Many websites have gone dark today in protest of SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and PIPA, Protect IP. These two dangerous bills in congress could lead to censorship on the internet.

To summarize the legislation as simply as possible, these two bills are meant to stop companies from copying, or “pirating” content or software from others and reselling it. However, the verbiage is so broad that websites like Wikipedia, Reddit, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, and even your own personal blog wouldn’t be able to exist as they do today because things like comment boxes, status updates, and wiki edits all provide users the opportunity to upload pirated content. The bill would make it possible for your site to be taken down without due process. It entirely violates the first amendment, and would hinder the growth of our economy.

Here is a cronicle of some of the more popular sites that have gone dark today:

Here are the best resources for you to learn more about SOPA (without needing to be a lawyer):

• The Oatmeal created a humorous presentation on what SOPA is, in laymens terms. 
• Chris Heald at Mashable wrote an excellent piece on exactly why SOPA is dangerous. This is a must-read.
• Technorati compiled a full list of sites that went dark today (1/18/12) in protest of SOPA and PIPA.

Do your part to help. Click here to sign the online petition. Call or write to your state senator & representatives’ offices. Let’s do what we can to make sure our freedoms stay intact.Related Posts:

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Facebook gives you access to millions of people on a daily basis, and you should give your brand visibility where people go every day. If your blog, website, or business still doesn’t have a Facebook fan page, it’s not too late. You’d be surprised by the amount of companies that still don’t realize Facebook is a valuable resource for reaching their audience.

Here are just some of the reasons why your business should have a Facebook fan page:

1. Increase Online Visibility

With 250 million users signing into Facebook on a daily basis, having a Facebook fan page provides you with a platform to engage with an increasingly social audience. Facebook allows pages to share photos, videos, questions, and more with users who have liked the page. These shared assets are visible in users’ newsfeeds, right on their Facebook homepage, in-line with their friends’ status updates.

2. Engage With Your Target Audience and Consumers

Facebook has made it easier for businesses to advertise to their target audiences in a very personal way. With Facebook fan pages, your promotional messaging is integrated right into your fans’ newsfeeds, alongside updates from their friends.

Facebook is inherently social. As such, your target audience and current customers can like, reply to, and share any update, photo, video, or link you share on your Facebook page. And you can engage with them by answering any questions they have, or showing your appreciation for participating on your page.

3. Manage Your Online Reputation

Facebook can also be used as a customer service platform. You have the unique opportunity to publicly show that you care about your audience/customers/consumers. You can monitor and respond to any questions, feedback, suggestions, and even criticism posted to your Facebook wall. By responding, you’ll show that you have a genuine interest in your audience’s opinions, which can create a positive buzz around your business.

4. Be More Easily Findable Online

Having a presence on social media sites like Facebook also has benefits such as increasing your search engine presence. Search engines take well-maintained Facebook pages into account when determining their search results, which can allow you to be found by more potential clients in the search engines. Also, the more “likes” your page has, the more visible you’ll be within Facebook, which is second to Google.

5. Gain Social Endorsement

It has been proven that our behavior is influenced by the behavior and approval of our peers. The most powerful form of marketing is via social endorsement, where you can see that your friends like or have bought a product/service. People tend to tune out traditional media, such as TV ads and magazine ads. But they pay attention to what their friends are doing. And their friends are on Facebook, perhaps liking your page. So they might decide to like your page, too.

6. Target Ads Based on Interests

In addition to your Facebook page alone, Facebook also provides your business with an advertising platform that hyper-targets your ads based users’ interests. So not only can Facebook increase your visibility, but they can help you gain exposure to an audience that you already know is interested in topics relevant to your business.

Facebook can provide you with the opportunity to reach millions of people very inexpensively. This guide will show you how to build a Facebook page, engage with your audience, and promote your presence to reach as wide and as relevant an audience as possible.

What do you think is the best reason to have a Facebook fan page?Related Posts:

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The 9 Worst Ways to Use Facebook for Business
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Over the past year, I’ve been guilty of long lulls between blog post sprints. I blame it mostly on (1) the fact that I was planning my wedding and (2) any extra hours I spent working went toward writing content for my day job. But there were many times when I sat down to write a blog post, and even had a great idea for a post and the title in mind, but my brain was so filled with upcoming dress fittings and menu selections that I couldn’t focus.

Writer’s block happens to all of us at one time or another. But if you make your living online, and depend on your ability to consistently adding fresh content to your blog to generate traffic, you can’t make up excuses. Here are a few ways to beat writer’s block when blogging.

