ActiveRain Tutorials

I wrote a blog a few months back here at ActiveRain that was very well received titled "3 Tips to Getting Your Website To The First Page Of Google" in which I shared three really basic principles to help move your website/blog to the first page of Google.  They were

• Write good quality keyword rich content.
• Be consistent with writing.
• Link, Link, Link!

The last point about linking seems to be an area of confusion to people, so I wanted to explain this point in a little more detail as well as share a really easy way to help get some awesome SEO benefits from a feature here at ActiveRain. 

The Basics To Linking

The biggest confusion seems to always revolve around reciprocal links.  Back a few years ago, the search engines used to give major SEO juice to links of any type.  So, at that time, some learned quickly that they could increase their ranking by simply adding a few links to their page & get a bunch of links in return.  The owner of Site A would put a link to Site B on their page, and in return, the owner of Site B would put one to Site A on their page. 

This practice worked well for regular consumers who knew friends with websites and were just trying to help each other out with some linking.  Friends shared links, and everyone was happy. 

UNTIL people decided to take this practice to extremes.  Suddenly there became places online that you could go and "register" your site.  After registering, you then were given a list of links to add to your page and after it was completed, you would then have a few hundred links pointed toward your site. So site A would link to Sites A-1,248 and in return, the 1,248 sites that you placed links on your page would return the favor.  Of course, this was all for a nominal fee.

This new spamming practice where you could buy your way to the top of the search engines quickly caught on and hundreds of sites with thousands of links came along which quickly forced search engines to change the way they looked at links.  Search engines recognized that there wasn't as much quality anymore in the high quantity of links and decided to not give credit anymore for reciprocal links.  Instead, they changed it that only links from one site to another without the reciprocation would get full credit.  Reciprocals don't harm you, but they do not give you the SEO benefits like they used to. 

Now for a website to get the full benefits of links, you need to have them all going in one direction.  Meaning that if you have a page link to you, you do not want to put links back to them on the same site they are linking to, or you are forfeiting some really good SEO. 

Using ActiveRain For Powerful Link Juice

So how do you use ActiveRain to optimize the link juice?  The first way to use ActiveRain to get the most potent Google Juice is to not fill your website with links to every single post you write on ActiveRain.  It is fine to have a link on your personal website back to your ActiveRain Profile and blog, but some go a little extreme by placing links to every blog post they write on their website.  Or, they reference and link to blog posts they write here on ActiveRain on their Website blog.  When you do this, you are in essence creating reciprocal links from individual blog posts on ActiveRain with your website and lose a bunch of the potency in your link juice. 

Cut out these constant links and have them all go in one direction.  You can choose which place you want to give the SEO to.  My opinion is to use the power of ActiveRain and the page rank 5 it possesses to help your website that probably isn't ranking as high.  Also, if you are like me, you want the consumers to end up at your website because there is normally much more content & offerings for a consumer there that you are limited from doing here on ActiveRain.  If ActiveRain is the only place you work online, please STOP reading immediately and click here to email me to discuss getting you set up with your own online presence. 

The second best way to optimize links from ActiveRain is to add an effective Automatic Signature to your posts on ActiveRain.  What the automatic signature does is place the exact same footer at the bottom of every single post you write.  I am sure by now you have seen several here who have the awesome little bottle cap buttons for different social media sites.  Others have photos of themself or their company logo in their signature. Whatever you decide, be in love with it, because there is no way to choose which posts it does or does not go to, so keep things on the generic end.

The one feature that gets overlooked a lot in these signatures is the ability to place anchored text hyperlinks to anywhere you wish.  This means every post you write can become SEO juiced links back to your website.  I placed a link to my website in my automatic signature.  It is the link that says 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors.  This actually serves dual purposes.  It gives me a link to my site, but it also helps with my keyword ranking for the term Social Media Advisors. ALSO don't forget the fact that this also goes along with any re-blogs of your posts or any ActiveRain outside blogs your content gets syndicated to.

So does this work?  I think it works pretty well, checkout these stats:

3,182 Inlinks to my website predominantly all from ActiveRain addresses & outside blogs.

