Web Design Development Articles

Social networking is the new black. It’s huge, and it’s not too surprising that it has already been exploited by commercial interests. This is a shame. It seems that every time someone comes up with a new site to “make friends and chat” it gets taken over by commercial interests keen on finding a new way to make a buck.

A whole new raft of “Social Networking Marketing Consultants” has sprung up like the little fleas on the bigger fleas to help businesses sell more though this medium, whilst at the same time developing their own careers.   There is no doubt that a great deal of business will be done through this route. At its simplest level the premise is that customers will make buying decisions based on recommendations offered by the social networking community. The idea is that a “personal” recommendation is more persuasive than the conventional sources of information from advertising and promotions alone.

This new fad has not escaped the providers of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software who are now rushing to see how they can integrate the social networking sites into their business sales and marketing software.   Can I be the only person on the planet who sees this as a largely pointless exercise in the Business to Business world?   If I look at my own customer database less than 5% of the contacts are Jo Public, the rest are Businesses.

The reality is that I can now go to a named contact in my database and have it automatically pull related information from social networking and other web sites. Now updating my contact records with qualified, meaningful data such as stock market price, business news, or such-like can undoubtedly add value, but linking social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter is unlikely to bring much to the table.I may be fascinated to know that Tania of Manchester is having cornflakes for breakfast, or that Stephen Fry is currently walking through Horse Guards Parade (he actually is, apparently) but unless I’m planning to sell Tania cornflakes or Stephen Fry an A-Z map of London the information is of no value to my business and frankly I want it nowhere near by carefully developed and lovingly maintained CRM database. Let’s face it, most of what is written on social networking sites is banal twaddle.   I’m sure there is money to be made out of exploiting the social networking sites, but for those of us in the B2B environment they are of little more than a distraction to the real work in hand.

Attending live events can be an important way for you to excel in your field. But did you know that you can actually make quite a bit of money by doing so? I went to a number of seminars and conferences before learning how to turn them into profitable events.

Once I learned exactly what to do, I began to make money and find prospects before the event ever began. Now that Twitter and Facebook are used daily by hundreds of thousands of people, you can use someone else’s event to promote what you do online even more easily.

You will want to start creating a buzz about the seminar or conference you will be attending about one week before it is scheduled to begin. I like to tweet about it, using the hash tag that the event coordinator has assigned to it. A hash tag is simply some letters and numbers that are assigned to your event so that people can follow the conversation and get to know each other before they arrive.

You will want to arrive the afternoon before the seminar starts. This will give you a chance to relax and change clothes before you go down to the restaurant or lounge to look for other attendees. If you already know what they look like, because you have heard them speak before or seen them online, go up to them and introduce yourself.

The following morning I like to register as early as possible. This gives me the opportunity to walk around and meet the other attendees as they are registering. I then choose a seat near the back of the room. I have learned that this is advantageous if I want to be perceived as a professional who is there to both learn and to network with others.

You will also want to have separate business cards made for each event. Once I started doing this I connected with more prospects and prospective clients than ever before. It is amazing to me how much money I was leaving on the table before I learned all of this and put it into action.

I now attend about six to ten seminars or conferences each year, and make more money from the people I connect with than I could possibly make by simply marketing on the internet. I encourage you to make a direct effort to learn how to set up your own strategy for profiting from live events you attend.

Many of us are getting addicted with social networks. It is an addiction, which will one day become as bad as alcoholism. Lives will be destroyed because of this disease and families will break up. Am I joking or what? No, I am very serious about this issue that will soon takeover as the main cause of lifestyle issues.

Are you one who will get affected by social networking? Let us find out.

Time - How much of your time is spent on social networks?

How much of your time is devoted to useful work that of quality and gives you material results? How much is your total work time? How much time do you spend with your friends and family? Make a estimate and write it down. Now find out how much of your time is spent on social networks every week? At what percentage lever should you get worried? This exercise will tell you about your time spending habits and may also give clue about relationship strength, work achievement and other such issues.

Quantity - How many social networks have you joined?

There are about fifty social network sites that have substantial membership. Are you a member of only one site that you had joined when you began or do you join every new network that pops up? Do you keep a track of which network is doing well and shift there immediately or keep your faith in your old network? There are people who join networks because somebody said that it was most popular? Some join a network because a friend joined. Some join a network because it is a subject specific? All of us have our own reasons to join a network. Before changing networks or adding more ask one simple question- what do I wish to achieve on this network? Is it to connect with friends? Is it to develop business? Or is it only for some fun? And ask another question- does my goal help improve my lifestyle?

