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I can design your Facebook Page for you

April 12, 2013 by Peter Mahoney

I can design your Facebook Page for you Wordpress SEO ExpertThis is one of those “ultra specials” that I run as a way to build my client base. In some ways I feel a bit silly doing it because it’s just so cheap, but meeting new people makes pretty much everything worth while in my book!

Your Facebook Page needs to carry a LOT of important messages about you in just a couple of graphics. Too many people just shove their corporate logo up as their Page’s profile pic, and some large photo they like as the cover image. And certainly sometimes that can be the best option, but in most cases, it’s a wasted opportunity.

Who are you? Who is your target market? What sort of ethos do you and your business wnat to foster?

If you don’t tell people who you are you leave them free reign to form their own ideas about you and your business.

Seriously take a look at your Facebook Page right now. What does it show, at-a-glance, about you and your company?

If it doesn’t say as much as it could, hire me for the ridiculously low sum of £19 to sort it out for you.

Filed Under: Branding, Marketing, Social networking

Facebook Pages, and just how big to make those pesky cover and profile pictures

April 7, 2013 by Peter Mahoney

This website may have been written when the new Pages system and layouts were first launched, but it’s still very valid and useful.

It contacts all the information about the picture sizes you need, and a few extra helpful tips besides.

http://www.marketinggum.com/facebook-timeline-upgrade-sizes-faqs-how-to

Do bear in mind though, even though your Facebook Page’s profile picture needs to be 180 pixels square, Facebook actually automatically crops out 10 pixels on all four sides. So basically, create an image that’s 180px, but know that you’ll lose a bit around the edges.

Of course, you can also have me do this for you, I make a lot of these for people! In fact, I’ve done over 100 in the past 12 months.

I can design your facebook page for you.

Filed Under: Branding, Hints & Tips, Social networking

SEO, in a nutshell

March 26, 2013 by Peter Mahoney

At its core, SEO is about reinforcing. Reinforcing your messages, your values, who you are and what you do.

Each page, every blog post, should help strengthen those key messages.

When we stop thinking about SEO in terms of its technical aspects, and instead see it as a form of communicating and interacting, it becomes both easier to understand, and perhaps more importantly we can start to slot it in with the rest of our business plans.

Almost everything we do in every aspect of our lives (including work!) is about the interplay between people. If we can find a way to see more of the processes we invest our energy and time in in those terms, then a cohesive model starts to emerge.

Filed Under: Branding, Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Youtube hits one billion monthly users

March 21, 2013 by Peter Mahoney

And they’re not all watching Justin Bieber videos.

Youtube is often overlooked as a social network for business, when in fact it’s one of the easiest ways to build your authority in your industry.

If you only post a two minute video clip a week, it’s still faster than blogging, and helps sell you as a person, your brand benefits, your exposure goes way up, and it’s a great way to build your audience.

And with the comments sections and embedding links in videos back to your site, it has the social interaction aspect that you need to be communicating with your clients.

The other big point of difference? Most people have Twitter and Facebook Pages. They’re still incredibly valuable, but Youtube videos are a simple way to set yourself apart.

http://mashable.com/2013/03/21/youtube-one-billion

Filed Under: Branding, Hints & Tips, Marketing, Social networking

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Social integration

March 19, 2013 by Peter Mahoney

Social networking is much more than an SEO technique. And while the point of this series is to focus on improving your search engine ranking and visibility, it would be reductionist (and actually really difficult) to talk about social media and it’s relationship to your business without discussing community.

After all, as important as SEO is, its purpose is to build your community of clients, and therefore that tribe of people is the most important thing.

While previous posts in this series focussed on a number of different things you can do, with this topic it all runs together and is a more conceptual dialogue.

Backlinks

At its simplest, the explanation of a backlink is, well, simple. Search engines scan social networks and basically count all the links to articles and content on other sites. If you have 50 links back to one article you wrote, you’ll be seen as having more authority than a site which only gets five.

It’s worth noting that social backlinks are given a fairly low importance by the big search engines, so unsurprisingly a link to your post from an article on The Guardian website carries a lot more gravitas. More on that in the next point.

They are however very useful, because they do offer some weight to your content, and it’s very easy to share content on social media. You’ll notice at the end of all my blog posts is a share feature—I click all those buttons myself to share my content. It’s the easiest way.

Photos/graphics/images

Before you share your article, make sure it has an image as part of it. Facebook and Linkedin both include a graphic from your content next to the link, and links with images get more clicks. Simple.

A word of advice here from personal experience—make sure you have an image in place before you even try to share your content via Facebook once, even if it’s just a test. Facebook caches the content on links, so if you post once without a graphic and then you remember that you really should have included one so you go back and edit your post then share again—Facebook is probably not going to bother looking for any changes. And you’re stuck with a text-only link.

