Don't waste your breathe with old communication methods (Photo: Sebastian Fritzon)

It’s no secret that social media drives Web content. You can read an article or watch a video online, and with the click of the mouse, share it with all of your friends immediately. Your friends share the content with their friends, and they share with theirs, and so on. For people such as bloggers, who create online content with the hopes that as many people as possible will read it and love it, social media provides an opportunity to shout headlines from the rooftops to anyone who is listening.

Twitter, in particular, is great for this. In 140 characters or less, you can have your content making its rounds across the Web in a snap. Not only that, but Twitter provides a great community that can help enhance your content even further. Most veteran bloggers are already on Twitter, but for those new to blogging, take some advice: Whether you’re a chef with a personal food blog or a Manhattan cosmetic dentist with a dental health blog, you should probably be tweeting, too. Here, explore the benefits of Twitter for bloggers and find some tweeting tips.

Boost Traffic to Your Blog

First, join Twitter. Next, tell your blog readers that you’re on Twitter. Make it easy for them to follow you and tweet your posts by posting the “Follow” button, the “Tweet” button as well as your stream to your site. Then, start tweeting your posts. Many people use Twitter as a mini blog reader – in addition to subscribing to your blog, they can follow you and get alerts on blog updates through Twitter. The more offsite links generated through tweets and retweets, the more your blog will grow.

Make Connections

If your blog is the main event, then Twitter is the after-party – a way to continue the conversation that you started on your blog. When I first joined Twitter, I was amazed at how much I had been missing. Bloggers and blog readers use Twitter to exchange links, share details of their day, show a peek behind-the-blog. If you’re only tweeting links to your own blog, other users may view your tweets as too “spammy.” Here’s your chance to get to know your readers and other bloggers better. Embrace small talk and banter with your followers. Start a conversation. Ask questions. Share tips.

Become a Better Writer

When you only have 140 characters to work with, you better make them count. Post updates that will grab attention. Be clever, charming, straightforward, informative. Twitter can be an opportunity to strengthen your unique voice as a writer and a blogger.

Stay In-the-Know

Use conversations on Twitter to generate hot topics and fresh content for your blog.   Chances are good that the people behind your favorite blogs, websites and brands are also on Twitter. Follow people in your field to stay constantly updated with industry trends and news, and to gain insight and feedback. For example, if you write a blog about advanced GPS trackers, vehicle monitoring and navigation devices, you might want to follow businesses that use those products. After all, in order to establish your own blog as an authority in your niche, you have to know what you’re talking about.

Just like keeping your blog updated, once you’re on Twitter, it’s important to stay connected. Engage your followers as often as possible with useful, interesting tweets that can improve your blog.

Are you on Twitter? How has Twitter helped your blog?

Why Blogs and Twitter Go Together Like Peas and Carrots: Twitter for the Beginning Blogger is a post from: Technshare

Guest blogging takes time but it builds quality links (photo: Chris Halderman)

Everyone wants to build massive links to their web site or blog and start ranking at the top of the search engines for high traffic keywords. Unfortunately the task of getting high quality and relevant links is getting more competitive and costly. With Google continually making changes to their algorithms and wiping out article directories and blog networks over night, you want to make sure you are building effective link building strategies that will stand the test of time.

Last week was a perfect example of how Google can simply make a change on their end, and wipe out whole businesses and millions of incoming links for web sites. A very popular link building network called, BuildMyRank completely shut down their business because they offered the service of “selling” and distributing links across their network of blogs. The concept was simple, users would pay a monthly service and could write 150+ word articles that would include a link back to their sites. These articles and links where then distributed through out the BuildMyRank network of blogs, then Google came along and de-indexed them all. Now all of those sites and links are potentially worthless.

Though BuildMyRank was the first major link building site that was made an example of last week, there are still plenty of BuildMyRank alternatives out there. Instead of asking which of these alternatives is the best, the better question to ask is how long they will last? With everyone fleeing from BuildMyRank, it’s obvious these smaller networks are getting massive exposure and signups to fulfill a needed service, but can they do it while following Google’s rules?

An Effective Link Build Plan Google Likes

Now that you have an idea of what can potentially happen when you build a business model around what Google doesn’t like, let’s look at a link building method that is quite rewarding and accepted by Google. The concept we are talking about is guest blog posting.

