If Facebook Was A Country It Would Be Bigger Than America!

Can you believe that if Facebook was a country it would be the third largest country and bigger than America?? That is amazing. It actually took 4 years for the internet to reach 4 million users and yet Facebook reached 100 million within 9 months!! This growth is incredible especially when you consider Facebook is free! Older ladies are actually the fastest growing group on Facebook!

The potential for the small business owner with social media sites is tremendous.

And who would have thought that YouTube is already the largest search engine after Google? Awesome! Everyone knows that Youtube has grown at an incredible rate and is very highly trafficked. A recent change that YouTube made was to transcribe every video that is uploaded, in order to rank it for keywords in their search engine! So putting keywords in both the video and the description is now key.

LinkedIn, although far behind Facebook in numbers, is way ahead in the calibre of the users. LinkedIn is used very much by company CEO’s, Management and other high flyers. In fact a staggering 80% of the companies who use Linkedin do their recruiting on this site! If you are looking for high calibre leads, LinkedIn is definitely the place to find them.

Another Social Media site that is growing quickly is Twitter. It is used generally by people who want to stay in touch with old and new friends, but it is increasingly used by businesses to promote themselves. Because anyone is allowed to make applications for Twitter, it is regularly changing and evolving. Lack of understanding does keep some away, but because it is so well known now, more and more people are jumping on the bandwagon everyday.

There are over 200 million blogs on the internet today. Over 50% of these have new content posted everyday! Basically if you are in business today you need to have a blog to keep your customers up to date with your products, services and special offers! Well you need a blog and you also need to be doing YouTube videos, and you need a Facebook page! This is what the future looks like!

Any business that is not on social media, I seriously believe is going to be losing out immensely. I am aware that alot of people out in the ‘real’ world consider it to be something of a fad and not something that they need to be involved in, but I think they are definitely missing something massive. Just study those figures once more and think about it!!

So jump in! We’re waiting for you:)

If you are amazed by this Facebook Fact and want to start promoting your business on Facebook, grab this FREE Facebook Training before it’s taken down!

Social networking spaces on the Web, including such sites as MySpace and Facebook have begun to catch the attention of thousands people from all over the world.

Social networks are very popular among young people and are usually considered as online places where users can virtually meet each other in order to establish friendships, relationships and express their opinions, thoughts, share the passion, interests and hobbies.

However the purpose of networking sites may be purely social, while others may focus on establishing business connections as networking is also the business of engaging and interacting with other internet users in a particular online space that’s why Social Networking can become a perfect, free marketing tool in a hand of an entrepreneur.

Websites such as Myspace, Facebook or any other social networks are great places where the marketer can easily spread the word about his business around the other net workers and create his own audience that might be a source of new potential customers or business partners. The fact is that social networking sites are being visited by a meaningful percentage of internet users expressing various interests what makes targeting product to the right people much easier.

The Functionality of social networking websites including features such us: viewable personal profiles, blogs, interactive ”friends” lists, customizable themes and layouts, automatic address book updates, the ability to form new links through ”introduction services,” and loads of other forms of online
social connections enable marketer to create professional and relevant “e-business card” that will attract new net workers paying attention to the promoted product.

How to promote on Social Networking sites

- creating personalized profile

Building and personalizing marketer’s own profile is the first thing that has to be done before any promoting steps are taken. Personalization is a very important factor that help building the authority and trust. It can be easily achieved by creating ”about myself” short story including informations regarding interests, hobbies, education, particular achievements in business field and off course proper links or banners to business websites or promoted products. All the information and biography need to be supported with professional looking personal photograph or business logo.

- final adjustments

Using specific features of particular social networking website, the marketer is enabled to adjust his profile to his own visual and compositional preferences, that will fit his company’s or product image.

- it’s time to make some friends

The SN site’s concept of connecting with other people enable it’s users to make new online friendships in a short period of time and this fact should be considered by marketer as a prior factor for marketing his business.

In order to promote product efficiently it needs to be exposed to as big targeted audience as possible.

Most of social networks sites includes advanced search tools that can be used to find people having particular interests and hobbies preferable by a marketer.

Once desirable members have been found it’s time to send them friend requests. This way the marketer collect more visitors to his business profile and get higher exposure.

- being selective is crucial

While online entrepreneur market his product making friendships with selected SN members he might receive friend invitations as well. The important thing is to be selective and approve only requests from net workers who might positively influence business campaign.

- influencer the most desirable kind of visitor

Sometimes some of “collected” friends may become so-called influencers who believing in the value of the product will pass the message about it to their own friends. As a result the size of audience get increased over time which means more chances to get potential customers and business partners.

Finally Social Networking is an long term activity making new influencing relationships that might bring a huge benefits and get the business to the next level.

About The Author: Daniel Gebura is an experienced online marketer who helps ordinary people to build a successful home business.To find the best home based business ideas and opportunities so you can work at home visit:
http://www.Financial3dom.net

Well, I guess you could say my u comment, I follow post was a success because here they come!

First, thanks to all humans who commented. If you’re a bot, you probably aren’t listening so I won’t address you.

Before this gets out of control, here are some simple some simple comment posting rules for dofollow link love seekers expressing their opinions on SMO Blogger. This also applies to bots, or rather, the owners of the bots that are making comments.

