Zach Browne

Top Reasons to Use WordPress for Your Website

Zach Browne — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 22:51:55 +0000

As a WordPress Designer, I know that there are many necessary components to producing a holistic and highly effective website designs especially if your goal is to maximize traffic opportunities and convert visitors into clients. From choosing the right color schema and developing industry specific photography to building a wire frame and putting it all together on the WordPress CMS, WordPress offers your business a high-performance framework that will help you maintain a direct stream of traffic and make it easier to drive that stream of traffic to you.

I view a website like a elevator pitch. If you have 10 seconds to explain to someone holding hundreds of thousands of dollars and ready to invest in your company exactly what it is that you do, your website should not only be able to tell that investor, but also be able to capture their contact information or drive them to a desired call-to-action.

With the proper WordPress design, social media integration, and SEO plan, you should be able to break into new territory every day and WordPress is hands down the most scalable and integrative platform to do it with. The way it is designed makes it very simple to interconnect each component together like a puzzle.

Thing you should know about if you are considering it to build your website with WordPress:

WordPress Themes & Plugins: (WordPress, BuddyPress or bbPress) know the right direction in terms of what products and plugins will best fit your particular situation. Sites like VeterinaryConsultant.com, and RainWaterCollecting.com have been implemented with WordPress. Knowledge the availability of themes, plugins, and media sources will help make sure that you’ll have a clean and cutting edge website.
WordPress Theme Development & Implementation: Have a design style you absolutely love? A concept you’d like to see come to life? Or maybe an idea of how a widget should function on your website? WordPress can help take your concept to reality with a website that delivers your ideas, thoughts, and sentiment while maintaining the structure and functionality that your users demand.
WordPress Plugin Development & Implementation: From integrating SalesForce.com & aWeber to adding forums & complex forms, WordPress can handle complex plugin configurations that provides you and your clients an excellent user experience that flows smoothly. If you know your needs WordPress usually has existing plugins that will fit like a glove.
WordPress Migrations: If you are currently using a different platform other than WordPress and need to migrate your website or blog over, WordPress has built in functionality that allows you to export your content and an import it right into your new site. I’ve done this many times and would be glad to offer assistance.
WordPress SEO: SEO is by far the most important aspect of any long term website marketing strategy. From making sure your title tags are properly named to improving the load performance of your website (500ms improvement in load time yields up to 20% improvement in time on site and conversions), search engine optimization is at the core of appearing on Google and the other search engines when a potential client searches for something relative to your business. WordPress can fully optimize your website with it’s available themes and plugins.
WordPress Social Media: When it comes to social media WordPress has got you covered. It can integrate with all major social networks (and then some). Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube should all be part of your long term WordPress social media strategy and WordPress can deliver with very efficient and automated solutions.

When it comes to websites, WordPress is an excellent choice. With years of coding behind it now, easy migration-theme-plugin implementations & SEO at the punch of a few buttons, it’s got you covered.

13 Excellent WordPress Shopping Cart Plugins

Zach Browne — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 22:36:45 +0000

WordPress Shopping Carts have become a very popular extension of WordPress for individuals and businesses who would like to start selling their products or services online. With a few mouse clicks and some products, a shopping cart can turn your WordPress website into an online store ready for business. There are many shopping cart plugins available and they all offer many strengths and weaknesses. Picking one really comes down to a few simple questions.

Do you want to pay for it?
How configurable do you need it to be?
Do you need it to integrate with other services out there? i.e. Google Base, Payment Systems, etc.
Do you want it to be easy to use?

I have installed and configured a ton of shopping carts for WordPress and I’ve put together this list of shopping cart plugins that I’ve used at one time or another. Some are free and some cost a few bucks but they are all used for building an online store with WordPress.

I have to admit however that the PHPPurchase is probably my favorite for a number of reasons, primarily for their support, however I like to work with the plugins below. I’ve included a video from PHPPurchase’s website that goes over the features, it also does a pretty good job of explaining how shopping cart’s for WordPress work all around.

They all have their advantages and disadvantages, the best thing to do is a little research and make sure what ever product or service you are offering matches up with the feature set of the shopping cart plugin you end up using.

Here’s the PHPPurchase video I was talking about.

As you look over shopping cart solutions for WordPress, make sure to consider some of the following things.

Does it sell digital AND physical products?
Can it handle recurring payments for memberships, payment plans, etc?
Can you use “promo” or “coupon” codes for promotions you might want to do?
Is it highly configurable?
Is it highly customizable?
Is it SAFE?
Does it have good support just in case it’s not working properly?
Is the checkout process easy and fast?
Can it integrate with other plugins you might use such as email newsletters and image galleries?