Schedule the time to blog

If you just try to fit in some time to write in between your other tasks, your brain won’t be solely focused on writing; in the back of your mind, you’ll still be thinking of all the other things you “should” be doing right now. Instead, schedule in an hour a day, or an hour every other day, to write your blog posts. This way, you’ll create that sacred time that is specifically reserved to writing. This will help shift the focus to the task at hand.

Choose a topic first

First choose a subject to write about. This can often be the hardest part. Whenever I’ve helped clients come up with new blog post ideas, I ask them: “What was the last question someone asked you about your industry? Before they became a customer? In a blog comment you received?” If someone had a question for you, chances are that other people (who haven’t necessarily visited your site yet) have the same question. That question makes a great subject for your next blog post.

Start out with a numbered list

If you have an idea for a post, but are still stuck, turn that post into a numbered list. For example, if I were stuck on this post, I could have called it “5 Ways to Beat Writer’s Blog When Blogging.” Now that you have a target number in mind, jot down the 5 ways, 5 reasons, 5 why’s, 5 steps, etc. to do whatever it is you’re telling your readers about. Now you have an outline that you can follow!

Write for 10 solid minutes

Get your iPhone, stopwatch, or egg time, and set it for 10 minutes. Then just TYPE. Get out whatever ideas are in your head about the topic you’ve decided on. There are two principles at work here:

• Many people work better under pressure. Even when you’ve set yourself an hour to write, you might spend the first 15 minutes on Facebook, 5 minutes checking your email, and another 10 minutes in your RSS reader, and all the sudden you’ve wasted 10 minutes. This way, you’ll spend the first 10 minutes being productive.
• It’s much easier to edit something than it is to write it from scratch. Once you’ve written out what’s quite possibly gibberish, you can go back and edit what you’ve got.  And you’ll have 50 minutes left to do so. Besides, you’re the expert on whatever you’re writing about, so chances are it’ll be much better than gibberish.

Maintain a consistent blogging environment

Sounds like music that’s not yours, a dog barking, an interesting program on television, or even a spouse’s question can completely derail your train of thought. Don’t let that happen. Make your family aware that you’re off-limits for the next hour (or better yet, wake up before the rest of the household does), and go in a quiet room to write. If necessary, put on some headphones and blast instrumental music like Mozart or the Lord of the Rings soundtrack (hey, it works for me). Find the environment that gets you in the zone, and replicate that environment each time you want to blog. It will help you get in the zone faster the next time.

What are your strategies for overcoming writer’s block? Let me know in the comments below!Related Posts:

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7 Top Reasons Why You Should Start a Blog
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Writing blog posts is a great way to get more traffic to your website, especially if you’re using SEO best practices and consistently adding fresh content to your blog. But you also need to make sure that you’re creating a good experience for readers once they’re on your blog. I’ve seen many blogs that are unappealing to read; they have dense paragraphs of text, and it feels like I’m about to read a textbook.

Creating blog posts that are easier to read will create a better user experience for your readers, and make them more likely to share your post on social networks and subscribe to your blog, thus getting you more traffic and a loyal readership in the long run.

Here’s how to write a blog post that’s easy to read:

1. Avoid dense paragraphs of text

Dense paragraphs are those long blocks of text with nothing to break it up. There aren’t enough paragraphs, section headers, or images to break up the content. At first glance, this style of writing looks very overwhelming. Posts like this will tend to have a higher bounce rate (so people enter your site via that blog post and leave your site right away).

2. Use section headers or numbered lists

This is what I’m doing in this post. I’ve broken up each of my points into a paragraph, each of which are prefaced by a numbered section header. I use H2 headers for paragraph headers, and H3 if I ever need subsections. This will make it very easy for my readers to scan the post, quickly grasp the main points, and then they can read the sections that are most interesting to them. It also breaks up the content nicely, so it looks less overwhelming.

3. Use bullet points

Bullet points are a great way to list points, takeaways, or ideas. Again, it’s a way for readers to quickly scan the content, making it easy for them to understand. Here are some ways to use bullet points:

• List things. Turn lists in which each item is separated by a comma into a bulleted list.
• Create steps. If you’re explaining how to do something, list each step as a bullet point, rather than having one long rambling paragraph.
• Summarize your post. Preface longer posts with a bulleted list similar to a table of contents, and show what you’re going to cover.
• Provide takeaways. Wrap up longer posts with the biggest takeaways from that post, in the form of a bulleted list.