In the second part we will look closer at the goals we hope to achieve by joining social networks.

There are tons of web 2.0 websites, but the one that really stands out is Squidoo. Squidoo is basically a web 2.0 site, where you can create multiple lenses, about almost anything. The great thing about Squidoo is that it’s really loved by Google. By this I mean that if you use Squidoo in the right way, you could end up high in the search engines and get tons of visitors to your lens. More visitors, means more money!

Here are 5 tips, that will help you make money from Squidoo:

1. Before you create a lens you must search for low competition keywords, this will increase the chance of your lens ranking high in the search engines. Less competition means more money for you.

2. Always optimize your lens with a lot of relevant tags. This will help you get noticed by Google and it will give you higher rankings.

3. Make your lens look nice. The first impression is always important, if you make a nice clean lens, you’ll increase the chance of converting your visitors in sales.

4. Try to build a lot of back links to your Squidoo lens. You can use other web 2.0 properties like Blogger, Weebly, … This will make your lens stronger and your lens could possibly rank higher than all the rest.

5. This is the most important tip! Always try to update your lens, just update your lens once a week and you’ll be alright. When you update your lens it will not disappear from the first pages of Google. Google loves new content, so be sure to update your lens with new modules every week.

So what’s all the talk about Twitter?

This site has been featured in a lots of places and is now pretty high profile but a lot of people still don’t know what “microblogging” is . Well I can tell you it’s great for start up business and freelance consultants.

So why is it worth giving this some thought?

Well, here are three reasons:

• It’s a useful way to share your messages and you interests
• It’s a good way to communicate with potential customers and partners
• It’s also a really useful place to go to research your market

It works by people posting ‘microblogs’ (up to 140 characters only) called ‘tweets”. But to maximize the usefulness of Twitter for your business, you should to understand how to find people to “follow” you and how to get “followed”.

Here are three ways to connect with people:

1. Go to Twitter Search, and enter the words related to your product or business into the search area. Twitter Search will show you the “tweets” that include all those words, as well as the people who use them. Then click to their profiles, and check if they are people you’d like to “follow”!

2. Check through the “Follows” and “Following” lists of the profiles of anyone you follow to see if you spot anyone you want to follow!

3. Check the conversations in your Twitter stream You can see who people are talking to from the “@NameHere” in each tweet. If you see people having an interesting exchange, follow them, or get yourself involved in the conversation by using the @ function yourself! If you see an interesting tweet, you can reply automatically by clicking the little arrow within the tweet box.

Once you have followed some people, you can make your Twitter experience more enjoyable - and to connect more effectively with other users!

1. Don’t request that people to follow you: People who do this others don’t usually succeed at getting ANYONE to follow them. Try to be interesting and informative and be responsive to others… people will follow you if they value how you use Twitter

2. Sharing information - Do not make pitches for your products and services: As with any social media platform, as in business, you want to build credibility and good relationships - instead of always asking people to buy from you

3. If you see someone post a link you like, “re-tweet” it: - just copy their message paste it into a new tweet, and add ‘ RT’ at the beginning. This is a good way to show someone you value what they have to say … by sharing it with your community.

4. Watch how other people use Twitter: A useful way to figure out your place in a community is to follow those people you admire.

That should be enough to get you started! Make sure to follow me.

How I got Banned from Facebook

When I was booted, I received no email, no msg, no confirmation. Just a generic link to the Facebook Terms of Service. For 3 weeks, I received no responses to any of the Facebook email addresses for disabled accounts. And then 3 weeks later, I get 1 email (see below), and my account is turned back on.

Since Facebook is a we-learned-from-myspace’s-mistakes kind of site, they are super, super, super paranoid about Spam. So the have a few strict published rules like:

1. No non-person profiles (you have to make a “fan page”).
2. No porn.

And then, they have serveral internal rules, which will cause you a lot of frustration if you don’t know about them.Those internal rules are:

1. No repeat messaging.
2. No over-inviting.
3. No scraping (copy/pasting emails from facebook).

Overall, I agree with these policies. Here’s the problem: They can’t manage 6 billion people’s behavior. No freaking way. So they have all these little internal Facebook Robots that are set to attack upon certain conditions.There’s no robot that can tell a business profile page from a personal profile page, which is why businesses still have profile pages. They can’t write a robot smart enough to figure out real person names from busines names. But for all their internal rules, here are the Bots!