Taking Over Page One of Google

One of our main keywords for our business is Social Media Advisors which we regularly hold several positions on the first page of Google for the term.  One of the things that helps us do this is the link juice from our ActiveRain automatic signatures.  Between my business partner, Jason Crouch & myself we have written well over 1,500 public posts here at ActiveRain all with a link pointing to our website. 

So if you have not yet set up your Automatic Signature, I suggest doing so immediately.  You are losing some major SEO benefits by not having one.  If you do not know how to set one up, I wrote a tutorial when ActiveRain Announced Automatic Signatures. It will show you how to go about setting up your signature. 

As I stated in that post, Please Do Not Abuse The Signature! This is not a license to place six inches of jargon at the bottom of each post you write.  The other warning I would make is to not place a video or dozens of graphics and animated things.  If you place too many things in your signature, it will slow down the loading of your page which will hurt all the good efforts that your signature is designed to do.  Page load speed is another factor that Google uses to determine ranking of a page, so keep it simple!

Now that you realize that this is a necessity, go set your automatic signature up NOW!

One of the things that I have wanted to do for a long time was have some sort of event here in the Carolinas where people could come and learn the basics of social media and how to use it effectively for their business.  There are always all these great events like RainCamp & BarCamps all over the country, but the amount of stuff here in the Carolinas is normally very minimal.

UNTIL NOW!

I am excited to be holding a half day workshop on Understanding Social Media. If you are an individual, business, church, charity, or any other organization that would like to have a better understanding of how social media platforms can be used to increase income, increase growth, and the strategies that you should use to maximize your efforts on each network, then you want to attend this workshop.

Here are a few of the topics we will cover in detail:

*Having an Effective Website
*Fundamentals of Blogging
*Twitter 101
*Facebook Personal Profiles
*Facebook Pages for businesses & organizations
*Using Video Online Effectively

This is a completely free event being hosted at Beach Family Worship Center.  The address is 133 Highway 707 Connector, Myrtle Beach, SC 29588.  It is located next to the Socastee Library.  Get Directions.

Please register below:

So if you live in the southeast and want to learn more about how to use social media to increase your business I hope you will make the journey to Myrtle Beach to this event. If you have any questions about this event, please e-mail me or call 843-222-9402.

Since this Friday I am teaching a webinar for ActiveRain University titled Customizing Your ActiveRain Blog that it was time for me to share about the importance of building your brands across all social media platforms.  Instead of writing a 3,000 word novel to cover all of the different platforms that exist and tips to customizing each, I figured I would break this down into a series. 

The first network I want to talk about today is Customizing your Facebook Page.  But before I get into what to customize and how, I first want to share the difference between the three main categories Facebook offers. The first is a Facebook Profile.  A profile is your personal page on Facebook.  It is where you have "friends" and can connect with people on a personal level.  What many do not realize about these profiles is that Facebook frowns heavily on you doing any business on them.  In fact, section 4.2 of Facebook TOS says this: "You will not use your personal profile for commercial gain." Pretty self explanatory.

A Facebook Group is the second category of Facebook that I wanted to discuss.  These pages are limited to the number of members you can have.  Also, they normally require each person to be accepted into the group.  They also have several limitations to the customization end of things. So while these might be good idea, they have some major limitations when it comes to being effective for business.

The third Facebook category which I want to talk in detail about is Facebook Pages.  These are designed for businesses.  They allow many customizations and also unlimited number of fans.  Many times though, when I look at Facebook Pages, I see so many things that could use some improvement. 

Here are my 4 most important things to do when customizing a Facebook Page.

1.  Fill in the about me section on your main page.  Facebook pages have a small about me section on the main area of your page.  Make sure you fill this area in with a brief description of what the page is about.  The other thing that is good to do here is add a link to your website.  You can do so by just typing out the full URL to your site.

This is a quick and easy way to share a little bit of information about the purpose of your page and also your business.  Like I mentioned, keep this brief.  Don't try to get into a sales pitch here or you will lose the consumer before they even take the time to click to become a fan.

