Make Money from Blogs » Promotion

Differences between Facebook Fan Page and Groups ? Which is better ?

ashish — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 19:16:03 +0000

Well, there is no easy way to determine the right answer for the last question above – “Which is better”. I know that most people detest an answer which starts with “It depends”, but it is true in this case. It depends on what you are trying to promote, what is the level of response and involvement you are looking at, and so on. So, let’s do some evaluation of the differences between a Facebook Fan Page and a Facebook Group.
1. The way that Fan Pages and Groups are setup (including their privacy settings) are different. Fan Pages, when they started out, were modeled after the concept of they being the representation of the fans of a artist, a musician, a rock band, and so on. A group allowed the administrator to set higher levels of privacy, including this being secret, and was more like a club.
2. Groups are meant for a more closer or intimate level of interaction, such as being able to see who the administrator of the Group is, being able to view the profiles of the group members, and so on. On the other hand, you can hide the name of the administrator of the Fan Page, and the profile information of members is also hidden. As a result, a Fan Page allows a viewer to maintain privacy while reading the information on the Fan Page.
3. Groups cannot have additional information added to the pages through applications, while Fan Pages allow you to extent the functionality through the use of external third party applications. As the number of such applications increases, this becomes more important.
4. Groups are not available to non-Facebook users, while Fan Pages are visible to non-Facebook users, letting a greater number of people get access to these posts and find these results through searches.
5. However, since the apparent involvement of users with Facebook Groups is greater, any update sent to the group is displayed more prominently on the user’s profile in the case of a Group rather than in a Fan Page
6. The level of statistics provided in a Fan Page is far greater than that in a Group, and if you are interested in doing a number of statistical analysis of your readers, then a Fan Page will be more useful.
(to be contd..)

Selectively updating your Twits on Facebook – “Selective Tweets”

ashish — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 09:15:21 +0000

Using social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter is an important part of how to promote your blog, but one of the challenges is how to ensure that your updates make it to all these tools. There are a variety of tools that are used to update your social networking sites; you can use Twitterfeed to update your Twitter presences from your blog posts, and you can use Networked Blogs to update your Facebook Fan Page. In addition, inside Facebook, you can update your Twitter through sending your Facebook Fan Page updates in the form of tweets to your Twitter account.
However, consider the case where you use your Twitter account to tweet, and your tweets are not only your automatic blog posts, but you manually add stuff to your Twitter account. In such cases, these tweets will not make it to your Facebook account, and you are missing out some important cross-tool promotion. In such cases, welcome to the concept of a tool called “Selective Tweets”, which takes your unprotected Twitter account (it does not work if your tweets are protected), and then these updates (marked with a #fb) are then picked up for posting to your Facebook Fan Page.
Refer to the following App page on Facebook (link)

Selective Tweet Status lets you update your Facebook status from Twitter –
BUT you can choose which tweets you want – just end a tweet with #fb when you want to post it as your Facebook status – simple!

You need to add the app to your Fan Page, and then you are set to go.
Refer to the FAQ for Selective Tweets if you need some help or have some issue (link)

Don’t misuse Twitter when using it for promotion

ashish — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:55:54 +0000

Twitter makes a great platform for getting new users to your blog. You can get a number of people to join your blog through a mechanism of following people in a similar line, as well as through writing short succinct Twitter updates (for more ways to use Twitter effectively, be sure to read the following blog – TwiTip.com).
Imagine the theory – all you need to do is get to a number of followers, and they will automatically get an update when you post a new Twitter update. However, it becomes far less simple after this point. Just because you have a number of followers does not mean that you will automatically get people coming to your blog from those posts – in many cases, the followers are not genuine. Getting followers who are genuine is far more difficult. And in many cases, it is the person posting on Twitter who is to blame. If you are writing genuine content, and posting short witty succinct posts to Twitter, then you will slowly start building up more dedicated users.
You could get more followers by following a number of people, and in many cases, there are software that automatically follows people who follow you. However, just because you have 10,000 followers does not mean that they are good. The strategy you need to follow is to follow only those people whose content you are really interested in, and then, if your content is genuine, then they will also follow you. However, and it is really important, do not share only for volume, share only that which would be interesting to somebody else.

