A Lake Worth organization providing food and supplies for earthquake victims hired Deborah Tobias to create a website for their relief efforts. This group has made frequent trips to Haiti, setting up areas where people can be fed, drink clean water and get needed supplies.

Haiti has long been considered the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

Today the vast majority of Haitians still live at the lowest economic level, and many suffer from a lack of food and medical care.

* An estimated 80% live in abject poverty, searching for scraps of food to survive or scrap materials to build a lean-to.
* More than half of the population, including two-thirds of the children, suffers from malnutrition. A
* bout 76 of every 1,000 children die before reaching their fifth birthday.

Check out the website… until they get their donation system in place, you can email them with any offers of support.
www.harvestime-outreach.org

Using Facebook can build your business

Small business owners already on Facebook are still not sure that it is a good use of their time and are unclear about how exactly Facebook can work for them.

Starting a Fan Page for your business may be your answer. But how can you use a Fan Page to achieve fantastic results?

1) The first way to leverage Fan Pages is to set up your Page for success.

PAGE TITLE: When you set up a new Page give it a title using keywords related to your business.

PHOTOS: You also want to choose a good, clear photo for your Page. Another thing to note is to make sure you have filled out the Info tab on your Page thoroughly with all the relevant information about your business.

2) Build your Fan base.

You have to be proactive about getting Fans, especially when your Page is new. An easy way to invite people is to use the “Suggest to Friends” link underneath the picture on your Fan Page. Facebook will then pull up a list of your Facebook friends and you would just click on the ones you want to send invitations to. You’ll want to consider people like former and current clients, people you’ve partnered with in your business, vendors you work with, people who you know have purchased from you before, etc.

3) The third way to leverage Fan Pages is to interact and engage with your Fans.

Once you have some supporters of your Page, you want to encourage more dialogue and interaction between yourself and them and even among each other. The biggest impact comes from simply having conversations with people.

One thing that I do on my Page is to just ask open-ended questions. Asking people to share experiences is another great way to get a dialogue going.

4) The fourth way to leverage Fan Pages is to provide good content.

Offering regular content will naturally encourage interaction because you are giving people something to respond to. You don’t need to come up with all the content yourself, either. You might just link to an interesting article or blog post you have found on the web related to your business or industry.

What content like this does is attract comments from your Fans, which is activity that in turn goes out into the News Feed. The more activity on your Page then, the more attention to your Page you have a chance of attracting.

5) Use Fan Pages to drive traffic to and from your blog or website.

List your website in the Info section, and share links in your updates to your own site.

You can also use an application like Notes to enter your blog feed so that it pulls your posts into your Page. You also want to add your URL to your email signature, and use the free badges and widgets Facebook provides that you can add to your website.

You can check out http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets for those. Once you have something like this on your site, visitors can just click on it and they will land on your Page where they can become a fan.

So, if you don’t have a Page yet, head over to http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php and start one now. If you do have one set up, use these tips to help make your Page stand out, get noticed, and become a helpful destination for all of your raving Fans.

Many folks don’t pay attention to their website’s statistical data, and lack the ability to interpret the data.

Among the tons of information that your web host (GoDaddy, HostGator, etc.) provides, few people bother to study and interpret this important website feedback.



Here is an example of one local accommodation website and their statistics. It’s a relatively new website, and has had some modifications progressively done to it over the past few months.

 First up, the one piece of data that almost everyone knows about is Page Views.

 Page Views provide you with a quick picture of your overall traffic. When you compare this information with previous weeks or months it’s a good snapshot – nothing more. However, Unique Visitors are more important because they represent the actual number of different people who have viewed your site’s pages, rather than repeat visitors, within the same day, same week, and with disregard to how many pages any Unique Visitor visits on your site.


In practical terms, this site has had 2610 Page Views so far this month, but only 1171 Unique Visitors – which means that each visitors has viewed an average of 2 – 3 pages each.



What does that mean?

 This Website only has five pages, so based on these numbers we can ascertain that only its visitors view half of those pages. With this information at hand, before we do any work on the site, we need to first see which pages are being viewed.
Using the Entry Pages report we are able to see that 85% of all visitors this month so far arrived on the main page.

This alone is an interesting fact as it tells us that the site is receiving search engine traffic to the other pages because there is simply no other way to find them otherwise. It also tells us that the content of the main page may need to be modified if people are not going deeper into the site.

So how do we find that out? We go into the Exit Pages Report. Here (in our demo site) we find that 73% of visitors are leaving from the main page. First up, that does not look too good. Could it be that once people arrive on this site that they don’t like it at all?