2.  Custom avatars-  Did you know that you can create your own custom avatars for your Facebook Page?  Instead of using a standard 200x200 photo, you can actually have something that is up to 540 pixels long!  One of the big advantages to the larger custom avatars is that they will stand out from your competition when someone is searching for pages to join.  If the logos for all the other pages are small and yours is over twice the size, you have a much better chance of them noticing you.  Here are a few ideas for other things to incorporate into your avatar.  You can add additional text, graphics, & colors to it.  While the links you add are not going to be able to be clicked, you can give people valuable information like a quick reference to your phone number, twitter account, etc.

Here are a few that I recently designed for clients.  You can see what I mean:

The key though to making these larger avatars is that you have to keep in mind the logo that will show up on your thumbnails on the wall.  So it is important that you use the correct spacing, sizing etc for your main logo/image. If not, you will end up with half of your head, or logo showing up on the thumbnails and that doesn't always look the greatest.  If you are graphically design challenged, I can help.

3. Integration of Blog- There are several ways to integrate your blog into your Facebook page.  While some work better than others, you have to go with the process you prefer.  I personally like mine coming in as an RSS feed through social RSS, but you can also use the notes function if you wish.  The key though is to feed in your blog information so that there is a steady stream of content other than just your regular wall posts.  One word of caution though, remember when you set up the RSS feed that it feeds everything posted to that domain.  So if you set it up & then place a blog post that is off topic or slightly offensive, it will be visible to your Facebook page as well.

4.  Custom Welcome Tab-  This is by far the most effective thing you can have on your Facebook page.  You can set this to be the tab that greets every single guest to your site.  That way they can get to know you immediately.  Our Facebook Page which was built by Mike Mueller, has a nice welcome video from myself & Jason Crouch that greets every single fan to our page.  We kept our video under a minute and just thank people for visiting & encourage them to become a fan.  In less than 10 days, it has been viewed 100 times! 

These custom tabs can also have all types of things added to them.  Including good keyword rich content, links to pages of your website, links to other services you offer.  If you know FBML, you can really do some awesome things on a page.  But, if you are like me and are not an expert on FBML (Facebook Markup Language) then I would HIGHLY recommend you contact Mike Mueller to build your page.  He has done over 200 of them & is really up to date on all the changes in specs to the pages.  That way you do not have someone build a great custom page for you to find out the next week that Facebook is making major changes to size allotments & other specs.  If you want a page, contact him here.  Also, because he likes me so much, he told me I can offer a 10% discount if you mention my name.  So tell him Jeremy sent you!

Take these 4 simple steps, place them into action, and you can really have one really awesome custom page that is branded to your business.  This means that if they find you on a website or on Facebook, it doesn't really matter because both sites look, feel & act in very similar manners. If you don't believe me, take a look at our website & Facebook page.  You will definitely see the correlation in our branding between the two.

If you want to learn more about how to customize your Facebook Page, feel free to contact me directly or register for our workshop on 3/17/10 at 2PM EST. Mike is going to teach you more on how to build awesome custom Facebook pages like ours!

Branding your image is one of the most important aspects of any business.  You need to have an image that depicts you and the business you are involved in.  Many sites require complex steps to customize a theme and make it the way you wish.  ActiveRain offers you a really great option on how to customize your blog to represent your image better.  Unfortunately, very few really master how to accomplish this.

Have you ever seen a blog on ActiveRain that looks like this?

I know I surely have.  While this type of theme might be acceptable on this network, it really doesn't convey a professional branding that you would wish to associate with your business.  On Friday March 19th at 11 AM EST (8 AM PST) I will be teaching at ActiveRain University on how to customize your your blog on ActiveRain.  This 1 hour webinar will cover the following:

• Creating a Custom Header that has Pizazz.
• Uploading a Header to your ActiveRain Blog & Outside Blog.
• Customizing your ActiveRain Background to compliment your header.

Now, in case you were wondering why ActiveRain chose me to teach this class, let me show you a few examples of headers I have created in the past for clients:

And here are a few more examples of member blogs that I have customized:

These are just a few customizations on ActiveRain that I have done for clients in the past.  In this webinar, I will show you step by step how to take your blog customizations to the next level.

To register for this class, visit: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/752157441.

