is useful for streamlining your business workflows. From social media to email campaigns, marketing automation facilitates the customer journey. You can attract, nurture, and convert leads without the unnecessary hassle. Give automation another chance. It’s worth the investment.

From Blogs to Riches: 3 Famous Entrepreneurs Who Started Out As Bloggers

Blog-to-riches is the digital-age version of the traditional success story: A scrappy and determined person starts a small blog and then writes, podcasts, or shoots their way to fame and fortune. The reality check is that in 2016 there were more than six million active “traditional” blogs and twice that number of people blogging via social media channels like Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. How can you make your blog stand out from the crowd, build a loyal following, and maybe grow into a profitable business? Here are three very different blogs-to-riches success stories to teach us by example.

Blogger-Turned-Entrepreneur #1: Ree Drummond of The Pioneer Woman

Ree Drummond has been on the cover of People magazine, her fifth cookbook comes out in October, and her Food Network show, Pioneer Woman, is in its seventh season. Drummond also has a housewares brand, a magazine, a restaurant, and a hotel under construction. She's built this lifestyle enterprise in just eleven years. Her success grew out of her personal blog—also called The Pioneer Woman—about her raising and homeschooling four kids with her rancher husband in rural Oklahoma. Today, the blog is still the cornerstone of Drummond's business, where she regularly shares recipes, project updates, pictures of her town, and stories about her family and friends. Somehow, in the middle of all of this work and raising teenagers, she also blogs for Land O'Lakes, too.

What new bloggers can learn from Ree Drummond:

Find your voice and use it to describe things you love. Perhaps more than any other star “mom blogger,” Drummond writes in a clear voice and uses it to help her readers fall in love with her way of life. Her blog today feels just as folksy and friendly (and funny) as it did a decade ago, and readers feel they have a window into her world: one that's focused on family, food, farm life, and getting to know and care about the neighbors. While she's a skilled writer, Drummond didn't create a persona to serve a target market – she just started writing about her rural way of life and nurturing a community of readers who wanted to know more. Her authenticity shines through. Yours can, too.  

Vlogger-Turned-Entrepreneur #2: Casey Neistat of Beme/CNN

If you're under 35 and own a smartphone, you probably already know who Casey Neistat is. For the rest of us, Casey Neistat is a vlogger-entrepreneur who—among other things—is building digital video tools for CNN to help them reach Millennials. It's a role he took on after selling his social-media video app, Beme, to the news network for $25 million. Neistat also invests in startups, represents Samsung, and speaks at conferences to encourage other creatives to do the work they want to do. He still makes time to shoot, produce, and share videos about his global travels, product reviews, and his wife Candice Pool Neistat's fashion company, Billy. Neistat has accomplished a lot for a self-described “old man” of 36, and his career arc is even more impressive considering where he started. The Denver Post's recent profile of Neistat sums up his backstory this way: “By age 17... the high-school dropout found himself living in a trailer park, washing dishes for a living and raising his infant son.” With no film-making education, not much free time, and a long history of hearing people tell him he couldn't succeed, Neistat went to work. He moved to New York, worked on his craft of telling stories through video, and had a viral hit about NYC bike-lane safety that drew the attention of city officials and YouTube viewers alike.

What new vloggers can learn from Casey Neistat:

Do what you want, and use the gear you have to get started. Neistat says all you need to begin is a phone, an internet connection, and a good idea. Do What You Can't, Neistat's 4-minute video autobiography, lists things authority figures told Neistat he couldn't do – alongside video of Neistat accomplishing all of those goals and more. So if you want to create a vlog about something you love, do it—even if, and maybe especially if, people have told you that you can't.  

Influencer-Turned-Entrepreneur #3: Chiara Ferragni of The Blonde Salad

Fashion watchers know Chiara Ferragni means business. The Italian designer and blogger, who now lives in Beverly Hills, brings in at least $9 million a year from her shoe and clothing lines, modeling, endorsements, and partnerships with major fashion houses. Forbes recognized Ferragni as the Top Fashion Influencer of 2017 for leading the way in the emerging fashion/social media influencer industry. Ferragni's was the first fashion influencer business to be featured in a Harvard Business Review case study—and that was before she began opening retail stores in Italy and China. While doing all of that, she's also graced the covers of dozens of international fashion magazines and earned a special edition Barbie made in her likeness. Before she was a fashion icon and tycoon, Ferragni was a law student in Italy with a personal blog called The Blonde Salad. She told Forbes that her diary-style posts and photos drew lots of questions about her wardrobe, so she took the blog in that direction. She also used Instagram to expand her sphere of influence. Today, Ferragni has more than 10 million Instagram followers, and The Blonde Salad is a digital fashion magazine and online store with a team of twenty staffers.

