New Site Media Group

3 Great WordPress Plugins to Customize Your Blog’s Navigation

Steinar — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 03:12:37 +0000

WordPress 3.o introduced some great new features including an advanced set of Menu options. Nonetheless, I always find the need for additional flexibility to customize what Posts and Pages are shown on my blog, when they’re shown and in what order.

Here are 3 WordPress Plugins to Customize Your Blog’s Navigation:

PageMash: This is one of my all time favorites. It allows to drag and drop Pages into the order you need for navigation. You can also drag and drop child Pages in, out and among Parent pages. This is a real life saver if you several nested Pages and want to change things around a bit.
Exclude Pages from Navigation: This plugin provides a checkbox on the editing page which you can check to exclude pages from the primary navigation. This is useful if you want to have a page “hidden” from everyday visitors or if you really only want people to find it through a link on another Page.
WP-PageNavi: If you have a lot of Posts you’ll like this plugin, which adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress blog. For example, instead “previous” and “next” at the bottom, this plugin will help create a numbered index of Posts, such as Prev, 1,2,3, Next, Last. It may require some custom CSS depending on your theme, but the end result is quote nice.

Any other WordPress Plugins you recommend to customize your blog’s navigation?

6 Ways to Improve Your Business Facebook Page

Steinar — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 02:43:02 +0000

Facebook Pages are a great way to leverage the largest social media platform and connect with folks in your target market. Here are some tactics I’ve been using to improve my business Facebook Page and those of my clients.

1. Consistently post new content. If people have “liked your page they’ve basically given you permission to communicate with them. Don’t be bashful – post new content on a regular basis to maximize the opportunity. One warning – don’t post too frequently or you might annoy them. Find a proper balance that’s acceptable for your audience.

2. Add some variety to your content. Don’t just post links or one-liners. Mix it up with pictures, videos, links to local events, articles on related content, and links to your blog articles. Also, use Notes to post longer updates, much like you would with a blog post. Finally, try asking questions or taking a poll to drive engagement.

3. Add some customization. Did you know you can have up to 6 tabs on your Facebook Page? The Wall and Info tabs are not optional, but you can customize the remaining 4 tabs with something unique. There are several apps to create tabs from Youtube, Twitter, and LinkedIn, but I also recommend you create a couple tabs with FBML. This basically gives you the flexibility to add HTML much like a Webpage.

4. Make it fun. If your Facebook Page is all business, people might get bored. Even the Wall Street Journal has comics.

5. Connect with other social media platforms. Most people know you can connect Twitter to your Facebook Page so that new updates gets tweeted. This will help drive traffic. You can also connect your blog RSS feed so that new posts appear in your Facebook Wall. Why do this? One, for efficiency and two, to help spread the word and connect your followers across multiple platforms. It’s no different that including your website address and phone number in a print ad.

6. Have a call to action. What do you ultimately want your Facebook Fans to do? Call? Sign-up for something? Visit your website? Share your content? If you never ask you can’t expect them to guess. Be bold and ask them to take action.

What have I missed? What other advice do you have for improving business Facebook Pages?

… sent from my iPad

My fist QR Code – scan this into your phone

Steinar — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 22:25:10 +0000

If you’re not familiar with QR codes, they are an increasingly popular method of sharing information similar to a bar code. Users with a smartphone can focus their camera on this code and the QR code software will save the information behind the code on their phone.

In this case, it’s my URL, but it could be your contact info or any number of attributes.

Looking for a QR scanning app for your phone? Here are some sources I found:

I’m already starting to see QR codes on packaging and websites. What do you think? Are QR codes here to stay?

… Sent from my iPhone

New Audio: Podcasting from my iPad again with AudioBoo

Steinar — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 05:12:16 +0000

Podcasting on your blog and iTunes is a great way to reach your market and the iPad makes it easy. Check out the Related Posts below for more details on how this is done.

Listen or Download

7 Tools to Increase Social Media Efficiency and Save A Ton of Time

Steinar — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 02:14:33 +0000

Nearly everyone agrees that social media is a great way to reach and communicate with your market online. Weather it’s through Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, direct access to your target market has never been easier. The challenge, of course, is finding the time and resources to make the process efficient and effective. Following is my list of 7 Tools to Increase Social Media Efficiency:

1. Google Reader

This one might not be so obvious, but Google Reader is a great tool for market intelligence and brand management when it comes to social media. Basically, Google Reader allow you to subscribe to the RSS feeds on other websites, blogs, Facebook Pages and Twitter Searches that you want to track or find relevant to your market niche. You can also subscribe to Google Blog or News results containing your name, product or brand. Finally, sign up for BackTweets and track Twitter updates that link to your content.

