You have more to say than you realize

Show me what you've got to say - I bet it's really good!

There's a common piece of advice given by big name marketers that says you should only write when you have something to say. It's meant to be applied everywhere - your blog, your newsletter, and social networks. In theory, it makes sense: Don't overload/bore/waste your audience's time with content that you share just to have content to share.

For a small business, with a small audience, that's trying to build up engagement, this is not good advice. Here's why:

1) It requires a critical mass of engaged followers/subscribers.

The marketers who say this have all done their time, building up a good sized audience that trusts their expertise. They have loyal followings that look for their content and interact with it when it comes. As a small business owner, it takes time to build that kind of relationship with your audience. To remain successful with a "write when you have something to say" strategy, you need a critical mass following you. Can your business grow if 50% of your followers convert to paying customers? Depending on the size of your audience and what you do, many can say yes to that. The reality is that most businesses won't convert nearly that many people. So, how many people would it take to build your business to the level you want to reach? Now, you'll likely have to grow an audience that is at least 20 times that size (or more!). That's why it's important that you know that when content isn't delivered regularly, your audience will not grow consistently or as fast.

2) Credibility starts with visibility.

The point of posting content regularly is to keep your business and expert content top of mind with your audience. If they don't see or hear from you on a regular basis, they can't learn to trust what you have to say. Whether you're sending a newsletter, writing a blog post, or posting to social media, each of those touch points is an opportunity to provide value that builds your credibility as an expert in your field. As your audience sees the information you share, they will respond in various ways: by filtering it out or ignoring it, reading it, taking some kind of action - like, comment, share, tweet, or apply it to their work. Each of these responses is important - some can be measured and give valuable insight to you for future content. Stay visible with your content by delivering consistent 

3) You have more to say than you realize.

Has anyone ever said, "There's a reason we have two ears and one mouth," to you? Human nature is that we like to talk and some people need a gentle reminder that listening is important too. It's a rare person who truly doesn't like or want to talk. Posting content without thought or for the sake of putting something out there isn't valuable to you or anyone else. But if you think about the interactions you have with your customers and clients each day, how many times did you find you had nothing to say to them? What about associates? 

On January 13, 2015, Lara and I are leading a Content Mindset Workshop that will help you see how much content you truly have. Whether you've been creating content for many years or you're just starting out, we have some exciting plans for this day that will help you look at the creation of content from a different angle. We're going to spend time teaching about various types of content, and tools and tactics that can help you create more effective content. You'll walk away at the end of day with content to use for your business. We strongly believe that you have more to say and this workshop is designed to draw those things out of you - for the benefit of your audience and your business.

Join us - I promise you won't regret it!

How to schedule posts on Facebook

To be successful on Facebook you need to be posting content on a consistent basis. We recommend that you post something at least one or two times a day. The best way to take the stress out of posting regular content online is to have a plan, create a lot of content at once and schedule it. This means that on a daily basis all you need to do is monitor how things are going on your Facebook page instead of wasting time trying to figure out what to say.

But how do you do that?

Good question. Facebook keeps changing the "how" part and they don't make it obvious, so today I'm going to walk you through how to schedule posts and how to update them or edit them if you need to change anything later.

Schedule

Start by creating your content. Then select the "Post" button from the bottom right and then select "Schedule Post" from the drop down menu.

Once you've selected "Schedule Post" a window will pop up. You then select the date by clicking on the calendar icon and then typing in the time. This is a great way to experiment with what time works best for your audience by trying different times of day, from early morning to later into the evening.

Hit "Schedule" and you're done - it's that simple.

What if I need to change my post?

Sometimes things change and we need to be able to edit our content. If that happens it's easy to go into your scheduled content and either change the time it will go live, edit the text or delete it entirely.

To find your scheduled content you will see the following right under the status update box. Click on "See posts" to open up the content.

From here, you select what you want to change by selecting the arrow in the top right corner of the post in question.

And that's it.  Try it out and let us know in the comments if you schedule posts.

