Ready to squeeze more juice from your Facebook page? Let’s go! Here is a plain Jane version of my Sand Solutions page on Facebook.

Now add these five enhancements.

Profile Photo

Use a current, quality photo that best represents your business. For sole proprietors, this is most likely a headshot of yourself. Don’t be shy and put your best face forward.

Cover Image

Create a custom cover image to jazz up the top of your page. Use the dimensions 850 x 315 pixels. Note the guidelines from Facebook:

Visible Web Address

Your web address visible in the “About” field of your page profile. There is a field for “Website” and you want it there as well, but adding it to the very end of your “About” description will make the link clickable with having to click and open the detailed “About” page first.

Sign-up Form

If you collect email addresses for a mailing list, create a custom Facebook tab for the sign up form. MailChimp, the email marketing program I use, offers a Facebook integration tool. Here is my sign-up form on Facebook.

Custom Tab Button

Use a custom button for your new sign-up form tab. The default button that appears for the MailChimp sign-up tab is a chimp.

He’s cute, but not exactly obvious that it leads to a sign-up form. I used the dimensions 110 x 75 pixels to create this “Free Solutions” button.

Big Improvement

Now let’s take a look at the “AFTER” page. Much better!

Pinterest is a social site that lets members curate and share all the beautiful things they find on the Web. Small businesses that sell anything creative, beautiful, or tasty should consider showcasing their wares on a free Pinterest account.

Membership is primarily women, and popular uses are to plan a wedding or other big event, organize favorite recipes, collect decorating and craft ideas, and more. Members can “pin” any image they find on the web to a “pinboard”, or collection of pins around a certain topic.

The Pinterest Community

The following features make Pinterest an excellent social media marketing tool. Members can:

Despite the obvious temptation to use Pinterest purely as a tool for self-promotion, members do seem to be respecting pin etiquette and avoiding this. For small businesses that want to promote their pinboards, try to mix it up – offer both your products and inspiration from other sources.

Example: My “Digital World” Pinboard

My “Digital World” Pinboard on Pinterest

I recently devised a new gift certificate solution for a client. Previously, she was using custom artwork printed to heavy card stock and mailed to the buyer. It was attractive, but costly and time consuming.

She had the following wish list for a better gift certificate process:

Use Google Docs for Business

After a good deal research and false starts, I came up with a solution using Google Docs for Business that satisfied the entire wish list.

Unlike the free Google Docs service, paying $50/year to upgrade to a business account allows you to create a private, not public, template for your gift certificate. After logging in to your password protected account, simply open the template, save a copy, and modify as needed.

Automatically Convert to PDF

After you’re finished with the edits, the “email as attachment” option will automatically convert your document into a PDF file attachment. Add a message, click send and off it goes to your buyer. Or, print it yourself and mail to the buyer if they prefer.

Built-in Record Keeping

Google auto-saves everything, leaving behind a record of every certificate you create. Make it even easier to track by following a consistent file naming convention. For example, a file named “20120315-Sarah-Jones“is a certificate issued to Sarah Jones on March 15, 2012.

Sand Solutions Helpful Extras

I love going the extra mile for my clients. In this case, I created a special password-protected “Help” page for my client on her website. It includes the link to the template, step-by-step instructions, handy text to copy/paste into the message to her customer, and even a video of me walking through the entire process.

If you could use a better gift certificate solution, contact me. I can set up the entire process for you from A to Z.

I just ordered new business cards that include a QR or “Quick Response” code. Now anyone with a smartphone can quickly add my business to their contacts by scanning the code on the card. It looks like this:

What is a QR Code

A QR code is a pictoral representation of information that can be easily read by devices such as your phone, or the check-in scanners at airports. It can encode any type of information such as your business contact information or flight details.

How to Scan a QR Code

Install a free QR code reader on your phone. I use this one for iPhone and iPad called simply Scan. Or try this one from Kaywa which is more universal.

How to Generate a QR Code

I bought my business cards from Moo.com, and they provide a QR generator. But you can google “QR code generator” and quickly find one. They are plentiful and free. Once you’ve generated the image, you’ll be able to download it and use it wherever you like.

How to Use a QR Code for Your Business

In addition to your business card, you can use QR codes in print advertising such as flyers, posters, postcards, invites, and the like to promote:

Grab a Discount

Moo has some pretty nice designs. Any purchases made using my Moo referral link will earn you 10% off your first order.

I’ll earn “Moo Money” as well, which I can use towards buying more business cards. A win-win! So please consider using this link if you’d like to give Moo a try.

Admit it – you’ve Googled yourself. I have! Did you know about a free tool from Google that will automate this little exercise for you?

Create a Google Alert for a name, word, or phrase and Google will email you whenever it finds new content on the Web that matches your search query.

A great way to use alerts is to monitor your own business name. That way you get an email notification whenever someone else is talking about you on the Web. This can be very insightful!

Or create an alert to monitor the name of a competitor and see what they’re up to and what others are saying about them. You just need a free Google account, and it literally takes seconds to create an alert. Create as many as you want.

Search Query Tips

It’s best to be specific as possible, and use quotes to specify an exact phrase. An alert for Digital Zen would return all content that contains “Digital” or “Zen”. Instead, use quotes to create an alert for “Digital Zen” - this query will return only the results with an exact match.

Other handy search syntax:

Happy Googling!

Now go find out what others are saying about you on the Web. You might find some juicy insights.

If you don’t already have a page for your business on Facebook, now’s the time to create one. The social web is not going away! You’ll need a personal Facebook account first to do this.

