The other day I received my copy of WebHosting.Info's NewsGrid Daily newsletter. In the newsletter there was a banner ad flashing "free hosting, with no ads." What caught my attention was the simplicity of the banner ad, but more importantly, the name of the company - WebHero. 

I think the name is great. We all have our heroes - The Incredible Hulk anyone? The banner ad said "Free Web Hosting" and flashed "With No Ads." At the bottom of the ad was the WebHero logo (shown above). Typically I would not click on a free web hosting ad, but I had to check this one out. I almost never come across a free web hosting company that has such a great company name. That said, there must be something else to it.

When the WebHero site loads, it shows four products. The first product in WebHero's matrix is the "Free Web Hosting" package - the one mentioned in the banner ad. In the second slot, WebHero highlights the "Everything Hosted" package in green as the "Best Selling Plan." At $4.95 you get 10GB of storage space, 1500 throughput (bandwidth), an ecommerce cart, priority phone support, tons of email accounts, even MySQL databases.

The point of this blog is not to sell you on WebHero's products and services, rather I want to point out how effective company branding can be in terms of attracting new customers. Even though I would not use a free web hosting service, WebHero caught my attention and almost sold me on their paid hosting plan. 

How?

1. Great branding.
2. Extreme simplicity (design and copy).
3. Great color scheme.
4. Everything I would need in a hosting package.
5. Great pricing model.

WebHero, like many other companies I feature in this blog, has done a great job branding their company. Especially in today's overly saturated shared web hosting market, branding plays an even more important role in the success of a company that primarily sells shared hosting services.

Great job WebHero. Keep up the good work.

I recently published another article in Ping! Zine web hosting magazine called "Marketing With Press Releases" that list the top 10 rules for a winning press release marketing strategy. I have extracted those top 10 rules for you and placed them in their own document at Winning Press Release Marketing Strategy. The article makes my 10th contribution to the magazine.

As someone who practices professional writing daily, I have first-hand experience with how powerful a press release marketing strategy can be for companies. When you combine the 10 rules I listed in the article with optimized press release writing and optimized press release services, you can generate more traffic and more exposure to your potential customers, partners, and anyone interested in your products and services.

In the coming weeks and months I plan on writing posts and developing case studies on how well optimized press release writing works for my clients. The companies interviewed will be sharing the top benefits they receive from our regular press release writing, optimization techniques, and press release distribution methods. 

What's Xenu Link Sleuth you ask? Xenu is a link checker. It's free, easy to use, and provides a nice report on broken links found on your website. As a contract technical writer, I use it every time I update content or technical documentation, be it on the Young Copy site or on a client's site. Actually, all our technical writing services utilize Xenu Link Sleuth. So why should you check for broken links on your site?

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As a professional writer I have the wonderful privilege to write articles for two prominent magazines in the software, hosting, technology, and ecommerce industries. Although my primary focus is dedicated to promotional writing services and technical writing services, I often write about ideas and concepts that complement my professional writing services. For example, I wrote an article for Ping! Zine magazine in December 2007 that describes the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) and provides some useful SEO Tips and techniques that anyone can implement. I have posted the SEO Tips and a link to the full article on the Young Copy website to help you get started with your own search engine optimization campaign.

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Talk about cool software. MailChimp, an Atlanta, GA based email marketing solutions firm, has developed a really powerful, feature-packed, user-friendly email marketing tool. What's more is how they educate customers on the ins and outs of email marketing with their MonkeyBrains blog. Ben Chestnut, co-founder of MailChimp, writes regularly in MonkeyBrains on topics that help email marketers get the most out of their email marketing campaigns.

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