Guest blog posting is not only free, but it can be extremely effective when done well. If you’ve ever wanted to become an authority in a specific market, you can continually provide high quality guest posts on blogs that are in your niche and keep building a name for yourself.

Writing guest blog posts is much better than buying links because the content you create is actually being read by people, who are more likely to then visit your site and become a long time reader. The majority of link building services out there are just setting up links that never get clicked on or actually read by interested people. Your content on high ranking blogs will be read for many years to come, along with a constant flow of new readers coming to your site.

As wonderful as guest blog posting sounds, it does take a lot of work. It’s easy to pay link building companies to blast links all over the place, but with guest blog posting you will need to take the time to find quality blogs that are in your niche (or writing topic), contact the sites and provide only the highest article content. It will take time and effort, but you will also take comfort in knowing that you are contributing quality content and building high quality links back to your sites.

The Future of Link Building and Power of Guest Blogging is a post from: Technshare

Don't get bitten by the Panda (Photo: Phan Ly)

Did you see a significant drop in your website’s traffic around February last year? If so, chances are you were hit by Google’s Panda update, which acted as  a quality filter and was aimed at reducing the amount of spammy content appearing in the search results.

Since Google’s original release of Panda, there have been various iterations, each trying to further refine the sites which are affected, as many legitimate sites were originally hit without knowingly doing anything manipulative.

Because of this, it’s important all webmasters are aware of what types of issues on their site could create Panda problems and, if they do suffer, what they can do to recover:

What Makes Your Site Vulnerable to Panda?

• A lack of original, unique content
• A large amount of duplicate content (internal or external)
• A high % of pages with low quality content, even if your top pages are highly rated
• Lots of adverts
• Unnatural use of a word or phrase on the page, i.e. keyword stuffing
• Low quality links pointing at the site
• The content on the page and/or title tag not matching search
• Low amount of time spent on the page or site as a whole

What Should You Do If the Panda Bites You?

Locate the Problem

• Find pages which have been worst hit
• Identify what affected pages are doing which others are not
• Test changes on those pages

Eradicate the Issues

• Take the issues and pages you have highlighted and work through them to remove the problems
• Remove low quality pages and consolidate the site so every page is doing a job and worthwhile
• Write unique content for pages which have duplicate content
• Edit over optimised pages so they are targeted at a user rather than a search engine
• Try to add different forms of content; images, videos etc

Promote Your Site

• Once you’ve corrected the on-site issues which may be annoying the big bad Panda, it’s time to move your focus to promoting your newly streamlined site
• Promote content on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google+
• Reach out to blogs in your niche and ask if you can contribute content to their sites in order to generate higher quality links

Once you’ve been through this process, it’s unlikely that you’ll immediately recover the traffic lost originally, but don’t be discouraged! Once sites have corrected all Panda-related issues, they then have to wait until the next iteration of the update, at which point Google will judge whether you have overcome the issues. If you’ve done enough to ‘untrip’ the switch you flicked to get struck by Panda, then you should see you traffic start to climb back to where it was originally.

The Panda Update has caused a lot of webmasters a lot headaches, but if you think you’ve been hit it’s worth taking the time to run through the points highlighted above. As well as recovering traffic, it’s more than likely you’ll come out the other side with a better site for users which has the potential to convert better.

Beat the Panda: How SEOs Can Combat Google’s Panda Update is a post from: Technshare

Which part of the day is most profitable? (Photo: alancleaver_2000)

Success in every walk of life is all about time management. The more you manage time efficiently, mold, and turn your activities according to the prevalent time, the more successful you become. This management of activities according to time applies to all the tasks you undertake, whether it is your personal life, your work, or your PPC campaign.

If you own a business and avail the services of a web marketing company for online promotion, you will see that the service provider pays special attention to the time factor. A good service provider will know, when to start a campaign, when does it gain more success, what are the days in which the campaign experiences change, or even what is the time of day when the campaign gets more attention.

Dayparting:

Dayparting is a phenomenon in which you analyze the progress of your campaign, with respect to the periods of the day. Meaning, at what time of day the campaign is more profitable compared to other hours of the day.

