Thank You

Thank You, a photo by imageonedesign on Flickr.

Thank You veterans and fallen serviceman of Pearl Harbor and World War II.

13 Hot Facebook Marketing Tips From the Top Pros

Facebook continues to be the most powerful social network on the planet with over 750 million active users. Businesses simply cannot ignore Facebook as part of their online marketing strategy. We spoke with top marketing book authors and Facebook brand managers.

Take your Facebook marketing to a new level with these hot Facebook marketing tips direct from the top pros in Facebook marketing.

#1: Give people a reason to become fans

Richard Krueger

“A Reveal tab offers first-time visitors a clear call to action."

By encouraging the visitor to first “Like” your fan page in order to receive a free trial, coupon or even specialized information, you can significantly increase fan conversion rates, while giving real value in becoming a fan,” says Richard Krueger, co-author of Facebook Marketing for Dummies.

#2: Stay on topic

Daniel Sundin

“People who Like your brand on Facebook expect your posts to be at least somewhat related to your brand or industry. Keeping your focus so narrow may seem limiting, especially if you’re the one crafting the posts each day. Instead, think of it as a creative challenge,” says Daniel Sundin, community manager at PETCO.

Sundin gave the following tips:

• Write about a current event and tie it to your brand or industry.
• Find and share a funny YouTube video loosely related your brand or industry.
• Ask your audience to post questions, pictures or stories about your brand to your wall.
• Repost the most interesting content back out as an update.
• “Remember, Unliking a page is just as easy as Liking it. A single odd or off-topic post could get you booted from the stream,” said Sundin.

#3: Ask the right kind of questions

Amy Porterfield

“One of the best ways to get your fans talking on Facebook is to ask interesting and entertaining questions. But did you know there’s a right way and wrong way to ask questions on Facebook? When done right, you can significantly increase your fan engagement and build some great relationships,” says Amy Porterfield, co-author of Facebook Marketing All-In-One for Dummies.

“The trick is to ask questions that are easy to answer. Questions that require just one-word responses tend to get the most engagement. Remember, people LOVE to talk about themselves, so when you make it about them, they are more likely to jump into the conversation,” added Porterfield.

#4: Include pictures in your Facebook updates

Guy Kawasaki

“Twitter is a link economy, whereas Facebook is a picture economy. So just about every status update should include a picture. Ideas for pictures include customers, your product or service in action, employees and events. There’s no such thing as a bad picture,” says Guy Kawasaki, author of Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions.

“And one more tip: crop your pictures. For example, no-one needs to see people’s feet. Remember that Facebook is going to present a tiny version of the picture, so you need to get up close, personal and cropped,” said Kawasaki.

#5: Celebrate your milestones

Ekaterina Walter

“Did you reach a milestone? It can be one important to you or one important to your fans. Celebrate with your fans! Even if you think it’s something small, pull them in, thank them, celebrate with them like you would with your friends,” says Ekaterina Walter, social media strategist for Intel.

#6: Get creative when your Facebook readers are most happy

Mari Smith

“Facebook has a Happiness Index  that shows a spike of 10% on Fridays. As a marketer, you can take advantage of this increase in sentiment by doing something creative,” says Mari Smith, co-author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day.

“About once a month, I host ‘Facebook Friday’ (similar to #followfriday on Twitter), where I invite all my fans to promote their own pages, links to their blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, etc. In addition, I know from other studies - and from my own fan page reports from PageLever - that my fans respond best to photos.

“By giving your fans specific times to cross-promote, network and create more visibility for their own pages, they’ll be less inclined to do so outside of these windows, plus you’ll elevate your leadership and increase your news feed optimization,” said Smith.

#7: Activate Facebook fans (don’t just collect them like baseball cards)

Jay Baer

“Your Facebook audience is a club, not just a list, and you cannot satisfy the intellectual and sociological cravings of a club through one pithy status update each day. Get creative. Get interesting. Get successful,” says Jay Baer, author of The Now Revolution.

“Recognize that the vast majority of your Facebook fans are indeed fans. Why would you Like a brand that you don’t actually like? These are your best, most enthusiastic customers who have taken the initiative to raise their hands in the Facebook environment. Don’t bore them to the point where they lose interest.

