Use Photos to Stand Out in the Facebook News Feed

This guest post is by Tommy Walker, Online Marketing Strategist and owner of Tommy.ismy.name.

A picture is worth a thousand words, right? This old cliché has become especially true in blogging. It’s statistically proven that by inserting compelling photographs into your blog posts, you’re able to better retain your reader’s attention.

So what if photos are also exactly what you need to stand out on the world’s most popular social network?

On Facebook, Photos are the most used features of the site (after status updates of course). You may have already known that, but did you also know that Facebook is one of the most used photo sharing platforms on the entire Internet?

So how can we tap into the power of Facebook Photos to separate your Page from the rest of the noise on Facebook?

If you’ve been using Facebook ads to perform inception on your blog, you’ll have a good idea of the psychographic profile of your readers. We can use this information to create (or find) compelling images that will resonate with your audience.

Let’s imagine I run a blog about creating Hollywood movie props on an indie movie budget. Normally I build simple props that are pretty general, like ray guns, or jet packs. But lately I’ve been running Facebook ads and I’ve learned from the Responder Profile report that the majority of the people who clicked on my ad have listed “Iron Man” as a favorite movie in their profile.

Knowing this, I create a tutorial for my blog that gives instructions on how to make an Iron Man mask.

To really draw attention to this step-by-step tutorial and stand out in my fans’ news feeds only requires a little extra thought and attention to detail. Just a little more work, and I get a result that looks something like this:

Now let’s break down what I did here, so you can create results like this, too.

Step 1: Breaking up the image

Take the main image that you would like to show up in the News Feed and break it up into two or three parts using a photo editor. For the Iron Man album, I broke one photo up into two separate images, with each image highlighting a different element of the build.

The original image looks like this:

To break it up, I simply opened the image in Gimp (although you could use Photoshop or even Paint!) and selected the Battery and Arc Reactor. Then I copied and pasted it into its own image file, and did the same for the mask.

I then very quickly created the album cover by typing “Become” over the Iron Man logo, and saved that as its own image file> I then saved everything to its own folder on my desktop.

Here are two quick notes about album covers. Firstly, selecting the right image is important for two reasons:

1. The album cover is the first thing people see when someone clicks on the Photos tab on your page. By default, Facebook also displays the two most recent photo albums on the left-hand sidebar underneath the list of people who like your page. When they visit a page, it’s only natural for people to check out the number of people who like that page — for social proof. Take advantage of this curiosity by creating an eye-catching album cover. Even with a small number of likes, you’ll appear to be ahead of the game, as this is valuable real estate that most pages simply aren’t taking advantage of.
   
2. The album cover will always appear in the furthest left-hand corner when you publish an album to the news feed. Selecting the wrong image for the album cover can make the entire update completely pointless. take a look at the images below. By default, the photo titled “Step 5″ would be the album cover here, but it’s not a great image. To have the most impact on the News Feed, you’d want to make sure that the album cover shows the image titled “Step 10.” We’ll talk about this more in the next section.

Step 2: Selecting the album cover and organizing your photos

Go to the Photos tab on your Business Page and click on Create a Photo Album.

A dialog box will appear, giving you instructions on uploading your photos.

Click Select Photos and choose the photos you would like to be included in the album.

Click Open once you’ve selected all of the photos for your album. The photos will begin to be uploaded to the album. By default, the album is named with the date and time that you’re uploading the photos. Change the name to reflect the contents of the album. Also, check the High Resolution button (just because you can!).

Once the photos have finished uploading, click Create Album.

From here, select the image you want to use for the cover of your album. Also feel free to add descriptions to your pictures. If it makes sense, insert links to relevant pages within your blog (this will depend on the content of your album).

Once you’re satisfied with your Photo descriptions, click Save Changes. A dialog box will appear prompting you to Publish or Skip.

Do not click publish!

Click Skip. You will be brought to the album and all of the images will appear in the order in which they were uploaded. This isn’t always ideal if you’re really looking to stand out in the news feed.

It is vital to note the arrangement of the photos in the album, as it will determine their order in the news feed.