4. Use images

Use images in your post to break up the content, if applicable. If you’re showing your readers how to do something, take screenshots of the steps you’re describing. If you’re a food blogger, take pictures of the food, or of each step of the recipe. If I’m writing a blog post like this where images aren’t really necessary (such as this one), I at least always have one image at the top that conceptually shows what the blog post is about. It’s a visual aid for readers to understand what they’re going to be reading about.

5. Break up longer posts

If you have a super long blog post that exceeds 2,000 words, you might want to think about breaking it up into two separate posts. This will also allow you to create two separate pages of content, which give you two separate opportunities to get traffic for each of those pages. Remember to link back and forth between the two posts so readers can easily find the different sections.

What strategies do you use to make your blog posts easy to read? Let me know in the comments below!Related Posts:

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New Years resolutions have to be the most frequently broken promises people make to themselves. Can you remember the last time you kept your new year’s resolution until the following December? If so… you’re pretty awesome. Just think: it’s always impossible to get a treadmill at the gym in January. Then it gets a little easier in February, and then is back to normal by March. So many gym memberships go to waste by spring.

Resolutions are often broken because they weren’t realistic to begin with, or were too drastic a change to adhere to. But new years are such a great opportunity to get a fresh start, especially after wrapping up big projects before the holidays in December. So if you can set realistic goals for yourself, now is the time to do so.

If you want to set some social media new years resolutions, here’s how to do so in a way that will be motivating, realistic, and will keep you from falling off the wagon.

1. Don’t resolve to improve every aspect of your social media strategy at once

Overwhelming yourself and burning yourself out is the worst way to start off the new year. This is how people fall off the wagon with their diet and exercise resolutions; they cut down to 1,200 calories and one hour of cardio a day, seven days a week, and then quit when they’re on the verge of fainting a few days later. Not the best approach. The same applies to social media: if you take too much on in the beginning, you’ll burn yourself out, never see your friends or family, and won’t apply the best practices to each social media element.

An over-ambitious social media New Years resolution:

I will write a new blog post every day of the week, tweet four times a day, create a Facebook page and update its status twice a day, and get TONS more Twitter followers, starting tomorrow.

A realistic social media New Years resolution:

I will follow this schedule to have an improved social media presence within 4 months:

• January: Create a Facebook page, add a like box to my website, and get used to updating the status once per day to start. Updating my status regularly will help me see the gaps in my existing content. When I see a gap, or think of content that would be nice to have, I’ll write it down in an Excel file I have saved on my desktop.
• February:  Start blogging on a regular basis. I will start with three blog posts per week: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. By this time I will have topic ideas in my excel file, and I will add to the file as I think of new ideas. I will share the link on my Facebook page each time I publish a blog post, in addition to my regular status update I’ll stick to creating once per day.
• March: Get more engaged on Twitter. I will retweet two articles per day, reply to someone once per day, and share my three blog posts per week on Twitter as well. Additionally, I’ll start following people in my industry so that I can start getting more of a following, and will create Twitter lists so that I can group people together and make sense of my Twitter stream more easily.
• April: Now that I’m used blogging, Facebooking, and Tweeting on a regular basis, I will increase my blog output to five blog posts per week.

2. Set measurable goals that are realistic

Have target metrics in mind. This will help motivate you, and will be an encouraging factor when you start to succeed. Also make sure to make these numbers realistic. Here are a few examples:

• If you currently have 50 Facebook fans, aim for 20 new fans per month. (If this doesn’t seem like much, just think: this would more than quadruple your fan base after a year.)
• If you currently get 500 page views per month on your blog, set a goal of 700 page views for month #1, 1000 page views for month #2, and 1300 page views for month #3.
• If you currently have 500 followers on Twitter, aim for 200 new followers per month.

You can always adjust your goals as you go if you exceed your own expectations.

3. Write out your plans for the new year

Flesh out exactly what your goals for the new year are, like in the examples above. Don’t go overboard with a 50 page business plan; again, avoid overwhelming yourself. Just take out a piece of paper and write down your goals (and the numbers you want to achieve) over the next six months, and pin it up above your desk. If you want to be a bit more organized, keep an Excel spreadsheet (and still print it out and pin it up above your desk; files often get forgotten and abandoned).

Having your plans written out make your goals seem more real. It’s more motivating than having a couple vague ideas floating around in your head, which you might quickly lose sight of.