7 Secrets to Facebook Page Success

I am sure by now we all know that Facebook is an absolute must for your business, but you may not understand why this is so important. Allow me to share a few statistics that might make it more obvious why everyone who is in business needs to have a Facebook page.

General Stats

• More than 400 million active users on Facebook
• 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day
• More than 3 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
• More than 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
• More than 3.5 million events created each month

Many though get confused by the personal profiles and Facebook Pages which are designated for business. If you weren't aware, Facebook frowns heavily on the use of a personal page for business purposes. In fact, I have heard of profiles being shut down because they were being used for the wrong purpose. A client of mine the other week ran into restrictions on his profile because it had too much business dealings taking place for their liking. They made it almost impossible to add friends, join a page, or even attend an event. The other thing with a personal page is that you are limited toonly 5,000 friends. Facebook pages allow you to have unlimited fans and talk about business as much as you wish. Because of these rules that are in place on Facebook, not only are more and more people joining daily, but so are businesses setting up a page is growing at astronomical rates.

Take a look at some of these stats on Facebook Pages:

• More than 1.5 million local businesses have active Pages on Facebook
• More than 20 million people become fans of Pages each day
• Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans

In a constant effort to provide the best content for our clients, 210 Consulting is bringing in one of the most proficient people on the planet about Facebook Fan Pages, Mike Mueller. Mike has created over 150 custom Facebook pages for clients and is constantly keeping abreast of any changes to Facebook. He has also traveled around the country teaching hundreds the basics of Facebook pages and how to use them successfully.

We are excited for Mike to join us for this FREE 60 minute webinar titled "7 Secrets to Facebook Success" on Tuesday, March 9th at 2PM EST.

To register for this free class, simply fill out the form below.  Seating is limited and is on a first come first serve basis. We hope to see you there!

It is no secret by now that social media is a huge component to any real estate agents marketing plan.  Blogging, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are so important in generating new contacts and increasing business.  But, with the constant changing of tools, new applications, and new platforms emerging, it can become overwhelming quickly as to which are effective and what isn't 

Join Jason Crouch and myself tomorrow as we will share over 35 different tools that we implement regularly in our social media marketing plan in two back to back webinars.  These 45 minute webinars will be fast-paced and give you a cursory overview of tools we love using in our business.  The class times are 12:30 & 1:30 ET. 

To register for these sessions, simply fill out the form below and you will receive an email tomorrow with a link to join the session.  Here are just a few of the things we will talk about:

• Facebook
• Facebook Business Pages
• Posterous
• Google Alerts
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Mobile Apps for Blackberry & iPhone
  

Obviously, we will be cover a lot more than listed above.  As mentioned these sessions are completely free to anyone who wishes to attend.  Seating is limited to 25 seats per class and will be on a first come first serve basis.  If you can't attend tomorrow's session, fill out the form anyways and we can add you to our mailing list to keep you informed when this class will be taught again.  Make sure to fill out the form below completely & correctly so we can contact you tomorrow with the webinar information.

We look forward to seeing everyone tomorrow!

The concept of getting your website to the first page of Google seems like an almost impossible task to many.  People spend months writing more and more content for their site, getting backlinks, and editing things without ever getting your website to the first page of Google.  You feel defeated when your site stays on page 17 and just won't budge.  Then one day you get a call from a company who promises “if you give us $395.00 per month, we will put your site on the first page of Google.” The part that these telemarketers neglect to mention is that the moment you stop paying them, your website will drop faster than lead balloon.  As a former real estate agent, I used to get these calls regularly.

So, how can you actually get your website to the first page of Google?  Well, there are a couple of really basic principles that you’ll need to implement.  The “basics” are just that – basic.  Before I share these, first you need to learn to not over-complicate things.  Here are 3 easy steps to getting your website to the first page of Google:

1. Good, solid, keyword-rich content. So what is quality keyword-rich content? Basically, it’s content that gives something of value to consumers and search engines.  You need to have keyword-rich posts that answer the questions your consumers have.  Do not just spit out some random words and call it a post.  If you write just to write and do not really have purpose, you are basically wasting your time if you are trying to get business.  Develop a gameplan for your content and stick to it.

