Then I found RSS Graffiti. This application is FREE which is always good! And it updates immediately! I just did a post on creating RSS feeds from the Meetup.com group I am an organizer for. To pull it into Facebook, I used RSS Graffiti.

Log into Facebook, then use the search feature at the top and type in RSS Graffiti. You will need to allow this app to have access to your profile or page before you can have the feed pulled in. Once you have done that, you can set up as many feeds as you want to. I have three set up for the New Lawrenceville Facebook Profile that I moderate. Enter in the url for your RSS feed. You can then set up how many items from the feed you want to pull in, if you want a text prefix before each article is posted, and other useful settings. Do all of that and then save.

RSS Graffiti will start working immediately. Once your feed is updated, you will see the articles posted directly on your Facebook wall. Hope you find it useful!

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The first one is a business that already had a great sit. Sarah Johnson, the owner of Pampered Pet Care of Atlanta, realized the value of having a blog on her site. Having a blog gives you access to publish articles, educate people and  inform clients of upcoming holiday news  or services. She also knew that a blog is one of the key elements in having great search engine results.

I was able to use her current site as the template, and incorporate the blog right into it, using the same images, fonts and color scheme. She has some great things to say, so check out her blog here: http://www.pamperedpetcare.com/blog

Next is another pet sitting company, but this time they are in North Carolina. Pet Sitters of Charlotte are a relatively new company. Phil & Lisa Koch were great to work with. Phil knew that to have a site that would work “for” them, Twitter, Facebook and a blog were the way to go. I created a website using WordPress, giving them control of their own pages using the Content Management System that this blogging platform provides.

I added all of the standard features to their package including a favicon for their site, submitting their site to all of the major search engines, adding keywords, descriptions and titles, and providing them with Google Analytics to see who is visiting their site. Their site is still so new, a couple of extra visits won’t hurt, check them out! http://petsittersofcharlotte.com

The last site I want to highlight is one I worked on for a wonderful lady named Tracy Knight. Tracy and I must have had about 3 or 4 calls before I started doing work for her. She already had a blog, but was using WordPress.com which has certain limitations.  Having reached the limit of what she could do with this, she began to realize that having a WordPress blog set up under her own domain would allow her to have a custom theme, put banner ads on the site, and get access to code if she needed to.

Tracy had a beautiful header image that I used as a starting point for her custom theme. Tracy’s blog provides inspiration, thought provoking questions and most of her blog posts get some great comments posted to theme. No matter your belief, religion or opinions, I think everyone can gain by taking a look at her blog. Keep up the great work Tracy! http://womenencouraged.com

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Do you do a lot of your blog writing in the evenings, or over the weekend? We often can’t control when the urge hits us to get creative and write. If writing at 3 in the morning works for you, that’s great, but don’t publish as soon as you are finished, many of your readers might miss it if you are putting the word out through Twitter and Facebook. Instead, simply Schedule your blog post to go out at a much more acceptable hour!

As soon as you start typing out your article, go to the right side of the post and click Edit next to where it says Publish immediately. You will now see some date controls. Here you can enter in the date and time you want the post to go out.

Once entered, click OK. Now the Publish button becomes a Schedule button instead. Click Schedule. Your post will not be made visible on your blog until the entered date and time. If you have automatic posting set up to Twitter and Facebook (which you should!) then this means your post link will be distributed to those sites at a time when more people will be on them. Bonus!

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If you head over to Google you can type in your search criteria. If your blog is about animals, type in dogs, or cats. If you write about family matters, type in marriage, children or summer camps. This is a great way to see what people are posting online and searching for.

Once you have keyed in your search, in the left navigation pane, where you see All Results, click on More search tools.

From here you will see Wonder wheel as an option. Once you do this, you will see that the results format changes slightly. You now see a “wheel” of sorts with your search phrase in the middle, surrounded by related phrases.

Drill down to the other search criteria by clicking on the phrase. You will now have a sub wheel of your original wheel search. This allows you keep drilling down, looking for new potential blog post ideas. On the right of the wheel, you will see related Google search results. Use this free tool when you are stuck for ideas. It should provide some inspiration!

