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Facebook to charge users to "promote" posts to their friends

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Facebook is experimenting with a new revenue stream, paid personal posts, but the idea could backfire. “I don’t think the average user will pay to have a post promoted unless it was in some way related to business or advertising. When asking our fans if they would be willing to pay, the general response was a flat-out ‘no,'” said Lauren Formalarie of SayItSocial.

Facebook wants you to advertise … to your friends.

The world’s largest social network, which announced Thursday that it has crossed the billion-user mark, has struggled to make money from its enormous pool of users. The solution: Turning individual users into advertisers.

“I thought it was a joke at first, to be honest,” explained Cameron Yuill, founder of digital media technology company AdGent. “Now they’re going to charge me $7 to tell my friends something?”

Facebook announced Wednesday that Joe Sixpack will soon be able to ensure that you’re reading his messages, thanks to an expansion of the Promoted Posts program, which lets businesses pay anywhere from a few dollars to a few thousand to ensure that hundreds of thousands of Facebookers see your posts.

I toyed with the idea of “paying” to promote this post, then I realized Mark has enough money and doesn’t need any of mine to promote his new ideas.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2012/10/04/facebook-to-charge-users-to-promote-posts-to-friends

Supercharge your WordPress site

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WordPress speed testGoogle is always trying to improve the users experience. This is the reason they add page load time their algorithm in ranking sites. Everybody is in a hurry, nobody wants to wait for a slow loading site. With more and more sites using WordPress it’s important that your fully optimize your WordPress for speed.

Fortunately, there are some basic rules and techniques to follow that can improve your website performance and increase the quality of your viewer’s experience.

Here’s my top five:

1 Optimize your images: I love to use sliders with 3 to 5 pictures on the home page and many others load up images on your home page. Images grab attention and quickly tell the “story” of your company. However, make certain you resize the images to the appropriate format before uploading them. If the image size is large, make it smaller to improve your page loading speed. Here’s one of our site’s with a couple of 870 x 400 images in the slide show, each image is less than 100K. Smaller images should be even slower. This is perhaps the fastest and easiest way to improve load time.

2: Upgrade your software: This is also important for security. WordPress developers are always working to create a better and faster versions of their software. So upgrading WordPress, your themes and plugins is important.

3: Install W3 Total Cache: This plugin is easy to install and works great. It reduces page load time and improves overall site performance.

4: Limit Number of Post on Home page: Optimize home page: Don’t over crowd your home page with numerous posts. Fewer posts also improves the look of your site. Limit number of posts to 4-6 and show excerpts only instead of full posts.

5: Use a good hosting provider: Ooops here comes the self-serving plug. All my sites are hosted on my dedicated server at RackSpace. This provides the fastest possible hosting since I am not a shared server with other “unknown” sites that could be sucking up the bandwidth. However, there are many good reliable providers out there. Here’s a good link to test the speed of your site.

Are you hiding from Google ?

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Everyone wants to appear first in a Google search. With Google latest release of Penguin they are trying hard to reward sites with GOOD content, while at the same time penalizing sites trying to “game” the system. People spend countless hours and vast sums of money optimizing their site. This is important to maximize your exposure, however, too many people fail to incorporate simple changes that can have a dramatic effect on their ranking.

However, the rules are explained by Google and explained in their Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Below is a paragraph from the guidelines.

Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the “ALT” attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.

Many sites use Flash or graphics to display text on their pages. It’s important you verify that your webmaster didn’t use “images” instead of “text”. Sometimes this is done because the client wants a specific font, however, there are better ways to handle this. Thus it’s important that you check the site yourself. Below are the simple steps to check.

1: Type in your site’s name in a google browser
2: Your site should be listed on the top. Move your mouse to the right of your domain and you will see two arrows.
3: Click on “cached”
4: Then click on “text-only version”
5: You will then see what Google sees

Below is the result of a site we just redid. Below is what each of the interior pages from the old site looked like to Google. So Google was unable to index the text from the site and thus it’s impossible for Google to “learn” how to rank this site. The new site we designed use important key words in the text, which were easily indexed by Google. Now the client has a good chance to rank well for important key words, whereas before it was impossible.

If this is too complicated you can send me your domain name and I will be happy to check for you no charge.

 

 

 

 

 

Linkedin announces New Business Pages

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LinkedIn announced this month new redesigned business profiles, which are officially known as Company Pages.

These new pages contain company specific business look similar to Facebook’s business page. Business can even add large Cover Photos similar to their Facebook Business Page.

“We know a picture is worth a thousand words, so we’ve provided companies with the ability to easily add an image that best represents their company and brand,” Linkedin said in a press release.

The real power of Linkedin is that it’s networking on steroids. You can quickly learn about hundreds of potential leads and more importantly THEY can learn more about you.

Make certain to update your Linkedin profile with compelling information that speaks to your unique selling position.

Google's Latest Algo change Penguin – what you need to know.

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With so many changes in Google’s rankings recently, keeping track of what Google’s been doing can be tough, so here’s an update to help. With details of what’s happened and what you can do about it, you’ll (hopefully) get a clearer picture of what Google’s been up to.

What became clear from your comments is that Google has made a number of updates over the past six weeks. And the effects of these different updates have become hard to separate. So, if you’ve been hit, this article will help you identify whether the cause was Penguin or one of Google’s other updates.

Click here to read the entire story on Penguin the latest change from Google.