In the first part of this new series I wrote about three ways to redirect visitors to a new site. Today I’ll show you that there are also off-site ways to guide your audience towards another destination.

Using various tools to keep in touch with your visitors

1. Update newsletters are a great way to stay in touch with your visitors. If you usually send email alerts to let them know about fresh site content, it’s obvious that you may as well send out a special alert informing everyone about your site’s new address. In case you still haven’t set up an update newsletter, I strongly recommend that you start working on it right now.

2. Forums are great for community-building purposes and also to make a site stickier. Depending on how successful a forum is, it may become more popular than the site it originated from. If you currently use a free webhost for your site or blog, make sure to host your forum on a third party (even if it’s a free one too). Never have both your site and forum hosted by the same free webhosting company. This way, if you need to move your site for reasons that are beyond your control (e. g., your site’s webhost suddenly goes out of business), you’ll still be able to use your forum to communicate with your visitors and let them know about the changes.

3. The same principle can be applied if you keep a site and a blog simultaneously. Do not host both of them on the same free webhosting provider, even if this recommendation appears to be less practical. Use your blog to inform your visitors about your site’s new address and vice-versa.

4. Don’t forget about the sites, forums and blogs that you know your visitors usually read. Update your signatures, leave comments linking to your new URL, sign guestbooks when available… But please, don’t go overboard with those. You don’t want to become a spammer, do you? If you do, all you will manage is to lose your visitors for good.

Can you think of other ways to leverage online tools and communities to direct a site’s visitors to its new address? Feel free to share your tips by leaving your comments on this post.

Did you think I was done with this series? Think again! I want to help you retain and/or recover as many visitors as possible. So I’m going to offer some additional suggestions in my next article. Get it as soon as it’s published by subscribing to our blog.

Karen Zara has been involved in Internet-based projects since 2002. One of them is Abaminds, a blog for content producers that you can visit by clicking here.

Before we get into the reasons a dedicated IP is far more better than a shared IP let’s go over the difference a little. A shared IP would be like getting a birthday cake and sharing it with 10 complete strangers. You don’t know where their hands have been and you don’t know what they’ve done with those hands. A dedicated IP would be like having a birthday cake to yourself. You know exactly where you’ve been and exactly where your hands have been. With the growing number of spammy website’s and black hat webmasters on the internet today, having your website on a shared hosting provider using a shared server IP could get your site blacklisted, blocked, and even penalized by search engines. A dedicated IP is just that, dedicated. Your website is the only website using that IP address meaning you control your own destiny. Many easy website hosting providers offer dedicated IP’s for their customer’s who wish to take advantage of them. Paying the extra $2-$4 a month for a dedicated IP may not be such a bad idea. It could save your hard work from getting blocked by Google, Yahoo, and other popular search engine due to someone else’s bad spamming habits.