Social Media Blog | Internet Marketing Blog

Comment Luv

October 24, 2011 By Terri 12 Comments

I LOVE Comment Luv! How about you? That almost sounds like a cheer doesn’t it?

But I do really love the plugin, CommentLuv and there is a hot new WordPress plugin coming soon! Cathy Stucker is giving away a free copy at her book marketing site, SellingBooks. Learn how you can enter and win by visiting Cathy’s CommentLuv Premium giveaway page.

If you are not familiar with this plugin, it builds backlinks, increases traffic to your blog, makes it easier for your readers to share your posts on Facebook, Twitter and others social networking sites and leaves a link for your last post on any other blog you comment on that has the plugin installed.

I highly suggest you take a look at this plugin and install it on your WordPress site. You’ll LUV it!

The New Facebook Timeline – An Online Scrapbook

September 27, 2011 By Terri 2 Comments

As I sat in my office watching the Live Feed from Facebook’s F8 Conference last week, I quickly saw the new Timeline being much like an online scrapbook. I love to scrapbook and have gotten together with friends to share stamps, templates and other embellishments for by books. But the one thing I don’t do with my scrap-booking is to…Keep It Up To Date! I’m terrible about this. I have really good intentions, but I put it off and put it off until my children are grown and all the wonderful events of their life are outdated, so why put that book together now?

Well, with the new Facebook Timeline, (and everyone should remember this, you don’t HAVE to put your life out there, it’s your choice) I can can go all the way back to my birth and start building my life online. I’m not so sure that I want everything out there or if I even want to go back that far. But I have that option now.

And there are Apps that will make the Facebook experience more like a community. We can share music, movies, books and videos with each other and even watch them together and chat about them, all from within Facebook. Be careful, not to make yourself a hermit with this feature and never go out to a real theater or bookstore. You still need human touchy-feely relationships.

Here is a run down (as I noted it) of the new Timeline and it’s accompanying features:

The heart of the Facebook experience is your Profile
The Story of your Life will be represented in Timeline
Timeline will be a lot more visual
On the right of the Timeline will be the years and you can click it to see what you posted for that year
A large area for a Cover Photo at the top of your Timeline. Can be changed daily, weekly, monthly, etc.
Visual Tiles for the Apps you use
Works on Mobile Devices
You can go to the beginning of your life and build your Timeline, or just start where you are
Apps express who you are by highlighting and curating all your stories and giving you complete control over everything and everyone that sees it
A new Report feature to allow you to see quickly a summary of your Apps, like what you ate, what movies you watched, where you have been, etc.
Ticker (which a lot of people find annoying) is a lightweight stream of information. It moves quickly and shares posts from your friends so you can jump into a conversation with them
Open Graph – a new class of Apps will cover four areas, Communication, Games, Media and Lifestyle
Through Open Graph you will discover new things from your friends – Frictionless experiences and Realtime Serendipity (this is the music, movie sharing feature I mentioned above)
Open Graph is the biggest change on Facebook since the 1st F8 conference

The beta period for Timeline began last week for developers. But many people have declared themselves developers so they can begin building their Timeline. Myself…I’ll just wait until all the bugs and kinks are worked out and build mine. Which will only be a couple of weeks.

After everyone has gotten to learn and use Timeline, the Open Graph will be rolled out.

So you have lots of decisions and choices to make. Do you want to have your entire life online for everyone to read? Do you want to share just the highlights of your life? Do you want to build relationships with your friends over a song, book or movie? You can (or cannot) do it all with the new Facebook Timeline and Open Graph.

How do you feel about these features? Will you use them? I’d love to know your thoughts.

Promoting Your Blog Using Offline Marketing

August 22, 2011 By Jen Silva is a writer for Choosewhat.com. ChooseWhat is a company that provides product reviews and test data for business services and products such as business cards and PBX services. Their goal is to help small companies make informed buying decisions on business solutions that help their business. 4 Comments

Using traditional offline marketing techniques to market your online blog seems like it could be a daunting task, rife with frustration and needless papers and phone calls. However, by doing all of your marketing online, you leave out a huge number of potential readers. If you are blogging for fun or for money, the point is you want people to read what you write. Without readers, all of your work and fantastic writing is for nothing.

