How can your small business leverage Facebook?
Looking for the secret recipe on marketing your business on Facebook?
What special tricks can you learn about one of the Internet’s most popular network platforms?
Do you have a Facebook Marketing Strategy?
Facebook is here to stay. Just look at the cover of Canadian Business on July 19 for proof. Is your business ready for the Facebook generation?
More and More businesses are now looking at how they can market through Facebook, create strong networks, build loyal followings and increase sales in their business. Now is the time for your Canadian Small Business to develop a series of Facebook Marketing Strategies that work.
Join Ulistic for a no cost Webinar on Facebook Marketing on July 5, 2010 at Noon Eastern Time/9 AM Pacific.
Stuart Crawford is a Calgary Social Media Coach and works with a number of leading and progressive small businesses across North America. During this 60 minute webinar Stuart will share exciting tips and tricks on how you can market your business with Facebook without breaking the rules. Stuart will share core strategies on connecting with the right folks who will help you build your brand, product or service in and out of the Facebook world. Understand how you can leverage the power of other people’s networks and build a loyal following.
Register online for Ulistic’s webinar on Facebook Marketing.
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Ulistic focuses on serving the needs of Business, REALTORS, and Information Technology firms across Canada and United States. Helping your business understand, deploy and leverage social media, search engine optimization and online communications to generate business opportunities and make an impact inside your community and industry.
My business partner Stuart and I are business professionals first. We understand what it takes to run a successful small business.
I invite you to reach out to me personally at 403.775.2205 or email dawest@ulistic.com.
The point of email is to communicate. Years ago, when I felt like I was one of 4 people in Canada with an email account, I read a bit on email ettiquette. One of the points always stuck with me, “One day you will send an email that you will regret.” I have indeed.
Have you ever sent an email message that you regret? Big corporate servers sometime allow users to recall their sent email, if it is sent to a co-worker. Traditionally though, when you fire off that heated response to politically charged cult leader (he who’s name we shall not speak is what we call him)… your mail is gone forever and you can’t take it back.
The ability to get delivery and read reciepts is also a function that is missing in many modern email clients and web based email solutions such as gmail.
Enter the solutions: PointofMail
PointofMail is a great web service that allows you to send email by appening .poinofmail.com to the email recipients address. The email goes through the PointofMail server and then spins off to the intended recipient. You can setup your account to simply track delivery, opens and forwarded email. If you wish though, you can kick it up a notch and send your mail so that it can self destruct after a pre-determined period of time or so that you can, at will, recall the message.
In order to facilitate instant self destructing email or email that you can litterally yank out of the other persons inbox, PointofMail actually converts the email into an image and send the image to the final recipient. When you recall a message, PointofMail simply deletes the image off of their secure server. Should the person look at the message after it is recalled, you can have a polite little note show up… “sorry, I recalled my note because it was time sensitive, please call me …”
One nice feature is the ability to track attachments, such as how many times an attachment is read. You can also track your email message as it is being forwarded. In terms of sending sales proposals or other sensitive documents, you can learn quite a bit about the interest in your message by the frequency that it is opened, and forwarded.
Incidentally, when you send through PointofMail, you dont’ have to recall the message completely. You can simply edit the message. Change the message completely if you wish and it simply updates in the recipients email box!
If you send a document that is highly confidential and you want to, you can send it with a prompt to automatically delete itself if the first recipient tries to forward it to another person. You can even password protect these highly sensitive messages with PointoMail!
PointofMail.com has plans starting as low as $29.99 per year. Check it out here…
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Ulistic focuses on serving the needs of Business, REALTORS, and Information Technology firms across Canada and United States. Helping your business understand, deploy and leverage social media, search engine optimization and online communications to generate business opportunities and make an impact inside your community and industry.
My business partner Stuart and I are business professionals first. We understand what it takes to run a successful small business.
I invite you to reach out to me personally at 403.775.2205 or email dawest@ulistic.com.
Among online marketers, few things are as misunderstood as search engine optimization. The premise is simple enough: get your site to one of the top rankings for important keywords on Google, Yahoo, or Bing, and new customers will flood in through the virtual front door. The reality, however, is that it’s usually a whole lot harder than that.
Here are three reasons your search engine optimization plans might not be working out the way they were supposed to:
You aren’t being patient enough. There’s no way around this one – SEO takes some time. It’s usually 3 to 6 months before most marketers will even see their site show up in the first couple of pages of search results, and depending on how competitive your industry is, it could be twice as long before you make it to one of the top spots. Just because you aren’t getting a lot of hits yet doesn’t mean your search engine plan isn’t working; be patient, do the right things, and it will.
