There are a couple of ways you can use KnowEm.  The listing of all the important sites is very helpful.  If all you do at KnowEm is find the different lists of networks valuable to your marketing conversations you have saved yourself quite a bit of time.

To help you set up your profiles, you can use KnowEm to see if your business handle is available for registration. In less than a minute, you can see if your profile name of choice is available or not.  If you’re busy, let KnowEm setup your profiles across the networks for you.

With KnowEm you can take the search out of finding the most popular social networks and get right down to the business of joining in the conversations and Be Found.

How to show all your upcoming events to all your clients and prospects using Google calendar:

Log into your Google account (or create a Google account if you don’t have one). Add a new Google calendar and make the calendar public in the sharing options. The URL for your public calendar is also listed on the same screen. Add your events to this calendar. Include a description, location and descriptive title for each event. If registration is required for your events, provide a link to your event registration page in the description.

Brand the calendar URL to your website by adding a new page. On this page you can embed the new calendar (code generated within the Google calendar application) as well as provide the link for your visitors to add your calendar to their google calendar.

To encourage anyone add your calendar to their calendar:

Login and click the small triangle next to the name of the calendar you want to share on the left side of your screen, and choose “Calendar Settings”.
Click the XML icon next to “Calendar Address” to get the address of your public calendar.
Copy the Calendar Address link and paste it into the box on this page: http://www.google.com/googlecalendar/event_publisher_guide.html#public

Choose the button style you want to use, and then click “Create button HTML”. Just copy that HTML and paste it into the design of your page to add your Google Calendar button.

Anyone can now add your calendar to their Google calendar and your events will be shown when they look at their calendar.

Now make your calendar easy to find:

• Add the link to your main events page on your website.
• Include your Google calendar link in your newsletter.
• Add the link to your business cards and brochures.
• Include the link in your power point presentations.
• Tell everyone in your webinar or presentation that you have a Google calendar they can add to keep updated on upcoming events.

You can use the Google calendar to do more than advertise your events:

• If you provide a discount of the week, use the calendar to notify your customers.
• Do you offer free daily or weekly tips? Use the calendar to put your tips on to their calendar.
• Add homework assignments for your classes.

Suggest some ideas of your own, post a comment.

An online calendar can be so much more than a personal schedule. Use the power to keep in touch with your clients and prospects. This technique won’t replace the way you currently advertise and do your marketing, but it does add a free and easy way to get your word out and Be Found in the sea of other messages.

To add your Avatar to your site is fairly simple.  Plugins are available for leading blog software and content management systems like WordPress, Joomla, Ruby on Rails and other software platforms.  The current WordPress version automatically will recognize your Gravatar. If you have a Gravatar from http://en.gravatar.com/ then many times this image will display in your WordPress site automatically.

Having a Gravatar for your Avatar is also great if you comment on blogs and videos. Some businesses will use their logo but most people prefer to be personal and use their photo or drawing.

To get started you create a login http://en.gravatar.com/site/signup.  From there you will upload your image, add more email addresses and add your profile.

After you have created your Gravatar, you will see your image and profile information when you comment on posts and other social networking sites like Youtube and Vimeo just like the image on the left of this post.

Don’t wait, go get your own Gravatar and spread your smile across the Internet.

It’s also important to know that impression count rules changed as well. If you start a query and pause for three seconds, that will count as an impression. When you complete your search, the results will change according to the completed query and this will count as a separate impression. So those are two impressions and will count twice in Webmaster Tools and Adwords.

There is data showing that click-throughs on 2 and 3 word search terms are decreasing, and click-throughs on 4/5/6/7 word phrases are all increasing. Keep this in mind as you prepare and write your blog posts. Use longer search phrases in your titles and meta tags. You may want to work with complementary blog sites and submit your posts for publication in order to help mitigate a decrease in visitors if Google Instant has negatively impacted your visitor traffic. You could also rewrite your Facebook page to incorporate your key search terms.

I believe that Google Instant will add more pressure to fewer search phrases than we had before. This could be expensive for paid ad positions (CPC). As fewer key phrases are pushed to the searcher the bid amounts on these select phrases will increase. Don’t take lightly that paid search is how Google makes their money. More money fighting for fewer results is likely. Next time we will talk about Google Places to help take the sting out of Google Instant.

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Just how big is this marketing opportunity? From 2007 to 2008 online coupon usage grew by more than 130%. The savings from online coupons reached more than $850 million for 2009, a 170% increase over 2008. If you have an e-commerce store or you are looking for walk in customers originating from the Internet, discount codes and coupons should be a part of your marketing mix.