“Create a robust, ongoing calendar of engagement programs whereby your company gives Facebook fans the opportunity to receive special insider info, tell you what they think about future product and marketing plans, access unusual fan-only deals or learn more about the people behind your brand,” Baer added.

#8: Run a Facebook contest

Andrea Vahl

“Everyone loves a contest and a chance to win. If you need a little excitement on your Facebook page, a contest will spur your community to action. Hopefully you will also get the benefit of people sharing your contest with their friends,” says Andrea Vahl, co-author of Facebook Marketing All-In-One for Dummies.

“There are several different types of contests you can run: a photo contest, a video contest or a sweepstakes where people just enter their name and email to win.

“To run a Facebook Contest, you’ll need to use a third-party app such as Wildfire, Strutta, North Social, Easypromos or Shortstack. You can also create your own iFrame app to accept the entries, but that will require programming. Facebook has many rules about how a contest or promotion can be run that you should read here: http://www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php. The main thing to consider is that you cannot automatically enter people who Like your page or post a comment on your wall.

“Your prize does not have to be expensive to garner a lot of entries and good buzz. Social Media Examiner’s Michael Stelzner ran a very successful contest using the Strutta application and gave away a business launch package including one-on-one coaching. He received 80 photo entries, took his fan base to over 1,500 Likes and got fantastic publicity for his new book, Launch.

“If you give away something your audience is interested in, you will create great buzz for you and your Facebook page,” says Vahl.

#9: Try out Sponsored Stories

Ben Pickering

“Earlier this year, Facebook introduced a new form of advertising: Sponsored Stories. These ads display activity from your friends in a fixed ad position on the page,” says Ben Pickering, CEO of Strutta.

“For example, if I Like your page, use your app or check in at your location, you can display an ad to all of my friends sharing that activity.

“Why would you pay to have something that is already in the news feed for free?

First, because the volume of activity in the feed can easily overwhelm any one update.

Second, and of particular importance to those running apps on their page, is the fact that stories published from an app are subject to user feedback.

“That means that if many users hide or block posts from your app, subsequent content is likely to be deemed of low quality and won’t surface in the news feed.

“Sponsored Stories ensure that activity on your page or app is still prominent. And because the ads contain actual activity from friends instead of generic advertising copy, they are a powerful consumer-to-consumer marketing tool,” said Pickering.

#10: Measure your Facebook marketing!

Jan Rezab

“Measure your Facebook marketing efforts as well as you can. Measure unique users, fans, conversions, clicks, activity, retention, loyalty and many other metrics.

“Only if you measure those will you be able to fully understand your fans, and next time you’ll come with an even better targeted offer,” says Jan Rezab, CEO and co-founder of Socialbakers.

#11: Find the best tool to measure your Facebook marketing

Victoria Ransom

“Once you have your marketing calendar all set and you are engaging your Facebook fans daily, spend some time to find the right tool to measure your Facebook marketing,” says Victoria Ransom, founder and CEO of Wildfire Interactive.

“Over time you’ll be able to see your progress as well as your competitors’ progress and adjust your social media strategies,” she added.

#12: Learn to make sense of the volumes of data currently available on social media

Chris Treadaway

“Businesses that succeed will make sense of the currently unmined volumes of data that have been crowdsourced through social media. They’ll use it to get more intelligent and they’ll use data to create better, more intelligent and more targeted marketing campaigns.

“Experiment with data mining, data-driven analysis and intelligence now, because that’s where we are heading,” says Chris Treadaway, co-author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day.

#13: With Facebook, you now need to consider your brand as a network

Paul Dunay

Smart brands are tapping into their Facebook audience to get instant feedback, ideas on new product design, how to market better and what topics are trending with their audience.

“Some marketers are reacting to social media, but smart marketers are proactively using social media to drive their business,” says Paul Dunay, co-author of Facebook Marketing for Dummies and Facebook Marketing for Dummies, second edition.

Article by: Cindy King at Social Media Examiner (www.socialmediaexaminer.com)

Could Your Small Business Survive Without Social Media?

Could your business survive without social media? If the answer is “No,” you’ll be just as surprised as I was to discover that in a recent survey by small business insurance provider Hiscox, a mere 12 percent of small business owners surveyed described social media as a “must.” In comparison, a whopping 50 percent said word-of-mouth was essential to their businesses.