You are emphasizing the wrong keywords or phrases. One of the great ironies of SEO is that the money isn’t always where we think it is. In other words, even though we think a certain word or phrase is going to be profitable, it might turn out that the best customers are searching for different variations – or something completely different. All you can do, as a marketer, is make an informed guess and then keep adjusting your campaigns as you go along. Eventually, you’ll find the most profitable terms to target.
Your landing pages aren’t doing the trick. Hits mean nothing if they aren’t turning into sales. As important as your search engine optimization content is, it’s just as critical that you have strong sales elements on your landing pages. Make sure to tweak and test different versions so that your buying ratios are improving over time.
The real goal of SEO is never to gather traffic, but to increase sales.
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Ulistic focuses on serving the needs of Business, REALTORS, and Information Technology firms across Canada and United States. Helping your business understand, deploy and leverage social media, search engine optimization and online communications to generate business opportunities and make an impact inside your community and industry.
My business partner Stuart and I are business professionals first. We understand what it takes to run a successful small business.
I invite you to reach out to me personally at 403.775.2205 or email dawest@ulistic.com.
Her resume was posted on a website and was indexed by Google …exposing it all.
Have you ever submitted a resume’ or other personal information to a company only to have it show up on the Internet, in it’s entirety, on Google search results?
That’s what happened recently to a job seeker in Calgary. She passed her resume onto a large professional association in hopes that it may be used to place a “job seeker” ad at the website. Little did she know that they were going to upload the resume’ to their website and make it public. The association may not have even meant to expose the document. May website owners don’t realize that even documents uploaded into a “client only” area can in some cases be indexed by search engines.
Here is what the client had to say,
“Thanks for your assistance earlier. As I mentioned, xxxxxx provides a wonderful service involving allowing job seekers to submit their resumes for posting to the xxxxxx website. A few months ago, I submitted my resume to xxxxxxx. Recently I decided to use the Google search engine to do a search on myself. I was curious about what the public will be able to retrieve when they enter
“xxx_my_name_xxx Calgary” into a search engine. Unfortunately, as a result of submitting my resume to the xxxxxx website anyone who enters “xxxxxxx” into a search engine can now retrieve my entire resume.
In the past I have submitted my resume to job search sites (for example, like Monster and Workopolis) and it doesn’t make my resume available for the the entire world to see if they enter my name into a search engine. “
The job seeker spoke to the professional association to remove the resume from their website and received a response back that it is removed. When I investigated, the document is still online and still shows up in Google search engine results. While the website owner may very well have removed links referencing the document, the physical PDF file still remains on the server. This roots itself in “out of site, out of mind”, but on a webserver, once a document is indexed by a search engine the spiders will come back and check on it. As long as the document resides on the public server, it will not drop out of the index.
While many people fight to have their website and documents surface on first page of Google, this is one case where the call to Ulistic was to help get it off of Google. The calls for ‘reverse SEO‘ or reputation management are increasing. Unheard of three years ago, reputation management is a phrase that we are all sadly going to have to learn.
To the credit of the professional association, it is clear that they are offering to make submitted resume’s available on the website for public viewing. It was not clear to this particular website visitor though and she did not realize that the PDF file she submitted would win her a first page placement on Google.
Ulistic Inc. is a Calgary Internet Consultancy where our team of expert internet consultants deal with this type of issue daily. Do you need and internet consultant on your team?
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Ulistic focuses on serving the needs of Business, REALTORS, and Information Technology firms across Canada and United States. Helping your business understand, deploy and leverage social media, search engine optimization and online communications to generate business opportunities and make an impact inside your community and industry.
My business partner Stuart and I are business professionals first. We understand what it takes to run a successful small business.
I invite you to reach out to me personally at 403.775.2205 or email dawest@ulistic.com.
While still in it’s infancy, YouTube has introduced a video editor (available through labs) or at this address.
It is a rather simple interface that allows you to clip the front and end of any of the videos in your account and then join to other portions of your own video archive. A second track allows you to add a sound track from a list of available royalty free selections.
As with all Google products it is likely to be expanded upon in the near future. The addition of transitions and filters would be welcomed. As it stands today it is still rather clunky, but as with most Google initiatives I hold hope for it. I would be disappointing if I had to buy it, it it’s current state, but as is usually the case with Google’s beta offerings it is without a fee and of course no obligation to use it.
Watch for other features to roll out soon too; such as the ability to synchronize slide shows with your uploaded video.
If you have a YouTube channel, have a peek. (click the image to enlarge it)
http://www.youtube.com/editor
Cheers
David A. West