Dayparting and AdWords:

The phenomenon of Dayparting can also be applied to your PPC campaign. In your AdWords account, you can see which hours of the day profit compared to hours, which don’t yield any benefit to the campaign. By doing so, you get to see the hours which are affecting your ROI negatively in a discrete manner.

Applying Dayparting on AdWords:

To see the progress of your campaign with respect to hours of the day, you need to follow the steps given below:

• Sign in to your AdWords account and select the campaign
• Go to the ‘dimension’ tab of the campaign
• In the dimension tab, click on the ‘view’ button
• Click on the ‘time’ button in the view tab, and from there select the hours of the day.

Analyzing the data and Applying Dayparting:

Once you select the hours of the day option in the ‘time’ button, you will see a chart, which shows the progress of your campaign during the whole day, broken down into hours. The thing you need to analyze is:

• There will be some hours of the day, that may show high clicks, but in the revenue column they will show nothing.
• This implies that, you can shut of these hours of the day to avoid a cost that does not generate revenue.

To shut your campaign in those hours of the day, you must follow the below given steps:

• Go to the ‘advanced settings’ of the campaign, and click on the ‘Schedule’ button.
• In the schedule button, click on ‘start date, end date, ad scheduling’ link
• The links will show you the three options, in the options in front of ‘ad scheduling’, there will be ‘edit’ option, click on it.
• It will give you a basic mode, where you can turn your campaign on or off during the day for a 15minute time period.
• By clicking on the ‘bid adjustment’ link, you get the option to raise or lower your bids in any time of the day. Here you can turn off your campaign for the hours you don’t want it to run.
• Then select any day of the week (e.g. Monday), this will show you a dialogue box, and in the time box, add the time when you don’t want the campaign to run.
• Copy this setting of one day, and apply it to as many days of the rest of the week as you want to.
• Exit by saving the changes.

Optimizing Time of Day:

A good PPC management services provider knows that dayparting is not just about shutting of the campaign and saving cost. Instead, it is much more than that; it is about knowing the surfing trends of your customers during the day. The more you understand their trends, the more effectively you can apply dayparting to your campaign.

AdWords gives you the tool of applying multiple time zones. With this tool, you can apply dayparting with regards to the time zone of your customers. By utilizing time zone tool, you optimize your dayparting application, divide groups of your customers with respect to their regions, and then run a campaign accordingly.

Conclusion:

PPC management is all about understanding the behavior and trends of internet users, the more you know about their daily surfing routine, the more effectively you can manage your campaign.

How To Apply the Dayparting Technique to Your Ads Campaign is a post from: Technshare

Select affiliate products for your site (Photo: epSos.de)

What precisely is internet affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is considered the single speediest growing markets on the net. It’s also true that internet affiliate marketing is among the most quickest and most creative new ways to make money and also have a line of business on the web.

Basically put, online marketing is advertising products on a commission basis. You hold profitable business that will market and advertise products of different businesses. You might have a product of your own to start with. Things that a profitable internet marketer needs to have are:

1. Your website could be the jumping off position of all your advertising and marketing efforts. Hence the initial step in any successful affiliate marketing business is creating a good, trustworthy as well as professional looking internet site. You have to design a user-friendly website, which will attract your prospects and also motivate these people to go through the links towards the goods and services you are marketing making a purchase. Right now there are companies whose business is building websites that you can employ in order to develop one for you.

2. You need to find items to market, an individual should have the ability to determine whether there is a demand for those products and if people will actually invest in these. You may possibly possess your very own unique product or perhaps solutions which tend to be built by other people. No matter which approach a person goes, he should do a thorough research on the particular approach.

3. It will be necessary with regard to an individual to be able to turn into a great marketer and be capable to tell whether the marketing and advertising you happen to be paying for will be generating extra income for you compared to advertising is costing you.

4. Great numerical expertise. You will need to be able to track the sales in addition to figure out earnings, besides seeing to it that your suppliers are paid entirely and on a particular time frame.

5. You require the complete and unwavering support of your family so that you can devote the time and energy needed to be able to kick start a successful internet affiliate marketing company.

