Coaching For Success
Posts tagged facebook
How To Change Your Facebook Page Background?
Aug 20th
Today we are doing a quick stepwise guide on how to change your Facebook background. Now how to do this may seem obvious but if you want something more than the standard options or you have had an internet conultant or web solution developer do you a brand identity you may wish to use thison your Facebook pages instead.
The easiest way to change your Facebook background and add a theme to it is to install a third party plug-in for your browser. There are a large number of third party plug-ins available online for free.
Step 1: Find the plug-in
Go to the third party website, which in our example is ‘http://www.pagerage.com’. This particular plug-in works only on ‘Firefox’ and ‘Internet Explorer’. If you are using any other browser, then you must search for the correct plug-in corresponding to that browser. The homepage of pagerage.com is shown below and as you can see there are a number of themes being displayed. After choosing one you will need to click on ‘Install Plug-in’ to start the installation.
Step 2: Install the plug-in
The next page displayed has a button on it ‘Start Install’ click this and then your installation process will start.
After a time the following pop-up appears, click ‘Save File’ to download the application file on your local system.
After the download is finished, you need to double click on the application file (with .exe extension) to start the actual installation procedure.
The following pop-ups will appear, follow the prompted instructions step-by step and continue the installation process till it is finished as shown in the images below (note the images only show two screens of this process).
Step 3: Apply the theme
After the installation is complete, you will need to go back to ‘http://www.pagerage.com/’ and select your layout from any of the themes available, as shown below.
You can preview your layout and if you like it you can apply it by clicking on the ‘Select This Layout’ button as shown below.
The following pop-up confirms that your layout change is complete. After that you can login to your Facebook account to see the changes.
Hope you all find this stepwise post useful, remember if you need any help just post a comment and we will do our best.
Facebook For Your Internet Business
Aug 12th
Today is a small help guide for those who want to use Facebook but have not yet started. Facebook is the fastest growing social networking site on internet. It has over 500 million active users. These users are from multiple geographies; have different backgrounds; and have different needs. This provides business operating worldwide, a chance to reach out to them.
Many businesses large and small are actively reaching and engaging customers through Facebook and the Facebook Platform. It is indeed useful for Internet Business Marketing. This post looks at the features within facebook which can add value to your internet business promotion.
Facebook Page For Your Internet Business
Facebook Information Tab
To start with you will need a facebook page to give your internet business an identity among millions of online business pages. A typical facebook page has features that allow you to showcase your business to the online communities. You should add all your content to your profile in the form of ‘status updates’, ‘video links’, ‘images’, ‘events’ and many more. This facebook page is the hub of all the activities you do to promote your business.
You can add fans on this page that will be able to see your updates as and when you post them. Whenever a visitor ‘comments’ on or ‘likes’ your activity, it becomes visible to the fans of that visitor. And hence a viral effect is created and the visibility of your page and your business increases exponentially. The increas in visibility helps to increase Search Engine rankings which is great for your Search Engine Optimisation effort.
Apart from that, you can post ‘polls’; add ‘contests’; create ‘quizzes’ and many other custom built applications to promote your business in more effective manner. Following image shows a business page on facebook.
Facebook Advertising Platform
Facebook Advertising
Facebook also provides you the platform to advertise your products. However, these ads are not free and facebook charges usually on the basis of ‘cost per action. This platform helps you to decide the target audience and the budget requirements. You can connect with more than 500 million potential customers. These advertisements range from simple text-based ads to high resolution images. Moreover, you can change your budget on daily basis. Hence this platform is easy and cost effective. The image below shows the interface of facebook advertising platform.
Sponsor Facebook Applications With Ads
Facebook has number of applications for ‘games’, ‘music’ and other ‘leisure’ activities which are accessed by different audiences. As a business, you can choose the applications which are mostly accessed by your target audience and place your advertisements on them as a sponsor. The sponsored application with ads is shown below.
Facebook Sponsor Ads
Integrating Facebook With Your Website
If your website is an important channel to you, Facebook Connect can help you amplify engagement. You can do this by adding Facebook ‘Share’ links to your website. This tool is known as ‘Facebook Connect’. This way you can get your webpage URL visible across the facebook users. The sharing enables you to share website content with friends, and publishing feed stories to generate traffic. Following image shows how Facebook connect works.