You don’t have to worry; though…integrating tried-and-true offline marketing methods with more modern techniques is not as hard as it sounds. There are 3 easy ways you can get started advertising your blog offline. Each of them is unique and helpful on its own, and they work well together. All of them are low-cost, and have proven effective time and time again.

Business Cards

One of the best ways to get the word out about your blog is with the use of good, old fashioned business cards. Keeping these handy in your wallet, glove box, and jacket pockets (don’t wash them!) will enable you to network everywhere you go. They are relatively inexpensive to print – you could even do them yourself, if you really wanted to save money. Here are 3 tips to help you with your amazing business cards:

Don’t print too many. Your contact information, address, job title, or logo may change. It is recommended that you print no more than 1000 cards at a time for the heavy distributor; 500 should be sufficient for the average at-home self-promoter.

Don’t be too flashy. The goal of a business card is for people to be able to contact you at a later date. Unless you can do it tastefully, try to avoid a multitude of sparkles, glitter, graphics, and logos. Utilize the free space on both sides of the card. Remember: people will contact you and have a better chance of visiting your blog if your business cards are neat, clean, and easy to read.

Do treat them like candy. Give them to everyone you know. Post them on community bulletin boards. Check out local businesses and schools; a lot of them have cork boards available for community and business-related information.

Fliers

Fliers can be an invaluable resource when you are thinking about reviving your blog with some updated offline marketing techniques. With virtually any option available in size, color, cost, and quantity, using and creating fliers is easier than ever. A number of popular office services companies are available to help you design a flier, or you can hire a graphic designer. Just like with business cards, you can post them everywhere. Be sure to do a little research with your city or county to make sure you are only posting fliers in appropriate areas.

Conventions and Lectures

Depending on your prime reading target, there may be conventions or lectures held in your area – or even outside of your immediate area if you are willing to travel relevant to your blog topic. Purchasing space – or getting it free – at a convention is a great way to draw potential readers to your blog. If you choose the right place, you are guaranteed to have patrons that are already interested in what you have to say. They did come to the convention, after all.

Regardless of the method you choose, remembering the many options available to you via offline marketing will be helpful in increasing your overall reader base. When you blog, you want people to read your blog. Taking advantage of some offline techniques will help to ensure people find you…even when they are away from the internet.

Jen Silva is a writer for Choosewhat.com. ChooseWhat is a company that provides product reviews and test data for business services and products such as business cards and PBX services. Their goal is to help small companies make informed buying decisions on business solutions that help their business.

Becoming Shareable – Let the People Talk!

July 28, 2011 By Ben Leave a Comment

Enjoy this guest post by Ben ~

Social media has become an essential part of web promotion. Not only is it effective and helpful for increasing the popularity of your business or website, but it is absolutely necessary! Proper use of social media such as Twitter and Facebook will not only help your site gain exposure, but it will act as a catalyst for making your content more prominent and even viral.

The easiest and most important step to take when stepping into the “social” scene is adding buttons to your site to help visitors share your content. In other words, make your website “shareable” because the last thing you want to do is inhibit their ability to advertise your business for you. People love to communicate and we also love to share. Social media is the Internet’s analogy for word-of-mouth advertising. Neglecting to add buttons on your site for visitors to share your content is a lot like stripping them of their voice – let them talk!

TweetMeme is a fantastic tool for making your content very shareable. It adds a simple button at the top (or bottom) of all of your posts that people can use to tweet your content with literally 2-clicks. A common trend you will notice when observing popular sites in almost every niche is the overwhelming amount of tweets in comparison to “likes” on Facebook. Tweeting is easier and faster, and in an online world where we skim almost everything we read, we need to have quick sharing options for our visitors.

A common and effective layout for making your site easy to share is to include a button at the top of every post for Twitter and/or Facebook, a set of buttons at the bottom for a few popular social sites, and also the presence of similar sharing buttons consistently displayed on your sidebar. For the sidebar, the most important inclusions are Twitter, Facebook, and your RSS Feed. You might have other sites like LinkedIn that you like to use or a series of videos on YouTube – these would be good additions for your sharing buttons.