4. Don’t resort to automation

If you want to get more Twitter followers or Facebook fans, don’t start downloading sketchy software to automate the process for you. Followers that you acquire automatically will not be worth anything to you in the long-run. By using social networks the right way (sharing content, following and interacting with others in your industry, etc.), you will foster valuable relationships and gain followers who will be interested in clicking your links and reading your blog content.

Followers you get via automation software are usually bots, spam accounts, people who rarely use Twitter, or people who will unfollow you soon since you’re not really relevant to their interests after all.

So which would you rather have: 1,000 followers who don’t pay attention to you, or 100 followers who read your tweets, reply to you, and click on your links?

5. Have fun with it!

Social media should be fun! It shouldn’t seem like a massive chore. That’s another reason not to overwhelm yourself in the beginning: it WILL seem like a chore. By setting realistic goals and expectations for yourself, you can take the time to learn the best practices of each element, get comfortable using each platform, and enjoy writing content and making connections with other people.

What are your social media new years resolutions? Share yours in the comments below!Related Posts:

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Oooh. Look at that. The magical yellow bar has appeared at the top of your WordPress dashboard, with a pretty upgrade button. An upgrade to WordPress 3.3 is available.

You click the pretty upgrade button.

You sit patiently for a couple seconds, literally twiddling your thumbs in anticipation. You get up to make a hot chocolate while the coding faeries are hard at work, delivering magical upgrades to your WordPress experience. You sit back down at your computer, eager to enjoy your chocolaty treat and explore the new WordPress functionality. Then you stare in disbelief at the screen.

This is you for approximately 10 minutes:

Sound familiar? We’ve all been there. Maybe it was a blue screen of death, or a crashed PowerPoint presentation you were so close to finishing, but hadn’t been saved. (Isn’t it amazing how simple it is to hit Ctrl-S, yet how much we neglect that keystroke?) In my case, last night it was a WordPress upgrade failure.

I Googled the error message and found that other people were having the same exact issue, and apparently I tried upgrading 1/2 hour after WordPress 3.3 was released. Bummer.

The moral of the story is: you should wait to upgrade software that you depend on for your blog or business. Just like you should wait a couple months before getting the newest iPhone. If you wait:

1. Bugs will have been fixed.
2. If there are conflicting plugins, they will have been discovered.
3. There will be resolutions posted in the forums for any issues you may still have.

So when that’s shiny upgrade button appears, do a quick Google search to make sure the latest version has been out for a while, and bug fixes have been applied!Related Posts:

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Facebook fan pages allow businesses to engage with fans in a two-way conversational format. In order to continue this conversation beyond a single fan page visit, businesses need to find ways to get people to “like” their fan pages. This way, their fan page updates will appear in their fans’ newsfeeds, offering an opportunity for fans to interact.

Facebook reveal tabs, a.k.a. like gates, are an excellent way encourage people to like your fan page. They’re default landing pages the user sees the first time they visit your Facebook page, which encourage them to “like” the page in order to see some sort of exclusive content. It’s proven to be an effective way to generate a fan base more quickly.

If you’re looking for some design inspiration, here are 25 examples of great Facebook fan pages and how they designed their reveal tabs.

Which is your favorite Facebook fan page reveal tab? Does your Facebook page have one? Share yours (and your favorites) in the comments below!Related Posts:

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Are you planning on changing your name when you tie the knot? If so, you’ll have a lot of forms to fill out, from updating your driver’s license to updating your utility bills. Fortunately, Facebook makes it much easier to change your name than the Social Security Administration.

Here’s how to update your name on Facebook in three simple steps.

1. Change your Display Name

Before you change your display name, think about how you’d like your name to appear to your Facebook friends in their newsfeeds. You have a few options; I’ll use my name as an example (Freedman is my maiden name, and Urban is my married name).

• Diana Urban
• Diana Freedman Urban
• Diana Freedman-Urban

When you’re ready, click the little down arrow at the top-right side of the screen and select Account Settings.

Then click Edit in the Name row. Again, I’ll show you my settings as an example.

Option 1: Diana Urban

If I wanted my name to appear as Diana Urban, I would edit the last name field. Then I would enter my former name, Diana Freedman, in the Alternate name field.

With this option, my name would appear as Diana Urban in friends’ newsfeeds, but my maiden name would appear in parenthesis on my profile, and people would still be able to find me via Facebook search if they searched for “Diana Freedman.”

Option 2: Diana Freedman Urban

If I wanted my name to appear as Diana Freedman Urban, I would add Freedman to the Middle name field, and select “Diana Freedman Urban” from the Display as dropdown menu.