Ten well-written, targeted, keyword dense posts will bring a greater result than 100 posts that are thrown together quickly, with topics all over the place, and which contain piles of typos, grammatical errors, and more.  This is a prime example of the principle of quality over quantity for the greatest result possible.

2.  Writing Consistently on Your Blog. Many times people start working on getting their website to the first page of Google and after the first month or so they simply give up. One of the key factors to getting your website on the first page of Google is to consistently offer fresh content on your site.  The easiest way to do this, of course, is to integrate a blog into your page.

You don’t need to have a Masters degree in English to have an effective blog.  You just need to publish 2-3 good, quality posts each week that offer valuable content to your readers that are also written with your primary keywords in mind.  One of the biggest excuses that I hear is that a business does not have time to write.  According to HubSpot, businesses who blog receive 55% more visitors than companies who do not.

Here’s a simple time management strategy:  On the weekend or whenever you have a few spare hours, (watching a football game, relaxing by the fire, etc.), sit down and write 2 or 3 really good quality posts.  Then, on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday you can launch these pre-written posts.  You can then take the rest of the week to respond to comments, etc.  To the consumers and search engines, it appears as though you have written new content on three different days.

This practice is far healthier for your rankings than writing a bunch of content one day, then waiting 7-10 days to write more.  Why? The search engines are constantly visiting your page to index more content.  The freshness is important when it comes to Google’s indexing algorithm.  Also, they see a constant stream of new stuff instead of a bunch on one day, then a week of dormancy until you get around to posting again.  This is also helpful for your consumer audience of readers.  If you publish 3-4 posts all at once, the likelihood of those posts bringing you good consumer traffic from those subscribed to your blog is minimal.  Most consumers will read maybe one post, but will not have the time, attention span, or energy to read multiple posts.

3.  Link, Link, Link! The more sites that are pointing links at your page (especially when titled with the keywords you are trying to achieve) will produce a great return.  One easy way to get some great links pointing to your site is to make sure you have added your business site to your profiles on any and all networks you participate in.  Links from higher ranking sites help the search engines realize that these sites recognize your website. 

It is kind of like when Oprah endorsed KFC’s new grilled chicken promo.  In no time, there were over 2 million coupons printed and many were left missing out on the promotion because of lack of supply. Links from reputable sites make your own site seem more reputable. 

One thing for sure, you need to make positive that the links you insert places are actually working for you.  Many networks block the search engines from following the links to prevent spam.  (I will be writing more about this in the future.)

Another great way to get links, is to ask your friends and family members to place a link on their blogs, websites, etc.  Two things with regards to linking: do not pay a link farm service.  Search engines don’t value these links – I could go into great detail about why, but just rest assured that it’s a waste of time and money. The other tip is to not do a reciprocal link when possible.  This means, if your brother links to your site, do not put a link back to his. 

A detour. An easy alternative to reciprocal links is to have a link triangle. In this case, your brother links to your site, you link to your parents, and your parents link to your brother’s page.  All links are one-way and none are going back and forth.  The more links you can have pointed at your site, the better it will help in getting your website to the first page of Google. You can think of each link as a “vote” for your site.

If you implement just these three tips, it will help get your website onto the first page of Google.  Obviously,  there are plenty of other factors that contribute to this phenomenon.  If you take these and not only integrate into your website, but also into your blog, the most vital part to your website, you will start seeing results in a rather quick fashion. These three items I discussed alone can make or break the effectiveness of a website. 

If you have any questions, let me know. And by the way, 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors offers some really great personal coaching taught by myself and Jason Crouch on this subject.

Photo Credits: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mklingo/245562110/ & http://www.flickr.com/photos/spiderpop/2798740868/

One of the most common questions that I keep getting asked over & over is by many of our members here on ActiveRain is "How do I get those I work with & my friends to try out ActiveRain.  They just don't understand it and how to use it for business."  I also get asked by many of our members to teach the class for their brokerage.  In fact, many have asked if I would come personally & teach the class at their office. 