These two figures reveal a strange disconnect. Aren’t “social media” and “word-of-mouth” pretty much the same thing?

Word-of-mouth has always been a major marketing tool for small companies. Social media hasn’t changed that; it’s just amplified the power of word-of-mouth. Instead of your customers sharing their experience with a few people they happen to run into over the course of a week, they can now broadcast it to hundreds of their friends, or to thousands of people reading their blog posts, or to millions of people reading online reviews.

Many times, small, well-established companies that rely on a local clientele—such as retailers, restaurants or service providers—are the ones that scoff at the idea of social media, saying they “don’t have time” or their customers wouldn’t care. Yet ironically, these are the very businesses that stand to benefit from social media the most.

Consider the power of social media if you’re a bar or restaurant owner. I number a lot of foodies among my friends, and when these people go out to eat or drink, they invariably check Yelp first. If your establishment is on Yelp, you’re going to benefit immensely. If not...well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Last week, one of my business partners saw a Facebook friend posting about a new gastropub in her town. It was 5:00 p.m. on a Friday night. She went on Yelp! to read reviews, Facebooked with a few more friends to see who else wanted to check it out, went there that night, had a great meal and told all the friends she saw over the weekend they should go there, too. A week later, three of her friends have already eaten there…and you can bet they’re telling their friends on Facebook, Yelp! and Twitter.

Increasingly, social media is where we connect, discover and learn about new things. Using social media not only keeps you in touch with your current customers, but opens you up to a whole new world of their friends, their friends’ friends (and Twitter followers). Why would you cut yourself off from that?

I’m always surprised when I learn that otherwise-sophisticated small business owners aren’t making use of social media. Let me share one more story with you. Today I made a purchase for my business at a local store and was, quite frankly, shocked when the owner laboriously wrote out a handwritten receipt, using one of those carbon-copy receipt books you get at the office supply store. (And no, I wasn’t shopping at a quaint antique shop on Nantucket—this was a franchise of a large, national chain in a big city.) As I waited (and waited) for her to copy out that receipt, I had time to start worrying about the quality of service I was getting from this business. If they weren’t “with it” enough to print out a simple receipt, how well were they handling things that happen behind the scenes?

That’s kind of what social media is like these days. Yes, word-of-mouth still matters. But increasingly, social media is where world-of-mouth happens, and if you don't at least join in the conversation, you’re going to get left behind.

Article by: Rieva Lesonsky at Open Forum (www.openforum.com)

9 Ways People Respond to Your Content Online

Blogs and Twitter have almost eliminated any barrier to publishing. You have an idea and in a few minutes your thoughts can be online. Think about it – with every person thinking about more than 50,000 thoughts a day, producing online content can be simple. Maybe. But simply churning out meaningless content does not guarantee that others will read what you write. Make this mistake and people will read what you write and write you off.


What’s the alternative?

Use your creativity to generate content that will inspire and transform the lives of the audience in a positive way. Remember that it costs time (and indirectly – money) for your audience to read what you write. And, they expect a good return for that investment. You will know whether you are succeeding in influencing your audience in a positive way because the audience will tell you. No, maybe not directly but by the way they respond to your content.

So, here are the nine ways your audience will respond to your online content:

ere are the nine ways your audience will respond to your online content:

Spam: If your content does not provide a reasonable ROII (return-on-investment for an interaction) for the reader or is self-serving or simply useless, the reader will mark it as spam. Posting something that may be assessed, as “spam” is the fastest way to losing credibility.

Skip: The reader makes an assessment that he or she won’t lose much by reading it. In this case, the reader has not written you off yet but if you consistently create content that is worth “skipping,” the reader might write you off.

Scan: The reader thinks there are only a few parts that are of relevance and wants to get right to the core of the content and skip the rest.

Stop: The reader is touched by the article and stops to think about the article, it’s relevance and what it means to him or her personally and professionally.

Save: The content is so good that the reader might want to re-visit this multiple times.

Shift: The article is transformational. The reader is so deeply affected (in a positive way) by the article that it shifts some of their values and beliefs. In other words, this piece of writing will transform the reader and make him or her grow.