To further emphasize the importance of properly using social media, lets cover a scenario:

Someone visits your site and reads an article. They really like it, but they don’t see any sharing buttons and so it may not even cross their mind to tweet it or like it, so they move on with their day.
This same visitor comes to your site and reads the same article. However, this time there are social sharing buttons featured prominently on the page. This visitor tweets the post and it is quickly exposed to all of this user’s followers (dozens, hundreds, even thousands of people).

And it doesn’t stop there. The people who see that tweet might tweet it too, they might look through your site and tweet another post, or they might follow you on Twitter and become exposed to all of your new tweets. Simple processes like this can quickly multiply and expand upon your daily traffic, and all of this happens simply because you have made your website shareable.

Supplement your social media strategies with SEO. Check out our FREE SEO Course or download our FREE OnlyWire Account Creator to make social bookmarking effortless.

5 Best & Free Antivirus Programs for Your Laptop

June 29, 2011 By Anna Watson 3 Comments

Enjoy this guest post from Anna Watson~~

The top priority for any laptop is its security which is endangered by virus, phishing attracts, rootkits, Trojans, malwares, key loggers etc. Both the external factors and the high use of internet put the security of your laptop in significant danger. Laptop Repair can be done with minimal threat to the security but once a virus hacks into your laptop your confidential data becomes venerable. To fight this menace nothing is better than efficient anti-virus program.

You have two options while purchasing an anti-virus you can opt for the free version, or go on and buy full protection for your laptop. Wondering what factors make the anti-virus best. Take a look at the points mentioned below for the same.

Snippet for a Good Anti Virus for laptop

Speed should be its Deed – this just means that a sloppy and lazy anti-virus cannot act at the right time, so definitely a fast speed anti-virus program should be your first choice.

Active Stealth Mode – whatever Anti-virus Program you choose, it should have the capability to detect every hidden virus and malicious scripts and codes running.

Price Virtually Saves – Of course we cannot spend oodles of money on anti-virus program. If we need to buy, then it should be cheap and within economical price range.

Excellent and easy configuration – It should never be a hassle or complication to install a Anti-virus Software.

Updates Regularly – An anti-virus for laptop should get updated regularly, otherwise chances are that its database will get out of date and will loose its power to protect your system.

Comprehensive Support – The Anti-virus you choose should have an excellent set of after sale support, so that if you require prompt assistance you have one immediately.

Nick of the Time action i.e. Real-time Provision – The real time scanning is what it actually means. If anti-virus software acts sporadic and often fails to act at the right time then it is useless.

Top 5 FREE Anti-virus Programs – Laptop Repair for Virus

It is rightly said that the best things in life comes free. The list below contains 5 best anti-virus programs which provide excellent protection for laptop. Plus they have both the free and the purchase versions. The free version has many features enabled which satisfactorily protect the laptop.

1. BitDefender Anti-virus

2. Kaspersky Anti-Virus

3. Webroot Anti-virus

4. Norton Anti-virus

5. ESET Nod32 Anti-virus

Author Bio: I have been interested in such topics and have always been writing about them. I usually write on common computer/laptop repair problems, Quick Laptop Repair Techniques. It is always good to see that people are always interested to read my articles and appreciate them.

How To Determine What Kind of Online Business Suits You

June 16, 2011 By Guest 2 Comments

How To Determine What Kind of Online Business Suits You

Starting an online business is simultaneously simple and challenging. Working on the internet eliminates many of the problems that sink businesses, like overhead costs, employee insurance and location selection. But at the same time, it provides its own set of obstacles.

Here are 5 ways to determine what kind of online business suits you:

1) Find something you are good at.

The internet is filled with lackluster businesses. Owners push products not because they are interested in them, but because they need to make money.

Find something you are good at and you will create your first product: passion. Insurance, business cards and homemade t-shirts can all make for successful online business, so long as you are good at them.

But be honest with yourself. If you feign interest or stretch your experience, it will show.

2) Know how the internet works.

The internet is a growing, changing, mutating organism. Online business owners need to spend some time learning how the internet works. Take classes, read how-to books and meet like-minded people with similar internet goals.

