Dear Facebook, I Love You, I Hate You, I Love You, I Hate You

This morning as I was reading my wall I came across a post from PRDaily, one of my favorite FB pages.  They posted this: “Report: The ‘most hated’ companies in America”.  That is what I call a big attention-getting headline.  I clicked on it immediately.

It was no surprise to me to see all those airline companies on the list, we all love to hate the airlines.  I was surprised though to see Facebook in the top 10 as #10.  I went to the source, Business Insider, and the biggest complaint among consumers was privacy and personal information protection.

These are very big concerns but we also have to take some responsibility in protecting ourselves.  I was totally amazed this morning when I dug deeper into this with the number of people who did not know that under account settings on Facebook there is an Account Security page that looks like this:

 

What We Need to Learn from “Weinergate”

Let’s think about Twitter and how nice it is to be a happy little blue bird on a wire.

A month ago Anthony Weiner was one of those happy little Twitter birds.  He was tweeting away and he never stopped to realize that with one single send button his feathers could be plucked for good.  He was suddenly standing naked so to speak, or in actuality, all across the world wide web.

Now that all the excitement about Anthony Weiner has gone down (sorry couldn’t resist), I thought it was a good time to write about thinking before Tweeting.

Mr. Weiner’s downfall was caused because he chose to link some surprising pictures on his main Twitterfeed rather than send is as a private direct message.  He is not the only person to have ever confused the two choices. Read more..

Cheesy Ads + Junk Mail = Free Keyword Advice

If you write articles or blogs and if you don’t have a killer headline and compelling content, you may as well shut your computer down and stop writing immediately.

Remember when we sat down in English class and our teacher told us “words are powerful” and we all thought are you kidding me?  Words have overthrown kings, governed religions, and have caused many of us to fall in love.

However, words are not powerful enough unless they are the “right” words.

The right words make the difference between success and failure in your headline, your blog post or an article you are submitting.

Long before we even heard the term Search Engine Optimization copywriters understood what the right words could do for you. Read more..

Getting Rid of Twitter Litter

The other day instead of using Hootsuite, which all my reader’s know I adore, I actually went to one of my Twitter accounts to see what my ratio of followers and following was and I did not like what I saw.  I have a 365 page on FB like a trillion other real estate agents do.  It is geared to a certain area and I like to follow and have followers that are more on a personal level.  I knew it was time to clean out the arteries of that particular Twitter account so I set up for an angioplasty.

It was the holiday weekend so I decided to just go name by name and unfollow.  The first to go were all my little Bieber following teens.   Bieber doesn’t live in the Greater Tampa area, so they needed to go.  I do have a friend who is his sound man in NYC. I possibly could be bribed to mention when he will be in the studio again, but then I would lose a friend.  *sigh* Read more..

The Down Low on SEO

Do you know that people pay tens of thousands of dollars to Google adwords for keyword assistance?  I am serious, people pay tens of thousands of dollars to figure out the right keywords to draw people to their websites.  It’s the old moth to a flame concept and if your flame is flickering your website is in trouble.

Let’s think of your website like a candle.  In order to keep the flame burning brightly, the wick needs to be short.  Short works when using your description on your webpage too.  Short and simple with rich keywords.  Think of keywords as being the oxygen needed to fuel the flame and keep it burning brightly.

I know this can be a confusing concept,  but hang in here with me.

You are going to start a website, or you already have one.  Who is your target market?  You have to know this to find your keywords.  What is your niche?  My target market is people who want to learn basic social media marketing.  This article is about basic SEO so guess what?  Basic would be a good keyword for me.  There are people who will enter “basic social media help” in a search engine and if I had a website that used the word “basic” at least 3 times, I might just pop up in their search.

You can Google keywords and start entering words that you think would direct traffic to you but when you see that 13,000,000 monthly searches were done on your word choice you need to understand that your choice will get lost among all the rest.

If you had your webside designed for you, open it up, put your cursor somewhere in the middle of the site and right click on your mouse.  Choose “review source” or “review page source”.  All kinds of interesting computer wording will come up but you will be able to see the word “keywords” and right after that are all your keywords.

If someone else wrote it for you – this is your chance to see the keywords they chose and you might want to make a phone call.

