Ready for a deal? If you’re looking for a great hosting company, HostGator has you covered! It plays well with WordPress (one of the requirements when *I* do a site for a client), and it’s a US-based company with great tech support — right here in the USA (headquarters is in Texas).

HostGator is already competitively priced, but you can save an additional 25% using the coupon code: 25OFFCDGSPRING

If you’re looking to host just one site, the Hatchling plan will work for you, but if you are going to host more than one site, go for the Baby plan.

In the spirit of full disclosure: If you use this link to purchase hosting from HostGator, I will receive an affiliate commission. That said, I personally have sites hosted here, and am actually a HostGator reseller. It’s a company I truly believe in. Heck, I even use their VOIP service as well. Ask me about my $8.95 a month phone service…

If you’re one of the small local businesses trying to move your marketing online, this article is for you. Perhaps you already have a website, a blog, and even a page on Facebook. If you do, great! You’re making progress. Depending on whether you are doing the work yourself or hiring it out, you may have missed the opportunity for some of the best free advertising you can get — listings in some of the larger online directories… the ones that count. (Being in a bazillion small meaningless link-farm directories doesn’t help and you want to stay away from those!)

The biggies:

• Google Places (aka Google Local)
• Bing Local
• Yelp
• Manta (click “Add Your Company”)

If you’re a restaurant you should also be in:

• Urban Spoon

Entering the data into these sites will be a bit repetitive, but that’s okay. Different search engines serve up results from many different sources and you want to make sure you’re included in the ones that matter. This is a really basic list, there are lots of other good, solid directories, but folks just starting out should worry about these first.

Most of these sites also offer upgraded ‘paid’ listings or other features. For now, just stick with the basic free listing, you can always upgrade later. Ideally these listings will include a link back to a website, but if you don’t have a site, put up a page on Facebook and link to that.

When provided with the opportunity to enter a description about your company you are writing for both a human audience and computers. For the humans, it needs to be well written sales copy that tells the potential customer what benefits you offer them. Why should they come to YOUR business and not the guy down the street? For the computer audience (search engines) you need to make sure to include your primary keywords. Those keywords are likely what your customers are typing when they sit down to find you online. Give it some thought, and ideally, do some keyword research at Google’s keyword tool. It does make a difference: the search engines are smart, but they may not be able to tell the difference between “dog sitter” and “pet sitting service”.  Customers are more likely to type in ‘air conditioner repair’ than ‘hvac service’, which is industry jargon that the general public doesn’t use. Part of the challenge is writing for this dual audience, AND making it fit in the limited amount of space. The great part is, this information can be re-used over and over, including on your own web site!

HostGator, one of the most popular web hosting companies around, is having an insane Black Friday sale that you don’t want to miss!

This Black Friday promotion starts at 12:00 AM Friday November 26th CST (-6 GMT) and will run until 11:59PM CST (-6 GMT) 11/26/2010.

Without further ado, here is our Black Friday 2010 Special Offer:

• We’re offering 50% OFF EVERYTHING From 12:00AM CST – 5AM CST
• We’re offering 80% OFF EVERYTHING From 5AM – 9AM CST WHILE SUPPLIES LAST (first come, first receive; so definitely don’t miss out!)
• From 9AM – 11:59PM CST OR after 80% OFF accounts have sold out, we will continue to offer 50% OFF EVERYTHING

This applies to ALL Accounts and ALL Term Lengths of up to 3 years worth of Hosting! That would come out to $35.64 for 3 FULL YEARS!

That includes Shared Hosting, Reseller Hosting, VPS Hosting AND even Dedicated Servers! Never before have we allowed the promotion on EVERYTHING including reseller, vps and dedicated servers AND ALL Term Lengths!
The discount will apply to the client’s first invoice (first term length you sign up for whether that be 1 month or for 3 years).
This promotion gives our customers our award winning hosting for as little as:

• Shared Hosting – $4.95/month AS LOW AS $0.99/month

• Reseller Hosting – $24.95/month AS LOW AS $4.99/month

• VPS Hosting – $19.95/month AS LOW AS $3.99 First Month

• Dedicated Servers – $174/month AS LOW AS $34.80 First Month

As you can see, this is an absolutely CRAZY DEAL and you have an opportunity to save a LOT OF MONEY.

Set your alarm clock so you don’t miss out on this sale, remember, the best deals start at 5:00 a.m. CST and run until 9:00 a.m. CST

Check out the latest post on Inspired Magazine for a great article about WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS). They cover the pros and cons of using WordPress to manage your website content, feature some WordPress websites from some movers and shakers in the business world, and they round it out with a list of favorite plugins. (though I think they missed a gem: Widget Logic, which lets you customize which pages each widget will or will not appear on.)

One of my favorite things to do when I see such a hot blog is to open the source code and hunt for the plugins. I love to see what the big boys are using.

The Inspired Mag site has a pleasing design; note how they prominently display the number of followers and subscriptions they have… with all the tools to jump on the bandwagon and follow them right there in the same area. Who doesn’t want to be friends with the popular kid on the block?

I’m actually surprised at the number of ads: more than a third of their site is devoted to them. But I guess if you’ve got a page rank of 5 you can get away with it.

We’re happy that so many of our customers refer us to their friends and colleagues for printing and web site work. So happy, in fact, that we’re starting a new program: for every 5 new printing or web design customers that you refer to us, we will give you 1,000 FREE premium business cards.

Our premium business cards are full-color, 2-sided, and printed on your choice of 14pt or 16pt stock, with your choice of a glossy or matte finish – a $48 value!

This isn’t a special promotion; it’s a new policy. We want to make sure our customers know we appreciate the referrals. So keep ‘em coming!

While we get organized, if you do send us business, please let us know (or have the customer tell us you referred them). We’re working on a way to track the referrals, but didn’t want to postpone the announcement while we worked out the details.