Facebook Cover Image Offer
Do you have your new Cover Image?
When your Fanpage changes to Timeline you will need a new cover image. This is the large graphic at the top of your Fanpage. I am running a special through March 30th 2012 to create a Cover Graphic for you for $40.00. You need to supply whatever image you want used and the text that is wanted on the graphic as well. Here are some samples of ones completed recently:
Ideally you want your cover to represent your business and highlight what you do.
Facebook Changes March 30th 2012
FanPage Changes Coming
Facebook will be changing all FanPages to the Timeline layout on March 30th 2012.
What does this mean for you?
- We will now have the opportunity to have a large image at the top of our pages – 851px X 350px. This is good for:
- Building your Brand
- Advertising Events or Classes
- Highlighting Products or Services
- Welcome Tabs will no longer work. Custom Tabs will remain and be available for viewing as they are now.
- You will be able to Pin a notice at the top of the Timeline
- You can highlight posts so they stretch all the way across the 2 columns of the Timeline.
These are the highlights of the changes coming. Make sure you are ready and have your Page updated before March 30th. You will not like how your page displays if you wait for Facebook to make the changes for you on March 30th.
Facebook Cover Example
Twitter: Enhanced Profile Pages
Business Pages for Twitter
You may not see them yet – but they are coming. Over the next few months Twitter is rolling out business branding pages for our use. They will be better for marketing your business on Twitter.
- The header graphic will be larger (835px X 90px)
- Featured Content: Ability to stick a specific Tweet at the top
- Tweets with Video or Image links will show a preview
- Promote with @AskDotty (use your handle)
- More ways to make your brand stand out
Here is the official announcement from Twitter enhanced profile pages.
I will be checking often to see when it is available for me to use. As soon as it is available look for a video tour of the new look on my Ask Dotty website.
March Customer of the Month
…and the winner is Rhino Quilts
Rosie of Rhino Quilting has a great success story to share. Here are her words…
“When people ask me how I get my business, they are usually somewhat surprised when I say, “From my website.” Although I do have some local customers, about 75% of my customers come directly from my website. My business is making customized bereavement and memory quilts and my customers are spread out all over the United States. Many of them have commented on my website, saying, “When I found your website, I just knew I had come to the right place.” One of them wrote, “When I saw your website, I knew I’d struck gold!”My most recent quilt (shown here) was made for a customer who had looked for quite some time online for the quilter she wanted. When she found my website she was very excited, even more so when she found out she lived only about 45 minutes drive away from my home.Dotty has not only provided me with a sparkling website, but has been very helpful and supportive along the way. I love the fact that I can manage my own site, but if I run into a problem, Dotty is right there to help.”
Rosie is an ideal client
She came to me with a website that did not really get her clients and we worked together to build her a site that works for her. She is able to add new quilts to her site periodically and keeps her site optimized using the tips she has learned. I think it is wonderful that she has clients all over the United States. Here is your Blue Ribbon Rosie – keep up the great work!
I love your quilts!
Twitter: What is Twitter?
How to use Twitter
As a business owner we do not care what other people eat for breakfast. Twitter can be very noisy with irrelevant topics. How can you really use Twitter to get results?
Twitter Followers
If you have no Followers then no one will see you messages!
How To Get Followers
You don’t want just anybody – you want people in your target market to follow you. One of the best ways to get the right kind of followers is to follow them first. Most people will follow back! If you are a local business do a search on Twitter for other people that live in your city. If you know that you are looking for other business owners (you are a B2B business) then look for other local businesses on Twitter. If your target market are Gardeners then search for gardeners on Twitter. Find the people that are going to CARE about what you have to say.
Once you have targeted people following you – look at their followers and Continue reading
Benchmark Email Catastrophe
My sincere apologies…
to everyone that is on my Tip of the Week list. Benchmark has now sent out 2 unauthorized emails to mt entire list – causing confusion, frustration, and spam!
When my list service company that allowed me to send Video emails quit working (poor upgrade) I moved to Benchmark for providing my video email list management. After spending over 6 hours setting up the program – importing my list, purging names I knew were not valid, changing emails I knew had been updated, adding last names etc. – they decided to send out a Welcome email that I set up to be sent ONLY when a new person gets added through my website form. They sent it out to my entire list instead!
If that was not annoying enough for both myself and the people that received the email they then shut down my account. All that time wasted! When I called Monday morning to find out why they did that I was told the “confused” me with someone else and did not mean to close my account.
I had already moved to MailChimp (free account for email list management) and redid all the work from the previous day. I requested the Benchmark account be closed – and they complied and refunded my money.
Jump forward a week – yesterday they sent out an unaltered template (which I never even set up) to my entire list AGAIN. To my HORROR they spammed my list again with absolute garbage.