Interacting With Your Customers
Most important part of internet business marketing is the two way interaction with your customers. Facebook provides you the facility of opening up the discussion threads. You can initiate any topic related to your business. You can also ask for the feedback from your customers. Continuous engagement with your customers goes a long way in building long term relationship with your customers.
Integrating Facebook With Your Internet Business Website
As we have seen, facebook is an excellent platform to spread the buzz about your internet business products and service in the market. If it is integrated with other promotional tools then it is bound to produce excellent results in terms of helping to provide new customer leads for your internet business.
Google Updates Algorithm AGAIN!
Jun 7th
Google Algorithm Changes Again
Everyone wants top rankings for their website and most people use search engines to find what they are looking for. We all know that if your website is not in the top of a search engine that you will miss out on prospective clients, however as you also know getting these top ranks are not easy. We almost all know in some form what SEO (search Engine Optimisation) is, even if we have not got a clue how to do it. But whether we have done it ourselves or got someone to do it for us you will know that a one of hit will not fit the bill especially when search engines make changes make changes to their algorithms (this is the special formula that SE’s used to rank your site in the search engine results pages [SERPs]). Sometimes these tweaks are minor while other times they are huge and the impact is far reaching for all onliners.
Google has made an algorithmic change, which, looks for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. Apparently this is not a flyby night minor change either as Google have stated it is a rankings change, not a crawling or indexing change, which suggests that sites getting less traffic will still be indexed, but some of those pages are no longer ranking as highly this change impacts “long tail” traffic, which generally is from longer queries that few people search for individually, but in aggregate can provide a large percentage of traffic. Google have said they will not be rolling it back.
So where does this leave your average small to medium sized business owner? Well if you have an ecommerce site using a structure that has longtail keywords for pages less viewed, you need to check your stats and see if you were in fact impacted by the update (did you lose traffic from some long tail phrases), also check out your linking practices ensure all links have been obtained using whitehat techniques. Another very important thing to do to help yourself now is check your link strategy out and ensure you are passing link juice to your internal pages.
Make sure all pages have unique good quality information (if you do ecommerce, this is definitely for you do not just use the manufacturers materials) and if you do not use them currently or have not used your social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for a while now is the time as this will help you to build links to internal pages and get traffic throughput to them. Most savvy Business owners realise they can not rely purely on Google or any search engine for that matter for traffic and that social media sites can help boost their business’ exposure. Finally do not go mad do not change everything in the hopes of fixing something that may not even affect you, use your stats and above all common sense.
This is not the end of Long Tail Keywords however good optimisation is really important to your continued online success now, forget how to change, manipulate or find a way around the algorithm changes instead work with it and fix your SEO efforts accordingly by making consistent updates to your content, posting high quality articles that have been optimised on to a well designed site that has also be optimised is the winning game plan here. This does not mean that your rank will be the same indefinitely it does mean that you do work a bit harder and a bit differently to consistently keep you business in front of potential customers.
Understanding Offline Marketing Can Help your Online Marketing
Jun 1st
In today’s hectic, bloated online world where information overload is stifling creativity and trashing old school ideology it is refreshing to step back into the old world to drenge up the methodology of past glory and use it to create new online glories. When it comes to marketing this revival is both useful and warranted and can help small business owners to understand what is really take place online by using terms they understand from offline marketing for comparison.Most importantly if used properly it can increase client conversion.
OK so let us look at some of these ideas, offline when you are going to do a Marketing Campaign you will either get a marketing specialist or do it yourself in either case both should start by
1, Identifying potential customers, offline you may use surveys, the post office services or things like Dunn & Bradshaw’s directory to help you do this. These methods are still extremly useful and work very well in terms of targetting prospects – if you understand what service or product you are selling. Online there is no real difference in that you still should be doing this only this research can be done using deep keyword research or by finding like minded communities and forums both using search engines, blog catalogs and social media sites – Facebook have great tools which are supposed to be used for targeting a Facebook ad campaign can actually be used to tell you how to find your market inside Facebook without spending any money.
2, Placement of your marketing – offline you would not put an ad or run a campaign for a bakery in a car magazine would you? ( I hope not 
) by ensuring that the right type of prospect see your ad in the right offline mediums canhelp improve your businesses chance of obtaining new customers – online it is no different you in that you must make sure that the right people arrive at the correct landing place (targetted traffic) for the search query (keword) associated to that product or service and not another unrelated product.