The Facebook Robots

After researching other Facebook bans, here’s the robots I know about:

1. The Inbox Protector Robot: If you send messages to too many people using the compose tool within a 24 hour period, this robot boots you from facebook after you send to certain magic number of people. He causes problems when you are communicating the same information to a large number of people who really want the information.

2. The Friend Protector Robot: If you click the “Add a Friend” button on too many people within a 24 hour period, this robot boots you from facebook. She causes problems when you really do need to connect to a large number of people in a short period of time.

3. The Scraper Robot: If you copy (Cntl-C) information from too many friends’ profile pages within a 24 period, this robot boots you from facebook. He causes problems when you are not a spammer, but need key information from your friends’ pages.

4. The Anti-Porn Robot: If you post inappropriate material that gets flagged, this robot boots you from Facebook. She causes problems when you have a profile set to Adults only and someone still flags you, or if you are flagged by a jerk.

How Long Till You Get Back on Facebook

The best part is that the robots are set on timers. So after exactly 3 weeks, your profile is automatically turned back on. The email is signed from someone in Support, like “Bob.” I’m sure that for each bot, you receive a different kind of message. This is a generic email programmed to be sent out when they automatically turn your profile back on.

How to Avoid the Robots

You will get a Warning message as you approach the limit on the number of messages or friend invites. Heed that Warning! That Warning is also a cue to the timer in the robot to start watching you. If you proceed to hit okay, everything will seem fine for a little while, then suddenly, your login ability will be taken away. And you will have gotten banned.

How to Play with the Robots

You can safely test the waters by continuing to add friends (maybe 50 or so) until you get the Warning message. When the Warning appears, hit Cancel, do not hit Okay. Then, do not add any more friends for 24 hours. This will successfully navigate you away from the robots, and allow you to continue with normal profile activity. If you try to add a friend later and you see the warning, you’ll know that it hasn’t been 24 hours.

I suspect the Robots will continue to get smarter, and eventually control your every thought. In the meantime, you can enjoy playing with them on Facebook.

For more business coaching, contact Mark Berry at mark@littlelovecoach.com

Twitter is one of the fastest growing services in the web and with celebrities joining in it is sure to take off. Most people who are new to the service has one major problem , That is deciding who to follow . Most of them join the service because some famous celebrity is already on Twitter but there are many ways you can use service. Deciding who to follow depends largely on what you are going to use the service for. If you are interested in getting news alerts then your better off following CNN or any other major news network. If you are interested in getting the latest activities of your favorite actor or actress then you can use the service to do that. You can even use it to stay in touch with your family, well you have to get your mom dad and wife to  use it first.

Some people are using it as a medium to share things that are related to there day to day lives. For example if your a journalist then you can use Twitter to share an interesting article or a web page almost instantly via the service. The cool thing is because it limits your message to 140 characters you are automatically forced to be precise and concise with your messages. Advantage of this is if you are getting lots of tweets you can easily go through them without much of a hassle.

As you can see whom you follow on Twitter depends entirely on what is your purpose of using the service, Most marketers are using it because it gives them a tremendous advantage over other in doing sales and generating traffic to there website and sales pages. The thing to remember is if you are going to use it as a marketing tool be careful about spamming your feed with affiliate links.

The hardest thing that just about every internet business owner deals with is driving traffic to their website. Let’s get right into it.

Drive traffic using social media:

With a little hard work and time, it is possible to drive tons of traffic to your website using social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc! Even though they tend to have a lot of rules that they enforce, they are extremely popular social networking sites and well worth putting in the time to market your site to its members. Remember to play by their rules though.

1. You need to go to their site and join up to become a member. They are free to join. Remember to read thoroughly their rules, paying attention to their position on SPAM, marketing etc, as you do not want to get off on the wrong foot with them. Browse the site and familiarise yourself with it and start to get to know the members. Search for members that you share a common interest with and begin to build a network of friends who will learn to trust you and want to know more about you. As you get to know these members you will find yourself discussing topics that may be related to what you do and they will more than likely ask you questions, so through this subtle way you will be able to build some contacts for your business. This is the social part and then there is the marketing side of it. For instance, Facebook now has paid advertising. You can submit your site, so long as it is within their criteria and you can nominate a daily spend for clicks of your ad, displaying to the members.

2. Look at what other members are doing to improve their position for paid advertising. Ask other members what they know that you can do that is within the rules, to promote to your market.

3. Join some groups. You will have noticed when you familiarised yourself with the site that there are lots of groups that you can join. Join up to some of these groups and participate in the variety of marketing and business group discussions. It will help you to forge trusting relationships with fellow like minded members. Share your knowledge and offer to help members whenever you can. This will help in the popularity ranks!

