Facebook Timeline for Business Pages

This was inevitable, I guess.

Timelines are taking over our personal pages, and someone at Facebook decided we absolutely must have them on business pages as well.

In fact, it’s only three days away, so if you haven’t done so yet, now would be a good time to hop over to your Facebook pages and make the switch over to the new layout. If you don’t then Facebook will do it for you on March 30th.

Key Features of the New Facebook Pages

As far as the front end of your page is concerned, this is a visually dramatic change. You will no longer be able to set up any welcome pages encouraging visitors to like your page, using promises of exclusive content revealed only to those who clicked the Like button.

Instead, you now have a new large prime real estate, in terms of visuals: the header. A huge space, in Internet terms, of 850 by 315 pixels is up at the top of your business page, for you to cleverly put to use towards branding your page.

The body of the page also complies with the timeline layout, which means your updates now show up in two columns. While you do have some control over this, with the option to pin posts or highlight them by making them stretch across two columns at once, this is a tricky set up. Stretch an update to cover both columns and you risk an overall sense of imbalance on your page.

As with personal profiles, the timeline allows you to set dates to your updates, essentially allowing you to work back a history of your company or product with “historic” updates. Dates go back to 1905, by the way.

These are the main changes, as far as I can tell. If you noticed any other significant differences, please do share them in the comments section.

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Facebook Landing Page Resources

I need to make a landing page for one of the Facebook pages that I manage. It’s been over a year since I last made a “Facebook Splash page”, so it’s time for a short refresher’s course! Please excuse the “notes” format here – these really are my notes, and I’m sharing them here, pretty much in the raw.

The links I’ll be aggregating here go past the “How to use the FBML” app to create a new tab. I’m looking for ideas on what to put unto that page, to make it attractive and make people hit the “Like” button.

Sharing some useful resources here – please leave me a comment if you can share more, or want to show me your own successful Facebook splash page – thank you!

Good Resources:

40 Facebook Designs and Practices

10 Tips & Tricks For Your Business’s Facebook Fan Page

26 Great Facebook Landing Page Examples

Fanbook Pages Generators and theme sites:

* I haven’t tried any of these yet

PageModo

FanPageEngine.com

FacebookTemplates2U

FB Templates on Wix

Important notes -

Landing page should be action-motivating: get users to hit the Like button.

Offer some benefits to doing so: exclusive content, coupons etc.

Elements that can be added to the FB Landing Page:

“Share” Button.

“Invite your friends” box – good as a footer.

“Hidden Content” – which becomes visible after you Like the page.

 

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Domains Yard Sale! Make Me an Offer!

I am moving servers soon, and decided to use that as a trigger for some house cleaning. That of course begs a yard sale, so come in and take a look,  maybe you’ll find something that’s a good fit for your next project?

So, without further ado, here’s a list of domains. They’re all listed on Godaddy and many most of them are well aged (over five years old). Some have some content on them and usually some pagerank as well. Prices are for the domains, unless otherwise indicated, but we can talk about the content too, if you’re interested.

See anything that you like – leave a comment and I’ll get back to you to the email you provide in the comment form.

Offers of $50 and above will be considered for these domains (keep in mind their age and that some of them carry some pagerank too) -

4RESELLERS.INFO
ACCEPT-CREDIT.NET
ANTI-AGING-HUB.COM
ASTRONOMYFORKIDS.NET (including content on that page)
BATHROOM-INTERIOR.NET
BOATS-HUB.COM
CATPICTURESBLOG.COM
CCDIR.BIZ & CCDIR.INFO (together)
COFFEE-HUB.BIZ (including content on that page)
COSMETIC-CARE.NET
COSMETICS-HUB.COM
DISCOUNT-ELECTRONICS.BIZ
DISCOUNT-HEALTH.BIZ
DVDDIR.NET
ELECTRONICS4OFFICE.COM
FAMILY-PLANNING.BIZ
FINANCE-HUB.COM
FITNESS-NOTES.COM
FUJI-DIGITAL-CAMERAS.NET
GETELECTRONICS.BIZ
GETPILATES.COM
HADIR.ORG
INFODIRECTORY.ORG
JUST4CARS.NET
JUST4COSMETICS.COM
JUST4SHOPS.COM
KDIR.ORG
KEEPGOALS.COM
KIDS-SPORTS-SHOES.COM
LEGALDIR.NET
MEDICAL-HUB.COM
MYCROCK.COM
NO-PRESCRIPTION-MEDICINE.BIZ
PAIN-RELIEVERS.BIZ
PARENTING-NOTES.COM & PARENTINGNOTES.COM
PET-SUPPLIES-HUB.COM
SITENURSERY.COM
SLEEPINESS.BIZ
SWIMWEAR4WOMEN.COM
TOOLS-HUB.COM
TRAVELITINERARY.INFO
WEARSPORTS.NET
WEIGHT-LOSS-NOTES.COM
WGF2.COM
4FURNITURE.BIZ
4ISO.COM