Online Affiliate Marketing in a NutShell is a post from: Technshare

What do people say about your brand? (Photo: Urban Woodswalker)

Who doesn’t want to create more sales leads to their business? In this current economic climate, as small business owners we could all do with finding new ways to generate more traffic, create more leads and generate more sales into our businesses. Whilst this is more easily said than done in practice there are a few instant practices that we can all do more of to help get our businesses making us more money.

Today I’d like to share with you 3 very simple, yet powerful strategies which you can use to help your business create more leads and thus generating more sales.

Branding & Recognition

These days branding is absolutely everything to a business. Two of the things that company image do so well is provide both instant recognition and also installs trust into consumers, so ensure you incorporate your brand image in everything that you do.

People put faith and trust into something they recognize, look at Apple, it’s a brand that practically sells itself. If your business is somewhat renowned for a certain quality then ensure that you focus on this area the best you can to uphold that merit. Highlight it, advertise it, broadcast it and make it unique to your brand image.

In some cases corporate image is enough to make your consumers take action, as we used Apple as a prime example of this, as well as this your business marketing exploits can be greatly rewarded for your recognition.

Communication

Communication is the key, communication is vital; it is in fact the lifeline between your business and your target audience. Ensuring that your business contact information is kept up to date and plenty visible and also more importantly easily accessible is one crucial points of importance, the other is being able to communicate directly with your consumers without having to wait for them to come to you.

There are several things that you can do to make the latter more robust. For instance, make it easier for your consumers to subscribe to your updates, and ensuring your business is making good use of the social media platforms and marketing tools.

Promotions

Promotions are an important marketing tool in all online businesses and contribute to generating roughly over 60% of total annual sales for many small online companies.

When consumers see a promotion they often don’t hesitate, they take instant action there and then, because in many cases as consumers we often buy on impulse when there is an offer simply too good to resist or to wait for later. Just take a look at Amazon’s recent Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, not just Amazon but lot’s of other small internet sales based businesses also.

Asides encouraging leads and promoting sales, the news of promotions can spread quite rapidly whether it’s from an email marketing campaign, from a message on social networking sites, which is why we come back to communication and corporate image and recognition being vital ingredients of the sales generating success.

There are of course many other strategies that can help attract more sales leads to your online business, but essentially these 3 are probably amongst the most robust and important ones of them all in my experience.

Let me know your reactions on the three elements above and whether you have any other suggestions and practices for increasing your online sales, I’d love to hear them.

3 Simple yet Powerful Ways to Promote More Leads and Generate More Sales to your Online Business is a post from: Technshare

Facebook fan page is no longer a luxury these days. Almost every company has their Facebook profile which they use to communicate with fans, share news and attract new customers. However, most Facebook page owners reduce their experience to simple status updates, video, photo or link sharing. Still Facebook is much more than this – it is number one social media platform which give access to hundreds of useful web applications from which everyone can benefit a lot. Here is the list of the most essentials ones which can really help engage Facebook fans and turn them into a loyal community.

Welcome Page

First impression is very important, therefore a landing page is a must for Facebook business accounts. It’s not only a place to say “Hi” to new fans or encourage people to click  “Like”, here you can tell about your company in the way you wish. With the Welcome Tab from Word of Social, you can easily create a custom landing page with your images, links, code or iFrame.

Facebook Notes

You may use this app to share tips and tricks related to your product or service, publish interesting facts about your company or any other information you find worth mentioning. Your fans are free leave comments and share your notes. The setup is quick and easy.

Top Fans

This app helps figure out the best contributors to your Facebook fan page. Each fan earns points for his/her posts, comments, likes and shares. Booshaka app identifies your “top fans” and ranks them in a nice leaderboard. You can motivate and reward your fans participation by small presents or special offers on your products.

GooglePlus Tab

This app allows Facebook users to stream their GooglePlus updates on a special tab. The app works for both personal and business Google+ profiles.

Tweets To Pages

If you run a Twitter account as well, you can automatically bring your tweets onto Facebook with Tweets To Pages app. This is a great way to create a crossover that expands your reach in both networks.

With this app, you can broadcast your YouTube videos in Facebook. The tab shows both uploaded videos and Favorites, plus you can specify which videos you’d like to show as featured.

Contact Me

Poll is a good way of gaining user information. If you have a large community on Facebook, this app is a great way to bring in some honest feedback from your visitors. Find a hot topic around your product and ask your fans to vote for one of the possible options.

