First off, for an array of image-awesomeness without the limitation of a “theme”, go here: http://pinterest.com/source/google.com/.

1. Snapito

This tool allows you pin a screenshot of a website, as apposed to a single image. Clicking through the image on Pinterest will still direct users to the page you pinned, too.

Snapito offers a Pin Page button and Pin Full Page button. I would suggest putting both in your bookmarks bar. Here’s the difference:

“Pin Page” has a set dimension (I think) for a screenshot. Click here to see an example of how the iPad Features page looks when pinned via the “Pin Page” button.

“Pin Full Page” will literally pin the entire webpage, no matter how long it is. Click here to see an example of the same iPad Features page pinned via the “Pin Full Page” button.

2. Pin A Quote

This tool converts text into a pinable image. The free version converts your text to white images with simple black text, like this. For more customization, going pro for $1.99 offers customizable colors and fonts.

View how people are using Pin A Quote and see examples of customized pins by going here.

3. AddThis: Pinterest Follow Button

This is a little off-topic, but very valuable. AddThis has finally added Pinterest to their follow tools! AddThis makes it really easy to promote all of your social media profiles and providing in-depth analytics. Create yours.

Follow Netwirks

What are some Pinterest tools you’ve been using? Tell us about them in the comment section.

One question I’ve been getting asked a lot lately is “How do I update my website’s blog?” Since we build most of our websites in WordPress, posting to our blog is pretty easy — however, it’s nice to have a cheat sheet. So here it is:

1. Access /wp-admin/
To access the WordPress Login panel, go to http://www.[your-domain-name.com]/wp-admin/

2. Enter your username and password
When the page loads, you’ll see a page that will look similar to the image below. From here, login with your username and password. If someone else made your site and you don’t know what your login information is, contact them and request the username and password.

If your site was designed by Netwirks and you don’t know this information, email us with your domain name, first & last name (this will be your username), and phone number.

3. Add New Post
From the Dashboard, hover over “Posts” on the left and select “Add New”.

1. Basic: Visual
The basic way to write a new blog post in WordPress is in “Visual” mode. For the most part, you can see how your post will look once it’s published.

To format your text, just highlight and select b for bold or i for italic. Same for lists, adding links, and everything else.

2. Advanced: HTML
The advanced way to write your blog post is in “HTML” mode. This is the way we publish content at Netwirks. Even though you still take the same steps when formatting your content (just highlight and select b for bold or i for italic, etc), there are advantages.

For example: You might notice that “Visual” mode creates extra spaces between paragraphs. If you see this happen, just switch over to HTML mode, find the <p> and </p> tags and delete them.

Be careful in “HTML” mode – if you’re not familiar with basic html formatting, I suggest steering clear.

1. Post Categories
It’s really important that you get your post into the right category. You’ll probably see “Blog” and “Uncategorized” in your list if your site was designed by Netwirks. In almost every case, we’ve set up your website’s blog to be under the category “Blog”, so be sure that’s selected.

2. Pictures
To upload an image, select the option above your content box. A popup will appear, telling you to drag your media like this:

Once you’ve selected how you would like your photo positioned, select “Insert into post”.

1. Preview, then Publish
Always “Preview” your post before publishing. Your preview will open in a new tab or window, allowing you to easily edit anything you missed without having to navigate all the way back to your draft.

Once you publish, make sure you go to your blog (either www.[your-domain-name.com]/blog/ or www.[your-domain-name.com]/category/blog/) to see how the excerpt looks. If you’ve attached an image or do any funky code, this page could end up looking pretty weird.

Don’t see your post? Usually this means you’ve posted it in the wrong category. Just edit the post, change the category, and “update” (this will be the option you’ll have instead of “publish”).

Look at your published post. Everything good? Start sharing!

Have you recently started using WordPress as your blogging platform? Let us know how you feel about it in the comments.