Social networks

You have a bunch of options for places to post to:

  • Facebook is a no-brainer. Have a page on it, and post your content to it. Make sure the privacy for your posts is “public”, and even if you have very few “likes”, at least the backlinks are there.
  • Twitter is a no-brainer. It’s short, simple, scanned by Google in near real-time, and again, even if you have very few interactions on that network the links to your content exist.
  • Linkedin is, for almost every professional business, a no-brainer. It’s where professionals find each other, discuss their industries, and again, if nothing else you’ve got links back to your content.
  • Blogs should be a no-brainer. Their potential as social networking is often overlooked, but those comments sections are valuable. Read an article, a few of the comments, then post your own reply with a link to your site. Backlinks ahoy. I include online newspapers and the link as blogs for this purpose; they’re very widely read. Here’s a top tip. Once a week, read a really popular blog about your industry. Take 10 minutes to write your own thoughts on the subject, and post that to your blog. Then comment on the industry blog saying, “Hey, I’ve been thinking about this a lot too, and here’s my recent blog post that might help enlighten things.” Boom. Your traffic goes up, and you have original content linked to on a popular site—it doesn’t matter that you did it yourself.
  • Tumblr is a great one too. We’re now in the realm of the networks I call “time-allowing”, because while it’d be nice to hit up every network out there, I also hope you’re busy making money. But this is worth having a presence on, and sharing your ideas through.
  • Google+ (a.k.a. Google Plus). I use it because funnily enough, Google search knows what’s happening on its own social network. I haven’t made much of setting up my Google+ presence yet simply because there are so many hours in the week. However, I still think this network shows promise for really taking off, and if it does, I want to be established there while other people are playing catch up.
  • Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious. They’re all worth a go, and are essentially social bookmarking services. People share bookmarks, rate them up or down, that kind of thing. The one to be slightly wary of is Reddit though—while it can drive some serious traffic to your site, they have a very close-knit community of users; and if they grab hold of content they don’t like for one reason or another they will tear it to shreds. And with it your ego.

Community

This is really important, because it’s not just backlinks that you want, it’s to have people taking about them, interacting, and ultimately sharing themselves. That in turn brings other people in, and before you know it you have a community of people to sell to. And this is of course the desirable ultimate result.

But people won’t share content unless it’s right in their faces, and of interest to them. And also importantly, of perceived interest to their friends. People don’t share content on social networks because they think it’s awesome, they share it because they think their friends will think it’s awesome. It’s an important distinction.

Part of this community building is for you to interact with your followers and subscribers. If someone looks like they want to get into a debate, then engage with that. If they retweet something you’ve written, thank them for it. Make them feel included and valued by you. Don’t leave other people’s comments hanging out at the tail end of your posts, reply.

Also consider the nature of a community. If all you ever post is backlinks, people will start to overlook your social content. Twitter is a great example, it’s a very social, social network. Because it’s so quick to post to, and users expect a fair quantity of tweets to be made by other users, ideally you’ll post a couple of times a day with something humorous, or clever, or an original inspiring thought, and perhaps post backlinks three times a week. With this sort of ratio you’re building your community and adding weight to your links.

Find opinion leaders

Within any grouping of people, there are those who the rest look up to, and value their opinions. These are the people who naturally settled into a position at the top of the pack, and set the tone for how people interact, what sorts of things they share, but most importantly decide what will be valued by the group. Marketers are always trying to find these people and to get them onside. Have you ever seen those giveaways on Facebook where if you share an advert, and get the most “likes” for it, you win something? Well those campaigns aren’t just about getting brands shared about, they also allow the marketers to see who gets the most likes—and these are the opinion leaders they know to target their advertising towards in future.

My wife is an opinion leader amongst her peers. Whenever she comments on one of my Facebook page’s posts, or shares it with her friends, that post reaches about five times as many people as a normal one.

Opinion leaders make your shares, backlinks, and social communities much more effective. And bear in mind you want to be one of these people yourself. The go-to-person for a section of your industry. Experts and gurus are opinion leaders.

So start acting like one. 🙂

Filed Under: Backlinks, Branding, Content, Google, Hints & Tips, Marketing, Online community, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Social networking

Guess who’s number 1 baby yeah!!11one!

March 7, 2013 by Peter Mahoney

I’m more than a little happy about this.

I’ve beaten out the phone and Linkedin directories!

A Google UK search for “Peter Mahoney” returns my website as the top result.

Hitting number one is pretty phenomenal, especially when you consider that in the tech world there are a couple of CEO’s of major international companies sharing my name.

Plus this means when people ask me for my URL, I can show off my SEO skills by simply saying, “Google me”.

So what’s next? I want to see my Twitter feed at number two, that’s what.

Filed Under: Branding, Google, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

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