By now you’ve heard of Google Plus, but you still may not have create a profile…you should. Think about it this way, Google is the most used search engine and they give priority to their services and those who use them. Not to mention, because Google.com is the most visited website, the sites they own (Google+, You Tube, Picasa, etc.) will naturally have higher search results than others.

Take a look at this screenshot below from when I searched for “social media”. There are four areas on this search that would not appear if you did not have a Google+ profile. The large area on the right is an entirely separate search result, only including content from Google Plus, from people you may or may not be following.

The two lower items on the left side are the natural Google search results, but point out who, from within your Google Plus Circles, has previously +1′d (like Facebook’s “like”) or shared this information. This is essentially an endorsement of this content, that your eye is drawn to, that your friend has already suggested is good content.

The other area to point out is on the very top, which shows you that there are another 80 search results from within your Google+ Circles. Clicking on this will show you only these results.

So, how you ask, does this bring my website more traffic? By having a profile, sharing content, +1′ing content and participating on the network, your profile will appear in these search results. Your profile popping up all over Google’s search results will bring people to your profile, who will see your website address, and thus, clicking on it and bringing you traffic. Add the +1 button to your website (in the upper right corner of this site above the Facebook like) and appear in even more results, getting more traffic.

Create your Google Plus profile
Create a Google Plus Business page
Follow me on Google Plus
Get the +1 button for your website
Related: Google+ Tips and Shortcuts

As you know, Facebook has recently filed documents for their initial public offering, expecting $5 Billion to be raised. The company was created in 2004 and rapidly gained millions after millions of users, and revenue.  The details inside the 197 page prospectus are so remarkable that I wanted to share them. Take a look:

• 2009 revenue was $777 million and soared to $3.7 billion in 2011
• Their earnings grew from $122 million in 2009 to $668 million in 2011
• Number of users went from $608M at the end of 2010 to $845M at the same time in 2011
• Average of 2.7 billion “likes” and comments on a daily basis
• Approximately 483 million users login every day
• 1 billion users expected to be reached in the summer of 2012
• 44% of it’s revenue is generated outside of the U.S.
• 85% of 2011′s revenue was generated from advertising
• Facebook receives 30% of sales from game makers and external applications
• Next year CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s salary will fall from $500,000 to $1
• IPO share price is expected to be in the $35-$40 range, but will vary depending upon demand

What do you think of these numbers – do you plan on purchasing stock in Facebook?

article source: AP  image courtesy: MoneyBlogNewz

Attention all small businesses! The fabulous team at Ovaleye.tv has created a new weekly show just for you! Each week Kathy Nelson, Ovaleye’s Chief Decision Maker, and I will bring you an amazing small business owner who shares their tips, knowledge and insights on how small businesses do it better.
Join us LIVE tonight, and every Tuesday at 7:00pm PST at Ovaleye.tv/live or watch anytime at Ovaleye.tv
Be part of the Small Businesses Do It Better chat on twitter using #sbdib

Social networking is an important small business tool. Use these ideas to display your social media profile for maximum exposure. When used strategically, you can have many different ways for visitors to share your posts and including links to your profiles, all on one page.

Side bar – this is the most common area, if you only want to display your profiles in one area, do it here. You can choose a different format to display so your social media profiles don’t seem redundant. On my own blog I prefer one click widgets for higher conversion (on the right side of this page).

Floating bar – these are great because they are always in view, which makes sharing easy (directly to the left of this post).

Static bar – unlike a floating bar, the static bar disappears when the page is scrolled down. They are useful as they remain in the same spot and are easy to locate (on the top left of this page).

Each page – readers should have the option to share every page, not just blog posts. The sharing of your service, about and contact pages are very important (see the bottom of this page).

Contact page – even though your profiles may be displayed elsewhere on your website, sometimes people forget to put them on the contact page. This page should list all of the ways you are reachable (see contact page).

Social media profiles – cross market yourself on all of the networks you participate in. List your twitter page on your Facebook page, LinkedIn profile, Google Plus profile, etc (see on my Google+ page).