Finally, to determine this, we need to view the Single Access Pages Report. It is bad news – 68% of all visitors to this site are arriving on the main page and then leaving again!



Here is the question that we need to ask: What is it about the main page that people don’t like? Do you even know how many people arrive on your main page and then leave again?)


What is bringing them to the site? Are they qualified customers, or are they kids looking for games to play?

 Checking the Search Engine Keywords Report, we can figure out that just over a quarter of all their traffic this month had come from 15 different search engines, through a combination of over 100 different keyword search phrases. That alone is not enough to determine the problem here. All of these people were targeted customers. However, also using the Referring Website Domains Report we could see that a 68% of all visitors came from a recent email marketing campaign advertisement.

 Ah Ha! Speaking with the owner I was able to learn that in the previous week they had placed an ad about a few limited available rooms they still had available for let in January, at the end of the school holidays. The ad had gone out to almost 1200 people (opt in subscribers of a local tourism Website) and 673 of those people had clicked on their URL (a massive 56% response), wanting to look over their available holiday dates.

 And guess what was on the main page? Yep – the details of a limited offer 7-night package.

So right now we’ve gone a complete circle. We knew that there must have been something wrong with the main page (in fact we actually knew exactly what it was in advance), but the exercise had allowed me to explain to you in finer details just how you should be looking to evaluate and interpret your own Website statistics. 

What if you were not running a targeted campaign for a special offer? How about if these were the results on any normal given week? Then what?

 As a closing thought – the first thing I’d want to know is this: Time Spent on Site.

 Before making major changes to your website content, you need to determine if people are reading / viewing it or not. Using the above example, 51% of visitors to this site in the past two weeks have stayed between 1 – 5 minutes. Good or bad?

 A bit of both.

We’d like people to stay onsite for more than five minutes, but with only five pages, that’s not going to happen unless you have a very long sales letter up front. So that’s the good part. The bad part is only 38% of these visitors invested the time to actually read the home page sales information. The rest just left. 

If this were your website, you’d now have to decide how best to service those 38%.

Negative reviews means that customers will be wary to shop from your store or to do business with you. Would you want to buy from a store without positive rankings?

A good way to check if your site has any negative reviews is to type in different variation of your website/ company name in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Scroll through the first three pages to see if anything bad sticks out. If something does, then you must take corrective action immediately to thwart these sites.

Now that you are aware of negative feedback and the impact it can have on your business you may be wondering what you can do to avoid this.

The simplest and easiest solution is to personally manage any complaints against you company and ensure that angry customer problems are resolved. Unfortunately, sometimes this is not possible and the customer is angry and wants to do everything in their power to spread the word about your service. This means you have to fight back, by building or promoting existing pages for those specific keywords that are bringing up the negative feedback.

You can create new sites tailored around specific keywords that bring up negative feedback about your site. Promote these new sites by building links and adding the new sites to directories.

Review the sites just below the negative feedback and try to push those sites up the rankings. This can be achieved by promoting and building back links to these sites. In time these sites will surpass the negative results and dominate the search results.

These methods should help remove any negative feedback or remarks about you or your company from showing up on the search results.

This is an ongoing process and the negative feedback will start to reappear if you do not continue to monitor the new sites that replaced the negative feedback. This will show your customers that you truly care for them and will increase sales, revenue, and ultimately your business’s reputation.

You’re probably reading this post outside of normal business hours.

If you have a life, a majority of your time is spent away from the computer. But the sun never sets on the internet. It operates 24/7/365 for online and offline businesses both. The doors are always open and the lights are always on!

Blogging is increasingly being used to effectively to present businesses and products to the market. A free, easy way is now available – to share your knowledge and experience – through blog posts.

Helpful blog posts on relevant content establish you as a leader and creates a relationship that your people don’t normally get from just visiting your website. Just today in a phone conversation a client said, “I was so glad to see you are a real person!” The personal touch works.

Need  examples? I’m a fan of blogs like one of my own clients

www.brennanking.org/blog as he shows a painting in progress and painting on locations in the beautiful Florida landscape.

A great blog is also

blog.thomasdolby.com/2009/07/tedglobal-09-music/

Contribute to the communication in meaningful ways. A terrific way to increase networking is to be active and to comment on others’ posts. Respect the poster; comment on the post. Remember that a single post could be read by thousands, some of whom may take great interest in you and the ideas you represent.

Don’t Abuse the Blog

If you use your blog correctly, folks will appreciate your information and insight. But consistency is key. Deliver value to your business community by remaining active in blogging and in social networking forums. Don’t hold back. Give more, and you will receive more.