Displaying gratitude on social media is one effective way for your small business to draw its online audience closer and establish loyalty among its web community. Here are 4 easy ways you can do that:
On Periscope, you can thank your active viewers for their hearts and other interaction during a broadcast. After the broadcast, fullScope.tv is a great tool that reveals your top engagers in terms of hearts & comments. You can compose a tweet to them, something to the effect of, “Thanks for the Periscope love,” or, “Thanks for the hearts and comments on my broadcast!”
I was invited to share 5 things I love for a Periscope challenge. So I chose WordPress plugins, since WordPress is my web design tool of choice. It’s user-friendly, by which I mean end-user friendly, not just designer-friendly. Call me crazy, but I just don’t like the idea of a small business professional being completely dependent on their web designer for even the most minor changes. I prefer to empower them to have a hand in maintaining their website if they so choose.
Jetpack for Stats
My two favorite components of Jetpack are Publicize and Site Stats. Publicize is for another time and place/post. When it comes to the usefulness of Site Stats, let’s face it…you may have Google Analytics installed, but as a small business professional, do you ever actually log in and check out your stats there? Probably not. With Site Stats, your stats are RIGHT THERE when you log in to WordPress, showing your site traffic, traffic sources and most popular posts. WOOT!
Wordfence for Security
Wordfence has a LOT of components, but once it’s set up, it pretty much runs itself. This security plugin provides enterprise-class WordPress security for free (there is a paid version starting at $39/year, but the free version is pretty darned robust), protecting your website from hacks and malware. When my website was hacked and harboring malware (you read that right…a web designer’s site was hacked), a certain malware removal/security service wanted upwards of $500 to repair the damage and reverse the situation. I installed Wordfence for FREE and was able to handle it all myself…successfully. DOUBLE WOOT!!
Yoast for SEO
It may be cliché, but I chose it anyway. Yoast is simple and streamlined but still effective in helping small businesses boost the search engine value of each page and post on their website. I’ve taught clients to use it and it’s probably the #1 SEO plugin currently available. With that being said, I have had some theme-compatibility issues with Yoast, so my second choice (and the one I use, actually, as someone with Yoast theme conflicts) is All-in-One SEO Pack.
BackupBuddy for Backups
I love love LOVE BackupBuddy [that’s an affiliate link right there]. It’s like zipping up your entire household into a teeny package, moving it miles and miles away and then POOF! all your ‘stuff’ is automagically placed right where it belongs. It’s also a super easy backup tool you can use for regularly backing up your WordPress site (you DO regularly backup your site, don’t you?!?). For less than $7/month, it’s totally worth the peace of mind you’ll receive.
Juicer for Social Media Aggregation
Why have a Facebook feed widget, a Twitter feed widget, an Instagram feed widget….and so on…when you can pull all your feeds into a single page with Juicer? That’s right, aggregate and embed your social media posts on your site (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, Pinterest and many more) as a single beautiful feed. The free version lets you aggregate from 2 sources. If you want/need 3-5 source accounts, it’s just $19/month.
Well, I certainly didn’t start out with a plan to become a Divorce Concierge or Career Coach, because those careers simply did not exist when I was starting out. I did, however, always have the desire to help others in some way. I actually have a degree in Communications, with a major in advertising & public relations and a minor in psychology.
My first jobs were in the advertising industry up in New York City. Yes, I actually did work on Madison Avenue. I did that throughout my twenties. When I married, I decided to go into sales and got my real estate license. I was pretty good, too, becoming Rookie of the Year with Weichert Realtors.
LinkedIn just rolled out 3 new features for their mobile app last week (these are not currently available on the desktop or mobile browser versions of LinkedIn…just the app).
1. Customize your feed. Tap the three dots in the upper right corner of any post in your feed to customize what you want to see. Hide updates from or unfollow connections that you find less interesting or whose content is just not that relevant to you or your business. It seems to me that this feature ‘learns’ from your actions, so if you hide a LOT of posts from a connection, over time, LinkedIn will intuitively begin to show you fewer posts from that person. ‘Improve my feed’ lets you define topics that interest you and follow leaders you want to see more from. Continue reading
There’s no 100% guaranteed way to keep hackers from getting into your website (other than to NOT have a website). However, there ARE some things you can do to protect your small biz website from being compromised. Here are 6 of them: Continue reading
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Stuff I Like: Mighty Deals
Mighty Deals offers amazing and exclusive deals for web professionals and small biz do-it-yourselfers. [Click the image to visit.]
Yep, that’s an affiliate link. But this is also the provider I personally use for fonts, graphics, web tools and more.
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