I had a client this week who needed help with ghosts – Facebook ghosts. Facebook ghosts (and I’ve seen these on LinkedIn too) are pages you accidently set up – usually with no information except your company name – and then forget you ever had them.

The trouble is, these ghost pages show up in searches of your company along with your actual page that you use for your marketing. The odds are pretty good that whoever’s looking for you will “like” the wrong page and also have a pretty poor opinion of your company since the ghost page isn’t providing any info about your business.

To get rid of your ghosts, go to your profile home page and look under Pages on the left hand side. You’ll see a list of any page that have you as an administrator. If you find any ghosts, go to that page, click “edit,” then “manage permissions.” At the bottom of that page, you’ll see where you can delete the page.

Ghost is gone! (Insert Ghostbusters joke here.)

1. Blog software like WordPress is a content management system. Blog categories and subcategories become chapters and sections, individual posts form the chapter content. Get a post in the wrong section? Change it easily by switching the category.

2. Are you intimidated by the thought of writing an entire book? It’s a lot less daunting to write one post a day or two posts a week. Remember the old advice about how to eat an elephant? The answer was “one bite at a time.”

3. You can build your online audience while you’re writing your book. Use Facebook and Twitter to promote your blogged book. 8 out of 10 people surveyed say they want to write a book. Trust me, you’ll have people following your progress to see if they could do it too.

4. Stuck on a chapter? Write out of order and rearrange as you go.  You can arrange each post under a category heading.

5. Readers can evolve to become fans, friends, editors, critics, and cheerleaders. They’ll probably buy the finished book, too.

6. Blog posts that don’t make the final cut in the finished book could become articles used to promote your book.

7. Never be short on blog topics again!

With all of the whoop-di-doo over Facebook’s latest page updates, you’d think that EVERYBODY would have updated by now. Instead, I’ve met a lot of small business owners who have no idea how to update their pages. Help is on the way…

I’ve got an easy way for you to see what you need to do, and step-by-step instructions on HOW to do it. Sign up for my weekly marketing tips and get this recording of my last webinar, “How to Set Up Your Facebook Page for Your Business” FREE.

Post a comment to let me know how you’re doing with your pages!

Writing and publishing an ebook has become a stock item on a lot of solopreneurs’ to-do lists. I know, it’s on my list too. So once you’ve got your book written and formatted for sale, where do you sell it? Here’s my list of the best places to sell your ebook:

1. Your website

The obvious place! You can sell a pdf of your book directly off your website or post links to all of the ebook sites where your book is for sale. If you do sell directly, make sure you have a shopping cart or site that will deliver it automatically to your buyer.

2. Amazon.com Kindle Store

Setting up a Kindle account to sell your book takes minutes. The book shows up on the site within a few days. Remember your book must be in Kindle’s exclusive .mobi format to be uploaded to the Kindle Store. No set up cost; Amazon takes a percentage of your sales.

3. Barnes & Noble Nook Store

B&N’s Nook store is also a popular place to sell and buy ebooks. Remember the Nook Store requires your book to be in .epub format to be uploaded here. No set up cost; B&N takes a percentage of your sales.

4. Clickbank

Clickbank has been around for several years as a site for both buying and selling products. In addition to listing your book for sale, Clickband offers your product for others to sell. Affiliate sales can add a lot to your bottom line.  Check the available titles here to see if this would be a good place for you to sell your book. How-to books are especially popular. Costs: Clickbank charges a one-time activation fee of $49.95. You set the percentage you’ll pay your affiliates for selling your ebook.

5. e-junkie.com

E-junkie.com is similar to Clickbank in that you can offer your book for affiliate sales and create your own affiliate programs for your website. Here, you can create your own shopping cart for selling products for your website. Cost: monthly fee based on the number of products you have listed.

6. Smashwords

Smashwords is an aggregate site where you can have your ebook published, sell your book on Smashwords and also have them sell your book on many other ebook sites. NOTE: Smashwords won’t list your book on Amazon. See their site for a current list of where they do list your book and their terms for their service. No set up cost; Smashwords takes a percentage of your sales. See their terms of service for details.

Remember those old hair color commercials who’s message was with the right hair color, you could look like you… only better?

I was reminded of that this week when I was working with a new client who wanted to improve her web presence while she was job hunting. During our session, this question came up – Should you be you online – warts and all? Or should you “enhance” your image a bit?

You know, “like you….only better?”

Why bother? There’s really nowhere to hide anymore. What exactly do we hope to accomplish by airbrushing those laugh lines and glossing over graduation dates? Once you meet somebody in person, the jig is up anyway. (I’ve heard versions of this dilemma several times from women friends who have tried internet dating.) And it’s not just about your appearance anyway.

Should you censor your opinions and even your personality to land a job, get a date, whatever?

My client’s worry was that her online comments and opinions could cost her a job interview. That’s a legitimate concern. But I pointed out to her that she probably didn’t want to work for someone who’s diametrically opposite to her values anyway. And, her opinions could also land her a job interview with a company who loves her opinions.