Landing page – if you have a keyword specific landing page targeted towards a specific social network make sure you include a link to the targeted network. If you don’t have a landing page of this nature, perhaps you should.

Newsletter – If they read your newsletter they find your information to be valuable. The reader may not be aware of your social network activity, so list it. Social media is a way for the reader to hear from you more often.

Email signature – believe it or not, people live on their favorite social network and may prefer to contact you through that network rather than via email.

Business card – yes, these still exist. Again, providing your social media information allows potential clients to reach you via they’re preferred method. Make sure to use a vanity URL as opposed to long URL’s.

What way do you tend to click on the most?

Image courtesy: ivanpw

These two quick website scans take less than five minutes, yet are vital to your marketing, social media, page speed and how your site is viewed by search engines. The reports will provide you with a grade on where your site stands and give extremely beneficial and detailed suggestions on improving your website.

Type your website address in the boxes at both of these sites:

Marketing.grader.com

I recommend emailing yourself the reports and begin working on this list of suggestions. Use this report as a helpful guide, work on one thing at a time, and gradually complete the list – you can only improve your site from here!

If you have any questions on the process or need help with any of the suggested website changes, feel free to contact me!

Image: rosmary

This post was originally a four part series, I have reworked the series into one post, and have also updated the content with new and more specific points. “How to Blog Better” is meant for anyone who is just starting a blog or anyone who has a blog that needs a little guidance.

B is for blog

Many forget this basic principle;  When you have a blog, you must blog. It is very disappointing when you like a brand, head to their blog and see that it has been months, or even a year since their last blog post.  I’ve also seen blogs with the post date removed so they can “get away” with posting less frequently. From my perspective, no date is equivalent to an old post, but the writer is masking their lack of frequent updates.  If you have a blog or call yourself a blogger, you should regularly post updates.

Regular blog posts also provide more traffic to your site – from both readers and search engines.  Search engines favor websites that are more frequently updated. If you regularly provide new content, search engines will scan your website more often. The more often the bots scan your site, the more content you will have indexed, which can appears in more search results. Also, the more often your site is scanned, the sooner your posts will be indexed and appear in search results earlier. Having more content and content indexed sooner will bring you more traffic from search engines.

You can also obtain more readers by blogging regularly. If you post less often you may be forgotten or ignored. Every blog has a unique audience, find out how often your audience prefers you to post.  Come up with a posting schedule and review your website statistics a day or two after each post to see how often you should post, even which day of the week and time of day. The goal is to post often enough so your readers remember you, yet not annoying by posting too frequently. Many successful bloggers post one to three times a day while consistently maintaining a high level of traffic and generating good income. For my own blog I have found that one post per week is ideal, while two posts per week doesn’t increase traffic enough to bother with a second post. With one exception, I use a second post in one week for newsworthy information, these posts simply cannot wait until the next week.  These posts generate good traffic as long as the post is published quickly.  One thing I have also found is that posting on a Monday or Friday is a waste of a post, much less traffic comes in on those days, so I post on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. Weekend posts can go either way – generally speaking, there is less internet usage on weekends, but it will stand out more on social media because there are less updates.

In short, find out how often your audience likes to read your posts and regularly and routinely stick to that schedule.

L is for Listen

Part of providing valuable content is continuing to evolve, this requires continuous research and learning. Here are some of the most important ways you can listen to improve your blog.

Listen to your readers

Your readers will give you insight on the content they like and want. Engage with your readers and you can learn from them. Ask your audience questions in your posts and on social networks. This interaction can inspire ideas for posts, while networking. Read and respond to comments on your posts; Whatever you wrote here was thought provoking enough for the reader to comment. Reply to comments in a timely manner to show that you value their time in commenting. After you have many comments, see which type of posts generated the most comments and write like this more often.

