Think your business doesn’t have a niche on Pinterest? Think again.

Recently I read an article stating that Pinterest is obviously not a good fit for every business. There are just some businesses that can not be marketable on the site. The example that was given was a waste management company with the argument that no one wants to pin pictures of garbage.

I call bull.

First things first, just because a company is on Pinterest doesn’t mean they have to pin photos strictly of their products or what they do. I can agree people probably do not want to pin pictures of garbage. With that said, what could a waste management company pin?

• Home decor – This is a popular category on Pinterest and it would be a great opportunity for waste management companies (or any company) to find a niche. A waste management company should think about household areas where trash is most accumulated, like kitchens and bathrooms. They should dedicate a board to each of those rooms and pin photos displaying creative layouts and designs for rooms with trash containers. If you type “Kitchen Trash” in the search bar on Pinterest, you’ll get 100s of pins displaying creative places to hide your trash can in the kitchen. The same goes for the bathroom.

• DIY projects with trash bags – If there is one thing Pinterest has, it is a DIY (do-it-yourself) project for everything under the sun… and that includes trash bags. There is everything from making trash bag ghost to fancy belts.

• 

  Cleaning products/tricks – Want to know the best way to clean your trash can or how to prevent maggots from invading your outdoor trash can? There’s a pin for that. Pinterest is big on how-tos, and it is actually expected that businesses will pass on knowledge pertaining to their business on the site.

• Trash can photos – There are a lot of trash cans on Pinterest. The site showcases a variety of brands, sizes and types. Of course this would be a no brainier board for a waste management company. Pinterest user Scrappy Liz has an entire board dedicated to cool trash cans.

• Company culture photos – There is more to any business than meets the eye. Pinterest is a great way to showcase what might not be so obvious about your company. For example, maybe this waste management company has been a family business for 50 years. They could post pins related to family business, entrepreneurship, best business practices and actual photos of the family linked from their company website. This would be a great area to do a lot of repinning (pinning from others boards to your own) and networking with other entrepreneurs.

• Health topics – Whenever people think about trash they think about sanitation and that leads to health topics and ways to stop the spreading of germs. This would be a great way for the company to show that they care about these issues and topics. People are more likely to engage with companies that show an interest in their over all well being.

• Trash bag fashion – Laugh all you want, but this is a thing on Pinterest. People are making gowns, jackets, accessories and skirts out of trash bags. These avantgarde fashion pieces are awesome to look at and inspiring to those into constructing fashion.

As you can see there is a lot of potential for a Waste Management Company to market themselves on Pinterest. I am confident that every company can find a way to market themselves on Pinterest. Pinterest should not be confused for another online marketplace where products are shoved down consumers’ throats. Instead it needs to be viewed as a place to show case what your company values, finds interesting and wants to share. It is a great place to show that you are an expert.

How can you come up with Pinterest board ideas for a not-so-photogenic company?

Sure at first glance Pinterest is all about what looks good in photographs but in reality Pinterest is focused on providing and sharing good content. When creating boards focus on what type of content you are an expert on, content that interest you and content that your audience would find valuable and interesting. This is what your boards should be centered around, not photos. The photos will come after the content. Also remember that if you are active on Pinterest you will be doing a lot of repinning therefore photos have already been selected taking the responsiblity off of you to find a great photo for that pin. You will only have to provide photos for original pins (pins you post from your own website and blog).

First, make a list of keywords and phrases for the company and trying searching for them in Pinterest to see what people are pinning. By just typing in “trash bag” I found the fashion pins, the DIY pins and some kitchen cleaning pins. From there I broke down trash bag into smaller more specific search terms based on the pins I found. For example, since I saw pins related to crafts I then researched trash bag crafts, DIY trash bags, trash bag DIY, trash bag projects, projects with trash bags and creative trash bags. After seeing results with each of these searches I knew there would be enough content to make a board devoted to DIY trash bag projects. Also through this search I found how to pins for making your own trash bag fashion pieces confirming that another successful board would be trash bag fashion.

Second, take a step back in your brainstorming. Try not to just think about your product, but instead focus on your values, history and goals. What are you the expert on? What are you passionate about? What do you think is important to run a successful business? These are all great questions to ask yourself to get your juices flowing.

Third, think about your audience. Do you market to mothers? Teenagers? What are they interested in? If you market to mothers they are likely into tips for running a household, health issues and anything that will make their life easier. Where as teenagers are into the newest gadgets, pop songs, quotes and school-related topics. Consider your target audience’s interest and find a way to meet them where they are at.

Marketing your company on Pinterest is not a black and white process. To be successful you need to look past just your product and dig into the life of your consumer. Meet them where they are at and insert yourself as an expert into their life. Of course no one wants to look at trash, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to hear from you.

Pinterest Can Help Any Business…Even Garbage Companies was written by Augusta Nissly for AboutUs.com.

We’re really excited about the new features we’re adding to our Competitive Edge report, and we’d like to show them off by giving some away.

Want to win one? Comment on one of our social posts (linked below) and let us know which 3 social media channels you use most to promote your business and connect with your customers:

• Facebook post
• Twitter tweet
• Google+ post
• LinkedIn post
• Pinterest pin

If you’re one of the winners, we’ll contact you Monday and give you a Competitive Edge report that analyzes your company’s posts – and your top 3 competitors’ posts – on those 3 social networks. (Our full Competitive Edge report analyzes 5, plus social shares of blog posts, and tracking everyone’s rank in Google for your keywords. Want to see an example? Here you go.)

Good luck!

Enter the Contest for Our New Hotness was written by Kristina Weis for AboutUs.com.

Today’s business world is as competitive as ever. While modern technology has allowed many firms to become more efficient, it has also changed the way consumers decide which businesses to frequent. More and more customers are using mobile devices to shop and consume online content – in fact, Google recently stated that there will be one mobile device for every person on earth by 2015. That’s over 6 billion mobile devices! The question is, what impact will this have on your business?

The advantages of having a mobile website

While most businesses have a website, it is becoming increasingly important to have a mobile website that can be easily viewed by potential customers. Many traditional websites do not work well on mobile devices. A site that is difficult to use on a mobile device will not only frustrate customers, it may send them to the competition. In a recent study by Compuware, 57 percent of respondents said they would not recommend a business that had a bad mobile site, while 40 percent said they would turn to another business after having a bad mobile website experience.

So what is a mobile website exactly?

A mobile website is a separate version of your primary website that has been optimized to work on all mobile devices. Since the screen size is much smaller on a mobile device, the navigation will typically be “thumb-friendly”, meaning it is will display larger buttons that can be easily clicked on. Also, there will usually be less text and larger font sizes to make reading on smaller screens easier. Mobile sites usually also feature click-to-call buttons, as well as maps and directions to a business’s location. When a visitor lands on your main website from a mobile device, they should automatically be redirected to your mobile website.

What do I need to do to make my website mobile friendly?

The first thing to do is check what your current site looks like when viewed on a mobile device. Google has recently launched its own mobile friendly initiative, howtogomo.com and have created a useful mobile tester. This tester allows you to check if your current website is currently mobile friendly. If you find the text difficult to read, or have to scroll to view the whole page, then you will probably need to consider getting a mobile friendly website developed.

They also go into detail about the best practices you should use when trying to create a mobile friendly website. These include:

• simplifying the navigation
• ensuring that the page loading time is fast
• using redirects that automatically send the visitor to the mobile version of the page
• ensuring that the text is easy to read so that the user does not have to scroll or zoom in

Whether you decide to build a mobile website yourself or hire a professional mobile website designer, here are some other things that you most definitely will need to consider:

1. Ease of access

Customers are able to carry their smartphones or other devices with them everywhere, which gives them the ability to make purchase decisions immediately (and from any location). This means a business needs a mobile presence that can cater to those needs.

2. A growing audience

Experts estimate the mobile web is growing eight times faster than did the first wave of online Internet use. This rapidly growing segment of consumers use their smartphones to read content, search for places to eat or shop and find coupons to help them do these things more inexpensively. These customers may often not know exactly what they are looking for, so having a mobile site that places higher on mobile search engines is important.

3. Branding

Many businesses will spend lots of money to develop a brand that attracts customers, and having a good mobile site it is becoming increasingly important for that. A poorly-developed mobile website can drive customers to competitors and undo all the other hard work the company has done to build their brand.

4. Opportunity

According to two recent surveys of smartphone users, 66 percent of respondents said a good mobile website would make them more likely to purchase a good or service, while 74 percent said they would be more likely to return again. On the other hand, 61 percent said if they do not find what they are looking for quickly, they will move on to another site.

As smartphone users increase at a rapid rate, it is becoming ever more important for businesses to have a branded mobile presence in order to cater to their customers. Those consumers are able to access the Internet from any location at any time – therefore, successful businesses need to be able to meet their needs at a moment’s notice. As Bob Dylan once sang, “The times they are a changing.” The mobile web is not going away. The question is will your business be ready for the change?

This article was written and contributed by Simon Phillips. Simon is the CEO of Touch Logic, a mobile marketing company that develops premium mobile friendly websites and apps for small business owners.

Why You Need a Mobile Website To Be Competitive was written by Simon Phillips for AboutUs.com.

Thanks to Google’s updates and peoples’ increasing use of social media, content marketing is quickly becoming one of the most effective ways for companies of all sizes to market their products and services.

But what is content marketing, really? Why should companies care about – and try – it? How can you find ideas for your content marketing?

For the answers to those questions and more, check out our own pieces of content marketing: our infographic below and our blog post.

Like our infographic? Feel free to share it by clicking the social buttons, or you can download the image and share it.

Have questions about content marketing, or a comment about our infographic? Post it below.

Could your business use some help with content marketing and social media? Contact us if you’d like to hear about our services.

Content Marketing: Who, What, When, Where, Why & How [Infographic] was written by Kristina Weis for AboutUs.com.

We’ve had a lot of heartbreaking news stories in the past few years, and for many Twitter users that social network was the first place they heard about some of them. It can get emotional and a little overwhelming on Twitter as these tragedies unfold, and it’s a good time for your personal and company brand to make a positive impression and contribution to the conversation – and avoid a negative one.

If you want to hang on to your followers and sound like a real and thoughtful human (or a company ran by thoughtful humans), follow these tips for tweeting during a sad news event.

Once you hear a sad news event has happened…

Do:

• Be human and social.
• Tweet something nice like “Our thoughts and prayers go out to…” if you feel moved to do so.
• Tweet a link to the best news article you read about it, if you want to help spread the word.
• Tweet or retweet things that can help. In the example of the Boston Marathon bombing, tweeting the phone numbers to locate family members, telling your Boston followers where they can donate blood, etc.

Do NOT:

• Let your scheduled auto-tweets continue to publish without at least checking what is set to tweet next. You can look like an out-of-touch jerk bot if someone sees your automated tweet amongst a dozen others about the tragedy that just happened. Imagine if your company had scheduled a post to publish today that just happened to be very offensive or insensitive given the news. You’ll probably want to push out your scheduled tweets for a few hours, and perhaps post less than normal until talk of the tragedy has calmed down a bit on Twitter.
• Do what Guy Kawasaki did. After news of the Boston Marathon explosion broke on Twitter, he continued to auto-tweet things like “If you super size your title, make sure you can deliver the beef – [link]“. That’s understandable and many people didn’t turn of auto-tweets, but after someone replied and told him to turn off the automatic tweets because “Your tweets stuck out in a stream about Boston,” Guy went on to tweet “Loving how people with less than 1,500 followers are telling me how to tweet…” and then back to automated-looking tweets like “12 fun facts about tulips – [link]“. I noted Guy’s number of Twitter followers just over an hour ago, and his number of followers is now down by 51 – so he’s probably gained his normal amount of followers today, and lost quite a few.
• Jump into tweets with your political opinions or conspiracy theories on the sad news event before any facts have been released. (Unless you think most of your followers want or expect that from you.)
• Tweet every new development in the news story. (Unless you think most of your followers want or expect that from you.)
• Offer to donate money for every retweet you receive, or something similar. That’s what the fake @_BostonMarathon Twitter account did, and it can feel more tacky and selfish than generous.

Do you have any other advice? Have you seen any other social media faux pas around tragedies? Share in the comments.

How To Tweet When Sad News Breaks was written by Kristina Weis for AboutUs.com.

Don’t let your online reputation interfere with your offline persona.

The time to claim your web identity is now. Online reputation management cannot start soon enough. Purchase a YourFirstNameLastName.com or YourBusinessName.com domain, register relevant Facebook and Twitter accounts, and start filling those services with accurate information that you want to spread. Without a proper domain with your name in it and the relevant social accounts, reputation management may turn into reputation firefighting.

Reputation Management Fit for a President

Presidential candidate Ron Paul didn’t buy his namesake domain, RonPaul.com, and was forced into reputation management tailspin. Paul, a 2008 and 2012 contender, known for his staunch libertarian and anti-government standpoint, has filed a dispute with the UDRP, an agency of the United Nations, over the ownership of the www.RonPaul.com domain.

For reasons unexplained by the candidate or the owners of the RonPaul.com site, Ron paul did not register the domain RonPaul.com. Google searches for “Ron Paul” bring up his official website, CampaignForLiberty.org first, and RonPaul.com in a close second, dividing his online reputation and clicks between two sites. Fans who enter in the candidate’s name followed by a “.com” are directed to a fan page, not Paul’s official page.

Now, instead of focusing on his political and business endeavors, Ron Paul has now been thrown into a drawn-out reputation management debacle.

Create Your Online Reputation

Now that search results pull up hundreds of people with your exact same name, your name doesn’t hold much cachet in and of itself. Sure, people can search for your name or your company, but a casual user will opt for the “BobSmith.Com” over “ArchitectsLosAngeles.com” when searching for Bob Smith, an architect.

Claiming your domain name is like taking ownership of your own name. Brands with the proper domain name have one less hoop to jump through when connecting with users. A domain using your real name takes no explanation; users searching for a site with an unnatural domain will have to pass through an extra layer of confusion to find your web presence.

Claim Your Identity By Claiming Your Domain

Filling search results with accurately-labeled information also has the upside of pushing any unflattering web results below the fold. That embarrassing blog from high school that you forgot the password to, but still mysteriously appears at the top of the results for your name? You can begin to get rid of that by gaining control of internet content under your real name domain.

Claiming your online identity also means clearing up the spread of misinformation in the future. Many online directories draw their information from just a few sources, with no human double-checking. Spreading correct information is important not just for human eyes, but for the digital sources that aggregate your information.

Even your name isn’t the unique calling card it used to be in the pre-Internet days. Now you must struggle to differentiate yourself from the unexpected other Mac Pogues, or Channing Kennedys, in search results.

Stake Your Claim

For personal identities, services like Flavors.Me allow a quick aggregation of your most important social media accounts and information about your identity. The company offers simple, attractive homepages designed to lead people to the information they need fast. Claiming Google authorship through Google Plus adds another layer to Google results for your name and can push your identity over the edge into that coveted saturation level.

For brands, claiming your identity through Google’s Places and Plus pages helps maintain your identity across the search mammoth. Adding information to these listings will help place your brand or business in the numerous areas of Google’s search returns.

Start Today

Your online identity requires your input. Defending your web persona means playing a good offense; throw information out into the void early and often.

Reputation Management Starts With A Domain was written by Mac Pogue for AboutUs.com.

If you’re paying any attention at all to online marketing, you know that content marketing is hot. Everyone’s telling you to create compelling content that will bring customers to your website and help you rank higher in search engine results.

And then there’s social media. You know you should be getting likes and shares on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Google Plus. But if you want to earn those likes and shares, you need to be publishing really good content in social media – otherwise, you’re just adding to the noise.

So first, let’s get to the basic question:

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is any form of marketing that relies on or draws from editorial content. That editorial content can come in all kinds of forms:

• Blog posts or articles
• Video clips
• Infographics
• Photographs
• E-books
• Guides
• Tutorials
• Webinars
• FAQs

Your editorial content should be very helpful to your prospective customers, and to current customers. You can certainly include things like instructions for using your products, but it’s also good to create content that isn’t obviously self-promotional.

It should go without saying that any content you publish on other websites – for example, YouTube, SlideShare or other people’s blogs – must link back to your website. Otherwise, you’re just providing goodness to someone else’s website. Not a bad thing, but not very helpful for driving traffic to your own site.

Why Should I Do Content Marketing? 

• It’s great for SEO (search engine optimization). Google constantly changes its algorithm to improve search results. Over the past several years, many of these changes reflect Google’s efforts to favor content that’s truly useful. Conversely, Google’s changes punish content farms and other sites that create content solely to rank high for specific keyword searches. Creating relevant content signals to Google that the purpose of your site is to help people by providing real information.
• Worthy content gets shared. People like sharing their discoveries with their colleagues, friends and family. It’s a way of earning credibility, plus we’re just hardwired to do it: When we share something we like with others, and they like it too, that validates our judgment.
• Great content helps people make buying decisions. I’ll give you a personal example here. In doing some competitive research for a client, I found a personal training website with lots of blog posts about strength training, health, cardio fitness and more. As I read the posts, it became clear to me that this trainer had deep background in kinesiology, plus years of experience helping people get fit. Now I train with him.
• Content gives you something real to promote in social media. If you don’t have relevant, interesting content on  your website to promote, what ARE you going to talk about in social media? And how will you entice people to visit your site? Without compelling content, you may as well just talk about your cute pets and snap photos of the lunch you’re about to eat.

People Share Great Content, Not Meh Content  

It’s not enough to create content – it has to be interesting enough, funny enough, helpful enough or surprising enough to get shared.

Great content fulfills the same goals as great journalism: it enlightens, informs and entertains.

To create great content, make sure you:

• Write about things you genuinely care about.
• Draw on your industry expertise.
• Talk about issues your customers and prospects care abou.t
• Help people with problems they’re trying to solve right now.
• Engage people’s emotions. Make them laugh, move them to tears, even cause them to say “eewww” – anything to engage an emotional response that will motivate people to share.

Note: When I say “write about” topics, I mean it very broadly. You can create content by writing social media posts, video scripts, cartoons, text for infographics. etc. Choose the best way to express your brand and experience, make sure it’s shareable, and you’re good.  

Shared Content Brings New People to Your Site

When people share your content, it helps you in two ways:

• Your company becomes visible to people who don’t already know you. And awareness of your brand is reinforced among people who have heard of you already.
• Social media mentions and shares – also called “social signals” – tell search engines that your website is important to people. This in turn can boost your site’s SEO.

Both of these benefits are equally important. In an ideal world, you’d have relevant content visible in every online location that your prospects visit: video sites, slide-sharing sites, blogs, news publications – and search results. Because people use a variety of websites to learn before they buy, you want to be wherever your target customers go.

Be Genuine and Social in Social Media

There’s one last piece to getting your content shared: You have to be someone people WANT to engage with in social media.

This means not being that guy who walks into the cocktail party and starts talking about himself, his thriving business, his genius kids, his athletic prowess and his general awesomeness. You want to be the one who walks in, smiles, and asks the person by the fireplace what she does for a living and how she feels about it…and pays close  attention to the answers.

So be generous in social media. Share other people’s posts; comment on their great advice or insights; ask questions. And when people share your content or ask you questions, respond in a polite and friendly manner. You’ll find more people will pay attention to your content – and share it, too.

Content Marketing: What Is It & Why Should I Do It? was written by Aliza Earnshaw for AboutUs.com.

When many businesses start out using social media, they often focus on their number of Twitter followers, Facebook likes, etc. and desperately want to increase those numbers.  That’s why “services” that offer hundreds of thousands of new “real” followers for $5 or $150 can look like a good idea. (Spoiler alert: They’re not.)

Increasing your number of followers – or reach – can be instrumental in making your social media marketing more effective.  But, having more followers only helps if those followers are real people. You want followers who will notice you in their stream and be interested in what you have to say and sell.

Unfortunately, the Twitter followers you can buy are not real. They’re kind of like the “valuable” video clicks you can get from Buyral, as advertised in this (parody) video.

Don’t forget about your business’s real goals.  Your primary goal is probably to sell more of your product or service. In addition, you may have sub-goals that you think will help you get there – like increasing your reach in social media.

Think of it this way: If you’re a real estate agent, one of your goals may be to get more people to show up to your open houses. But, would it make sense to put an ad on Craiglist and offer to pay random people to show up to the open house? I doubt it, because your real goal is to sell the house. What are the odds that one of those people would buy that particular house, or that they’re even in the market for a house?

Getting more followers in social media can help your business get more sales, but only if you are gaining real, qualified followers.

What can buying followers get you?

• A higher number on your profile. This can make your business look popular if people take a quick glance, sure.
• Less money in your budget.
• A lower conversion rate. Suddenly, you have a ton of new followers, but no better results.
• Bad press and/or snarky tweets if someone notices you purchased followers. (It’s really not hard to tell.)
• Possibly hacked, because some follower buying services ask for your password.
• Possibly in trouble with Twitter or Facebook as they notice shenanigans on your account.
• You could easily be back where you started, because Facebook and others likes to delete fake accounts.

In summary: At best, buying social media followers is a waste of money.

So, what are the alternatives? How can you get meaningful followers in social media?

