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We all want to increase Facebook likes for our individual blog posts and also our Facebook page. Especially when you’re a creating a brand for yourself, it’s important to avoid certain mistakes, just as much as taking the right actions.

Include Facebook Like Box On Your Website

One of the right actions to take, and one of the most fundamental for marketing your blog on Facebook, is to make sure you have a like button on your blog or website.

You can head over to the Facebook developer section here, and generate the code you’ll need.

From the above link, scroll down to find this box. Where you see the field “URL to Like”, enter your Facebook page address. That might be something like https://www.facebook.com/inscribd/

You can also choose whether or not to show faces alongside the Like button, and also customize the width of the area for the Like button.

Click on ‘Get Code’ and you’ll be given some options.

The easiest option is iframe

Copy the code given and paste it into the location of your blog or website where you want the Like button to appear.

Now that we have the fundamentals out of the way, there are some common mistakes marketers make when it comes to updating their Facebook page.

The good folks at Woobox have created the infographic below to show the primary reasons why Facebook users don’t engage with certain pages.

According to Woobox, over 80% of users “like” to see deals and promotions, and your page will be un-liked if you post too much, too often.

Check it out:

Increase Facebook Likes And Keep Readers Happy

Some key points we can take away from this study is the following:

• Ask your audience what they want to read,
• Don’t post too often, and keep it relevant,
• Give readers special promotions, discounts, coupons and freebies.

What turns you off from liking a Facebook page?

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How Copywriting Killer SEO Page Titles Destroy The Competition

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Crafting the perfect headline for blog articles or meta tag SEOpage titles is more fun than kneading a handful of silly putty. The title begins life as an amorphous blob containing a target keyword we want to focus on, nestled within a jumble of words. Trying to get our target keyword into the title, in the right place and making the title meaningful is quite a challenge. The title needs to be molded into shape so that it conveys the topic succinctly and includes our chosen keyword within a coherent sentence.

The title of a webpage, especially for blog posts, is not only crucial to encouraging visitors to read the page once they are on our website, but it’s also vital to getting visitors to our website in the first place.

Sometimes I’ll spend hours trying to craft the perfect headline for an article. I want the article to grab a person’s attention within 2 seconds. In order to do that, often I’ll spend a lot of time researching in Market Samurai (affiliate) the types of phrases and keywords people type into Google. This keyword research does 4 things for me.

1. Pinpoint the *best* keyword to focus on for SEO purposes,
2. Get an idea of the competition I should expect from my keyword use,
3. Find related topics/keywords that I can discuss in articles,
4. Frequently while researching one topic, I find myself getting off course but discover new topics for new articles.

More often that not, the research effort pays off when search traffic starts flowing in.

Crafting the perfect headline is not only essential for getting search traffic to a website but it also makes tweets and status updates far more sharable. The same logic applies to Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, such as the Google’s AdWords program or Microsoft’s Bing Ads

SEO Page Titles For Better Click-Through Rates

In the code of a website, we have a meta tag called title. Google uses this tag as the headline of search results and it is the first, and perhaps only, impression we make on a prospective visitor. Without a compelling title that turns a vagrant into a reader, the rest of our words may as well not even exist.
Would you click on a search result listing like this one? Bad SEO page titles are bad, mkay? However, we can see there are 3 fundamental elements to the search result – title, URL and description.

While all three elements are important in their own right and shouldn’t be neglected in your search engine optimization efforts, I want to focus on the title. I believe it’s the #1 most important meta tag and getting it wrong can cost you valuable search traffic.

The title is essential to attracting the right audience and that audience will likely be searching for something very specific. We aim to capture them by utilizing the best keyword phrase in our headline and main copy of our page.

According to some of the best copywriters, you should spend half of the entire time it takes to write a piece of persuasive content – on the headline. I’ve read this a few times and I believe it’s true if you’re about to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on a marketing campaign. In the context of website titles or blog posts, I’d suggest tweaking your headline for a good 20 to 30 minutes after you already have your keywords known. Return to your headlines and titles after a few days and tweak them again with fresh eyes.