Listen to trending topics

Write about topics that are relevant to your audience. You don’t want to bore them with content that is a month old and has already been read elsewhere. If there is some big news in your industry, be sure to write about it immediately! Here are a few helpers: Google Trends – real time Google search popularity. Google Insights – keyword search popularity tool.

Listen to your website statistics

Website statistics can tell you things about your blog that you never could have imagined. This information can be used differently for blogging than from a typical website, such as:

• Traffic peaks – Web server logs can show such detail as traffic visits broken down per hour in each day. You can use these stats to see which hour of the day and which day of the week to post your blogs to obtain the most visits possible. You can also see the lowest traffic times/days and try to improve upon them.
• Traffic to each post – Posts with the least amount of visits should have the meta-description re-evaluated. Determine the posts keywords and get suggestions using Google Insights. Update the post by using these keywords in the meta-description and re-evaluate that posts traffic in a month or so to see if the changes have generated more traffic.
• Keyword search results – Within your webstats you can see which keywords come up more often in search results. What you need to do is find more keywords that come up often and update posts meta-descriptions with the more popular keywords. Each of your blog posts should generate organic search engine traffic from keywords, not just a few posts. Once you find your rhythm in using effective keywords, every one of your posts will get organic search traffic.

O is for Optimize

Your blog and/or websites traffic is very dependent on how well your site is optimized. There are many ways to optimize your site for search engines, overall website performance and page load time. All of these points play a very important role for your site, so don’t discount any.

Page Titles

The titles of each page are heavily weighted in searches and are also the title in search engine results. Make sure you also set your permalinks to reflect the page title in the URL (example: CaffeineKeyboard.com/Contact is superior than CaffeineKeyboard.com/page5).

Meta Description

Put a keyword rich description on every page. Search engines use this description to display in search results. This description can set you apart from your competition. Research keywords and key terms to include in this page description and limit the description to 160 characters.

Meta Keywords

Keywords are used less frequently than in the past, descriptions are used more now. Keywords are still important to use and are picked up by websites other than search engines. It’s best to use both meta descriptions (with keywords in the description) and keywords, if you choose to only use one, then use a description.
Search for keywords using Google Insights, Adwords Keyword Search and Word Tracker

Photos

Appropriately name photos and use alt tags on all photos. Image searches display images from all websites, so don’t forget about being found by image searches. Websites are seen in a better light by search engines and website graders when your images have alt tags.

RSS feed

Since you have a blog make sure you also have an RSS feed. I recommend using Feedburner to do so, as you can also track your subscribers and obtain statistics.

Links

• Minimize redirects – redirecting, rather than linking directly, can take longer for the page to load.
• Page errors – make sure all of your pages are working properly and successfully link to one another.
• Outbound links – if you link out to another website, make sure that as long as you have the link listed, it works (sometimes they change).

Load Time

The faster your website loads, the better. Your search engine rankings improve and you won’t test website visitors patience. People leave slow websites before they fully load and you’ll lose traffic before you even have a chance to gain a reader.

• Reduce number of WordPress plugins. Delete inactive plugins.
• Optimize images – shrink the actual image, don’t just resize the image.
• Delete unused files or duplicate files

Test your website’s load time at: Pingdom and Google Page Speed (Pingdom also shows you which files take longer to load).

G is for Goals

Bloggers should establish goals they would like to achieve while blogging. Begin by establishing your starting date, dates you would like to reach milestones by and ultimately, and when and what you want your blog to become at it’s fullest potential.  There are many different avenues a blogger can take to promote and monetize their blog, increase traffic, and gain readers.

Here are a few different ideas on which goals you should set for your blog:

Posting Schedule

Establish and maintain a regular blog posting schedule. Set a schedule that you can stick to and not break, no matter how busy you are. This may start out with one post per month in the beginning, with a goal of several posts per week. You get out what you put in and you may find you can be a full time blogger!

