5 WAYS TO USE FACEBOOK

• Share your mission and story in a personal way
• Add pictures, videos, and any other applications to highlight the work you do, and the faces behind it
• Invite supporters to contribute their own photos, stories, videos
• Example: invisiblepeople.tv [Read why: Case Study: InvisiblePeople.tv by Geoff Livingston]

2. Engage and grow your community

• Ask questions, encouraging members to share feedback, stories, and insights
• Here are 16 Ways to Ask Questions on Facebook(by John Haydon)
• Respond to wall posts
• Interact and join the conversation on other organization’s pages

3. Fundraise

• Use applications like Causes to raise money
• Choose a fundraising platform that has Facebook share feature, like FirstGiving, Crowdrise, or GiveZooks
• How to get started with Causes here.

4. Educate, raise awareness, and promote

• Create content worth sharing. As members share, more people learn about your organization and work
• Use events and updates to promote upcoming events
• Example: Oceana

5. Drive traffic to your website or newsletter (and vice versa)

• You still want to direct people to your website, blog, and newsletter. Make sure to encourage people to sign up and subscribe directly
• Include social sharing features on your website, blog, and newsletter
• Add Facebook (and other social networks) link to your email signature
• Add email subscription tab to your Facebook Page
• Example: 350.org

TIPS

• Personal profiles are for you. Pages are for your organization. More here.
• You can create a Page, without having/creating a personal profile. Create a page here.
• There is a difference between Facebook Groups and Pages. How are Pages different than Groups? by Facebook
• Consider using Facebook Places. But first: Four questions you need to answer before using Facebook Places for your nonprofit by John Haydon
• Facebook Engagement Practices: Recent Studies and Discussions, by Debra Askanase, Community Organizer 2.0

MORE RESOURCES

• Nonprofits on Facebook: Get Started, on Facebook.com
• Nonprofit Facebook Guide (PDF), Facebook Best Practices
• Social Media Toolbox, WeAreMedia.org
• Build Your Own Facebook Page, by Janet Fouts
• Facebook Best Practices for Nonprofit Organizations, Diosa Communications
• Facebook Ads – Case Studies – Library of regularly updated examples of successful Facebook ad campaigns, ie (RED)
• How Non-Profits Can Maximize Engagement on Facebook from Mashable’s Social Good section (including tips from Danielle Brigada of NWF, Holly Ross of NTEN, Brook McMillan of Livestrong)
• Social Media Listening and Monitoring tools — by Janet Fouts – http://bit.ly/kOg3Cn

Policy & Guidelines Examples

• Example of Community Guidelines, AARP FB Fan Page from Beth Kanter
• Social Media Policies in the Workplace , Created and curated by Vivienne Storey (on Scoop.it)
• Does Your Enterprise Have a Social Media Policy? http://rww.to/lToI8d

And absolutely everyone obeyed. I know they did because no planes fell from the sky. No planes had to make an emergency landing because the avionics went haywire. No planes headed for Miami ended up in Anchorage. We were all made safe because we all turned off all our Kindles, iPads, iPhones, BlackBerrys and laptops, just as the Federal Aviation Administration told us to. Realistically speaking, I’m going to bet that a handful of people on each flight could not be bothered, or forgot to comply.

According to the F.A.A., 712 million passengers flew within the United States in 2010. Let’s assume that just 1 percent of those passengers — about two people per Boeing 737, a conservative number — left a cellphone, e-reader or laptop turned on during takeoff or landing. That would mean seven million people on 11 million flights endangered the lives of their fellow passengers.

Yet, in 2010, no crashes were attributed to people using technology on a plane. None were in 2009. Or 2008, 2007 and so on. You get the point.

Surely if electronic gadgets could bring down an airplane, you can be sure that the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration, which has a consuming fear of 3.5 ounces of hand lotion and gel shoe inserts, wouldn’t allow passengers to board a plane with an iPad or Kindle, for fear that they would be used by terrorists.

New technologies are often greeted with fear and that is certainly true of a disruptive technology like cellphones. Yet rules that are decades old persist without evidence to support the idea that someone reading an e-book or playing a video game during takeoff or landing is jeopardizing safety.