Let’s look at how bloggers, copy writers, magazine editors and salespeople write great headlines.

When in doubt, start with How, Who, Why, What, When …

One of the most famous ‘How’ headlines is How To Win Friends and Influence People (affiliate). This headline structure is powerful because directly after “how to” is a benefit – win friends. Then after “and” is another benefit. The subtle relationship between the 1st benefit and the 2nd suggests that if you can achieve the first, you can automatically achieve the second.

How about some more …

• How to Save Money and Retire Rich.
• How to Travel Central America on $17 a Day.
• How I Improved My Memory in One Evening.
• How a New Kind of Clay Improved My Complexion in 30 Minutes.
• How an Obvious Idea Made Me $3.5 Million.
• How Moving to Melbourne Improved My Sex Life.
• How Doctors Stay Well While Treating Sick People All Day.

Who …

• Who Else Wants a Great Website Themes?
• Who Else Wants More Fun and Less Stress When on Vacation?

Why …

• Why Some People Almost Always Make Money in the Stock Market.

What …

• What Everybody Should Know About Writing Great Headlines.

When …

• When Doctors Have Headaches, What Do They Do?

Then there’s lists, which always work great.

• Do You Recognize the 7 Early Warning Signs of High Blood Pressure?
• 11 Ways to Beat the High Cost of Living.
• Five Familiar Skin Troubles.
• Free Book Tells You 12 Secrets of Better Lawn Care.
• 8 Things You Can Do This Weekend to Repair Your Credit.
• 23 Things You Should Never Pay For.
• Eleven Secret Techniques That Make Bloggers Money.
• Lose 35 Pounds in Only 7 Weeks.
• How to Shave 5 Strokes Off Your Golf Score in 3 Days.

For Example

Remember, our titles should contain our primary keyword phrase that we want to rank for in search results. For example, let’s craft a headline to include the keyword phrase ‘homemade dog food recipes’. How about:

• 5 Homemade Dog Food Recipes That Improve Your Pet’s Health.
• Homemade Dog Food Recipes For Under $5 a Day.
• How I Pamper My Poodle With Homemade Dog Food Recipes.
• What Every Pet Owner Should Know About Homemade Dog Food Recipes.

Once you get the hang of it, it’s quite easy.

Old SEO Methods – Who Needs ’em?

You’re probably aware of the meta tag keywords. This tag was once the darling of SEO best practice. Just include your keywords in the HTML meta tags and boom! You’d rank in the search engines for those keywords. Well, obviously those days are gone and the keywords tag is completely ignored by the search engines.

Keyword over-stuffing has also fallen out of practice. It used to be common for titles to read:
Keyword 1 | Keyword 2 | Keyword 3 – Website Name

Google prefers to see a structured, meaningful sentence for the title.

SEO Title Best Practice

1. Title should be a coherent short sentence.
2. Primary keyword should be at the beginning of the title (or close to it).
3. Title display in search engines is limited to 70 characters.

Great For Social Media Too

Absolutely everyone should have social mediasharing buttons on their blog. Putting SEO aside for just a moment, your page title continues to hold significant importance when a visitor wants to share your page on their social network. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn – whoever – uses the title tag from your page as the status update, as can be seen in the image above.

Bonus Tips

Another important part of showing up in the search results is to include your target keyword phrase in the body of your page content. Google scans pages of your website to determine the topic. They don’t just look at the title tag.

It is not recommended to over-stuff your content with your keyword phrase either. Google is very good at detecting when you are trying to manipulate search results and you may be penalized for it. Google recommends that you write content for the reader, not for the search engines. Good advice.

Also read 8 Google SEO Mistakes That Will Choke Your Search Ranking

Tell us in the comments, how long do you spend crafting your headlines? What are your best titles?

