Luckily for me, most of you can’t tell how old I am.  Well, I’m pretty old (think 80’s big hair days).  So as you can imagine, I may not exactly be cool, hip or up-to-date on things and I’m not (although I’d like to think I am)!  With two little boys consuming most of my waking hours I don’t necessarily have the time to do things like play with my Twitter account.  :( 

Well, after following some seriously experienced tweeters, I’ve ran into a bunch of Twitter slang (RT, HT, OT, etc) that I had NO IDEA how to translate. Oh thank goodness Google exists for this ol’ broad!  I found a wonderful post about what the heck all these acronyms  mean plus other cool Twitter tidbits that I wanted to pass along to you!

http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2008/08/twitter-101/

Happy tweeting everyone!

You can have the coolest looking website around but if you don’t have much content or solid content, you will be guaranteed not to get many visitors.  The reason?  Search engines are not interested in stale content.  If you have stale content, you will rank low with the search engines.  If you have NO content, you will not even rank.  If you have some relevant content that is updated a couple of times a week, you will get more noticed by the search engines.  And if you are writing articles or posting to your blog multiple times a day with relevant content, you will rank highly. 

The idea from an SEO (search engine optimization) standpoint is that you want to be picked up by search engines such as Google and you want to rank highly (that is, you want to appear on the first search page ideally…not several pages in!)  In simplest terms, this is called Organic search results.  You don’t pay Google for showing up “organically” on their searches.  However, if you want to, you can pay Google through their Google AdWords program to show up in their Sponsored Links.  More about that in another post.

So, back to content…

Where do I get this content you ask?  Well, of course, the best way is to write it!  You can also pull RSS feeds to your website but the problem is that others are doing the same thing and the more duplicate content that is on the internet through these RSS feeds, the lower your website will rank according to the search engines if you have those RSS feeds on your website.

Do I have to write it all myself?  No, you don’t!

If you are in a position to write all your content, that’s great.  However, if you just don’t have that kind of time, you can do a number of things.  You can hire a writer through freelance service websites such as elance.com or shelancer.com or you can purchase PLR (Private Label Rights) Articles from various PLR websites. 

How PLR Articles work is that you purchase the rights to an article and then you rewrite that article’s content for your website or newsletter and use it as your own.  You can also purchase the rights to eCourses or eBooks to use as your own.  Just be sure to read the rules for obtaining and using these rights as they can vary slightly from website to website.

A great place to purchase PLR Articles is EasyPLR. 

The owner, Nicole, thoroughly explains PLR on her website and even compares against other PLR sites so you know what you’re getting through her website.  This is a great place to start if you’re interested in using PLR Articles to build content on your website!

Here is a brief intro to advertising your business the best way: the free way!  :) 

If you don’t have any accounts at the following social networking sites, you should create one for each:

http://www.facebook.com

http://www.myspace.com

http://www.twitter.com

http://www.linkedin.com

Facebook

Besides just connecting with friends and family on Facebook, you can also do a couple of important things to help your business:  start a Group for your business or create a Page.

My personal preference is creating a Page for your business.  Why?  Because Pages are more customizable then Groups, you don’t have any limitations on the number of fans you can have and your personal information including your name does NOT appear on the Page unlike Groups.

Once your Page is created, you can post updates on your Page via the Wall message or just add Notes that your Fans can see.  Oh yes, what’s a Fan?  It’s someone who likes you or your company and wants to follow what your business is doing.  By someone becoming a Fan of your business Page, it simply lets others know they like your business.  When they become a Fan, it shows up in their profile for others to see.  It’s displayed as “xxxx just became a fan of xxxx” and the link appears for those curious about checking out this newly added fan page.

You can also add a Link to your profile that will remain static on the left-hand side of your profile so your other Facebook friends will see it whenever they look at your Profile. That’s why it’s important to create a growing presence for yourself and your business on places like Facebook.  It may be not huge but…it’s free advertising and has the potential to be huge or viral.  (Viral Marketing in simplest terms is “word of mouth” marketing - your company URL or website info passed on from person to person.)

