Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog

Get Inspired With Google Suggest: 3 Tricks for Content Marketers

Ann Smarty — Mon, 13 May 2013 13:00:51 +0000

Ah, Google… they have taken over everything on the web, haven’t they? Once upon a time, they were nothing but a simple Beta engine on a university server, with a unique algorithm and big dreams. Now they dominate the Internet to the point of it being next to impossible to get away from them. Come on, who really uses Bing? Who doesn’t watch YouTube? Who doesn’t have a Gmail account? It isn’t a coincidence that other email platforms have been making message threading an option.

But what they will always be most famous for is their search engine. Every once in awhile they tweak it, adding in a new feature. I still remember my shock and awe when they put in their more advanced Google suggest tool. I have never been given so many unhelpful suggestions in all my life. Yet, I would find myself going to those suggested search pages just out of sheer curiosity. Google kills my productivity.

What I’ve learned doing since then is finding lots of inspiration!

Here are three tricks to using Google’s auto-suggest for content creators!

1. Watch Your Spelling

It sounds stupid, but if you misspell something it can actually really confuse Google. Sure, if it is a common search term you don’t have to worry and it will automatically fix it in results.

But if it is something more obscure, in another language or close to another keyword, you have no way of knowing what you will get. I mean it, go to Google right now and misspell a single letter in a word, even one often used. You will get a whole lot of suggestions, and I bet not a single one will be right.

2. How To… Content Inspiration

How-to pages in every niche are very popular. Any time I need an idea for a trustbait article, this is my first tool to try!

Interestingly, I have also found that ‘how not’ has some bizarre results (think linkbait!). Like “How not to dress like a mom”, and “How not to kill your baby”. Thankfully, this last one appears to be a book title, not something people are often seeking advice about.

Results become even more interesting when you go back to the phrase you just types and add a wildcard inside:

3. More Content Inspiration: Moral Dilemmas

Is it right? Is it wrong? Well, asking this question will get you very different results on Google. “Is it right to kill” is one popular question, alarmingly. But one of the most frequent suggestions for “is it wrong” is “Is it wrong to date my cousin?”

I like to think these two questions were asked by the same unstable person, as are some of the other popular suggestions. Like “Is it right to clone humans” and “Is it wrong to mast”. Which they either didn’t finish, or else I have the wrong idea. I will assume it is the latter, and just inform the search user that, no…it is not wrong to masticate. You have chew your food well before you swallow!

Have a good search trick for Google suggest? Let us know in the comments.

Image Credits: 1, 2.

The post Get Inspired With Google Suggest: 3 Tricks for Content Marketers appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.

Optimizing Your Facebook Likes

Laura Eggleston — Thu, 09 May 2013 13:00:40 +0000

Adding a Facebook Like button to your website is easy. Facebook has a handy form that you fill out which gives you a block of code to copy and paste, and you’re done! If that’s too much, there’s plenty of third party plugins that make adding a Like button to your websites as easy as clicking “Install”. This simple process is a big part of why Facebook’s Like initiative has become so successful in the past few years. The Like button is functional right out of the box with little-to-no customization, but that doesn’t mean it’s effective. Too many companies think that adding a Like button is good enough, without bothering to optimize them properly.

When a user clicks “Like” a few things happen. Right off the bat, it connects the user to the website in Facebook’s open graph. It also posts a story to the newsfeed and appears on the user’s timeline. These things happen regardless of whether you’ve optimized your Like buttons or not. Facebook will take a look at the page in question and get the title, url, image and description. Sounds great, right? Less work for you! Not quite, sadly. Facebook has no way of deciding which image on the page best represents your brand, which is why many people will end up with random icons or other irrelevant images along side their newsfeed stories. It’s also possible that it won’t retrieve other data properly, such as the canonical URL.

