Category: Uncategorized

Visitors are using tablets

One day recently there were ONE BILLION different people using Facebook.  In other words, one human out of seven was on Facebook that day! And many of them were using drop down menus on their tablets.

You can rest assured that at least 700 million of those people were using mobile devices.  If you want people to be able to find your website, you absolutely must have your pages mobile ready.  Not only that, but people have to be educated on how to use their tablet computer.

This blog post tells how tablet users can properly access a complex horizontal drop down menu.  It might be wise to have a link from your FAQ page to this page.

It would also be a good idea to pin this graphic to a Pinterest board.  Your tablet visitors must be properly educated.

Confusion — change of protocol with drop down menu

The above image was created a few years ago. You now simply tap to get to a new post/page. You hold if you want to do one of these five things:

• Open in a new tab. It may take a few seconds. The link pressed will open in a new tab on your tablet. The original page will stay intact.
• Open incognito. Pages you view will not stick around in your browser’s history, cookie store or search history.
• Copy link address into clipboard. To paste into email or text box using an Android:
  • Navigate to where you wish to paste
  • Press & hold finger until Edit Text menu appears
  • Tap Paste Text option
•  Copy link text
• Download link. Wait a second or two & you can click on the blue open text.

Earn a percentage of the selling price for every book sold.

Click here to learn more.

Forget about drop down menus

Some people such as this Smashing Magazine writer still like drop down menus. It’s a matter of personal preference. I never have them in my websites. Because it is so rare these days, you could just confuse people.

Fundraising for a myriad of causes

You may be in dire straits like the man in this photo.  Perhaps your
house burned down and you lost everything.  Perhaps the flood of the
century has wiped you out.

Or perhaps you have a run-of-the-mill problem such as financing someone’s wedding.

To handle this type of societal need, some people have come up with
the idea of fundraising websites.  There are a number of such websites.
However, the only one I am acquainted with is GoFundMe.

Get your need known with GoFundMe.

GoFundMe will help you create your own personal web page.  Then GoFundMe helps you promote the page on Facebook, Twitter and with your email address list.

People go to your page and make online donations.  Each time someone donates, you will receive an email notification.

What costs are involved?

It does not cost anything to set up a GoFundMe page.  It does not cost anything for people to donate.

When you go to withdraw the money, GoFundMe will keep a little under 8% to cover their expenses.  This may be a bit higher if you are a registered charity.

YouTube video

Watch the video below to learn more about GoFundMe.

Earn a percentage of the selling price for every book sold.

Click here to learn more.

Disclosure: Some of the links on this webpage may result in us getting an affiliate commission.  Please consider buying.  it will help support this blog.

Free or paid?

To earn money on social media, you can use free systems or paid advertising.  Expect to make money online quicker with paid advertising.  With the free system, you are competing with millions of other users out there.

With the free system, remember the social part of social media.  You are socializing with someone as if you are sitting across the table from them.  You begin by establishing a rapport with them.  Post interesting pictures and videos for them to enjoy.  Because of the picture, they may share your post with a friend.

If you know lots about someone’s blog topic, you may want to read their blog and comment on it.  Slowly they and the related community may get to know you.

Earning respect

There are common sense principles to follow so that people respect you:

• Be polite to everyone
• Don’t spam
• Listen
• Give more than you expect to receive
• Add value
• Be honest

The more popular social media

Facebook

You can slowly begin to earn money online by simply posting to Facebook.  However, Facebook advertising will give you a quicker return with a much higher probability of success.

For instance, with my granite pet memorial ad, I

•  Chose my demographics

  •  Women 35 – 64
  •  Live in the lower 48 American states
  •  Own their own homes
  •  Like dogs
•  Choose my daily budget
•  Choose my own photo, heading, ad text and landing page to which ad is linked
•  Get lots of help from experts if I agree to advertise at $25/day for 30 days

Cost of advertising

It’s cheap.  So far today I’ve spent $8.36 and have had 14 website clicks.  (I chose to be charged per impression.  That means that I am charged each time my ad shows up on someone’s Facebook page.  My ad has shown up 749 times today.)

With Facebook advertising you can choose your target audience’s country, city(ies), age, sex, relationships, languages, interests, education and more.

