There is very little doubt about the fact that some people use Facebook a little bit too often and that some of them post a little bit too much information in their status updates.  If that isn’t your cup of tea personally, then don’t open an account for personal use, but not using Facebook to your advantage as a business owner could be causing you to miss a boatload of potential traffic to your website.

There are a number of things that make up a sound internet marketing strategy; unique and regularly updated SEO friendly content is one and purchasing Google adwords is another, but if you are ignoring social media as a viable source for your internet marketing you are making a big mistake.

Facebook not only gives you the ability to reach and interact with thousands and thousands of prospective clients who could be very interested in the service that you are offering, it makes finding them an absolute breeze.  Based on profile information that you (and your prospective clients) enter voluntarily, Facebook makes suggestions for connections that make doing business much easier.

Once you’ve found prospective clients, or they’ve found you, you can begin to share updates, discounts, special offers and insider information that will draw them to your website.  If the information that you provide is good enough, odds are that many of them will share what you’ve shared with their connections allowing you to dramatically increase the audience that you have reached without doing any additional work.

Good marketing is about getting your product or service in front of potentially interested parties and the use of Facebook makes that job quite a bit easier than many of the old fashioned, labor intensive methods of traditional marketing.

In the last blog entry, we talked about the importance of being active on social networking sites like Twitter.  Twitter and Facebook give you, as a business owner, the power to reach an enormous audience of current and prospective customers and keep your services fresh in their mind with interesting and informative updates.

Timely social networking updates are a powerful internet marketing tool to virtually every business owner, but you don’t have to be right in front of your computer in order to reach your targeted audience.  Websites like Hootsuite make internet marketing via social networking sites easier and more convenient for business owners who operate under a busy schedule or who may not have the time to log onto their accounts at several points throughout the course of a day.

With Hootsuite, you can type a multitude of status updates at once and schedule them to appear on your social networking accounts when they will reach a prime number of prospective clients of customers.  Hootsuite also has a built in URL shortener that allows you to fit links into even the limited 140 characters that Twitter allows per update.

By combining the power of Hootsuite with the your Twitter and Facebook accounts you can reach thousands of current and prospective customers at regular intervals throughout the day for an entire week (or more) and you can do it all by logging into a single account at a time that is convenient for you – internet marketing doesn’t get much easier than that.

In order to build your business and grow your brand you need a constant influx of new visitors (potential customers) coming into the virtual store that is your website.  One of the easiest and most effective methods of internet marketing is done through social networking sites like Twitter.

Twitter is easy to use, it puts you in direct contact with potential customers and it can even let you see exactly what your competition is doing that is working (or not working).  There are more than seventy five million active Twitter users, any number of which could potentially benefit from what your company has to offer.

Twitter allows you to promote company updates, sales & specials, new blog content or questions and answers all in real time, to keep your current or prospective customers as up to date on your services as possible.  An important part of attracting new customers lies in making them aware that you are out there – Twitter is free and offers plenty of tools to allow you to quickly and easily reach the masses in short, 140 character blurbs.

There are also a wide array of sites that allow you to schedule future Tweets at specific times and there is plenty of compatibility between Twitter and most mobile devices so you don’t even need to be close to your computer in order to effectively promote your brand.

In order to be as successful as possible with your online business venture, you need an effective internet marketing strategy to drive customers to your site – Twitter is only a small part of that effective strategy but with more and more users signing up every day, it’s one that you should definitely be making use of.

So, I had thought that I was doing the right things. I built a website with content management and SEO capabilities. I am, obviously, blogging about my business in a way that is helpful to my business community.  And my site has done very well in attracting new business. I monitor my traffic with Google Analytics which does a terrific job of telling me about my visitors. I know where they are and how they found me.

But do you know if Google is actually seeing your new site content as you are creating it? What if you were creating new content like this but Google was ignoring it? That is exactly what happened to me. And I might never had known about it accept that I had setup Google Alerts to monitor my site.

Google Alerts allows you to monitor Google’s awareness of new web content based on search strings that you program into the alert. For example, I simply look for “Progressive Office”. And every time a new posting is created that has “progressive office” in it, Google sends me an email. I get emails about “progressive dentist offices” and such. And it is easy to ignore that. But when I post a new article, it shows up in my email from my Google Alert. And that let’s me know that Google is paying attention to my content.

Without the Alerts I would have never known that Google was not crawling and indexing my new content. I saw a drop in my traffic but without Alerts I would have not known that Google was ignoring my site.

Fortunately, I was able to fix the problem.

So, start an Alert for your website right now and as you add content… wait… you aren’t adding new, fresh content to your website? Well, feel free to contact us and we will show you how you can do it easily (or we can do it for you). Now go create that Alert!

This is the Google Alert email that I received about 7 hours after posting this article.

So, I bought a new Acer Aspire One Netbook for my wife and for home use. It is a terrific little machine. It comes with Windows 7, 1gb RAM, a 160gb hard drive, 3 USB ports, external video jack, 10″ LCD screen, 100mb ethernet, WiFi, cam and a microphone for only $325. And it weighs just over 2 pounds.