• Be interesting. When you post interesting things in your social media accounts, your real followers will notice and possibly retweet, share or +1 your content – thereby getting in front of more eyeballs that may choose to follow, like or circle you. Also, when someone is considering whether to follow or “like” your page, they will often look at your recent posts to see if they will want to see them in their stream.
• Post regularly. Posting often keeps you on your followers’ radar, and will make it harder for people to forget about you. Also, many people will only see a small percentage of all your posts – either because they follow too many people, they don’t check their account very often, or because Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm only shows them a few posts from the pages they like. So you want to keep post often, so that all your real followers will at least see some of your posts.
• Make the first move. On the social networks that you can follow people as a business page, go for it. They may notice and follow you back.
• Be social. For example, view your stream and reply to interesting posts or tweets. Many people don’t want to follow companies that only push out marketing drivel day after day.
• Let people know you use social media, and make it easy for people to follow you. Does your website have easy buttons or links to your Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn pages? Do your email newsletters link to your social presences?
• Facebook ads are a way to indirectly buy likes/fans.  You can target your ads to the type of people you would like to see your ad. (Pro tip: Go for the type of people you think might want to buy your product or service.)
• Promoted tweets are another indirect way to buy followers.  They get your tweets seen by more (real) people that don’t already follow you, and if they like your tweet, they just might follow you.

So save your money, and possibly a few headaches: Don’t buy Twitter followers.  You’ll get much more out of your social media efforts by putting your resources towards quality content and engaging with people.

Could your business use some help with social media and creating great content? Check out the services we offer here at AboutUs.

This article was written by Kristina Weis, the Director of Marketing for AboutUs who also helps AboutUs clients with their social media and content marketing. She tweets at @KristinaWeis.

Why Buying Social Followers Is a Bad Idea was written by Kristina Weis for AboutUs.com.

AFAR featured this image from GoWithOh in their feed!

It can be very difficult to produce a Facebook business page that not only drives traffic but encourages conversation with fans. We found one example of a company that has managed to solve the Facebook riddle. They’re AFAR travel magazine (a.k.a. AFAR Media).

Here are some secrets for success on Facebook, as learned from AFAR:

1. Facebook likes consistency!
One of the easiest ways to earn a faithful audience is to post to your Facebook page on a regular basis. If it is easiest for you to post on your Facebook feed every three days, do that! But make sure that you stay on that schedule, so that your fans know when to expect a post from you.AFAR takes the idea of regular posting to the next level, sending out messages at least once a day. Every one of their posts is self-aware, referring back to their mission as a company to give customers an interactive, culturally aware travel experience. Their identity as a company is evident in everything they post in social media, and shows off the products that they offer (such as the magazine itself, membership in their online community, and world vacation tours).

AFAR used this adorable image to promote a contest. (Via AFAR.com)

2. Pictures and Photographs? Stick ‘em on Facebook!

This photo’s from Erica Gragg, one of AFAR’s many guest contributors.

4. Engagement determines Facebook success, not likes

AFAR: A Facebook Page Case Study was written by Brit McGinnis for AboutUs.com.

When Facebook introduced its new Timeline layout for business pages they dangled a marketers dream in front of our faces: the Cover Photo. It is the ultimate first impression. It’s the largest object on a company’s Facebook page—the viewer’s eyes travel straight to the photo. There’s one caveat—the Cover Photo can’t be used directly for marketing.

In their terms of service, Facebook forbids users from displaying a cover photo containing a direct call to action. Nor can users list contact information, prices, purchasing information, promotions or references to Facebook features. With that, all traditional marketing methods went right out the window.

While Facebook’s guidelines regarding cover photos may seem like a restraint on marketing, they are in fact, a chance to set your business apart from the competition. Rise to the challenge with these suggestions:

1. Showcase what you’re selling.

If you own a bakery take a picture of freshly made muffins coming out of the oven. Let your product speak for itself. The photo can draw attention to the product and below in your daily post you can write “Muffin Sale! Today Only!” Boom! Your photo communicates the quality of your product and urges visitors to search for the details on your page about how and where to obtain the product.

2. Use a photo featuring your place of business.

Snap a photo of your storefront, allowing viewers to make a connection with your location. This shows people where you are located or how they can recognize your business without providing contact information in the photo. Another route would be to photograph the inside of your business. This photo could reveal the process of production or urge customers to stop in based on the vibe they get from your environment.

3. Show customers engaging in your business.

A cover photo showing a crowd lining up outside your store speaks volumes on your popularity. Show your customers engaging in the services or products that you offer. People are likely to be encouraged to visit your business if they see others enjoying what you have to offer. Featuring these types of photos encourages people to take an action without flat out asking them to.

4. Highlight your company values and accomplishments.

If you do something as a company that sets you apart from your competitors then use the photo space to display just that. For example, if your company donated 10 percent of all profits to three different charities, then the cover photo could be either a photo or an infographic that displayed the amount of money donated to date. This is not bragging. This is showing consumers where their money is going. It also makes them feel good for supporting your business. It encourages new patrons to check out what you have to offer because they want the chance to contribute. Your photograph can’t in any way ask for donations, but it can show the donations have been made. In addition if your page reaches an substantial number of likes or followers use your cover photo to celebrate. This will show new visitors to your page that others are finding value in what you have to offer and are interested enough in what you are posting to follow you.

These are a few ways to use your cover photo to create positive marketing results without violating Facebook’s terms of use. View the terms of service as an opportunity to push your marketing tactics to the next level.

This post was written by Augusta Nissly, a Customer Success Rep here at AboutUs who crafts effective social media plans for her clients, designs sleek web sites and writes custom blog content.

Have a question? Seen a great example of a company Cover Photo? Share your comment below.

Could your business use some help to make your social media efforts pay off? To see if our services would be a good fit, email us at Sales@AboutUs.com or call 1.800.AboutUs or 1.503.488.5763 and press 3.

Rock Your Company’s Facebook Cover Photo Without Violating the TOS was written by Augusta Nissly for AboutUs.com.

Yeah yeah yeah, we’ve all heard about Pinterest. It’s that silly site where you can post pictures of cute animals and home-baked cookies, right?

What delicious sharing! (Via ShardsofBlue, via Flickr)

Wrong! Pinterest is a growing social media power, just behind Twitter in referral traffic. The number of unique visitors has consistently grown since Pinterest’s inception and there’s no sign of a halt. And now that Pinterest is allowing businesses to have their own accounts, the competition for those visitors’ attention will intensify!

Pinterest’s Users Act Differently

Pinterest is unique in that its users don’t necessarily show up to socialize with one another — 70 percent of users reported that they were using Pinterest “to get inspiration on what to buy.” This is a new kind of social network, and the potential for businesses to gain referrals through Pinterest is enormous. This means that more people click on links on Pinterest that lead them to other sites than most other social media websites. In short, Pinterest is the ultimate “middleman.”

Modcloth’s Pinterest page is fun, cute, and prominently features the site’s products.

Still not convinced? Consider this: Pinterest users, on average, follow an average of 9.5 brands, as opposed to 8.5 on Twitter and 6.9 on Facebook. Emarketer.com has also reported that people referred to businesses through
Pinterest tend to buy more items and spend more money overall than they would at businesses referred to them on other social networks. When Pinterest users log in, they don’t mess around!

Your content is reaching a new (and huge!) audience

The average Pinterest user tends to be a middle-class woman between the ages of 25 and 34, living in the Midwestern United States with some college education. No other social media network is so heavily populated by women, and Pinterest is a unique opportunity to reach out to them.But there are indeed men on Pinterest (they actually outnumber female users in the U.K.), and Pinterest boards by men and specifically geared toward men have been gaining followers. And gender aside, the typical Pinterest user is between the ages of 25 and 34 and tends to be middle class or above with some college education.

It’s your company — just more approachable

Mashable may be a technology blog, but its entertaining and out-there Pinterest boards are always crowd pleasers.

A Pinterest account, where you can post anything from favorite WordPress themes to pictures from the office party, can make any brand seem friendly and down to earth. Posting pictures onto public boards (not secret boards!) can help you appear more  approachable to customers, especially if your business isn’t exactly Halloween costumes for kids.Businesses with visually-appealing products have it easy — clothing store Modcloth is a great example of marketing one’s own products with Pinterest. But Mashable’s eclectic boards paints it as an interesting and trendy company.

Pinterest is attracting members all the time, and they’re often fans of shopping. Make a Pinterest business page today, and they’ll start shopping in your direction!

Does your company have a Pinterest page? What do you like or dislike about the network? Let us know in the comments!

Why Pinterest Is Definitely Worth Your Time was written by Brit McGinnis for AboutUs.com.

Google’s Penguin update and unnatural links warnings

Back in March 2012, some website owners started receiving unnatural links warnings via Google Webmaster Tools. Often, their website’s rank in Google search results would plummet shortly after. Naturally, these people – and many other website owners who weren’t affected – freaked out. (Exhibit A: The 100+ comments on my post about it back then.)

In March, Google began cracking down on link networks like BuildMyRank. People who used these link-building sites probably didn’t realize that paying for or exchanging links is perilous and often goes directly against Google’s guidelines.

Then on April 24, 2012, Google’s Penguin update was rolled out. The Big G said:

“In the next few days, we’re launching an important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s quality guidelines. This algorithm represents another step in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content.”

“…this algorithm affects about 3.1% of queries in English to a degree that a regular user might notice.”

Penguin is primarily about penalizing web pages with inbound links that violate Google’s quality guidelines – including links that pass PageRank (links without a rel=nofollow attribute) that Google thinks were paid for, as well as link schemes like link exchanges.

According to SearchEngineLand, Penguin is also trying to target sites using spammy techniques like keyword stuffing and purposefully publishing duplicate content, as well as doing shady things like cloaking, sneaky redirects and “doorway” pages. (You can find definitions of each of these in Google’s webmaster guidelines.)

You could have a Penguin problem if…

• You noticed the number of visitors to your site from Google search results or your Google rankings dropped on April 24th (or May 25th or October 5th – the two Penguin refresh dates).
  
• Anchor text for links pointing to your site are mostly perfect keywords. A “natural” link profile should have a lot of links with anchor text such as your business name, your website address and “click here.” An unnatural link profile would be mostly inbound links with anchor text such as “adirondack chairs” – and linking on these keyword terms looks odd or inappropriate.
• Your home page and awesome blog posts have fewer inbound links than your product or service pages. People are much more likely to link to your home page or interesting content than any sales-y pages…unless they’re paid to.
• You have very few links coming from sites in your industry or niche. Check out the graphs and analysis here.
• You have links to your site from every page of a number of other websites – and they all have keywords as anchor text. These sitewide links can be legitimate – for example, some web design companies put a link to their own site on every page of the sites they build. But if these links are keyword-rich, they can get the web design company in trouble.

To look at the links to your website:

• Use OpenSiteExplorer.org, a free tool up to a certain amount of usage. It will show you which website URLs link to your site, the anchor text they used, and the page and domain authority (similar to PageRank) of the linking web page and website.
• Look in the “Links To Your Site” section of Google Webmaster Tools, and you’ll find a list of the domains that link to your site, along with the number of links that point your way from each domain.

How can a website recover from or prevent a Penguin smackdown?

Ben Lloyd presented the three Ds at a great SEMpdx event earlier this month:

1.) Delete bad links… if possible.  You can spend a lot of time crafting an email message and then finding contact info for each website that has shady links to your site.  Many sites won’t list any contact info, so your next option is to go to their whois record.  Unfortunately, some webmasters make their information private, or list contact info they don’t check anymore.  And once you get the emails sent off, who knows if the website owners will get the message, or do anything about it…

2.) Destroy

• If most of the bad links are pointing to an internal page or pages – and not your home page – deleting those pages so they produce a 404 error can help you start fresh, and avoid the penalty for those bad links.
• If you have many bad links pointing to your home page, it may be time to consider completely ditching your current website and domain name, and starting over somewhere else.  If you need help ripping the Band-Aid off, Ben reminds us: A website is not your business – it’s a tool for your business.

3.) Dilute your bad links by getting more good natural links.

This will admittedly be a lot of time-consuming work because legitimate content marketing and link building is never easy.

Ben made it clear that people should not just go out and use the same black hat link-building tactics, and buy natural-looking anchor text like their business’s name, instead of a nice juicy keyword phrase.

Check out the video at right (pardon the language) that Ben turned me on to for great tips on white hat link building techniques.

Since Ben’s presentation, Google has introduced a link disavowal tool. So here’s a new option for recovering from Penguin:

4.) Disavow (verb: deny any responsibility or support for)

Matt Cutts of Google told the SEO world in June that Google was considering a tool that would allow website owners to tell Google which links to their site they were unable to get removed, and that they don’t want counted either in their favor or against them.

On October 16, 2012, the Big G launched the Disavow Links tool, but made it very clear that it should be used with caution and only after you’ve tried – and failed – to get iffy links removed at the source.  For more information, read our post.

When to know if you’ve recovered from Penguin:

If you make changes that you think should get you back on the straight and narrow in Google’s eyes, you will have to wait until the next Penguin data refresh to see if you have recovered.

Penguin data refreshes have happened on May 25th and October 5th so far, following the initial Penguin launch on April 24th, 2012.   You can check a site like SearchEngineLand.com or Google Webmaster Tools’ Twitter account religiously to see if a new update has been announced. Then check your Google Analytics to see if your organic Google search traffic improved after that date.

As always, the best advice is to stick to white hat SEO techniques and put out great content – the kind that people naturally want to share with their friends and colleagues. That should help you weather just about any Google update.

• Only hire SEO companies/employees you really trust to not get you in trouble. Don’t pay for any service that promises to get you on the first page of Google. If they’re making that promise, odds are they’re either lying or using black hat SEO techniques that will eventually get you in trouble with Google.
• Don’t chase the algorithms like a crazy person. If your goal is to stay one step ahead of Google, you may succeed for a while – but it’s going to be stressful, a lot of work, and one day your site may be dead in the water.
• Focus your energy on what Google will always want: good interesting content.  If you write excellent content on your website that real people want to share,  you’re golden.
• Don’t get stuck in an SEO time warp. It’s easy to stick to the gray or black hat things that worked for you before, like buying links, keyword stuffing, sending link exchange requests, or submitting articles to directories. All of these are outdated now, and Google will continue to try to shut down these artificial methods for trying to look authoritative.
• Embrace social media. It has so many benefits in its own right, and odds are search engines will continue to give social mentions plenty of weight when determining rankings.

Have a question about Google’s Penguin update and “unnatural links” warnings?  Want to share your experience?  We’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

This article was written by Kristina Weis, the Director of Marketing for AboutUs who also helps AboutUs clients with their social media and content marketing. She tweets at @KristinaWeis.

Google’s Penguin Update: Prevention and Recovery was written by Kristina Weis for AboutUs.com.

Google started sending unnatural links warnings in March, and rolled out its Penguin update in April, freaking out many website owners and SEO professionals.  That’s because sites hit by Penguin or unnatural links warnings typically plummeted in search results, ruining traffic and business results.

Just to refresh your memory, Google’s Penguin update was launched to crack down on links that appear to violate Google’s quality guidelines – including paid links, link exchanges and other link building schemes that are intended to manipulate search results.

Since Penguin, website owners and SEOs have been crying out for a place where they could say, “Hey Google! Pretty please, don’t punish me for this handful of links to my website. I know they probably look iffy to you, but I didn’t ask or pay for those links, and I can’t get them to stop linking to me. Please ignore these links so they don’t help or hurt my Google rankings.”  At SMX in June, Matt Cutts said Google was considering creating a tool like that.  Well…

A few hours ago at PubCon, Matt Cutts announced that Google has rolled out a new link disavowal tool.  It’s part of Google Webmaster Tools, and it allows you to upload a file of URLs that link to your site that you don’t want Google to count towards your PageRank.  You can view it here, and for instructions on how to format the file see Google’s announcement.

Google says it’s best to get the not-so-great links to your site removed by the webmaster of the linking site – after all, you could still get in trouble with other search engines.  The disavow tool is a back-up plan or last resort in Google’s view. But since it’s really not easy to contact sketchy websites and get them to actually remove the links, the link disavowal tool is a lifeline if you’ve received an “Unnatural Links” message from the Big G.

Who should use this new link disavowal tool? Google says, “If you’ve been notified of a manual spam action based on ‘unnatural links’ pointing to your site, this tool can help you address the issue. If you haven’t gotten this notification, this tool generally isn’t something you need to worry about.” There are also several warnings within the Disavow Links section of Webmaster Tools as well, like the one pictured to the right.

For more information about the new link disavowal tool, check out Google’s post, this video, SearchEngineLand’s post or the Dos and Don’ts list on Portent.com.

For more information on Google’s Penguin update, read our post.

Are you glad Google released this tool to disavow iffy links?  Will you use it?  We love comments!

This article was written by Kristina Weis, the Director of Marketing for AboutUs who also helps AboutUs clients with their social media and content marketing. She tweets at @KristinaWeis.

Penguin Pain? Google Launches Tool To Disavow Links was written by Kristina Weis for AboutUs.com.

Blogs aren’t exactly the new kid on the digital marketing block, but boy, they sure do get the job done. Here’s why I think you should seriously consider adding a blog to your company’s website.

1. A blog shows visitors you know your stuff

Whatever your industry, potential customers probably want to know you understand it before they hand over their credit card number, or even call. If they can easily find some articles written by you and/or your staff that show your company’s expertise, they’re going to feel a lot more confident about spending their time or money (or both) with you.

2. A blog helps you get more traffic

Sounds good – maybe even a little too good to be true, right?  Nevertheless, if you’re blogging regularly and well –  or even kind of well – you’re bound to get some social media attention that will bring more visitors to your website. You may earn links from other sites, too. And then there are the SEO benefits inherent in any decent blog…

3. Blog = SEO, baby

The more content on your website, the better your odds of ranking highly in Google search results for the keyword phrases Google finds in your posts.

Search engines really look for each page of a website to be about one specific thing. Every blog post is a page, so if you want to rank for 50 different keyword phrases, you really need to have close to 50 different pages (such as blog posts) with each page dedicated primarily to a single keyword phrase.

You can’t hope to rank well in search engines for many keywords that matter for your business if your site has just a few pages such as Contact, About Us, Meet Our Team, and a home page that talks about all the various things you offer.

4. Blog posts are link bait

We’re sure you know that links from other sites to yours – also known as backlinks or inbound links – are an important factor for helping your site appear higher in SERPs (search engine results pages). And as you probably also know, it isn’t easy to get someone to link from their site to yours. (Unless you pay them, and we don’t recommend that.)

It’s unlikely that someone will want to link to your home page, or to a page about your product or services. But how about an interesting and insightful blog post about your industry? That might do the trick.

If you regularly put out interesting or helpful content on your blog, you will have a much easier time getting backlinks.  Be a good example: When you see interesting or helpful content on someone else’s blog that’s relevant to one of your posts, do include a link to that blog. (They may return the favor!)

5. A blog is food for social media 

Just like it’s hard to rank well without blog posts, it’s hard to get anyone to share a link to your website on Twitter, Facebook or Google+ if you don’t regularly blog about interesting topics.

If you can blog well enough that people start sharing links to your blog posts from their social media accounts, there’s nothing better. People like to share valuable articles with their networks, and these social media links will help your SEO. Social media mentions and links are a signal to Google and Bing that people consider a site valuable – and the search engines use that signal to help them rank websites in search results. Plus, you’ll get more direct visitors from the people who actually click those social media links.

For tips on creating blog posts more people will want to share in social media, read our post You Deserve More Blog Comments & Shares.

One more great thing about blog posts – they give you something to mention in your own social media accounts. Some days even the cleverest person runs out of new things to say.

6. Behold the CTR power of Google Authorship

Have you seen a search result like this? That’s called a rich snippet – a Google search result that isn’t just the plain ‘ol link with a little text below. When the author of a blog post is hooked up with Google Authorship, their blog posts will look like this in Google SERPs.

So what? Well, search results like this have a much higher CTR (click-through rate).  MarketingTechBlog.com found that their posts with a Google+ portrait in search results were almost 5 times as likely to be clicked on in search results than links without it.

Read more about the importance of Google Authorship and how to set it up for your blog.

7. Unlike social media posts, you really do own your blog content – and you’re the one benefiting from it

For many business owners, the idea of giving up control is scary.  But that’s exactly what you’re doing when you post content on a social network.

Facebook could decide that you’re violating their terms of service and delete your page. LinkedIn gets to decide which ads to place around your content. Twitter sometimes goes down and makes your tweets temporarily inaccessible. Pinterest could get bought by some company that doesn’t care about keeping the site working. The list of risks goes on.

When you put out great content on social networks, you get some benefits for sure – and so do the social networks.  They get more pages in Google’s index, they can sell more advertising, and their valuation or stock prices could go up – all thanks to you and a few million others.

Now don’t get us wrong.  Here at AboutUs, we definitely think social media is something businesses should be using. But we hate to see blogging overlooked when it has some serious advantages for almost any business.

8. Getting and keeping people on your site probably helps your business goals.

Do you want people to buy your product, call you about your services, fill out a lead generation form, or do something similar? If someone is reading a blog post on your website, the odds are much better that they will.