As I said earlier, Facebook automatically puts the album cover as the far left image of the three in the album preview in the news feed—regardless of how the images are arranged in the album. Facebook then takes the two images after the photo that’s designated as the cover, and assigns them as the middle and far-right images in the news feed.

So if the photos are arranged like this in the album:

They will look like this in the news feed:

To achieve this landscape effect in the news feed, simply drag the two images that are meant to follow the album cover in the order in which you’d like them to appear in the news feed.

Then, your album will look like this:

And the feed will look like this:

Once you have your photos arranged the way you’d like them to appear in the news feed, all you have left to do is create an album description and publish the album.

Step 3: Entering your album’s description

Underneath your photos, you’ll see an Add a Caption link. Click it to open the popup where you can describe your album and include any external links.

Facebook will allow a total of 320 characters (including spaces) in your album description before it hides the content and adds a See More link to the end of your description.

Keep your descriptions around one to two lines, and always put a line break between your description and link so that the content appears cleanly in the news feed.

After you’ve clicked Save, click Edit Album Info to see the Album Description page. Click the Edit Photos tab on the top right of the gray box. Then, click Publish Now.

And there you have it! Your album will have a good chance of standing out in the otherwise really crowded news feed!

What’s that you say? You don’t make props? There are all sorts of other creative ways to use Facebook Photos to promote your business. What are some ways you’ve used this tool? Are there other Facebook Photo ideas you can share?

Tommy is an Online Marketing Strategist and owner of Tommy.ismy.name. He is about to release Hack The Social Network, the ultimate guide to Facebook Marketing, and is currently developing a “mind hacking” course.

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Your Biggest Investment: Time and Dedication

One of the biggest problems we see when trying to teach and motivate others to make money online or start their own business, is that they won’t put in the time and effort. Usually it’s because their either too lazy and not dedicated, or just expect to see immediate results…. but why should you expect immediate results? Whether you run a retail store or a web site, business is business and the same principles always apply, you need a solid structure and plan to make anything work.

In times like these, a situation many of us have gone through, is furthering our education. How many of us will go to college for two, four or even eight to twelve years… then graduate, just to try and pay off the debt from the last several years for the remainder of our career, and maybe even lives? Imagine the amount of success individuals could have if they put this same work and effort into starting/running their own business or online marketing campaigns, as they had for college.

You can’t simply walk into a high paying career right after high school and expect a job, and running a business should be looked at the same way. College is a very expensive way of investing in yourself and planning for the future. The truth is, students graduating from college, now have more debt than ever. A recent report shows students graduating from college are now leaving with over $20,000 in debt. Double or even triple that number for higher education such as Masters and PHDs…

Am I saying college is a waste of money and time? No, but a great majority of affiliates and internet marketers have passed on college and even dropped out to bigger and better things. It’s take a certain mentality and drive to be successful in business, but those dame principles can be applied to anything you try and achieve. The point I’m trying to make, is that whether you are aiming to work for a fortune 500 company, or run you own business, they all require the necessary mindset and time/work investment to reach your goals.

Anyone who says money doesn’t make life easier is lying. Money is great, but your time and dedication is the difference between getting to where you want to be versus where you are headed.

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Influence, Cash, or Hobby: Which Blogging Choice Is Right for You?

This guest post is by Brandon Connell of brandonconnell.com

When I first started a blog that I took seriously, it was to promote an ebook that I had published on Amazon’s Digital Text platform. Initially, I wanted the blog to be my “author’s headquarters,” but soon after, I realized what I really wanted to do with my blog. It was far from my initial goal, and I wish I’d made the right decision from the beginning, rather than reversing course.

The problems

Changing your blogging type after you start the blog causes problems. Those problems include, but are not limited to:

• losing readers and subscribers that had expectations
• confusing the search engines due to content changes
• wasting time marketing your blog on the wrong sites.

Readers walk

When you change your blog style or niche, it’s common sense that your readers will most likely walk. Think about it. They came to your blog because they came across some content that intrigued them. Now that you’ve decided to change your content, what reason do they have to stick around?

It’s important to choose your blog style ahead of time, and think about it carefully. You can literally waste hours of your time approaching the wrong reader audience. You can also end up being bad-mouthed by another blogger who’s angry with your switch.