Send: The content is not only useful to the reader but also to one or more people in the reader’s network. The reader simply emails the article or a link to it to people that he or she cares.

Spread: The reader finds the article fascinating enough to spread it to anyone and everyone via a blog, twitter or the social networks that he or she belongs.

Subscribe: This is the ultimate expression of engagement and a vote of confidence that you will continue to provide great content. When the reader wants to continue listening to your thoughts, he or she will subscribe.

Finally, here are a few things to consider before you post your next online content:

1. Understand Your Audience

Unless you are writing something for your private consumption, your audience should be the center of the focus and not you. The more you know about your audience, the better you can connect with them. Think about:

• Who is your audience?
• Why are they reading what you are writing?
• What are their concerns in general and what are their concerns NOW?

2. Check Your Objective

• Some questions to think about:
• What is the purpose of your article?
• What assessment do you want the reader to create by reading your article?

3. Unleash Your Creativity

You know the audience and you know the purpose of the article. Now the next step is to unleash your creativity and create something that will generate the kind of response that you are looking for.

Some questions to think about:

• What would be unique (content, point-of-view etc.) in this article that will make the audience do what I want them to do?
• How can you make this article “extremely relevant” to the current times?
• What can you include that will increase the “longevity” of the article?

4. Learn from Feedback

You already know the nine ways that people respond to your online content. When people act the way they do, they are providing you valuable feedback. Keeping your emotions aside, learn from the feedback and incorporate this learning into your next article.

Article by: Rajesh Setty at Life Beyond Code (www.rajeshsetty.com)

Has my website been penalized by Google?

In some circles it's commonly accepted that if you over submit your website to Google, or any search engine, that you will be penalized for it. In other circles, it's accepted that you can actually submit your website to Google everyday if you like, and that you will never incur any penalties whatsoever for doing so. Google claims that there is actually no penalty for repeatedly submitting your website to them. That's true, and yet, the penalties for over submission are very real indeed.

Why the complete contradiction? Is your website being penalized, or is it not? If it is, by whom? Why? And what are the penalties? All very good questions, and yet the answer is so obvious that it's hard to believe anyone would miss it. But miss it they do, in their thousands every day.

Who is Penalizing your website when you over submit?

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" -Google Mission Statement

What does this mean to us? Perhaps not a great deal on the surface. However, we all use Google everyday, and rely on it to find the content we were looking for. Google quite rightly prides itself on finding search results faster, and with less fuss, than any other means of search on the internet. Google has invested vast resources in their infrastructure. Estimates are that Google maintains over 450,000 servers, arranged in racks located in clusters in cities around the world, in order to achieve their goal of providing the best search service on the net. Few people would deny that there's is not the best search service.

Googlebot, the Google crawler, enjoys nothing more that juicey, new, unique content. It's always hungry for more and more new content; eager to analyse it, index it, digest it, syndicate it, and generally consume it. It just can't get enough. We must feed it, and feed it often. It has an insatiable appetite for content!

The more content we give Googlebot; the more it wants. The more pages you publish on your website; the more you update and add content to your website; the more often Googlebot will come back to index it. The same is also true if we would prefer that Googlebot not visit us so often. Just feed it less. That means publishing less content. Fewer pages and less frequent site updates. The less we do to feed Googlebot new content, the less interested Googlebot becomes in our website.

Every webmaster, and business owner, hopes to have top search results on Google, and lots of site visitors from the search engines in general. It's when the success we wish for isn't forthcoming that we start to turn to "the dark side", and do things we wouldn't normally consider. Such as repeatedly submitting, and resubmitting, our website to Google in the assumption that doing so is the way to achieve what we want. Some webmasters even attempt to manipulate the search results in more deceptive ways, rather than just impatient ways. However, the deceptive ways, will only lead to your website's demise.

Does Google penalize websites for over submission? No, it does no such thing.

Who is penalizing your website when you over submit then? You are!

It's clear that all Google wants is content. Unique, genuinely intersting and engaging content. The more content you offer on your website, the more Google is going to visit your site. The more content you have indexed by Google, unique and interesting content, the more likely your site is to appear in search engine results pages (SERPs). This in turn brings more site visitors and traffic.

Conclusion

Have you ever wondered how much more successful your website might be if you dedicated yourself to it's content?

