Webmaster Blog

You may have read my last post on Using Facebook to promote your website; this is basically a follow up on that, only using Facebook in a different way for website promotion!

In the last post I was explaining how to use Facebook Groups to promote your website, whereas this article is for promoting your website using Facebook Fan Pages.

What are the advantages of using Facebook “Fan Pages” over “Groups”?

The main advantage is, when you make a wall post to your own wall (also known as a status update), the post is submitted to every fan’s Homepage Feed.  This means every “fan” of your page will see all posts you make on your Fan Page.  This can generate a lot of interest towards your group – but remember, do not spam your fans with status updates because it will cause people to become very agrivated and they may stop being a fan! (NOT GOOD!)

The other great think about Fan Pages is the Discussion boards.  Every time anyone talks on a discussion topic on your Facebook Fan Page, it will send a notice to their profile “wall” saying they have participated in a discussion on *topic title* at *Fan Page name*.. This also attracts people to your page!

Get on with it!  Tell me how to promote my site using Facebook Fan Pages!

Okay… To begin; Click here to make your Facebook Fan Page.

Now, you need to follow the steps it gives you to build your Fan Page.  Upload a decent, meaningful page display picture, fill in ALL the information secions that you can, and update your Page’s info box because this is displayed on every section of your Fan Page making it extra important!

Now go to the Invite Friends link.  Here you will be able to select friends from your friends list to invite to the group – and you will run into TWO MASSIVE annoyances – It limits you to inviting a maximum of 20 people, AND you have to select them all manually! Ugh!

However; I do have a tip to avoid this limitation!  Simply add all your friends to a custom contact list.. Then, when inviting friends, choose that friend list in the “Filter” of who you want to add – then it will let you simply click “Select All” – And with that, the limit also disappears! Genius!

Then wait for people to join!   It helps if your “Friends” are genuine friends because they will be more likely to join if a real friend has invited them!

Now, once a few people have joined (whether it be ten or one hundred), create a discussion topic, and give people inscentive to discuss the topic, even if it doesn’t match your page’s content, just make a discussion topic people will like to respond to, because at this point, what you want is interest!  The benefits of being able to get people to your site only appear once you have those valuable fans!

There you have it, the basics of getting a Facebook Fan Page started and populated.  All questions are welcomed!

Thank you for reading!

Popularity: 22%

Everybody has seen the Facebook Connect feature on Jelsoft’s vBulletin software, but what about an Open Source version?  I asked myself the same and to much disappointment never found anything, but not anymore!

FINALLY somebody has made a Facebook Connect MOD for phpBB3!

Currently undergoing heavy (and fast) construction, the MOD is flying through ALPHA stage and will soon be released for BETA!

Click here to view the MOD thread on the phpBB community forums!

I will keep you updated here when the MOD is available in BETA, and when it’s out of BETA, etc..  So subscribe to the Webmaster Blog RSS Feed for updates!

Wooohooo!

Popularity: 51%

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: 25%

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: 8%

When I first made the switch at my free myspace games website from PH Arcade Version 1 to the nice new “Version 2″, I saw a massive, devastating dent in my AdSense statistics from that domain.

I was not alone.  I saw many people having the same problems.  But being an experienced webmaster I knew that changing the layout and appearance can have a temporary stall in your revenues.  So I stuck at it, kept things going.

Now, I’m looking at figures like 18% CTR on a daily basis because of PH Arcade!  The AdSense placement is perfect!  I’m getting CTR values of 10-20%, consistently!

For examples of what ads I’ve chosen to use on the site, you can go check it out: www.tazgames.com.

I am amazed at the statistics of my AdSense performance on this script.  Kudos to Justin, the owner, for his ad placement skills!

Anyone wanting to still earn good money from arcade websites; I advise you to use PH Arcade.  It is working fantastically!

I urge you to grab yourself the script from the PH Arcade Homepage – Good luck!

Popularity: 37%

PH Arcade Version 2 is out!

Due to my recent absence I was unable to make an announcement as such about the release, but nevertheless, better late than never! PH ARCADE V2 IS HERE!

Complete with a beautiful new layout, and a vastly improved front and back end, the script is a must have!
You can grab a copy of the basic arcade here for $0. That’s right, nothing, not a penny, zilch. Priceless, you might say.

There is however a price to using the free version; but that’s obvious – It’s not as good as the premium version!

You can trust my word, and rest in the knowledge that I do know this script inside and out.  If you didn’t know already; I am a voluntary programmer for the Arcade Script.  I do this out of sheer respect for the script; it is a masterpiece!

The premium version is available for a charmingly small price, under $20!  You will not find a better priced arcade script of this standard.  I highly recommend it!  You can always try the basic one for a while to test it out before you buy the better one!

Behind the scenes knowledge – purely exclusive to Chuckun’s Blog: A major bugfix update is to be released very soon!

Popularity: 43%

“How do I make my Privacy Policy live up to Google’s requirements for AdSense Publishers?”

I get asked this question so much I thought I’d make a post about it.  Lots of people don’t realise what they need to include in a privacy policy to please Google when using the AdSense system.

Well there’s not too much to it.. If you look at my privacy policy you’ll see that I have a very personal approach because I’m a more personal person than most like to be when running websites.  I believe it portrays a more wholesom character.. But most will try to act 100% professional when making privacy policies so heres a template I’ve drawn up for you to use.  You may copy it directly or you can change it to your desires.  Either way, here’s a simple template:

On-Site Advertising

Google, as a third-party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on our website in order to serve relevant advertisements.

Google’s use of the DART cookie enables the service of advertisements to our users, based on what pages and content you choose to view within our website.

Google offer you the option of removing yourself from this service if you may choose.  You may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy.

I hope this helps many of you create or simply serve an AdSense compliant Privacy Policy for your website.  This template covers the most recent privacy policy update notice you will have recieved sometime in March 2009.

Popularity: 69%

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: 100%

I recently released a completely new addition to the PH Arcade script! (Find PH Arcade in the links section in the sidebar!).

This system places a link to a tidy templace-css-driven report form which allows users to report a game/movie, on each media page.  The system includes the game ID, and the reported problem by the user.

The backend features a highly manageable report administration, which will allow you to edit the game settings, and/or remove the game completely.

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Popularity: 99%

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: 72%