• Use your name in the name field. Don’t tell me your name is Viagra (does have a Spanish or Italian kind of rink to it though doesn’t it?)
• Leave a URL to one of your white hat sites, that is, one of your good sites (of course you don’t have to leave a URL, it is optional).  Promotional links are fine, as long as you’re promoting something that is decent or that a reasonable person would find appealing. Anything harmful to the user experience at SMO Blogger is not published.
• No gambling, porn or potentially offensive links
• Say something useful.

Call me a noob if you want, but I’m resurrecting the old u comment, i follow practice for SMO Blogger.  No, I’m not one of those idealistic bloggers who think that commenters are basically good people–not that most commenters are even people–who are just misunderstood and have a right to be linked to.  I don’t have a “Save the Comments” bumper sticker on that back of my green powered car. Blogs were social before social media became mainstream. Part of optimizing your social media universe is making your blog the social hub you want it to be.

Search engines use the nofollow concept to block link credit from going to spammers, even though to the human eye, it’s still a link. The only part of the code that’s different is ab HTML attribute which reads this way if you view source in your browser:

rel=”nofollow”

That one little link of code will single handedly shut down the link love spigots of Google from delivering even a drop of link credit to your site. Of course, you’ll find it trendy among social media and SEO types to post that building nofollow links pays link juice dividents. They are wrong.

I don’t recommend adding U Comment, I Follow on an established blog. Why? Because, if you haven’t discovered this already, spammers will rush in from the fields to drink from the comment troughs. You can infer from this that if SMO Blogger ever becomes an established blog, I will likely turn off U Comment, I Follow.

Here are the three reasons I U Comment, I Follow Blog:

• More content -granted user generated content is something that search engines probably want to filter out and get rid of because of it’s high volume and noise. I’m an experienced blogger but darn it, this is a new blog and I need activity, controversy, tension, etc. to help us get to the core of what social media optimization really does for us all.
• More friends -
• More Links – I’d like SMO Blogger to be added to all of the quality IFollow blog directories and lists out there for link loving consumption.

Lastly, what WordPress Plugin do I use? Of course I use WordPress for blogging. Doesn’t everyone?

It’s called FollowMyLinks by everflux and here is a snippet from the plugin author page:

Follow My Links is a very simple plugin that prevents WordPress from automatically adding a “rel=nofollow” attribute to the following two categories of authorial links:

1. links in the post author’s comments;
2. links to the post author’s URL (usually linked to from the comment author’s username).

The default behaviour of WordPress (as of version 2.8) is to add a “rel=nofollow” attribute to all links in the comments section, including links in comments made by the post author and links to the post author’s website. The nofollow attribute prevents search engines like Google from following (indexing) such links, and passing “link juice” (including PageRank™) to the linked pages. In fact, nofollow was originally introduced by the major search engines as a deterrent or counter-measure to link spam in blog comments. For that reason, it doesn’t make much sense to have nofollow on your own links, when you’re the post author or blog owner, since those links are supposed to be “editorially given” (and therefore spam-free): that’s where this plugin comes at hand.

You Comment? I follow.

Let the commenting begin friends!

Google Web Spam Team chief, Matt Cutts talks about nofollow.

Is Squarespace (http://www.squarespace.com) a search engine friendly blogging platform? Is this out of the box blogging platform suitable for SEO purposes? If not Squarespace then what?

Squarespace.com site company line:

Squarespace is an exceptionally tuned publishing system for managing websites and blogs. Need to create a blog? Build a website? Our software helps discerning individuals build stylish, easy to manage websites complete with state-of-the-art blogging tools. Squarespace hosts thousands of high-quality websites — both large and small.

At first glance, I don’t see any reasons not to recommend it for SEO purposes. I don’t see that much difference in this and WordPress except it’s cheaper than the premium version of WP. I signed up and poked around in Squarespace, but I really don’t like the interface that much. So, I’m sticking with WordPress.

Of course, I am just writing from a personal standpoint. I am biased toward WordPress because I’ve been using it so long and invested so much in it. Also, because it is open source and there are tons of plugins and widgets and themes, you know. That’s just my personal view.

I don’t see anything wrong with Squarespace in terms of SEO. I didn’t spend much time in the admin area but I did a site:squarespace.com looked at a bunch of user blogs and they all seemed pretty indistinguishable from WordPress blogs. I don’t recall seeing any with tag clouds like WordPress has, though.

I wasn’t sure but it looked like Squarespace had to be hosted at squarespace.com? And if you want to use your own domain you have to map it to their server? That’s fine but I wonder if you would lose some degree of control without hosting it yourself. It reminded me of WordPress.com blogs, where you just log into their system and post stuff and don’t have to worry about maintaining anything. WordPress has a premium service that they allow you to map your domain to in a very similar way: http://wordpress.com/vip-hosting/.

Thoughts on Squarespace anyone?

Flickr, I will nofollow you to the gates of Hell!

Flickr, once a popular source of dofollow links for SEOs has recently turned its links to nofollow automatically! Whereas you could link to your site(s) before and pass juice, now external links are nofollowed.

Sphinn Flickr Nofollow post…

• Flickr
  The quintessential web 2.0 photo site. Post your own pics free. Comment on images of others.
• Flickr (Yahoo!) wants to “help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them.”
• Flickr wants to “enable new ways of organizing photos and video.”

Getting ready to start blogging!