First, an introduction to Pinterest:

The newest craze in the social media world has major potential. It’s an image-based platform called Pinterest. It’s a place, a virtual pinboard, where people can “pin” photos they are interested in onto their pinboards. Pinboards are categorized into different interests. It’s a great way to see the up and coming trends. In a way it’s a lot like Facebook and Twitter, but with images. People can repin stuff they like onto their own boards and “like” the image or even write a comment about it. If you are really proud of something you have done, then pin it but don’t overpin your own stuff. What’s great about Pinterest for businesses is it creates link juice every time one of your photos is pinned. And even more link juice if that photo is repinned by someone else and in turn creates a greater audience for that product and your business.

Is Pinterest a good place for businesses to advertise their products?

Well, in the pin etiquette, it lists one of their rules as “avoid self-promotion.” What does that mean for businesses then? There are a few examples of businesses on Pinterest that are already doing well. One such company is Whole Foods. On their boards they don’t even advertise their products. Instead they create boards based on the demographics of their customers and what they like to do, and that in turn relates to the products they sell. Another way to get around advertising your products would be to make boards related to your line of work.

Ex: If you sell food, pin recipes.

In turn, people will have to go to your grocery store to get the items needed in the recipe. Pretty simple. But Pinterest isn’t for every business…yet. The types of businesses that will benefit the most right now are those that are e-commerce and have really great pictures to share on their sites. Just wait though, sooner or later all types of businesses will benefit from Pinterest. Already, the number of Pinterest users has exceeded the 11 million mark and it’s growing everyday. More and more businesses are catching on and joining. Give it time, and Pinterest just might be the next big social media platform. Already it’s number 5 on the list, just below Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Yahoo!.

4 Things your business should do:

If you want to see what photos of yours are pinned and repinned check this out…
http://pinterest.com/source/[yourdomainname].com

Have you seen any creative marketing strategies on Pinterest yet? Let us know about them in the comments, we’d love to know.

Google AdWords

More Popular
Let’s say someone’s looking for a web design company to redesign their site. The first place they’re going to go is most likely Google, and search “web design company.” If you’re a web design company, clearly the place to be is on the first page of these search results.

The point: Google AdWords allow you to advertise to people who are already looking for your product or service.

Better Quality
With AdWords, advertisers target buyers by bidding on keywords and targeting a location. That’s the gist. It’s easy to target buyers if you are experienced with PPC. With negative keywords, maybe a few broad match modifiers and some understanding the psychology behind intent — getting in front of people ready to purchase your product or service is simple.

Facebook Advertising

Different
Advertising on Facebook is a little different. Continuing with the perspective of a web design company, let’s say you begin a Facebook campaign. For the sake of keeping it simple, pretend your ad is visible to the entire U.S., both genders, and anyone above 25 years old.

Problematic
There’s one fundamental problem here. Who’s to say that anyone who sees your ad even has a website? However, you might reach a ton of people who love looking at great websites, in which case you’ll spend $2 (random estimate) to have some 35 year old living in his mom’s basement check out your portfolio while drinking a 40.

More Advanced
Facebook does have some pretty advanced targeting techniques. Besides the basics, these include interests, education, and connections (“liked” pages). Because Facebook uses cookies to track how you surf the web outside of their own site, I wouldn’t doubt this information is used towards choosing which ad to show you. But how do you target business owners, or someone in need of a certain service? Apply the same idea to pest control companies, remodeling companies, and dentists. See how hard it becomes to target buyers?

The point: With Facebook Advertising, your ads are being shown to people who aren’t looking for your service.

Less Expensive
Of course, amazing campaigns have come from Facebook ads. If you’re willing to integrate a great contest or other incentive into your existing Facebook page, clearly Facebook is the place to advertise that incentive. Don’t be afraid to get creative with your marketing strategies. With notably lower CPC rates on Facebook, a budget of $10/day can go a long way — with the right incentive.

Do you have any successful Facebook Advertising stories? Tell us in the comments section.

1. WhatFont

This is an incredibly helpful tool. You can do almost the same thing (with the exception of source info) with Firebug, but you might still have to do a bit of digging through code. WhatFont is much easier, faster, and intuitive.