What new bloggers can learn from Chiara Ferragni:

Share the love. Like Drummond, Ferragni blogs about what she loves—fashion, friends, and travel. Ferragni is also, like Neistat, a natural collaborator, as her work with Gucci, Chanel, and other fashion houses shows. Ferragni's enthusiasm for fashion is contagious. Her work with others in the industry has raised her brand's visibility to the point where she's the acknowledged “It Girl” and has earned her fans—and customers—from Los Angeles to Shanghai. The takeaway for new bloggers is to use social media to amplify your blog's reach and to reach out to others in your niche for new projects, cross-promotion, and creative cross-pollination.   Ready to start your journey from blogger to entrepreneur? HostGator has WordPress plans that make it easy to design your site, manage your content, and start posting.

Getting Started With Marketing Automation: 5 Things To Do First

Learning a new business process takes time and money. You have to train team members and select software that fits your budget. Right now, many companies are evaluating their options when it comes to marketing automation. The primary question being asked: Is it worth the investment? Colin Bentley, group product manager at Intercom, offers his opinion. “The key benefit of marketing automation is its ability to provide a personal experience that directly relates to the action each person takes. Good marketing automation creates a connected set of personalized and relevant messages that enrich the customer journey and help them discover and use your products.” If you’re struggling to make a decision, no worries. Here are five things you should do before investing in marketing automation.

1. Assess How You Identify Qualified Leads

Every consumer that walks into your store or visits your website isn’t going to fit your ideal customer type. And that’s okay. You don’t want to be all things to everybody. However, it is your responsibility to filter through potential leads and determine who can benefit from your products and services. For example, a high-end shoe enthusiast won’t find your comfortable, low-priced sneakers appealing but a cash-strapped father might. Qualifying leads requires examining your customers’ demographic profiles and behaviors. Specific actions can indicate a consumer is ready to move to the next step in the sales funnel. We call this process lead scoring. Below is a chart from Wishpond listing a few possible actions that hold significance in identifying leads. Marketing automation makes lead scoring easier for your team. Instead of tallying your consumers’ actions with pencil and paper, there’s software that can automatically do these tasks for you. It’ll record what actions occur and notify your team when prospects become leads. eMarketeer reports that “companies that nurture prospects with the help of marketing automation, see a 451% increase in qualified leads.” If you’re still guessing whether a visitor is a lead or not, marketing automation is a natural next step for your business.  

2. Study Your Current Nurturing Process

Gone are the days where a consumer learns about your brand, sees your merchandise, and buys your product immediately. Competition is fierce in the marketplace today, and with choice comes consumers’ hesitations to purchase things quickly. When a consumer comes across your product, they start investigating. They ask their friends about your brand and even visit multiple review sites to get other people’s opinions. The time it takes to make a purchasing decision has extended. For your business, this means creating a nurturing process to keep buyers interested while they do a little research. Lead nurturing is a major part of the sales cycle. You’re educating and engaging consumers to persuade them to purchase. Nurturing activities may include making courtesy calls, sending promotional emails, or suggesting a blog content to read. The entire process is tedious and involves several courses of action. How you nurture a teen buyer would be different from how you would nurture a middle-aged consumer. Then, you must factor in the individual’s interests and buying motivations. With marketing automation, you can create the system and then run the lead nurturing process on autopilot (with some supervision). For instance, you can automatically send consumers an email with a coupon after they abandon a shopping cart. No more reminding yourself to follow up; let the software do the heavy lifting.  

3. Track Marketing Activities

Your team is working on a big project to increase customer retention. It’s a brand-new initiative with no set procedure. So, everyone is basically creating steps from scratch. As retention ticks upward, the team declares the project a victory. So your boss wants to replicate the success. But there’s one major problem. No one on the team tracked the marketing activities. You don’t even know how much time it took to achieve results. While it may seem obvious to record marketing activities, this mistake is common in many businesses. Tivi Jones, a contributor for The Arizona Republic, offers her insight on the topic: “Keeping track of your marketing projects regularly enables you to not only monitor your activities, but also your results. Based on your current marketing goals and objectives, set up marketing projects or campaigns in order to group activities and results into chunks you can manage and analyze for return on investment.” Don’t know which marketing strategy led to results? Marketing automation may be your solution. The right tool can track what marketing activities you did and when you implemented them. For instance, if you run an A/B test in January and forget which strategy won, you can retrieve the results in May when you revisit the problem.  