What payment processors can it use? Here’s a small list of some of the more popular ones:

2CheckOut
Authorize.net
eMatters
eWay
First Data
Google Checkout
MoneyBookers
Ogone PSP
PayPal
Realex Payments

No matter what you decide, make sure you get help you installing it if you don’t know what you’re doing. All the different things to do like adding products, integrating it with your current or new site, configuring it, and customizing it can be a difficult task.

12 Best WordPress Plugins for SEO

Zach Browne — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 22:28:36 +0000

WordPress has an excellent line up of plugins for SEO and is by far the superior platform for online marketing. It can help you overcome a variety of your Internet marketing challenges by automating your tasks, freeing up your time, and most importantly – helping you rank on the search engines.

WordPress is the best framework available for SEO because:

Everyone Loves WordPress! – WordPress is such a popular and ubiquitously accepted platform that just about every company involved in the SEO world have developed an SEO plugin, theme, or something that will work with WordPress. Also most organizations that don’t have something to do with WordPress intend to down the road. So just the fact that organizations such as SEO Scribe, a SEO content provider, Google, & many others integrate directory with WordPress makes it an ideal choice to minimize the amount of work it takes to keep your site ranking.
Ease of Use – Traditionally someone like me would provide you with my SEO recommendations for your website and then I would hand them off to your web designer to update once approved. WordPress gives you the ability to make those changes yourself now, cutting the extra expense in half. It takes all but 20 minutes to login and update a few items versus waiting a few days for someone else to do it. And even if you don’t have time and would like someone else to update your website, the amount of time it takes is so much less that the 3 hours you would have been charged prior to using WordPress for SEO has now become less than an hour.
SEO Automation – WordPress does a tremendous job of automating the Search Engine Optimization tasks for a website project. It reduces the amount of manual coding a professional SEO or web designer would have to do and lets them concentrate on the more important elements of SEO like writing quality content, title tags, anchor text, latent semantic indexing (LSI), meta descriptions, & related posts. These are all methods WordPress has made very easy, even automated, so after initial set up the average person can generally keep up with the day-to-day SEO tasks that allow the Search Engines to clearly be aware of your content and what it is all about.
SEO Plugins – Plug-ins are additions to WordPress that add very useful and effective SEO features to your blog with out having to write any code or know about writing code. There are a number of excellent open source (free) plugins available for WordPress that can be added with a few clicks of the mouse. As a matter of fact I believe the most important aspect of WordPress is the ability to use plugins for SEO. There are lots of plugins that essentially do the same thing but after years of using all of them I have a standard group of specific plugins that I implement on all my WordPress websites.

12 Best SEO plugins for WordPress:

wpSEO – Paid but awesome. wpSEO is just hands down the best SEO plugin for WordPress, period. It’s features are extensive and it’s just amazing really. Well worth the cost.
All-In-One-SEO Pack Free or Pro – Definitely the best free SEO plugin that just about works out of the box with no customization although with a few tweeks here and there you can get it exactly the way you want it. The free version of AIOS works well but the Pro version removes all the ads from the admin section and contributes back to the developer who has put a tremendous amount of work into it.
Smart 404 – A complex but simple to implement plugin that handles all HTTP errors your website has from time to time. The most common type of error is when a page cannot be found, due to a bad link, mistyped URL, etc.. So this plugin uses some AJAX code, Google Search API’S, and a few tricks to display a very helpful and Search-Engine Optimized Error Page. The default displays Google Search Results for images, news, blogs, videos, web, custom search engine, and your own site. It also searches for part of the requested filename that was not found, but it attaches your domain to the search for SEO and greater results.
cbnet Ping Optimizer – Helps your website notify all the ping services available. This encourages search engines to index your website and I’ve always seen improvement in traffic after I install this. It also, more importantly, keeps your website from unnecessary pinging which can get your site listed as a spammer. Must have. Just be sure to use a fresh list of pinging sites in it like this one.
Google XML Sitemaps – An absolute must if you want the search engines to accurately index your website. Again this one works pretty much out of the box but adjusting a couple of settings like adding a Yahoo Application ID and enablling Categories to be indexed are a couple of tweeks to consider. I work under the philosophy that using categories to index your site is much better than tags. So make sure to let the search engine bots find your categories and noindex your tags.
SEO Friendly Images – Automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images. Improves traffic from search results and makes them W3C/xHTML valid as well.
SEO Slugs – Removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve SEO.
SEO Smart Links – SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more.
Ultimate Noindex Nofollow Tool – Improves your blog’s search engine optimization by “noindexing” pages you choose.
WP-Auto Add Tags – As you publish or edit a post, the plugin gathers and sets the tags suitable for your post based, on your content. (Used in combonation with WP-Auto Trackback Sender
WP-Auto Trackback Sender – Sends trackbacks towards similar blog posts based on your post tags/categories. If you edit the post, the plugin will send trackbacks only using the new defined tags/categories. You can also set the plugin to look for specific post language.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Returns a list of related entries based on a unique algorithm for display on your blog and RSS feeds.

