Now through May 31, 2012 Business 2 Blogger is offering 1/2 OFF of one of our most popular Blogger Credit packages!

Whether you are looking for Bloggers right now or want to stock up on credits for a future Blogger promotion, this is a fantastic deal!  To take advantage of this great offer, log in to your account (or REGISTER) at http://jobs.business2blogger.com/emplogin.cfm and click on PRICING PLANS.

BLOGGERS:

If you participate in our affiliate program, you can grab promotional banners/buttons in your ShareASale account.  If you aren’t part of our affiliate program yet, you should be! Sign up or learn more today & start earning 25% of all sales that come through you!

A quickie SEO tip today from your pals over at B2B.

Although each of us Bloggers is convinced that we are the funniest, most engaging, and dare I say, CUTEST blogger out there, Google has a funny-and-yet-insulting habit of disagreeing with us.

So after you decide whether or not your blog post is even going to be SEO-worthy, you’ll then need to make sure you do the most important things right. And those are…

Your Post Title, and
Your Post URL.

There are plenty of things to consider when optimizing your SEO, but these two are by far the most important.

Your post title should be appropriate to the post content, obviously, but more importantly it should contain the keywords you are trying to capture visitors with. And herein lies the problem: If you decide that you really want to land on the first page of search results when people search for the word “business”, I have a startling revelation for you.

Ain’t gon’ happen.

Instead of trying to target something so broad, go in search of the long-tailed keywords that will allow you to capture search hits without trying to battle the entire internet in a pick-me-free-for-all.

Pick a long-tailed keyword phrase that is appropriate to your post content like “start a duck-calling business”. The trick to finding these phrases is playing with the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, and looking for popular search phrases with low competition. Then, place that phrase as close to the beginning of your post title as you can.

As far as the Post URL is concerned, I then have good success simply using the Post Title in the Post URL, with hyphens in between the words, which is the default we set up in WordPress. For instance, you can see that the URL of this post is:

http://business2blogger.com/seo-tip-your-title-and-post-url/

Remember, there is plenty more that is important when writing an SEO-attractive post, but this by far is the most important place to start. Back soon with more!

So Facebook, in all their infinite wisdom, is forcing all business / brand pages into Timeline format on March 30, 2012, sending developers and Social Media Managers (like me!) everywhere scrambling to fix their clients’ pages.

Timeline offers many new features and opportunities for designing a brand page, but it has omitted one popular feature of the old page, the ability to build “splash”, or “landing” tabs. No longer can you have your visitors land on a custom welcome tab that encourages them to “like” your page. In fact, Facebook has gone so far as to put restrictions in place for the design of your “Cover” image that sits at the top of your page: no including any information that should be included in the About link. Now we’re gonna have to get creative, folks.

One little known feature that exists in Timeline, however, is the ability to create a custom “Tab” or “Tile”, that sits next to your Photos Tile. In fact, I believe you can build 4 or 5 of them. Below is the Livestrong Facebook brand page, which they’ve done a really nice job with. If you look next to the Photos tile, you’ll see one called “Spread The Livestrong Word”, another called “Share Your Story”, “Blog”, and more. These are Tiles, or you can call them Tabs or App Boxes if you like. But each has been added with its own tile graphic, and when you click on them, there are a myriad of possibilities behind them.

I’ve created a full tutorial that will walk you through how to get creative with your Tiles over on my site at RunMySocialMedia.com. Have fun with it!

Dallas Social Media Optimization

It is very common for bloggers and businesses alike to share a link on Facebook. It’s a great way to share content you find online, or even from your own website. However, when many people share this information, there is one detail they often overlook: the Facebook description box.

What is this description box, exactly? It’s the place for you to share exactly what your post is about. The content can be generated in several different ways. If you just post the link without doing any type of work on the back end of your blog, then it will pull the first characters of your post. If you use the first sentence or two to very clearly describe each and every post you share, then this is no issue. However, this is rarely done in most posts and leaves an important optimization effort overlooked.

How can this be remedied? If you are on a WordPress blog, there are two ways. One way is to use a premium theme, such as Genesis Framework or the Thesis Theme. These themes offer built-in SEO settings that allow you to set a custom SEO document Title and- the key part here- a custom post/page meta description. In this description, you should use the 140 characters most search engines will read to clearly explain what your post is about and what message you want to convey. An alternative to using a specific premium theme is to use an SEO plugin such as Yoast. A plugin such as this one will give you the same optimized settings as a premium theme.

If you are not on WordPress or want to describe an article you are sharing from somewhere you have not written, then there is a different way to edit the description area. When you post the link to the article, Facebook will generate a preview. If you double-click on the text description in the preview, it will open up an edit box. You can then put in your own custom description explaining what the link you are sharing is all about.

What tips and tricks have you found to be useful for Facebook?

Please don't use this button! Your button and text link choices will be given to you on the ShareaSale site.

Holly’s got a problem.

Actually she’s got a lot more than one, she’ll readily admit…But this one involves her email inbox.

She gets emails from businesses every day wanting to work with her. Only most of those businesses aren’t right for her blog, or are offering things she isn’t interested in reviewing or endorsing.

Not wanting to burn any bridges with any brands, she replies, “Thanks, but I’m not interested. Good luck with your promotion!!”

But wait…

What if Holly could make money simply by referring those companies to Business 2 Blogger??!!

Today, we’re proud to announce the Business 2 Blogger Affiliate Program…

Jay Cooney
@JayB2B @Biz2Blogger

Business2Blogger had a nice little New Year’s surprise on Friday… being mentioned in Mashable’s great article entitled “How to Launch a Social Ambassador Campaign“. B2B was described as being a company that had begun to develop ways to facilitate “the process of finding, managing and maintaining the “talent””.

Hope you’ll help us get the word out about this by tweeting, retweeting, Facebooking and Blogging about it… the more brands learn about what we’re doing here, the more they’ll want to work with you!

Happy New Year, all!!

2011 is coming to a close- that means that a lot of changes will come about, with new challenges, adventures, and opportunities. Forget resolutions to start a diet or to clean more around the house. Instead, focus on resolutions for your blog! I was wondering what most people’s resolutions were for their blog this year, so I threw the question out on Twitter. Though various types of bloggers responded, there was one common theme.

While a handful of people answered with having more time to blog, the most common one was getting their blog posts organized. This is crucial to keeping a consistent schedule. While your platform and design are important (very important!) to the success of your blog, an editorial calendar can be essential to your blog’s success.

An editorial calendar does not have to be something fancy, nor does it have to be a plugin or electronic. You can use a paper calendar, an app on your phone, or even a list on a piece of paper. For more details on various ways to organize your blog’s content, check out our post on building an editorial calendar. One of these options is sure to be right for you and help you to create the ultimate blog for 2012.

The best approach to do this successfully is to pick a day each week- or month if you’re really ambitious- to be your planning day. Spend about a half hour to an hour sketching out blog post topics, series ideas, and a general schedule for when you want to post which information. Since you are the only one who sees your calendar, you are not set in stone. Plenty of events or topics may crop up throughout your scheduled time, so feel free to be flexible! As a bonus, if you write some of the posts ahead of time, you have content you can post if you’re running behind.

How do you plan for your blog?