Backlinks:

Backlinks are one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website and get index fast by search engines, especially by Yahoo or Google. So here are some of the few tips that you can use to have some backlinks to your site and drive traffic to it.

1. Web Directories: One of the easiest way to have a backlinks to your site are by using web directories. Paid directories will provide you with good backlinks for your site for just few dollars. Or you can enlist your site to a free web directory services with no cost at all, like DMOZ.org, or freedirectorysubmission.com. Google “Web Directories” and you will find quite a large list of potential places to use.

2. Link Exchange: exchanging links to other websites or blog is another way, and perhaps one of the best way to acquire backlinks, you can do this by mailing the webmaster, and try to exchange links with each other, remember to make sure the blog or sites content is also related to your site.

3. Forums: forums can provides a great amount of traffic to your site, by signing up and adding your site as a signature. With thousands of users signing and participating in forums in a wide variety of niches, there is a big chance that your site will be spotted and surf. Or you can add your link to your post, just make it sure that the link that you’re adding to your comment is related to the discussed topic. Note: Be extremely cautious in putting or adding it in your comment because some forum sites are very strict in adding links to the posted topic, your site may be considered as a spam, and banned from their forums, or other users might mistaken it as a blog spam.

4. RSS feeds: Try to submit your RSS feed to search engines like Google and Yahoo, or you can try to add an RSS subscription link or textbox to your site, for your visitors to subscribe and have an update to your newly posted articles, feed site directories like Feedburner and Feedblitz, provides you a tool and options for you to manage your feeds.

5. Article Submission: Personally, I think this is the best way to earn a lots of backlinks and drive traffic to your site, not just backlinks but quality backlinks… Submitting a good quality article will boost a major amount of traffic to your site. One of the best sites to submit your article is EzineArticles, proven to be an effective way of driving traffic to your site, bloggers and webmasters always recommend this site for article submission. Other sites are goarticles.com and or squidoo.com. (Kind of like what I have done with this post here)

Search Engine Optimization:

Update your web site with good, new content. Search engine web “crawlers” constantly check for new content on your web site. This affects how your site ranks in natural search results. That’s why I often recommend a blog strategy for most sites - each blog post has it’s own URL and is an easy way to add new fresh content to your site. If you update it you can train search engines to index your site several times a day. Tell bots how to index your site and to alert you to issues that can affect your rankings. Tools you can use include a robots.txt file (see Robots.txt.org), a Google webmasters account (Google.com/webmasters). Submit and verify your site and then upload a sitemap. Repeat if your web site is redesigned or as it changes.You can also submit the same sitemap at Yahoo! SiteExplorer SiteExplorer.search.yahoo.com and MSN http://webmaster.live.com.

Offline marketing:

Taking your online knowledge and using it to make money and drive traffic from offline businesses and traffic is an absolutely wonderful thing to do. So if you have online expertise then you should take it offline and make loads of cash.
Though most Internet Marketers have been aware of how the Internet works and all the ins and outs of marketing online, most offline businesses don’t have a clue. This is especially true of local businesses. To many of them the entire Internet is a mystery. And to almost all of them, marketing on the Internet is a concept well beyond them.However, small businesses can really benefit from an online presence. And you, the online expert can help them get more customers and make more money.

There are two main ways that you can use your online expertise. You can offer to build a Website for local businesses and/or you can offer to help being more traffic to their Website. If the business already has a site then you won’t offer to create one for them. You would simply want to offer to bring more traffic to their site by optimizing their content and by using some basic SEO tactics and finally joining your website or hanging up a sign in their business with your website. If the business doesn’t have their own site then you can offer to put one up for them. By actually signing up for our affiliate program and letting us do the work for you would be the easiest way!

You can either visit local related businesses in your area or you can simply write a form letter and blast out the letters to all the local (or non local) businesses in your area. You would simply have to do a little research to see which businesses already had a Website and which businesses didn’t. Then you would have one form letter for the businesses with a Website and for those without. You can even include in the letter that you will be calling to follow-up the letter in a few days.

All you have to do is write a couple different letters with solid copy and then follow up with a friendly phone call. Before you know it, you’ll have a booming offline business.

Guerrilla marketing: Guerrilla marketing is pretty awesome. Getting people to talk about your website is a big deal.
stickers - makestickers.com
direct mail - sendoutcards.com
billboards - look for available billboards and call the number listed on them…
infomercials - turn on the TV late at night and watch a couple infomercials… Learn by example.