Now you have a powerful one-stop-shop for getting up to speed on the latest news, trends, and brand mentions in your niche. Now, use this for inspiration in your next blog post, reply to people’s comments about you, and share links with your social network.

Congratulations! You just saved hours a week by setting up a proper system that pushes your content to you!

2. WordPress “Press This”

“Press This” is a often overlooked bookmarklet that comes with every WordPress blog. Essentially, it allows you to highlight text on a website and then easily quote the content in a blog post. So instead of copying and pasting text and links back and forth between a webpage and your WordPress post editor, you can now do it with the single click of a button. This is a huge time saver!!

3. Ping.fm

If you’re like most people using social media today you have accounts on multiple social media networks. Ping.fm allows you to update multiple platforms at once without having to go to each individual account. The beauty of this system is that you have central control over how information is distributed.

For example, when this blog post is published, Ping.fm will automatically send a link to Twitter, Facebook, linkedIn, and Delicious. If at any point I decide to change my distribution strategy all I only have to login to my Ping.fm account and make the changes there. This is much more efficient than re-routing my content on each individual network.

4. Smart Phone (iPhone, Droid, Blackberry, etc)

Today’s smart phones provide users with many of the same capabilities available to them on a laptop or desktop computer. However, most smart phones also have cameras and GPS capabilities that add visual interest and location-based information to your social media updates. The tools are so easy to use that literally within less than 60 seconds you can take a picture of something, tag your location, and update all of your networks with just a few clicks.

To do this from your desktop or laptop computer would take considerably longer and would be virtually impossible to complete using a standard cell phone.

5. TweetDeck or Hootsuite

Tweetdeck and Hootsuite suite are two applications that allow you to control your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn updates from one single location. This is very helpful because you no longer need to log into each individual account to post an update or to see what others have to say. Another great feature of these services is the ability to schedule or timestamp your updates for future release.

For example, if you knew that next week you were going to be announcing a new product, you could schedule your updates over the course of the next few days all at once to correspond with the upcoming product launch. This saves you the time and hassle of manually updating your accounts every day with Marketing copy you already have available now.

6. InstaPaper

InstaPaper is a free and very simple online tool that allows you to save a webpage or article for later reference. Rather than printing the article or saving it to your bookmarks or favorites where he can easily get lost, InstaPaper keeps everything organized and accessible across multiple devices by storing information in the cloud. This is particularly important if you don’t have time to read the article now and/or you would like to reference the article in an upcoming blog post.

For example, I can save something using the InstaPaper bookmarklet on my iMac desktop and it will be instantly available for viewing and sharing within my iPad InstaPaper App. Dozens of third-party applications are supported and the functionality continues to expand, so check out InstaPaper when you get a chance.

7. Posterous

Posterous is a terrific blogging platform of sorts that allows you to easily capture text, images & audio and then share this content across multiple social media networks automatically. The real differentiator is that you can e-mail content to your Posterous account, and it will use a smart filtering process to determine where and how that content is posted on your blog.

For example, you just took a picture on your cellphone and would like to post it to your Posterous account, but you would also like that picture to get posted to your Flickr account at the same time. In this case, you would e-mail your picture from your phone to Flickr@Posterous.com and Posterous would take care of the rest. Again, trying to do this manually would take considerably longer.

There are so many other tools and approaches that you could incorporate into your process to increase your social media efficiency. I hope you learned at least one new idea in this post. What other tools are you using that help make your social media life easier?

Targeting Your Niche with Facebook Ads

Steinar — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 23:30:09 +0000

Targeting your Facebook Ads is a powerful way to communicate with your niche. With over 400 million Facebook users, chances are good that your audience can be reached either directly or through some of the new targeting features that allow you to reach friends of fans.

Facebook has 3 types of connection targeting: users who are fans, users who aren’t fans, and friends of fans. It’s this last option that is amazing– so awesome that I’m afraid public mention of it may cause Facebook to remove it. And that’s why we keep testing, plus don’t reveal all our tips, but I digress.

from … The Most Powerful Secret In Facebook Ads http://bit.ly/aapEYf

What’s your experience with Facebook Ads?

… sent from my iPad

3 Reasons Why You Should Blog

Steinar — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 21:43:36 +0000

Believe it or not, some businesses spend a lot of money building fancy websites and pay-per-click advertising network but still do not blog. This might not be such a bad thing if they have endless financial resources but for those looking for a long-term position in search engines and influence online, there are several reasons to blog.