Tags:  copy writingcopywriting website titlesSearch engine optimizationseoseo page titles

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Before you jump on board with free wordpress themes you’ve found during your search, there’s a few things you need to look out for and actively compare the free wordpress themes with paid premium wordpress themes.

When you first set up a blog with WordPress, you’ll be given a default choice of themes, which are quite boring. There’s no reason why the WordPress team couldn’t include a handful of awesome themes pre-installed, but it’s my opinion that they don’t in order to open the market to designers like iThemes for paid premium wordpress themes and other free wordpress themes.

Developing themes for WordPress can be quite lucrative for web designers and some of the premium wordpress themes deserve fair credit.

Conversely, there are developers from the open source community who live by the philosophy that software should be free. And don’t we love them for it!

Often though – and this applies to everything in life – you get what you pay for. That is, if you pay in peanuts, you might end up with a big lumbering elephant. Instead, we should be looking for a themes equivalent of a sleek cheetah, optimized for speed and to be lightweight in it’s download size.

That’s not to say you can’t find spectacular free wordpress themes. Free wordpress themes are a dime-a-dozen (er.. zero-a-dozen?). Finding the good free themes are actually just as hard finding good premium wordpress themes.

How To Choose The Best WordPress Theme

Even if you only want to get a free wordpress theme, I recommend taking a look at some paid themes as well. This will give you a good idea of the difference in quality and various design techniques to look out for.

What you need to look for are themes with a demo. You shouldn’t have to install themes just to see how it looks. Also, don’t rely on screenshots because you can’t test the functionality or proper layout on your screen.

You really should test a theme before deploying it on your main blog because you could regret it later. Spend a bit of effort making a wise choice to begin with and save yourself time and heartbreak down the track.

Testing WordPress Themes in Demos

If a theme’s author can’t get their own demo right, you certainly can’t trust them to get the theme’s inner code working well enough either.

1. Test All Links

Click on all the menu and navigation links. Click through to articles and make sure they all display as expected. Also make sure the ‘author’ link works – a link on the post author’s name. Often, that page is missing (because it’s technically not essential, but it’s nice to have).

2. Re-size Your Browser

A common web design technique called ‘responsive design’ adjusts certain elements of the theme to re-size as your browser window changes in size. Un-maximize your browser window and make it smaller. Notice if the website elements start shifting around.

Responsive design is recognized as good practice and your theme of choice should get bonus points for being responsive.

3. Load From Mobile

The web is quickly shifting to mobile devices and therefore you can’t just focus on desktop themes. Load the demo on your phone and tablet to see whether it still looks good.

Some themes will load a special mobile-optimized version while others might re-size elements to fit the mobile window, such as with responsive designs.

Free Vs Premium WordPress Themes

There is a common perception that when you pay for something, rather than get it for free, that the paid option would be better quality. With wordpress themes, it’s a bit of a mixed bag.

Premium wordpress themes can still have bugs, performance issues and missing components.

On the other hand, free wordpress themes can be so lightweight and “simple” that they just work, which gives those the upper hand over bloated premium themes.

Your choice of theme comes down to a balance between features and performance. Often, more features slow down a website so think hard about whether you’d need that flashy gallery or fancy menu system.

Where To Get Free WordPress Themes

Instead of just re-hashing what other bloggers have found, here’s a few links to check out:

wprazzi.com free wordpress themes.
inspiretrends.com best responsive wordpress themes.
webdesigntunes.com awesome responsive wordpress themes.

Where To Get Premium WordPress Themes

iThemes have over 130 premium wordpress themes and live demos of each.

iThemes are also the creators of the BackupBuddy plugin which automates backing up your entire wordpress installation to the cloud or sent to your email address.

If you are looking for an easy way to edit your theme of choice, try DIYthemes who provide great looking themes together with powerful layout plugins.