Luckily you can use a set of meta tags placed in the section of your website, called “open graph meta tags”, to tell Facebook everything it needs to know. Facebook has a small form on their Like Button plugin page that guides you through generating these tags, but it doesn’t do a great job of letting you know just what these tags do and why you need them. Each of the meta tags Facebook gives you has a property to identify what it is. Let’s break it down!

og:title

This is the title of the page being liked, and will be the text the user clicks to get to your site. If you don’t specify it, Facebook will grab your title tag. Your title should just be the basics of what’s being shared with no branding information.

og:type

A category for your page. Is it a website or blog? A band? An athlete or author? This doesn’t have much affect on the newsfeed story itself, but it does define where it appears on the user’s timeline. Each user has a section for their Likes which is split into categories. The type that you specify here determines what category your site fits into.

For example, if you have a website for your band you would want to specify a type of “band” or “musician” so that the Like shows up underneath the user’s “Music” category, instead of getting lost among all the other uncategorized Likes which have much lower visibility. Facebook also states that the type you set will affect how often your content appears in newsfeeds. This likely has to do with their newsfeed algorithm, which strives to show users only content which is relevant to them.

og:url

The canonical url that the like button should point to. The Like button automatically grabs the URL of the current page, but you can override it with this tag. The og:title links to this URL.

og:image

This is an important one. Facebook is a bad judge of images, it could pull anything off your page to use for news feed stories. Choose an image that you want to represent your page and put the URL here. It’s what will appear as the thumbnail next to your news feed story, and is a big factor in how much news feed real estate you get.

Recent changes to Facebook’s newsfeed have made it so that Facebook prefers a minimum of 200px by 200px for these images, though they can go up to 1500px by 1500px, which Facebook will resize and crop appropriately. The average size of images in Facebook’s improved newsfeed layout are 600px by 600px, and they (and I!) encourage you to take advantage of it.

Note: Facebook terms say that you can only have 20% of your image be text, so be wary of this when creating these images.

og:site_name

Facebook defines this as the “human-readable name for your website”. If this is specified, it will appear underneath the linked og:title and point back to your site’s domain.

og:description

This one isn’t included in Facebook’s quick form, which is disappointing, so you’ll have to add it yourself to the code block. By default, for the few sentences of description to go underneath the title and alongside the image thumbnail, Facebook will use your meta description. If you want to customize it, you can put a description here instead. Use the space that Facebook is giving you here! A couple word description means less visibility. For a properly optimized Like, your description should be at least two sentences long.

fb:admins

This facebook specific open graph tag connects user(s) to your Like button. Many people skip this, or just leave it set at the default value in Facebook’s form, but this step is essential if you want to see statistics for your Like button. Insights, Facebook’s internal analytics service, is available for all manner of Facebook objects, including Like buttons. The user(s) whose ids are stated in this meta tag will be those who can see this Insights data. Multiple users can be connected by entering them as a comma separated list.

fb:app_id

This tag is used for connecting your Like button(s) to a Facebook Platform application. This is especially handy if you have a large amount of Like buttons and want to be able to reach out to all of the users who have liked anything on your website. Basically, if you want access to your Insights data and connected users for multiple Like buttons programatically, you create a Facebook application and put the Facebook ID for it in this tag.

Note: Not sure what your Facebook id is? User ids have been old news since Facebook switched to friendlier looking usernames for user profiles and pages. If you need to get your user id, check out our Facebook ID Lookup Finder Search Tool! Enter in either the username or the full URL for your Facebook profile or page, and it will give you the numerical user id that you need for the two meta tags above.

After you’ve added the above tags into the section of your website, there’s one more step you need to take in order to see the Insights information for your Like buttons. Navigate to http://www.facebook.com/insights/ and click on the green “Insights for your Website” button in the upper right hand corner. Enter your domain and then click “Get Insights”. If you have added the proper fb:admins tags, and the user id you entered is the same as the user you are logged in as, then it should properly identify your website and you’ll see Insights data in no time!

Note: If you added multiple ids into the fb:admins tag, each of those people must click “Like” on your domain to verify that they want to be an admin. They will not see Insights data until they do this.