2. PageRank Status

All the other developer I mentioned will basically tell you the same thing, but this extension shows the page rank of the current open page in the extension icon. It’s nice to be able to glance at it while your browsing as apposed to opening the extra window (below) every time.

3. Color Pick

This tool makes it so easy to match the color of anything… not just images.

4. Keyword Density Tool

In my job, keyword density is extremely important. I’m always shuffling between tabs to copy and paste URLs into keyword density analyzers and this tool does it right from the same window.

1) Locate Negative Reviews

Using a search engine of your choosing, type “(business name)” and “(business name) reviews” in to the search field. Scan both the first and second pages of the search results to identify and note any negative reviews that can cause problems with potential customers doing their online research.

2) Claim Your Listings

Once you have located the websites and negative reviews associated with your business, you’ll want to log or sign in to the website that has the negative review. Any authoritative review website should have this ability to login and manage a listing. Some websites will instruct you through a verification process via telephone or mail which takes very little time to complete. Other websites simply have you just click the “Claim” button. Either way, you’ll need to claim the listing so you can begin responding to your negative review.

3) Respond Professionally

Whether the review is legitimate or not, you’ll want to acknowledge the review and admit your company was at fault in a short and sincere sentence or two. Try your hardest to resolve the situation. If no comment was provided, kindly ask the reviewer to provide more information on this low rating. After fault admitted and apology given, discuss what you learned and how you and your business will improve its operations. Never argue with the reviewer or provide an excuse on the review website. Your response will viewed by the public and make your business look worse. Remember to be professional.

4) Improve Your Business

Reviews are intended to help businesses like yours identify strengths and weaknesses in their product or service. It’s up to you act on this customer feedback so you can start generating more positive reviews on your listings. Whereas negative reviews can hurt your business, positive reviews will help increase conversion of your visitors to customers thus producing more leads and sales to your business.

5) Generate Positive Reviews

Generating positive reviews can be a difficult process. Usually when a customer is happy with your product or service, they tend to not want to leave a review on your listings. Just simply remind them to do so when your communicating with your customers. Incentives and review generation software are other popular methods of generating positive reviews.

6) Monitor Review Websites

Here is a list of a few of the important review websites that you’ll want to create and monitor your listing.

Google Maps – http://maps.google.com
Yelp – http://www.yelp.com
Better Business Bureau – http://www.bbb.org
Yellow Pages – http://www.yellowpages.com
Angie’s List – http://www.angieslist.com

One Tool To Rule Them All

Google’s Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer) is a powerful and extremely popular tool to help businesses explore and analyze keyword phrases that are relevant to your industry. It can help you identify highly searched keyword phrases and the cost of running paid advertising through Google AdWords.

Know Your Audience, Be Your Audience

Before using you the keyword tool, identify the products or services that earn your business the most money. Understand your audience and get a feel for how they search in your industry. The keyword phrases you think should be targeted may actually be different than what is actually searched according to search engines. The Keyword Tool is one the more reliable resources we could find to analyze user search behavior.

Market research shows that an older audience searches more with zip codes, cities and states whereas a younger audience tends to search without zip codes, cities and states. A male audience tends to search with zip codes whereas a female audience tends to search with cities and towns. If you’re unsure of your audience, run both campaigns and measure the results. Look at the metrics in your analytics after you’ve run the campaigns for 30 days to see which campaign produced the best metrics. Things you’ll want to look at are goal URLs, average time on site, average pages per visit and bounce rate. Disable, turn on and adjust campaigns accordingly.

No Need To Reinvent The Wheel

Starting from scratch can often be a difficult process and delay the keyword research process. By now you should know which businesses are the leading competitors in your area for your industry. If they’re successful competitors, then they have to be doing something right, so let’s not reinvent the wheel. Go ahead and take a look at the keywords they’re going after. Using Google’s Keyword Tool, we’ll copy and paste the domain name of a competitors website into the Website field and submit the request. Upon submitting the request, the tool will return keyword ideas that this competitor is or should be targeting according the analysis of the content on their home page. Use these ideas to find keyword ideas relating to your industry and find a niche to improve the conversion of website visitors to customers.