MySpace

With MySpace, you can have your MySpace page be your business or you can have your own profile and put your business and/or website info on it.  Ideally, you would create the MySpace page with your business name being the name of the MySpace page.  You will want to get a little personal without getting too personal.  What that means is that you want your visitors to feel comfortable knowing a little bit about you but don’t give too much information about yourself since there are weirdo’s out there!  Also, you can say “No Answer” to some personal info such as your religion preference, etc. 

Here’s a great blog article on MySpace setup for your business http://onlinebusiness.volusion.com/articles/myspace-business-page

The difference between Facebook and MySpace is that ANYONE on MySpace can see your profile versus Facebook where you can only be invited by your friends to be added as a Friend on Facebook.  A nice safety mechanism if you ask me!  The only caveat is that while your Facebook profile is hidden from the general public, your Facebook Page is not.   Anyone with a Facebook account can see your Page (not your Profile) so I would be careful not to put too much personal information on the Page.

Twitter

Twitter is another popular place for social networking.  Twitter’s concept is pretty simple and this model may or may not work for your particular business, but hey, it’s worth a shot.  Okay, after you create an account on Twitter, you can put out messages on your Twitter account (which should be your business name) giving your Followers updates in 140 characters or less. 

So you put out very short messages or as the industry calls them “tweets”.  Other tweeters or followers may see those tweets and if interested, they will start to follow you.  In these tweets, you can put out short messages such as “hey, I just read an awesome article on generating revenue for your business” for example, and then ideally you’d put a URL link to that article so people can click on the link (which is nice because it validates your tweet).  The more followers, the more hits you’ll receive on your website. 

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is another great site although it’s more for networking from a career standpoint.  However, it’s good to create an account because it’s another good inbound link to your website (helps with SEO).  When you setup your profile, you should add your business information and URL link also.

This is really just the tip of the iceberg.  There is so much more you can do with using social networking sites to boost your company’s business and I’ll be adding those in the next week or so.

PPC or Pay Per Click is a form of advertising on the internet particularly on search engines such as Google or Yahoo but also commonly used on websites containing content such as blogs.  PPC’s are everywhere.  You’ve seen it when you Google.  Take a look next time you’re on Google - type in a search for something like “designer jeans” and when the search results are returned, you’ll notice that there are “Sponsored Links” above the organic results on the top left and also vertically down the right side.  These Sponsored Links or Sponsored Ads are paid advertisements.

People advertising on Google pay them every time someone clicks on their ads or Sponsored Links.  This type of advertising is called Google AdWords.  On Yahoo, it would be called Yahoo! Search Marketing.  And there are many more places where this type of advertising takes place but for simplicity’s sake, we’ll just focus on Google.

These people advertising on Google also bid on the keywords (the search terms that people type in such as “designer jeans”).  For example, let’s say you are a denim store called XYZ Jeans and you want to pay for advertisements on Google.  You would:

1.       Create a Google AdWords account (takes 5 minutes)

2.       Create  an Ad Campaign if you haven’t already done so (typically it’s 2-3 lines of something catchy that will entice people to click on your Sponsored Link).  This Ad Campaign will show up anytime someone types in your keywords (see next line).

3.       Assigned Keywords to your Ad Campaign related to your business (this is where you bid on keywords and where it can get costly for your business if you’re not careful - there are likely to be major companies you are bidding against who have bigger budgets than you).  The bottom line is the more you pay for these keywords, the closer you get to having your ad displayed on the first page.

So, now you have an Ad Campaign running on Google:  a user comes along on Google and types the search terms which happen to be the keywords you paid for (eg. “designer jeans”) and voila!  You’ve probably paid a hefty price for those keywords and now your Ad or Ad Campaign showed up on the first page!  Woo hoo!  The user clicks on it and gets taken to your website and Google deducts the cost of the bid or CPC (Cost Per Click) from your Google AdWords account .

But you’re saying that good to know but I want to make money not pay for those darn Per Per Whatevers!  Okay, then.   Check out Part 2 of this article.