Weekly Work Due 6-22

To Do:
1) Read the following:
Chapter 10
http://socialmediatoday.com/genevieve-lachance/1454711/successful-facebook-business-page-top-10-must-read-tips
http://www.brandcampblog.com/8-clever-things-to-post-on-your-facebook-business-page/
http://askaaronlee.com/what-to-tweet-for-small-business-owners/
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-use-twitter-for-business-and-marketing/

2) Take Chapter 10 quiz

3) Write 1 Good post for your blog (350 - 500 words) with pictures and formatting.
3A) Mention the post you wrote in your 3 social media accounts. 
3B) Write a Post in your 3 social media accounts related to the topic of your blog. (This is completely separate from the post you are writing this week.) Make sure you spread these out over a couple days.  I don't want two posts in one day. 
3c) Retweet a tweet from another twitter page that is in the same industry (or topic) as you. 

4) Go into your Google analytics you installed. Find the following information:
  a) What percentage of your traffic came from search engines, direct, and referrals?
  b) How many people came to your site and the left without clicking on anything else?
  c) What was the average time spent on the site?
  d) How many different states did people visit your site from?
  e) How many unique visitors did you have?

5) Create a Microsoft Word document with the information from number 4.  Take screen shots of your analytics for all your answers so I can see where you get your information. If you don't have Word you can come to FAU and use a computer lab or create a blog post with all the information complete with screen shots. 

6)  Submit your blog post to safe assign.
In the comments section include:
a) Your blog URL
b) Your twitter URL
c) Your Google plus page URL
d) Your Facebook Business page URL (Not your Personal)

7) Start your HootSuite work that is due in two weeks.  (Details on blackboard). 

How To Make A Blog Post (And Your Blog) Look Good

This week I wanted to concentrate on the aesthetics of your blogs and their presentation along with a little search engine optimization. We have been reading about all this in text and this week we can incorporate what we have been reading about.

This week you guys will write one blog post and spend more time doing the following.

1) Include 1 or 2 pictures in every blog post you have written so far. I want you to switch around between left aligned, right aligned and centered.  How to use images

2) Edit the ALT tags of your photos and I want to see a caption on your photos when I hover over them.  The reason for this is that search engines cannot read photos.  The alt tags tell the search engine what pictures are on your page.

3) I want everyone to pick one or two keywords or keyword phrases for their blog.  These are going to be words that you want your blog to come up for when people search for them in the search engine.  If my blog is about find the best pizza in Boca Raton then my target keywords could be:

a) Boca Raton pizza

b) South Florida pizza

c) Best pizza Boca Raton

d) “Where can I get a good pizza in Boca Raton”

There is not limit really to how many keywords you target although you generally would want to stick to less than 5 for one page.  Most websites owners only target about 1 to 3 primary keywords across their website and then a bunch of ancillary or geo keywords. Every website is different.  Play around with your keywords and search for them in different search engines. Are the keywords competitive? Why are the keywords coming up for certain websites?  Have those website worked them into their URL’s?  Are they writing pages or posts that have the keyword loaded into them?  Try to get a feel for the competitiveness of the keyword and try to pick a keyword or two that you think you could get ranked on.

When you have those keywords picked out I want you to go back and include them into each post at least twice.  They may already be there or you might have to be creative to work them in. I want you to bold the keywords and maybe even change the font color to highlight your keywords. Those keywords should be worked into your Alt tags and the titles of your posts also!

4) I want you to link to two of your other posts.  I want you to incorporate a keyword as anchor text  and reference back to something you wrote about.  If you have long link to other posts I want you to condense them down using anchor text as well.

5) Make sure the font in your blogs is consistent across all posts.  Play with your fonts and font size to make the text look good. 

6) Break up your posts into paragraphs.  People do not want to read large paragraphs of text.  Keep your paragraphs short and sweet and include visual elements as much as possible.

7) Read the following and incorporate what you can:

http://diaryofamadfreelancer.com/5-ways-blogger-blog/

http://thecreativemoose.blogspot.com/2014/01/good-typography-gets-90-of-job-done.html

 I am going to be grading your blogs this week as follows:

10 points for your blog post.

10 points for aesthetics for your entire blog. (How well you incorporated everything from this post.)

To do this week:

1) Read Chapter 8

2) Take Chapter 8 quiz

3) Write one blog post

4) Do blog project instructions posted above

5) Finish your Hootsuite project that I gave you last week..

6) Submit your 1 blog post this week to safe assign.
7) Post about your blog on Twitter, your Facebook business page you created, and Google Plus.
8) When you submit your blog post to safe assign in blackboard, in the comments section I need the following so I can grade easily:
a) blog URL
b) Facebook URL
c) Google Plus URL
d) Twitter URL

Installing Analytics Into A Blog

Everybody should have their blogs up and running. If you build it, they will come! Actually, not really. Think of your blog as your business. If you were to go out and build a physical business, chances are someone would see it and you might get some people passing by to be interested in checking you out. However, imagine if you were to build your business in the middle of the Saharan desert. How many people are going to be able to find you out in the middle of nowhere? Right now your blog is in the middle of the Saharan. The rest of the semester we are going to use Internet marketing, and social media tools to bring your blog closer to main street, USA.