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1. The files for your website are stored on the hosting server. So, all of the hard work that you or a web designer put into your site is sitting out there on a server somewhere and you have no idea where.
2. You are paying someone either monthly, or each year and you don’t know who. Again, not a good idea! You should know where your business finances are going right?
3. If you want to change hosting companies, then the first place to start is to know where your files are right now. Not knowing can take time to uncover! If you don’t know your hosting company then you probably don’t know your account information either.
4. Smaller hosting companies can easily go out of business. If this happens, you need to know how to access your files, and quick!

If you don’t know who hosts your website, do this. Go to this website: www.whoishostingthis.com Type in your website address. It will tell you the name of the hosting company where your site is hosted. Make a note of it, somewhere, anywhere! Also, if you don’t know your account information, then figure it out, either by calling them, or using a forgotten username or password link.

Hopefully you can get all the info you need, store it, and be ready when you next need it!

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You will only be able to add your company if you already have a profile that includes the e-mail address for that company. In other words, LinkedIn needs to see you as a current employee. Add the name of your Company and your e-mail address, then click Continue.

Next, you can walk through and add items like your website address, description, industry and part of your address. Once you have added this info, you can then add your logo by uploading an image. Next add your locations, any financial information you wish to share, and your company blog.

Finally, once you are finished, your company can now be found during searches. Also, if someone hovers their mouse over the company name in your profile, a pop up window appears showing some of the information about your business.

Make sure you don’t miss out on this free opportunity to promote and market your business some more!

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Social RSS seems to be doing the trick for me. Log into Facebook and then click on the following link: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=23798139265

It will take you directly to the application for Social RSS for Facebook. This application allows you to pull in your blog feed directly into Facebook. If you are using WordPress, there are several plugins that will do this for you, but I haven’t yet found one that has the same settings and flexibility of this app.

Once at the application, you will need to put in the settings. First, you can enter in a Description. Put in a little bit about you or your business. This is going to be used on your Facebook Profile, not your Page (more about how to set that up in a moment). Let people know about what it is that you do, or what your RSS feed is about. Why would it interest me? Who is it targeted at?

Next you can put in a website link. You can make this your home page if you wanted to. You will put the actual RSS Feed link further on down in the settings. Now onto the settings for the feed itself. If you need more guidance just hover your mouse over the title of the field and it will give you more info. These are all required fields and the tag can be something simple. The field is no more than 5 characters so just put in a combination of letters and numbers that makes sense to you and what the feed is about. This is really more critical if you have more than one feed. I just used an acronym of my business name, seemed simple enough!

The Title I just used my company name. When a new post is published to your wall, it states: New Story from, then the Title you entered, so put in something that makes sense. The URL is that of your RSS feed. If you are not sure what it is, click on the orange rss icon from your blog and it should take you to the url. If you are still not sure, ask a friendly web designer, I am sure they will tell you for free!!! Do not just use the url of a regular web page, it won’t work that way. The Alternative URL will be used when someone clicks on the Title of the feed. I have it taking people to my About page for more information.

Next click the Display Options tab.This allows for more settings to determine how the new posts from the RSS feed will look. Here are my settings below, feel free to copy, or use your own. You can click on the other two tabs but I haven’t changed anything on those. Finally, click on Add to Profile.

This will ask you if you want to add Social RSS to your Profile. You can add it to the boxes tab, or the Wall and Info Tab.

Once you have done this, click on Application settings from the top right of Facebook. Click to Edit the Social RSS Settings. Select your Profile settings, and also click on the Bookmark tab. By Bookmarking Social RSS, this means it will show up when you are on the Facebook home page. You will see it listed underneath News Feed, Messages and any Applications you have book marked. This makes it easier to get back to in the future.

Once you have this all configured, the next time you publish a blog post, you will see it listed on your Profile. Below is how mine looks.

And finally, if you want it to appear on your Facebook Fan Page, click on this link: http://apps.facebook.com/rss-connect/pageinfo.php?ref=tb If you have more than one page, it will ask you which one to add it to. Click to Add Social RSS and then you will be taken to the same settings page as before. It’s a pain to set it up twice, but you only need to through this once, and that’s it. I kept two windows open, one with my Profile settings and one for my Page and just copied and pasted from one to the other.