Offers of $150 and above will be considered for these domains (keep in mind their age and that some of them carry some pagerank too) -

PLASTIC-SURGERY-HUB.COM (with unique content)
PORTABLE-DVD.NET (with unique content)
PROFESSIONAL-DIGITAL-CAMERAS.COM

p.s. – I also have a few nice catchy LLLL.com’s for serious buyers with a budget in the $x,xxx range. Let me know if you’re interested.

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Referrer Spam in WordPress

It’s been a while since I posted, for various reasons. One of them was really cool: a six months long road trip across the US. I’m blogging about that in my personal blog here. I’m finally back now, and catching up on work.

Stop Referrer SpamOne annoying task I’m facing is combating referrer spam on a blog I currently manage. A combination of high-intensity graphics and a bunch of pesky referrer spam bots who constantly crawl the site are causing an influx of bandwidth usage I would really like to curb. I figured I may ask well make this into a post – hopefully this will be helpful for other bloggers.

What is Referrer Spam

Whether you check your stats on a WordPress plug-in or using a server-side script like Awstats you may be seeing them. Referring websites that -

  • Don’t seem to be related to your niche.
  • Don’t actually have a link back to your site.

Congratulations! You’ve been hit by referrer spam!

Why are they doing this?

Surely, they don’t think traffic from a frustrated webmaster checking his stats will give them any benefits? Truth is, they couldn’t care less about your visiting their site. They are hoping that by some widget or link to an unsecured page, some of their spam links will eventually end up on web pages that are accessible to search engine. For example, some people have widgets on their sites celebrating top referrals. They mean well – to automatically reciprocate with traffic and link juice to those who link to their site.

Well, we all know what the road to hell is paved with. These “good karma” widgets became food for spam scripts, who hope to gain exposure by faking traffic from their website to yours. Unfortunately, they are indiscriminate in nature, hitting every site they can with robust scripts that just go after every site they can find. I think they may have a preference for blogs too.

How to Fight Referrer Spam?

To be honest, I don’t think there is a very good solution. At least, I haven’t found one, and I have been looking. If you know of an effective quick fix, WordPress plug-in or otherwise, please let me know in a comment. The best plug-in, specifically designed to counter referrer spam, that I could find, is six years old and compatible with WordPress 1.5 *roll eyes*

I did find two possible solutions.

The first is using the Bad Behavior WordPress plugin which is an overall anti-spam solution, based on an analysis of user agents used to access your site. According to the developers

Bad Behavior complements other link spam solutions by acting as a gatekeeper, preventing spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place. This keeps your site’s load down, makes your site logs cleaner, and can help prevent denial of service conditions caused by spammers.

The second possible solution is to manually edit the site’s htaccess file to block specific domain names or ip addresses, or both. There is more than one way to achieve this, and this page on the official WordPress site provides a detailed description.

For my blogs, at least for now, I won’t be blocking referrer spam using the htaccess file. For one thing, this is a cumbersome task that requires continuous maintenance. I have read accounts by webmasters who have to work daily to keep their own list of blocked sites up to date. Additionally, blocking ip addresses is a tricky business. You can never be sure you’re blocking the right ip address, and you may end up blocking innocent surfers from visiting your site, while still letting spammers through.

I am going to give Bad Behavior a go. I’ll install it on one of the blogs that is most effected by this and see how this works. I will be back with an update as soon as I have some data to analyze.

 

 

 

 

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From Rock to Online

I took the day off yesterday (I’m from Israel and Saturday is our weekend). Just one of those days with no (ok, little) computer time, and spending time outside in the glorious weather we’re having, with my kids, family and friends.

It’s when I get these thoughtful insights too.

One that occurred to me yesterday (while taking out the trash, if you must know) is about those ancient prehistoric wall paintings.

Did the people painting these pictographs and carving in those petroglyphs realize how their messages will be conveyed across  the ages? Or were they intended to be just local and temporary “blogs” or message boards?

How long will our words last? This blog post, and others like it in hundreds of millions of blogs – will they be around a decade from now? a century? millenia?