9. Blog posts have a longer shelf life

Email newsletters, tweets and Facebook posts are fleeting, and will likely be forgotten and hard to find a few days after they’re sent or posted.  Your blog is a great place for more evergreen topics that will stay relevant and helpful weeks or months after they’re first published.

It’s certainly fine to blog about timely and current things, and we encourage you to do so. But make sure the important things you want people to see now and later are published on your blog.

10. Help with customer support

Do you keep getting the same questions from your customers?  Why not turn each question and answer into a blog post?  It will lessen the load on your customer support people, and make it easier for them to give more detailed answers quicker.  It can also show prospective clients that you are serious about helping your customers.

11. Cred for author

Do you want your CEO to be seen as a thought leader in your space?  Do you want to give your employees some publicity?  Writing for the company blog and getting a byline can give employees (including the CEO) some street cred, and probably a warm, fuzzy feeling. Bonus points for having each author create or enhance their Google+ profile, and for assuring they have Google Authorship status (more about that here). (Do NOT post everyone’s blog posts as Admin…we’re begging you.)

12. Blog comments – and commentors – are gold

One of the great features of blog posts is that they allow readers to leave a comment.  This conversation is invaluable.  It can give you ideas for your new product, next blog post, a better customer service process, or something else important to your business.

Because it takes time and effort to comment on a blog post, anyone who does is probably worth taking a look at.  Are they a prospective client or business partner someone should follow up with?  Is the commenter someone you should follow on Twitter?  Is he or she a customer you should reach out to, maybe to offer support or ask for a testimonial?

Comments also make your blog post more meaty content-wise, both for your readers and for search engines. For tips on getting more blog comments, read our blog post about that.

13. Blogging shows you’re still in business, and rocking it

When I look at a company website, I often come away with a sense of how “alive” the company is.  First and foremost, I can’t help but notice if the site looks like it was built in the ’90s, or if it’s modern.  I also notice the presence or absence of social media links and a blog, and I pay attention to when the last blog post was published. For this reason, I only recommend adding a blog to your site if you plan to blog more than once a year.

An active blog (posts are published once a month, or more often) is a signal to Google that your site is “alive,” and that it’s worth revisiting regularly to re-index and discover new pages. If the content on your website hasn’t changed in years, Google will visit it less often. That sends a signal that the site isn’t so valuable, and can cause Google to rank the site lower than it would if you published more regularly.

Convinced? Here’s how to add a blog to your website

Adding a blog to your website can be very easy or pretty tricky, depending on how your website was set up.  Talk with your technical or website person and see if they can add a blog to your website at www.YourWebsite.com/blog or blog.YourWebsite.com.

If adding a blog on your existing website doesn’t seem like an easy option, you can set up a separate domain name and website for your blog, and link the two to each other.  For example, if your current website is YourWebsite.com, you could register a domain name like YourWebsiteBlog.com or one with a different TLD like YourWebsite.org.  Then you can install a WordPress website on that domain, which will give you an easy-to-edit blog.

Here at AboutUs, we help many of our Competitive Edge clients by replacing their blogless and hard-to-edit websites with a modern WordPress website that’s already enabled for social media. These sites are easy for our clients to update themselves, and it’s even easier for their readers to share the posts in social media.

Have a question about blogging?  Post a comment below, or contact us.

This article was written by Kristina Weis, the Director of Marketing for AboutUs.  She tweets at @KristinaWeis.

Yes, Your Company Needs a Blog – 13 Reasons Why was written by Kristina Weis for AboutUs.com.

You’re diligent about writing for your company blog. You plan out blog posts, schedule them, respond to current events, and every post is thoughtful and appropriately seeded with your important keywords.

But you’re still missing one vital component if you don’t have a Google+ profile that’s properly hooked up to your blog posts. This status is called Google Authorship, and the rich snippet that shows up in search results as a result is huge for winning new readers – and more website traffic.

Why do I need a Google+ profile and Google Authorship?

Magaly Rivera’s blog post stands out because of her Google+ profile.

A Google+ profile can increase clicks. I’ll bet you’ve already seen the most compelling argument for Google Authorship in search results. The rich snippet (including your lovely headshot!) appears in search results, just as you see in the image at right.

This rich snippet with your portrait really makes your blog post stand out in search results. And research shows that about one-third of people click on images first in search results. Choose a photo that makes you look friendly and approachable, and you’re even more likely to attract attention.

Your Google+ profile improves your credibility, and your site’s credibility. When a reader can easily click to the author’s Google+ profile and find good information there, that inspires more confidence in the author’s expertise. This is especially true for material that’s unfamiliar to the reader, or controversial.

Your Google+ profile also improves your site’s credibility for Google itself. You’re telling Google that the author of an article acknowledges the content – indeed, is proud of it. That lets Google place much more trust in an article’s quality. You’re telling Google your article the exact opposite of spammy content created solely to pull traffic from search.

Your Google+ profile can boost your position in search results. Because Google+ belongs to Google, many search optimization professionals believe the big G pays a lot of attention to +1s on articles, and to the information in Google+ profiles. This means having a complete Google+ profile, and connecting it to your blog posts or articles, can help your work rank higher in search results for the keywords you’ve emphasized.

Mike Arnesen of Swellpath has a great piece on SEOmoz about the factors Google will likely consider when ranking articles. Mike says it’s all about an author’s established authority, as evidenced by:

• links with other established authors
• +1s and other “votes” for a writer’s work
• the number and authority of sites where the author is published
• and more…

How to set up Google Authorship and connect your Google+ profile to your posts 

Show Google where your work can be found.

To help your Google+ profile picture pop up next to your posts in search results, make sure Google knows who you are and where you publish. Edit your Google+ profile to add the websites you contribute to, and your other online profiles.

If you have an email address at the same domain where you publish your articles, you can sign up for Google Authorship verification. This is by far the fastest way to link your posts to your Google+ profile. For example, I publish on AboutUs.com, so I entered my email, Aliza@AboutUs.com, in the box on the Google Authorship signup page.

If you don’t have an email for the domains where you publish, no fear – there’s a link on the authorship page that takes you to another method for linking your online publications and your Google+ profile.

Don’t forget the most important thing: Content quality

If you really want your articles – and your website – to rank high in search results, you must write high-quality content that people read, comment on and share in social media. But you knew that already.

Aliza Earnshaw is vice president of business development at AboutUs. A former business reporter and editor, Aliza still indulges her love of great writing and working with creative writers while pursuing business opportunities for AboutUs.

Why Every Blog Author Needs a Google+ Profile was written by Aliza Earnshaw for AboutUs.com.

When you walk into a classy restaurant you usually notice one thing before anything else. Sometimes, you don’t even realise you’ve registered it: it happens on a subconscious level. But this seemingly minor element can have a huge effect on your overall experience.

I’m talking about a sense of visual cleanliness. I’m talking about the crispness of your surroundings. I’m talking about when the place just LOOKS inviting.

With copywriting you mostly concentrate – and quite rightly so – on the words you use. It is what you write, after all, that will ultimately make the sale.

But as well as considering the content of your copy, you should also consider the VISUAL CONTEXT in which you present that copy.

That might sound a bit flowery, I admit. But really, all I’m talking about is how your words appear on the page.

When it comes to sales letters, there are three key things that you should always remember…

1. Never forget the wise words of this advertising legend

First and foremost, David Ogilvy’s dictum still stands:

You should NEVER ‘reverse out’ the main body of your copy.

Even if white text on a black background looks ‘cool’… just don’t do it.

Years and years of testing has proved this. And even then, that didn’t stop ME from going ahead and testing it anyway. What did I find? Don’t reverse out your text! Black (or a strong , bold colour) on white always wins.

You’ll see people ignoring this. You’ll see people using all sorts of crazy designs and reversing text out left, right and centre. And sure, they might make sales. But you can be sure they’re not making as many sales as they would if they weren’t reversing out!

2. Surround your copy with white space

Once you understand that a white background is the best approach, the next thing to realise is that the more of that white background the reader can see, the easier it will be for them to read your sales copy.

Yup, when it comes to long copy… white space is incredibly important.

If you’ve got huge blocks of black text everywhere, a reader is going to take one look at the page and think “jeez, that looks like a lot of serious reading, maybe I’ll take a look later…”

And just like that, you’ve lost a reader – and a potential customer – before they’ve read even a word of your copy.

You should use small, bite-size paragraphs and clipped sentences. Surround them with white space, and your copy will look easy to read.

3. Size matters a lot more than you realise

Finally you should think about size!

I know your partner keeps telling you size doesn’t matter, right?

But it does. Especially online.

First, any text should be set to a font size that is easily readable. Within reason, the bigger the font, the better. The size of headlines will vary, but your standard body text should be at least 14 points, and more likely 16.

Second, you should make sure that the width of your text is relatively slim.

I see so many online sales letter set to incredibly fat widths. This is a mistake. Ideally, your page text should be set in a table no more than 600 pixels wide. It might seem narrow,  but it will make it an easier read.

If you’re used to a much wider setting, ease yourself in. Start at 800 and knock off 50 pixels a time until you’ve worked your promo to slimness!

All of these cosmetic changes may seem small, but they can have a much more dramatic effect on the conversion power of your sales copy than you’d imagine.

Try adapting your current sales material with what I’ve shared here, and I’m sure you’ll soon see positive results.

This article was written and contributed by Glenn Fisher.

Glenn Fisher is a professional copywriter and founder of AllGoodCopy.com, a website dedicated to helping people improve their copywriting. To receive free advice direct to your Inbox, you can subscribe to Glenn’s free email.

Effective Sales Copy: More than Just the Words You Write was written by Glenn Fisher for AboutUs.com.

Wikipedia, the popular wiki encyclopedia that anyone can edit, has rules to keep its content useful – and neutral.  For example, if your business is notable enough to get a Wikipedia page, you’re not supposed to edit it yourself, because the editors want the page to be neutral, not promotional.

Now a scandal has broken out because two high-up Wikipedians have allegedly been editing the Wikipedia pages for their PR clients.  Being paid to edit a page for a client doesn’t exactly make you a neutral editor, and paid editing certainly goes against the values of Wikipedia.

In addition to editing pages for clients,  the accused editors are also suspected of promotion. The government of Gibralter, which paid a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation UK for training services and “creation of QRpedia plaques,” as disclosed on UK.Wikimedia.org, was featured as a “Did You Know?” on Wikipedia’s front page 17 times in August.  The only other repeated topic throughout that month was the Olympics, which probably deserves repeated mentions a lot more than Gibraltar. I’d guess this editor was fairly confident that his promotion of a page would escape notice, as it probably raises fewer eyebrows when the page is about a country, instead of a company.

What did Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, have to say?  “It is wildly inappropriate for a board member of a chapter, or anyone else in an official role of any kind in a charity associated with Wikipedia, to take payment from customers in exchange for securing favorable placement on the front page of Wikipedia or anywhere else.”

AboutUs started as a wiki

Here at AboutUs, we find this story interesting because our website directory AboutUs.org is also a wiki, and it’s always been the opposite of Wikipedia in some ways. On AboutUs.org, every website can have its own wiki page, and the website owner is more than welcome to edit that page to talk about and promote their site and their business.

We’ve had lots of people over the years ask us how they can get their company on Wikipedia. We’ve always explained how Wikipedia works: Only “notable” entities get pages, and usually it’s only large companies that qualify as notable entities. But if your company is notable enough to get a page, you’re not supposed to edit it, because you wouldn’t be neutral.

We, however, invite business owners – and the PR and marketing people who work for them – to use AboutUs.org because we have a different mission: We want to help small businesses level the playing field and win more attention.

What do you think?

Can Wikipedia really prevent paid promotion?
Should Wikipedia allow people to edit the Wikipedia page about their company?
What should happen to these two Wikipedians who are in hot water?
If you could, would you pay someone to create a Wikipedia page about your business?
How much will this scandal hurt Wikipedia’s brand?

This article was written by Kristina Weis, the Director of Marketing for AboutUs. She has worked on AboutUs.org, the wiki about websites, since early 2007 and Kristina also helps AboutUs’s Competitive Edge clients with their social media and content marketing. She tweets at @KristinaWeis.

Wikipedia Paid Editing Scandal – One Wiki’s POV was written by Kristina Weis for AboutUs.com.

According to SmartInsights.com, 1.08 billion of 4 billion mobile phone users worldwide own a smart phone. And more and more, users are turning to these devices to find a place to eat, check their email or browse the web for shopping. From conversions to branding, mobile is where your business should be.

However, many businesses are stuck wondering how to take on the daunting task of executing a mobile marketing campaign. From mobile web design to buying ad space, it seems overwhelming, but you can get started with three simple steps.

1.  Start With the Basics

As with any business project, you should begin with the basics. This means integrating your current methods, such as email marketing, and creating your place in the mobile internet. To do that, you want to consider two things.

• Mobile website: You need to have a mobile website if you don’t already. This will be your base for your mobile marketing, and it should be done properly. Consider ease of use and simple navigation.
• Email formatting: Customers are likely already getting your emails on their phone, but they might not look very good. Be sure to choose a format that will be successful on any mobile device, and get all important information above the fold.

2.  Plan to Get Found

Once you’ve made your presence on mobile, you need to get found. One half of all internet searches are performed on a mobile device, and studies have found that 61 percent of mobile searches result in a phone call. With odds like that, you want to be sure people are able to find you when they need your services.

• Claim your location: Mobile users use Foursquare, Google, and Facebook Places to find businesses close by. Be sure that you’re there, easy to find, and easy to get in touch with by adding your location, phone number, and any other important contact info.

3.  Consider Your Strategies

Finally, you’re ready to get started with your mobile marketing. As with marketing in general, there are a variety of avenues you can take to reach your mobile customers. From traditional marketing to text messaging, it’s recommended that you choose one and stick with it.

• Banner ads: Just like the internet, you can buy ad space online. Buy banner ads with places like Admob or Rapid Mobile.
• SMS/MMS marketing: Text message marketing is tough to break into but can be effective; people are less adapted to deleting texts right away, as they do emails. However, be sure to offer an easy to find “opt-out” option and only send 1 or 2 messages a month. Some people pay for incoming texts, and you don’t want to annoy them.
• In-app ads: With more than 400,000 apps in the Android market alone, it’s smart to get an ad on the apps that your customers may be using. You can do this through both the Apple and Android app stores.

Mobile marketing is the new social media marketing. Still in its infancy, it’s better to get in now than wait any longer. Remember to start slow and make your way toward full blown ad campaigns once your feet are on the ground.

Jessica Sanders is an avid small business writer. As the marketing copyeditor of Resource Nation, she touches on a range of topics such as direct mail marketing and internet service providers.

How To Get Your Mobile Marketing Off the Ground was written by Jessica Sanders for AboutUs.com.

Our Competitive Edge reports help marketers and business owners see who’s earning the most social media engagement – them or their competitors. The report also helps marketers get new ideas from comparing successful, engaging posts with unsuccessful ones.

We thought it would be fun to try running the Competitive Edge for politicians competing in the 2012 election.  We’ve compared the social medial following and engagement earned by Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Paul Ryan. Check out our report for the week of August 30-September 5, 2012.

What does this report tell us?

1. Early morning posts do well for B2B – and presidential candidates, too. 

The Competitive Edge shows the time of each post (Pacific Time), rounded to the nearest hour.  Posting in the early morning is often recommended for B2B companies, and we can see here that many of the candidates’ most engaging posts were posted between midnight and 4am PST.

Out of the most engaging three tweets from each candidate, 75 percent were early morning posts.  The other top tweets were posted at 2pm PST, and two at 8pm PST (which is pretty early in the morning on the East Coast).

Of the top 3 Facebook posts from each candidate, I would define seven or ~58% as early morning (counting the 9pm and 11pm PST posts) and five as during the day (from 1pm to 5pm PST).

2. Asking people to share and like your Facebook posts works.

Romney’s most engaging Facebook posts include a clear call to action: “Stand with Mitt. ‘Like’ and share to help us get to 6 million Likes!”  At the time we generated this Competitive Edge report, nearly 810,000 people had liked that post, and nearly 23,000 people had shared it on their own Timelines, making it show up in the Newsfeeds of many of their friends. That’s great amplification, and helps spread Romney’s message more widely.

Let’s give it a shot: Would you like to tweet this point?

3. Photos do really well on Facebook.

The three most engaging posts from each presidential and VP candidate contained an image.  In the Competitive Edge report, you can click on a specific Facebook post that shows an image icon and view the image (and the rest of the post, too).

Not convinced that photos ramp up the engagement level on Facebook? Just click to view all of the Facebook posts in the report (by clicking the “95 posts” bar in Romney’s column), and  scroll down to see the least engaging posts.  Romney put out several Facebook posts without images and – spoiler alert! – all of his non-photo posts received less engagement than his posts with photos.

4. Candidates that posted more often got more engagement and fans.

Of all the candidates, Mitt Romney posted the most on Facebook (95 times in one week) and Barack Obama posted the most on Twitter (263 tweets in one week).  Guess who gained the most fans and got the most engagement on Facebook?  Romney.  And who got the most engagement on their tweets and gained the most new Twitter followers last week?  You guessed it – Obama.

5. Twitter may skew more Democrat than Facebook.

Since Obama is the incumbent, it seems logical that he’d have more social media followers – after all, he’s had four years and lots of public exposure to help him build a following.  It also seems logical that Obama would not be gaining new fans nearly as quickly as the Republican candidates, because they’re newer on the national political stage, and so they have some novelty value.

We’re guessing Facebook reflects the Democrat/Republican ratio of the nation, because it seems everyone is on Facebook  - including my grandparents. So the numbers play out just as I would expect: At the time we created this report, Obama had 28 million fans and Romney had 6 million, but Romney gained 815,000 Facebook fans in the week of August 30 – September 5, compared to Obama’s gain of 228,000 fans.

On Twitter, Obama also has a lot more followers – 19 million compared to 1 million for Romney. But in this platform, Obama had a much greater gain in followers: 324,000 to Romney’s 97,000.  I’m not quite sure what to make of this, honestly.  Are Twitter users more likely to be liberal than the general U.S. population?  I would also venture to say that following a candidate on Twitter is less of an endorsement or foreshadowed vote than liking a politician on Facebook, since I imagine many people follow the opposition just to keep tabs on them, or to add some drama to their lives.

If you have a theory on Twitter’s political demographics, I’d love to hear it in the comments.

6. Google+ still hasn’t quite caught on.

When I created this report, I could find Google+ profiles only for Mitt Romney and Barack Obama – no Joe Biden or Paul Ryan.  Do the campaigns not have time to manage another social media outlet for their VP candidates?  Do they not think Google+ is important? If you have any ideas about this, tell us in the comments section.

7. Joe Biden was never that exciting.

Paul Ryan already has more Facebook fans and Twitter followers than Joe Biden, and that’s likely an embarrassing fact for the Obama campaign. Because Biden’s had extra time to gain followers, he should really have more than Paul Ryan.  The numbers may be telling us that Ryan gets more engagement because he’s a new player – his selection was just announced, while Biden’s been on the scene for four years – or that Biden is simply boring. What do you think? Again, tell us in the comments section below.

8. Romney may not have the crackest technical team.

Our Competitive Edge reports show the social engagement on blog posts – how many people shared them on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. But we can only do this analysis for blogs with working RSS feeds, and Romney’s blog doesn’t have one.

Update: When we set up this Competitive Edge report, the blog on MittRomney.com wasn’t allowing our tool to collect data on its blog.  See comments below for more info.

Do you think these social media numbers say anything about how the election will play out this November? We’d love to hear from you – tell us in the comments below.

Could your company use some help with social media, including a weekly Competitive Edge report? Fill out the form on AboutUs.com and we’ll give you a call to discuss how we can help.

This article was written by Kristina Weis, the Director of Marketing for AboutUs who also helps AboutUs clients with their social media and content marketing. Her personal blog is at KristinaWeis.com and she tweets at @KristinaWeis.

Election 2012: Social Media Insight via Competitive Edge was written by Kristina Weis for AboutUs.com.

YouTube videos are one of the best ways to market your brand, business, product, or service. The most popular video sharing site on the Internet, YouTube offers a venue where millions of people gather to catch the latest in visual media. This creates a hub where your videos can potentially go viral.

Even if your videos don’t go viral, good SEO practices can help you gain valuable targeted traffic. The following five tips can help you craft a more effective YouTube video strategy:

1. Use Titles and Descriptions For SEO and To Attract Viewers

Your titles and descriptions can do a great deal to promote your video content and draw traffic to it. Remember these points:

• Make sure your videos have intriguing and relevant titles that attract attention, as well as detailed descriptions that tell potential viewers precisely what they contain. This is no place for ambiguity.
• Incorporate any benefits of viewing your video that could entice someone to watch who has an interest in your product, service, tutorial, webinar, lecture, or other video content.
• Use appropriate keywords in your titles and descriptions to help search engines send relevant traffic to your videos. Don’t stuff your titles or descriptions with keywords – that will only harm your search engine rankings.
• In your video descriptions, ask people to like, rate, or share your videos, subscribe to your channel, and post video responses.

2. Use Keyword Research To Improve SEO for Titles, Descriptions and Tags

Use your favorite keyword research tool to find the most relevant and profitable keywords for your business videos. Then use these keywords to craft titles, descriptions, and tags that capture the attention of your ideal audience, while attracting search spiders and sending you targeted traffic.