UserVoice

Facebook fans often provide valuable ideas for your service/product. With UserVoice Facebook app, you can easily monitor and prioritize suggestions and have others to comment and vote for them. The app goes together with Feedback service, pricing plans with Facebook intergation feature start with $45/month.

Contests

This app enables companies to easily create and launch branded contests:  photo or video contests, design, logo, or review contests. Fees start with $5 per promotion.

10 Essential Facebook Apps to Engage your Fans is a post from: Technshare

Measure your goals. (Photo: Claudio Matsuoka)

Blogging has emerged as a competitive ad innovative process of mass communication. The information required to set up a successful blog is all over the internet. Yet, the success rate of most blogs is quite low and there are more failures every day.

Of the many causes that can be attributed for this occurrence, setting unrealistic goals or in some cases not setting up any real blogging goals at all, takes a major share of the credit here. It is vital to have realistic blogging goals; they are your guiding lines to keep your blog on track even when you are confused with the numerous details related to your blog. It is just as mandatory to monitor the psychological aspect of blogging as the creative or technical aspect.

Realistic and reasonable blogging goals are the measures of an efficient psychology to support your blogging process.

You are the one to decide the specific boundaries that you consider realistic when you measure your goals. Here is a rundown of points based on which you will evaluate this decision.

Be specific with your blog goals

Vague goals do not set up a finishing line, which means it is difficult to gauge when you have satisfactorily achieved the intended results and you need to stop. Specific goals are necessary because the process of creating a successful professional blog resembles the working of a charged machine. You have to be specific to keep the time management, technical details, and creative outflow in the perfect working balance.

Quantify your blog goals

The vitals of your blog goals need to be quantifiable. Simply deciding you need to increase your subscribers‘ growth might not be enough to motivate your endeavors to make that happen. However, if you mention a precise quantity of intended subscribers’ rate for a precise period, you are more likely to get results.

The important part is these results will be comparable with the next period target or evaluated against the previous batch of results. This sort of comparison helps gather information that can create a comprehensive analysis of your blogging efforts. It will definitely help you pick up the slack in areas that need immediate attention.

Goals should specify target action

Orienting your goals to match the related action just simplifies your task in the schedule. Non-targeted goals require on the spot research where you will be frantically cramming up information to understand what you have to do to meet the target requirements.

Instead, complete your research and go through the information to understand the specific action required. Mention the relative action with the desired goal when you plan your blogging goal schedule.

Measure of realism

Always weigh in your desired output against the estimate of possibility. It is vital to set blog goals, but in the wake of a list of impossible goals, your only sure outcome will be disappointment. Setting achievable goals will ensure you are motivated throughout the process with each rolling success and lesser chances of the entire thing tanking down due to failures.

However, you should have a realistic approach; this does not mean you set over easy targets for your blogging process. Maintain the difficulty level but balance it out with target-oriented efforts.

Allot a definite time frame to each goal

This is probably the most important assessing feature of a blogging goal schedule. You need to allot a clear period for each goal. This will help you manage the complete schedule without the process overwhelming (or taking over) other aspects of your life. Try to stick to each allocated timeline.

In case there is a deficit you can always schedule in separate time for covering them. This will stop you from over compensating for the schedule and effectively keep your blogging process on track.

Motivate yourself with positive rewards and reaffirmation

When you make substantial efforts towards creating a successful professional blog, the reward waiting for you at the end of the line is the blog and the revenue that you generate with it. However, down the line, the track can get a little tiring and stark without regular motivations.

Creating positive reinforcement for the small but significant achievements can encourage you to want the bigger outcome more fervently. Set aside some time to analyze the day’s output and reward yourself for every point of success.

The journey of creating your pro blog is majorly self-motivated, so you have to step up and take charge of your blog goals and keep track of your achievements and failures. However, the journey is also a great experience so remember to savor it every step of the way.

Jane also writes about useful discount coupon deals for bloggers as that of photos.com promo code and istockphoto promo code. Apart from writing at Problogging Success, she also writes for a discount coupon blog that features photos.com and istockphoto discount deals.

The Art Of Setting Realistic Blogging Goals is a post from: Technshare