Nevertheless, Les Dorr, a spokesman for the F.A.A., said the agency would rather err on the side of caution when it comes to digital devices on planes.

He cited a 2006 study by the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics, a nonprofit group that tests and reports on technical travel and communications issues. The group was asked by the F.A.A. to test the effects of cellphones, Wi-Fi and portable electronic devices on planes.

Its finding? “Insufficient information to support changing the policies,” Mr. Dorr said. “There was no evidence saying these devices can’t interfere with a plane, and there was no evidence saying that they can.” I’m not arguing that passengers should be allowed to make phone calls while the plane zooms up into the sky. But, why can’t I read my Kindle or iPad during takeoff and landing? E-readers and cellphones can be easily put into “Airplane Mode” which disables the device’s radio signals.

The government might be causing more unnecessary interference on planes by asking people to shut their devices down for take-off and landing and then giving them permission to restart all at the same time. According to electrical engineers, when the electronic device starts, electric current passes through every part of the gadget, including GPS, Wi-Fi, cellular radio and microprocessor.

It’s the equivalent of waking someone up with a dozen people yelling into bullhorns.

As more and more people transition from paper products to digital ones, maybe it’s time to change these rules.

Michael Altschul, senior vice president and legal counsel for CTIA, the wireless industry association, said a study that it conducted more than a decade ago found no interference from mobile devices.

“The fact is, the radio frequencies that are assigned for aviation use are separate from commercial use,” Mr. Altschul said. “Plus, the wiring and instruments for aircraft are shielded to protect them from interference from commercial wireless devices.”

Mr. Dorr reluctantly agreed. “There have never been any reported accidents from these kinds of devices on planes,” he said.

As Posted in the New York Times
November 27, 2011, 6:28 pm

• Select the most important features and specification of your product.
• List the keywords you would use if you were searching for a product with same features and specifications.
• Compare these keywords in Google Trends to find the most commonly searched keywords.
• Use Google Ad Word Keywords tool to find keywords best suitable to your site or keywords related to your preferable keywords.
• Monitor your analytic reports watching the keywords with high searches but not related to your product. For example, if you are manufacturing energy saving equipment you may be interested in the keyword “Energy saving”, but not in “Energy saving LED lights” – add these keywords to you Negative Keywords to get rid of unwanted impressions and clicks.
• Estimate traffic you will get by the keywords you selected with Google Ad-words traffic estimator.
  

2. Give Meaningful Titles to Every Page.

3. Give Meaningful Names to Every Resource/Image.

4. Create Site Maps. This makes it easier for search engines to crawl your website.

5. Create Compelling Copy That Visitors Will Read Based on Keywords.

6. Spread The Word About Your Website. The more people that visit your site, the higher your ranking will be.

7. Put Your Web Address (www.webditty.com) on All Your Marketing Materials.

8. Link Your Own Pages to Each Other.

9. Get Other Websites to Link to You.

10. Be Patient. Increasing traffic to your site is a gradual process. Constantly market your website and people will come.

What Do You Mean By Bad Color Scheme?

A bad color scheme can take many different forms. For example, this site is very unsettling to look at due to the flashing rainbow colors. Here’s another example which better illustrates the issue of color. Besides the fact that the background is painfully boring to look at, it also washes out the words and makes it hard to read the information displayed on the site.

And just for fun, here’s an example of a horrible website which was designed to be horrible. In this case though, it’s more annoying than anything else. I actually think the two examples above are better, though they may change as these site owners find out that they’re being cited as examples of terrible site design.

Decide What the Theme of Your Site Is Going to Be

The single most important thing when picking a design as far as color is concerned is to think about the kind of audience you want to appeal to.

For example, when you think about Crayola Crayons you think and remember a yellow box of crayons but when viewing the www.crayola.com website you will notice that the site uses green with yellow, two very common colors that are both not only primary colors but are bright and catchy to the eye. The Crayola website is trying to primarily attract children, parents and teachers to their site to play games and download coloring pages to further promote their product.