Search engines get confused

It is a search engine’s job to make sure it indexes and ranks relevant content. Let’s say you start a blog about your golf hobby, but then you switch course, writing a stock tips business blog. Search engines may have already given you good rankings for golf. If you change your content, you’ll lose those rankings. You may even end up being penalized by the search engines.

When you first publish your blog, unless you’re blog hopping and guest posting, search engines are likely to be the first ones to read your content. Make sure they leave as happy customers. How? Be consistent. Your niche and blogging style should never change once you start.

You waste time

Should you have done your research on blog marketing, you’ll know that blog commenting and article marketing are excellent ways to promote your blog and build backlinks to it. If you change your style or niche, you have to consider the fact that you wasted all that time writing irrelevant articles that don’t match your newly chosen niche. The audiences for those article sites, backlinks, and guest posts will no longer be interested in what your blog has to say. When they click through to your site, they’ll be disappointed.

Another wasted effort would be the fact that you now have to delete your mailing list that you may have built up, since your subscribers didn’t sign up for information on your new topic. They subscribed because they had an interest in your previous topic.

Style vs. niche

Your blog style is not your niche: a blog style reflects your reasons for starting the blog in the first place:

• Did you want to make money?
• Did you want to influence a certain type of group?
• Did you just want to blog about your interests?

When choosing a blogging style, you need to think about what you intentions may be in the long term. There are many bloggers who simply want to make money—they heard that blogging can make that happen for them. There are others who don’t believe or care about making money blogging: they simply want to write about what they love. The influential blogger is a writer who wishes to have his or her readers care about what s/he says, and take action because of what s/he said.

A niche, on the other hand, is a topic that you’re writing about. You can fit your blog into any niche using any of the three blogging styles I just mentioned. My niche topic is making money blogging, and I write regularly about this topic. You could say that this niche reflects my target keyword—the topic that I want to be known for.

As we saw with the golf and stocks example above, it’s important not to change your niche after you start blogging. Most of the time, your niche is connected to your style. When one changes, so does the other in most cases.

Let’s look more closely at these blogging styles.

The influential blogger

The influential type wants more than anything to have control over the actions that people take. We can take medical marijuana as an example niche in which the influential blogger style might be applied. This blogger will either want to oppose medical marijuana laws, or support them. Whichever route they choose, they want to be able to get people on board to support their cause. Their cause may be a call to action: for example, to contact a congressman with a specific message that will generate support for the blogger’s desired law.

Influential bloggers are usually heavyweights because they touch on sensitive topics that gain a lot of attraction. An influential blog doesn’t usually have a lot of advertising, and although the blogger may ask for donations to support their cause, that’s usually the extent of their money0making agenda. This does not make them a cash-seeking blogger.

The hobby blogger

I love the hobby blogger because they don’t care about anything other than sharing their passion with others. They care about what they do for fun, and they want you to have fun reading about it.

Hobby bloggers are quick to gain followers because they’re not concerned about advertising on their blog. They love the idea of publishing their articles and having like-minded people comment on them.

The cash blogger

I would say that I am a mix between a cash blogger and a hobby blogger. My entire niche and style is to teach others and make money doing it. I have done well in my style and niche, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. The reason why I consider it a hobby is because I love what I am writing about, and I love sharing it all with others. It just so happens that I make money doing it.

My niche isn’t a necessary one, and it’s flooded with new blogs every day. You can monetize a hobby blog in any niche. I would say that there are a lot of hobby bloggers who have unintentionally turned into cash bloggers too, just because they realized at some point that money can be made with their traffic. If you’re thinking “but that’s changing your blogging style!” you’re right … in part. It’s a sort of merging of the two, rather than a clear switch. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, and you shouldn’t feel like you’re selling out if you go down this path.

Which choice is right for you?

No matter what style or niche you choose, you need to take the decision seriously. The last thing you want to do is change course once you’ve made your decision. There are too many negative side-effects of changing your style halfway through the mission.

Look at your decision as a life choice. You wouldn’t just pick up and move from Chicago to Iceland, would you? The choice you make today will impact your life years down the road. Make sure it is a decision you can live with, and choose a style and niche that you love without a doubt.