Subscribers

Each blog has its own subscriber list and it is gold. Subscribers are regularly and voluntarily updated with your new posts, without having to go anywhere to read it. First of all make sure you offer a few different subscription options to satisfy everybodys preferences. Set a subscription number that you want to reach and test out methods for reaching your number. A few different methods can be email subscription in your sidebar, within a blog post, or on pages. Don’t discount rss reader subscriptions too!

Guest Posts

Determine if you want your blog to accept guest post submissions; If so then establish a guest post policy. Perhaps you would just like to be a guest poster on other blogs to drive more traffic to your own blog. Both of these can gain readers from other blogs; However, many bloggers avoid accepting and submitting guest posts all together.

Website Traffic

You should know how you would like to obtain the most traffic: referring sites, natural search results, social media posts, or other methods. Once you determine where you want your traffic to come from, do what you need to on the appropriate websites to achieve your traffic goals. No matter where the traffic comes from, you should also establish a specific number of unique visits per week/month/quarter you would like to have. Continuously monitoring this data will help you reach your goal.

Monetizing

Blogs can bring clients in to utilize your business services or you can make money directly from your blog. If you use your blog to bring in clients then determine specifically what you need to write about to bring them in. If you want your blog to make money on it’s own then determine which means would earn the money you are trying to earn; affiliate ads, search ads, donations, advertising, or product sales. Whichever method, or both methods you choose, set a monthly or yearly dollar amount that you want to reach.

Social Media Network

Some bloggers only care about the number of followers and fans they have. For blog promotion, social media network quality is better than quantity. Be amongst those who you can learn from, those who will learn from you and share your knowledge. You can set a goal of how many fans/followers you would like to reach, but I would suggest setting a goal that will help you, such as number of people or number of times one of your posts is shared or republished.

All of these elements go hand in hand to ultimately reach your blogging goals, some cannot be reached without others.

2012 is going to be an exciting year!  I have several projects on deck, which I will soon announce, that will help my clients with their website, marketing, and overall business needs.

Most of the services I help small businesses with are related to website optimization and social media. Over the past year I have seen many of their businesses grow and succeed as each entrepreneur works harder and becomes more involved in learning how to improve their online presence.

Over the next year I am very pleased grow relationships with my valued clients and anticipate helping many other businesses.

May all of your businesses continue to evolve and flourish. To all of the small business owners and entrepreneurs, remember this:
Some people dream of success… while others wake up and work hard at it.  ~Author Unknown

Image Courtesy: NASA on The Commons

These are a few of my favorite WordPress plugins. Some plugin features come standard with premium themes, but many of my clients prefer to use free themes, which makes many of these plugins necessary. These plugins I use myself, for my clients websites and I recommend. None of them are affiliate links, and they are all free – while some offer premium versions for a nominal fee. Each plugin is fabulous is it’s own way, and here’s why:

Broken Link Checker: This plugin does exactly what it says, it monitors your site for broken outbound links (which are bad to have). When a broken link is detected, you receive an email giving you the option to leave as is, modify the link or remove the link.

cforms: The best form plugin I have come across, and it happens to be free! Create forms with check boxes, radio buttons, dropdown menus, required fields, groupsets, or a combination of several fields. Easy to change administrative options and also the ability to modify form styling.

CommentLuv: This is simply a plugin to give back to the visitors who comment on your posts. When commenting, a link to their last blog post is left on the comment. Comment Luv also provides a directory of websites that use their plugin.

Exclude Pages: Many themes have page exclusion as a standard option, but for those themes that do not, this plugin is recommended. This plugin gives the site the ability to have pages within which are not shown in the main navigation bar. Simple, yet important.

Insights: WordPress has somewhat integrated this into it’s updates, but this plugin is much more in depth. From a page’s or post’s edit mode, Insights allows you to search for content from your entire site, or Google, and create a link to that content, with one click.

NextGEN Gallery: There are really too many reasons to list for this plugin! This is essentially a beautiful and extremely customizable photo gallery plugin. A few of my favorite options are the ability to change the order of photos in a gallery and that you are able to specify the exact image thumbnail size. These galleries are also visually pleasing to browse through.

