Here at HostDime, we know that you have a website because you have something you want to tell the world, be it your opinions or your products and services. Just having a website with that information is not very helpful if you can’t get people to actually visit it. These days businesses are learning the importance of being found online and how much of an increase in business the online exposure can bring. You’ve taken the first steps in building your website and hosting it with HostDime, but that doesn’t mean potential customers will find your site naturally (natural is organic discovery search and not paid targeted ads). To help solve this issue we have started writing a series of blogs focused on offering different free marketing tools and strategies that are out there for you to use. You will be able to find all of them in the “Marketing” category on our blog.

Imagine when company URLs will add their brand names as the web domain suffix – .pepsi, .apple, .google, etc. – instead of the 22 current generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs): .com, .org, .net, etc.

HostDime has been looking for ways to organize our multiple online profiles scattered across various services, including our Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Twitter. You probably understand how difficult it is to keep an eye on each of your several accounts on the internet. One of our social media goals was to find an online service that will solve our problem by pulling all of this information together to build a single online identity. Think of it as an ‘eBusiness Card’ that will inform your visitors about you within a short summary and also link them to every network that person is connected to online.

In today’s society, social media marketing allows small businesses to always be accessible to their customers and also increases the traffic to your site by pinpointing your industry’s influencers and target market. A new survey by Constant Contact reports that 73% of small and mid-sized businesses are using social media as a main promotional tool. However, many unfamiliar business leaders have made mistakes within their web marketing program that can reveal their lack of social media savvy and often negate the effectiveness of those marketing efforts.

Recently on Friday, May 20th, 2011 HostDime participated in the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life at Lake Eola. Our team of 14 was able to raise hundreds of dollars for the American Cancer Society. We raised money online through our website dime.at/relay, selling hamburgers at the event, and the “America’s Next Top Model”-Mr./Ms. Relay competition.

In a continued effort to give back to our community, on Friday, May 20th, 2011, HostDime will participating in the American Cancer Society Relay for Life event at Lake Eola near our global headquarters in Downtown Orlando, Florida. The relay will begin at 6:00 pm on Friday night and continue until 11:00 am on Saturday morning. After the relay, there will be closing remarks. The relay is sure to be a fun event with games going on throughout the night and things such as face painting for both participants and event visitors.

If you still haven’t had the chance to meet Alex, the HostDime mascot, it is about time for us to introduce him. Alex is the average techie, with the pocket pen protector gear and his broken glasses, who represents the top-tier customer service HostDime’s support team offers to our beloved clients. When our customers open a ticket with us, either by phone or live-chat, they have a hard time to visually picture our HostDime support team.

On Wednesday, April 13th, 2011 HostDime presented a workshop at the University of Central Florida (UCF). There were about twenty students in attendance. The workshop covered the importance of establishing an online presence and how the students in a specific major might do so. We also gave the students a free small web hosting account and a domain name.

There are hundreds of social media sites already and every day we get more. They stay in business because apparently for every social media web site there are at least a couple thousand people willing to log in on a daily basis. For Facebook that’s well in to the hundreds of millions. Well get ready for one more.

The HostDime team is sponsoring and preparing their next exhibition at the Parallels Summit 2011 which takes place from February 22nd – 24th at the Gaylord Palm’s Convention Center centrally located in Orlando, Florida. This is the premier conference for hosters, communication service providers (CSPs), web designers, value-added resellers, and anyone else interested in delivering the widest range of integrated and easy-to-use Cloud services for their small businesses.