WordPress Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is by far the most important aspect of any long term WordPress website marketing strategy. From making sure your title tags are properly named to improving the load performance of your website (500ms improvement in load time yields up to 20% improvement in time on site and conversions), optimizing your website with WordPress and search engine optimization is at the core of appearing on Google and the other search engines when a potential client searches for something relevant to your business.

12 Free Website Analytics Tools

Zach Browne — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 22:17:59 +0000

This is a list of free website analysis tools & resources that will help you understand and improve the performance of your website. It is an evolving list so grab the feed to watch for changes.

Woopra

This is a service that provides a cutting edge, real-time interactive dashboard that you can use to interact and chat with your visitors as they peruse your website. It provides so many statistics and options I can’t even begin to list them here. It’s fun to watch visitors come to your website, look at the country they are visiting from, and see which pages they visit and how long they stay. I highly recommend this tool. It’s free for the basic service and it integrates with WordPress and other CMS platforms easily.

http://www.woopra.com/

Statcounter

This is an invisible hit counter that will provide you with some real-time statistics on how many visits and visitors you are getting to your website. It will also tell you when they came, what links they used to get there, what keywords they used in search engines to find your site, what browser they used, what OS they used, what screen resolution they used, your most popular web pages and more. This provides a more detailed analysis than the stats programs typically offered with web hosting packages (some of which require you to be some kind of rocket scientist to figure out how to customize). Statcounter’s free service is intended for all those whose websites receive 250,000 page loads per month or less.

http://www.statcounter.com/

Google Analytics

Although designed primarily for those running Adwords campaigns, GoogleAnalytics will provide detailed website traffic reports for anybody and any website. All you need to do is sign up for a Google account (free) and you’re in business. Google Analytics provides detailed statistics about traffic to individual pages, average time spent on each page, bounce rate (how often a user hits one page on your site and then leaves), page entry and exit stats, keywords most often used in search engines to get to your pages and much, much more. Not nearly as idiot proof as Statcounter (see above) but the stats are much more indepth and can be used to set up a comprehensive ROI analysis if you’ve spent considerable time and/or money getting traffic to your site.

http://www.google.com/analytics/

W3C Markup Validation Service

This is a free service you can use to analyze all the HTML tags in your web pages to see if they conform with W3C Recommendations (uh oh… heh heh…). This has a number of uses including making sure your web page is cross-browser compatible and spotting those errors you’ve made that are making your web page look all cockeyed. You can have it check web pages by either inputting a URL to your site, inputting HTML code into a text box or uploading files from your computer.

http://validator.w3.org/

W3C CSS Validation Service

This is a free service you can use to analyze all the CSS you use in or along with your web pages to see if it conforms with the W3C Recommendations. After the analysis, if your CSS is good (according to their specifications) then it’s termed as valid CSS. You can validate your CSS by inputting a URL to your site, directly inputting code or by uploading files from your computer.

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

AWStats

AWStats is a free powerful and featureful tool that generates advanced web, streaming, ftp or mail server statistics, graphically. This log analyzer works as a CGI or from command line and shows you all possible information your log contains, in few graphical web pages. It uses a partial information file to be able to process large log files, often and quickly. It can analyze log files from all major server tools like Apache log files (NCSA combined/XLF/ELF log format or common/CLF log format), WebStar, IIS (W3C log format) and a lot of other web, proxy, wap, streaming servers, mail servers and some ftp servers.

http://awstats.sourceforge.net/

Netcraft

This free service will tell you what OS and what server software your web host is running. If your site is requested frequently enough, it will also tell you its uptime. You can check this information for Iron Spider by clicking on the image below:

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph

Web Page Analyzer

This free service will spit out a complete rundown on how fast your web page loads according to various connection speeds. It will also give you a detailed readout of the combined file size of all items used on your page (e.g. HTML files, CSS files, Javascript files, images, etcetera) and then issue advisories to cut back based on how well you do. (And yes I know… My web pages here at Iron Spider are getting ‘fat’. I’m working on it… *ahem* … heh heh…)

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

DNS Stuff

This site has —among many other things— the best WHOIS lookup service I know of that can tell you what exists in your domain name’s WHOIS public profile. It’s important to check this now and then if only to make sure that the contact email you gave when you registered your domain name is an email address that you still frequently use. Many a domain name has expired simply because the domain name owner didn’t get a renewal notice.