On the other hand, if you are trying to appeal to more conservative crowd to promote your financial investment services such as www.UBS.com, you may choose less color, more white with black and an accent color.

How to Choose

I find that if you are using a pre-made site design or a ready-made theme for Word Press, one which is popular and used by many websites, you may find that your site doesn’t stand out from the crowd. This is where a website design company such as WebDitty, LLC – website design can help your to find the right colors that suite your company’s style, work well with your design and attract your target audience.

Tools to Help

On the other hand, if you’re not sure which color scheme to use or if you are designing a site completely from scratch, there are a few tools you can use to help you choose the right colors.

Color Palette Generator

This useful little tool will let you choose which color scheme is most appropriate to go with a photo. This means that if you have a great photo which you know you want to incorporate into your site, you can use this tool to match your site to the photo.

Colorzilla

A very useful Firefox plugin which will help you to choose the right combination of colors by providing good information on contrast and even providing you with useful pre-selected color schemes that work.

Kuler

Finally, a free tool from Adobe (who makes the Creative Suite CS5.5, which professional web designers use to make quality websites and graphics) allows you to generate color schemes that work and to ask others for their opinions as well.

For a Free Consultation on your website design project or even just help picking out the colors for your blog, store or website contact WebDitty, LLC.

Branding is not only to get your customers to identify your company and choose you over the competition, but it is also about getting your prospects to see you as the only one that provides a solution to their problem.

The objectives that a good brand will achieve include:

• Delivers the message clearly
• Confirms your credibility
• Connects your target prospects emotionally
• Motivates the buyer
• Concretes User Loyalty

To succeed in branding you must understand the needs and wants of your customers and prospects. You do this by integrating your brand strategies through your company at every point of public contact.

Your brand resides within the hearts and minds of customers, clients, and prospects. It is the sum total of their experiences and perceptions, some of which you can influence, and some that you cannot.

A strong brand is invaluable as the battle for customers intensifies day by day. It’s important to spend time investing in researching, defining, and building your brand. After all, your brand is the source of a promise to your consumer. It’s a foundational piece in your marketing communication and one you do not want to be without.

Research is everything

Research is the most important part of creating a brand for your company. Whether you are a solo freelancer or part of a branding team, your target audience will heavily influence the decisions you make and the direction your design goes towards. Understanding a company’s marketing strategy is as important as placing the keystone in a building foundation. Research encompasses everything from typography selection to presenting to a focus group.
Giving an identity a name and then giving the name a face. These are your bottom line goals when planning out your design – in that order. A strong name, with or without a mark, has to be recognizable without any taglines. It must carry weight of its own.

For the life of me, no one can remember my last name, much less how to pronounce or spell it correctly. In branding however, we don’t have that luxury. I would have to be able to catch your attention as you zipped down the supermarket aisle. Hence, I made a short, rare name that I identify myself with and use persistently all over the web: WebDitty.
Coming up with a strong name can either be fun or a complete burden. Regardless of whether it’s made up (Skype), a misspelling (Google), or a simple word (Apple); it all goes back to branding.

1. Create Highly-Targeted Resource Pages – Targeted content around a specific topic that focuses viewers around the most engaging and relevant content.

2. Say Goodbye to Categories – Categories often confuse visitors, so direct them to the very best content you have to offer.

3. Capture Email Addresses Above the Fold – Make it easy for visitors to opt in with a visible Web Form without scrolling down. Consider moving search and other tertiary calls to action toward the bottom.

4. Use a Reliable Email Marketing Solution for sending new blog updates to subscribers – even manually.

5. Promote Your Facebook Page with an Interactive ‘Like’ Box – Instead of using a linked image to your Facebook Page, use the interactive “Like Box” so visitors stay on your site.

6. Leverage Public Mentions as Social Proof – If a business is a member of an alliance, industry group or written up in the media, consider using their logos on the blog as social proof.

7. Capture Leads at the Bottom of Blog Posts – Serve the needs of visitors by enabling people to receive for more information at the bottom of the blog post itself.

8. Use Internal Linking to Cross-Promote Related Articles – Not only will doing this improve your SEO, it also allows visitors to learn more about content with related posts and resource pages.