Login, and open Create a Page. Choose page type, and follow the instructions provided. It’s pretty simple!

Fill Out Page Basics

While you’re on your new page in edit mode, you will see a menu on the left with various options. Be sure to complete the information found under the first three tabs, and then upload a profile picture on the fourth tab. The remaining tabs are for additional features, like setting up your mobile phone to send updates to the page via email or text (the “Mobile” tab).

Post Content To Your Wall

Now you can share photos, status updates, links, and other content just like you would do on your personal Facebook page. Note that you can only “use” Facebook as one identity at a time. To switch between your personal and any page accounts, click the “Home” button at top right and select the identity you would like to use.

Promote Your New Page

Now you’ll want to let people know about your new page. You can do things like:

Claim a Username

Once your page has at least 25 fans, you can claim a username for the page. Now instead of a string of numbers, the link to your page will be the selected username. Note that once you click “confirm” you cannot edit or transfer a username.

Claim a Facebook username

Cross Link Yourself

Make sure you include your website address as well as any other pertinent links like a Twitter or LinkedIn profile in the “Website” field on the “Basic Information” tab.

Then back on your website, you’ll want to cross reference your social media links as well. Most often these are placed in a sidebar and represented with icons. One of my favorite resources for free social media icons is www.icons.mysitemyway.com. Lots of fun colors and styles to choose from! And royalty free for both personal and commercial use.

As mentioned before, the Facebook Like Box is another popular sidebar “widget” as well. You can find this and more social plugins to help promote your page under the “Resources” tab (when you’re in edit mode).

I hope this helps get you started with Facebook pages. If you need help, contact me.

Many small businesses use Feedburner, a free tool from Google, to distribute their blog feeds. Did you know you can add an image to the top of your email message to further strengthen your brand?

How To Do It

It’s quick and easy to do.

Feed Image Burner

LinkedIn is the leading social networking site for business, so today I created a page for my company. Like most social media tools, you can “follow” other company updates, and invite others to follow you.

Here’s how to create your own LinkedIn company profile and start networking with over 100 million members.

Get Started

Creating the page is simple and doesn’t take a lot of time. You will need a free LinkedIn account and personal profile, and an email address with your company domain.

Email addresses using free web mail like Yahoo and Gmail cannot be used to create a LinkedIn company page.

From the LinkedIn main page, click Companies in the main menu and then click Add a Company near the top right. The basic company overview is comprised of the following:

Promote Your Products and Services

In the next tab, define your products and services. In addition to the required category, title, and description, you can add:

Monitor Traffic & Analytics

The last tab, Analytics, is where you can track page views and unique visitors for your overview, careers and product/services pages. You can even compare how your company is doing with similar companies.

Sand Solutions on LinkedIn

MailChimp is the email marketing tool I use and it’s a great option for small businesses because of their “Forever Free Plan”. Most small businesses will not exceed 2,000 subscribers. Plus, it’s really easy to use.

Sign-Up Form Everywhere

You’ll also want to provide an online sign-up form on all of your online points of contact, which allows your customers to subscribe to your mailing list whether they are on your website, Facebook page, YouTube channel, or other online profile.

Get Going

I can help you identify a good email marketing strategy for your business, and get you set up and ready to start publishing. Contact me if you need help.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of designing a website so that search engines index and rank its pages easily and favorably.

The goal here is when someone searches for your product or service using Google or another search engine, your business appears in the first page of search results – the higher the better.

Just about every element of your site (structure, keywords, meta tags, images, videos) can be optimized for the purpose of search engine exposure. An entire industry exists to help website owners obtain a high results page ranking.

Getting It Right

My advice to small businesses – don’t make yourself crazy! Make sure your web designer or developer includes basic SEO best practices in their designs.

Don’t trust anyone who says they “guarantee a top ranking”, because no one can honestly make such a claim. The search engine algorithms are a closely guarded secret, for obvious reasons.

For the DIYer, make sure at the very least that your page titles, descriptions, and keywords accurately define your content. For titles, go for about 60 characters or less; for descriptions, 160 or less.

Use descriptives that go from most specific first to more general last. It’s a bit counter-intuitive for me but that’s how the search engines like it. For example:

Defining your pages is actually a difficult exercise and makes you think carefully about your content and messages. Look at other sites or blogs similar to yours and see how they define their pages. This will get the ideas going.

If you are using a CMS, look for plug-ins that will help you get search engine optimization right. I use All In One SEO Pack for WordPress.

Finally, if you publish both a business website and blog – I highly recommend using the same self-hosted CMS for both. Site traffic helps to increase your site’s ranking – and sending any traffic away from your business website to a third party blog platform like WordPress.com or Blogger will only benefit them, instead of you.

Black Hat Techniques to Avoid

Search engines use different criteria for ranking pages, and those criteria are periodically changed to keep site designers from falsely describing their pages and obtaining a permanent, high ranking.

Attempting to “trick” a search engine is known as black hat SEO or spamdexing, and engines look for sites that employ these techniques and remove them from their ranking entirely. Black hat SEO includes methods such as:

Other Terms

Sponsored vs. Organic. Search results usually include both paid advertisements (indicated by “Sponsored Links”) and organic search results, which are generated by the engine’s indexing algorithm and not paid for in any way.

Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. Many SEO experts consider the optimum keyword density to be 1 to 3 percent. Using a keyword more than that could be considered search spam. Free online keyword density checkers abound – try one at SEO Book.

Backlinks are incoming links to a web page. The number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page.