3. Use Creative Tagging for SEO

Use keywords in your tags. You should also add any other on-topic information, along with phrases that people might be searching for that relate – even remotely – to your video. This can draw more varied traffic and potentially build wider interest in your video.

4. Use Video Responses To Gain Attention and Traffic

Subscribe to relevant channels and post video responses to the videos that relate to your own content. This can draw interested viewers – and subscribers – to your channel and increase traffic to your videos. Be sure to like, rate, share, and leave comments on other users’ content, as well, so that other YouTubers will feel inclined to reciprocate.

5. Don’t Neglect Link Building

Link building is just as important for your YouTube videos as it is for your online written content. Inbound links are a key indicator of popularity, and when your backlink count increases, Google’s spiders notice. When it increases significantly, your search engine ranking can, too. That means even more searchers will see your YouTube video listing in search results.

Depending on your purpose, try some or all of the following to optimize link building:

• Link to your individual videos and/or your YouTube channel from your website, blog, and social media pages, in comments you leave on other blogs and forums (within reason), and in the bio sections of any relevant articles or guest blog posts you publish. While some of these links may be “No-Follow,” you’ll still attract traffic to your videos, which can inspire viewers to share them and/or subscribe to your channel.
• Create YouTube badges for your website and blog that link directly to your video content.
• Add your YouTube channel or video link to your e-mail signature, and consider including a video in your e-mails when appropriate and relevant to your messages.
• Let viewers embed your videos on their websites, blogs, and social media channels. They’ll become great ambassadors for your brand, attracting more traffic to your website.

With a bit of extra care and attention, your YouTube channel can become one of the greatest promotional media platforms for your brand.

David is a freelance technology writer and his articles appear on various marketing blogs. David contributed this guest post on behalf of WhoIsHostingThis.com.

5 SEO Tips for YouTube Videos was written by David Kendall for AboutUs.com.

I received a great question from one of our Competitive Edge customers: What is the best Twitter URL shortener?

As I dove into writing an answer, I took a step back and pondered whether it’s actually a good idea to use a URL shortener when posting in social media. After all, Twitter now has a built-in URL shortener, so you no longer get extra characters by using your own shortened URL when you want to include a link in your tweet.

Here are the pros and cons I came up with for posting shortened links in social media.

PROS of using URL shorteners in social media:

• If you pick a URL shortener with some analytics, you’ll get easy stats on how many clicks that URL got. For example, take a look at the stats bit.ly provides in the image below.              
• With some URL shorteners like bit.ly, you can customize the URL to make it something like bit.ly/AboutUsNews that looks nice, and is easier for people to remember. If you don’t have much control over the URLs on your website, and you like the idea of using link language, custom URLs are nice.

CONS of using URL shorteners in social media:

• Some people reading your social media post or tweet may not trust your shortened link because they’re not sure which site it will be taking them to. That means you could easily get fewer clicks on your link than if you used the full original URL. Many accounts that put out tweets that are spam or phishing attempts do use URL shorteners, so a shortened URL may make some people’s spidey senses tingle.
• Using a URL shortener is an extra step that makes posting in social media take a little more time. Better to post quickly and often, so make it easy on yourself.
• URL shortening services can go down temporarily (or maybe even permanently), rendering your shortened URLs broken for that time. Of course, your own site can go down too.
• If someone chooses to link to your website from their own website via the shortened URL they saw on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc., it will pass only 90-99% of the SEO value, or PageRank, to your site. The shortened URL will pass even less SEO value if you’re using a not-so-great URL shortener that doesn’t use permanent 301 redirects. If the person sees only the full original URL, that’s the link they’ll use on their site – and then you’ll receive all the SEO value of their link.  (Keep in mind that the links you post in social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are NoFollow, which means they don’t pass PageRank like a normal website link. But still, social media links are a ranking factor that search engines pay attention to.)

What do other people think?  Here are a few tweeted opinions on URL shorteners from savvy social media people:

• Ryan Campbell, a long-time account executive at a marketing agency in Portland, tweeted, “I have no problem with them, but studies I’ve read say URL shorteners decrease CTR.” (CTR means click-through rate, or the number of people who see a link and choose to click it.)
• Keridwyn, who provides social media services in Seattle, tweeted, “Not only do shorturls allow you to track clicks, they also look much tidier! I use them not only in social but emails as well.”
• Charlie Loyd said shortened URLs in social media are a yellow flag to him, and a credibility buster. He tweeted, “Domain names, and recognizing things I’ve already seen, are important,” and “An unnecessarily shortened link says ‘I expect you to click on anything I link to’ and/or ‘you’re just a statistic to me.’”
• Pierce, a marketing manager and author of Epic Marketing Fails, tweeted, ” I like the full URLs or at least part of the full URL so that you know where it’s going to take you.”
• Cesar Pinera tweeted, “I don’t trust shorteners, they hide their destination. Thus, I don’t follow URLs that use shorteners unless I know the posters.”

What do you think about URL shorteners? Do you have a favorite one? Share in the comments.

This article was written by Kristina Weis of AboutUs. 

Kristina is customer service and social media lead for AboutUs.  She helps website owners who are trying to promote their businesses online.  Her personal blog is at KristinaWeis.com and she tweets at @KristinaWeis.

URL Shorteners in Social Media: Pros and Cons was written by Kristina Weis for AboutUs.com.

See Tip No. 7

“We publish on our blog every week – but no one ever comments or shares.”

I wish I had a dollar – okay, $10 – for every time I’ve heard that. And when I look at the blogs people are complaining get no engagement, it’s rarely the content that’s the problem. People who put their hearts & souls into writing blog posts usually have something interesting to say on a topic that other people care about, too.

Here are the tips I most commonly offer to people who ask what’s wrong with their blog posts:

1) Write shorter posts. People do not read on the Web – they scan. A 900-word post looks like it’s scrolling down into eternity, especially if there are no images or subheads to break up the gray space.

2) Grab attention with your blog post title. The title needs to grab attention on the front page of your blog, in people’s RSS feeds, in Google search results, and on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn.

3) Include a call to action at the end of the post. What do you want people to do after they’ve read your post – besides share it? Do you want readers to post their own anecdotes about adopting a rescue dog in the comments section of your pet grooming blog? Do you want them to enter your Worst-Organized Closet Contest – and get the chance to win a half-day of your help – by posting a photo on  your Pinterest board? Getting readers to do something makes them feel more actively involved with your brand.

4) Publicize every post in social media, and in your newsletters – more than once. Schedule periodic Facebook posts, tweets and Google+ posts about each blog post, and include the link. While it’s tempting to use software that automatically publishes the title and a link to each post in social media, everyone does that, and it makes your posts look robotic. Take the time to craft a few different social media posts for each blog post, and rotate them over weeks and months to attract different people’s attention and avoid boring your followers.

5) Blog about common customer issues. If people call you about specific issues, these can be great topics for blog posts. Make sure you include a few practical tips in each posts – this makes them more useful to your customers and prospects. Plus, people are more likely to share genuinely helpful posts.

6) Be a person. People who are lively and fun in person often turn stiff and formal when they write. Try to write blog posts in a conversational, friendly and casual voice. Don’t be afraid to be funny or irreverent – a fun post is more likely to be shared.

7) Include a byline. Bonus points for author photo. It’s a lot more interesting to read a post written by Hecate McIver than to read a post attributed to “Acme Hardware Staff.” Plus, posts with author photos get more clicks than posts without. A nice touch: Include the author’s bio and contact information at the bottom of the post or in the sidebar.

8) Add social sharing buttons to your blog posts. Make it easy for people to share. Don’t include 20 social sharing buttons – just a few will do. Important social sites include Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, Twitter and StumbleUpon. Don’t forget about “follow us” buttons! These are not the same as sharing buttons, and they’re just as important for expanding your audience.

9) Ask friends and colleagues to comment on your posts. Do this intelligently – don’t get one or two people to blanket all your posts with comments, or it will look fishy. Ask a friend who has expertise in one of your topics to comment on one or two relevant posts. Then ask another person – then another. That can seed more comments.

10) Respond to comments in the comments section. Thank people for their insight, or for raising a point you hadn’t thought of. If a topic is hot and people are piling in to comment on that post, let a few comments build up before you jump in. Especially if you’re answering a question, you may discourage others from commenting.

Have you published blog posts that got a lot of comments and shares? Please share them with us in the comments section below. Tell us why you think this post was so popular.

Aliza Earnshaw is vice president of business development at AboutUs. A former business reporter and editor, Aliza still indulges her love of great writing and working with creative writers while pursuing business opportunities for AboutUs.

You Deserve More Blog Comments & Shares was written by Aliza Earnshaw for AboutUs.com.

Facebook just rolled out a new plug-in that integrates with WordPress.  You’re probably thinking, “Great, a new tool to learn about and add to the list of social media to-do’s already on my plate”.

I agree, it’s exhausting the way that Facebook is always rolling out changes and new add-on’s, but there’s good news. Facebook’s WordPress tool is easy to set up and pays off big for businesses.

Why you should install Facebook’s plug-in on your WordPress site:

1. Increase your reach and social connnections: When you post on WordPress, you have the option of posting to friends’ or pages’ timelines by mentioning them – these mentions show up in the post itself and populate the mentioned timelines with the post.  It’s a great way to spread your new content and encourage others to read your post and share it, whether they come to it from Facebook or your website.

The new plug-in will post to an author’s Facebook timeline every time they add new content to your site.  Plus, a new recommendations bar makes it easy for users to like and share your posts and add what they’re reading to their timeline giving your website and post even more exposure.

2. Make it easy to post to Facebook regularly: You can specify a Facebook page on which to post new content, so every time you post,  that page is populated.  This can work for new pages and posts.

3. Increase your SEO:  Facebook says that comments are SEO supported. I’m not sure what they mean by that, but I do know that Google informs search results based on your social activity.  Social media directly affects SEO now, so making it easy for your website visitors to share what you post or add to your website is more important than ever.

4. Make analytics easy: The new Facebook tool integrates with Insights to make watching analytics easy. You want your posts to be relevant and valuable to your customers for increased engagement and, for Facebook, that means watching your pages’ Insights and using that information to determine what and when you post.

You can also keep track of any changes in your Facebook and other social media rankings compared to your top 3 competitors with our Competitive Edge product.  Get a free week.

Comments/Questions? Leave them below.

4 Ways Facebook’s New WordPress Plug-In Helps Your Website was written by Meg Hartley for AboutUs.com.

You may recall us kvetching a couple of weeks ago about a social media contest that didn’t seem terribly social.

Believe it or not, we like to commend -  not just complain – so this week we’re pointing out the Style Your Denim Shorts contest that Revolve Clothing is running on Pinterest.

What do we like about this contest? It encourages people to use Pinterest in the way that Pinterest is meant to be used: to allow people curate images they like, and to spread a company’s message via social sharing (on Pinterest, that means pinning and re-pinning).

Revolve Clothing is offering $500 worth of merchandise as a prize for the best board that includes a photo of a model in shorts (uploaded by Revolve), plus photos of five pieces of clothing from Revolve that complement the chosen shorts. Each contestant is also supposed to add five “inspirational” images that reflect her (or his) own personal style.

Will Revolve get lots of new followers out of this contest? Probably…..and not just because they hope for $500 worth of clothing. (Frankly, at Revolve that’s probably just two or three pieces, anyway.) People love pinning photos on Pinterest, assembling boards that do, indeed, reflect their own personal style….and sense of humor, in many cases.

Why is this type of social media contest so great for a company? Because when you pin photos from a website – as Revolve is asking you to do – Pinterest links the photo to the web page it came from. When people see a photo they like and click on it, they’re taken to the web page. In this case, that means lots of people are going to be looking at Revolve’s products, and there’s a fair chance some of them will buy. Whether they buy right away or not, Revolve is certain to grow awareness of its brand and products.

One piece of advice we’d like to offer Revolve: Include the invitation to sign up for your newsletter on more pages. It’s well understood that many people need to look at a company’s communications for quite a while before they buy. And you can segment your email list, offering people who haven’t bought yet some kind of incentive to do so.

Here’s another thing Revolve has done right: asking contestants to email Revolve the links to the boards they’ve created. Savvy marketers know it’s great to tie your social media marketing to your email marketing, and a contest is a great way to grow your email list. We think Revolve would be wise to offer each contestant a discount coupon via email.

If you choose to enter the Revolve social media contest, do me a favor – let me know what their follow-up communication looks like by emailing me at Aliza@AboutUs.com. I’ll write a follow-up post if I get enough information.

What do you think of the Revolve social media contest on Pinterest? Tell us in the comment section!

Aliza Earnshaw is vice president of business development at AboutUs. A former business reporter and editor, Aliza still indulges her love of great writing and working with creative writers while pursuing business opportunities for AboutUs.

Now Here’s a Social Media Contest that Makes Sense (Pinterest) was written by Aliza Earnshaw for AboutUs.com.

Yesterday I was amused by a post about how Facebook was testing paid post promotion in New Zealand.

I thought it was a bit crazy, but dismissed it as not all that important.  After all, the company was just testing paid post promotion, and I bet Facebook tests all sorts of things that never see the light of day outside the test market.

But I was wrong to dismiss Facebook’s paid post promotion. Today, as I was posting to the AboutUs Facebook page, I was introduced to the new “Promote” option that’s now been rolled out worldwide.

Here’s what Facebook says about this new feature:

Promoted posts are a simple way to reach more of the people who like your Page and their friends.

Your promoted posts will be seen by a larger percentage of the people who like your Page than would normally see it. It will also be seen by a larger percentage of the friends of people who interact with your post.

This raises all sorts of questions for me:

1. How many people would be willing to pay?  I’ll admit, I’m tempted.
2. How will people react to seeing promoted posts labeled “Sponsored” (albeit with subtle gray text) in their News Feed?  Twitter’s equivalent “Promote Tweets” don’t have too many fans, as far as I can tell.
3. Would Facebook have gone the promoted posts route if they hadn’t been planning their IPO?
4. Did Facebook create their EdgeRank algorithm just so they could later charge people to get more reach and circumvent that very algorithm?

EdgeRank is Facebook’s magic-black-box algorithm that allows you to see only a small fraction of the total posts created by your friends and the pages you “like” in your News Feed.  The goal of EdgeRank is to show in your News Feed only the posts it thinks would be most interesting to you.  There are many factors that make posts more likely to show up in your News Feed, including the level of engagement – likes and comments – that posts have earned.

Facebook has said that the average post from a person reaches 12% of that person’s friends. On company pages, Facebook shows admins how many people each post reached (see image at right).

The EdgeRank algorithm, and how it filters posts, makes Facebook different from other social networks. Twitter and Google+ – two of the largest social networks -  show posts from all people and companies you’ve chosen to follow. Its EdgeRank algorithm puts Facebook in a unique position to satisfy and get more engagement from users than other networks – and now it’s clear that Facebook has also discovered the frustration created by EdgeRank can drive companies to pay for preferential placement in their fans’ News Feeds.

Here’s a thought experiment for you. Google is the largest company using algorithms to serve up content that will best satisfy their users’ requests. Is paying Facebook to promote a post akin to paying Google to rank you higher in search results? Or is it like paying Google to display your ad next to search results? Perhaps Facebook post promotion is more like paying Gmail (or another email provider) to make sure your marketing emails land in your prospects’ Inboxes, and not their spam folders.

What do you think? Will you pay to promote your company’s posts? Will you unlike pages that pay to show up in your News Feed? Answer by posting a comment below!

For more info from the horse’s mouth, check out Facebook’s help page Promote Your Page Posts.

This article was written by Kristina Weis of AboutUs. 

Kristina is customer service and social media lead for AboutUs.  She helps website owners who are trying to promote their businesses online.  Her personal blog is at KristinaWeis.com and she tweets at @KristinaWeis.

Facebook Will Take Your Money to Game Their EdgeRank Algorithm was written by Kristina Weis for AboutUs.com.

When we first saw the Social Madness competition hosted by The Business Journals, we were happy to sign up. Helping companies use social media more effectively is part of our mission, and we do a pretty good job of it, if we say so ourselves. So we thought this would be a great chance to demonstrate how we continually expand our reach and influence by employing good social media practices. (We’re also pretty fond of the Portland Business Journal, and rely on it for excellent local business reporting.)

Today, our marketing manager, Kristina Weis, got an email from the contest that made her decide to withdraw our name from the contest. Everyone in our office agreed and supported her decision.

Here’s the part of the email that seemed so un-social:

Call us purists, but we think a social media competition should be based on which companies most improve their reach and engagement during the contest period. And they should accomplish that by using social media in the way that’s most effective for a business: Offer content that’s genuinely interesting to your audience, and engage in real conversations with real people – in public, where your audience can watch you.

Somehow, the idea of winning points by asking your friends and followers to vote for you on the contest site – and placing a badge on your site, linking to the contest site, to encourage more votes – doesn’t seem very social. It feels more like link-building, or like pay-per-click advertising. It feels especially like a branding campaign for Spark Business from Capital One, the contest sponsor.

Don’t get me wrong – we’re all for companies promoting themselves online with innovative new tactics. We just think a social media competition should encourage the best practices that make social media most effective for business.

Update, 5 June:

Egg on face. It turns out that the top three national winners of the Social Madness competition will each get the chance to direct some donated cash to the charity of their choice. That feature of the competition isn’t mentioned in the official rules, and it certainly wasn’t mentioned in the email that Kristina received after signing us up. In fact, we didn’t find out about the charitable component until a company we know and love, Outlier Solutions, told us that’s part of the reason they entered – that and their hope of winning more followers while having fun.

We searched for a while and finally found the charitable donations mentioned in an article published by the Philadelphia Business Journal. Now we’re feeling all curmudgeonly and embarrassed. Sigh.

But we still feel that our points about a social media competition being more – well, social – are correct.

Aliza Earnshaw is vice president of business development at AboutUs. A former business reporter and editor, Aliza still indulges her love of great writing and working with creative writers while pursuing business opportunities for AboutUs.

Social Madness Contest: Not Really Social? was written by Aliza Earnshaw for AboutUs.com.

When is the right time to launch your company’s social media and content marketing?

How about before you’re even open for business?

That’s what Melinda Casady and Susana Holloway did. The owners of Portland’s Culinary Workshop started a blog, Facebook page and Twitter account before they had even finalized their business plan, much less found a suitable location.

The result? By the time Portland’s Culinary Workshop taught its first class in February 2011, Melinda and Susannah had generated a huge amount of buzz. They had been written up in The Oregonian, on the blog Good Stuff NW and had plenty of Facebook fans and Twitter followers. The enthusiastic following meant that the partners were able to fill most of the classes they offered, right from the start.

The buzz – and demand – has continued. Portland’s Culinary Workshop runs full classes six days per week, doubling up some days. Places in popular classes such as Knife Techniques and Week Long Menu Planning sell out months in advance. “We are blissfully successful,” says Melinda.

We’re sure you’re as curious as we were about how Portland’s Culinary Workshop managed to launch its content marketing and social media presence before it even had a website.

Melinda started off by blogging about her desire to start a business, long before choosing a business name or writing a business plan. A post published in November 2010 reveals her first entrepreneurial stirrings:

So what’s really new is a new idea, a new plan, a new dream that I’m almost afraid to believe in. I’ve definitely looked around me at other people owning businesses and wondering how the hell did they make that happen? I could do that! I could probably even do it better. So why am I not [....] maybe it’s just because that sounds scary and risky and where the hell am I going to find the money to start my own place.

Dammit I have gumption! I’m smart, I have amazing smart and talented friends, I have a freakish work ethic, and I’m tired of working for the man! Sorry man, you’ve been good to me, but it hasn’t been always the healthiest of relationships and it’s time I think we move on and end this on a good note. Kisses and hugs.

That’s right we, I mean me and my partner in crime, are going into business for ourselves. I’m also a big believer in the goals that are most likely to succeed are the ones that are written down and/or screamed from the roof tops. So I’m screaming it.

Melinda went on “screaming it.” She blogged about every step of starting Portland’s Culinary Workshop – from applying for an Employment Identification Number to buying a domain name, to organizing her paperwork, to finding investors, to leasing a suitable location. [Note: The early blog, originally posted on one of the public blogging platforms, has been moved to Portland Culinary Workshop's website.]

Melinda also created a Facebook page, and she and Susana asked all their friends to “like” it and post on the Wall. Pretty soon, they had a large and active following. Susana took charge of the company’s Twitter account.

Portland’s Culinary Workshop has built on its great social media and content marketing start by continuing to publish great information for people interested in cooking.

While some blog posts promote new classes and company news, most posts document the real-world trials and tribulations of an enthusiastic cook. Melinda shares recipes and cooking tips, and she’s refreshingly honest about her cooking disasters (see her post on garam masala gone wrong).  Twitter and Facebook posts are a combination of promotion and conversation with followers – exactly the right mix to enlighten, inform & entertain Portland Culinary Workshop’s audience.

The best thing about this early start on content marketing and social media marketing is that these activities are now an integral part of Melinda’s and Susana’s regular business operations. The partners aren’t asking themselves how to carve out time from the business for marketing – they just do it.