Back to basics now.  Remember this is the information age, and more than that it is the “What’s in it For Me” WIFM Radio age.  When people perform a search they are looking for something they are interested in-it is all about them. Therefore what is your hook?  How do you get them to your site?

They are using a search engine to get information, to answer the “why, where, when, what and how” of their needs.

The answer is in choosing the right keywords.  I ran the cost for a client today on the keywords he wants to use on his web page to get him to the first page of Google.  Are you ready?  The 5 words he chose if he ran a Google adword campaign to get him to the first page on Google would cost him $940 per day.  They were not keywords I could foresee anyone using to find him.  He would have to pay for them.

Worse yet if he could afford that account with Google what is to stop a bigger company with deeper pockets from approaching Google and paying $1200 a day knocking him down the search engine ladder?

Deep breath time – I am not advising paying for keywords-most of us don’t have the deep pockets to do that.  We have to be creative.  If we can’t do it ourselves there are people out there who will help you for less than $940 per day.

I know we all believe we are the most clever copywriters in the world when it comes to OUR webpages, OUR business ideas, if that was true Madison Ave wouldn’t be needed.  In essence we are not, it is essential that we start with the basic understanding of what it takes to keep the flame burning.

There are many things that go into building a successful website.  The #1 building block is SEO which consists of a a great title/tagline that is rich with your keywords, a great short keyword rich description about your business, and content on your page still peppered with rich keywords that ties it all together.

My husband uses the rule of 3 – making sure your keyword is mentioned at least 3 times, and the rule of 25 – don’t use more than 25 keywords.

I came across a really good website that understands the concept of clear concise keyword marketing.  It is:

http://imarketingsolutions.com/

I was so impressed!  Then I went and looked at a webpage a friend of ours has up and running which is of the same genre and the most glaring cardinal sin in writing stood out like a sore thumb, bad grammar.  I will save that for another article.

You need to always be watching your website, you need to add new content all the time, and you should be using a website grading tool at least ever 6-8 weeks AND after you make changes on your webpage.

Another great tool is Alexa.  Alexa will tell you what your standings are in the world of websites.  That means the entire world – our real estate site started as having 14,000,000 other sites ahead of us and we have it down to 835000 at this time.  Believe me we work on this constantly, it is not a set it and forget it thing.

When we run a website grading site, our score is 94.  My husband is striving for a 98.  My friend’s site scored 43 and he thinks he has a great site.

If you want the moths to come to your flame, your need to start with understanding keywords, there is no Genie in a bottle.  Roll your sleeves up and start your research.

Good luck and come fly with me again!

Carole

Carole Sanek is a REALTOR in the Greater Tampa Bay area and Director of Marketing for Castle Dream Real Estate. Carole has been in real estate since 1995 in both Indiana and Florida.  She specialized in waterfront second-home sales in the panhandle for years and she and her husband now specialize in the international market in Florida.
Carole’s social media experience started with blogging 5 years ago, and has expanded into hosting multiple pages on Facebook, managing 4 Twitter accounts, LinkedIn and 4 other blogs besides being a contributing writer on Social Media Advocate.

Click Here to mail Carole Sanek

Follow me on Twitter

Social Butterfly on Facebook

 

 

 

 

Creating the Full Chain Reaction in SMM

 

I admit I borrowed this post from one I recently wrote for The Social Butterfly Media Marketing, sometimes it’s easier to do this than to re-invent the wheel.

My business is based on getting your social media marketing done as quickly as possible so you can be doing what you should be doing – in many cases that is selling.

I have been doing some type of marketing for over 25 years, and social media marketing since there was email.  Remember email?  There are so many SMM platforms available these days you feel like you are standing in the buffet line of the largest brunch in the world.  It is overwhelming – you are stuffed with ideas coming at you, sometimes you want to scream “No More!”

I know I have been there.

As SMM grew so did our business in real estate and now my business in sharing effieciency tips is growing even faster.

I watched SMM evolve over the years.  I have learned everything I know by trial and error and being in classes with the best in the business.

I have taken all that I learned and put it into a blender and out comes something highly palatable and digestable.  I have a way to make your SMM so efficient it could almost be done by a chimpanzee.  Notice I said almost.

I began with all the SMM sites even myspace.  I had to pare it down.  I now use Facebook for real, and Twitter and LinkedIn are done by that chimpanzee.