This “should I or shouldn’t I” dilemma is mostly a boomer phenomenon. Those of us from this generation are still very much in the habit of not spilling our guts in public. The generations who have come after us have less of a problem sharing personal information on Facebook. (I’m still mortified about one photo I saw on my timeline of a FB friend’s very private new piercing.)

I go back to my self-imposed Mom Rule for posting on social media. I don’t post anything  I wouldn’t have wanted my Mom to read. (Mom wasn’t a total prude, but she was a lady.) Envision your own personal arbitor of taste. What would they deem to be acceptable in online etiquette? And follow that cue.

Fun video of the week: If you’re in business, you need to create a brand that’s true to your goals, your ideals, your personality.

But, what if your brand is to never look the same way twice? Then you get Lady Gaga:

There was a flurry of updated Facebook pages yesterday as businesses added new timeline cover photos. Today is the deadline for updating your page, but I’m willing to bet there’s a lot of procrastinators out there. (Sort of like the people who file their taxes at 11:59 pm on April 15.)

So, if you’re one of them, don’t despair! Get busy working on a great new photo to use for your cover image. The image should be

• 851 x 315 pixels in size
• Not an ad – avoid using blatent sales or promotions
• Attention-getting and reinforces your brand.
• Not text-based
• Your own work – does not infringe on someone else’s copyright

Looking for inspiration? Check out some of the major brands on Facebook and the businesses you’ve liked on your own profile. I’ve seen some great images this week.

Next, pay attention to those little squares right below the big image. Those are your custom apps, formally known as tabs. You have up to 12 of those little apps to use for likes, video, pictures, events, and some custom apps. Especially think about the best ways to use the first four for your business. These are “above the fold” in prime location on your page.

Consider what would benefit your business the most. Do you need to:

• build your mailing list? Then add an app for your ezine provider, like Constant Contact, iContact, or Aweber.
• have special offers? Add content using an app like iFrame Tabs
• have video tips? Add the video app.

Last, revisit your current content and your Insights to see what’s been getting the most attention from your fans. Is it time to update content and refocus your message? Does your content meet your marketing objectives? Are your fans interacting with your page?

Facebook has also provided a handy guide for the page update: https://www.facebook.com/about/pages

Animoto, the online video creation site has been around for a while, but I just recently signed up for an account in order to create a book trailer for a client. If you’ve been wanting to create a video to promote your book or business, but have been intimidated by video, this is a pretty easy way to get started.

Animoto basically gives you an animated background to your photos and allows them to move and split in two and swoop around. Very cool. Fortunately, I was working with a book that featured some great cartoons. All I needed to do was resize some of the cartoons and photos, create a narrative, select a look and music for my video, and mix. Voila! Suddenly I’m Cecil B. DeMille.

Well, not quite. I don’t think Cecil ever did a movie featuring a chicken. Here’s the video for the book, Teaching Algebra to Chickens:

A sales prospect once told me how often he’d like me to contact him. “Don’t be a stranger, but don’t be a pest.” I still regard this as a nice rule of thumb for staying in touch with prospects, clients, social media connections, and subscribers to my blog and ezine.

The frequency may vary depending on the medium. How many times have you unsubscribed to an ezine because you got bombarded with messages every day? On the flip side, there’s a few publications that I’d like to see more than once a quarter or so.

If you really want to know how often people want to hear from you, ask them. A simple survey would do it. “How often would you like me to send you stuff? ___Daily  ___Weekly  ___ Monthly. The answers might surprise you.

The length of your communications could also impact how welcome your ezine or blog post is to your reader. These days, short is good. Nobody has time to read a dissertation on Facebook. But, they welcome a tip that they can implement that day.

So ask yourself: are you communicating with your customers the way they’d like you to?

I’ve been spring cleaning a client’s WordPress website – editing some pages, checking links and cleaning up code. The media gallery have been the biggest challenge. We had tons of duplicate photos, some really large media files and a couple of bitmap files – no wonder the site has been slow! So I’ve been deleting duplicate photos and resizing huge images that have really slowed down the loading time of the pages. Since several people administer the site I decided to propose a few procedures we can agree on on how to manage the photos on the site.

Here’s what I came up with:

1. Do not upload any photos in bitmap (.bmp) format. They are huge and will slow down the site. Please convert the image to a .jpg format first.
2. Resize any .jpg images more than 800 pixels wide and 1000 in height. Again, big images slow down the site.
3. If you’re going to reuse an image that’s already on the site, do not upload the image again. Use the one that’s already in the gallery. If you delete an image off a page or post you’re working on, you don’t have to re-upload it. It’s still in the gallery.
4. I’ve been playing with naming conventions for photos so we can easily find images in the gallery. Currently there’s 135 or so, down from over 250. I’d really like your input on how to name photos moving forward. Right now, it’s a pain to find anything. Please change the name of the image before uploading to the site. Here’s my suggestions on what to name images:

• If the photo is of a person – title the photo with their full name
• If the photo is a company logo – title the photo as “company name logo.”
• Animal – If a companion animal – use their name. Wild animals – short description, i.e., zebra on savanna.
• Anything else – very short description, i.e., old wagon, mountain meadow, watering can.

We’ll see if this system works for this client. How have you solved this problem?