It’s The Little Things That Make A Difference

In addition to targeting the seemingly obvious keywords phrases for your business, don’t be afraid to go after the smaller products and services within your industry. Plan your campaign around these more focused products and services and guide them within your website to a larger, more profitable goal. Be sure to keep in mind that you are always presenting relevant content to the user during their experience within your website.

Be A Risk Taker With Paid Advertising

After you’ve completed you’re keyword research, be careful hopping right into organic campaigns via search engine optimization. Optimizing your website for organic results can often be a lengthy and risky process that can be tough to adjust later. With very little time involved, Google AdWords can help you test your research, provide metrics and assist you in identifying the strong keyword phrases you can then use to optimize your website for organic rankings. With more money invested in paid advertising in search engines, more metrics are returned for you to analyze and thus provide a better idea of the keywords you should be going after in the organic area of a search engine results page.

Get A Bigger Tool Belt

As with any occupation, you need to equip yourself with the latest tools and equipment. Ubbersuggest (http://www.ubersuggest.com) and Merge Words (http://www.mergewords.com) are 2 more great online tools to assist you in the process of keyword research. There are many other SEO and internet marketing companies that continuously recommend tools to improve this experience. Follow their website, blog and social media profiles to become an expert in marketing your business within search engines.

Are We There Yet?!?!

Knowing, understanding and using these tips as you keyword research will hopefully prevent you from making the mistakes many businesses make when running their search engine marketing campaigns. During your campaigns, analyze, learn and modify these tips to continually improve the amount of quality customers to your website. We look forward to any keyword research suggestions, arguments and feedback in regards to this article.

“Domestic results, however, are a different story. Yahoo! still managed to hold on to the silver medal with 9.74%, while Bing was trailing ever-so-close behind at 9.03%. Shockingly, Google actually has less control over the search engine market share in the United States with just 79.63%. Okay, so that’s still nothing to complain about, but Bing could pull ahead of Yahoo! in March.” By: Rachel King | March 2, 2011

The top 4 major search engines, Google, Yahoo, bing and MSN (ABOVE) are what make up 90+ percent of the search engine market. These are the guys that you want to impress with your content. There’s know how and strategy behind this delicate process, but the utter importance is if you’re going to tempt these spider’s, there’s a few things you need to have.

Build Domain Age

Your domain’s age is a majority factor in the organic ranking in search engines, as well as google ad placement. Don’t be a fly-by-night company and register your main domain for less than a year. Only register for a year on offer domains, lead sites, etc.

Choose Your Keywords Wisely

Having more than just your brand name in your domain is a positive. Drop the ego and come to realization that NOT EVERYONE knows you by name, but by the product or service you provide.

Simplify & Organize Your Navigation

Having your pages in order is vital because it shows organization, easy navigation and professionalism not only to your site visitor, but also the search engines.

Use Header Tags Within Content

Make sure they’re used properly, effectively and consistently. These helps in identifying what your pages are about.

Add Meta Descriptions To Your Pages

I’m going to wing it on this one (I looked it up) Meta Descriptions, which contain HTML characteristics which will provide precise explanations of each of the web pages content/ details, are used by search engines on the organic results page to provide a “sneak-preview of what the page contains.

Use Conversion Forms

Just because your business is closed for the night, doesn’t mean your website is. Give them a place to contact you whether by “question form” or “request a quote” or “request a call” form.

Consistently Update Your Website With Fresh & Original Content

Keep it original and write from the heart. That’s how this blog post started and its body contains and will end. Make sure that you blog on trending topics, products, services that contain the keywords you want to show up for. Remember, not everyone knows your business name, but more the product or service you provide. Now you’ve spent all this time on research for keyword enrichment, the article you wrote and now you’ve made it live on the site. Once you’ve hit the “submit” button, you want your post read as soon as possible, right? The thing of it is, no one knows when these top 4 search engines will crawl it until you see it indexed. Just make sure the keywords are enriched and your content is ORIGINAL. You can use HYPERLINK “http://www.copyscape.com” www.copyscape.com to help you in detecting duplicate, plagiarized content yourself. Keep in mind; if your site is new, under a year old, you still need the search engines to recognize the site as whole, as well as its content. But be very careful with how much you post, how many back links you place towards your domain; too many may result in google, yahoo, bing and MSN in thinking your site is indeed SPAM!