But when I went to install my printer to the machine I ran into a problem. I have a HP LaserJet 1320TN at home. It has been a terrific printer. It has 2 trays and it prints on both sides of a page. It has never had a single problem. I think the printer is about 7 or 8 years old. So, I get out the CD that came with the printer and I copy it onto a thumb drive because the netbook does not have a CD drive. Then I try to install it but it just doesn’t work. The printer software is too old.

So, I went online and searched the HP website for an updated driver. All I could find was a generic driver and it would not allow me to select my different printer trays.

Windows 7 was NOT my idea.

What do I gain by getting yet another operating system from Microsoft? I do not see any new, compelling functionality that makes Windows 7 worth the loss of my printer. I can’t print to tray 2. I can’t print checks. My choice is to move paper around when I want to print, buy a new printer or hope that Microsoft or HP will develop a driver for my old printer.

I really wish Microsoft would STOP coming out with new operating systems!

Gazelle wants to change the world – one cell phone, one laptop, one iPod at a time.

Gazelle is the nation’s largest reCommerce company, providing a practical, responsible, rewarding way for consumers to get value for used electronics. Today, they accept products across a wide range of categories and have found a new home for more than 20,000 used electronics, while responsibly recycling thousands more.

They are creating a revolution in consumption, inviting everyone to think differently about the products we buy, own, sell, and dispose of. Their vision for the future is that every consumer electronic is considered for reCommerce and that none ends up in a landfill.

The idea for Gazelle took route in Brookline, Mass. when the company’s founder cleaned out his closet by reselling used items. The experience sparked an idea to create a new market that rewarded people for smart consumption. And Gazelle was born — with the goal to change the behavior of the world’s consumers and create a high growth business that could help solve global environmental challenges.

It’s a big goal. But Gazelle is committed to making sure it is the simplest, fastest, and most trusted recycling service in the industry— everyday, for every customer, on every transaction.They ‘ve assembled a dedicated team focused on this mission.

What can we say? With Gazelle, it pays to be green! If you think so too, we’d love to hear from you. Ideas, thoughts, comments?

When you build a website, it is very important to make it easy for your clients to get in touch with you.  They are either going to want to visit you, call you or they are going to want to fill out an on-line form. That can be achieved by doing a few things right and by avoiding a common mistake. Here are the three things you should do.

1. Put your phone number in your header or in a sidebar so that it is always visible on every page as visitors navigate your site.
2. Add a Contact Us image that is linked to a Contact Us form that is relevant to the page they were visiting.
3. Create multiple landing page forms. Each form should be designed to ask questions that are relevant to the visitors needs. If they are on a page about widget sales than they should be directed to click on an image that sends them to a survey about their need for widgets.

What not to do.

Do not publish any email addresses on your website. The Internet is crawling with bad guys that are looking for email addresses for spamming and for sending out Scareware and other bad things. Build a form. Build lots of forms and program the form to send the email.  If you need help in getting specialized forms designed, let us know. We do the for free as part of our Internet Marketing Support to our clients.

You can also try obfuscating your email address. This free Email Address Obfuscator uses obfuscation to generate a “mailto:” link which will confuse naïve spambots, but will still work in standard browsers. This is not an ideal solution because some Spambots can decipher the obfuscation code. But it will work better than just displaying your unobfuscated email address(es).

I can’t explain this but I suspect that running a Craigslist ad might have hurt my website.

I was looking for someone to paint my house. And so I posted an ad with a link to a couple of photos. I put the photos on my website because that seemed like the easiest way to get a link to them. I use WordPress so it was just a matter of “adding” the photos to the Media Library of my website. Once I did that, I was able to get a url to the two photos.

This is seemed like a good idea and I found a good painter for my house. There was a huge spike in traffic because of the clicks on the two photos of my house. But right after the ad started running I noticed a drop off in traffic. And the only explanation I can think of is that Google was somehow punishing me for running an ad on Craigslist.

So, I have removed the photos and I am writing this story in the hopes that I can help someone also avoid this problem. If you want to create a link to photos for a Craigslist ad, I suggest that you use a service like Photobucket. Otherwise, So, I have removed the photos and I am writing this story in the hopes that I can help someone also avoid this problem. If you want to create a link to photos for a Craigslist ad, I suggest that you use a service like Photobucket. Otherwise, Google might get the wrong impression and they might punish your site by ignoring your new content.

I have contact Google by going to this page. I wrote them a brief email and sent them a link to this article. I am hopeful that they will unblock the indexing of my new content because at this point I am not very motivated to create new articles if Google is going to just ignore my work.

Resolution:

I originally posted this on May 24, 2010. I finally have this fixed on August 15th, 2010. Most of that time was wasted because I did not know how to fix it.

I wrote emails to Google Apps people but they told me that I was working with the wrong department. I was eventually steered towards the Google Alerts page. If you are not using Google Alerts, sign up and see if your site is being indexed as you are adding new pages and they are not showing up as an email alert, contact Google.

Click here and report the problem.