That’s it! By this point you should have properly optimized Like buttons. Users will see larger images which represent your brand, and an informative title and description, leading to higher visibility and increased reach in newsfeeds. Plus you’ll be able to properly measure your social efforts using Facebook’s Insights analytics service. If you want to customize your social plugins further, you can add additional optional meta tags, which let you specify industry specific data, contact information and even versions of your website in other languages! Check out Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol documentation as well as the official Open Graph Protocol page for more options.

The post Optimizing Your Facebook Likes appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.

Social Communities: How to Talk Without Causing a Riot

Kimberly Krause Berg — Tue, 07 May 2013 17:46:33 +0000

In person, we judge people by what they look like. Online, we decide what we think about someone by what they write. Both can be deceiving.

Last week I wrote that I don’t think social communities are really “social” and nobody disagreed with me. I’m sure many readers do but for whatever reasons did not leave comments. Maybe they didn’t want to use the comment form. Maybe they are lurkers. In larger forums, lurkers come and go and we never have any idea what they think or feel about the discussions. Maybe some people are afraid to respond to online discussions because of a variety of fears that go unaddressed.

Fear is a big reason for not communicating on the Internet. What are people afraid of? They fear sharing too much information. They lack confidence in their own voice. They are deeply afraid of search engines tracking everything they say. Writing is not their best way of communicating. People can be mean if you make a mistake.

The following are guidelines I developed from 17 years of being moderating, owning and being a member of chat rooms, email lists, UseNet, groups, clubs and forums. Have I broken my own rules? Yes. And whenever I did, I regretted it.

How to Write for the Social Communities

1. If you want to get someone’s attention, whisper. This approach is powerful and marketers hate it. The marketing game says, “Join all forums, set up a profile and drop a bunch of one-liner useless posts so that people and engines will find your profile. PS. Post to old discussions.”

As a forums owner who works with other forums owners, let’s clear the air of this. You may get away with this on forums that don’t get traffic and exist only to host ad-sense ads. For legitimate forums with real communities, actions like this are our equivalent of target shooting. Your profile is our clay pigeon. Your posts are shot down on sight and your user name, email address and in some cases, IP are banned. This is our fun part. What you don’t know or don’t seem to notice is that your profile isn’t “live” and available to the community or engines.

The way to converse online is to start quietly and with respect for the community and its rules. Rather than galloping on your great white stallion shouting how much of an expert you are, prove it over time by getting involved with your community of choice.

2. Respect the culture, community, moderators and newcomers. It’s been over 5 years since I’ve had to ban a community member at Cre8asiteforums. Since 1998 there may have been about 5 or so truly banned members and they were also banned from other forums. What did they do? They were rude to everybody in the community. They had no respect for the rules of the community and disregarded moderator warnings. I believed in working with difficult members because often it’s not them, but how they write that’s the problem. In private PM’s I could work out rough areas with a troublesome member but when they would return to the community itself they lost control again.

I learned from this that not everyone should join online discussion groups. Under the cover of being anonymous it’s easy to argue and even take on a personality that is nothing like you are in person. Some of you have to be right about everything. You don’t care about other perspectives because to you, we’re all wrong. To you we are mush brained low lives who don’t deserve to be working in our fields because we’re not experts like you are. You love to call us names and make us feel badly. Being part of a community is not part of your game plan. Disrupting the communities you join is.

Every community has its own way. Some are more tolerant than others. Some are for beginners while others can’t stand newbies. To avoid being a loser, always take the time to get to know the community you are thinking of joining. Forums don’t pay their moderators and administrators. Those roles are performed by volunteers who love the community and care about it. Disrespecting them is your way of indicating you don’t want to belong.

3.Is it kind, necessary, true? This is ancient advice for any kind of dialog and especially useful for social communities on the Internet because whatever you say is going to live on forever and ever and ever. I’ve broken this rule. The last time I did I swore and got into a cat fight on someone else’s web property. Some people will joke around and tell you to “step away from the keyboard”. I was so mortified that I lost my cool that I lost confidence and thought for sure I destroyed my reputation.

The rule of thumb is solid. The proof is at Cre8asiteforums in our members-only pub where I launched a discussion on gun control. It’s now at 8 pages and still active. At no point did anyone lose their cool. With members around the world, opinions are all over the place and yet the entire discussion is extremely smart, respectful and thoughtful. In years past we were able to pull off political discussions without any riots. Facebook can’t even do that.