http://www.dnsstuff.com/

Browser Statistics

This has nothing to do with your site directly but nevertheless will furnish you with a detailed monthly update on what web browsers, operating systems, screen resolutions, color depth and Javascript capabilities people on the internet are using these days. This is invaluable to you when building and analyzing your web site as it’s paramount to keep abreast of the latest trends and then adjust accordingly.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Service Uptime

Here’s a great uptime monitoring service that will email you if your website becomes unavailable. Their free service will perform a check every 30 minutes 24/7 on one domain. You can also have the option to change the domain name that is being checked (i.e. you’re not obliged to stick with the domain name that you initially set up).

http://www.serviceuptime.com/

Mint

Mint is an extensible, self-hosted web site analytics program. Its interface is an exercise in simplicity. Visits, referrers, popular pages and searches can all be taken in at a glance on Mint’s flexible dashboard.

http://www.haveamint.com/

7 Great Reasons to Use WordPress

Zach Browne — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 22:14:05 +0000

People who embrace WordPress are using the easiest CMS (content management system) available. It can be shaped and diced and makes managing your website content as easy as using Microsoft Word.

7 Reasons to Choose WordPress

It’s Open Source

WordPress is an Open Source» software which allows it to be used free of cost. You can use it on any kind of personal or commercial website without have to pay a single dime for it. It is built on PHP/MySQL (which is again Open Source) and licensed under GPL.

Easy to Manage

You don’t really have to be experienced to use WordPress on your website. Nowadays most of the hosting companies provide the ability to install WordPress on your site at a single click of the mouse. The administration section is easy to navigate and its even easy to add articles/content to your website.

Supports Hundreds of Thousands of Themes

You will never run short of templates when using WordPress. If you don’t like the themes that come with the default installation of WordPress, you can hunt on the Internet and you will find thousands of free themes that you can download and use for your website. There are themes which can even make your website look like a regular site instead of a blog.

Supports over 7000 Plugins

WordPress plugins allow you to do just about anything that you want and can be installed in a jiffy. For example, you want to paginate your blog posts, just look on Google and you can easily find the relevant plugin that will easily do the job for you.

It’s Standards Compliant

WordPress is one software that follows all the Web Standards and keeps your blog or website compliant to all the rules that have to be followed when running a website.

It’s Very SEO Friendly

Search Engines have to be definitely kept in mind when building a website. WordPress uses different functions which allow it to be search engine friendly. For example sending pings to other sites, making categories, tagging your posts, use of h1/h2 tags etc.

It has a Huge Support Community

As per recent statistics, WordPress is used on more than 1% of the websites on the Internet in the world. There is a large user community backing the development of this software. So, whenever you face any problems, you can go through all the available WordPress forums and communities and find answers for all your questions.

Whether you are looking for a full-fledged WordPress CMS website, WordPress template design & development, WordPress custom extensions or WordPress bug fixing and support, finding someone to help you is always easy. Make sure you consider WordPress for your next website project.

HubSpot vs WordPress, is HubSpot Worth It?

9 Factors to Consider When Hiring a Freelance SEO

Zach Browne — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 22:47:57 +0000

There are many factors to consider when hiring a freelance SEO consultant to provide SEO for your organization. Making sure you’re working with someone who is competent and experienced can be the difference between going to a 3rd world country to have surgery or using a specialized surgeon in New York City. When you deal with something as important as search engine optimization, you need to make sure you don’t cut corners or the long term effects can devastate your business.

The factors that need to be considered are for the most part pretty basic but yet they are overlooked regularly. Essentially search engine optimization is a fundamental means of content organization with weight given to specific factors required by the search engine’s algorithms. If all the factors are met, and new content and links are being built each month, you’ll have a successful website if your goals are not too aggressive. Although it is possible if you have some experience, skill and training to optimize your own website, using a professional can increase your website’s performance much more than you might expect. Although it is possible to tune factors and see immediate effects, usually each change progresses over weeks and months. Read below to find out how one should conduct SEO on any particular website. I realize there are many more factors but I’m talking about a 50,000 foot over view here.

Keyword Research

Before SEO can occur, all primary keywords and keyword phrases must be chosen. This is the most critical factor as it must be relevant to the website’s purpose as well as something people will enter into the search engines when searching for your products or services. This can be a very difficult task to carry out and is by far the most important part of any SEO campaign.

Keywords in Title Tags

It may be a basic concept, putting your main keyword phrases inside your title tags, but I assure you it is overlooked on the majority of websites. Just do a search for anything you want and then hit Ctrl-U (in FireFox & Chrome) and look for the title tags, they look like this < title >keywords< /title >. Anyone in the industry knows how important this is, especially now in 2010, but time after time it is not done. Make sure to watch your title tags and that of your competitions to determine if the keyword density is higher or lower. Adjust your copy to increase or reduce the density of the particular keyword phrase you are working with.