Before we can even think of marketing our blogs, we need some eyes. At your physical store, you can watch people come in and out and you can ask them how they found you. On the Internet you cannot see who is visiting your site unless you install tracking software which is more commonly known as analytics. Analytic packages store cookies on the computer of people who visit your site when they first arrive. If they click to another page, the cookie is updated. If they take a look at your site, and it is horrible and they click away, the cookie will know. This is known as a bounce. If you have ten people visit your site and 3 bounce, then your bounce rate is rate is 30%. You want the lowest bounce rate possible.

Additionally, analytics track thousands of different things. Where is the person visiting from (the country, state, city, and network)? What speed is their connection? How did they find you (directly, organically, or referral)? How did they navigate through your site? How long did they visit for? How long were they on each page? Etc, etc, etc….

For this week, we are going to install Google analytics. It is free and very powerful. This is not hard to install at all. If it is your first time, then you may need to play with it a bit. With experience, it takes less than 2 minutes. Simply do the following:
1) Go to Google.com/analytics.
2) Sign up for a Google account if needed
3) Install analytics by following their instructions

The next thing you want to do is to make your blog searchable by the search engines. If you create a blog, how does Google know you created it? If Google doesn’t know you created it then how are they going to be able to display your blog in search results? Try googling you URL. Does it come up? (If you have wordpress it might because wordpress links to your blog). Now try Googling www.blogginginsights.blogspot.com. You can see that the search engine can find it no problem. The easiest way to get your blog indexed in the search engines is to submit them manually. It takes less than 30 seconds for each major directory.
1) http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
2) http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx

Also: If you didn’t submit it to these sites manually then your site would still be found eventually if someone were to link to you. When Google crawls the Internet it follows links and thus you would be found within a couple of weeks.

How to Pick A Blog Topic and Set Up A Blog

Blog Project Instructions:

Step 1: Decide what kind of blog you will create:
You have two options available to you for the blog project. You can do a blog that simply covers internet marketing and social media and the different aspects about it that you learn throughout the semester.  Or you can do a blog about whatever you want.  The latter obviously will take a little bit more time and thought but it should be more interesting for you and could lead to something for you down the road. I will give instructions for both types of blogs.

Option A: Standard Internet Marketing/Social Media Class Blog
You will write at least two blog posts per week throughout the semester.  This could be a post that is reflective of your thinking about assigned readings; or maybe one about anything related to Internet Marketing, social media, online communities, and social networks -- including your own experiences. More than two blog posts per week are suggested but not required.

Option B: Creative Blog
For this blog you can write about whatever interests you. As long as it does not offend anyone in the class you can write about whatever it is you want to.  It just has to be an original idea. You cannot copy the exact same idea as another site.  You need to differentiate yours.  It is easy to be similar, but different.  If you need help exploring an option send me an email.

Step 2: When you come up with an original idea you should write down a couple things for yourself so you can make sure it is feasible.
                          ii.   What is the main idea of the blog topic?
                         iii.   What types of information can be added to this blog each week?
                         iii.   Why will this blog be interesting?

Remember, you will have to blog about the topic you pick each week. Some blog posts are personal reflections, rants, or arguments, but the quintessential blog post is a link surrounded by context. Not all blog posts contain links, but links are at the heart of blogging. As a rhetoric, bloggers can use the medium of a blog to entertain, inform, incite, dispute, organize, depending on the voice and stance they take. Strive in your blog posts for critical, informative, performative, public voices. Show me that you are thinking about the core issues of the course and share your learning with the rest of the class, as well. Entertainment value is a plus, but critical public voice is required.

The other students and the instructor are the public in this class. A public differs from an audience because members of the public are potentially active; instead of simply absorbing what you publish, members of a public can talk back -- comment on your post, link to you, argue or agree, even join you in collective action in cyberspace or the physical world.

Step 3: Now that you have clarified this idea to yourself, go online and research other websites and/or blogs that are similar to your idea using Google.
                           i.   Which other blogs and websites are similar to yours?
                          ii.   Are there similar types of information that all these sites give amongst themselves? What information is missing?
                         iii.   What can you do to your blog that would make a person want to visit your site instead of these competitors?  What value would you give your readers? What would you make your competitive advantage?
                         iv.   What are some of the things or features of these other sites and blogs that they can provide that you probably won't be able to? Each week you will be adding information to your blog through two posts at a minimum.

 Step 4: Pick a URL and write a post
Once you decide what type of blog you want to write you need to select a URL for the blog. Go to Blogger.com and create a new blog. The URL for the blog will be something like this: example.blogspot.com.  After that, pick your template. Now that your template is picked out, practice writing your first post. Write an introductory post about what your blog will be about.  Then for your second post you can write up anything you want! You should play around with all the different settings and formats to familiarize yourself with the blogger format.

Complete "Blog Project Assignment 1" in which is in the content section of blackboard.

This is due by 6/1/2014 at Midnight

Tutorials:

How to create a blogger.com blog:
http://www.wikihow.com/Start-a-Blog-on-Blogger



Resources:
What Should I blog about?
Things to know before you start blogging: