Visions Virtual Assistance Blog

The last post I wrote about social networking was quite a while ago. Since then I think I’ve settled into a groove with it. I found a really cool gadget called Digsby (www.digsby.com) that puts the three main ones into one place. Facebook, MySpace and Twitter now sit in my desktop tray. What’s cool is that I don’t have to check to see if I have messages. I just hover my curser over the icon and it tells me.

Since getting Digsby I go to MySpace more often - which is good. In the past, my friends would leave me comments and then get upset that it took me sometimes a week or two to acknowledge them. The reason was it just was too much effort for me to sign in. Seriously. MySpace doesn’t keep you signed in. Digsby does.

Digsby doesn’t help me to leave comments more often, but at least now I am saying Thank You in a more acceptable timeframe. With all this new media social networking, we cannot forget our traditional social etiquette and manners. If you don’t acknowledge someone’s kindness, they will remember just as they will remember the ones who said Thank You and sent the Birthday wishes.

MySpace has a reputation of being for teenagers. That was true in the beginning but they are trying to be more grown up. They’ve changed the back end a bit and I hear there’s more changes to come.

Facebook, on the other hand, seemed to draw the college crowd or the people who wanted to connect to people from their past. There is still a lot of that going on, but I think it’s much more sophisticated than that now.

Since I’ve been on Facebook for a while I go there more deliberately. In the past I would open the site, but I wasn’t really sure what to do there. Now that I’ve been there a while I know what must be done and what’s a waste of my time. When I see a (1) when I hover over Facebook, I go check it out.

Facebook has a lot of rules that you need to follow. It doesn’t allow anyone to conduct business, ie advertise/spam. You can invite people to business happenings, though. It doesn’t allow you to grow your friends list very fast, either. As a matter of fact, it caps your friends at 5000. You can only have one account and it must be your real name. Break a rule and your account will be deleted. Seriously.

Twitter is the one that can get you into trouble because its role is not clearly defined yet. Many people still post what they are doing each and every minute. “Eating ham sandwich.” If you read that, would you care? If not, then don’t post what you are eating.

So what do you post on Twitter? Keep it interesting - ask yourself, “If I were to read this, would I be interested?” That’s the best I can advise.

Have you ever wondered what social networking sites you should be on? There are a few main ones that you must be on - MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. You may also want to join the social networking sites that are specific to your industry. You can see in my list on the left that I am also on Active Rain and Ryze because those are important to my business.

The first thing to do before setting up a social network is to sit down and write a profile - one common profile that you will use on all your social networking sites. Your profile should show people who you are and why you are competent to do what you do. You want to add your personality to this profile, too. Many of the sites have places for you to list your interests.

So how much of “you” should you add? That’s a good question. The answer depends on your target market. If you plan on doing business with any of your contacts, then try to stay on the professional side. When in doubt, look at other people’s profiles and see what they do. Don’t outright copy someone, though.

Then choose one photo that you will be common to all the sites. To brand your social networking sites to your website, gather together your header, your logo, and your main website color codes to be used to customize your site.

Now that you have so many social networking profiles out there, what’s the point of having a website? Think of yourself as a rock star. You round up your band and your costumes and put them in the tour bus. You visit many cities gathering a following. That’s your social networking. Each site is a city where you gather fans. Some of your fans may become groupies and follow you around to other sites. Unlike rock stars, you should reciprocate and add them or follow them also.

But you can’t fit everything you own into your tour bus. You can’t fit all your products, all your services, plus all your price lists. You may fit a few testimonials, but not all. You get the picture. What you need is a home base, a place where these things all fit. That’s your website or your blog site. On the social networking sites you are going to leave links so when your fans want to know more about you, they will click on the link to your website or your blog. That’s where they will find out everything they need to know.

In the code of your webpage there are two very important areas of information - the Title tag and the Meta Description. It looks like this:

<title>Visions Virtual Assistance</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Hire a virtual assistant.“>

Those two areas are very important for Google. When someone does a search on Google, what you have in these two areas are what pops up.

Try it. Go to Google.com and type in site:www.your-url.com. You will see all the cached pages of your site. More importantly, you will see the page title and description that you put in.

The tags above look like this:

Visions Virtual Assistance Hire a virtual assistant. www.visionsvirtualassistance.com/ - 12k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

This is not very descriptive to a stranger, and most likely not enough information for them to choose my site to visit. If your title and description does not reflect your message, then change the title and description tags.

Each page of your site should have it’s own title and description since each page has different information. Then the next time Google comes crawling through they will pick up the new information.

I came across a blog that explains complex ideas - In Plain English. It’s so simple! Why didn’t I think of that?

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Wordpress.org Version 2.5.1 came out yesterday. I was surprised to see a new version after they just upgraded to 2.5 just a few weeks ago. Apparently they found a security issue with cookies in the 2.5 version. Cookies are tidbits of information, such as user names and passwords, that is saved by your computer.

My first thought was, “Oh, no!” I have been upgrading blogs like crazy lately. How can I tell these people their blogs need to be upgraded again?

There are two things you need to do before you upgrade your blog. First, back up everything. Go all the way into your database and back the blog up from there so you have a copy of your posts and comments.

Second, disable all your plugins in case one has a conflict with the newer version of the blog.

It’s a good thing I do back up. I just upgraded my blog to V2.5.1. It erased everything - my password, my settings, it even set my theme back to the original theme. The worst was that I did lose all posts and comments.

Expect that this will happen to you and be prepared. Just make sure you do the upgrade. It’s important.

The Wordpress Blog says, “If you are interested only in the security fixes, you can download these corrected copies of
wp-includes/pluggable.php
wp-admin/includes/media.php
wp-admin/media.php
Replace your existing copies of these files with these new copies.”

But if you haven’t upgraded to 2.5 yet, then it’s best to upgrade all the files at once.

If you have a Wordpress blog and you need assistance with upgrading it, shoot me an email using the form on the left.

Your visitors need to trust your website. They learn to trust you when things on your site are consistent. Surprises in websites are almost always bad. When links appear and disappear it makes the visitor uneasy and untrusting. You want your visitor to feel comfortable enough with you that they take out their wallet.

It seems logical, yet I see all sorts of things when it comes to navigation links. The navigation links are the links that help your visitors move throughout your website. These links should be the same on every page. They should also be in the same place on every page. No surprises.

Having different links on each page makes your website look amateur. You want to guide your visitor through your website, but don’t do it by changing the links on the sidebar.

Your links should be in the same place on every page. You can have them at the top, you can have them on the left. Some people even put them on the right. Where ever you put them, just don’t make your visitor have to search for the links to move about your site.

If you are linking to a page within your site, do not make it open in a new window. You want your links to be doorways to the rest of the pages. You only want your links to open in a new window when the link will take the person outside of your site. For those of you who don’t like links that open in a new window, it’s perfectly alright to add a note stating, “This link will open in a new window.”