Modifying WordPress Themes To Suit

Often, you’ll find a near-perfect theme that’s missing just one feature or you want the layout to be slightly different. If you don’t know how to code, you could hire a web developer through Elance at very reasonable rates to help you mold your theme to suit your tastes.

Readers, what is your budget for WordPress themes?

Back in the early days of Facebook, it was considered a real mistake for parents to friend their children and especially their children’s friends. This resulted in the Facebook etiquette phenomenon for kids to limit their profile so the parents could only see certain information.

As Facebook became the most ubiquitous social network with well over a billion users, the younger and older generations grew to share the network equally and understand it’s value as a place for community engagement.

As Facebook matured, so did the user base and those prior limits that kids imposed on their parents are no longer relied upon.

Kids and parents alike now rely on unwritten rules of Facebook etiquette. Most of them are a set of “Don’ts”.

If you are a parent yourself, don’t make these Facebook etiquette mistakes.

Bad Facebook Etiquette

1. Don’t pressure your kids over 18 years old to fully open up their profile to you. Even though they’re your babies, they are now adults who make their own decisions and can expect to reserve some privacy.

Don’t be offended though. Down the track, your kids may loosen up a bit and let you in.

2. Don’t comment on every single picture posted on your kids’ wall or status update. At least you could pretend not to be stalking them.

3. Don’t like every single status update. Liking everything is like the boy who cried wolf. Clicking ‘like’ is not to be used as an acknowledgement that you’ve seen the status. ‘Like’ only if the status is worth liking. Not all are.

4. Do not request to be friends with your children’s friends. It’s creepy and may be stepping over the line.

If that child is under 18 and you have a legitimate reason, you may want to get permission from their parents first before even sending the request.

5. Don’t reveal private arrangements in comments or status updates.

“See you tomorrow at our house at 3” may seem harmless enough, but it’s a general rule not to give burglars a heads up that your kid’s place will be unattended at a certain time. Instead, send such comments in private messages.

6. Don’t tag your kids in embarrassing photos. Actually, don’t upload those pictures at all. Scrutinize every picture and decide whether your kid would be okay with it being online permanently – yes, pictures stay online forever!

7. Don’t be the first to reveal big news of family members. Give them a chance to do it first.

8. Don’t fight with friends of your kids via comments. Sometimes kids will post comments on pictures or statuses that may seem offensive to a parent but are just playful schoolyard banter.

If you are concerned about bullying, ask your child first before jumping into a slanging match.

9. Don’t post vague status updates that can worry your children or designed to generate concern and attention. “Gee, I hope my husband is OK”.

10. Don’t post complaint after complaint. Hey, here’s an idea. Try post something positive, a silver lining, a nugget of gold for the day. Don’t use Facebook to vent all the time.

11. Don’t only post overly lovey-dovey, ‘look how great my life is’, spiritual wisdom type updates.

These have their place in the right context but won’t appeal to everyone and may make your life look a bit fake.

Nobody’s perfect, even those lucky enough to have the perfect life at certain moments. If you’re in that boat, show some humility around your more unfortunate Facebook friends.

12. If someone has deleted a comment you posted on their wall, status or picture, it’s probably for a good reason. Don’t get mad. Think about whether your comment was inappropriate and just let it slide. Take it on the chin.

13. Don’t post too often. A few times a day may be the upper limit for most friends, where others may have a higher tolerance. A general rule: If you have nothing important to say, don’t say anything at all.

14. Don’t share pictures without permission. On Facebook, a user who shares a photo with their friends only (as opposed to publicly) has intentionally limited the reach of that photo. When you come along and share that photo with your own friends, it’s kind of like sharing a private conversation.

The same goes for status updates. It’s not your place to make these things public if it was never intended to be.

If you want to avoid the dreaded ‘unfriend’ situation, take notes from 13 Reasons To Un-Friend On Facebook And In Real Life.

Also read 38 Things Not To Share On Social Networking Sites.