How did you choose your blogging style and your blog niche?

Brandon Connell is a full-time blogger, web designer, and internet marketer in Illinois. Visit http://www.brandonconnell.com, where Brandon teaches you how to make money blogging.

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How To Build Your Credibility As An Expert While Blogging

I don’t run ads on my blog; I don’t do a lot of affiliate marketing. The primary way of monetizing my blog is selling my own products and coaching services in the area of communication skills.

I’ve learned that when your strategy for making money with your blog is to sell something you have created or something you do, then your credibility as an expert is crucial.

People have to trust that you are a professional and that you can provide them something of real value before they decide to buy from you. The amount of traffic you get is not highly relevant if your readers don’t believe you are an expert in your field.

The good news is that there are specific ways of using your blog which reinforce your credibility as an expert. Being passionate about communication, I was eager to explore this topic and test various methods of building credibility as an expert through blogging.

Here are the methods that have worked best for me and I believe will visibly benefit any blogger:

1. Develop Your Expertise, Not Only Your Blog

I think many bloggers skip a step in their search for a source of income. They start blogging and growing their blogs, but they do little to actually be experts in the area they blog about. They revamp ideas they read in books or on other blogs, and then they wonder why readers won’t buy their products.

Up to a certain point, blogging in itself is a way to develop expertise, but I find it to be insufficient. If you want to become an expert, you need to also address this subject separately and use other ways to train yourself.

I worked with my first coaching clients for free and I also had another coach supervising me, before I started calling myself a coach and asking money for my services. Also, I only started blogging and promoting my services on my blog after I’ve already had significant experience as a coach. Putting expertise first did wonders for me and the quality of my blogging.

2. Go Against the Mainstream

In any area, there are ideas that are very popular yet any real expert knows to be wrong. This is why instead of reinforcing the same old ideas, many experts will oppose popular ideas in their blog posts and they’ll debunk them.

Do the same and you’ll develop credibility as an expert. Of course, in order for this strategy to be successful, you need to know what you’re talking about, to pick the right ideas to oppose and to back your claims with hard and smart evidence. Otherwise, you position yourself as a rebellious novice rather than a connoisseur.

3. Write with Depth

Almost anybody can write a blog and offer some general advice, much of which may be impractical or mundane. A real expert stands out because they can talk or write about a certain subject with a lot more depth and go into the fine details that make a piece of advice exceptionally valuable.

In my field, many bloggers write advice such as: “Just be confident”. This kind of advice is too superficial to actually help anyone. I write posts in which I decode the psychological process of acquiring confidence and describe it much more precisely. This is what makes me more believable.

4. Quote Scientific Research

Anybody can make claims on their blog. What separates experts from the rest is the fact they crave solid evidence and they put in the effort to keep in touch with the current scientific research in their area of expertise.

As a result, they often quote research to support their ideas or simply to discuss it, and they do so in a skillful way. One of the most important recommendations I can make is to practice reading and quoting scientific research, at least in some of your blog posts. The more you practice, the more apt you’ll become at using research.

5. Associate with Other Experts

Professionals in a certain field often tend to know each other and collaborate. Prove to your readers that you interact positively with recognized experts in your filed, that they appreciate you, and some of their authority will transmit to you.

There are many ways to do this: you can interact with experts using social media, you can guest post on their blogs, you can interview them for your own blog etc. While doing any of these, keep in mind that the main focus is on truly building trust-based relationships with experts, not on simulating them.

At the end of the day, the most important thing I’ve learning about building credibility as an expert is that it only works if it’s authentic. Expertise cannot be communicated with high impact by faking it. You can only do so if it is something you really have and you know how to tastefully reflect through your blogging.

About The Author: Eduard Ezeanu provides communication coaching and helps people put their best foot forward in communication both online and offline. He also writes on his blog, PeopleSkillsDecoded.com.

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Google, China, Wikileaks: The Actual Cable

When the Wikileaks story broke, I wrote a short piece chastising folks for blogging the assertion that one of the cables proves the Chinese government was behind the Google hacking which preceded Google's pulling out of the country. The cable is based on single sources, who are anonymous and second-hand, and that doesn't pass the journalistic sniff test.