Press Release
Just Google “issue a press release”

I hope you use some of these techniques and tactics to drive some traffic to your website.

Get Started with Twitter

It looks like Twitter has finally gone mainstream thanks to superstars like Oprah Winfrey coming on board. Recently, you might have read about Ashton Kutcher’s race with CNN to 1 million followers, which has also cause the Twitter userbase to increase dramatically. Now, since you are new to Twitter you might not see the significance of this, but let me take a minute to tell you why this is important.

1. Twitter is now becoming a way for everyone, including businesses and brands, to be able to communicate a message instantly with anyone in the world. This means that if you have a business or brand, that you can use Twitter to further brand yourself and increase your overall brand presence and awareness. Your customers, clients, and prospects are all on Twitter, so there is no reason that you should not be. Grab a guide or eBook that teaches you how to make the most of Twitter for your business and start capturing the attention of your audience.
2. There are many new services and systems that allow you to advertise on Twitter without having to spam or turn other prospects away. Most people on Twitter are tech-savvy and don’t want to see constant advertisements. However, with the emergence of services like Twitterhawk, you can select a target audience to market to without looking like a Twitter novice.
3. Thanks to social media and social networking, you can use Twitter to funnel people into your other modes of communication. I use Twitter to send people to Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn, but you can send them to your blog or email signup form. The options are unlimited, but you’ve got to jump on board and learn how to take advantage of them. If you don’t know how to use Twitter in this manner, there are hundreds of guides that can help you get started with ease.

Twitter as a social marketing network and a place to find and follow friends, network yourself & even your business is a truly remarkable community.  The concept is truly awesome and is sometimes also called micro blogging.  Micro blogging (or minimalistic blogging) essentially limits the size of each contributor’s posts - which minimizes or condenses what people say into what’s most important.

Twitter limits each tweet (or post) to 140 characters including spaces, punctuation & links.  The concept has caught on and is now blazing across the internet.  Now people with short attention spans (and/or limited time) can check out the latest tweets without having to read/scan through an entire 500 to 1,000 word article to get to the real meat of what someone is saying.

Twitter forces its users to condense their comments to 140 characters or less … no one can get wordy, get on their soapbox, go off on a tangent AND, most importantly, no one has the time & characters to be truly boring.

If you are new to Twitter, it can be confusing and sometimes overwhelming.  So, here are some true Twitter-like tips for new users just getting started — each one 140 characters or less:

1. Tweet about things that interest you. People with the same interests will follow you to see what else you have to say.

2. Follow interesting people. When you find them, see who they follow & follow them as well.

3. Say “Thanks” when someone (or several someones) RT one of your posts. People see the “thanks” and go find the post that started it.

4. Don’t use Twitter to constantly sell your stuff. You are not a pimp. It’s the quickest way to lose people’s interest and their attention.

5. People do NOT want to know about your bathroom habits. There really is such a thing as T.M.I. (Too Much Information)

6. You never know who is twittering. Don’t tweet something you wouldn’t want your Mom, your boss, your spouse or your worst enemy to read.

7. If you get in a long 2-way discussion with one twerson - take it to DM. There’s nothing as boring as seeing one side of a conversation.

8. Need an answer? Ask the question! Tweeple love giving their opinions.

9. Be a real person - add your photo. It’s better than an icon, avatar or your sister’s cat. People want to see YOU.

10. Not sure what to tweet? Ask yourself “what’s interesting now” instead of “what am I doing now?”

11. If someone follows you, follow them back. They may have some really interesting tweets. Use an auto-follow software if needed.

12. When someone else says something inspiring, interesting or fun; Retweet it to your tweeple. Don’t forget to give credit to the originator.

13.  Think Golden Rule-If you can’t say something nice, you may want to rethink your tweet. Lots of people may judge you by that single comment.

14. Shorten your links using a URL shortener. Some Twitter application, such at TweetDeck or HootSuite, even have them included for convenience.

15. If you decide that you really like Twitter, check out different Twitter applications & tools. It’ll make your tweeting time more efficient.

16. Be willing to offer something of value, give of yourself, learn from others and then retweet it. It’s really NOT all about you.

17. Tell a clean joke. Show beautiful photos. Inspire someone. Share funny stories. Condense your life into 140 characters at a time.

18. Most of all, have fun! The networking & business building (if that’s your real goal) will come naturally if you tweet right & give it time.

And there you have it!  With these basic tips in mind, you are ready to start your Twitter adventure - in 140 characters or less!