SiteProNews |
- Nipping Spam Accounts in the Bud: Tips for Recognizing and Reducing Spam on Your Site – A SPN Exclusive Article
- 5 Amazing Tips For Successful Facebook Ads
- How to Actually Rank For Any Keyword With a Legitimate Search Engine “Loophole”…
- Leveraging the Social in Social Media
| Posted: 23 Sep 2011 08:11 AM PDT 
The Captcha One of the oldest responses to spam bots is the captcha. A captcha is a basic response test used to ensure a human answers the question. Normally it’s represented by either an image including letters or a math problem. While a captcha won’t cut out users who are actively trying to create spam, it will keep out bots and that alone will cut down on your spam by a wide margin. Most websites require a captcha when creating a user account, but that’s not enough. I recommend requiring users answer a captcha every time they comment. It’s a little less convenient for the users, but it will do a lot to keep your site clean. Zero Tolerance This tip is especially true for forums. Make sure you have a clearly stated zero tolerance policy on spam. If ever you catch users spamming, new or old, ban them. It’s important that the community knows you take the issue seriously and may ward off a few potential spammers. Sometimes this works best if you can make an example out of someone, so at the first chance you get, ban the spammer immediately. Nothing is worse than having an interesting conversation thread ruined by a spammer. Forums, perhaps more than any other type of website, have a lot to lose from huge numbers of spammers. It’s also important to ban the IP, not just the account. While it’s not impossible for them to return when banned by IP, it’s more difficult. Keep an Adequate Moderating Staff The larger your community becomes, the higher the chance of being targeted by spammers. It will eventually get to the point where it just isn’t reasonable to keep up with it all yourself. This is where the importance of having a moderator staff comes into play. If you take a handful of dedicated users you feel you can trust and give them basic moderation power, your site may clean up itself. Often these moderators will agree to help out of pure love for the site. Make it clear that you’re looking for volunteers and are unable to pay them. You may be surprised by the community response. Require an Email Address to Post Comments Requiring an email address to post comments serves two purposes. The first is warding off spam bots and the second is forcing some responsibility. Often, when any portion of the anonymity of the Internet is taken away, spammers avoid it. It’s still possible to create an account for the sole reason of spamming your site, but it’s likely not worth the effort. If this does happen, make sure to take the email address and add it to a database before deleting the comment. You can then keep a record of this database and use its emails to cut down on spam of other websites you run. Collaboration Partner sites and affiliates are the lifeblood of the blogosphere. You can make use of this to avoid spammers using the database mentioned earlier. If you encourage your fellow webmasters to keep up a similar list, you can compare the two and end up warding off more spammers. With a large enough collective, you can create a joint safety net. This net works by protecting the other sites in the collective from any single spammer. While it won’t cut spam out completely, it will do a great job of cutting it back and requires minimal effort to maintain. Maria Rainier is a freelance writer and recent graduate of Elon University. She is currently a resident blogger at Online Degrees, where recently she’s been researching different Online Business Administration Programs and blogging about student life. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| 5 Amazing Tips For Successful Facebook Ads Posted: 23 Sep 2011 07:57 AM PDT 
The first step is understanding what you want accomplish. Some goals could include looking to build awareness of your company or brand, and driving traffic to your web site. Promoting a specific event or generating sales are other common goals. To build awareness and grow your fan base (getting people to “Like” your page), there are standard marketplace ads. The ads point to your Facebook Page and allow users to “like” your page, using the Like link right in the ad. You also could try a “Page Like” sponsored story, where the ad shows friends who have liked your Page. You can even target people who are friends with people who already “like” your Page, which creates a social context, that makes people much more likely to remember the ad’s content. When you want to promote a particular post from your page, such as a special offer or important news, you can also use “Page Post” sponsored stories to convert your post into a News Feed item. Sponsored Stories is one of Facebook’s newest marketing tools which promotes word-of-mouth recommendations about your business that are happening in the News Feed. You can sponsor stories about people checking in to your business or “liking” your Page. Measure success by social media metrics. Click-through rate (CTR) is an important metric to track, but since the average CTR for Facebook ads is only about 0.05%, which is half the industry standard of 0.1%, set goals instead to increase comments, Likes, impressions and active users. Facebook has hundreds of reports you can use to analyze results – make use of them for maximum results. 