My colleague Matt McAlister at the Guardian has sent me the link to the entire cable, and while I stand by my original take on the story, it sure is intriguing to read. In fact, the details I find most interesting are the interactions alleged between Baidu and the Chinese goverment.

From the cable:

....

Another contact claimed a top PRC leader was actively working with Google competitor Baidu against Google.

....

Google's recent move presented a major dilemma (maodun) for the Chinese government, not because of the cyber-security aspect but because of Google's direct challenge to China's legal restrictions on Internet content. The immediate strategy, XXXXXXXXXXXX said, seemed to be to appeal to Chinese nationalism by accusing Google and the U.S. government of working together to force China to accept "Western values" and undermine China's rule of law. The problem the censors were facing, however, was that Google's demand to deliver uncensored search results was very difficult to spin as an attack on China, and the entire episode had made Google more interesting and attractive to Chinese Internet users. All of a sudden, XXXXXXXXXXXX continued, Baidu looked like a boring state-owned enterprise while Google "seems very attractive, like the forbidden fruit."

....

XXXXXXXXXXXX noted the pronounced disconnect between views of U.S. parent companies and local subsidiaries. PRC-based company officials often downplayed the extent of PRC government interference in their operations for fear of consequences for their local markets. Our contact emphasized that Google and other U.S. companies in China were struggling with the stated Chinese goal of technology transfer for the purpose of excluding foreign competition. This consultant noted the Chinese were exploiting the global economic downturn to enact increasingly draconian product certification and government procurement regulations to force foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) to transfer intellectual property and to carve away the market share of foreign companies.

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Niche Marketing Breakdown

Before jumping into your next ad campaign, or even starting a new web site or blog, take a step back and look at exactly who you are tying to target. We often come up with great ideas for new ad campaigns and site, then start getting excited with our ideas, without looking at the big picture and room for improvement. It’s not enough to target a niche, but it’s now more important than ever to focus on niches within niches.

An excellent example of a huge site in it’s own niche, is IGN.com, which is one of the largest video game sites on the internet. They don’t just cover computer games, they cover all games! Everything from XBox, Playstation, Wii, Computer Games and more. IGN has the massive exposure, staff and funding to take on this massive and competitive niche like many others can’t. Pushing out quality content and video on a daily basis isn’t a problem for them. With all of that said, do you think you would be able to compete with a player like IGN.com if you wanted to get into the video game space? Probably not.

You want to focus on video games, but how can you compete at the same time? Simple… break down your efforts and focus on a niche group. Instead of trying to create an ad campaign, web site or blog that focuses on all games, you need to be selective on your targets and ad copy. An excellent way to do this, would be to focus on one of the big three (Wii, PS3, XBox). To break down your efforts and increase your return on efforts, you can go a level deeper and select specific games which are only available on one of these system.

Using Google’s Keyword Tool, we can pull up quick reports on how many time the big three gaming systems are searched in a given month. Among the three systems, you have over 300 million searches every month. Even if you were to grab just one tenth of a percent (.001%) of this traffic, you would have 300,000 visitors to your blog… but the competition for these keywords is phenomenally high, as you can see from the “competition” bar below.

Break down each of the gaming systems to another level, such as the most popular games from each system. You can see we still have millions of monthly searches, and they vary heavily based on the game search. Competition is still extremely high, which usually means there is good money to be spent and made in this area… but the majority of these advertisers are probably big and well funded sites in the video game space.

One last time… let’s take one of the search results from above and break it down by itself. You are now given a selection of top keywords searched just on this one search term. Now you have a massive amount of search results and topics all on this one tight niche group. Had you created a blog on call of duty when it first came out, you would have reaped the benefits every time a new version of the game came out.

This breakdown is a perfect example of how you can take one niche and continually break it down til you have a super tight and high traffic topic. Instead of spreading you and your ad campaign or web site thin, why not focus on a single topic with a large following and search traffic? You will find that not only will you provide exactly what your customers and site readers are looking for, but they are also more likely to be in a buying / action mode, which increases overall revenue.

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