A great way of getting your name or brand out into the public arena is by writing an eBook about your expertise.

Ebooks and blogs are like two star-crossed lovers, walking hand in hand along the shore, warm sand filtering through their naked toes, strolling along the beach and off into the orange sunset.

This little romance between blogs and eBooks doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone.

Writing an eBooks can be used as a comprehensive marketing brochure for business services, or as an introduction to your blog to be given away to new subscribers. Ebooks can of course be stories, novels and hit the bestseller lists of Amazon, earning you a nice paycheck.

Writing An eBook

Writing an eBook doesn’t have to be difficult even though it may seem a bit challenging at first.

But if you plan ahead, think about chapters and contents within an organized structure, you’ll make the writing process fly by quicker.

The following tips will help you write a well-received eBook of any form, whether it will be used as a giveaway, sold on Amazon or the beginning of your own version of The Hunger Games bestselling trilogy.

1. Have A Brainstorming Session

Before you start writing your eBook, you’d likely have a broad idea of the topic you want to cover. Get a comfortable chair or jump on the couch and brainstorm what you want to include in your eBook.

You might start with jotting down some titles for chapters. Write down all your ideas for chapters, and break each down into sub-chapters.

You might want to consider what topics will be covered within each chapter, or make each topic a chapter of itself.

When brainstorming about chapters, also write down what should *not* be included or left out for it’s own chapter or a whole new eBook. Why stop at one eBook if you can fill the pages of two!

It is important to try narrow down your major eBook topic as narrowly as possible. If a stranger asks you to describe what your eBook is about in just one word, what would that be?

Find your eBook niche and stick to it. Instead of writing a book about dogs, wouldn’t it be much better to focus on one aspect, perhaps dog training? Focusing your eBook’s topic will make it easier to market and sell.

2. Organize Your eBook

Pour over your brainstorming notes and collate all the good ideas onto a new piece of paper or page on your computer. You’ll need to get that mess of ideas into a neat and logical order.

Think about how a reader completely new to the topic would appreciate the eBook chapter layout. What chapter should be first? How should you conclude the eBook?

Each chapter should have a logical order. If your eBook discusses technical or how-to information, make sure all elements are explained before getting into the nitty-gritty.

This will help format your eBook into readable sections and serve as a table of contents that readers can easily navigate through.

Even with a how-to guide, approach your eBook writing as if you’re telling a story.

Source

3. Write An Outline

Every book has a story to tell, even technical how-to guides. Each ebook must have a clear beginning, middle and an end.

Once you have divided your eBook into chapters, you can start with 10 bullet points you want to cover in each chapter.

Write an outline covering those bullet points and keep the outline organized in a logical order. You can write 100 to 500 words for each outline, which will help you get a very clear picture of the end result when it comes time to doing the hard yards.

Writing an outline before getting stuck right in to full writing mode is the most essential part of keeping yourself on track and having a finished, presentable eBook when you’re finished.

4. Write

Now that your have a clear outline and organized chapters of your eBook, you can focus on writing that specific topic. It may sound silly, but start writing from the start. Don’t write the conclusion first, or any middle sections. Your original outline is not set in stone and you’ll likely change it a bit as you go.

The outline keeps you focused and helps break down writing into manageable chunks. Take a break after completing each chapter.

Commit yourself to writing for 3 hours per day, or to writing one chapter per day. Having a writing calendar will help you stay on topic and stop you from burning out.

5. Edit, Re-Write

Editing your work is just as important as writing it in the first place. Some writer like to go over the chapter they’ve just completed and edit while it’s still fresh in their minds.

Other writers like to edit long after they’ve written the text to look upon it with fresh eyes. I tend to do both, but I admit it takes a fair bit more time. I could go over a single chapter 4 or 5 times before considering it ‘complete’.