2. Targeting with Your Ads When placing your Facebook ad, the form makes it very easy to select the demographic profile of your target audience. It has the added feature of targeting very specific audiences. Here, less is more. Better results are achieved by having less very targeted people, rather than having large numbers of people who are not interested. Gaining smaller but very specific target audiences, even at the risk of reducing the size of your audience, can be more effective. Let’s say you want to promote an event at your business. It would be more effective to target people who are already fans of your page, who may be more likely to respond to a a local offer. Besides targeting people by location, you may want to also use names of popular local 3. Choose Text and Images That Grab Attention When designing your ad, you have up to 135 characters, but some of the most effective ads don’t use the whole character limit. Use small and concise ads that speaks directly to the audience you will reach. Special offers or unique features that differentiate you from the An image that will draw a person’s attention to your ad is recommended. Logos in this case, may not be the best way to go. Since the photos are small, use something unusual or a face shot of people. Smiling women tend to generate a high click rate. Experts recommend trying natural photos with colors that contrast with the blue color scheme of Facebook, such as red, yellow and orange. 4. Use and Measure Multiple Ads Create multiple versions of your ad and test them to see which ad gets the best response. Once an ad has been created, you have the option to “Create a Similar Ad”, via the Facebook interface, and put in a new picture or text. Experts recommend creating four different ads for the same campaign. Run each ad for a day or two and then check your ad statistics on Facebook to see which did best. You can then create a new ad that is similar to your ad that performed the best, with a few minor changes to see if it improves the ad’s performance. Since these ads rotate constantly, keep changing the ads so that your specific target audience doesn’t get disinterested. Also, take top-performing ads and create new ad groups with related ad copy and pictures. This will lower your costs because your ad group has a higher CTR (Click Through Rate). Facebook has hundreds of reports available, and it is wise to make use of them. 5. Be Ready To Get the Most Out of Your Traffic Keep your Facebook Wall fresh and updated. Stale content, like the last Wall update was weeks or months ago, will make people lose interest. Give them a reward for visiting so they keep coming back. Most people don’t click through to your Facebook page; they click ‘like’ right in the ad. Have fresh status updates or special offers or events available that follow up on the content in your ads, and get people to keep coming back. The click you get is not the end result, it’s the beginning of presenting your campaign to your audience. When someone likes your page, you now have their consent to talk and update them over and over. Boundless opportunities can result by keeping them interested with Pump Up Your Website is a leader in the field of search, social media and email marketing. We’re also very good at web design, Internet development and ecommerce. We use tools like Wordpress Blogs, Facebook and Twitter to make your business successful. Visit us at http://pumpupyourwebsite.com or follow us at http://twitter.com/#!/pumpup . Receive a Free eBook – “Online Marketing Insider Secrets Revealed”. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| How to Actually Rank For Any Keyword With a Legitimate Search Engine “Loophole”… Posted: 23 Sep 2011 07:43 AM PDT 
And why not? Not only can Google send you a boatload of free traffic – it’s also highly targeted, and it’s one of the best ways to drive business. The problem is, that exact same ideal is shared with thousands of your direct competitors. This creates an environment where you’ll always be fighting, kicking and scratching to maintain your traffic – along with the ever present fear that your livelihood is only one “algorithm update” away from vanishing. And that’s if you can even get ranked for any decent keyword, to begin with… In fact, only the largest, most-established authority sites can reliably see consistent traffic from Google. And even then, their rankings fluctuate constantly – several times a day, in some cases. The fact is – it’s getting harder and harder for the “little guy” to get any kind of meaningful web presence on the web these days. Getting ranked in Google is almost impossible unless you’ve got a major promotional budget and some time on your hands to “wait” for your domain to become trusted (Google favors older domains). And advertising with pay-per-click ads isn’t affordable like it once was. Search marketing has finally become what everyone feared it would – a game reserved for big business. But what if there was still a way to legitimately rank for keywords with tons of traffic? And what if you could do this without having to spend months and even years building up an authority site to do so? In fact – what if you could systematically create one-page minisites that could rapidly rank in the top 3 spots (consistently) for basically any keyword you target within a matter of a week or so? Is this for real? YES. But not with Google. It’s happening right now, as we speak, on MSN.com Now – before you think it – yes, I know, MSN doesn’t have nearly the reach that Google does. But, it still does receive millions and millions of search users daily. After all – MSN is the default home-page for anyone who first uses Internet Explorer. And, to put it in perspective, which would drive more traffic? Occupying the #1 ranking for your most desirable keyword target on MSN? Or occupying the #47 spot on page 5 of Google’s results? Sadly, it’s actually more effort to make it to the 47th spot in Google than it is to literally dominate in MSN. How does this work? Watch this video to find out: P.S Like I said – forget about Google. The author is a part-time internet marketer. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| Leveraging the Social in Social Media Posted: 22 Sep 2011 10:00 PM PDT 