No matter where you go online, if there is an opportunity to provide feedback, always take the high road. Whether you submit reviews, participate in discussions, leave blog comments that are not spam, converse in Facebook and Google Plus or speak in “hash-tag” language, be nice about it. Be fair. Use humor. Don’t hijack the discussion. If the host has potty mouth, this doesn’t mean you have to if this isn’t really who you are.

Next week’s topic is: The conversation is NOT about you. The conversation is about you.

You read that right.

The post Social Communities: How to Talk Without Causing a Riot appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.

4 Useful Creative Commons Browser Plugins

Ann Smarty — Mon, 06 May 2013 13:00:52 +0000

While the open source nature of the Internet is continuing, and in many ways expanding thanks to developers efforts and demand, it isn’t always easy to find something that is truly covered under creative commons licensing. This is because a lot of sites or businesses will offer something for ‘free’, and that is mistaken for CC work. But it isn’t, it is just paid for in different ways, such as sponsorship, marketing data and advertising.

Images have become a huge part of content marketing, therefore finding cool images we can use (and as we know, we are not able to use just any image we come across online) is so hot nowadays.

For those times when you really need CC content and images, try these excellent plugins for your browser.

1. Flickr Blogger

Browser: FireFox
How does it work: As the FireFox search plugin

Search Flickr quickly for images you can use for commercial and non-commercial purposes. It is easy to install onto Firefox, and simple to use. There isn’t a lot to it, but if you just want a very basic image search that can help you find the right kind of CC content, this is for you.

2. Flickr CC Attribution Helper

Browser: FireFox (through Greasemonkey) or Google Chrome
How does it work: Inserts proper attribution on the image page for you to copy-paste. Only works on pages with Creative Commons image: If you don’t see it, don’t use the image!

Copy and paste the attribution coding quickly, without having to search through individual pages for the info. This is a useful little tool that for some reason hasn’t gotten anywhere near the attention it deserves.

3. OpenAttribute

Browser: FireFox, Google Chrome, Opera
How does it work: Similar as above but use the address bar to signal of the CC image on the page and lets you copy attribution text right from there

This has overtaken old plugins that are no longer available, such as MozCC or Mycroft CC. It is arguably the most advanced and thorough attribution and CC plugin you can find, at this point. It is sleek, easy and perfect for regular use. I would say this is my favorite on the list.

4. CC Search

Browser: FireFox
How does it work: Another search plugin but it gives a quick access to about 10 Creative Commons search engines (including flickr, spinxpress, wikimedia, fotopedia, etc). It’s a good search plugin when you need more options that just Flickr

While it isn’t technically a plugin, this is a good one to have on hand. Add Creative Common search to your usual search platforms. Some versions of Firefox will already have it, but Chrome doesn’t. From the search bar you can check out anything within the CC realm, rather than sift through results on Google.

Have a plugin that allow Creative Commons use? Let us know in the comments.

Related tool: Resize and crop your images for web use

And don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter!

The post 4 Useful Creative Commons Browser Plugins appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.

What the Heck is a Facebook Like?

Laura Eggleston — Thu, 02 May 2013 13:00:47 +0000

Everyday, Facebook is asking us to do all sorts of things – like this page, join this event, subscribe to this person, comment on this post, share this picture. There’s a seemingly endless amount of actions a user can take, and it’s as easy as clicking a link.

Each of these actions has an affect on the social network, but in what ways? Some actions trigger a notification, and some a news feed item. Some are unobtrusive and just show up on your timeline. This is all beneficial for Facebook, since social activity is what keeps the site going. As a user it’s all impulse clicking, but for us to measure these actions we have to understand them.

Like vs Share

Let’s start with the biggest one: Facebook Likes. The Like button is relatively new, having only been implemented in 2009 but in that time it’s made a BIG impact. Before the Like button was introduced, websites could encourage users to “share” an object. Clicking the share link or button would make a Facebook window pop up previewing the story the user would be sharing with a box for them to enter their own comments about it. This story would appear in other users’ news feeds traditionally with a thumbnail, link title and short description.