Link Popularity

This is one of the most important factors to consider when conducting SEO. Determining the number of websites, type of website, and the website’s authority is very important to track and you need to devise a long term strategy to increase that number. Each link is seen as a vote to the search engines. Typically the more votes you have, the higher you’ll rank. There are so many ways to get links it is amazing, but an SEO’s job is to make sure you not only have links, but that the quality and relativity of those links match with your particular niche.

Anchor Text

Another very important factor is what the actual text that contains the hyperlink from other sites linking to yours contain. For instance if you own a daycare, then you would want other sites to create a hyperlink to your site with the word “daycare” in it. Not only does it help the user know where they are clicking, but it makes for a higher vote to Google because the text in the links is checked for relevance and Google wants its users to have the most precise experience possible.

Domain Age

The age of the domain you use for your website is also a very important factor and can be compared with your competitors sites as well. Older, established sites will typically rank higher. So you might look at purchasing an aged domain and pointing it to your website.

Keyword Density

A factor that is also judged by the search engines is the use of your target keyword phrase in your content. Also how many words in your content are similar to your main keywords. Or how many synonyms do you have throughout the page that would infer the relativity of your target phases. The components that are included are; body text, H1 Headers, H2-H6, domain name, URL, Image ALT tags, anchor text, external links, meta description, meta keywords (not too much any more), the first sentence of the page, and HTML comments (many more). All these factors have specific rules about their attributes to the page and it is actually pretty easy to have too high a keyword density.

Social Networking

Search engines prioritize links from many social networks. A professional SEO stays on top of which networks and how important certain networks are to be in daily contact with.

Server Speed

Another factor that is now more important than ever is how fast your website loads. Google’s new algorithm change, called Caffeine, takes this strongly into consideration. Google’s main goal is to deliver a fast, relevant result to it’s user based on their search criteria among other things. If your site is slow, and the average person spends 5 seconds waiting for a website to load, you might see why this has become so important. If we need to add a cache, compress your site or conduct a number of other methods to increase your site’s speed, then that’s what we’ll do.

Website Traffic

The more popular your site is, the more it is indexed, the higher it is ranked, and the more money you ultimately make. An SEO’s goal should be to make sure you are getting a steady stream of qualified traffic to the right pages.

Advanced Search Engine Optimization

In general, the factors described above are basic requirements for SEO. Some of the ways an SEO might add value is to look at things that others might not. For example, I always take into account how many trailing slashes are in the URLs, whether your site has valid HTML by W3C standards, see if the pages are compatible from search engine to search engine and browser to browser, what the readability level is, and spam factors that might affect your website negatively.

It can be seen from the above that even basic SEO can be an overwhelmingly time consuming and difficult process if not done using the assistance of someone who knows how to navigate this subject. Making sure all these factors are in sync on every page and every page is in sync with the rest of your site is labor intensive.

It also needs to be looked at each month and updated constantly. Hiring someone to do this for you is most likely your best option if you want to succeed in this competitive search landscape we call the Internet.

No related posts.

Get 50 New Clients a Year With Social Media Networks

Zach Browne — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 00:52:53 +0000

Developing a social media strategy and integrating it with your website has become a necessity to stay competitive and stretch beyond the reach of what having a normal website can offer you. The larger social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube all have plugins for most major CMS platforms that will tightly integrate your daily activity with the press of a button or two. If you don’t have a Social Media strategy in place then check out some of the social network integrations that can help you achieve more traffic and brand recognition.

Facebook Page Development & Ads:With 400 million active users and 1.6 million businesses using Facebook as part of their marketing strategy, Facebook is a force to be reckoned with. Surpassing even Google now in users and being the only other domain scoring a “10″ for Google’s PR algorithm, Facebook should be an intricate part of your online presence. Facebook should definitely be part of your overall marketing strategy.
LinkedIn Network Development:LinkedIn has fast become the strongest business social network to be part of. I read recently that their net worth is now in the billions. Everyone involved in corporate or entrepreneurial life has a profile on LinkedIn and is using it daily to make new business connections, find jobs and create a personal brand for themselves. My own about page is a direct LinkedIn integration. If I change my LinkedIn profile it automatically updates my WordPress about page. If you’re going to choose any one particular social network to start with, LinkedIn for WordPress should be the beginning of your social media goals. It establishes that you are who you say you are and can help you get your business off the ground.
Twitter Background Design and Twitter Marketing:Who would of ever thought typing in 140 characters to tell the world what you are doing would ever come this far, but it has. Twitter is a ubiquitous global presence used every day all over the world, including media outlets and their programming. Every journalist, entrepreneur, and blogger advertise their Twitter addresses now just like a phone number and businesses are soaking up the opportunity to reach out to a new and technically savvy audience that did not exist a couple of years ago. I have over 13,000 Twitter followers and counting that help me get way more visitors than I had before I started my Twitter venture. It also helps me maximize my personal exposure and drives new leads for me.
YouTube Channel Design and Marketing:YouTube gets over 2 billion views every day, has 24 hours of video uploaded every minute, and the average person spends over 15 minutes a day on YouTube. In terms of marketing dollars, YouTube’s ability to reach your target audience with a compelling message is so much less expensive than any other traditional media that it’s literally a “must have”. Not using YouTube’s power to drive new businesses is like saying no to free money. It far surpasses that of any other form of marketing when implemented properly and the best part is that your customers or potential customers get to know you before they contact you. It is the strangest thing to have someone say when they call you, “I’m ready to move forward” with out having to be sold! I’ve spent the last year working on very large video projects that have hit mainstream viewing numbers with just a flip camera. You can achieve some great results and build a brand for yourself or your business very easily and just with a little sweat and hard work.