The Key Thing: Customer Investment Just about everyone’s familiar with the smart and trendy Mac commercials. They’ve been seen, redone, spun off and parodied just about to death, and will stand as icons of excellent advertising. But think about it – when was the last time you saw one of these commercials on TV? How often do they actually come up anymore? The fact is, Mac’s most consistent and open advocates are its users. People with an Apple notebook can’t wait to tell their friends about it, take it around in public and talk up its virtues. This is true in other areas as well – Honda users have fan sites for their chosen vehicles, most people get into novelty diets or exercise programs as a result of their friends’ influence and so on. So, give people a reason to talk about your brand – by making it their brand. Step 1: A Place to Talk There is no reason whatsoever not to have a public, open discussion forum for your brand on your site. This can take the form of the comments section if your brand consists of a simple blog, or it can be a whole message board. Definitely have a Facebook page and enable comments so that people can provide input on your frequent, informative updates. Step 2: Other Places People like to put up fan sites of their own, in addition to official ones. This should never, ever be discouraged. Yes, there are some risks with having a site that isn’t under your direct control. However, very few people are going to respond favorably to “big business” quashing the “little guy” who only wanted to show off how much he liked a certain product the business makes. Instead, leverage this as an excellent opportunity. Contact them as an official representative and mention how much you appreciate their interest. If someone has a whole webpage dedicated to your bestselling line of how-to books, make a friendly “how to be an awesome fan” spotlight on your page showing off their site. When people see how well the brand treats its fans, they will talk about it. Step 3: Talk it Up Wherever people are talking about your brand, make sure they have good quality information on things, and that the information you give them is tailored to your audience’s expectations. If your brand is high-class technical engineering tools, provide rigorous specifications your users can dig into. If it’s a fashionable line of casual Sunday wear, offer interviews with the fashion designers and what their inspirations were. Give them some real meat to talk about, and they’ll be chattering for months. Further, remember the reciprocity principle. If a conversation seems to be really taking off, jump in on it. If someone raises an interesting point in an otherwise quiet thread, give it a boost with some official insight. However you see fit, get involved in the discussions and help people see that you want to talk about the brand as often and as early as possible. Spur the discussion, encourage the argument, do whatever you need to keep the party going just one point longer. Step 4: Reward Interest This was touched on slightly in Other Places, but it can be expanded further into its own point. McDonald’s recently gave an award to one of its most loyal customers, Don Gorske. The restaurant recognized him as the world’s premier Big Mac enthusiast, since Gorske has eaten more than 23,000 Big Macs over the course of his life. An odd award by most lights, but McDonald’s certainly reaped the attention, and Gorske has gone onto be a guest on Super Size Me and The Rachel Ray Show. Most brands can’t quite leverage that degree of influence, but there are many ways to reward a fan for loyal interest in a brand. Perhaps your biggest fan deserves an advance shipping of the newest product you’re planning. Maybe she’s read every one of your novels to date and maintains such an active author-fan community that you’ll use her name for the heroine of your newest work. Or perhaps the reward is a friendly lunch where you talk about ideas for the brand, and other things you have in common. Maybe you even hire your No. 1 Fan because he has some genuinely excellent ideas. In General, Think Humanely No list can comprehensively contain all the material that will get people interested in and talking about any brand. There are so many verbal tricks, psychological cues and special gimmicks that even trying to Google them would take months of research. The biggest key is to think like a human. Remember the advertisements or conversations that got you interested in something, that made you want to participate in a brand as its advocate. Try to extend those same thoughts into what you put into your brand, and you’ll draw in people just as interested as you. Enzo F. Cesario is an online branding specialist and co-founder of Brandsplat, a digital content agency. Brandsplat creates blogs, articles, videos and social media in the “voice” of our client’s brand. It makes sites more findable and brands more recognizable. For the free Brandcasting Report go to www.BrandSplat.com or visit our blog at www.iBrandCasting.com Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
In many ways, spam is just a fact of life on the Internet. Many of us get the occasional spam email and have a filter to take care of it. Far and away, the most common example of spam is email spam. While email spam is easy to avoid and relatively harmless, if you’re running a website, you have to try and be more mindful. Spam accounts on forums or even in comment sections can be a real problem. Too many spam accounts can make your site look bad and make new readers wary. Here are a few simple tips to help you nip those spammers in the bud.
Facebook ads are one of the most popular and inexpensive ways to promote a small business online. According to research from BIA/Kelsey LCM, 48 percent of SMBs (small and medium businesses) are using Facebook for advertising or promoting their business. Forty percent said they have a Facebook page just for their business.
Everyone wants to have their site rank well in Google.
So, social media marketing is about the conversation, not the pitch. People are starting to get that. This is a good step, but what does it mean in practical terms? Having conversations with people is nice, but the goal of a brand is ultimately to get people interested in spending their time or money on the brand, after all. What does having this conversation accomplish, and just how does a brand use that conversation to get the critical conversion from conversation to customers?| You are subscribed to email updates from SiteProNews Recent Articles To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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