This helps keep your Facebook friends from being confused about who you are. Whenever someone abruptly changes their name on Facebook, it’s a bit confusing, especially if their Facebook profile picture isn’t a clear closeup. Not all of your Facebook friends will know your husband’s name, so this way they’ll see the new name after your original name, and will make the connection.

Option 3: Diana Freedman-Urban

If you’re officially changing your name to by hyphenated, this is an option for you. In this case, I would edit the Last name field to be Diana Freedman-Urban.

2. Change your Facebook Username (Vanity URL)

Back on the Account Settings page, you can also change your Username. This is the URL that people can type in to find you. Click Edit in the Username row, and then type in your new URL.

You may find that your new name is already taken. Mine was taken, so I decided to keep my Facebook URL the same. But if you can snatch up your new name, go for it!

3. Edit your Primary Email Address

If you also changed your email address to reflect your new name, you should update your email address in Facebook. Click Edit in the Email row (also in Account Settings), and follow these steps:

• Click Add another email
• Enter your new email address and save your changes
• Your new email address will then appear as a Choose primary option. Select this new email address and save your changes again.
• Next, you may want to delete your old email address. If so, simply click Remove next to your old email address. Save your changes.

That’s it! Note that if you have a Facebook fan page for yourself, you will NOT be able to change the name of that page or its vanity URL. Please let me know if you have any questions in the comments below!Related Posts:

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Search engine optimization is the science (and art) of strategically including a keyword you want more traffic for throughout a website page. If done correctly, it allows people to find you when they search for that keyword in search engines. If done with black-hat SEO techniques, it can ban your site from Google. If done poorly (or overdone), even with the best intentions, it will just make you look foolish to your readers.

This post isn’t about intentional black-hat SEO techniques like content cloaking, invisible keyword stuffing, link farming, link exchanges, and other practices. It’s about websites that overdo their SEO to the point where it ruins what would have been a perfectly good site, page, or blog post.

Here’s how to kill a great website page by overdoing search engine optimization.

1. Keyword stuff to the point where your sentences don’t make sense

I caught a website in the act this evening. I was doing a bit of a redesign on this blog, and I did a search for “best wordpress plugins” to see if there were any new plugins worth checking out. I clicked on the site that ranked third at the time of this post. Upon first glance, it looks like an excellent list of plugins. But as I read the sentences, I was blown away by the blatant keyword stuffing going on for the term “best wordpress plugins.” Go ahead, click on the link and count the mentions.

No really, go ahead and count.

It’s kind of like a scavenger hunt.

29 times. And that’s not including the post title. Or the 3 additional “wordpress plugins” and 4 more “wordpress plugin.”

If you still don’t think this is a lot you’re weird, here are some of my favorite quotes:

• “uBillboard are slider best WordPress plugins.”
• “UberMenu is a user-friendly, highly customizable mega menu ( or mega drop down menu ) best WordPress plugins.”
• “…and the great variety of best WordPress plugins and themes makes it even more useful”
• “Currently this best WordPress plugins for autoblogging can add…”

If those 29+ mentions actually made sense, I might have missed the overuse of the term. But the complete lack of editing is what makes this keyword stuffing strategy so obvious. Which is a shame, because the article did have really good content.

2. Stuff your title tag and meta description with similar keywords

If you optimize your title tag (70 character max) and meta description (150 character max) of a website page correctly, it should include one or two mentions of the keyword you’re trying to get traffic for. Then use the rest of the space to convey your value proposition, and include a good call to action in the description.

You should not, however, fill the character limits of your title and meta description with keywords. It’s not necessarily a “black-hat” technique, but it makes you look silly. Because it’s funny hilarious to pick on SEO agencies that have made this mistake…

Tee hee!

SEO agencies aside, if you stuff your titles and meta descriptions with keywords, you may get ranked by Google but you’ll get less traffic from the humans who clicked the stronger listing below you.

3. Create a horrible user experience

There are several tactics (and many WordPress plugins, for you bloggers out there), that add breadcrumbs to the top of a post, tags to the bottom of the post, tag clouds, tag lists, etc.

Overdoing it can confuse the navigation of your site, making for a very poor user experience. Some companies even cram keywords into the navigation of their site.

Don’t get me wrong, geographic SEO is great, and can be a huge traffic driver for businesses who target a local audience. But calling out the city in each and every navigational element isn’t helping anyone.