When it comes to Social Media these networks really have you covered. Integrating your CMS platform with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, & YouTube should definitely be part of your long term online marketing strategy and the return is by far worth the effort.

HOW TO: Get the Most Out of Your Business Facebook Page

Zach Browne — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 14:59:30 +0000

Sometimes I run across blog posts I feel make an excellent read for my readers, and this one by guest author Susan Payton on Mashable.com is definitely worth your time.

Susan Payton is the President of Egg Marketing & Public Relations, an Internet marketing firm. She blogs at The Marketing Eggspert Blog. Follow her on Twitter @eggmarketing.

So you paid attention to what everyone is saying and you created aFacebook Page for your business. You’ve got your press release links, photos and videos … but no one seems to care. What are you supposed to do now?

You’re on the right track, so congratulate yourself. A lot of small business owners don’t even bother to create a page — they’re simply not “on” Facebook.

Continue Reading on Mashable

8 Easy Steps to Create Your Corporate Facebook Page

8 Easy Steps to Create Your Corporate Facebook Page

Zach Browne — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 02:22:06 +0000

Your Facebook Page is your brand’s official social network community. It should represent what your company is, who you are serving, why they should care, and where they can go to learn more or take further action. When people become fans of your Facebook Page, their friends are notified via News Feeds. If they click on the story, they are taken to your Facebook Page. Pages are also often used as the landing page for social ads.

Here are eight simple steps for getting started:

1. Register for a Facebook account. To create a Page or buy ads, you have to sign up for a Facebook business account.

2. Create a new Page.

Most products and services fall under the “Brand or Product” category. If you are a smaller business focused on a specific location, you can select the “Local” option, which Facebook has defined mostly for service oriented businesses who cater to a particular city. The last option is for artists, bands, and other public figures, such as politicians and celebrities. Once you have come up with a strategy and your set of content, actually creating a new Facebook Page is fairly straightforward. Just specify the name and type, and Facebook will generate a page template with blank sections for a company picture, description, wall, photo, video, and notes.

3. Upload a picture, provide basic information, and customize the look and feel.

Use a large, high-resolution logo for your picture. Grainy pictures look unprofessional. Next, provide basic information about your company, such as when it was founded, a link to your website, company overview, mission, and list of products. To make it more entertaining and stand out, it’s not a bad idea to also include interesting facts such as celebrity customers, funny quotes, and brand trivia. Last, but not least, you can use Facebook Markup Language (FBML) to customize the Page’s look and feel using HTML and Flash. You might want to make this consistent with your brand look and feel elsewhere. Some companies choose to purposely create a completely different look and feel to bring fresh perspective to the brand.

4. Add engaging content, platform apps, and opportunities for interaction.

Before you make the Page public, seed it with interactive content and apps, such as polls, petitions, games, contests, slideshows, and surveys, to inspire engagement. Platform applications can be added to Facebook Pages just like they are added to a person’s profile. In addition, you should write a “welcome” message on the wall, post relevant links, seed discussion board topics by posing open-ended questions like “what are your thoughts on X?”, upload photos, and add your blog’s RSS feed to the Note tab. When you are ready, publish the Page so that it becomes public, shows up in search results, and becomes viewable by others.

5. Recruit early fans.

Make sure to become a fan of your own Page, and ask your employees, friends, and acquaintances to do the same. It’s important to seed the Page with a critical mass of fans before going out to the public and recruiting new people. You want people being exposed to your brand orPage for the first time to feel like it’s dynamic and in high demand.

6. Promote your Page to get more fans.

You can help promote your page using Facebook Ads. Another popular technique is to include a link to your page in your e-mail signatures, website, blogs, and other customer or prospect touch points so they know where to find you on Facebook.

