Webmaster Blog

There are many ways of promoting your website using various social networking promotion techniques.  But today I’m going to focus on Facebook’s “Group” pages.

If helps if you already have a facebook account with lots of friends who are likely to join your group if they get a personalise invite from you (I will explain this later on in this post).  However, you don’t actually need ANY friends, because you can invite your entire email address book, or to selected email addresses.  I will explain all this within the post.

Firstly you need to create a facebook group.

+ Create a Facebook Group

Choose a relevant group title, and add a brief but detailed description of what your website is all about.

There is a “Recent News” box in the group setup.  You should use this wizely as people like to be kept up to date on important issues / news to do with a product, service, or website that interests them (presuming people who join do so because they are interested in the topic your website is based on).  Make sure you keep this updated with all events and news to do with your site.  Do not waste your time updating it with irrelevant information however; You are better off updating it less regularly than you should, whilst maintaining a quality news update which people will actually appreciate.

Upload a relevant image for your group.  This may be your logo or advertisment banner which hopefully you will already have at your fingertips.

Now, when it comes to inviting people you have two options (or you can do both, of course).

You can manually select all of your existing Facebook friends, which may take you up to 5 minutes depending on how many friends you have, but it is definitely worth it.  It is highly recommended that you choose to add a “Personal Message” to your invite… This ensures that your friends are invited properly, not just with a standard invite notice; it raises the chances of people accepting your invite.

Your second option is to invite via emal.  Here you have two separate choices.  You can either import your contacts and send the invite to everyone in your email address book, or you can manually add emails to a list.  This is up to you, but the manual method will take a lot longer and will be somewhat tedious.

You should now be ready to publish your group and post an automated update message to your profile (which will be seen by all of your friends too, which is handy if they don’t check their invites), so don’t skip this process!

Now, sit back and watch your member list grow!

Check back here for part two of the Facebook promotion guide, where I will explain how you can convert those group members into active members on your website!

Popularity: 29%

Need an SEO analysis done on your website but can’t afford to pay for it?  Well I have the perfect solution for you!

I recently discovered a perfect All-In-One SEO Analysis tool, handy for any level webmaster looking to perfect their website for the almighty search engines!

The tool is by PineBerry, and can be found here.

This SEO analysis tool provides you, the webmaster, a complete run-down of your websites SEO properties.  It shows you in simple, easy to understand terminology, how to improve your Search Engine recognition.

What I really love about this tool is that it gives you a “points” system, which makes it easy to determine which factors of the analysis are most important, and which ones you can focus on at a later date once you’ve consulted the more severe parts which have deducted you the most “points”.

So go ahead and get a completely free analysis of your websites SEO situation now.

http://www.pineberry.com/en/skills/seo/analysis-tool

Popularity: 12%

Everybody is under the impression that Hostgator are the best, or atleast in the top 5.  But why?  I often wonder if people actually understand whether or not they deserve their reputation or not.  Or do people just trust other people’s judgement and hop on the band-wagon?  Surely a ridiculous idea when you’re looking for a hosting plan to suit you; not anybody else..?

The answer to that proposition is; Actually, it’s not such a ridiculous idea.  It doesnt take a genius to work out that purchasing shared hosting from ANYONE – including Hostgator is going to mean you’re restricted as to what websites and services you can run.  Anything highly demanding like proxies and major image hosts (which are disallowed by Hostgator) should never in a million years be run on a shared server.  For many reasons other than just the server load.

So baring in mind that you can’t go running internationally demanded, heavy scripts on such hosting, you can indeed hop onto the ‘gator-wagon’.  Their hosting packages are so flexible, especially since going “UNLIMITED”, that they will cater for the majority of wabmasters looking to run several personal or even modest commercial websites.

I have been using Hostgator for a while now, and I will now highlight a few aspects of their superiority over most other hosts.

Support – Their support is truly the best I’ve seen.  Admittedly I do not require support often, so I can’t say I’m the best qualified person to make judgement, but I can garauntee that their support is excellent, where others’ will more than likely fall short of such a label.  You will be talking live to a member of staff in SECONDS and they answer immediately, and really understand what you’re asking for, and understand their service well enough to provide you with a full, extensive answer to cater all of your enquiries. Perfect.

Uptime - I use several methods of monitoring my websites’ uptimes.  I have yet to receive a single report of any down time at all.  I have never experienced lag-spikes, high server loads, or any signs of overselling.  The uptime garauntee they provide really is a garauntee!!

Prices – Their prices are tremendously competative.  I have scoured the internet looking for a quality webhost at as low a cost as humanly possible, and thus; I have had nothing but downers untill I used Hostgator: downtime, servers breaking down, my earnings going down, and ultimately; letdown.  Hostgators prices are amazingly low, and so I distrusted their opting into the “UNLIMITED” scheme, but I can honestly say for Hostgator; THE PRICE IS RIGHT!

HOSTGATOR IS IDEAL FOR BEGINNERS, EXPERIENCED WEBMASTERS, AND PROFESSIONALS!

What’s more; Hostgator’s datacentre is completely environmentally friendly! That’s right, their servers are both powered AND cooled by wind turbine generated power based in Texas, US.

Whether you’re after a simple, single-core shared server, or perhaps a duel core beast of a server; Hostgator can cater for your needs!

Get started with Hostgator! - You won’t be sorry!

USE COUPON CODE: SPRING FOR 20% OFF!

Offer ends June 1st 2009. Grab it while you can!

Popularity: 18%

Many people have trouble getting their AdSense Pallets to blend.

It never appeared as obvious to me, but after a bit of trial and error, it seems the answer to blending is simple!

Firstly, there is an alternative preference to blending, which is to make ads clash instead of blend.  If this is your preference then just do the opposite of my blending advice!

To blend ads properly here are the basics rules:

If the area around the advert placement is a light colour, you want the adsense to be a light colour.  Whilst this seems obvious, you must realise it’s not about matching the ad background with the page background.. Not by any means.  You want the ad to be slightly heavier than the rest of the page, but still faint.  For example, with a white background, you may want to use a very pale green, blue, or orange.  By pale I mean very light, faint colour. Then you want the border a similar colour, only a tiny bit (but noticablely) darker than the ad background.

If you’re using dark ads, simply do the opposite of the above!

I hope this helps some of you with your Ad Placement.

Comments welcome!

Popularity: 38%

We now have a Google pagerank checker tool!

If you’re not sure how this works, all it involves is you typing in your website’s URL, and it’ll retrieve your PageRank from the almighty Google!

Go to the PageRank Checker page now to check it out! Perhaps check how your sites are doing for PR?

I hope this gets some use… It’s there on a trial basis for now, if nobody uses it (I will be checking the my useage statistics) then I’ll remove it, because I hate things lying around redundant!

Hope you find this useful!

Popularity: 24%