The buying behavior of the customer who searches to find a store off-line might use the newspaper ads or the yellow pages for their search. A business will advertise and offer coupons in those advertising channels to attract the buyer to visit their store and make a purchase. The online shopper however takes an opposite approach. First the buyer searches to find what they want to purchase and then performs a second search to see if there is a discount available before they finalize their purchase or decision to visit a local store.

It’s not very difficult for you to offer a discount. If you’re a local business, Google Places is where you want to start. It’s free and not only does it put you in Google maps but you can enter your business hours, add photos and video to your listing. You can also include a simple printable coupon. Google then makes it easy for the online searcher to find your business and your coupon.

Several web sites offer listings for discount codes. Tjoos.com has over 1,000,000 unique visitors per month. Add your website to their listings and online shoppers can enter that discount code into your online shopping cart.

To find other coupon factory type sites and list your discount codes, just search for “coupon discount codes” and visit the sites to see which are appropriate for you.

If you’re not using a discount or coupon code you may want to make it part of your online marketing plan. Offering discount coupon codes can easily bring additional revenue for your business and help you to be found on the Web.

Find a WordPress template which offers a place to enter meta titles and meta descriptions or install an SEO plugin.

Meta titles should make sense to the reader, but the wording should be based on keyword search popularity and relevance to the rest of the web page content. The meta title field is where you tell the search engines what you would like them to use when they display the page title in the search results list.  Your page title is what people see when they arrive at your site and is added to the top field above the Permalink: line in WordPress.  The meta title and page title do not need to be identical but it’s important to use the same keywords in both places.

The permalink should match the meta title making sure you use the keyword phrases you are targeting for that page/post article.  Be careful though, if you are re-working your pages for SEO you may already have search placement for the current permalink.  In that case, install the 301 redirect plugin to be sure you notify the search engines of your new page permalink or you will lose your ranking and your visitors could get a 404 page not found error message. However, if you don’t have search traffic coming to your site on that page (check your analytics for the site) don’t bother with the 301 redirects, they can be problematic if not cleaned up over time.  You’ll gain more ranking and traffic by making the changes than you would lose without the redirect.

You can get some good ideas for your titles by looking at top selling magazines such as Reader Digest.  They spent lots of money researching what headlines sell.

Examples of Good Titles

• Tips on Growing Flowers – How to Grow Flowers
• US Population Statistics – 2008 United States Population Statistics
• Chocolate Dessert Recipe – Best Chocolate Dessert Recipes for Chocolate Lovers
• Tax Tips – Tips on How to Pay Less Taxes  (someone nothing thinking about SEO might title it Tax Tips – Tips on How to Pay Less Taxes to Uncle Sam and adding Uncle Sam could confuse the search engines and decrease your impact)

When creating meta titles:

• Do repeat keyword phrases – no more than twice is usually best
• Do tie these phrases to your content and other meta data
• Do use plurals and word variations when possible
• Do limit the use of punctuation
• Do use initial caps throughout the title

Note that the above title tags accomplish three things:

1. They help robots understand what is most important about the content on the page by repeating part of the keyword phrases that would be found in article titles and content
2. They make sense to people reading them
3. By using plurals when sensible, it allows more possible keyword searchers (both on singular and plural or major keywords)

How Long Should a Meta Title Be in Length?

Generally, a title should be long enough to be clear; short enough to avoid being “truncated.”  Truncation happens when a title is too long. Search engine robots will only read so many characters then move on. Different search engines read different numbers of characters but if you keep your titles less than 150 characters you will keep most major search engine robots happy.

Use your keyword list, title your page/post using your keywords and write your meta titles.  Good luck!

If you have been using Constant Contact to generate email marketing campaigns to advertise your events you’ll like this.  You can now let your readers register and pay for the event within your email message.  Even better, you can send information directly as a Twitter feed and your readers can tell their Facebook friends they just registered for your event.

They offer an integrated ticketing system which gives marketers the option to create and distribute actual tickets to events that can be printed.   Guest registration functionality has also been added and offers the ability for registratants to register one or more guests, limit the number of guests each registrant can bring, assign different event fees for members and non-members, and allows registrants to pay for the event.  Other features include the ability to post event information directly to a Twitter feed and tell friends in FaceBook.

The cost is $10 a month if you already have an email marketing subscription and you only have to pay the month you use the service.  Now there’s an easy way to connect your social network and your events together doing what you already do with your email marketing campaigns.