Tamar Weinberg’s The New Community Rules, Marketing on the Social Web is an excellent primer for getting an overview of marketing your business online and it’s a great book to help your business begin to get noticed online. I read this is just a couple of days, and found it very helpful.
*The books I’ll recommend are available for instant upload via Kindle or iBooks
Of course there is always more to come, and if you would like to recommend a book or a blog post, please know you are more than welcome to participate!
If you blog for your business’ website, and you should, or if you just blog for fun, attracting readers is a difficult task in this world of millions of blogs. Of course there are all the standard ideas for attracting eyes to your blog, though it seems no one has come up with a fresh idea in a while, one aspect that will streamline getting your posts in front of people is using Twitter to announce a new post. A few thousand followers, coupled with a great post title and great content can increase your readership immediately.
Here’s how you can set it up so when you post, HootSuite will automatically Tweet it for you–how awesome is that!
Click the Launch Bar, go to Settings, and select “RSS/Atom”.
From here, click the button that says, “Add New Feed”.*
Paste the RSS feed URL into the text field underneath where it says “Feed URL”.
Then select which social profiles you want the RSS feed to post to by clicking the pertinent avatars.
When done, click the “Save Feed” button.
*Be sure that the feed URL ends in “/feed”
**On Tuesday July 5th, we will have a post that discusses streaming your blog posts automatically to your Facebook Business Page–not your personal wall. Be sure and sign up to receive our blog via email so you never miss a tip!
***If you have any suggestions for posts, please be sure and let me know through the comment section or the Contact Us Form.
Many of us repeatedly question Facebook’s motives and reach. As the social networking site approaches 700 million users, they have rolled out a new feature that scares more than a few people–even prompting the EU privacy regulators to take a closer look. So, what is it? It’s Facebook’s new facial recognition software that does away with the cumbersome manual “phototagging,” where each person in each photo had to be tagged by the uploader by hand. The new facial recognition software, that is now is turned on by default, will auto-tag all images that users now upload. Kind of creepy, don’t you think?
Okay, so as you probably are concerned about Facebook and your privacy, as you should be, here’s the down and dirty on how to disable Facebook’s facial recognition feature:
1. Under the “Account” drop-down menu at the top right, click “Privacy Settings.”
2. In the “Sharing on Facebook” section, click on “Customize Settings.”
3. Scroll down to “Suggest Photos of Me to Friends” and click “Edit Settings.”
4. In the drop-down on the right, click “Disable.”
I hope this little bit helps, and you feel more secure on Facebook
Are you ever curious about how images and information about people seems to follow them whenever they post or appear on the web–there is that same picture, and linkable information. Would you like to have the same capability, essentially to have your image, or avatar, and information that links back to your site, appear automatically for you?
You can! There is a free service called Gravatar, and here’s a quick introduction to how it works and how simple it is to set up.
Webvantix recently built a website for a company that’s been around for over twenty years. They had an existing site, but they knew it was not doing what they needed it to do to create new business, nor was it doing anything to enhance their customer’s experience. They needed a online vehicle that gave their site visitors the ability to quickly find what they needed, execute, and move on to the next part of their day.
So, what does that all mean? It meant that we as a development company had to create a website that spoon fed their site’s visitors. Now, instead of spending precious time digging for information, or not being able to make a simple reservation online, all is a quick click away, and their customers are raving and beyond happy.
Therefore I must pose this question: Are you spoon feeding your site’s visitors?
Consider these three key elements:
1. Does your homepage ‘silo’ your visitors to the correct landing pages that meets their specific need?
2. Do you give visitors the ability to contact you with a lead capture form on each page–not just a Contact Us page.
3. Do you capture valuable information about your potential customers, or do you just offer an email link and a phone number. (Quick tip–people hate the phone–it’s too slow!)
We are currently writing a brief whitepaper that addresses structuring your website to create leads and customers. Stay tuned for its release, it will have some helpful advice.
To make sure you don’t miss the release of the whitepaper, sign up to receive our blog posts via email HERE.
I hope this little bit helps, and if you have some ideas on building a better website, please share them with everyone here!
I thought I would give some additional attention to WordPress security plugins that we recommend, as security, whether for large multi-national companies or small individual blogs, is such an important factor, yet is often overlooked–especially at the individual level. Of course, we would all be upset to be hacked and all the hours of blogging be lost!
I recently read a great post on website security entitled How to Keep Your Blog Hacker, Spammer and Spyware Free on ProBlogger written by Sean Sullivan ofF-Secure and thought I would expand a bit on a few of the WordPress plugins he mentioned, as we use them at Webvantix, and recommend them to our customers.
One of my absolute favorites is the plugin Limit Login Attempts. This is a simple plugin that when installed and activated will limit the number of login attempts to your site, then after the preset number of failed attempts will lock the ability to login for a customizable about of time. It will also automatically email the site’s administrators when a specific and customizable number of login fails are reached. This is key to inhibiting brute force attacks on your blog/website as WordPress does not limit the number of attempts to login.
I couldn’t help that title, but I have been noticing that Internet security seems to be an ever growing problem. So, although I have not done much technical blogging lately, I thought this would be a great place to pick up again. I will be posting on several security related issue in the near future, including WordPress Plugins that can help you lock down your blog. Stay tuned.
For those of you interested in a great added layer of security for Gmail, check out the video below that discusses Google’s new 2-Step Verification process–Brilliant!
If you have a security issue you would like to have addressed, please feel welcome to comment.
Preston Ehrler, Webvantix
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My name is Preston Ehrler and I started Webvantix to bring professional website design and website redesign to businesses that desperately needed help. Additionally, Webvantix blogs about ideas and tips for marketing your business online. Our team is comprised of individuals who are highly skilled in the fields of social media marketing, design, coding and programming. If you need our help, or simply have a question, we welcome your contact!
My name is Preston Ehrler and I started Webvantix to bring professional website design and website redesign to businesses that desperately needed help. Additionally, Webvantix blogs about ideas and tips for marketing your business online. Our team is comprised of individuals who are highly skilled in the fields of social media marketing, design, coding and programming. If you need our help, or simply have a question, we welcome your contact!
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