Portland Culinary Workshop’s content exemplifies what we at AboutUs mean when we talk about “great content.” It addresses the interests, needs and concerns of their target audience in a way that’s genuinely helpful, warm and friendly. Melinda & Susana believe in sharing openly, whether in class, on their blog, Twitter or Facebook, or during casual conversations IRL (In Real Life).

“There’s no point in trying to hold out and say, ‘We have a class for that,’” says Melinda. “It’s better just to offer it right away, when people need it.” And as their success demonstrates, it’s a great way to build a happy, growing customer base.

Aliza Earnshaw is vice president of business development at AboutUs. A former business reporter and editor, Aliza still indulges her love of great writing and working with creative writers while pursuing business opportunities for AboutUs.

Start Your Social Media & Content Marketing Before Opening Your Business was written by Aliza Earnshaw for AboutUs.com.

It’s a terrible feeling.  You spend months, even years building up your blog. You lovingly polish each post, find the perfect image for each one and publish it for the world to see.

Then – for no apparent reason – some anti-social cyber-weasel hacks into your site. They might place links to not-so-family friendly sites in your footer or (if they’re really bad) delete your content altogether.

Regardless of what they do, the feeling is the same. You feel violated.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. The following five steps will help make your blog more secure for years to come.

#1. Beef Up Security With The Secure WordPress Plugin

Your blog publishes a lot of meta data – such as the WordPress version you’re using – which hackers can use to break into your site. Secure WordPress is a plugin which removes all this public data, thereby making it harder for hackers to plan a successful attack on your site.

It also makes access to plugin and theme update information available only to people you’ve designated as administrators. Secure WordPress also adds extra security by adding the index.php plugin directory, which denies public access to your directories, and so prevents hackers from browsing them.

Step #2. Move the wp-config.php file out of the public_html folder.

Wp-config.php is the file which contains all your site’s configurations. You can imagine the kind of damage a hacker could do if they had access this all-important file.

Strangely, WordPress places the wp-config.php file in the public_html folder, thereby making it public.

This is not good. Fortunately, you can easily move it to a private area on your site. Simply open the public_html folder, then drag the wp-config.php file outside the folder. This moves the file up one level in the hierarchy. Though the file can no longer be viewed by the public, WordPress automatically searches for (and finds) the file in its new location.

The file path goes from something like this:

/home/user/public_html/wp-config.php

To this:

/home/user/wp-config.php

Step #3. Regularly update WordPress and all plugins.

New versions of WordPress include security patches and functional improvements. If you don’t update accordingly, hackers may exploit known security issues in past versions.

Same goes for plugins. Try and update them on a regular basis; not only does it make your site safer, it also ensures optimum performance. A quick note on plugins: Use as few as possible, as numerous plugins can slow your site’s performance and create possible security holes.

Updating WordPress has never been easier. You can set it to automatically update, which saves the hassle of updating several times a year.

#4. Delete the Default User Admin

Hacking your site is a one-two punch. Armed with your username and password, a hacker can run amok through your blog, tearing down anything they wish.

And unfortunately, WordPress creates an admin user with the username “admin”… and since most people don’t update this, hackers already have the first piece of the puzzle.

Now it’s time to take it back.

What you need to do is delete the default admin account and replace it with a new username.

Here’s how:

• In the WordPress admin, click Users, then create a New User. Make sure it has admin privileges.
• Then, click Users again, select the user “admin” and delete it. It should lead to this page:

If the “admin” user has posts associated with it, make sure to click the second option (see above) and attribute the posts to your newly created admin (or whoever else you wish).

#5. Back Up Your Database Regularly

While this doesn’t protect your blog from getting hacked, backing up your site minimizes the damage if do you get hacked.

The WP-DBManager plugin will back up your database and email it to you every day. You can change the scheduling, but once a day ensures you’ll never be too far behind if you actually need the backup to restore your site.

If you want to make your site extra secure, change your database password so it’s different from other databases. If you don’t know how to do this, call your hosting company.

These five actions will help secure your blog and, in the event of an attack, will help you recover quickly. Implementing these steps shouldn’t take longer than 20 minutes – so get to work!

What security measures do you use? Tell us in the comments section below!

This article was written by Adam Costa.

Adam Costa is the co-founder of Trekity.com, a travel site that finds the perfect trip for you based on your personal preferences. He also runs the Travel Blogger Academy, which shows people how to build profitable travel blogs. If you love travel, follow him on Twitter for updates on the world’s greatest adventures.

5 Ways to Protect Your Blog from Hackers was written by Adam Costa for AboutUs.com.

Putting your contact information out there and inviting sales questions and customer service can feel unimportant — or downright scary.

But making contact information visible on your website can get you more leads and improve your sales, conversions and search engine rankings.

You don’t have to just take my word for it, though. Display your contact info – or make it more prominent – for a month. Then watch your sales and key metrics in Google Analytics. I’m willing to bet they’ll change for the better.

Build Trust with Your Future Customers

Once you’ve created a professional-looking and easily navigable website, providing easy-to-find contact information is the most important thing you can do to make your website feel trustworthy.

Contact information can provide potential customers a sense of security. They know if they buy that widget from your company and it breaks, they can get in touch with you.

Whatever actions you want visitors to perform on your website that will lead to conversion, their decision to take each next step will be conditioned subconsciously — or even overtly — by their sense they can trust your website, and your company. Trust becomes even more important if you’re asking people to type in their credit card number.

A website with no contact information, or contact information that is hidden or hard to find, makes me wonder why that website is trying to hide from me — and I often assume the worst.

Improve Your SEO With Contact Info

For businesses that rely on local customers, including contact information can help their search engine optimization.  What local business wouldn’t want to get more customers who search the web before they leave the house or from their smart phone while on the go?  A website that has easily found contact information can get better rankings in search engine results when people’s searches include the city, zip code, state, and/or area code.

For example, if a Portland, Oregon, widget company’s website clearly displays its full address, then someone in Portland who searches for widgets, or searches for “widgets Portland,” may be more likely to find that website. For more information on local SEO, read this article and our article on Google Places / Google Maps.

Some search engine experts feel that search engines use contact information as an indication of trust, and so sites and web pages with full contact information could be ranked higher in search results. This seems very logical to me, and if Google.com had a contact page I could tell them that I think it’s a good idea to favor websites with contact information. If you’re interested in how search engines determine trust in ranking websites, read this Search Engine Journal article discussing possible on-page trust ranking factors.

To get the SEO benefits of including contact information, make sure it’s displayed as plain HTML text. Search engines won’t “see” contact information if you’ve included it as an image, or if you make it hard to find. Read further for tips on where to place contact information.

Increase Sales With Contact Info

“I just have one question before I buy.”

It’s common for someone to be 99 percent ready to purchase, and to want to ask one quick question, or double-check one detail. If you haven’t provided an easy way to contact your company, that person will probably just vanish, and take their business with them.

Let People Help You!

Wouldn’t it be great if a friendly person could easily alert you that:

• a link on your website is broken
• you’ve got an embarrassing typo
• something on your site doesn’t work with a specific web browser
• their shopping cart isn’t working and they can’t pay for your product
• they want to link to your site (remember, backlinks help your SEO)

What Type of Contact Info Should I Provide?

I suggest including at least one of the staple contacts that everyone should know how to deal with. It’s really better to include all of these:

Phone number

Some people really prefer to talk to a real live person, and because it’s the highest level of customer service it is reassuring to see a company is open to receiving customer phone calls.

Suggestions: List your business hours and time zone beside your phone number. It will save people from getting frustrated by trying to reach you outside of business hours. If you have a toll-free number, do list your local number for international callers and people who want to save you some money.

Email address

I personally prefer the actual email address to a contact form, but a contact form that includes an actual email address listed is fine.

Suggestion: Make it easy for people — let them to see and copy the actual email address to paste into an email. For bonus points, make it a clickable mail-to link.

Physical address

While people probably aren’t going to write you a letter, seeing a company’s address can be reassuring and make it feel more legitimate. Listing an address with the city, state and zip code can help you with local SEO.

Alternative contacts methods

Other contact methods can be an added bonus:

• A link to your company’s Twitter handle or Facebook page.
• A Feedback tab – for example, GetSatisfaction.
• Live chat – with a real person who works at your company, please!  We have a chat button on our contact and product pages here on AboutUs.com that we love. Want to try the chat widget we use? Click here.
• An FAQ, Help or Support page that offers people do-it-yourself help.

Where Should I Put My Contact Information?

Where you place contact information will affect how many people find it, and thus how much benefit you will receive.

Don’t bury or hide your contact information. If someone has to click “About Us” and then “Support” and then scroll all the way to the bottom of that page, they probably won’t bother. And now you’ve probably turned that person into a frustrated non-customer.

I suggest choosing one or more of these locations for contact info on your website:

Contact link

A “Contact” link at the bottom of a website or in its main navigation is pretty standard, and people look for it in these places. Make sure the link says something obvious, like “Contact Us”.

Contact info in the web page footer

To cash in on SEO benefits, place contact information in the footer of every web page, making it clearly available to search engines.

The site pictured at right has both their contact info and a “Contact” link right there, visible to search engine crawlers and people.

Contact info “above the fold” – no scrolling required

Placing contact information in such a prominent location provides a lot of visibility. This placement is commonly used on websites that trying to sell something.

The site pictured at right has their phone number right there at the top of every page on their website.

Miscellaneous Tips

• If you provide contact information, make sure you provide decent customer service to anyone who gets in touch through all the contacts you offer.
• It’s helpful to set expectations by letting people know how soon they can expect a response to an email, or the hours during which your company answers the phone.
• Want to know how important contact information is to your business? Compare your important website metrics and sales numbers before and after giving site visitors a way to get in touch with you.

Boost Sales, Conversions & SEO with Contact Info was written by Kristina Weis for AboutUs.com.

We’ve said it over and over again: One of the best ways to get your website ranking high in search results is to create great blog content that prompts people to link to it, share it in social media, and comment on the blog post itself.

I’m about to blow our own trumpet here, and I hope you’ll forgive me. We’ve just experienced the magic of great content right here on our own website  - and it’s such a good example of why content matters, I had to share.

On April 16, Kristina Weis – our community manager and most active blogger – published a blog post about how to avoid an unnatural links penalty from Google. The post hit a nerve with people: It has been tweeted (on Twitter) 149 times, shared on LinkedIn 77 times, and on Google+ 26 times, as of this morning. In addition, there are now 79 comments on the blog post itself. Admittedly, 18 are responses from us, but that’s still 61 comments from people who found the article valuable. And what’s especially heartening is seeing people answering each other in the comments – now that’s community!

Here’s the magic: I checked Google last night to see how the article was ranking. (I used a different computer and browser from my work machine, to avoid getting personalized search results.) I found the article in the No. 9 position for the search term “unnatural links.” That means Kristina’s article now ranks as high as unnatural links articles in some of the top SEO blogs that we hold in high esteem.

I can’t tell you how gratifying it is to see the strategy we advise people to follow – cascading your content into social media for more visibility –  working for our own website. We’ve certainly seen it work for other people, but there’s a real thrill in seeing it work for AboutUs.com, which is a fairly new website for us. (We still own and operate AboutUs.org, the world’s largest editable directory of websites.)

Why did the Unnatural Links post get such a big response?

There are a few reasons. No. 1 & No. 2: It’s a timely topic, and one that scares website owners.  As you can see in the comments, people are asking all kinds of questions about what kinds of backlinks are okay, how to get spammy backlinks removed, and what to do if they get a penalty notice.

So if you can write a blog post on your own site that’s timely and addresses your audience’s hot buttons, do it! You don’t have to know the whole story to write a post, if there’s enough information to make it interesting right now. You can always update the post itself, or write a later post with more of the story, and link the two. (And by the way, internal links are great for SEO. They tell search engines that the content on your site is rich, that different articles relate to each other, and that you believe in helping your site visitors find the content they’re looking for.)

The Unnatural Links post also got a lot of response because we promoted it in social media, as we do with all of our blog posts. We do that in our AboutUs accounts, and most of us promote AboutUs content in our own personal accounts, too.

Promoting our blog posts this way works because we have a very engaged following in our social media accounts, especially Twitter. People ask us questions, we respond, and we solicit people’s opinions and feedback in our social media accounts. We’ve been doing this for years, so our following is a genuine one: People who really want to read what we post.

There’s one other factor that really helps: We have an email list that people have opted into because they want SEO and social media tips. We send out teasers to our blog posts when we think our email subscribers will be interested in them, and that helps promote our content, too.

You can get great results, too.

It won’t happen overnight – but if you write great content, get engaged in social media, and give people the opportunity to sign up for informative, interesting emails, you too can get your best blog posts ranking high in Google search results.

Aliza Earnshaw is vice president of business development at AboutUs. A former business reporter and editor, Aliza still indulges her love of great writing and working with creative writers while pursuing business opportunities for AboutUs.

Good Content + Social Media = High Search Rankings was written by Aliza Earnshaw for AboutUs.com.

Zappos’ Pinterest account is spectacular! Every brand needs to take notes on how they are using Pinterest.

They are the perfect candidate for Pinterest : their product is visually interesting and their market demographic is mostly females between 25 and 54. And they are rockin’ it!

Here’s what Zappos is doing right on Pinterest:

1. They mix up their content with a variety of Pinterest boards:

• “Because it’s fun!” board is full of fun apparel and makeup ideas, crafty how-to- guides, interior decorating inspiration, and silly images.  They make it fun, while also appealing to their marekt demographic.
• “Genius!” board shares DIY project ideas and other useful tips for the home.

2. They use employee pinboards and intersperse their product with a variety of images to appeal to different segments of their market:

• “Hope’s board” is full of inspirational parenting quotes and pictures, holiday tips, fun fashion, recipes, and pictures of her son for the 30-40 something’s.
• “Kiddies” board is tailor made for parents. They sprinkle children’s footwear with kid friendly activities, recipes, fashion, and party ideas.

3. They keep their content fresh with trend boards to keep the customer coming back to find out the latest and segment their market:

• “Animal attraction”  board has trendy animal print fashion and Demi Moore, who is pretty trendy herself these days.
• “Tribal instinct” board  includes tribal attire and footwear, as well as fun imagages, quotes, and beauty tips
• “New Neons” board shares all things neon from footwear to home fasion to neon light displays

4. They always credit their sources. They make sure to keep their account in line with Pinterest best practices by crediting sources just like in a research paper.

Note: they credit the account where the image is re-pinned from and the source of the original image.

5. Zappos knows “1 in 3 engaged women use Pinterest to plan their wedding”. They use this planning element of the platform in their boards.

• “Wedding Day” board showcases jewelry, fashion, cakes, wedding portraits, event planning ideas and,of course, footwear.
• “Mother’s Day” board has inspirational quotes, gift ideas, pictures of Jackie Kennedy,  fashion, footwear and they even ask the customer to choose a  category for this board from a drop down menu to get more engagement and consumer intelligence.

This article was written by Meg Hartley of AboutUs.

Meg Hartley is an account manager for AboutUs where she helps clients with their social media and blog content creation and strategy.

Get in touch with her on Twitter: @meg_hartley.

5 Ways to Rock Pinterest Like Zappos was written by Meg Hartley for AboutUs.com.

It’s pretty easy to unfollow someone on Twitter. That’s both a good and scary thing.

Getting Twitter followers is half the battle. But hanging on to them is just as important – especially because it’s the most engaged tweeters (or tweeple) who are the most valuable for helping you get your message out. They’re the ones who are paying attention, and who will reply, retweet and favorite you. These are the people you want to hang on to, not the spammy types who will follow anyone and then never pay attention to them or their tweets.

Engaged people do choose to unfollow sometimes – after all, they are paying attention! Here are some tips for keeping your most valuable Twitter followers happy and un-annoyed, so they won’t want to unfollow you.

 
#1 – Make sure your Twitter bio and tweets are on the same page.

If your bio says you’re an expert in underwater basket weaving, many people are going to follow you expecting tweets about underwater basket weaving. But if your tweets don’t deliver what they were hoping for – say you mostly tweet about what you ate for breakfast – you are bound to lose followers.

By the way, this is very similar to how you should do email marketing. If people sign up for emails about natural medicine, but you send them emails about weight loss products, many people are going to unsubscribe or mark your emails as spam.

 
#2 – Don’t automatically DM (direct message) people when they follow you.

When I asked my own followers on Twitter (many of whom are online marketing and social media experts) what things would make them unfollow someone, this was the answer I heard most. For some people, nothing is more annoying than an auto DM that sounds canned and artificial. Social media should be social and human after all, right?

 
#3 – Don’t have apps tweet for you, unless you think they’ll be interesting for your followers.

For example, many people tweet automatically every time they check in on Foursquare. Tweets like that get boring or annoying really fast, and some people (like me) are bound to unfollow you. Unless you’re a close friend who’s in the same city, I don’t really need to know what restaurant you’re at.

 
#4 – Have some variety and good stuff in your last three tweets.

If I started following you because you shared good tips about online marketing, but then a while later I see 10 in a row about your latest diet, I may forget why I followed you in the first place, and unfollow you on the spot. Or if I remembered why I followed you, I may still may decide that your signal to noise ratio is too low, and choose to unfollow you.

Also, when I see a lame tweet and I’m trying to decide if I should really unfollow that person, I click on their profile and look at their last three tweets. From there, it’s easy to unfollow – or I can go back and continue following if I liked those last three tweets.

 
#5 – Don’t just talk about yourself.

Few people want to follow someone who only talks about him or herself – their blog posts, their company, their product, their day, etc.

It’s not very social to just toot your own horn, and anyway, it’s not nearly as effective as someone else tooting your horn. You should engage with other people on Twitter – respond to their funny remarks, link to their content, and highlight their accomplishments. That way, you’ll be seen as a source of valuable information, and as a real, likeable person.

 
#6 – Don’t tweet too often.

Unless you’re following thousands of people, it can be annoying to have your Twitter stream dominated by someone who isn’t one of your closest friends. When one person’s tweets are crowding out everyone else’s in my stream, I will usually unfollow them unless their tweets are pure gold.

 
#7 – Tweet regularly.

If you don’t tweet for a while, some people will forget about you and why they followed you in the first place. Then, when you start tweeting again they will be less likely to engage with your tweets, and they may unfollow you if they don’t recognize you.

Also, there are various tools – TwitCleaner.com, for example – that suggest which people you may want to unfollow on Twitter. One category is people you’re following who haven’t tweeted in a long time.

 
#8 – Be wary of politics and religion.

This shouldn’t be a surprise, but if you tell people in your bio or recent tweets that you’re a strict Verdukian who feels very strongly about the Third Amendment, you’re bound to lose some followers who don’t share your beliefs, or who don’t want to hear about your beliefs.

 
#9 – Be mindful of your potty mouth.

If your tweets regularly contain swear words, adult humor, or links that are not safe for work (NSFW), you may lose some followers who have strict bosses or morals.

 
#10 – Be consistent with your language.

I commonly see bilingual people on Twitter whose tweets will switch between English and another language. We understand that it’s normal in some communities to mix two languages very casually and easily – but you should understand that it can cause some people to unfollow you.

To minimize unfollowing, it can be helpful to make your last three tweets always have at least one post in each of the languages you use to tweet. That way, if someone sees a tweet in a language they don’t speak and goes to look at your profile, they will be reminded that you also tweet in a language they can read. You could also give people a heads up in your bio, or consider two separate Twitter accounts – one for each language – so you can build a strong following for each.

 
#11 – Consider having two accounts for different purposes.

It’s not just bilingual people who can benefit from having two Twitter accounts. Many sophisticated Twitter users have one account for their professional relationships and another for their closer friends. That allows them to share blog posts, reach out to prospects and help customers in one account, and indulge their rants and off-color humor in another.

Keep in mind that unless you protect your tweets, all Twitter activity is public. People can still find your other account and read its tweets.

 
#12 – Don’t ignore @s (mentions).

When I reply to someone’s tweet or mention them with an @ on Twitter, I usually remember and anxiously await a response. If I haven’t heard back in a few days, I will sometimes feel bitter enough to unfollow them. Maybe they’re snubbing me, or their tweets are just automated and they don’t pay attention to replies – either way, I probably won’t miss following them.

Unfortunately, Twitter only emails you when someone you’re already following mentions you. So if you want to notice @s from new people, you have to log in to Twitter regularly and check. Not everyone does this.

 
#13 – Don’t just auto-post from Facebook or another social network.

Chopped-off tweets with links to Facebook don’t look good, and they don’t encourage engagement. I wouldn’t expect someone whose tweets come automatically from Facebook to notice or care when I reply, or if I retweet one of their tweets. So why waste the time?

Also, people usually want to stay on whatever social network they’re on. It doesn’t usually work to try driving people from one to another.

 
#14 – Don’t get hacked.

Have you ever received a DM from someone that said something like “Someone’s spreading nasty rumors about you” with a link to some spammy site?  Or seen someone randomly start tweeting about some new miracle diet they found?  That means someone or some bot got into their account and is using it to spam people or infect them with malware.

Unless they know you well, many people will be likely to unfollow you if they see tweets or direct messages like this coming from your Twitter account.

To avoid being hacked, make sure your password is secure – with a capital letter and a number perhaps, and not the same password you use for other sites.  Also, check which applications you’ve authorized to access your Twitter account, and revoke access to any you no longer use or trust.

