Category: Tips

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Are You Losing Customers Because of Facebook?

Portrait Of Extended Family Group In Park
Your Customers Are On Facebook!

If you have 500 or more followers on Facebook, you should be checking your business page once a day for personal messages (PM).

Facebook use is growing and more users are never leaving Facebook; instead using Facebook Messenger or PM’ing a business instead of visiting their website.

As professional Facebook account managers for a number of businesses, we see the type of traffic that comes in on the Facebook control panel. What is surprising is the number of people who will ask a question, ask for a price, request that you call them, or PM them back with more information.

If you never look at your Facebook business page, you’ll be missing all of these potential customer interactions. In fact if you just have a writing service and don’t look or pay your service to look at least once a week, potential customers may simply feel that you are not interested in their business.

The more followers you have and the more active your page is the more frequently you need to be watching Facebook for online messages.

Facebook has some nice message automation tools, but they only work if you enable them and use them. For every account we monitor, we enable an auto responder that includes our clients’ phone number and email address. For many clients we will monitor their message traffic at least once a week and some nearly every day.

Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by wanting to grow your business and then never checking Facebook – it’s where your prospects and customers are hanging out connecting with friends and family every day. They think that you as a business are there, where they are. Don’t let them find out that you’re not.

Need help with Facebook? Find out about our Facebook writing and management services.

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Just Nancy – Why Reviews Matter

Hit the mark with your customers every time for great reviews.
Hit the mark with your customers every time for great reviews.

As a Google Local Guide, I review every place I visit and every place I eat. With over 300 reviews and photos uploaded to Google, I am just one of many who are helping Google index local businesses, build reviews and improve the accuracy of Google Maps.

Google does not pay me for these services, but I do receive special Google branded products and other perks for being a Google Local Guide.

Here’s what I’ve found out as I travel my local area.

  1. Reviews really do matter.
  2. People actually look at the photos I post for about a business.
  3. Negative reviews mean I probably won’t visit.
  4. I am constantly evaluating my store or restaurant experience.
  5. If I receive poor service, I will write about it.
  6. Even for lower end restaurants food presentation is important.
  7. People actually read what I post about a business.
  8. I do not tell business owners I am reviewing them.
  9. I myself select who I trade with based on online reviews.
  10. Reviews are more important than a nice website.

The bottom-line is that you are on display and being rated with every phone call, every visit, every plate that is served. You may have the best website, but if your visitors do not receive the royal treatment when they call or visit, you’ll set yourself up for a negative review. Get several and they can damage your business and sales!

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What Do Hackers Want with Your WordPress Blog?

Expect the unexpected.
Illustration depicting a roadsign with an ‘expect the unexpected’ concept. Sky background.

The question is always the same, “Why does a hacker want to get into my blog?” The answer is always the same – to drive traffic. But, that traffic is not to your site, but rather to drive traffic to a site they are being paid to promote.

The traffic is either direct or indirect. Direct traffic is where a hacker breaks into your WordPress site and then overwrites your website with their own site or landing pages pointing to their own site, I just saw one today for a webmaster prospect that was taken over by pornography sellers.

Indirect traffic is more sneaky. Here the hackers break in to WordPress and hope that you won’t know. Then they leave self-replicating scripts in various locations of WordPress and even tunnel into your own website. They use these scripts to create “ghost” pages that only search engines can see that are filled with links and keywords all pointing to sites they are hoping to boost in the organic search results.

In many cases if you find what you think is the spam directory (usually they hide it) and you delete it, the replicating scripts simply recreate everything you’ve deleted. You’ve got to do a very thorough  wipe of the server and site files to get rid of this type of hack permanently.

Many business owners ask, “Why me? I’m not Amazon and don’t even have tons of traffic!” Here’s where the hackers are playing a numbers game. The more sites that point to the site they are promoting, the better off they are initially.

Typically sites that these hackers are promoting are trying to garner organic placement temporarily to serve malware installations. Once the search engines figure out which sites they are they shut them down, but by then many people are now infected and the hackers then go on to the next site.

The best way to protect yourself from these kinds of issues is to keep WordPress updated and as secure as possible with plugins that monitor files and then check your WordPress application at least once a week.

If you need help with monitoring WordPress, please check out our webmaster services.

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Get Google Calendar’s Goals to Organize Your Life

Get active and let Google Calendar book the time in your schedule for you.
Get active and let Google Calendar book the time in your schedule for you.

Do you use Google Calendar? Want to squeeze more out of each day? Google will now schedule time for you to squeeze more out of each day when you set up a Google Calendar Goal.

This is a new enhancement to the Google Calendar app. If you already have Google Calendar installed, use these quick steps to check it out for yourself.

If not, go to https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.calendar and download the app to get started.

Get Started!

  1. Open the app and then click the big red circle with a + at the bottom right.  Choose the blue “goal”.
  2. Let Google know what you want to have as your goal – exercise time, building a skill, time for family and friends, me time,  or simply stay organized.
  3. Based on the activity, you will see different questions. I selected stay organized and my menu is plan the day, clean, do chores, custom. Each step has different questions to fine tune what Google will do and how frequently it will add a note on your calendar.
  4. When you are done click the checkmark at the top right of the last page. Google will then flag time in your calendar based on your criteria. And, Google will remind you to stay on task to accomplish your own goal.

If you are having trouble finding time to do something regularly, it’s a good idea to allow Google to scan your calendar, add the item, and then remind you that you need to do it. You can mark the goal done or defer it as needed when your reminder pops up.

Using goals in Google Calendar is just another great way that Google Calendar can make your life easier and for you to live smarter.