Earn a percentage of the selling price for every book sold.

Click here to learn more.

Twitter

Twitter members send out tens of millions of tweets every day.  The idea is to find people with similar interests to yours and follow them.  If your tweets are interesting enough, many of them will likely follow you.

Here is an example of a tweet I recently made.  It is the type that will be retweeted because it has an entertaining picture.  Read my blog post giving the characteristics of an effective tweet.

The corresponding blog has a note at the bottom of each post saying, “We use Twitter for our table of contents.”  Click on the Twitter hyperlink to see what they see.
Here’s a website that will tell you lots about how to advertise on Twitter.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is something like a Facebook for business professionals.  It has several hundred million members.  Among other things, it can help you to brand your business.  As far as advertising is concerned, LinkedIn has a highly-targeted communications channel that offers marketers great
opportunity. It has considerable reach — over 250 million
members worldwide, with an estimated 100 million in the US.

Google+

This social platform has around a billion users worldwide.  Google+ allows you to organize conversations privately or by a specialized group.  It even has a video-calling feature called “Hangouts”.  Here you can promote your product to thousands of people via video.  Or else you can use +Post Ads.

This is just a quick overview of how to earn money online using social media.  To get a free e-book explaining more, click here.

Inevitable Social Media
is a free 25 page ebook giving an excellent overview of social media
marketing.  To get your free copy, click on the picture of the ebook.

I use Twitter for my blog’s table of contents

All Social Media Marketing blog links

Introduction to Social Media Marketing

Introduction, pt. 2

Social Media Platform

7 tips for improving social media marketing

Earn money with social media

Banner ads

Personal fundraising

Social media and political campaigns

Social media and graphics

Multiple social media together

Accessing a horizontal menu with a tablet

The 7 best social media

There may have been more since this was written.  Check your horizontal menu.

Disclosure: Some of the links on this webpage may result in us getting an affiliate commission.  Please consider buying.  it will help support this blog.

More tips for increasing exposure

Continued from p.1, here are more social media marketing tips.

Interview a niche leader

Interview one or more niche leaders and publish it.  They will appreciate the exposure, especially if it goes viral.  This can cause your campaigns to
go viral.

How to get traffic

Main goal of any social networking site — Get maximum amount of traffic.

♦ Entertaining photos/videos — Funny/sad/thought-provoking photo or video that people feel compelled to share with others.  Make sure your brand is on it.

♦ Give away something for free — could be a how-to video, a report, an e-book, an interview, a page of valuable information — anything that
people find interesting or useful.  Include distribution rights so that
people know it’s okay to  pass around.

♦ Find out what your audience is lacking and provide it.  You want the information to be so useful that they will share it with their friends.

♦ Social Media Campaign — Build a number of social media profiles and link them together before you start your campaign.  (See What is a Platform?)

♦ Facebook — One of the main advantages of FB is having a place
that links to other articles and media.  For instance, each post on my
granite pet memorials Facebook page links to a blog on my
LaserPhoto.ca website.

♦ Twitter — Like Facebook, you can link to other articles & media.  If you are linking to a blog post, try to make sure you have catchy headlines and relevant and useful content. You want to try to make sure that your posts are so interesting that people will share them.  If you go to my blog posts (e.g., Piper, the wildlife control dog or Second-Twitter-Account) and
scroll down, you will see how I use Twitter for my table of contents.

Earn a percentage of the selling price for every book sold.

Click here to learn more.
♦ Blogging — Here you write a regular post (at least once a week) on one of your areas of expertise.  The idea is to get a huge following from people with similar interests.  The idea is to NOT blatantly advertise to them.  That way people will stop following you.  Try to make your promotions subtle.

Always allow comments in your blogs.  That helps you to understand the personalities, likes, dislikes, etc. of your readers.  Use your blog to start two-way conversations with some of your followers.

(I find that I can make up to 3 informative, educational blog posts a day.  Read about my simple little secret.)

♦ Videos — Use lots of videos and photos.  Most
people would rather watch videos than read text.  Find yourself a good YouTube tutorial and start creating short videos for YouTube.  You want people to share your videos.  So, use some good software to help you make it entertaining, polished and shareable.