I AM SO SORRY THEY ARE TOTALLY INCOMPETENT
I went back into my supposedly closed account and removed everyone from the account. It should not happen again (now the list is empty).
It is never my intention to spam anybody.
Lesson Learned
Do not rely on a company to do what they say they are going to do – always double check when it involves your clients.
Dotty Scott
What is Mobile SEO?
How do I know if my website is Mobile Friendly?
Mobile friendly sites also need to be optimized just like traditional websites. Keywords and content play a large role in mobile website optimization just like they do in regular websites.
What is the difference?
People using mobile devices often times search with shorter keyword phrases, and they do not want to look through the entire site to get to the right answer or to find the information.
There is a thing called a mobile sitemap. This is a tool that will get your website listed in the Mobile Search Engines (yes mobile devices access a different search index). You must get your mobile website into the mobile indexes – and a mobile sitemap is the easiest way to do so. It is important to only include the pages that are included in your mobile website.
For a tool to create your mobile sitemap use MadSubmitter (free tool). Simply fill out the form and the tool will scan your website for mobile friendly pages. The drawback is that you will have to manually update this sitemap when new information is published. If you are using WordPress you are in luck. There is a Mobile Sitemap plugin that will automatically keep your sitemap up to date when you publish new content. It is a “set it and leave it” plugin – my favorite. Got to love WordPress!
Mobile Sites: Is Your Site Mobile Friendly?
How can you tell if your site is a mobile website?
In today’s market having a website that performs well on a smart phone is essential for your business. You might be surprised how many people are accessing your website via some kind of mobile device. I was! To find out look at your website analytics. If you are using Google they have added a mobile section. If not just check the browser usage – you should see the mobile browsers separated out from desktop browsers.
This is a growing market that will not go away – business owners need to have mobile friendly websites.
What is Mobile Friendly?
If your website is hard to read on a mobile device, if the menu is hard to navigate, if it uses flash, if the photos are too large to load, if your site does not load at all – it is not mobile friendly. You can take it one step farther – if your site is the same on a desktop as on a mobile device it is not mobile friendly.
What needs to be on a Mobile Website?
Let your website analytics help you. Take a look and see what pages mobile users are visiting. Make these pages prominent on your mobile version. Think about what people using your site on a phone are looking for – are they wanting your phone number, address, map to your location? Are they looking for a coupon, restaurant menu, or other benefit of your business?
Give them what they want and take the unvisited pages away. It will clean up your site and greatly improve the experience of your visitor. I know I have visited some websites on my phone and just gave up because the site was so slow or the menu was not usable. They lost my business that day.
Is your site usable on a mobile device?
If not you need to get that fixed this year – plug the hole in your funnel now not later.
Customer Service VS Automation
Some areas of business cannot be automated
I had an interesting and frustrating event happen over the weekend. I registered for a new email management system that would allow me to send video emails easily. I spent about 6 hours setting up my imported list, adding missing content to the list, creating a Newsletter template, and creating my first autoresponder message for new people added through the web form.
The next morning I logged on to create an email set to go out on Monday and WHAM…My account had been terminated.
What happened? All that time and effort wasted…to say I was unhappy was an understatement.
Guess what I did on Sunday?
I redid everything I had done the day before in MailChimp. MailChimp now allows for YouTube videos to be embedded into email Newletters.
This morning (Monday) I contacted to original company to request a refund and find out what happened. I assumed someone had reported my account as spam (the company sent out the autoresponder meant for the web form registrations to my entire list…not what I had planned). They said there was no complaints but that the account was suspended for content.
WHAT…There was no questionable content in my email. Come to find out they got my account confused with someone else and was sorry for the inconvenience. UNBELIEVABLE!
They could have called…they could have emailed…they could have done a number of things. They chose to terminate me for someones else’s indiscretions.
They lost a paying customer.
Had they handled it differently by not making me redo everything with another company they might have been able to salvage the business relationship.
Customer service cannot be automated…it just can’t. Period.
Treat your customers right and they will treat you right.
Search Engine Placement Changes
Layout Matters!
Google just announced an update to their search placement algorithm. This update has to do with the quality of the user experience and the layout of your website. Google’s goal is to provide the closest natch to what someone is searching for highest in the search results list. Our goal is to be in the top 3 for our search terms.
Best User Experience – Ads above the fold?
One complaint that Google gets from searchers is that they can’t find the information on the site that Google served to them. It is buried under a multitude of ads. Although ads provide an income for the website owner – they do nothing to help the searcher find your information.
This update is designed to rank websites with too many ads (how is that determined?) lower than websites with no ads. This will help to improve the user experience when they look for information.
What does this mean to you?
It means that business owners need to provide the most important information first – always keep users in mind. Do not clutter your website with promotional AdSense, or anything else that makes it hard for the user to find your information. Google cares – and so should we.