I do actually log in now and then to Twitter and LinkedIn but most of the time my posts. which are written by me,  are real but scheduled.  Then I take it all one step further and I link everything together.

I do one post and it goes everywhere I direct it to go even from my mobile device.  This gets better.  ALL of my blogs get distributed too – they are all linked.  I just need to hit the “publish” button and they are dispersed into outer space landing on their designated positions on other SMM platforms.

They go to LinkedIn also.  When I talk to a crowd about becoming more efficient I am serious.  I do all of this in under 60 minutes a day.  I blog, my blog links to LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook immediately as well as being picked up by 8 other blogging sites.  I Tweet and my Tweet goes to Facebook, LinkedIn and to 4 other micro-blogging sites.

Are you seeing how this can help your business and lighten your load?

Everyone wants to be linked to something good so talk to me and I will show you the good in linking.

Come on and fly with me.

Carole

Now get going and please while you are at it remember to do this too:

{Sign up for SMMCamp 9 on May 11 and learn how to use Facebook, LinkedIn, Activerain and Twitter to get more business - http://smmcamp.com}

Carole Sanek is a REALTOR in the Greater Tampa Bay area and Director of Marketing for Castle Dream Real Estate. Carole has been in real estate since 1995 in both Indiana and Florida.  She specialized in waterfront second-home sales in the panhandle for years and she and her husband now specialize in the international market in Florida.
Carole’s social media experience started with blogging 5 years ago, and has expanded into hosting multiple pages on Facebook, managing 4 Twitter accounts, LinkedIn and 4 other blogs besides being a contributing writer on Social Media Advocate.

Click Here to mail Carole Sanek

Follow me on Twitter

Social Butterfly on Facebook

 

 

15 Ideas to Unblock Blog Block

OKAY so you have a blog set up now what?  You want to start writing, you thought you had some of the greatest topics in the world to write about and suddenly your river of ideas has dried up to resemble the Sahara Desert.  You thirst for ideas, and nothing appears on the horizon, not even a mirage.

I have great news for you, there is help and it is real – I am here with your own personal genie in a bottle to the rescue. Read more..

Twitter Jitters? 15 Ideas to Tame the Little Bird

I wish I had one dollar for every time someone has said “I wouldn’t even know how to begin to use Twitter.”

It is the one social media platform that seems to strike terror into the hearts of many people.

{Sign up for SMMCamp 9 on May 11 and learn how to use Facebook, LinkedIn, Activerain and Twitter to get more business – http://smmcamp.com}

Once upon a time, I was terrified of Twitter too, but then I decided to take the bird by the wings and pluck out the unnecessary feathers  so I could get down to my basic skeletal needs in using Twitter.

I call it the basic feathers you need to begin to fly with Twitter.

1.  You do not have to read every Tweet.  It’s okay and impossible.

2.  Follow everyone who follows you, unfollow spammers later. Read more..

What Social Networking is Not

Plain and simple social networking is not tit for tat chit-chat nor is it a substitute for real networking. 

It is so easy to sit and comment on Facebook, LinkedIn, on a blog etc., but how many of those comments lead you to a real introduction where you can see facial expressions and have a good exchange of ideas?

{Join me at SMMCamp 9 on May 11 – 4 expert speakers share their top 5 tips for getting business on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Activerain – http://smmcamp.com}

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in the importance of social networking sites.  I have gotten many great ideas from the groups I belong to, from friend’s posts, and from pages I have “liked”.  However there is still a missing piece, the lead or introduction I am looking for is not happening. Read more..

Compelling Content Rules

Bill Gates wrote about how “Content is King”.  In my humble opinion is “Content is the Supreme Ruler”.   Great content is what gets people to want to read your posts and/or your blogs.

When you are stuck in that dark place where words and thoughts will not gel in your brain your fingers suffer from paralysis.  They hover over your keyboard and you struggle to have a brain synapse that causes those words and thoughts to gel so you can post something intelligent.  We have all been there.  It’s frenzied activity.

Pretty soon your fingers cramp from being held in that position and you need help to bring them back to normalcy.

This is when you should take a detour.  By that I mean walk away from the computer and do something else.  Allow yourself to get distracted because when you are distracted many times new ideas form.

If all else fails, read someone else’s posts and/or blog and if you like what you see write your opinion about that and link your readers to that post.  There is nothing wrong with doing this now and then. Read more..

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