Tools to create appealing images

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the components of a blog post. One of the 7 critical pieces is a featured image. A good graphic serves a few purposes:

• Your blog post graphic can help compel readers to click through from social networks when there's a thumbnail preview showing. 
• The featured image can double as a shareable image when you promote your post on various networks.
• It breaks up the page and assists with readability.
• When the graphic lends support to your post and adds visual appeal, you help readers connect with your message and purpose.

Beyond featured graphics on your blog posts, images are used all over the place, because humans are visual. We like imagery. It helps us relate to and process information.

With all this pressure to have images at the ready, some businesses are searching for tools they can use to create graphics on the fly without having to hire someone. Today, I'm going to tell you about two tools I use all the time that I really love.

Canva

Canva.com hasn't been around for very long - maybe 6 months or a year. I can't remember how I found out about it, but I'm so glad I did. If you ever used Picnik (the image editor that Google bought and shut down), Canva is better. It started out as a browser-based tool and they've just recently released an iPad app, so you can make images on the go quickly and easily. Here are some of the images I've created using Canva:

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Each of these shareable images was created with a stock photo, which I purchased from Canva for $1. Three eye-catching, meaningful images and they cost me $3 and a little bit of time. There are many, many free backgrounds, shapes, symbols and images that you can use as well. 

I use Canva exclusively for web graphics so far, but you can also create documents for printing as well. Canva even provides pre-sized templates for all the current optimal sizes for graphics on social networks, such as Facebook, Google+ and Twitter cover images, as well as timeline graphics. 

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The image I sent to Lara and our amazing VA, Tracy Noble. :)

There are some functions (like using any font I want) that keep me using Adobe design tools more than these tools, but that tends to be for graphics that I want clearly branded. Fortunately, Canva gives you lots of options for changing colours to complement your branding and they have some very nice fonts to use as well.

Wordswag

I stumbled upon Wordswag a few weeks ago by complete accident. It's only available on iOS, but for $2.99 you get forever free access to a really cool tool. I've talked to quite a few people since I found Wordswag and almost all of them bought it right away and love it as well - so you won't be disappointed! I've honestly never had so much fun designing quick images.

Just to give you an idea, I decided to see how many different versions of the same image I could create in about 5 minutes time I didn't really race through, but I still managed to get 8 done! 

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The variety is pretty impressive and since you can use your own photos and images, there's no need to feel like your text graphics look like everyone else's. Here's a video intro to Wordswag so you can see how it works:

The really wonderful thing about both of these apps is that you can make images right on your phone or iPad and then upload them to any social network, including Instagram. 

Bonus Tool - OUTSOURCE!

Lara and I are big believers in outsourcing work that isn't our genius. (That's one reason why we have that fabulous VA I mentioned earlier - we'd be lost without Tracy.) 

I'm very excited to announce today that Wellman Wilson is now officially offering design services. We recognize that creating images can be stressful and time-consuming if that's not what you enjoy or feel is a strength. We can help save you time and stress - allowing you to do more of the things that are your genius work!

Do you have a favourite tool for creating images? Tell us in the comments! (Especially if you have suggestions for Android users.)

How to schedule posts on your Facebook Page

Facebook recently made some updates to Pages that are really exciting. I think I could feel the excitement of every page admin I know when we all read about admin roles and scheduled posts.

But how do you schedule them?

It’s not super obvious, so here’s the rundown:

1) Set up the content that you want to schedule - status, link, picture or video. Add any text you want to include.

2) At the bottom left of your post you’ll see a little clock. Click on it and select the year, month, day, hour and minute (you only get the 10s as an option) you want your post to be published.

3) Press the submit button and Facebook will confirm that you’re scheduling the post for the date and time you specified and you can close out or go to your Page’s activity log to see the post. 

 

BUT, what if that post you scheduled needs to be changed or cancelled later?

Good question! Because this part is even less obvious. First, apparently you have to be using Facebook as yourself - not as your Page.

Go to your page (still logged in as you).