7. Moderate the community by periodically updating content and responding toposts.

At least once a week, refresh content with new surveys, contests,videos, photos, articles, and announcements. Hopefully, you will have developed these for other channels such as your website. You can reuse them here. Less frequently, you might want to check out new platform apps to add and switch out old ones. Respond where appropriate to user-generated content, such as wall posts and forum messages, especially if someone asks aquestion that has not received a response. Dynamic content is best at keeping users engaged, so select content that is timely, recent, and preferably multimedia. People will keep coming back to your Page only if you give them reasons todo so. If your Page is stale, you will lose people’s attention and potentially even hurt your brand. Set the right expectations for your community according to the high-level strategy you developed, and then make sure you follow through on the commitment.

8. Consider different Pages for different audiences.

Just like you might create multiple landing pages in traditional online marketing to tailor your message tospecific audiences, you might consider creating multiple Facebook Pages. There are trade-offs to maintaining more than one Page, so it might not make sense in every case. If you do decide to support multiple Pages, keep in mind you can reuse elements across Pages, such as streaming blog updates,video, and apps.

I really hope this helps you get started on launching you first corporate Facebook Page. If you need any help, be sure to contact me.

Related Blogs

No related posts.

7 Tips for Writing the Perfect Blog Post

Zach Browne — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 06:37:25 +0000

The title may be rather an old cliché by now, but it’s still true—content is king. Let’s look at issues surrounding content creation, and discuss some techniques and methods to help you produce the best content you can. Images and videos are important, but still for many web users, WordPress blogging is all about text—that’s what we’ll be focusing on here.

Let’s begin with some basic writing tips for all bloggers. Although you may be familiar with some of these already, it’s as well to re-focus your attention on them and ensure that you are applying them as part of your blogging routine. We then look at ways of organizing your content in a user-friendly way by using categories and tags. I’ll examine the apparently subtle differences between the two and ensure that you’re using them correctly.

Tips for Writing a WordPress Blog Post

The first thing to consider regarding content is the quality of your writing itself. Good writing takes practice. The best way to learn is to study the work of other good writers and bloggers, and by doing so, develop an ear for a good sentence. However, there are guidelines to bear in mind that apply specifically to blogs, and we’ll look at some of these here.

Excellent Headlines

Ask any newspaper editor and they will tell you that good newspaper headlines are an art. This is equally true for blogs. Your headlines are the post titles and it’s very important to get them right.

Headlines should be right to the point. You should try to convey the essence of the post in its title. Remember that blogs are often consumed quickly, and readers will use your post titles to decide if they want to carry on reading. People tend to scan through blogs, so the titles play a big part in helping them pick which posts they might be interested in.

Your post titles also have a part to play in search engine optimization. Many search engines will use them to index your posts.

As more and more people are using WordPress RSS feeds to subscribe to blogs it becomes even more important to make your post titles as descriptive and informative as possible. Many RSS readers and aggregators only display the post title, so it’s essential that you convey as much information as possible whilst keeping it short and snappy.

Length of Your Posts

Try to keep your posts manageable in terms of their word count. It’s difficult to be prescriptive about post lengths. There’s no one size fits all rule in WordPress blogging. You need to gauge the length of your posts based on your subject matter and target audience. There may be an element of experimentation to see how posts of different lengths are received by your readership. As with headlines, bear in mind that most people tend to read blogs fairly quickly and they may be put off by an overly long post.

An important factor in controlling the length of your posts is your writing skills. You will find that as you improve as a writer, you will be able to get your points across using fewer words. Good writing is all about making your point as quickly and concisely as possible. Inexperienced writers often feel the urge to embellish their sentences and use long, complicated phrases. This is usually unnecessary and when you read back that long sentence, you might see a few words that can be cut.

Editing your WordPress posts is an important process. At the very least you should always proofread them before clicking the Publish button. Better still; try to get into the habit of actively editing everything you write. If you know someone who is willing to act as an editor for you, that’s great. It’s always useful to get some feedback on your writing.

Frequency of Posting to Your WordPress Blog

Again, there are no rules set in stone about how frequently you should post. You will probably know from your own experience of other blogs that this varies tremendously from blogger to blogger. Some bloggers post several times a day and others just once a week or less.

Figuring out the correct frequency of your posts is likely to take some trial and error. It will depend on your subject matter and how much you have to say about it. The length of your posts may also have a bearing on this. If you like to write short posts that make just one main point, you may find yourself posting quite regularly. Or, your may prefer to save up your thoughts and get them down in one longer post.