These small, yet meaningful changes help the blog generate more value for businesses with seemingly minimal effort.

First Impressions

It is very important to remember that your website is just one of millions and that customers can choose to leave your site and go to another more professional and attractive looking website if the first impression they get upon arrival at your sight is chaotic and confusing to navigate. On the other hand, if your website is attractive and easy to navigate, people will stick around longer and the chances of making a sale or gaining a fan will increase greatly. This aspect gains a great deal of importance in the case of online stores: people will avoid websites that don’t look secure or professional because nobody wants to offer their credit card information to a website that doesn’t look reliable.

Website Design and Functionality

Website design and functionality always go together. A few simple changes in the design of a website can either help people find what they’re looking for easier or make your website confusing and turn customers away. Before you spend hundreds of dollars on a website that is not properly optimized, you need to focus on the connection between the functionality of each page and the overall design. The process will take time and this is exactly why you shouldn’t rush into things when it comes to hiring a website design company.

Optimization along the Way

The most popular websites on the internet have been using the same design for years and this is quite difficult to achieve in the fast-paced world of the internet. They managed to pull it off because a perfect design allows room for improvement and allows for adjustments along the way.

Drawing the Line

The design of your website is crucial, but at some point, you will have to draw the line and focus on marketing and search engine optimization. Luckily, if you hired the right company for the design of the website you will be able to attract and maintain visitors easier once you start focusing on this aspect.

Conclusion

In the end, no matter how much you focus on any other aspect of your website, its design will be the decisive factor in keeping visitors happy and on your site long enough to become paying customers.. Even those who offer great services and products have to deal with unhappy visitors simply because their website doesn’t offer a sense of security or professionalism. If you put the time and effort in creating the right design when you first publish the website, you will avoid many problems and attracting visitors will be a breeze.

The Nuts and Bolts of Web Designing:

The four main aspects of designing a website are:
• The Content – this is the core of the website and refers to the information on the site. The site should be rich in content all content should be relevant to the business and the purpose of the site.
• The Usability – every site should be easy to navigate. Try to avoid having a website visitor click more than three times to find what they are looking for.
• The Appearance – the website should be eye catching and not to cluttered. Usage of multimedia files and graphics should be limited but are important to have throughout. Too many videos and photos will turn potential customers away because what they are looking for on your website is information about your product. It is important that people who visit your site can easily navigate it and find the information they need with little difficulty.
• The Structure – the main page that visitors arrive at is called the homepage and it should contain a brief overview of the website and serve as map to the offerings of the business. There should be other more specific pages dedicated to the information that your visitors are looking for.

Blueprint of Web designing:

The most important step is not the designing of a webpage but the planning of how to design the site. It is very important to decide on what should be posted on the website; taking into account the people who will be reading the information to get the desired result. Every website should have a purpose statement allowing the rest of the website to follow in suit. This shows exactly what people will gain from looking at your website. The way in which the readers are defined is a key step. A website will develop only when the content is written in a manner that attracts the target audience. A prototype for the website will be a model which has all the information on the website layout and the design in a rough manner. After the prototype is reviewed a blueprint for the site is found by a process called storyboarding where all the information about the site is recorded and linked in order of most general to most specific.

Types of Webpages:

There are of two types of web pages:
• Static pages: Content and layout will not be changed unless someone manually changes it using HTML language.
• Dynamic pages: The content and appearance of the page changes depending on the changes in the computing environment. Content can be changed from both the client side and the designer side.

Management of the Webpage:

Most clients want their website content to be changed frequently therefore many web pages are created in a way that even non-technical people with limited knowledge on programming can change the content. This can be done by incorporating a blog, social media or by using a Control Management System (CMS). Contact WebDitty if you need help setting up a content management website.

Keyword Research

The most important part about SEO is keyword research. You need to figure out which phrases should bring visitors to your website and start writing a few articles containing those keywords. There is a fine line between offering valuable content for your users and writing an article just because you want your website to be keyword-rich. You have to focus on your users first and you shouldn’t place keywords in every other sentence just because you are trying you improve your search engine rank.