While unfortunately I am not able to physically travel around the US to visit each & every current & new member in person,  I am however able to do it virtually through technology.  As many of you know, I started a few months back teaching a Blogging Basics 101 class for our new members that have not yet become a Rainmaker. With our webinar software, I am now able to teach up to 1,000 people at a time.  So if you have a small or large company or brokerage, I should be able to accommodate. So, without further ado, let me announce that I will now be offering my Blogging Basics 101 class to not only new members, but also to brokerages, & businesses alike.  

So, if you have been telling your staff & friends about ActiveRain & encouraging them to sign up but they have not yet taken the time to do so, this class is for you & them!  This is the perfect solution to help all of your friends that are real estate agents, lenders, home inspectors,home stagers, & brokers to finally get their blogging career started in the right direction.   

What Can Be Expected in this Webinar?

In this class I will teach you: 

How to Optimize Your ActiveRain Profile.
How to Insert Photos into your Blog
How to Insert Hyperlinks.
Setting up Your Outside Blog.
How to write effective blog posts for consumers & search engines.

How to use your blog to connect with your community.
Topics to write about on your blog.
Question & Answer  
Why Blogs are the most important tool in your Social Media Arsenal.

When is My Webinar For My Brokerage?

Good question!  Due to different time zones & schedules, we will be planning these classes separately from my regularly scheduled classes.  Depending on the amount of interest along with the size of the brokerages, there may be a few companies combined together.   Of course, these classes will be scheduled at convenient times for your business.  So, if you have your company meetings on Tuesdays at 9AM, or Thursday at 5PM I will do my best to accommodate.

How Much is it Gonna Cost me?

For this time of top notch training from an expert in the field, you could expect to be paying hundreds of dollars to have them come in & speak to your team.  But, what if I said that the training was free for our members?  That is right, I said FREE.  The only thing that I ask, is that you make sure that those in your office that are not currently using ActiveRain on a regualr basis come to the class & encourage them to at least try out our Rainmaker Membership for the first month.  It will only cost them $5.00, but they will be able to enjoy the successes like so many of our members already have.

So, if you have a group that you would like to have a special training session for, feel free to fill out the simple form below.

Technology is constantly changing the way businesses act and conduct business daily.  How willing are you to adapt to the changes as they come along and incorporate them into your business plan?  If you are not, you may want to re-think before your all your business has been captured by your competitors.

This is a movie review of Transformers 2, but since I didn't care for the movie that much, it turned more into a lesson on how to embrace change for your business. In fact, if you want, you can skip right to around 1:24.

I reference Blockbuster Video and how they have not been able to embrace change as fast as competitors like Redbox which are not slowly putting them out of business. You need to embrace change in your business and integrate social media into your plan if you have not yet. If you refuse to embrace change, you will end up just like Blockbuster in a few years....an empty building with a for lease sign in front of it. Please take a few moments to watch:

The Moral of the story?   Technology is constantly changing the way we handle our day to day businesses.  Be alert to these changes and be willing to embrace/implement them into your business plan. Even if you feel you do not like it, or feel it is a waste of time, you need to at least test out the new technology to see if it will help or hinder your business before you form an opinion on them.  Assuming they won't work because of something you hear from somewhere else could be fatal to your business.  Plus, we all knows what can happen if we just assume....

Each time I teach a webinar class, one of the things we spend a good amount of time covering is how to claim the domain name for your outside blog.  When you become a Rainmaker, a custom domain URL is part of your benefit.  You do not need to go to godaddy.com and purchase a domain name. So, I decided that I would take a  moment tonight and do a brief tutorial on how to claim your domain for your Outside Blog through ActiveRain.

Also, if you were wondering if an outside blog would be a benefit for you, you may want to check out a few great features of the outside blog.

First, a few of the awesome themes available:

• Business Casual Theme
• Easy Going Theme
• Blue Days
• Real Estate Red
• A Day at the Beach
• Granite

And here are a few of the awesome widgets available:

• Local Posts Widget
• Google Search Widget
• Feedburner Email Subscribe Widget

So, if you have not yet become a Rainmaker and started your Outside Blog, try it today!  Also, if you would like to learn more on how to optimize ActiveRain & your Outside Blog, see if my Blogging Basics 101 class is right for you!