Had success with any other applications posting your RSS Feed to Facebook? Let us know about them below!

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So how do you know who is linking to you? Well, there are many sites out there that can show you this information, but a simple quick and easy way is to go directly to the Google Search Engine. Simply type into the search box – link: www.domainname.com where domain name is your domain. See below in the example for my website.

First glance and it looks like there are over 1,400 links back to my site. Technically this may be true, but many of those links are actually within my own site. One page linking to others. Once you get through all of those, you can see other sites that have added a link to their pages back to one of yours. This could be from another blog, a forum you visited and added your information to, or a site just showing you some love! It’s a good idea to know who is out there and linking to you. A lot of the sites listed when I do my search, I already know about. However, I often find someone linking that I had no idea about either! Sharing links is good, if it makes sense for your website. Consider a list of other local and trusted businesses, or offer a shared link for those that meet certain requirements.

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If you have Microsoft Office 2007, and have either Word or Publisher, you will know that you can save a document as a PDF, pretty quick and easy. PDF documents can be used when putting together a contract, creating project plans or any time you want a document that can be ready easily by someone else. For those of you not up to date with your Office products, there is another tool out there you can use. Primo Pdf is available for download to your computer at no charge. Once downloaded, Primo works like a printer would. With the document open that you wish to convert, simply click on the print button within Word or Publisher.

The screen to the left will open. Next to the path by Saved As, you will see a little button to the right. Click on this and you can select the desktop, or a folder to where your PDF can be saved. Click on Create PDF. If you have the Post Process set to “Open PDF” it will open up for you to review. Your PDF can now be used and e-mailed to others if needed.

There is also a service available that will do the exact opposite, convert a PDF to a Word document. This is provided by the same people that make Primo PDF, NitroPDF Software . With this, you go out to their website (visit site here), find the PDF document you wish to convert, select if you want it as a .doc file or Rich Text Format, then enter in an e-mail address that you want to have it e-mailed to. The e-mail takes about 10 to 15 minutes to get to you, but the conversion is pretty good! NitroPDF Software also have a convert PDF to Excel version that is also free.

Back in July, I did a post on Mozy, a service that allows you to back up your files for free. Learn more about Mozy.com and how you can use their services to have piece of mind, knowing that your private, confidential and critical documents (or maybe your precious family photos) are backed up each night, sitting waiting in the event that your system crashes and you need to recover them.

YouMail has been around since 2007 so still fairly new, but well worth checking out. Many small business owners work out of their home, or travel around so much that a cell phone is their mode of communication. Having your cell phone as your business phone is ok, but it means you lose a lot of functionality that a regular land line has. YouMail provides you a method to set up different voicemail messages that can be assigned to different callers.

Creating an account is free of charge. You set up your cell phone to work with this service. Once set up, YouMail is where you will get your voicemail (can easily be programmed with a speed dial number like you have now) but one of the great things about it, is that you can have several different voicemail messages set up. Consider this, those annoying blocked call numbers, a standard voicemail message can be set to inform the caller you don’t accept blocked or unrecognizable calls. Or, the pushy sales man that just won’t stop calling, add their number online and set their voicemail message to a “this number has been disconnected or is out of service at this time”. Perfect to get your number off their call list! You can also set it to get an e-mail or text each time you get a voicemail, and by paying a fee, can even get voicemails transcribed and sent to you in text format. You can also record your own messages and easily switch between them online, one for regular hours, one for weekends, one for the holidays and so on. Much easier than having to rerecord messages for each scenario as it arises.

Finally, another company that offers a variety of cool tools is Each of their services allows you to grade a marketing area of your business. You can grade your Facebook Business Page, your WebSite, a Press Releases and Twitter accounts. Grader.com is by a company called HubSpot. Below, you can see where I entered my Twitter account and got a grade of 89 out of 100. They take into consideration a number of factors, quality of posts, number of followers, of those you are following, and the number of updates made.