Make sure you do an Internet search for “YouTube insights” to get amazing analytics about who is watching your videos, how many minutes they are watching each one, the percentage of each gender, etc.

Related Pages

Free e-book

To learn much more about social media marketing, you can download a free e-book called Inevitable Social Media

Social media platform

Go to the Building Your Social Media Platform post
to get an overview of what a platform is and how to set it up.

Social media marketing advice

Go to 7 Tips for Improving Your S. M. Marketing.

Peter Enns has been developing websites since 1996. He is a social media blogger and author of a free YouTube tutorial. It’s called 7 Day YouTube and will teach you how to make entertaining videos & animated GIFs.

Schema markup to help the web crawlers

Suppose you made a movie review for the science fiction movie Avatar.  When the web crawlers come to your web page and see the word “avatar”, they do not know whether “avatar” is a type of profile picture or a movie.  This shortcoming can be overcome using schema markup.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have joined forces to help create schema markup.  It’s called schema.org.  It’s markup vocabulary that you add to your source code in addition to the regular HTML code.

For example, suppose you are selling a movie DVDs on your website.  You are creating a page with a review of the movie Avatar and a “buy now” button so that people can buy the DVD.    It may help your website ranking and therefore your sales if the search engines know that Avatar was a movie rather than a profile picture.

With schema.org you may include some HTML code on your web page that looks like this:
<div itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Movie“>

<h1>Avatar</h1>.

The inclusion of the word “movie” in the right way will let the web crawlers know that “avatar” is a movie rather than a profile picture.

Earn a percentage of the selling price for every book sold.

Click here to learn more.

What is microdata?

Microdata is just additional markup added to a page that adds meaning for computers, but has no effect on the page’s appearance.  Websites that use schema markup will rank better in the SERPs than companies without markup.

Below are two examples of microdata along with a pink rectangle showing how they would appear on a web page.

<div itemscope>
     My name is <span itemprop=”name”>Peter</span>
     This links to <a itemprop=”url” href=”http://www.marketinggraphicstoolkit.com/v4/?hop=design77″>my website</a>.
</div>

Let’s have some vocabulary definitions for the terms you see in that snippet of code.
♦  Itemscope: This is used to create an item. The itemscope attribute is a boolean attribute that tells that there is Microdata on this page, and this is where it starts. The itemscope should always be paired with an itemtype attribute that defines the microdata vocabulary in use.  Itemscope defines a group of name-value pair(s), called an item.
 ♦  Itemprop – An individual data element.

<div itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Person”>
     Here is some random data on the page, followed by my mailing address.<br />
     <span itemprop=”name”>Peter Enns</span><br />
     <span itemprop=”address” itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/PostalAddress”>
          <span itemprop=”streetAddress”>3700 O’Hara Street</span><br />
          <span itemprop=”addressLocality”>Tampa</span>,
          <span itemprop=”addressRegion”>FL</span>.
          <span itemprop=”postalCode”>33601</span><br />
          <span itemprop=”addressCountry”>United States</span>
     </span>
</div>

In general, the more content you mark up, the better. However, as a general rule, you should mark up only the content that is visible to people who visit the web page.

Schema markup overview

The above blog post is a simple introduction to schema markup.  To really learn it and improve your search engine optimization, study each of the four related pages below.

Related pages

Improving Your Site with HTML5 Microdata
Web Developer Tutorial: HTML5 Microdata
Getting started with schema.org using Microdata
Full list of all microdata item types

SERP: search engine results page

Peter Enns has been developing websites since 1996. He is a social media blogger and author of the free YouTube video-creation tutorial called 7 Day YouTube.

The easy way to create a WordPress website

Are you struggling starting your WordPress website? Are the online explanations too complicated for you? If you answered yes to either of those questions, you should keep reading.

(search engine optimization)
♦ Promotion
♦ Plugins
♦ Making money
♦ Writing content
♦ Layout
♦ Security
♦ Customizing common elements of your blog

What about a WordPress blog?

If you have a WordPress website, it should include a WordPress blog. Instead of having pages, it should have posts. Read a most useful article called How to Start a Blog. The article says, “In just a few hours, you can start using a functional, quality blog that gets results for your business or whatever your blogging goals may be.”

Watch the YouTube video below

Watch the SlideShare presentation below