So in this, you should be able to understand why it’s important to have a couple of key factors to rank and maintain rank. Keep your content original and fresh, as well as keep it fun.

1) Watch Your Social Language

People use speech styles as a short cut to determine everything about each other and writing is no exception. This means that the way you write is just as important as what you write.

“Finding my company’s voice sounds like a crucial part of social media marketing.”
“Man, finding my company’s voice sounds like a pretty important part of social media marketing.”

While these two sentences make the same statement, they say two completely different things. Creating a social language that sounds the same as when people speak can be great for companies that want to look casual and playful. This language doesn’t work well for lawyers or medical facilities because readers don’t want them to be casual or playful; they want clean and professional.

2) Don’t Always Talk About Yourself

Write content that is useful and important to your followers. An organic food company could say “Try sea salt on minor skin scrapes. mix a teaspoon-size amount in your palm with a bit of water, gently rub onto the area, and rinse (it does sting a little, though!)” People might share this helpful tip with friends, resulting in more followers for you.

Statistics are also a good way to catch the reader’s attention and promote sharing. But be sure the statistic you’re sharing is interesting, because (watch this) 72% of people share content because they find it entertaining or interesting (Chadwick Martin Bailey, 2010).

3) Let Your Followers Be Heard

Posting a question like “Tell us about a memorable experience you had with our company. Was it good or bad?” or “What service would you like to see us offer?” lets people know you are willing to listen and engage. It’s human nature to tell stories and share opinions because it helps connect us with each other. This also plays a role in brand loyalty, which has a huge impact in the long run. The key to using this method is that your company has to actually be willing to listen and engage, because if you’re not, expect backlash. Take what your followers say as a way to grow, improve, and learn.

A lot of internet marketing companies, including Netwirks, encourage clients to be active in their social media sites of choice. This is primarily due to the brand-knowledge needed to keep the site fresh such as new products, discount offers, events, and employee news. The down side to this is the knowledge, patience, and time needed to effectively market to the social network. Because of this, Netwirks is currently working on finding ways of becoming more involved.

Business owners: How would you like to see Netwirks get involved?

Lead Sites for Your Business

For a small business in a competitive market, getting top search engine placement can be a challenge, especially in markets where you compete with big chains or dominant local business. Good SEO is a great place to start, but getting to the top of Google takes time and can be very hard if you up against a giant with a huge marketing budget. That’s where lead sites play an important role in getting your website found.
What is a Lead Site?

A lead site is a small SEO driven site specifically targeted to at one product, service or geographic location. Rather than displaying all your companies information in once place, a lead site focuses on one specific product, service or geo and with great seo can get to the top of the ranking quickly, giving you a powerful lead generating source.

What makes a good lead site?

A lead site is more than just a simple website with little information or a clone of your main website. A lead site is a powerful marketing tool that can be custom tailored to needs of your marketing campaign. A lead site must be simple, well written and coded with proper seo, keyword density and specific content. But most importantly, it must convert visitors effectively.

How can a Lead Site Help a Small Business?

Its simple, a lead site can get your business found and get you in contact with the customer you need. Lead sites are targeted by marketing experts to specific keyword strings, allowing you to control the searches that your site appears for. Think of it as organic pay per click. In short having a number of specifically targeted lead sites can make your business dominate local search rankings and let you capture all those leads you’ve been missing.

Lead Site Services

Netwirks is a pioneer in lead site creation. We’ve been helping businesses succeed with our specialized lead sites for years. Be the next to dominate local search with a customized Netwirks lead site for you business. Contact us today for a free consultation.