Blogging helps your business in several ways:

1. Sharing your Knowledge. Blogging allows you to share relevant information online in a controlled environment. We all have something to share and rather than repeat yourself each time you meet a new client, blogging is a great way to catalog your ideas and use them for future reference. It also helps you organize your thoughts and stay up to date with the current trends within your niche.

2. Controlling Your Content. You own your blog so you are in control of how it is displayed and who can see or comment on your content. It’s fine to post content on other sites, but at the end of the day those sites might go away, increase fees for access, or change the way they share information.

3. Driving Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search engines like websites that have fresh content on a regular basis. Blogging enables you to easily update your content so it is consistently fresh. Using keywords and other SEO techniques in your copy will also help drive search engine indexing.

That’s just three reasons to blog – there are many more. What do you think? If you’re not blogging, why?

More Evidence that Social Media is Critical to Online Business Strategy

Steinar — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 02:14:33 +0000

I help companies map out their Internet marketing strategies and one component is often the use of social media. A common response is that their customers do not use social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. I often argue this point, given the growing numbers and expanding demographics of those using social media.

Currently, three quarters of Internet users worldwide visit a social network or blog when they go online — that’s a 24% increase over last year.

Joe Average (the international version) spends 66% more time on these sites than he did a year ago — for example, your average user spent 6 hours on these sites in April 2010, while last year he spent 3 hours, 31 minutes.

Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia make an appearance among the world’s most popular brands.

via How the World Is Spending Its Time Online [STATS]

If your company is considering social media as a tool to reach your market online, engage with existing customers, or expand your brand to connect with new prospects, I recommend you get started with three platforms: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Facebook is the leading online social network with over 500M users. Facebook Pages are a great way for a business to leverage this volume. Pages can be custom branded to fit within your other online assets and provide an excellent channel to offer a new communications channel to your online community.

Twitter is the leading microblogging platform. Currently Google indexes Twitter content into their “Updates” results and it’s believe to provide future value in how search engines determine webpage rank. In other words, if you’re engaged with customers on Twitter, it’s an indication that your website has value and may have some level of influence over others. There certainly are a number of tracking tools that indicate this is directionally true.

YouTube is owned by Google and is the leading online video sharing site. It provides companies with the opportunity to engage with customers using video rather than static text and images. Statistics suggest that video is more engaging and website visitor retention rates are higher when video is present. Video doesn’t need to be a high production excercise and I recommend you take a more casual, conversational approach with video when using it to speak directly to your customers.

Not convinced yet that social media is right for your company? What’s holding you back?

Tracking Facebook Ads in Google Analytics

Steinar — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 20:40:56 +0000

Facebook Ads are a great channel to market your product or service to a targeted set of Facebook users. The cost is very reasonable and with the right hook, your ads can drive significant traffic. To learn more, check out http://www.facebook.com/ads.

Statistics for Facebook Ads have improved recently, but it’s useful to know what happens with visits once they visit your site. Tracking Facebook Ads in Google Anaytics is a great way to do just that. Did visitors purchase? Did they browse around? Did they complete the intended action?

Steps to Track Facebook Ads in Google Anaytics

1. When designing your Facebook Ad, include a reference parameter at the end of the Destination URL, such as http://www.myurl.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=test

You can generate this URL at the Google Analytics URL Builder.

2. In Google Analytics set up an Advanced Segment

3. Create a new advanced segment

4. Customize the segment info

5. Select your Segment from the Dashboard to only see traffic stats from Facebook Ad traffic

What do you think? Will this help you get more insight into Facebook Ad performance?

How Can Social Media Benefit You as a Business Owner?

Steinar — Tue, 25 May 2010 17:40:04 +0000

A recent Nielsen survey showed that globally people spent an average of more than five and a half hours per month on social networking sites in December 2010, an 82% increase year-over-year.

For business owners, Social Media is important for several reasons. One, social media enables companies to connect with their target market, either locally or abroad. With over 500 million Facebook users and 100 million Twitter users, the potential to find and engage customers is like no other traditional marketing channel.

Two, social media is a great way to learn about your market, either directly from your customers, your competition or adjacent market businesses that serve your customer base. The ability to search and engage your market in conversation is a powerful means of market research.

Third, social media is a powerful channel in which to share information and market your business online. Have a new product to launch or a promotion to share with your customers and prospects? Social media is a great way to effectively communicate your marketing programs to a large, targeted audience.

Finally, search engines continue to incorporate social media data into their search and rankings algorithms. It is expected that social media will play an increasingly important role in how Google and other search engines determine a website’s relevance. Actively engaging in social media is considered good practice to leverage these changes and gain better visibility on search engines.

What do you think? What else makes social media beneficial to business owners?