Quick Cache: This one helps with page load time by caching your content. You may disable caching for the administrator logged in, you can also clear the cache at any time.

Tweet old post: Through the settings you can specify how often you would like your blog posts to be automatically tweeted for you. Choose the tweet verbiage, how often and even which posts you would like excluded from the queue. This plugin helps your twitter visibility without effort.

Ultimate Google Fonts: Hundreds of beautiful web fonts for your website. You have the option to specify fonts for the paragraph content and all of the headers – choose the same font or make each different. As you can see, my post title is a different font, as are the headers on my right sidebar.

Add This: Social sharing is a must and this plugin is great because of it’s compact size, options and it’s pretty. There are several options for displaying the buttons, their website also provides code for many more options. See it in action below, share the post to see how user friendly it is.

What are your favorite WordPress plugins?

Image courtesy adactio

Take a look at the research from Jay Baer and Argyle Social about social media timing. Their findings can dramatically help increase your Business to Consumer readership and interaction. They report the differences in engagement on Facebook and Twitter by time of the day and also weekday vs. weekend posts, which vary quite a bit.

Social Timing Insights

Argyle Social specializes in advanced metrics and social reporting and Jay Baer is an author, speaker and blogger in “teaching business leaders how to harness the awesome power of social media without forgetting that social media is an ingredient in a successful business, not the whole entree”.

The G in bloG stand for Goals. Bloggers should establish goals they would like to achieve while blogging. Begin your tracking by establishing your starting point date, dates you would like to reach milestones by and ultimately, and when and what you want your blog to become at it’s fullest potential.  There are many different avenues a blogger can take to promote and monetize their blog, increase traffic, and gain readers.

Here are a few different ideas on which goals you should set for your blog:

Posting Schedule

Establish and maintain a regular blog posting schedule. Set a schedule that you can stick to and not break, no matter how busy you are. This may start out with one post per month in the beginning, with a goal of several posts per week. You get out what you put in and you may find you can be a full time blogger!

Subscribers

Each blog has its own subscriber list and it is gold. Subscribers are regularly and voluntarily updated with your new posts, without having to go anywhere to read it. First of all make sure you offer a few different subscription options to satisfy everybodys preferences. Set a subscription number that you want to reach and test out methods for reaching your number. A few different methods can be email subscription in your sidebar, within a blog post, or on pages. Don’t discount rss reader subscriptions too!

Guest Posts

Determine if you want your blog to accept guest post submissions; If so then establish a guest post policy. Perhaps you would just like to be a guest poster on other blogs to drive more traffic to your own blog. Both of these can gain readers from other blogs; However, many bloggers avoid accepting and submitting guest posts all together.

Website Traffic

You should know how you would like to obtain the most traffic: referring sites, natural search results, social media posts, or other methods. Once you determine where you want your traffic to come from, do what you need to on the appropriate sites to achieve your traffic goals. No matter where the traffic comes from, you should also establish a specific number of unique visits per week/month/quarter you would like to have. Continuously monitoring this data will help you reach your desired numbers.

Monetizing

Blogs can bring clients in to utilize your business services or you can make money directly from your blog. If you use your blog to bring in clients then determine specifically what you need to write about to bring in new clientele. If you want your blog to make money on it’s own then determine which means would earn the money you are trying to earn; affiliate ads, search ads, donations, advertising, or product sales. Whichever method, or both methods you choose, set a monthly or yearly dollar amount that you want to reach.

Social Media Network

Some bloggers only care about the number of followers and fans they have. For blog promotion, social media network quality is better than quantity. Be amongst those who you can learn from and those who will learn from you and share your knowledge. You can set a goal of how many fans/followers you would like to reach, but I would suggest setting a goal that will help you, such as number of people or number of times one of your posts is shared or republished.

All of these elements go hand in hand to ultimately reach your blogging goals, some cannot be reached without others. What goals have you set for your blog?

Previous posts include B is for Blog, L is for Listen and O is for Optimize.

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