Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Calling all Squidoo lensmasters Are you a lensmaster on Squidoo? If you are, I'm inviting you to join a new social networking site for Squidoo marketing, where our goal is to help each other do a better job of creating lenses that are used for marketing. Want to increase the revenue you earn from your lenses? Come and talk about them. Attract new visitors. Learn new techniques and share your own. Want to become a Squidoo lensmaster? Everyone is an expert on something. Squidoo provides an easy way to build one-page websites called lenses that you can use to focus attention on a particular subject that you know and love. It's free, and Squidoo even shares any revenue they earn from your lens with you. There are many of us who get a monthly deposit from Squidoo into our PayPal accounts. I just got a deposit into mine a couple of days ago. You can, too. Are you an expert on something? Build your own Squidoo lens and tell the world. It's free, of course. Then, come join us at the Squidoo marketing community. We'll help each other become better lensmasters. Act on your dream! JD 8:32:35 PM    comment []  trackback []

Promoting your social networking communities, sites, and lenses I got an email from someone who's had a Ryze community for years, but he announced that he was leaving Ryze and moving to Facebook. That got me to thinking. I, too, have been staking out some territory on Ning.com and wanted to take advantage of Facebook to help promote my social networking communities. It took a bit of searching, but I found a great app that works on Facebook and let's me syndicate multiple RSS feeds. You can see it in action on my Facebook profile: Facebook profile for John Dilbeck If you look on my profile and scroll down below the pictures of my top friends, you'll see a new module for Blog RSS Feed Reader, where I've syndicated the Latest Activity feeds from my Ning communities. I'm also building lenses for each community that will syndicate the latest activity feed, as well. The lenses will link to the communities, which link to the lenses, and the feeds will be syndicated wherever I can. As a result, I'm already seeing excellent search engine results on Google with many page one results - sometimes page one, item one. You can easily add the Blog RSS Feed Reader app to your profile. Since Facebook is now ranked in the top 10 sites, I'm betting that syndicating your Ning feeds on your profile will make it easier for you to get found. By the way, if any of you have a Facebook account, I'd love it if you add me as your friend there. If you don't have a Facebook account, why not. It's much more useful than Myspace these days. That's my two cents. Act on your dream! JD 8:31:14 PM    comment []  trackback []

Have you claimed your business listing at Merchant Circle? Do you own or manage a business in Murphy, NC, or anywhere else in the United States? Did you know that you can claim your free listing at MerchantCircle.com? For example, here's the Merchant Circle directory page for Murphy NC 28906. The folks at Merchant Circle have used publicly-available information and have added thousands of businesses to their directory. If you own a business that is already listed, you can claim your listing and start promoting your business there for free. Publish a newsletter, offer special offer coupons, write on your blog, meet other members, and do much more. Even if all you do is add more to the information page about your business, it's worth the time to claim and update your listing there. Merchant Circle is already indexed and regularly visited by all the major search engine spiders, and you can easily lead them to your main website, blog, or newsletter, with an hour or so of work on updating your listing on Merchant Circle. Of course, if you prefer, you can use it more and promote your business on another easy-to-use and effective website. I just added a profile question for members of this community to link to your Merchant Circle page so it will show on your profile page here. If you have any questions, comment on this posting and I'll help you sort it out. When I have time, I'm going to compile all the experiments I've done over the last three years and create a mailing list where I can recommend valuable websites like Merchant Circle to you, and help you steer clear of other sites that offer no real value. I'll announce it when it's ready. What can we do to help you promote your business? Act on your dream! JD 8:24:42 PM    comment []  trackback []

Did you know that you can build a free online community? Do you have an account at MySpace, Facebook, or any of the other major social networking sites? Did you know you can start your own community at Ning.com for free? If you have the talent and time, you might even consider setting up an online community for your hometown, like I did for Murphy, NC. You can see our growing community at Murphy Connections. I started this site about six weeks ago and it is growing slowly, but steadily. You can do the same thing for your community. Meet new friends and help the business owners in your community spread the word about their products and services. This type of community is needed by many places, particularly small towns, and work well with other sites, including Merchant Circle. Please note, however, that you'll need to pay the upgrade for a premium service to control the ads on the community if you or your members post commercial links or link to other commercial websites. Act on your dream! JD 8:21:49 PM    comment []  trackback []

© Copyright 2009 John L. Dilbeck.