4. Stuff keywords into the sidebar or footer

Some consider this a black-hat SEO technique. I don’t think it’s quite as shady as other black-hat practices. Even if your content is great, as soon as I see that dense paragraph of keyword after keyword, I’m clicking the back button. So if you’re going to stuff your footer with keywords, at least do it “right” so that it serves a navigational purpose:

Unlike…

Still, both of these websites offer comparable Halloween Costumes, but I’d be more likely to stick around and explore the first site.

And just because it’s funny to see SEO agencies do this:

5. Copy other websites’ content

Unless you wrote a guest blog post that you’d like to share with your readers, you shouldn’t copy another website’s content verbatim. In search engine speak, this is known as duplicate content. If uncited, to the average reader this is known as plaigarism. If discovered, it looks extremely unprofessional. And can get you into quite a bit of trouble.

Unfortunately, a lot of professionals don’t even realize this is a bad tactic. They think “Hey, that blog post was really helpful, my readers would like that” or “it’d look great on my blog,” or worse yet “there’s an easy way to get traffic.” They don’t think of it as stealing. So think twice before you copy/paste!Related Posts:

10 Easy SEO Tips for Bloggers
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If you decided to change your name online after marriage, the first place to get started is with your email address. Then you can move on to the rest of your social media accounts. This article specifically covers how to switch your Gmail account name.

Unfortunately, Gmail does not you to change your email address after you create your account. You can change your display name, but your email address must remain the same. Since it’s confusing to have your display name differ from your email address, I recommend creating a new email address.

1. Create a new email address as soon as the rock’s on your finger

There are more than 200 million Gmail users, so chances are, there’s someone out there with your name who’s already snagged the Gmail address. So do away with any silly superstitions and create your new email address ASAP. I remember signing up with Gmail when it was invite only, and I took for granted how easy it was to get firstname.lastname@gmail.com. My married name wasn’t available this way. If yours is taken too, here are some combinations you can try that still look professional:

• lastname.firstname@gmail.com
• firstname.middleinitial.lastname@gmail.com
• firstname.maidenname.lastname@gmail.com (if it’s not too long)
• firstname.middlename.lastname@gmail.com (if it’s not too long)
• firstinitiallastname@gmail.com

If none of those are available, you might have to throw in some numbers. I personally refused to be Diana Urban #2, so I added my middle initial. Remember, with Gmail, you can create the email account with the periods (i.e. diana.urban), and the email address without the initials (i.e. dianaurban) will work as well.

2. Log in once in a while

If your account is inactive for around 9 months, Gmail will delete your shiny new account, and someone else could snatch it up. So make sure you log in once in a while and send an email or two, especially if you have a longer engagement.

3. Forward mail to your new email account

Once your married (congrats!), you’ll want to forward any new messages you receive from your old inbox to your new inbox.

To do this, go to your OLD email account, click the gear icon at the top of any Gmail page, choose Mail settings and open the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab. In the Forwarding section, click Add a forwarding address. Follow the steps to complete this process.

4. Import your old emails

Next, import all of your emails from your old account. Unless you’d like to start with a clean slate, but I love being able to look up any past messages, and I’m bad at remembering to log into old email accounts every 9 months.

Click the gear icon at the top of any Gmail page, choose Mail settings and open the Accounts and Import tab. Scroll down to the Check mail using POP3 section and click the Add POP3 email account button. Follow the simple steps to complete this process. Remember to automatically archive and label all of these old messages. This is very important!

If you forget this step, you’ll have to sort/archive possibly thousands of messages, wasting a lot of your time. Once you save your changes, you might have to wait several hours until the process is completed.

5. Import your contacts

If you want to continue using Gmail awesome autocomplete feature so that you don’t have to remember anyone’s actual email address, you’ll need to import all your contacts from your old email account. To do this, go to your OLD email account, and click Contacts in the left navigation. Then click the More dropdown and select Export.

Then export all your contacts (or specific groups if you’d prefer) as a Google CSV file. Save this file to your desktop.

Next, to go to your NEW email account, and click Contacts in the left navigation. Then click the More dropdown and select Import. Upload the Google CSV you just saved to your desktop.

6. Customize your new Gmail account

Now comes the fun part… making your new Gmail account pretty! Here are the items you don’t want to forget:

• Upload your Gmail picture – located under Mail Settings > General
• Write your signature – located under Mail Settings > General
• Get organized with Labels and Filters – located under Mail Settings
• Enable your favorite Gmail Labs – located under Mail Settings > Labs

That’s it! You’re all set with your new Gmail account. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments below!Related Posts:

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