Google doesn't penalise websites for over submission. However, better to avoid such non-productive tasks and spend all available resources and time on writing or improving the website content.

Think smarter and reap the rewards that a better website will bring for you quite naturally.

Article by: BSolve It (www.bsolveit.com)

3 SEO Traps to Avoid During Your Redesign

I receive a lot of SEO questions from business owners who want to spruce up their aging websites, but are dead afraid of losing their existing search engine traffic. And for good reason. Going live with a redesigned website without considering the SEO implications is like being ensnared in a nasty trap that you cannot escape from. It's hard to make monéy while stuck in a trap!

With that in mind, here are a 3 SEO traps to avoid before, during and after you develop your website:

SEO Trap #1: Your Content Management System

If you are switching to a different content management system, (CMS) it often means that the URLs from your current site will have to change to something that fits with the new system. It's likely that the new URL naming convention will not match your old one.

The Escape: If this is the case with your new back end, then 301-permanent redirect all of the old URLs to their new counterparts if you can. If this is a practical impossibility, then review your analytics to find the landing page URLs within your website that receive direct search engine visitors, and redirect those. Also redirect any URLs that have links pointing to them from other sites. While it's best practice to redirect all URLs, those that don't receive any direct search engine traffic and don't have any external links are less important.

SEO Trap #2: Your Site Architecture

Your new website is likely to be sporting a brand new navigational scheme as well as an overall change of its site architecture (how each page links to each other). This is a key element in determining whether pages from your website will show up in the search results. For instance, if you take a page from your website that is currently featured in the main navigation (meaning that every page of the site links to it) and you feature it less prominently within your new website, don't be surprised if it doesn't show up in the search results for its targeted keyword phrases as it used to.

The Escape: You can tell the search engines which pages are the most important ones on your site by how you link to them. Be sure that the pages you are optimizing are linked from your main navigation so that they will receive the internal link popularity they deserve. They'll stand a much better chance at bringing you targeted visitors than those that are deeply buried.

SEO Trap #3: Your Content

If you hadn't previously optimized the content of your old site, I highly suggest doing so with your new site. This means that you research the keywords that people use at the search engines to find products or services like yours, and then use them strategically within each page of the website. Doing so will likely boost the targeted visitors to your site fairly quickly after going live.

On the other hand, if your existing site was fairly well optimized and already bringing targeted visitors, you'll need to be careful about the content that you change. While you shouldn't be afraid to make your content better, it may not be a good idea to completely rewrite old content that was working for you. You'd be surprised how many marketers decide to change their website messaging without even realizing that it was previously optimized to bring in targeted visitors.

Still, your website redesign is a good time to work on increasing your website conversions. All the targeted visitors in the world are of no use to you if they don't take any of the actions you'd like them to take. Rewriting some of your content to convert more visitors into buyers is a good thing as long as it doesn't decrease the number of those visitors. Again - this is where you'll need to review your analytics reports to determine which pages were your best performers.

The Escape: If you find that your existing page content was bringing in search engine traffic and conversions, think 10 times before changing it! If you're certain that your new content is much better and more in tune with your company's message, then try testing it against the old copy through a tool such as Google's Website Optimizer. You may be right, but you won't ever know for sure unless you test it.

The Booby Trap!

Don't forget that title tags are an important part of your content as well. Sadly, one of the most common mistakes during a redesign is to inadvertently lose all the previous title tags.

The Escape: Don't go live with your new site without proper (unique, relevant and keyword-rich) title tags in place on every page. You will absolutely take a huge traffic hit if you do. Make sure that your new CMS allows you to customize the title tags of every page as needed. If it doesn't, then find a new CMS that does. I can't stress this enough because title tags are so important to SEO. It's fine to dynamically generate them based on specific rules, but some pages may need their titles to be customized for best results.

These 3 traps are just a few of many you may face as you redesign your website. Don't be one of the many who wait to go live with their site and THEN call an SEO consultant for help. Bake your SEO into the new site from the start to avoid any loss of search engine visitors, while ideally increasing them. There's no reason why your visitor count should take a hit with a new design -- but only if you are prepared to avoid the traps!

Article by: Jill Whalen is the CEO of High Rankings (www.highrankings.com)