Link Development

Another important part of SEO is link development. If your website’s link is present on many other pages, search engines will definitely notice it and they will offer you special treatment. Ideally, you will obtain this by posting quality content and incisive articles, but if you are already doing this and you are not happy with the results, you might want to consider link exchange. Find one or two websites that have a similar number of visitors and start collaborating. This way, everyone wins and you will gain quality visitors in no time. Additionally, search engines will treat your website differently improving your rankings and placing your site closer to the top of the search engine results.

Don’t Go Overboard

One of the most common mistakes website owners make when trying to improve their search engine ranking is going overboard. You will often notice articles that don’t make sense because a keyword is used once in every sentence and you will also notice websites that have a list containing dozens of links as a result of link exchange. You don’t have to submit your website to hundreds of article directories and you shouldn’t focus on placing your links everywhere on the internet. One valuable link is worth more than 1,000 links on new websites, so try turning your attention to quality, not quantity. If you think about what your visitors want to see on your website and figure out a way to keep them interested, results will soon follow.

Conclusion

Search engine optimization is a complicated job, but if you do it correctly, you will obtain impressive results. You simply have to focus on adding keywords when necessary and you shouldn’t forget that collaborating with an important website can help you a lot.

If you keep your eyes open, you will surely notice a few opportunities along the way and you will eventually learn to develop your own SEO strategy. However, do not forget that in search engine optimization overdoing is just as bad as not doing it at all.

Dare to lose your iden­tity on Face­book? No? Read on.
These step by step expla­na­tions will help you down­load your Face­book pro­file to your com­puter in a split second.

Go to Account Set­tings Click ‘Down­load your infor­ma­tion’ (Face­book now down­loads your information)Wait patiently for a con­fir­ma­tion mail from Face­book that reads ”your infor­ma­tion is now ready to down­load” (this may take a few min­utes) Take the secu­rity test to prove your iden­tity Click down­load and all of your Face­book pro­file details will be found on your desk­top in a jiffy.

This sim­ple process down­loads your updates, pho­tos, videos, sta­tus updates and much more. Down­load and sav­ing a copy of your pro­file is as sim­ple as cre­at­ing a Face­book account!

Back up your pic­tures — It’s more than just a mem­ory now!
Thanks to Face­book every­body can share their pho­tos and videos with friends and rel­a­tives mak­ing the need to own your own dig­i­tal cam­era some­what less impor­tant. Just be sure to save all of the pic­tures your friends have posted of you. Flickr and Picasa are two most used apps for stor­ing pho­tos online. These web­sites also allow you to have a backup of your cher­ished and mem­o­rable moments.

Pre­vent tweets from fly­ing away by back­ing up!

Twit­ter also offers a pretty effec­tive back up ser­vice. As a user of twit­ter you can have a back up of your infor­ma­tion and sta­tis­tics with the help of a free pro­gram called Tweet­stream. Who would want to lose tweets or mes­sages? Twit­ter now comes up with a bet­ter solu­tion to this prob­lem offer­ing a service-Tweet Scan. TweetScan helps you track backup infor­ma­tion back to 2007.

You can also choose from other users’ tweets you like, and con­vert links from tweet mes­sages to bookmarks.

Back up your Blog

Back­ing up your blog is impor­tant so that you don’t lose all of the arti­cles you spent hours research­ing and writ­ing for your busi­ness or even per­sonal blog­ging purposes.

Tumblr’s backup appli­ca­tion helps users to down­load their blogs. This very use­ful tool allows users to view their blogs to be archived in the form of HTML files or bet­ter yet to be backed up to an exter­nal hard drive.

It is also pos­si­ble to backup your blog in Word­press.
From your dash­board click tools export and then choose the infor­ma­tion you need to export. Thanks to the WP-DB-Backup plug-in that helps to back up your entire Word­press data­base at spec­i­fied inter­vals. This dis­tinc­tive tool even sends the back up file to your Email! When back­ing up your infor­ma­tion is this sim­ple, why ignore it?
If you need any more help back­ing up your blog or another social net­work­ing site con­tact WebDitty ASAP!