Knowing how the internet works will help you select a suitable business.

3) Choose the correct business model.

Memorize the online business models that have worked for others. Research similar companies and find out what they are using.

You can create an online business out of many models, such as subscription sites, internet sales, specialized software and unique services.

Success can be duplicated. It is simply a matter of learning the combination and entering it into your own online business.

4) Set goals.

Goals are maps. Without them, an online business is lost. If you are to choose a business that suits you, you need to establish your goals.

How much money do you want to make daily, weekly, monthly and yearly? Do you want a small company that reaches local customers? Or are you aiming for a large, global brand that can connect products with people over oceans and deserts?

5) Believe in yourself and your business.

Belief is the number one determining factor in success. People who have chosen the right online business and succeeded with it have done so by believing. They believe that it is right for them. They believe that they can accomplish it. They believe people will be interested in what they have to offer.

Choosing an online business that suits you is an important step in your professional and personal life. You need to do so with the same consideration and care you would give to selecting a home or spouse. It is something that you will be putting your time, money and effort into. It deserves your attention and detail.

This guest article was contributed by Jennifer Bell from Health Training Guide. Jennifer is a freelance writer and mother of 2 based in Los Angeles, CA. Check out her site to learn more about phlebotomist training and other exciting health careers.

5 Easy Ways to Boost Web Sales

June 13, 2011 By mikes Leave a Comment

Enjoy this guest post from Mike Seddon

It’s a fact that many businesses are loosing money through a leaky web purchase process. Most of these businesses choose to ignore the problem and will prefer to look at increasing traffic as the way to grow sales.

The analogy I like to give is to imagine you had a bucket with holes in it that you needed to fill with water. What would you do first? Fix the holes or just try to fill the bucket with water faster than it is leaking? Believe me; many businesses go for the faster filling leaky bucket solution!

What I want to do is show you five ways you can fix those holes and just by doing that you will boost your sales because you’ll close all the sales that were originally escaping you. In other words, you make more money from the buying traffic your website is already getting.

Step 1 – Stop Hiding that Buy Button!

You’ll be amazed how many businesses seem to hide the buy button. They make it blend in with the colour theme of their website or they put it below the fold (ie: you have to scroll down the website to find it).

Just making your buy buttons stand out and putting them in a prominent place will boost sales. Trust me. Try it.

Step 2 – Don’t ask for stuff you don’t need

Why is it that some websites ask for my inside leg measurements when all I’m trying to buy is an ebook! Why do they need that information?

Okay so I am exaggerating but you know what I mean. We’ve all been to sites where we have to fill out screens of questions before we can just get our credit card out and buy the darn thing.

So take a good long look at your payment screens and make sure you are only asking for information that you need to make the sale. Keep it short. Keep it brief and get the money!

Step 3 – Reinforce the Benefits

When most website owners install their shopping cart software they tend to only concentrate on setting up the pages so that they can collect the data they need to process the sale. They miss an opportunity here to help ensure the sale. If they were to add benefits of the products onto their payment screens they would find that less people abandon the shopping cart. Seeing benefits of your purchase as you go through the sales screens reinforces your desire to own the product and keeps you in the process.

Step 4 – Use Testimonials

This is the same approach I just outlined with benefits. Make sure your sales screens have testimonials. It helps reassure your purchaser that they are making the right decision in buying from you.

Step 5 – Guarantees

Do you offer a guarantee with your product? If you do make sure you repeat them on the purchase screens, especially the one that asks for the credit card details! What’s the point of having a guarantee if you don’t shout about it and use it to make sure you close as many sales as possible?

If you don’t have a guarantee then shame on you! Offer one.

The better your guarantee, the more chance you will have to make the sale. So make sure you offer a compelling guarantee. You may worry about the cost of honoring your guarantee but let me assure you that the increase in sales will more than cover any slight increase in costs due to covering a guarantee.

So there you have five easy ways you can quickly fix the holes in your purchase process and boost your sales as a result.

Once you’ve done those then you’ll be ready to increase the traffic to your website safe in the knowledge that you will maximize the sales from that extra traffic. You’ll find lots of free advice on increasing your web traffic using website promotion at the KKSmarts website.