Website Grader allows you to put in your url, and also add other websites you want to compare yourself against. This is great if you want to see how you compare with your competitors. How are others in the same business as you stack up against you.

Hopefully all of these tools will be ones you can actually use and will add value to your day. Let me know if you find anything, or know of any other tools that we could all benefit from.

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Local.com – There are two sides to this site. The first is to post an ad in the classified section. This runs for 30 days and is then removed. I found the categories to be a little limiting but it’s free and another way for people to find you. The other way is to add your business to the listings for people to search through. Local Promote allows you to list your services, website address, contact info and more. This is not removed and does offer an upgrade for a special offer of $49 a month at the moment. This allows you to add your logo, up to 5 photos and promises you will be found at the top of search results for some of the major search engines.

Superpages.com – This site allows for a fairly comprehensive submission of your business to their listing. However, to add your logo costs $25 a month and at a costly $22 a month per format, you can add bold, colored fonts or italics to your listing. I can target the area my business is listed (in my case it’s Dacula) but it would be an additional $77 a month to have it listed and targeted to the rest of Gwinnett County, $254 a month to the Metro Atlanta area and $384 a month for the whole of Georgia, so big differences there! You can see my profile page by clicking here.

GenieKnows.com – I hadn’t heard of this site before but it’s similar to the other two in that you can list your business at no charge. It also allows you to add quite a lot of information about your company which is good to see. I added my company but was dissappointed that I wasn’t able to then review it once complete. Instead, I received an e-mail to let me know that it could take up to two weeks for it to display. “All submissions are subject to review” which is probably a good thing!

Talk Gwinnett – Talk Gwinnett is the local site for the Gwinnett Gazette. Another free site but with a very basic listing available. Pretty much you can have your e-mail address and basic contact information. To add your website address is $10, to add a logo is $10 and to add a description is $5! You can submit your company in up to 3 categories for free, then it’s an additional $5 per additional category. It’s free, but all in all, not going to do much for my business.

Domestic Sale.com – Free again! This one allows you to add a long description, an e-mail address, link to your website, contact info and even a logo at no cost. However, I found that once I had uploaded my logo, it totally distorted all of the colors so much so that it doesn’t really look like my logo anymore. Aside from that, you can post a lot on this site at no cost.

Yahoo Local – With this one, I thought I had already created an account. When I did a search, I came up in the listing but with very little information. It seems that through searches and hits on the internet my site was then listed and I hadn’t needed to do anything. I signed up to modify the listing and add more information. Once this was done, it stated that it would take up to 5 business days for the listing to be updated. Not sure how they will verify I am who I say I am though! When I set up my business page with Google, they provide two options to verify you are the business owner. One is to call you on the business phone, the other is to snail mail you a postcard with a code on it which you enter into a website. So, we shall see if Yahoo believe me and just go with it!

urbanGwinnett – This site is local to the Gwinnett County area and allows for the submission of your business. You can select the category you wish to be listed. With not too many listed at the moment, you can actually have the monopoly of a whole category if you pick wisely! Visitors can write reviews, e-mail you and also see a visual of your website directly on the urbanGwinnett website. A well run informative site, worth posting as it is totally free!

Switchboard – This site is powered by Superpages.com. Similar in layout and content, it’s free and allows you to add basic information to this listing, before adding on cost for additional elements.

LTTA – Lawrenceville Tourism and Trade Association – If you are a member of the LTTA, you are automatically submitted into their Membership Directory. If you are a small business of 1, it is only $50 for the year, a great price. This also gives you other benefits, the ability to leave your business cards and brochures at the LTTA office, and be invited to their networking and social events. If you aren’t a member already and are local to the area, be sure to check it out!

Although there are many more, finally I will end with the best!

NEW Lawrenceville – this is a community run website. If your business is local to Lawrenceville, Georgia, simply visit the site and use the form to submit your business. With up to 200 words available for your company bio, and the ability to have your phone number, e-mail address and website listed, along with your logo, this free service is well worth taking advantage of. Even better, you can also submit articles that are of relevance to Lawrenceville and can include your business sales, promotions and events. Can’t get better than that!

If you know of any others, let us know! info@purplestarconsulting.com

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