At the top of your page, you’ll see an Edit Page button. If you click on it, there is a list of options. Select Use Activity Log.

The top section of your activity log has all your scheduled posts. You can change the scheduled time or delete the content but editing isn’t available…yet (I’m betting a future update will clear up this little issue).

Now, isnt this handy!? And if you go to our Facebook page today, you’ll see that post was published last night as planned. (Feel free to like our page while you’re there if you’re so inclined. ;)

Have you scheduled any posts to Facebook yet? What do you think do far?

To follow or "nofollow": How to handle paid links

Last week, I (Karen) posted a link on Facebook about nofollow links and the dangers of not using them. It generated a great deal of confusion and many excellent questions. So, I started doing some additional research into this issue (and indeed it is a hotly debated topic). What I found was that the supporting links in the post I shared were only telling part of the story. 

Background

I started with Wikipedia:

nofollow is a value that can be assigned to the rel attribute of an HTML a element to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.

The original purpose of the rel=”nofollow” attribute was to prevent comment spam. It didn’t (and doesn’t) work perfectly to solve the original issue and there are a host of issues with the attribute - read more about the issues here. 

In 2005, Matt Cutts wrote about Google’s stance on paid links, suggesting that using the nofollow attribute would give search bots the heads up that a link was paid (or not recommended):

But for everyone else, let me talk about why we consider it outside our guidelines to get PageRank via buying links. Google (and pretty much every other major search engine) uses hyperlinks to help determine reputation. Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and link-based analysis has greatly improved the quality of web search. Selling links muddies the quality of link-based reputation and makes it harder for many search engines (not just Google) to return relevant results. 

So, for 7 years, there has been an ongoing and lengthy debate about whether or not to use nofollow and why. This particular quote [emphasis mine] is probably one that would be considered extremely controversial:

But not everyone agrees it’s up to webmasters to help Google figure out how to rank websites. Romanian search blogger Ionut Alex. Chitu told me that webmasters should put paid links on a separated place on the website, and label them in such a way that users don’t think the webmaster is affiliated with them. Other than that, Ionut argues, “Search engines should be smart enough to detect navigation areas, unrelated links or spam.” When asked on whether he thinks webmasters should use the “nofollow” value, Ionut says, “No, they shouldn’t. Unless they care a lot about search engines. Ideally, webmasters should act as if search engines don’t exist.”

It would be interesting to know what that blogger’s views are five years later.

Endorsement

The nofollow attribute is not exclusively a signal to indicate a paid link. It’s also a flag that a link is not being endorsed by the site hosting the link. Why? Nofollow links receive no SEO benefit. That can be a reason to use them if you have a difference of opinion with the site you’re linking to for any reason.

Not All Search Engines are Equal

I’m not referring to market share. I’m talking about how they treat the nofollow attribute. Here’s a breakdown, courtesy of the Wikipedia article:

rel=”nofollow” Action	Google	Yahoo!	Bing	Ask.com
Uses the link for ranking	No	No	No	?
Follows the link	Yes	Yes	?	No
Indexes the “linked to” page	No	Yes	No	No
Shows the existence of the link	Only previously indexed pages	Yes	Yes	Yes
In results pages for anchor text	Only previously indexed pages	Yes	Only previously indexed pages	Yes

My Conclusion

Originally, my advice was to nofollow any paid link. My view on this has changed, despite the threat of negative action from Google, which appears to be minimal from what I’ve seen so far.

Whether to use the rel=”nofollow” attribute is a grey area. I know of many bloggers who will add any advertiser to their blog to generate revenue. I know of just as many who carefully vet the advertisers they promote for the express purpose of endorsing their business. 

My personal practice going forward will be to use follow/nofollow as an endorsement method. If I want to endorse even a paid advertiser, I will not use the nofollow attribute. For links to sites I don’t endorse, I’ll determine if it’s appropriate to add nofollow to the link or not. 

Do you understand the nofollow attribute better now? Do you need to know more to decide how you’ll decide to use (or not use) it?