Adding a ‘Digg’ button to your Blogger / WordPress posts

ashish — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 19:53:05 +0000

Digg is a very popular site that allows users to vote for the content that they want to make popular, in the sense, the editorial decisions are made by people, not by a separate team. And what is Digg ? If you have not heard of Digg by now, you should have ! Description from the people at Digg !
Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. You won’t find editors at Digg — we’re here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content and we’re changing the way people consume information online. How do we do this? Everything on Digg — from news to videos to images — is submitted by our community (that would be you). Once something is submitted, other people see it and Digg what they like best. If your submission rocks and receives enough Diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of our visitors to see. And as per Alexa, 0.5% of internet users come to Digg (which is a huge absolute number).

So, how do you ensure that your posts are added to Digg ? It’s fairly simple now, all you need to do is to read a bit about the options posted on the Digg Tools page (click here). This page gives you the code that needs to be added to your blog (or other web page). However, in a majority of the cases, you would want the code to be added such that it shows up automatically in all your articles / posts. You can do this by adding the code to the template ? You might ask, how do do that ? Well, now it gets a bit complicated whether you use Blogger or WordPress.

For Blogger, if you are still using the older version of Blogger, then it is fairly easy to step into the code of the older Blogger interface, go to the Template option -> Edit HTML, and then go to the section of code where it says

If you are using the newer version of Blogger, then you need to update your template, a bit trickier option. Remember, if you update your template, you should take a backup earlier. Here is this excellent post detailing how to modify the template (click here). However, you cannot just use the code as described in the blog, since the Digg code has changed and is much simpler. You need to find the section of template as described in the article, and then use the code for Digg from the http://digg.com/tools/integrate page.

if you using WordPress (not WordPress.com hosted blog), then you need to modify the WordPress template for making this change. Login into wp-admin for your blog, go to the Design -> Theme Editor -> Single Post.
After you reach the line, php the_content(‘Read the rest of this entry, in the next line, add the code for Digg from the http://digg.com/tools/integrate page.

You should be good to go with this. As to the question of which Digg to use from the http://digg.com/tools/integrate page, I recommend that you go with the first option, where it says “Digg This” with Submit Capability.

Finding Blogs that link to your blog

ashish — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 18:26:31 +0000

Part of the currency of the internet is the concept of linking. The mighty Google PageRank is a very high indicator of the popularity of your blog, and also an indicator of how easily you can find it using Google Search (if your blog comes often in the first page of Google Search, then you can consider yourself to have achieved a major milestone, something that will drive a huge amount of traffic to your blog). Now, from the time that PageRank was a concept in the minds of the founders of Google, it is used as a very important factor in the popularity of your blog. The higher the page rank of your site, the better it is for you.
One of the most important constituent of PageRank is the concept of Page Linking. The more the number of people who link to your blog, the better it is for you with the following caveats;
1. If the people who link to you have a higher PageRank, even better. If you get a link from a site that has a PageRank of more than 5 (and your PageRank is much lower, then you should expect a boost in some time in your own PageRank).
2. If you get people linking to you who are not exactly desirable (people running Warez sites, porn sites, gambling sites, etc), then do not gloat. Links from such sites can be treated negatively, or at the most, treated as without any value.
3. Getting links from link farms is being seen as much more negative and detrimental to placement in search engines, so you should actively reconsider such steps if you are planning to do so.
Now that some broad rules for the linking of other sites to your sites is known, how do you find out other sites that link to your site ? There are 2 common online sites that will help you do this:
1. http://www.google.com – Suppose you are running a site for photography tips such as http://5phototips.com/, then just type the following in the Google search box: link:http://5phototips.com/. This search will find all the blogs that link to your blog
2. Technorati Search. Technorati is a very famous portal that fetches information about blogs. If you want to find out all the blogs that link to your blog, then go to the following page, Advanced Search on Technorati, and go to the URL seach option in the middle of the displayed page. Type in the Blog URL without the http://, so, as in the previous example, type in 5phototips.com and click on Search.
There are other tools that help you find blogs that link to your site, but I have found both of them to be the most useful, hence decided to write this post with these 2.