It was funny seeing this in Mashable today – a recap of content creation through the ages… from stone age cave paintings till today  -

http://mashable.com/2011/01/25/the-history-of-content/

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Facebook for Sites, Blogs, Businesses

xIt’s been a while since I posted here. I won’t bore you with the details, but rest assured I have been keeping busy. I am working on a new project these days, and it is Facebook related (hey, the guys just won some Golden Globes or something, didn’t they?)

So, today’s post will be comprised of a list of resources relating to setting up Fan Pages for a business, a blog, a website – you name it, anything’s that’s not a personal website. How to set one up, how to design it, which elements to add and most importantly, how to promote it.

So here goes -

An excellent illustrated guide for setting up a business page on Facebook

Facebook 101 for Business – the first part is about Facebook profiles, or personal accounts, but the rest is about business pages (aka Fan Pages).

Creative Ways to Increase Your Facebook Fan Base – or rather the number of people who Like your page.

A Business Guide to Facebook – a bit cumbersome, but brings forward interesting data about why people choose to “like” a page.

Social Media Strategy Tips – not all of them are what I consider to be strategic, but still good.

How to Customize Your Facebook Page with Apps – short, sweet and to the point.

I will keep updating this post as I find more resources. Leave me a comment if you wish to recommend a link. Thanks!

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Shoutout Post

Hmmmm, looks like it’s been almost one month exactly since my last post here. The last post provides you with a big clue for the reason – planning a long family road trip takes a lot of time.

Feeling a bit out of the loop, blogging wise, so I’m dedicating this morning to catching up and while at it, creating my own shout-out post here.

Favorite Blog Posts Shout-Out

I Shoulda – a trip down memory lane and an inspiration for a future post here.

Top Engage at Blog Engage is always a good resource for finding the weekly gems.
Is Niche Blogging Killing … Blogging? – while I disagree with the central notion of his post, Murray does suggest some good tips for enriching your niche blog.

7 Simple and Effective Ways to Promote Your New Blog Post – some interesting techniques there, which I admit to not making use of.

Blogging Metaphors

I may just try my hand at a parody of these someday. It never ceases to amaze me how many “Blogging is like…” posts people can come up with. These aren’t necessarily bad either – sometimes a good metaphor does provide us with a new perspective. However, it still amuses me to see the titles, and especially how frequently these pop up in my RSS reader.

A few recent ones -

The Blog as a Bottle of Wine

Your Blog as a Sushi Restaurant

Your Blog as a Baby/Child – this one made me a bit uncomfortable, to be honest. Too many references to your baby dying unless you do this or that. Makes me wonder if the writer actually has kids of his own.

That’s it for now – as far as I can see nothing HUGE actually going on. Just good old blogging tips and advice posts mostly. If you can think of any major earth-shaking, or at least blogsphere-shaking events that I missed, do let me know in a comment!

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Shopping for Accommodation – Online

I have been spending the past couple of weeks in virtual travel across the Western US. Preparing for our up and coming American Road Trip, I am fine-tuning our itinerary and trying to book accommodation for at least most of the nights.

Shopping for hotels - online

Here’s what I need in order to make a reservation. It’s not a lot to ask for, really.

A Website

Duh! If you don’t have a website – there’s no way for me to know anything about your motel rooms or cabins. A phone number just won’t do – I can’t very well start calling overseas to ask whether or not there’s a fridge in the room, not when trying to compare several locations, and especially not when my working hours are when most sensible hotel managers should be fast asleep.

So, first things first, you need to have a website. A simple one will do.

Provide Your Rates

You can show me pictures of the most beautiful rooms in the world, but if there’s no price tag attached, I’ll probably move on. In fact, as a budget-oriented traveler, if your website is very fancy and the rooms look too good, but you don’t quote your price, then I assume you’re too expensive for me.

A List of Room Amenities

I need to know what I’m getting for my money. Fancy talk about how comfortable your pillows are, or how beautiful the room design, won’t cut it. I don’t need hype – I need facts. Let me know if you have air-conditioning, a mini fridge, a microwave or a TV. These are facts, upon which I can make a decision. Pictures are ok – roomplans are even better.

An Easy Way to Contact You

An email would do, actually. Just please please make sure it’s working!

That’s it – honestly. I’ll find my own way around review sites and check those out. From you, I just need a nice statement of what I’m getting and for how much.

A fancy design doesn’t make much of a difference. I have happily made reservations based on websites that look like they were built in 1996 (and perhaps they were!) or by the owner’s 10 years old nephew.

Give me a feasible navigation system, and I don’t care if you’re website has snow effects on the cursor and animated gif’s for a background. Well, maybe not animated gif’s for a background – THAT would be too annoying. But you get the point.

So, what if you don’t have a travel related website? I think most of the above still applies -

Keep your website simple, informative and functional.

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