Once you’ve written the entire eBook, you should back to the beginning and edit it fairly quickly. When editing:

• Insert extra headlines to help separate large chunks of text,
• Correct spelling and grammatical errors,
• Fix bad sentence structure,
• Cut down long sentences by splitting them into two or three,
• Cut down big paragraphs by re-writing them concisely,
• If something doesn’t make sense, re-write it,
• If you can’t explain something concisely, consider removing it entirely.

If you feel writing is becoming a burden, just put it aside for a while and come back to it later.

Writing an eBook should be fun and can be quite rewarding financially or just knowing you’re helping people.

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7 Basic Human Emotions To Manipulate Readers

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Basic human emotions have three primary components. The first are physiological changes such as increase in heart rate. Next there is a behavioral response, do I stay or do I go – the tendency to escape from or stay in contact with whatever is causing the emotion. Lastly, the subjective experience of feeling angry, happy, or sad – or somewhere inbetween.

Bloggers are no stranger to their own human emotions. There’s that anxious feeling of submitting a post wondering whether it would be enjoyed by their readers. The disgust in themselves seeing that their post has 0 likes, 0 tweets, 0 comments. That means zero love.

But don’t feel too bad. We’re all emotional every second of the day and bloggers should tap into the human emotions of their readers. If you have zero shares or comments, it’s not that your articles are trash or badly written. Maybe it’s just the emotional tone that needs a swift kick in the pants.

Our goal is to elicit emotions that excite or repulse the reader so much that they have to share your article with their social network. The reader is looking for confirmation from their peers that the way they are feeling is justified.

There are many types of human emotions. Here are seven that you can use to elicit sharing from your readers.

Human Emotions 1. Awe

What is awe? The definition from Google is “A feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear or wonder”.

A great way to inspire awe in your reader is to write something truly remarkable. If your post is genuinely amazing in terms of it’s content or written style, reader’s won’t be able to resist sharing and commenting. Huge lists work very well – something like 101 Ways To Skin A Cat. This turn of phrase is just awful by the way. The word “awful” literally means “To be filled with awe”.

Human Emotions 2. Anger

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Anger is one of the basic negative human emotions also epitomized in birds, apparently (joke). I don’t really recommend pissing people off but if you have a strong opinion about something, expressing it can draw out the trolls. But hey, they’ll tweet about it, write blog posts, and try get confirmation from their friends that you’re an awful person. You see, you would have filled them with awe!

Challenge your reader’s belief system or contradict common knowledge. Really rile them up!

Human Emotions 3. Anxiety

People don’t like feeling nervous and anxious. You can create anxiety by making the reader feel like they’re missing out on something.

Human Emotions 4. Fear

The strongest motivator to get someone to do something – even if they don’t particularly want to – is to elicit fear. Fear triggers the part of our brains that exists solely for our physical survival. It’s called the “reptilian brain” that makes up a part of the Basal Ganglia.

As an example, I used the emotion of fear in my article 8 Google SEO Mistakes That Will Choke Your Search Ranking to try make the reader feel they’ve made a mistake that could hurt their website.

Human Emotions 5. Joy

One of my favorite positive human emotions. There’s lots of things that make people happy. For instance, the video at the bottom of this page brings me a lot of joy deep in the cockles of my heart. Joy can be anything uplifting, funny or inspiring.

Human Emotions 6. Lust

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“First you get the money. Then you get the power. Then you get the women.” People can lust after many things including money and fame. Of course, many people lust after sex or any intimate contact. Others lust after food. Personally, I lust after anything chocolate. Trigger lust in the reader by teasing them with the results they’re looking for.

Human Emotions 7. Surprise

Go against reader’s expectations and surprise them. You can challenge assumptions or prove them wrong. You can give away something for free unexpectedly.

All 7 Emotions Working Together Can Make Your Article Go Viral

The 2013 craze of the Harlem Shake has several emotional elements that helped it topple the Gangnum Style craze of 2012. Can you identify all 7 emotions being elicited while watching this video?

You can thank me later.

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