 
#15 – See if your Twitter triggers any red flags.

TwitCleaner is a free tool I use to help me find people I may want to unfollow. TwitCleaner can also check your own Twitter stream to see if you would show up on anyone else’s reports as someone to unfollow. Check your account here.
What makes you unfollow someone? Share your frustrations or advice in the comments below.
Could you use some tips for getting new followers? Read this article.

This article was written by Kristina Weis of AboutUs. 

Kristina is customer service and social media lead for AboutUs.  She helps website owners who are trying to promote their businesses online.  Her personal blog is at KristinaWeis.com and she tweets at @KristinaWeis and @AboutUs.

Avoid Being Unfollowed on Twitter – 15 Tips was written by Kristina Weis for AboutUs.com.

Anchor text is text on a web page that is linked to another web page.

For example, in this link the anchor text is “this link.”

Backlinks (links from another site to your site) have always been important for SEO and how high a website ranks in search results.  The keywords in the anchor text of links to your site are also important for helping your site rank higher for those keywords.

When you link to web pages on your site or someone else’s, think carefully about the anchor text that you use.  Use keywords that may help your or their SEO, but don’t forget about the reader.  Make sure your choice of anchor text makes it easy to read your sentence and to have a good idea of what you can expect to find when you click the link.

Since March 2012, Google began using anchor text as a way to detect paid links (which are against their guidelines).  Google warned people when they detected “unnatural links” – links to their site with perfect anchor text, or that seemed like they were paid for and too good to be natural.  Read How to Avoid an Unnatural Links Penalty and Google’s Penguin Update: Prevention & Recovery for more information.

Have a question about anchor text? Comment below.

What is Anchor Text? was written by Kristina Weis for AboutUs.com.

Google is constantly adjusting its search engine algorithm in an attempt to serve up the best websites and most relevant results to searchers.  They’re at it again, and this time it’s a doozy.

What’s being called the Unnatural Links update is rocking the SEO world.  In March 2012 people started receiving warnings from Google about “unnatural links” and then many of those sites’ rankings in search results have taken a nosedive.  Some sites have been de-indexed, which means their site’s pages no longer show up in Google at all.

The scary part?  Unlike other Google algorithm changes, you can’t respond to this one by changing things on your site. This time, it’s about links to your site from other websites (commonly called backlinks) that you most likely don’t have control over – including sites you may never have asked to link to you.

Wait! I thought backlinks were good.

The number and quality of backlinks to sites has always been one of the most important search engine optimization (SEO) factors determining how high a web page will rank in search engine results pages (SERPs).

With the Unnatural Links update, Google has made it clear that backlink quality is of paramount importance. The Google algorithm has been modified to detect – and devalue – low-quality links, or links that are determined to be spammy or paid for.

In other words, Google is trying to distinguish “natural” links – the kind that people make to other sites because they think the content of the linked site is relevant to their own visitors – from links created solely to boost a site’s rankings.

Many SEO experts believe Google is going one step further and actually penalizing sites with links that are determined to be “unnatural,” because some sites appear to be ranking lower than they would if they had no backlinks at all. (source)

So, how can you avoid a penalty and make sure your links don’t look unnatural?

• Pay attention for an “Unnatural Links” notice in your Google Webmaster Tools.  *tweet this*   If you get one, your rankings are doomed to slip if you don’t do get those unnatural links to your site removed.  It’s important to note, though, that you may not get a notice before your site takes a dive (or you may not get a warning at all), so don’t assume you’ll be fine if you haven’t received a notice.
• Make sure you don’t have any paid links.  Buying links or selling links that pass PageRank (meaning they aren’t NoFollow) is against Google’s webmaster guidelines. If you are found to be paying for links, or if it appears you’re paying for links, your site’s rankings will suffer. To be safe rather than sorry, you should ask for any paid links to be removed or made NoFollow. Contact the linking site’s webmaster or customer service department and hope they’re listening.
• Make sure you don’t have links from blog networks. Google has cracked down on blog networks (like BuildMyRank), which are typically basic-looking WordPress blogs with low-quality content and keyword-infused links to other sites. For more information about blog networks and Google’s update, read this article.
• Sites with lots of links with keyword-rich anchor text look suspicious.  *tweet this*   If the vast majority of the links to your site just happen to use one of a few keyword phrases as the anchor text, they aren’t going to look very natural to a person, nor to Google’s algorithm.  What are the odds someone would choose one of your top keyword phrases when linking to you?  Odds are, most people will use something like your business name, the title of your blog post, your business name, or “click here” as the anchor text when linking to you.  Make sure that the anchor text in your backlinks looks diverse and not like you asked or paid people to give you links with SEO-perfect anchor text.
• Try to have a balance of high-quality and lower-quality links.  Many sites will have a few low quality links that they never asked for, but it becomes a problem when the majority of your backlinks look iffy. Look at the root domains (like example.com) that are linking to you: What is their PageRank? Do they have a decent social media following, or are many people sharing their content in social networks? If most or all of the websites that link to you seem low quality, you may be in trouble.  It’s time to build up some quality backlinks and/or try to get rid of some of the low quality links.
• Avoid site-wide links.  These don’t look too natural, and many sites that sell links will put the links on all their site’s pages.  See the keyword-y links on the middle right of this site, for example.  There’s even an “add your link here” link right by them that goes to a page where you can pay – DoFollow links costs 20% more than NoFollow links, of course ;-)

How can you see and analyze your backlinks?

• On your site’s page on AboutUs.org we have a free lookup that will show you how many backlinks Google and Alexa.com think you have, and then that number will link to a list of the web pages they note as linking to your site.  To use this, go to www.AboutUs.org, search for your domain name (like example.com) in AboutUs.org, and then click “Web Presence” on the left-hand side of the page.  Click “Refresh the numbers” to get numbers as of today.  Note that Google should only list backlinks from sites that it does value – so you probably don’t need to worry about those backlinks.
• Open Site Explorer is a free tool from SEOmoz that shows you the backlinks they’ve detected, along with the links’ anchor text and their estimate of the linking site’s authority.
• Google Webmaster Tools has a “Links to your site” section that shows you which sites link to your site and how often, which pages on your site have the most links, and what anchor text people tend to use to link to you (they call this “How your data is linked”).

The lesson here is that Google is constantly refining its algorithm, and before you employ a new SEO tactic you should give it a sniff test.  Does every aspect of it result in better content for searchers and the Web? Or is it just a self-serving tactic for making your site rank higher?

A better use of your time is building good content on your site, and cascading it to your social network. This is unlikely to make you rich overnight, but truly useful, well-written content will produce a more secure and sustainable ranking that improves over time.  Plus, more people will want to link to excellent content in natural ways ;-)

For tips on getting quality backlinks, check out this article.

This article was written by Kristina Weis of AboutUs. 

Kristina is customer service and social media lead for AboutUs.  She helps website owners who are trying to promote their businesses online.  Her personal blog is at KristinaWeis.com and she tweets at @KristinaWeis.

How to Avoid an Unnatural Links Penalty was written by Kristina Weis for AboutUs.com.

Not yet… Nooot yet… Nooot…Bang! You’ve got it: your 4,000^th follower.

Whether you’re closing in on it, long past it, or dreaming of it, you know how useful it is for your business – online, brick-and-mortar, or both – to have 4,000 potential customers interested in what you say.

For @AboutUs, that 4,000^th follower was me – a professional copywriter in London. It seems apt, then, that I should help AboutUs.com mark the occasion with some copywriting advice for you, dear reader. A milestone like 4,000 followers is achievable, no matter how big or small your business. Good copy will get you there much quicker.

You might think there’s not much copy to work with – but you’d be surprised at the difference a few words can make. When people land on your Twitter profile, they’re looking for an interesting detail they can connect with. And the more personal the connection, the better.  *tweet this*

So don’t just state you’re an “Internet marketer who specialises in achieving core success,” or some similar nonsense. Sure, say what business you’re in, but say something about yourself too: that you’re an Elvis fan, addicted to curry, determined to find all the lost socks of the world. Anything, as long as it’s personal and it’s about YOU.

Everyone has a business…but way fewer people have a likable personality you’d want to connect with. Remember that.

No matter what they’re about, tweets ARE miniature pieces of copywriting.

To write more effective tweets, think about them as concentrated headlines. After all, why would you tweet anything if you didn’t want it to be noticed?

It’s important to treat your tweets as you would a headline in a sales promotion. Rather than tweeting, “I’ve written a new blog post, read it at BoringTweet-dot-Snore,” you should make sure  each tweet contains at least one of  the Four U’s.  In case you’ve not come across them before, the Four U’s dictate that any headline should be Useful, Unique, Ultra-specific or Urgent.  *tweet this*

Keeping these in mind will help you write stronger headlines – and tweets.

3. Make sure your auto-responder doesn’t actually sound automated.

If you’re serious about getting more followers on Twitter, you’ve probably got some kind of direct message auto-responder set up to connect with new followers. If you haven’t, you should – check out SocialOomph.com, or something similar.

Problem is, nine times out of ten, auto-responder direct messages (DMs) end up sounding so false and contrived, it defeats the whole point of making that initial contact with a new follower. This is usually because the copy is reactive rather than proactive. What I mean by that is that the message starts something like this: “Hi, thanks for the follow…”

Think this sounds polite and conforms to some kind of social media etiquette? It doesn’t. It’s just lazy copy. An introduction like that is merely reacting to the follow. Worse, it’s  reacting in a boring way, and it stinks of auto-responder.

When you only have 140 characters to establish a relationship with someone, redundant small talk is a downright waste of characters. Be proactive instead – get straight to the conversation. For example, “Hi, I’ve been meaning to get in touch because I think we could work together on my new project. DM me and we can figure out how you can get involved.”

Now we’re talking! If you followed someone and got that message, you’d feel pretty engaged, right? That’s exactly why you’re using Twitter: It’s a networking tool. By improving the copy in your direct messages, you’re giving yourself a much better opportunity to expand your network.

Put each of these tips into action, you’ll soon see a difference in the number of Twitter followers you attract – and retain. They’ll be more engaged, too, which means more mentions and retweets, which means you’ll see your network expand even more quickly.

This article was written and contributed by Glenn Fisher.

Glenn Fisher is a professional copywriter and founder of AllGoodCopy.com, a website dedicated to helping people improve their copywriting. To receive free advice direct to your Inbox, you can subscribe to Glenn’s free email.

Get 4,000 Twitter Followers with Good Copy was written by Glenn Fisher for AboutUs.com.

More and more people these days are accessing the Internet from smartphones like iPhones and Android phones and tablets like iPads. More than 5% of worldwide web traffic and 8% of U.S. traffic is from a mobile device, and mobile is the fastest growing source of traffic on the Internet. As more of your visitors access your site from a mobile device, it becomes increasingly important to make sure that they have a positive experience on your site.

Not convinced mobile is important? Check out these stats from eMarketer:

• The number of tablet users will reach 54.8 million is 2012 (of which 41.9 million will be iPad users). Tablet use in 2012 will be a 62.8% increase from 2011.
• Smartphone users will reach 106.7 million in 2012.
• The number of people shopping from their smartphones will reach 68.6 million in 2012, and the number of smartphone buyers will reach 36.4 million.

Fortunately these newer mobile devices, unlike older “web enabled” phones, make a good effort to render normal web pages in a functional manner. Even so, there are a few things you can do to make sure your mobile visitors have an optimal experience. Below are some recommendations that will help you improve their experience, and avoid common pitfalls.

It’s important to thoroughly test your site’s functionality on a variety of smartphones and tablets to see just how mobile-friendly your site is.

Here are 3 things you can do to make your website display and function better on mobile devices:

#1 – Specify a meta viewport tag.

Because mobile devices have small screens, they typically shrink a webpage down so that it will fit the screen. These devices do a pretty good job, but specifying a meta viewport tag lets you influence how a mobile device – like a smart phone or tablet – will scale your website’s content when a mobile visitor first arrives at your site.

Using a meta viewport tag can help avoid issues where the phone shows a tiny rendering of the whole page instead of zooming right in on the important content. Non-mobile browsers will ignore this tag.

How to add a meta viewport tag:

If you are able to edit the HTML code of your web pages yourself, you’ll want to add this tag to the <head> section (below <head> and above </head>) near the top of the page’s code.

Here’s an example of a meta viewport tag:
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0″>

The following directives can be used in the content attribute to control how a phone will render the content.

width — The width of the viewport, in pixels. Specifying device-width means the viewport width should be the screen width of the device.
height — The height of the viewport, in pixels. Specifying device-height means the viewport height should be the screen height of the device.
user-scalable — Controls if the user can zoom in and out. Possible values are yes and no.
initial-scale — Sets the initial zoom factor of the page. 1.0 means display it unscaled. 2.0 makes it twice as big.
maximum-scale — The limit on how far a user can zoom in, that is increase the size of the content.minimum-scale — The limit on how far a user can zoom out, that is decrease the size of the content.

#2 – Avoid using hover effects for important functionality.

How To Make Your Site Mobile Friendly was written by Kristina Weis for AboutUs.com.

Dealing With Content Thieves

You’ve spent months or years building your website and its content, and you’re proud of it. One day you find that some thrown-together website has copied your content and tried to pass it off as its own work.

This is incredibly frustrating. Worse, this duplicate content forces search engines to decide which website is the original and should rank higher. It’s possible that the copied content on the other website may show up above yours in search results.

Here at AboutUs.org / AboutUs.com, our original content that we write is regularly copied/scraped and republished on another websites without any attribution. I want to share what we’ve learned, so you can deal with any site that steals your content.

How can I find out if someone steals my content?

It’s a great idea to track people who are talking about you. You can set up a Google Alert for your business name, your website name, and for the titles of important pieces of content or blog posts on your site. Once you’ve done this, you will get an email when a word or phrase for which you’ve created an alert shows up on the web.

Another great way is to search in Google or Bing for a unique sentence from something you wrote, placing quotes around it so that the search engine searches for web pages that mention that exact phrase.

For example, if I wanted to check if some other site had copied this blog post, I might set up a Google Alert for “What to Do Before & After Your Blog Content is Scraped/Stolen/Copied” (the name of this post) and search in Google or Bing for a sentence from the post like “Another great way is to search in Google or Bing for a unique sentence from something you wrote” (with the quotes).

Can I prevent my content from being scraped?

Not really. You can try to keep bad actors out of your site, but the tools to do this are really gentlemen’s agreements — and bad actors don’t usually honor these.

You can give it a try, though. The robots.txt file on your website lets you request that certain bots or spiders not crawl your site. You can tell search engine spiders it’s okay to crawl your site, and ask all other bots not to.  Here’s where the gentlemen’s agreement comes in. Robots.txt is code that courteous websites and bots respect. But any website that would send out bots to grab content, and then republish that content without attribution, is unlikely to respect your robots.txt code.

There’s one more thing to keep in mind. Disallowing all bots other than search engine bots can be risky. Sometimes search engines change the names of their bots, and you would have no way of knowing that unless you’re trolling the SEO blogs like a crazy person. If you don’t change the names of the bots you’re allowing, you could end up banning search engines from your site – and you wouldn’t know it until you notice your traffic has plummeted or that you’re not showing up in Google or Bing.

One thing you can do if you have a WordPress site

Many scrapers are not so smart and will just copy all the text within your blog post via your RSS feed and then publish it as their own. They will rarely include the “By _____” and so someone reading your content on their website would just think that it was written by that copycat-ing site.

If you have a WordPress blog or website, there is something you can do using a free plug-in called WordPress SEO by Yoast. In the RSS section, you can specify some text/links to accompany your blog post’s content in the RSS feed — For example, “[Name of post] was written by [author] on [name of site].” In that example, the name of the post would show up as the anchor text of a link to the original post on your site.

This way, if a dumb scraper steals your content they will unintentionally give you credit and a backlink to help your SEO and make it easier for Google to tell who the original source is. Note: Some scrapers are more sophisticated, or sometimes there is a human involved who might spot these and take out the credit.

So your content has been copied. Now what?

Contact the site and ask nicely – but firmly – for attribution or removal

Look for contact information on the website itself. If that doesn’t work, check the site’s whois record on a site like DomainTools.com. The whois record will tell you either who owns the site or who registered it, or both.

If you can’t get in touch with the website owner, or if the responsible person doesn’t respond appropriately, you’ll need to complain to a higher authority.

Talk to the people that control their website

Contact the website’s registrar or hosting company to let them know what this site has done. Explain that the owner hasn’t responded to your polite request.

Report the duplicate content to Google

• If you are confident that you have a copyright case, you can report the copyright infringement to Google.
• If a site is violating a law other than copyright, you can submit a legal removal request. This applies “if you have a court order establishing that a site is in violation of the law, or if you have identified a clear case of a legal violation for which Google has a removal responsibility,” according to Google.
• You can also try reporting spam to Google. If someone has copied your content without attribution, check the box next to “duplicate site or pages.” Note: Google doesn’t read every spam report. The company normally focuses its attention and action on larger offenders, to have the biggest possible impact on improving search.
  

Shine a light on the miscreants

• Let everyone know what happened to you, and about the site that grabbed your content. Talk about it in public venues like Twitter and your blog.
• Make sure the offending site’s online reputation reflects their bad behavior. Give the site a red rating and add an account of what they’ve done on MyWOT.com, a community that monitors website reputation. Try other consumer sounding board sites such as ComplaintsBoard.com, RipoffReport.com and SiteJabber.com.

Make sure your site is fully visible to search engines

• If you optimize your site well for search engines, you’ll have a much better chance of outranking a content thief in search results.  For free tips on how to outrank, read our SEO articles.  If you’d like an in-depth analysis of your website’s SEO, search engine rankings, and social media presence — all compared to your top 3 competitors — check out what we offer.

The Internet Thrives on Trust

We love the openness, vibrancy and ever-changing nature of the web, and we love sharing content. All our content is available under open license, so long as you attribute it to us and include a link back to our site.

Bad actors who take content and fail to attribute break the trust that makes the web a great place to converse, learn and share. Make sure you help by calling people on their bad behavior, and publicizing it. Don’t forget to praise people who do great things on the web, too.

This article was written by Kristina Weis of AboutUs. 

Kristina is customer service and social media lead for AboutUs.  She helps website owners who are trying to promote their businesses online.  Her personal blog is at KristinaWeis.com and she tweets at @KristinaWeis.

What to Do Before & After Your Blog Content is Scraped/Stolen/Copied was written by Kristina Weis for AboutUs.com.

Error pages are inevitable, even on the best websites.  As a visitor or business owner, it can be frustrating, and is certainly not ideal, but 404 error pages happen.

Recently, I had the opposite experience with an error page. When trying to access Seth Godin’s blog, the best error page ever came up, instead.

Usually, I click away immediately, but not with this one.  I studied it; I laughed; I tweeted it and shared it with my co-workers. Even though I came to the wrong page, I was happy and I wanted to try other ways to get to what I needed from his blog.

Seth’s page made me realize the importance of  the lowly error page as a customer service tool and gave me inspiration for making a better one.

5 Tips for Making a Better Error Page:

1. Add graphics

This could be your companies mascot or a cute image of an animal. Be creative. Seth used a knome from one of his book covers, and a silly picture of himself dressed as a pirate. It goes with his brand. Think about yours and how you can include a graphic that goes along with that.

GitHub uses their mascot, Octocat, in their 404 and 500 error pages.

2. Add humor

Be funny in your text. Make people want to read it.

Seth’s text: “Holy smokes! Somethin’ has gone wrong wi’ our systems an’ th’ page ye’re lookin’ fer be missin’. Here be some books t’ buy while ye`re waitin’ fer us t’ fix ‘t.”

He used text that worked with the knome on the cover of his book.  It grabs your attention and makes the reading a lot less dry. It says something that I actually read it, right?

3. Display your products or services

Put an image of your product or two to make people remember why they wanted to visit in the first place. Seth included images of his book covers in the error page. It’s a great use of the page to market his product and also reminds the visitor why you came there.

4. Add contact information

Include your email address with an easy input form or link, so visitors will alert you to the problem, while also feeling empowered, rather than just helpless and frustrated.

Seth did this: “If ye think ye got this in error, please mail us at oopsy [at] sethgodin [dot] com.”

5. Apologize

It’s okay to admit your mistake. People appreciate it. Seth added a yellow color to his “sorry” and put it in all caps at the top of the page.

By making a memorable page, customers will be happy and more likely to try to visit your website in another way, rather than leaving for good.

Read 404 Errors Drive Visitors Away for tips on avoiding error pages all together. Do you have any favorite error pages to share or other tips on making memorable ones? Comment below.

This article was written by Meg Hartley of AboutUs.

Meg Hartley is an account manager for AboutUs where she helps clients with their social media and blog content creation and strategy. Get in touch with her on Twitter: @meg_hartley.

Keep Customers Coming Back with a Hilarious Error Page was written by Meg Hartley for AboutUs.com.

YouTube isn’t the only video hosting website on offer, but it’s undoubtedly the biggest. YouTube also happens to be the second most popular search engine after Google, making it a very important site if you’re trying to attract more visitors to your website.

If you want to use YouTube to boost your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) and your online marketing efforts, here are a few tips for optimizing your videos.