4. Gauge Your Personalization Strategies

As more businesses open their doors, the market becomes more crowded. Consumers get bombarded with messages from their local gyms, doctors, and chain retailers. Everyone is vying for the buyer’s attention. Breaking out of the mold may seem difficult. Because, quite frankly, it is challenging to showcase your brand and product when 20 other competitors exist. But the battle isn’t impossible. Stop thinking about how you can be different. Instead, communicate differently to your target audience. Personalization combined with marketing automation opens doors to nurturing your consumers based on their desires. Nearly two-thirds of email marketers worldwide use email automation, according to a GetResponse survey. However, only 25.4% of email marketers are personalizing with dynamic content. Marketing automation offers a unique opportunity to integrate specific customer data into your email campaigns, sales collateral, and site messaging. By eliminating the boilerplate text, you show customers that you really understand their needs.  

5. Understand How You Collect Data

Data is a hot topic for businesses. Experts advise teams to collect every single piece of data to understand their customers. So, that’s what most companies do. They gather data from a recent campaign, pull information from an old database, and import contacts from an external source. Before you know it, teams have accumulated data from 20 to 30 different places. Then, after it’s collected, the data sits idle on a supervisor’s desktop, waiting to be accidentally deleted. This isn’t a sound strategy. Marketing automation can help your team centralize all your data. That way, you’re getting accurate information to make better judgment calls. If you need to look up a new customer, the data is at your fingertips, rather than a filing cabinet. “We track every single acquisition channel through which our users register. This includes blog posts, press, organic search, paid ads, partnerships, etc. We do weekly meetings to review the data. It shows which channels convert the highest, generate the most loyal users and more,” says Danny Boice, founder of Speek. You don’t want your data scattered around like toys in a child’s playpen. If it takes you days to find your data, it might be time to invest in marketing automation.  

Get Ready to Automate

Introducing marketing automation into your business is a big decision. You want to be well-informed before you take the leap. Evaluate how you identify qualified leads in your pipeline. Track your marketing tasks during campaigns. And of course, assess how you currently gather data. Get informed. Then, invest in marketing automation.

How Do You Know if a WordPress Plugin or Theme Will Work?

When you’re on the search for new plugins or themes you’re going to have a lot to dig through. After all, there are thousands upon thousounds of themes and plugins for you to choose from. The last thing you want to do is rush your plugin or theme selection and end up choosing one that will compromise your online efforts. Choosing low-quality themes or plugins can lead to slower sites, sites that break easily, and can even leave you open to security risks. Below we offer a few tips that will help you ensure you’re choosing a high-quality theme or plugin before you decide to buy it or install it on your site.

1. Only Download From Reliable Sources

One of the first steps to choosing a high-quality theme or plugin is to only download or purchase from reliable sources. Chances are, when you’re spending money on a theme or plugin it’s already going to be of higher quality. But, you’ll still want to thoroughly research the plugin or theme beforehand. Below we offer a few more things you’ll want to look out for when selecting a new plugin or theme. Follow these guidelines whether you’re purchasing from a marketplace or using the WordPress theme directory or plugin directory. If you’re looking for a solid source of premium WordPress themes, then ThemeForest, Elegant Themes, and StudioPress are all great resources to check out.

2. Check User Reviews and Feedback

User reviews and customer feedback don’t lie. If the plugin or theme you’re thinking about has a very low star rating, then it’s probably for good reason. However, it’s also important to keep the total number of reviews in mind. If it only has a small number of reviews, then it will be hard to glean a factual option based on the feedback provided. By reading reviews you’ll be able to learn things like how secure it is, how often any technical issues occur, and anything else that you might worry about when installing a new plugin or theme.

3. Check the Latest Update Date

This is a very important bit of information. You’d hate to install a plugin that never receives developer updates. This will lead to potential security risks and could even lead to plugin and theme conflicts down the road. Ideally, you’d like to see updates that have occurred no longer than a few months ago. This means the developer or development team is actively maintaining the theme or plugin and working to improve it.

4. Number of Active Installs

It’s not pure fact, but chances are, the more people who have installed and are using the theme or plugin, the better it’s going to be. It wouldn’t make sense for a large number of site owners to use a plugin or theme that doesn’t work.

5. Look at Their Support

Not every plugin or theme has a dedicated support team. It’s not completely necessary and depends upon the complexity of the plugin or theme. But, most high-quality themes and plugins do have some form of support. It can be helpful to check this out beforehand, so you’ll know you’ll be taken care of if any technical issues arise. Beyond support, you should also look for plugin and theme documentation that will help with setup and plugin or theme customization. 6. WordPress Compatibility Before you end up choosing a WordPress plugin or theme you’ll want to double check that it’s compatible with the latest version of WordPress. The WordPress core is updated on a regular basis, without your plugins and themes being updated you could run into a conflict that could break your site. Hopefully, the tips above will help you make a better decision when it comes to choosing a new theme or plugin. Remember that plugin and theme selection is very important. The more time you can spend researching, the more likely you are to end up with something that will benefit your site. Are there any selection parameters you use to filter the good from bad plugins and themes? Please share in the comments below.