Compared to other items, it took up quite a bit of real estate. When the Like button came onto the scene, it was pretty underwhelming from a marketing stand point. “Liking” a page or website only took up one line in the news feed, saying something similar to “Laura likes Internet Marketing Ninjas”. To make matters worse, likes were aggregated into one big list, with only one actually being featured in the news feed and the others being hidden behind a link (“Laura likes Internet Marketing Ninjas and 38 other pages”, for example). This wasn’t bad for the user, since they didn’t have to see a bunch of extra stories in their news feed, but for those of us who like to use social media to reach out to potential customers… it was a bummer.

Then something neat happened! Facebook added some of the functionality of a traditional share to the Like button. Clicking a Like button on an external website immediately likes the page, but also brings up a small dialog inside of the window, rather than an extra pop up window which was obtrusive and often shut down by pop up blockers. In addition, they started pushing social plugins, which let people add buttons, such as the Like button, to their website fairly easily. Users no longer had to deal with an annoying extra pop up when clicking a share button. Instead, they could just click a Like button and move on, allowing the website to catch the casual user much easier than before.

So what other differences are there? Why use Like instead of Share?

Because Facebook says so. When it comes down to it, Facebook has deprecated the old share button. Share actions still exist (as can be seen on any post in your news feed), but for prompting users to suggest pages to other users, a Like button should be used instead.
Liking something is more casual. Sharing a page is an added feature made available to the user. If a user sees something especially interesting, the share button is there for them to act upon it. Like buttons are simpler. They’re meant to be a reaction, rather than action. It asks a question: Do you like this thing? If it’s yes, you click the button. That’s it. Think of it like a call to action.
Likes connect users to your brand in a more permanent way. Share actions are one-offs. A user sees something, shares it and that’s it. A like on a website with properly optimized Like buttons lets a company continue to reach out to users through the news feed. In addition, when a user Likes an external page, that connection stays with them and can be used for targeting via Facebook ads.
It’s just more intuitive. Facebook has trained their users to “Like” things. LOTS of things. Give users something they’re familiar with and they’re more likely to use it.
Likes are prettier. When you click a share button which brings up the old pop up box, it’s obvious how old it is. The on-site dialog that comes up when clicking on a Like button is more aesthetically pleasing and better all around from a usability standpoint.

With that said, all of these things are important. Search engines take shares, likes and comments all into consideration. The biggest reasons to stick with Likes is for usability and because they’re supported by Facebook. After all, those old Share links that people are using could disappear any day and Facebook wouldn’t even have to apologize.

What Good Are They Anyways?

Okay, so now we know what a Like is. What’s the point? This is an easy one.

Search Engines are social. Sure, Google’s got their own shiny social network, but that doesn’t mean they’re ignoring the cues they can get from Facebook and Twitter. Likes, shares, and all those other social buzz words absolutely factor into rankings. They give a person or brand social authority. Both Google and Bing have come out and said that yes, these social cues are used as a signal.
Word of mouth. Social media has completely changed that phrase. On places like Facebook, you don’t just tell one person – you tell hundreds. Thousands, even! The news feed stories generated by Likes and Shares have an insane amount of reach. Not to mention many people don’t even realize when they’re sharing things with their friends.
Social authority is the new trust. People are judging you based on your social activity. Not you personally, maybe, but definitely your company. Seeing a page with thousands of Likes makes them trustworthy. How could thousands of people be wrong? Having a public profile also gives people the ability to contact you openly by posting on your page. If a company is willing to do that, it gives them more trust in the eyes of the user.

Social media is important for marketing – nobody will argue that. Customers expect a company to have an active Facebook page now-a-days. Effective social marketing, though, goes beyond the social network itself. Social plugins such as the Like button let you stay social outside of Facebook, and gives your users a way to connect with you without physically seeking out a Facebook account or page.

Image source

The post What the Heck is a Facebook Like? appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.