3, Measure responsiveness- just as you would measure response for offline marketing to an ad, radio or TV campaign you should do the same online – measuring which pages or sites are working. Measuring responsiveness helps you to tweak, remove or change an ad and where best to position it for maximum effect – lets face it why spend money on a campaign that does not work , measuring allows you the ability to stop wasting moneye. Use freely available tools like Google Analytics and Optimiser to help you see what is working and also help you split test pages, if you do not know how find an internet marketing specialist to help.
Finally your best gauge of the success of your marketing campaign on and offline are your customers and also the people who you did not convert (yes I did say the people who did not convert) – the people who became customers by buying from you should be willing to tell you why they bought your product or service and how they would use your product or service within their offline/online business – this is no different online – think about testimonials these are just customers recounting why they bought a particluar thing.
Funny but the people who did not buy are equally if not more important as they are the people that for whatever the reason was, were not quite happy with your offering – offline you may ring them up or survey them, online why not find out why by showing them an exit screen offering them a discount for your product or service (some will buy with a discount – this is a proven strategy) but if they will not offer them a free report to tell you why they did not choose your service (do this as a quick survey no more than five multichoice questions or as an open comment box. This may seem an unusual stratergy but it can help you improve the quality of your offering so that you are losing less customers. Again here click path analysis can tell you online what information people are viewing and finding interesting on your site so you can further push promotion of these products or services or work on those not doing so well.
My personal opinion is that offline ideology and methods are as good as they ever were and understanding them makes it much easier to market your business product or service online. Do this simple test – Ask yourself – how does what i want to do online this relate to offline marketing? Which offline idea or method is this? If you cannot answer get an internet marketing specialist and ask them, if they cannot answer find a new one ASAP one who understands both online and offline marketing and will be able to help you maximise your businesses results both online and offline.
Getting into Social Networking without dropping clangers
Oct 6th
Does your 2009 business plan include social networking? If so, do you know how to use social networking to explode your business? Online social networking is the newest weapon to get more customers.
Social networking helps you grow your business fast. Adding tastefully prepared video, good articles and content for your site can be very effective marketing tools you can use to inform people about your business and the services you can provide them.
If you are looking to use Social Networking to get more customers for your business then The Internet Business Coach is here to guide you in right direction. This article, which comes in three parts will hopefully help point you in the right direction.
Ok so you have heard all the fuss, you want to join in but are not really sure the best way to do it, below Dee one of our Internet Business Coaches gives an overview of the main points you need to cover in order to get great coverage for your business.
Hi
Social media is the phenomenon of our age builds faster than any other online process at the moment and is probably the most baffling to many businesses, however you know it must be useful if rock stars and even politicians use it to get coverage and there is no reason you can not use it too providing you follow the rules so that it is for the client and not a total sales pitch. I am a firm believe in if you give something, you get something in return no matter how small.
So how to you do it well there are four main factors that need considering, creation, control, converse and convert. Create something good, control the way this can work for you, converse, converse and then converse some more and finally convert those prospects into paying customers.
To do this you need to first create good content or gets some for free –then publish it – content is always a big issue (what to write, how to write it) – even when you get it right you still can never have enough of it. Basically there are millions of places to publish content but too little good quality content to make your business stand out in a crowd and this is what you need to do.
Then to be seen you need to spend time to create profiles in all the major social network sites and any smaller ones that are specific to your unique business offering. The major social networks tend to be Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn – millions of people visit these sites each day and as such make them a great forum to show off your business in. All you need to do to be in with a chance of promoting your business is to open an account. However do not do the bull in a china shop approach this will get you in trouble fast and possibly banned L from the network you have chosen to use.
Instead be more subtle create a blog (see our create a blog tutorial if you do not know how) then think about what knowledge you have in your field and create some really good content for your blog and articles from it to publish free in directories.
I heard a huh… one good piece on your area of expertise can be spun into many smaller articles that can be for submission to article directories (an article directory can help you to have a greater presence and help your SEO, in general the more articles you have is the more traffic you can potentially get to your site). Use these articles to create and post HubPages and Squidoo Lens’.
(A lens is a page made of modules that work on categories i.e. about you (called a squid who) or videos (called a squid vids) – get it… and a HubPage is a rich content webpage (images, text, design etc) you can publish articles on any topic as your own hub).
ok thats it for part one see you soon for part two