As a general rule of thumb, try to post at least twice a week. Any less than this
and there is a danger your readers will lose interest in your blog. However, it’s extremely important not to post just for the sake of it. This is likely to annoy readers and they may very well delete your feed from their news reader. As with many issues in blogging, post frequency is a personal thing. You should aim to strike a balance between posting once in a blue moon and subjecting your readers to crap.

Almost as important as getting the post frequency right is fine-tuning the timing of your posts, that is, the time you publish them. Once again, you can achieve this by knowing your target audience. Who are they, and when are they most likely to sit down in front of their computers and read your blog? If most of your readers are office workers, then it makes sense to have your new posts ready for them when they switch on their workstations in the morning.

Maybe your blog is aimed at stay-at-home moms, in which case a good time to post might be mid-morning when the kids have been dropped off at school, the supermarket run is over, and the first round of chores are done. If you blog about gigs, bars, and nightclubs in your local area, the readers may well include twenty-something professionals who access your blog on their smart phones while riding the subway home—a good time to post for them might be late afternoon.

Links to Other WordPress Blogs

Links to other bloggers and websites are an important part of your content. Not only are they great for your blog’s search engine findability, they also help to establish your place in the blogosphere. Blogging is all about linking to others and the resulting ‘conversations’.

Try to avoid over-using popular links that appear all over the Web, and instead introduce your readers to new websites and blogs that they may not have heard of. Admittedly, this is difficult nowadays with so many bloggers linking to each other’s posts, but the more original you can be, the better. This may take quite a bit of research and trawling through the lower-ranked pages on search engines and indices, but it could be time well spent if your readers come to appreciate you as a source of new content beyond your own blog. Try to focus on finding blogs in your niche or key topic areas.

Establishing a Rhythm

Tone and voice are two concepts that professional writers are constantly aware of and are attempting to improve. An in-depth discussion isn’t necessary here, but it’s worth being aware of them. The concept of ‘tone’ can seem rather esoteric to the non-professional writer but as you write more and more, it’s something you will become increasingly aware of.

For our purposes, we could say the ‘tone’ of a blog post is all about the way it feels or the way the blogger has pitched it. Some posts may seem very informal; others may be straight-laced, or appear overly complex and technical. Some may seem quite simplistic, while others come across as advanced material.

These are all matters of tone. It can be quite subtle, but as far as most bloggers are concerned, it’s usually a matter of formal or informal. How you pitch your writing boils down to understanding your target audience. Will they appreciate informal, first-person prose or should you keep it strictly third person, with no slang or casual language? On blogs, a conversational tone is often the most appropriate.

With regards to ‘voice’, this is what makes your writing distinctly yours. Writers who develop a distinct voice become instantly recognizable to readers who know them. It takes a lot of practice to develop and is not something you can consciously aim for; it just happens as you gain more experience. The only thing you can do to help it along is step back from your writing and ask yourself if any of your habits stand in the way of clarity.

While you read back your blog posts imagine yourself as one of your target readers and consider whether they would appreciate the language and style you’ve used. Employing tone and voice well is all about getting inside their heads and producing content they can relate to.

The Structure of a Blog Post

This may not apply to very short posts that don’t go further than a couple of brief paragraphs, but for anything longer, it’s worth thinking about a structure. The classic form is ‘beginning, middle, and end’. Consider what your main point or argument is, and get it down in the first paragraph. In the middle section expand on it and back it up with secondary arguments. At the end reinforce it, and leave no doubt in the reader’s mind what it is you’ve been trying to say.

As we’ve already mentioned, blogs are often read quickly or even just scanned through. Using this kind of structure, which most people are sub-consciously aware of, can help them extract your main points quickly and easily.

Always End With a Question

You may have already applied the ‘beginning, middle, and end’ structure, but that’s not necessarily the best place to end a post. Many bloggers finish with a question. This is a great way of soliciting comments. If it’s an interesting or provocative question, it may persuade those readers who only scanned quickly through your post to go back and digest it in more detail, so that they can give an answer to your question and join the debate.

Based on the writing tips we’ve looked at, there are a few common themes that keep popping up. This check list will help you to keep them in mind:

Know your target audience and try to get inside their heads.
Ask yourself if each post is truly relevant to your audience.
Are you posting frequently enough (or too frequently)?
Are your posts too long?
Make sure you include plenty of links to other blogs and websites (but try to restrict this to 100 outgoing links per page, for SEO reasons).
Consider whether your tone and voice are appropriate for your target audience and how they could apply to your brand identity.
Have you applied a structure to your post?
Could you add a question at the end of your post?

Remember that the art of blog writing requires plenty of practice, but the points we have covered should help to get you on your way. The key is to constantly analyze your writing and ask yourself how it can be improved.

Using Document Sharing Sites to Build Quality Backlinks to Your Website