Meta Data

Just like website SEO, optimizing a YouTube video relies largely on placing relevant keywords in your titles and meta descriptions.

If you’re uploading the video to your own site as well, it’s a good idea to vary the keywords you include in the title and description so your videos can rank in search results for a larger number of keywords.

While you’re at it, the description field you fill out on YouTube can be used to promote your own website, as well as describing your video.

Sharing is Caring

Adding an embed code allows visitors who watch and like your video to share it on their own blogs or websites. Find this by scrolling under the video and clicking ‘share’ followed by ‘embed’. Add links to your YouTube videos on your own website to encourage people to view your videos – this kind of cross-promotion ensures that existing customers see your latest message, too. They might like your new video and share it with friends.

Not Enough Pageviews?

If your video isn’t getting the traffic you’d hoped for, there are several ways to increase the number of views:

• Promoted Videos – Much like Google pay-per-click advertising, YouTube charges only when someone clicks on your promoted video. The rates are reasonable, and there’s no risk of paying for clicks you didn’t get.

• Video responses – This is a little sneaky, but it works. Find a video that gets lots of views and post your own video as a “video response” – see below. As long as your video is relevant to the popular one, people will click.

• Be social! – YouTube is essentially still a social network, so add users as friends, comment on other videos and become part of the community. Attract interest in your own content by interacting with other people’s content.

Learn your lessons

The monitoring tools on YouTube are amazing, so you can use trial and error to get results. Analyze the stats for your videos and think about the differences between popular and unpopular content. Think what was missing from that video that nobody watched, compared to your other video that got thousands of views.

Raven Tools offers a YouTube monitor that tracks video views, channel views and channel subscribers over time. Their advanced monitoring option also offers even more data, including unique views, comments and favourites.

Nobody watches long videos

If your video is ten minutes long, split it into five two-minute videos, if you can. People are more likely to watch these shorter videos, and they offer another benefit: You can optimize each video for specific keywords, and target a larger number of keywords.

For example, a long video titled, “How to look after your dog” can be broken up into a series of shorter videos: “How to brush your dog,” “What to feed your dog” and so on.

Make it look professional

YouTube Video Marketing: Get the Most Out of It was written by Matt Fielding for AboutUs.com.

Social media has forever changed the way companies market themselves.  With Facebook’s population now more than double that of the United States, an arguably more active (though smaller) user base on Twitter, and sites like LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+ attracting thousands of new people daily, there’s no denying the impact these sites are having on the business world .

But hiring a social media expert to manage your company’s online reputation and drive traffic to your site doesn’t mean you have to follow every bit of the expert’s advice. Some social media consultants rely on the fact that their clients are unfamiliar with social media, and prey on this lack of knowledge by making suggestions that sound good, but really aren’t great advice.

Remember, you know your company, its culture and its personality better than any social media expert. Stick to your common sense!

Here are the five most common suggestions made by social media experts that you can ignore to protect your company’s reputation and integrity:

1 – You should create a fake online persona for your company.

Social media consultants who make this recommendation are undoubtedly considering your best interests. They think you should create a “face” for your company in social media. While it’s appropriate for a business to create a company profile on a social networking site, it’s NOT appropriate to create a fake person, complete with name, photo and bio, and to pretend that fake person is an employee.

If you’re feeling nervous about using your own name for your company’s social media presence, creating a fake persona may sound quite appealing.  But it’s dishonest, and it opens your company to complaints of deception from consumers, and to penalties from social media companies.

Think there are so many profiles that a social media company will never realize your persona is a fraud? You’re wrong. Being shut down has happened to people I know, and possibly even to people you know (though they’re probably too embarrassed to admit it).  If you aren’t comfortable using yourself as the face of your company in the social media world, create a Facebook company page, a company Twitter profile and other profiles with your company name. You can still develop a consistent “voice” and personality for your company profiles.

2 – Social media campaigns must be managed by a social media professional.

While it’s true that people without any prior social media experience could have a hard time breaking into that world, it’s not at all true that your company’s social media campaigns must be managed 100 percent by a social media pro.

For starters, unless you’re selling something extremely commonplace, your social media consultant is likely unfamiliar with the intricacies of your business, and will be unable to respond to inquiries quickly – or in a professional manner – without seeking your advice.  Of course, you could train your social media consultant about your niche, but it makes more sense to have one of your staff trained in using social media appropriately so you can run portions of your campaign in-house.

One good example of this is Best Buy. The electronics retailing giant has 3,000 employees regularly tweeting suggestions and advice to customers, as well as responding to customer questions and complaints. CEO Brian Dunn is one of these employees.  Though Dunn isn’t a typical social media expert, he works hard to maintain a relationship with his 14,000+ followers, and has succeeded in turning Best Buy into a social media powerhouse.

3 – If you build it, they will come. 

When it comes to social media, nothing could be further from the truth.  Publicizing a social media campaign requires not only regular posting (an admittedly time-intensive endeavor), but strategic marketing of the social media profiles through placement on your website, external ads, contests and other PR efforts.

Some social media consultants downplay the importance of aggressive campaign promotion because they’re trying to stay within a client’s budget restrictions.  This form of compromise, however, will likely result in less than stellar results for the campaign, turning the up-front investment into money ill spent.

4 – It’s okay for social media to be a one-way street.

Don’t be misled! A social media campaign is not just another form of public relations. The goal is not just to push out your updates, articles or sales in a social platform – it should be to engage your investors, partners, customers and potential customers in a dynamic conversation. That will make all these stakeholders interested enough in your social posts to share them with their friends, who will then share with their friends, spreading your message to a wider and wider group of people with an interest in what you have to say – and sell.

An example of a company that does this extremely well is Coastal Contacts. The eyewear company offers giveaways and prizes to Facebook fans who send in suggestions and photos of their favorite eyeglasses, and fans who participate in online quizzes and challenges. The Coastal team also responds quickly to all customer inquiries on their Facebook page.

To succeed in social media, you may want to romance not only potential customers, but also influencers in your field who can help expand your reach.  Here are a few suggestions to enlist social media influencers.

5 – You can’t…(fill in the blank).

When it comes to social media, there is no rule book or holy grail that can ensure a campaign’s success.  If you feel strongly about sharing socially with a specific tone, approach or method, don’t hesitate to ignore your social media consultant’s dissent – once you’ve given these objections some consideration, of course.

It’s up to you to set the tone for your company. Unless you’re compelled to publish something inappropriate or irrelevant (think of how Charlie Sheen, Gilbert Gottfried and Anthony Weiner ruined their careers with inappropriate tweets in 2011), little harm will be done by pushing the envelope a bit.  In fact, that’s a big part of what social media is about!

This article was written and contributed by Sari Holtz.
Sari is an internet marketing veteran who contributes regularly to Consumer-Rankings.com, a website that offers web hosting reviews, as well as reports and ranks of the top dating sites, online tax software and more.

When to Ignore Your Social Media Consultant was written by Sari Holtz for AboutUs.com.

Imagine: you’re on Twitter and you find an interesting tweet with a link that you want to check out.

You click on the link and read the article or look at the image outside of Twitter – forgetting to open it in a new tab.

You want to retweet the post, but you can’t find the tweet again. It’s lost in the rapidly changing Twittersphere.

Has this happened to you?

It happens to me a lot.  And it’s super frustrating!

Nearly 99% of the time,  I re-discover tweets with profile pictures that stand out and have stayed in my mind, as a result. (Not the normal headshots, sorry folks!)

So, if you want people to remember you on Twitter and find you again – make your Twitter avatar stand out.

4 ways to make your Twitter picture more memorable

1. Add a vibrant color – have your picture taken in a brightly colored shirt or use a yellow background

2. Adjust the angle of the picture: from above or from a different angle other than head on

3. Amend it with digital effects – add color or enhancements to make your picture pop!

4. Put something in your hair, on your face or head, such as a cap, flower or devil horns.

This picture is pretty memorable, don’t you think?

Be sure to test your new picture.  Scroll through Twitter and see if your picture jumps out from the stream. Ask a friend or co-worker to do the same. If you don’t pass muster, then keep working at it.

What else makes for a memorable profile picture in Twitter? Let me know in the comments or in ‘real’ life @Meg_Hartley!

Find out more ways to excel on Twitter!

This article was written by Meg Hartley of AboutUs.

Meg Hartley is an account manager for AboutUs where she helps clients with their social media and blog content creation and strategy.

Get in touch with her on Twitter: @meg_hartley.

How To Make Your Twitter Portrait Stand Out was written by Meg Hartley for AboutUs.com.

Twitter is a powerful social network for business. And the more followers you have – meaningful ones – the more exposure you will gain from tweeting. (If you’re new to Twitter, I suggest reading Twitter 101 first.)

Here are 10 tips for getting more people to click “Follow” on your Twitter account:

1. Write interesting tweets.

Add something to the conversation. Did you find a great article other people might want to read? Do you have something to say that might make people think – or laugh ? Do you have expertise to share?

Give people a feel for what your future tweets will be like. That will help them decide whether they want to follow you.

Posting great tweets makes people more likely to:

• retweet you. This means your tweet is re-broadcast to the followers of whoever retweets you.
• “Follow Friday” you. On Fridays, some people will post a tweet recommending people they think their followers should check out and follow. The tweet will usually include a #FollowFriday or #FF hashtag.
• find your tweets when they search Twitter, and maybe follow you. When you’re writing tweets, include keywords people may be searching for.

2. Complete your Twitter profile: Add a bio and portrait.

Would you rather follow someone with a smiling face, or the default egg icon? How do you feel about following someone whose bio shows their interests are similar to yours, or who’s in your industry, compared to someone whose bio shares no personal information?

An incomplete Twitter profile doesn’t give people a reason to follow you. It can also make people think you’re a Twitter spammer, because many spam accounts don’t have a portrait or bio.

3. Start following people you know.

After you’ve posted at least a few tweets and filled in your profile, start following people.

Look for your customers and business partners on Twitter, and then follow them. They’ll hopefully notice that you’ve followed them, and then follow you in return because they recognize you.

4. Follow people in your industry and people who tweet about things you care about.

Search Twitter for people and tweets that interest you. When you search, you can click for “Tweets” with that word or phrase, or “People” who match your search. Twitter’s advanced searched is also handy.

Follow people you want to listen to, and who you think may want to follow you back if they look at your bio and recent tweets.

5. Once you’ve followed people, interact with them!

Look at the stream of tweets from people you’re following (click “Home” at the top of your Twitter page), reply to people and retweet their best tweets. These interactions will make the recipients more likely to follow you back and listen to what you have to say.

If you have limited time, focus on interacting with the people who aren’t following you yet. Remember to be genuinely yourself when you engage on Twitter. People recognize an authentic voice, and they also recognize an artificial one. No one wants to engage with a phony.

6. Include prominent links to your Twitter account on your website.

Ideally, your website should have an easy-to-notice link to your Twitter account “above the fold” (visible without scrolling down) on each page of your website. This makes it easy for people to follow you if they choose.

It’s more effective to give people a reason to follow you on Twitter instead of just saying “Follow us.” Are you going to offer them coupon codes, expert information about your industry, funny pictures of cats, or…?

7. Include a link to your Twitter page in your email signature.

This makes it so much easier for people you’re already talking with. I don’t know about you, but I’m lazy. When I see a Twitter link in someone’s email signature I’m much more likely to follow them. It’s a lot easier for me to click right now than to search for them.

8. Include a link to your Twitter page in your email newsletters.

If you send out email newsletters or email blasts, try including a link to your Twitter page and suggest that people follow you. Remember, give them a reason!

9. Include your Twitter handle on your business cards.

Your business card isn’t just for your name, company, and contact info. It’s an opportunity to offer a Twitter connection to people you meet in real life.

10. Ask your employees, friends and family to follow you.

These won’t be very meaningful followers, but getting them to follow you can help you gain momentum and get a few more “real” followers.

When someone looks at your profile, Twitter will show them if one of their own followers is also following you (pictured at right).

* Don’t buy Twitter followers.

It’s a waste of money, as these will be very low-value followers who won’t retweet you or recommend you to others. Even worse, too many “junk” followers can turn off potential “real” followers.

Do you have any other tips for gaining followers on Twitter? Comment below.

This article was written by Kristina Weis of AboutUs. 

Kristina is customer service and social media lead for AboutUs.  She helps website owners who are trying to promote their businesses online.  Her personal blog is at KristinaWeis.com and she tweets at @KristinaWeis.

How To Get More Twitter Followers was written by Kristina Weis for AboutUs.com.

This may not seem like the stuff of memoirs to you, but it was big for me.

I’m always deliberating over what social media is for, and the best ways to use it, since I use social media both personally and for our clients.

Is social media for building community? Connecting with people of similar interests or in your industry? Developing brand reputation? Or is social media simply for fun and the occasional rant?

Social media is for helping others

It was at Searchfest – a day long digital marketing conference put on by SEMpdx – that I heard the speech that shifted my thinking.

At the very end of the day, Wil Reynolds of Seer Interactive bounded onto the stage. He was an instant latte (triple shot)!

Wil talked about how he has turned to social media when he’s needed help solving tough work problems. One time, he put out a request for help on Google+ at 5 pm on a Saturday. By the end of day, people in Wil’s Google+ circles had provided him with the help he needed. Wil has also found experts to hire by putting out calls for help on Twitter.

Wil ended his talk with a plea that we all reach out and help each other in social media. Hey, it can even get you a new gig!

It’s not like what Wil was saying is new – I’ve always felt it’s good to reach out and offer help to people in other areas of my life. But this is the first time I really made the connection to helping people in social media – and for REAL, not pretend.

It’s just as possible – and just as important – to build strong community in the digital world as it is in the “real” world.

Social Media: Doing well by doing good works here too!

What’s true in social media can carry over into all areas of marketing. If you give people what they really need or solve a problem for them, it will work out well for you more often than not. You might get referrals, new leads, or an actual sale.

Pushing the point still further, Copyblogger’s Jonathon Morrow says helping people is the only reason for business. Isn’t that our role as marketers? To show people something that can help them?

So look out world – here comes the Mother Theresa of Social Media!

This article was written by Meg Hartley of AboutUs.

Meg Hartley is an account manager for AboutUs where she helps clients with their social media and blog content creation and strategy.

Get in touch with her on Twitter: @meg_hartley.

How To Be a Social Media Humanitarian was written by Meg Hartley for AboutUs.com.

Would You Rather Buy from a Person, or a Brand?

We thought so. Most people would rather feel like they’re engaging with real people than with a faceless, nameless “brand.” That’s especially true in social media, where people readily express their opinions and personalities.

So, how do you stay human on Twitter? Don’t be afraid to BE a human being on Twitter. Even if your company’s Twitter account has your company’s name, you can still project some personality.

Notice that TravelOregon promotes its own content, while also responding to people and re-tweeting other people’s comments. That makes TravelOregon’s Twitter stream seem like a real person is writing it, and conversing with the account’s followers. It doesn’t read like a stream of pre-scheduled, rote tweets, or automatic tweets from the organization’s blog.

Need an example of a boring, un-engaging Twitter feed? Here you go:

This is a pretty typical business-account feed. It’s just a series of automated tweets from the company’s blog – no personality, no variety, and no conversation.

You may be thinking this is unfair. How interesting can a foreign-exchange company’s tweets possibly be? Well, let’s look at another example. Groceries are kind of boring, right? Maybe, but Safeway’s Twitter feed is engaging and feels like a real person is writing it. Note the two tweets to @Jonspach at the top that clearly indicate a real conversation is going on:

Make People Laugh, or Catch them Offguard

It’s okay to be funny on Twitter, and when a big brand shows some humor, it’s refreshing. Just take a look at Southwest Air’s Twitter feed:

Note that Southwest Air attributes its tweets to actual people by using the ^ character and someone’s initials. This is a great way to show that several different people are manning the account.

Try bringing a more human touch to your tweets. I bet you’ll pick up more followers and get re-tweeted more often. That gives you a much bigger audience, and more opportunity to win new customers. And you’ll probably have more fun!

Have you seen a company with a great Twitter presence? Share it with us on Twitter by mentioning @AboutUs or @AlizaEarnshaw and the handle of the company or brand you think is doing a great job.

Aliza Earnshaw is vice president of business development at AboutUs. A former business reporter and editor, Aliza still indulges her love of great writing and working with creative writers while pursuing business opportunities for AboutUs.

Create a Personality for Your Brand on Twitter was written by Aliza Earnshaw for AboutUs.com.

Share Your Expertise for SEO & More Customers

When you write a blog post or article about something that matters to your customers and prospects, make sure you get the utmost value out of it. After all, it’s not so easy to produce a piece of writing, especially for busy business owners and one-person marketing departments ;-)

You’ll reach a wider group of people who find your content relevant to their needs and concerns if you adopt a cascading content strategy. By promoting your content on the social networks – and in email – you can attract more visitors interested in your topics, and demonstrate your expertise. That can inspire greater trust and lead to more sales.

Don’t forget that search engines use social signals to help them rank websites for relevant search terms. If you can get people to retweet and share your content with their friends and followers, that will tell search engines your website is valuable, and can help you rank higher for the keywords you’re using in your content and posts. That in turn can bring more visitors to your site.

Cascading Content Is Efficient & Effective

Let’s say you own a store that specializes in urban homesteading supplies. You’ve just discovered a great new way to quickly compost yard debris and food scraps, so you write an article and publish it on your blog.

Certainly, some people will discover the article there, and realize your store is a great place to stock up on urban homesteading supplies – especially if you’ve been thoughtful enough to include an RSS feed so people can subscribe to your blog.

But what about people who haven’t subscribed to your blog? There’s a world of potential customers out there you want to reach. You can do it, too, by cascading your content to your email list and through social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and for B2B (business-to-business) companies, LinkedIn.

Basically the idea is to write a long piece once, then publicize it multiple times over multiple platforms. Like a waterfall that starts high and cascades down a rocky slope, breaking into smaller streams, your content will flow through several channels, spreading out to many more people. And if you’ve written compelling pitches for each platform – always including a link – you’ll bring new people to your website.

Bonus: If your content really is valuable, and your social “hooks” are persuasive, people who follow you will retweet and share your posts (and your links) with their own friends and followers.

People reading your blog post may choose to share the post itself, too, as long as you’ve made it easy by providing social sharing buttons for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, StumbleUpon and more.

It’s not just people who notice social mentions of a website. Search engines do, too. To learn more about how social media helps SEO, read our article, Boost SEO with Social Media.

So, Show Me an Example of Cascading Content

I’m glad you asked! Refinery 29, a fashion and shopping site based in New York, makes money by selling apparel and other fashion items, and through ads it hosts on its site.

Yet Refinery 29 writers don’t blog only about things they can sell. They also blog about stylish people they find on the streets of various cities, bizarre products they’ve spotted, beautiful food blogs and anything else that lends itself to great photos and fun, engaging writing.

Refinery 29 also makes a point of tweeting its blog posts and publicizing them on Facebook. Here’s an example of tweets from the Refinery 29 Twitter account. Note that each tweet has personality and wit:

Here’s a Facebook post about a recent Refinery 29 blog post. Note that five people like the FB post and two have commented.

The blog post itself got 18 Facebook likes, 11 tweets, 1 StumbleUpon share and 13 comments. There are bloggers who would kill for that kind of attention.

If you like impressive numbers, here are a couple more: Over 109,000 people have “liked” Refinery 29 on Facebook, and about 280,000 people follow the company on Twitter. Yowza!

So Is Refinery 29 Making Money?

Judging from an article by Tricia Duryee in All Things D, it sure is. In October 2011, co-founder Philippe von Borries told Duryee that Refinery 29′s revenues were at an annual run rate of $15 million, up from total revenue of $2 million in 2010. That revenue is driven by 4.3 million unique visitors (as of October 2011). That’s a lot of traffic, especially for a site that’s been online less than six years.

Don’t Forget About Email

Offer the opportunity to sign up for your email newsletter on every piece of content you publish. It’s a quick way to get people to engage just when they’re reading something you created that they like.

You can share new articles and blog posts to people on your email list. After all, they’ve presumably opted in because they like what you sell, write or represent. Remember, you want to bring people back to your website often – it can take a number of visits and contacts before someone is ready to buy.

Aliza Earnshaw is vice president of business development at AboutUs. A former business reporter and editor, Aliza still indulges her love of great writing and working with creative writers while pursuing business opportunities for AboutUs.

Cascade Your Content for Better SEO was written by Aliza Earnshaw for AboutUs.com.

Marketers at small companies often ask how they can get their websites to show up higher in search results. They’re not sure where to start, and their budgets don’t allow them to explore every search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, nor spend heavily on pay-per-click advertising.

If you don’t want to read all the following material about how social helps SEO, just skip to the practical tips section below.

Social Media: The Poor Man’s SEO

Getting noticed by people and search engines for little to no money is where social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook come in. Just a few years ago, no one thought these sites – and others like Stumbleupon – made any difference to a website’s rankings in search results. Sure, it was a good idea to have people noticing you on social media sites, but no one thought that being mentioned there would help SEO.

Some examples of social “mentions”:

• A Twitter post – or “tweet” – that names your company and/or links to your site
• A Facebook status update that mentions your company and/or links to your site
• A comment on a post you make on your company’s Facebook page
• A recommendation posted on your LinkedIn profile
• A comment you share with a LinkedIn group
• Your answer to a question in Quora or other Q&A sites
• A share of your blog post in StumbleUpon

Search engines began using social mentions to help them rank websites in 2010. In 2011, respected search marketing professionals spent a lot of time analyzing the impact of social media activity on search engine rankings. Many have concluded that consistent mentions on the social Web – and plenty of them – really can get your site to rank higher in search results.

Here’s the best part: It’s easier and less costly for a small business owner to harness the SEO value of social media than to overhaul his or her site for SEO. Most business owners and small-business marketers aren’t SEO experts, and often don’t have the budgets to hire an SEO firm. But marketers are often very social people, and comfortable making connections with others who can help their business grow. Extending that behavior and mindset to places like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn isn’t all that difficult. And it costs very little, other than time.

Does Social Activity Really Help SEO?

Ian Lurie of Seattle marketing firm Portent Interactive tracked 15 companies in 2011 and found that a large number of “likes” on their Facebook pages was a better predictor of high Google search rankings than the number and quality of their inbound links.

Ian’s not the first to say this, and the whole concept turns SEO on its head. Search marketing experts have long held that inbound links – that is, links from other sites to yours – are the most important ranking factor for Google and other search engines. To hear that a social signal – Facebook likes, in this case – is more important really changes the SEO equation.

Here’s another wrinkle on the importance of social signals for search rankings: Search engines are smart enough to notice not just mentions of your company or product in social media, but also who is mentioning you.

Getting influential people to comment on your blog and Facebook page, and mention you on Twitter, may sound as time consuming as old-fashioned link building – that is, writing to people and asking them to link to you from their website or blog. It doesn’t have to be. You can get noticed quickly by following influential people, asking them questions, and commenting on their posts and tweets. Just make sure you add something valuable to the conversation. Do not just say “Great post,” and hope that makes you stand out from the crowd.

Because people on social media platforms have friends and followers of their own, getting mentioned or engaging in a conversation means you’ll be seen by lots of people who don’t already know you. Your message and reputation have the potential to spread far and wide, whether for good or for bad.

A simple example: Some savvy restaurants post their daily specials at 11:00 AM on Twitter and Facebook – just when people are getting hungry and starting to think about lunch. These posts are a great way to get people to come to your restaurant, of course. But wait, there’s more! As people start messaging their friends on social platforms to see who wants to join them at your place, you’re getting those valuable social mentions. These mentions tell search engines you matter.

Since your message can spread so easily, it’s good to follow social media etiquette and be a good citizen in this world. Watch how people behave, follow the people you admire, and learn from them.

Practical Tips for Building SEO in Social Media

• Twitter
  • Post every day. You can comment on industry news, link to your blog, high-five someone else’s comment, retweet someone’s blog post, ask for help with something, provide help to someone else….the list goes on.
  • Engage in conversation with customers and anyone else who mentions your company or your product. Thank people, ask questions, solicit feedback, etc.
  • Search Twitter for mentions of your competitors and their competing products, to learn which words people are using. Now you start using these words, too. It will help you when people search for what you’re offering.
  • For bonus points, you can use the hash tag – # – in front of an important keyword. This is how many people mark out and search topics in Twitter. For example, you might tweet “Read how @StephanieH improved her time with #WideRunningShoes on our blog” and include a link.
  • Use a URL shortener such as bit.ly for links to save characters…140 isn’t as much as you think.
  • If you see someone who could use what you sell complaining about a competitor, offer to help them somehow – but don’t disparage your competitor, or his product.
  • Find the people who are influential in your target market, and follow them.
  • Thank people individually for following you. Do NOT use an autoresponder. It’s a pity for someone’s first interaction with you to feel canned – and believe me, experienced Twitter users can smell an autoresponse a mile away.

• Facebook
  • Post every day. You can post the same things on Facebook that you do on Twitter, with the added benefit of being able to include a photo and a much longer comment.
  • Invite engagement by asking people what they think about something you’ve posted. Comments are noticed by search engines. In fact, Ian Lurie of Portent Interactive found a correlation between comments on a company’s Facebook page and high rankings in search engine results.
  • Search Facebook for mentions of your competitors and their competing products. That will tell you which words people use when they’re looking for what you sell. Now you start using these words, too, so you’ll pop up in product searches.
  • If you see someone complaining about a competitor, you can send an offer of practical help – or even a coupon! – to that person. Don’t disparage your competitor or their product…that’s not good etiquette.
  • Give people a reason to “like” your Facebook page. You might want to offer access to special deals or coupons, or to some other benefit, such as a “fans only” video page.

• LinkedIn
  • Join groups specific to your industry and to your target customers.
  • Post interesting articles and news to these groups. Be careful not to promote your product or company too hard. Some groups will kick you out for being overly self-promotional. Make sure you read the terms for each group.
  • Answer questions people post in your groups.
  • Write recommendations for people you’ve done business with.
  • Ask your good customers to write recommendations for you.

• Your blog
  • Post about industry trends and issues.
  • Post about business issues that aren’t specific to your industry, but interesting to other business people who may be reading your blog.
  • Post about your own company’s news and developments. Your blog can be the modern-day press room – just make sure you tag news announcements appropriately, so company news can be found.
  • Offer insights and advice based on things you learn in the course of business, even if you aren’t talking directly about your own product.
  • If you have something thoughtful to say about someone else’s blog that is too long for a comment, write a post on your blog, linking to the post you are commenting on. You’ll be noticed by the blogger, and he or she may choose to link to your blog, too.

• Other people’s blogs
  • Comment on people’s posts, but avoid generic comments like “great post.” Try to add something unique and interesting to the discussion. See the section above for when you have a lot to say about someone’s post.
  • Ask if you may guest post if you think you have something to contribute. Many bloggers are happy to have guest authors post, if they’re adding value.

• News sites
  • Comment on news stories that are relevant to your industry and your business. Don’t be snarky – be thoughtful. You can also share these news stories in your social accounts by linking to them. If people read the comments, they’ll probably notice yours.

   

Aliza Earnshaw is vice president of business development at AboutUs. A former business reporter and editor, Aliza still indulges her love of great writing and working with creative writers while pursuing business opportunities for AboutUs.

Boost SEO with Social Media was written by Aliza Earnshaw for AboutUs.com.

Links on the Internet are DoFollow, or followed, by default. A DoFollow link lacks the NoFollow attribute, and so passes PageRank or link juice to the target web page – that is, the page it links to.

The NoFollow attribute was introduced so that website owners could selectively tell search engine spiders to ignore specific links when it comes to determining the search engine ranking or PageRank of the target web page.

This is what the HTML code for a NoFollow links looks like:

<a href=”http://example.com” rel=”nofollow”>anchor text</a>

NoFollow links are now commonplace in certain types of websites. For example, most blogs are configured so that all links in the comments section are NoFollow to deter people from filling up comments with spammy links. Also, many popular social networks – such as Facebook and Twitter – set all links in people’s posts as NoFollow by default. Again, this is to prevent spam.

On the Web, a link to a website is essentially a vote for that site. You may not want search engines to think you’re endorsing or connected with some of the websites you link to. If that’s the case, marking the link with the NoFollow attribute is one way to show search engines you’re not recommending that they add the site to their indexes.

What is a NoFollow link? was written by Kristina Weis for AboutUs.com.

Why your social network activity fails to drive more business

So, you heard this social media thing is all the rage, and decided to give it a go. You set up some profiles, sent out a few updates, followed a handful of people, and expected the interest and traffic to come charging in. You got…nothing. You’re asking yourself, “What have I done wrong?”

1. You only get back what you put in

Social media is not the goose that laid the golden egg – you won’t get results without working for them! There is no reason for social media users, be they on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, to become involved with you if you’re not providing something of value. Providing valuable content requires work, time and creativity. You must put effort into becoming part of these online communities. Otherwise, you’re just the guy who walks into the party and expects to be the center of attention right away.

2. You have no network

Social media is called “social media” because you need to be – yes – social. You can post as much as you like, but if no one’s reading your posts, they won’t have much value.

The bigger the network of people you’re communicating with, the further your message will reach. More new people could get interested in becoming part of your network. It’s a snowball effect.

The hardest part is investing your time in finding relevant people to communicate and link up with. You can research people in your industry, those with shared interests and so on. Then you start talking to improve your visibility.

Try using search.twitter.com to search for words relevant to your industry. You can then start following the people you find who say the most interesting things and communicate often.

You can also use Twitter directories such as Twellow.com to find your clients, suppliers, or close contacts. Following them is another way to start building your network. You can use Facebook search and LinkedIn search in a similar way.

The very best way to find the real influencers in your industry is to slowly build your follow lists through interaction, and pay attention to the people who contribute the most valuable information.

3. You’re broadcasting, not interacting

You won’t build a network by “shouting” your message – that carries no value in the social scene. You need to interact with people, not blast them.

Picture social media as a party. Who’s going to be more popular, the guy standing in the corner just telling passing guests what he does over and over again – or the guy meeting and greeting people in a personable way, listening to their stories and sharing funny jokes? It’s obvious. You need to become the personable, interesting guy.

The trick is to think outside your brand. If you just talk about your own business, you’ll be boring. Be more like a real person – demonstrate your interest in a range of subjects and topics that people can comment on.

4. You’re not sharing

Interacting is good, but it becomes great if you’re sharing things that people actually want to know. People often share interesting news or funny stories in social media. Twitter has achieved popularity – and growth – because professionals find it great for sharing expertise and industry knowledge.

If you can share your expertise, and position yourself as a source of truly valuable information, you’ll have a great chance to build an appreciative network. You’ll also be building a positive brand image and reputation, and have a better chance of being first in people’s minds when they need your product or service.

5. You’re socially invisible

You’ll achieve the network effect and growing social influence only if you make yourself as visible as possible. It’s no good having an active and useful social media presence if no one can find it. You need to ensure your social presence is advertised across all your material and marketing, from your email signature to your business cards (example at right).

You can make social media a big part of your website and online presence by using Facebook and Twitter widgets on your website. That makes it easy for people visiting your site to interact with you, and opens up the possibility of ongoing dialogue between you and them. With more and more functionality available for Facebook business pages, you want to make sure you’re using it to the fullest.

For more social media marketing advice, read our other articles about social media.

This article was written by Joel Lumsden.
Joel Lumsden of Attacat, an Edinburgh SEO and Internet marketing agency, is 6’4” of enthusiasm for online marketing. He’s covered website management, paid search and SEO over the past six years for small and large companies in the public and private sectors, including charities, airlines, accommodation sites and leading UK service providers.

5 Social Media Fails was written by Joel Lumsden for AboutUs.com.

Links tweeted on Twitter matter for SEO

It’s official. Google and Bing include social signals – namely, links that get tweeted on Twitter – when determining rankings in their search results. This was confirmed by Danny Sullivan in his December 1, 2010 post on Search Engine Land, and it was likely a factor for a while before that.

To put this new factor in perspective, Google uses hundreds of signals to determine how it should rank a website. These include inbound links to the site, the title tag of a web page, and site speed.

Getting people to link to your site is really all about having great content that people want to share, whether on their blogs or websites, or on Twitter. As Google and other search engines increasingly take note of social activity and the links shared on sites like Twitter, having a good social media presence will become increasingly important for ranking well in search results.
Many companies have been employing social media as a part of their marketing strategy, and for good reason. Now that social activity has so much impact on search engine optimization (SEO), companies that take SEO seriously know they must use social media as part of their strategy for getting onto the first page of search results.

Note for those who are not familiar with Twitter: “tweets” are the 140-character (or less) messages that people post on Twitter. Twitter offers help for new people on its site.

How Can I Use Twitter To Help My SEO?

The ways of search engines are mysterious, and people are always trying to figure out which specific tactics will help more than others. But just as we know that other ranking factors are considered in light of giving searchers the best information for their queries, you can bet that search engines will elevate the best content on the social networks – especially the content that’s shared by real people who have influence.

Based on case studies, the more quantity and quality of tweets that link to your website, the more of a lift you can expect to see in your search engine rankings for the linked-to page or pages.

#1 Mind the Text

When you tweet a link, it’s likely that search engines use the text you enter to determine what your link is about. It’s very similar to the way that search engines regard anchor text on web pages – the text on which a link is built tells the engines what the linked page is about. This in turn can help the linked page rank better for the keywords contained in the anchor text.

#2 Who Says?

Who links to you on Twitter matters. You probably know already that it’s more beneficial if influential tweeple – “people” in Twitter-speak – tweet about you, or retweet your tweets, because they will reach a wider audience. The same is true for the SEO value of Twitter. Google and Bing both say they look at the author’s authority or quality when evaluating links that appear in tweets.

The search engines are mum on how they determine author quality, but here are some indicators of authority that SEO experts think search engines consider:

• Presence of an avatar or portrait. Spam accounts often don’t have one.
• Has the account been verified? Did the person confirm their email address? (People can’t see this, but Twitter has this information, and the search engines may be able to get it.)
• More followers.
• Quality followers. (This means people who follow someone for a good reason – NOT purchased followers!)
• Ratio of following to followers.
• It may be better if the URL in someone’s profile doesn’t match domain they’re tweeting about, because then it’s certain the person isn’t engaging in self-promotion.
• Twitter handles that don’t have numbers. (Many spam accounts on Twitter have user names like Name8765.)
• A bio with complete information.
• Engagement. (Accounts that never reply to other people certainly seem spam-y to me.)
• Included in lists created by quality tweeple.
• The PageRank of a Twitter profile

Think of it this way, who would you rather have link to your website?

The idea of author quality is much like PageRank for web pages. If a web page has 100 links, each from a different page with a PageRank of 0, they probably provide the same SEO value as a single link from a web page with a high PageRank. A link tweeted by a respected and well-followed person on Twitter will be worth more – both for your reputation and your SEO – than 100 tweets from spam-y bot accounts.

Something to keep in mind is that using bots or cheap labor to create a ton of Twitter accounts and tweet links to your site would be nothing but a spam-y waste of time and money. You won’t get any SEO value, and you could be identified as a cause of Twitter spam.

If you notice a spam-y Twitter account, click “report [username] for spam”.

What Can I Do To Encourage Tweets and Links?

1. This should be pretty obvious – I hope. Create great content that people will want to share.
2. Make it easy for people to tweet and share your content. Consider including a Twitter button, a call to action, or some simple way for people to share a link to your website.
3. Engage with your followers and attract new, quality ones. See our Twitter Marketing 101 article for guidance.
4. Keep tabs on who has mentioned or linked to you and thank them. You can also ask them to link to the newest thing you’ve created.

What Do We Know About Twitter and SEO?

Case Studies

The people at one website noticed the site suddenly ranked on the first page for a particular keyword right after the site was linked to by a prominent Twitter account – one with more than 350,000 followers – and that tweet was retweeted more than 100 times.

In a recent experiment, people were asked to link to one page from their website, or tweet a link to another page. The results so far? The page that was linked in 522 tweets outranked the page that was linked 646 times across 36 different websites. It showed up as the first result for a specific keyword search.

Points of Order

• Search engines take note of public Twitter accounts only. If you see the lock symbol, and you have to request to follow someone, their tweets won’t help anyone’s SEO.
• Websites still matter. You must continue to build good backlinks to your website to guide more people to your site and rank well in search. Links from Twitter are a new tool to help your SEO, but they can only do so much.
• Links from Twitter are still NoFollow. That’s because Twitter can’t possibly monitor them all, and judge which ones should be followed – that is, confer some link juice. However, when search engines look at the entire stream of public tweets to evaluate what’s being discussed, there are no rel=nofollow tags present on those links. Search expert Danny Sullivan believes that means links in Twitter do carry some weight, and help the links rank.
• Google and Bing look at links on Facebook, but they can only do so in profiles that have their status updates set as public. Most people have their Facebook accounts set to be private (the opposite is true of Twitter), so search engines see mostly just the information that’s on public business pages.

What We Don’t Know

• How long will the SEO boost from Twitter links last? Most SEO experts believe the boost in rankings from a tweeted link diminishes over time. That’s because tweets are constantly replaced with new tweets, unlike a web page. So tweeted links don’t have the persistent presence of a link on a web page.
• If you’re going to get X amount of tweets linking to a given page, is it better if they’re retweets of the same content, or uniquely written tweets? Not enough is known about this yet, but people can certainly get tired of looking at the same tweet over and over again in Twitter feed. That’s not going to help you get more clicks.

I expect we’ll know more about Twitter for SEO as more information is gained from experiments and studies.

Taking note of social activity makes SEO and search engine algorithms more complicated than before, and hopefully better equipped to produce search results that really matter to people.

For website owners, it makes sense to think about earning links in the social networks, as well as on websites and blogs. Don’t leave the benefits of sharing on the social Web on the table.

This article was written by Kristina Weis of AboutUs.
Kristina is a community manager for AboutUs who talks with a lot of website owners who are trying to promote their business online. Have a question? Contact me.
@KristinaWeis

How To Use Twitter for SEO was written by Kristina Weis for AboutUs.com.

Title tags are like neon for search

Title tags are ridiculously important for getting more visitors to click on your website when it appears in search engine results.

And lucky for you, they’re one of the simplest things you can change on your site. More SEO (search engine optimization) bang for the buck!

Why Title Tags Matter for Traffic & SEO

#1 Title tags are the most prominent part of a search result

Google and other major search engines use the title tag of a web page as the link to that page in search results. It’s what people will see and choose to click – or not.

You can see the titles of websites in the image to the right.

#2 Title tags are one of the most important ranking factors for SEO

When search engines try to determine what a web page is about – and therefore, what keyword searches it should show up for – the title tag is one of the most important factors that the engines consider.

If you want a page on your website to rank better for a certain keyword, include that word in the title tag.

Of course, search engines also consider factors that aren’t on the web page itself, including links to the page from other websites. These are called inbound links or backlinks.

#3 The title tag is at the top of the page and tab in a web browser

The title tag on your web page can help orient your visitors and tell them what to expect to find in a specific browser window. This is particularly important when people used tabbed browsing or have multiple windows open at once.

#4 The title tag is what displays when someone shares a link on social media sites

If someone shares a link to your site in social media sites like Facebook or Google+, what shows up is the title tag of that page. It’s great if people share your links, but if the title tag isn’t appealing or informative, less people are going to click on it and visit your site.

And don’t forget, social media mentions help your SEO.

How to Make a Great Title Tag

An effective title tag:

#1 Persuades people to click it.

If the title tag for a web page is just a bland statement of the topic, it may rank well for that keyword, but could be too boring to get clicked. A compelling title tag can increase your click-thru rate (CTR) — that’s the percentage of people who see your search result and click on it.

#2 Includes a few relevant keywords.

Because it is such a strong factor in search rankings, it’s a good idea to place one or two of your important keywords or keyword phrases in the title tag. Make sure it’s still interesting for people, though – you want to make sure it gets clicked.

#3 Accurately matches the page content and your goals.

Is the web page strictly informational, an interesting blog post you would like people to share, or a place to purchase something? Your title tag should help people understand what their experience will be on that page.

You also want to make sure that your title tag is consistent with the content so you don’t entice someone to click the search result and then make them bounce as soon as they arrive at the page. Remember, the whole point of using search engine optimization to get people visiting your site is to convert them once they arrive. You want them to read something, buy something or sign up for something – you don’t want them to leave as soon as they land.

Let’s say someone clicks on a link with the title, “Introduction to Photography.” That title implies they’ll get some free information on the topic. If they end up landing on a page that just overwhelms with aggressive sales pitches for cameras and other gear, and little actual information about photography, they’ll leave.

If you are trying to sell something on the page, be honest about it in the title tag. You’ll get visitors who have at least some interest in checking out your product or service, and they’ll be receptive to your pitch.

If the title doesn’t contain keywords relevant to the page’s content, it’s unlikely to show up when people search for what matters to you, or persuade as many people to click.

Make Sure Your Title Fits Search Results Parameters

The text of your title tag should be less than 70 characters long. Google won’t display more than 70 characters in the title tag link in its search results – longer title tags are cut short and end with “….”

The text portion of your title tag should include plain text only. HTML tags won’t do anything except make your site look broken.

Give Every Page Its Own Unique Title Tag

Every page on a website should have its own unique content, including a distinct title tag that isn’t used for any other page on the site.

If a web page doesn’t have a unique, accurate title tag:

• Google and other search engines may choose not to use the page’s title tag, and instead make up their own text to serve as the page’s link in search results.
• It could be seen as duplicate content, and disregarded by search engines.
• It will be harder for you – and your visitors! – to distinguish one page of your site from another.

How to Change Your Title Tag

However you edit your website’s content, you will want to look for <title>Your current title tag</title> and change the text to improve its SEO, according to the above tips.

The title tag should go in the top part of the code for the web page, after <head> and before </head>.

For example, the title tag for this article and web page is coded like this:

<title>Title Tags Really Matter for SEO & Clicks – AboutUs – by Kristina Weis</title>

Remember that each page on your website should have its own unique title tag, so don’t stop after you’ve improved the title of your site’s home page.

Have a question about title tags, how to edit yours, or SEO in general? Comment below!

Title Tags Really Matter for SEO, Clicks & Social was written by Kristina Weis for AboutUs.com.