Series: Selling My Domain Part 2

This is my first post about what I did today to sell my domain, www.fashionmista.com. I have no idea if this will work at all, but it's an interesting challenge. So here's what I did today:

• Made the graphic that you see above, to be the blog header over at FashionMista. This way, when a person is on the blog, they can't miss it, right? No matter what page they are on. I was going to put something like this in the right side column, but thought that this was good enough. I'm not going to blog over there anymore, so when you click on the top banner to take you to the home page, you'll always go to the page about the sale.
• Changed the blog title tag to "FashionMista.com is FOR SALE". This edit is effective in all search engine results, so when someone is googling "fashionmista" to see what's out there for that term, they will see this sentance right away. My blog pretty much dominates this term for pages and pages. So I wanted to bring the potential buyer to my message right away: in the blue underlined sentance of the title in search results for SEO.
• Emailed my fellow members at Collective-E, several of whome are in fashion and may know someone.
• Updated my Facebook personal profile with the news and a link to the blog post.
• At Collective-E, changed my company profile for this blog to have the new "for sale" blog header, and description about the decision. Press and fashion types frequent Collective-E, so they might see it.
• Also at Collective-E, added the domain sale to The Marketplace. Collective-E will tweet it for me, and maybe share it on Facebook if it works with their editorial.
  

One of these days, I'm going to have to comb the Media Contact Lists at Collective-E, and pitch some editors. Not my forte or comfort zone. Luckily, my busines partner at Collective-E is Sabina Ptacin of Red Branch PR, so she can hold my hand. ;)

Read all of the articles in this series here. 

Series: Selling a Domain Part 1

Today I put a domain I own up for sale. The domain is www.fashionmista.com, and it was the domain for the first blog that I every created. The blog itself with all of its content is not for sale, just this domain name. And it's not really *just* this domain name. It means that I have to start all over with that blog and that brand, and reinvent its purpose.

I will be chronicallying the experience, which may lead to nothing. It may lead to me being wrong about this term, that has come to mean "male fashionista". To me, it's an opportunity for someone to own a very basic domain name for a website they are building or have built around this topic. Usually those are hard to come by.

I've been approached before, but didn't take it seriously because I wasn't emotionally ready to let go. Today, however, I am. The word is a very good fit for its new meaning, and I'm ready to let the male fashionistas have it!

Read all of the articles in this series here.

How to let Fans Engage/Write on your Facebook Business Page

An easy way to increase interactivity on your Facebook page is to let your fans easily post to your Wall. The Wall is something that is enabled for both your personal Facebook page (like when friends write on your wall to say "hi" or share something), and the same now holds true for your Facebook Business Page.

Your first instict as a business may be to only allow posts from your business on your wall, to keep it professional. However, your fans (ie customers, supporters, potential customers) may want to publically chime in and let you know that they support you, or have a question that if answered, could apply to other potential customers. In fact, there may be some fans who have written on your Wall right now, but you never noticed!

To check, there is a little link that you very easily could have missed. It's at the top of your page, just below those tabs that say "Wall", "Info", "Photos", and the like. Under that is a text link that is called your business name. Next to it is called "Just Fans". It looks like this:


If you click on "Just Fans," you will see if any of your adoring fans wrote to you in a public way. Now. This public exposure is an incentive for them to write on your wall, which in turn shows up in their News Feeds as an activity that they did, which their friends can see, which then might prompt their friends to come on by and visit your page and see your business. So it may be in your best interest to allow these fan posts to be on the main portion of your Wall. If you did, your main Wall, if you selected that you want fan comments on it, would look like this:

Where you see the little yellow "katie james" squares is my business posting something to my page. Where you see other pictures of people is those people posting things to my page, and everyone else can easily see them. You can see from this picture that some fans of Katie James are asking Facebook questions. This is a great way for me to see them, and answer them back here on the blog.

To enable this to happen, follow these steps:

Click on the "Edit Page" link in the top left of your page, under your logo.

From there, you will use the little picture of the pencil to select which things you want to edit. Click the pencil near "Wall Settings". Click "Edit".

From the pulldown, select this from the setting, where it says "Default View for Wall", click "Posts by Page and Fans".

Now the fans will show up on your main Wall, with the posts from your business. To change this back, just follow these steps, and click "Only Posts by Page". In this case, "Page" means you.

It's Pouring Projects - The Latest from Katie James Pixelated

We've been busy here! Three projects wrapped up this week for the Katie James Pixelated team:

Alisa Benay's Blog, Couture Corset Wedding Gown Designer



Alisa couture line of corset wedding gowns is quickly growing in popularity, and she needed her blog to keep the pace and reflect well of the brand.
DESIGN: We worked with the existing look of Alisa's website and using elements from her logo to drive this design.
TECH: We built this on the WordPress platform, as Alisa wanted to have important static pages and be able to stand on its own as a website, not just a blog.
WHO'S MANAGING: Alisa has the keys and is driving this baby. She is able to train her staff on making updates to the blog posts and the the static pages, as well as to both side columns.
www.alisabenay.com/blog

The Purcell Sisters

The Purcell Sisters, if you haven't met them, are some of the funniest, well manicured southern belles living in Manhattan. They wrote a book, Cocktail Parties Straight Up! to help everyone throw an amazing party, and have brought their delicious recipes to the Internet.
DESIGN: Their original website was designed in images - every last word of it. So maintenance -wise, making changes was A. not in their control, B. more expensive, and C. could take a while. We based this design off of elements that they liked from their old website, with a little more flair.
CHALLENGES: Recipes are quite popular, and there were a lot of them. We discussed ways to categorize them, and retain natural SEO opportunities in the menus and page titles, leaving the copywriting to the Sisters when they wanted to optimize certain pages. The menus are also built to keep you on the recipe you are looking at, so that you can browse the recipes in the menus without constantly changing pages.
TECH: This website was built on the Drupal platform.
WHO'S MANAGING: The Purcell Sisters, of course! We sent them directions on how to create a new recipe and to edit non-recipe pages. We built the recipe pages as a special template, so that all the Sisters had to worry about was having an image, typing in the title, blurb at the top, ingredients, recipe, and the make-ahead-factor.
Warning: If you go to this website, you will leave hungry. Very hungry.
www.purcellsisters.com


Gemma Redux :: Press, Lookbook and Announcement Box
Press page: (updates like adding products)


Announcement Box: (can be turned on or off in seconds)


Rachel Dooley, designer and founder of Gemma Redux, is on fire. She is getting press from major outlets, and her fans are loving it.
GOAL: To quickly feature new press, and make it easy to buy the featured jewelry right away.
DESIGN: We designed these new components to work with the existing design - clean and contemporary.
CHALLENGES: This website shopping cart design is quite unique, and we had to crack open a few elements of the content management system to make it all work smoothly.
TECH: It's on the ZenCart platform. Bet you wouldn't have guessed that, right?
WHO'S MANAGING: We both are. Depending on how busy it is at Gemma Redux, we may jump in to lend a hand. But, all components were built to be user friendly for their team.

For more information on other websites, see www.katie-james.com/classes

Why Meta Description Tags in a Blog Can Hurt your Socialness

We just answered how to add a meta description tag to your Blogger blog template because someone asked this SEO question over at Collective-E.

However. Inserting a meta tag into your blog may not be the best idea.

Long ago, Meta Description tags stopped having any impact on how your site is ranked in Google search results (for a definition of the meta description tag with pictures, click here). This may not be the case for other search engines like Yahoo, but it is for Google (as of this post publication). However. Google may display the meta description tag in search results, and social outlets like Facebook will display them as well (as of this post publication...websites are always changing how they work). Here are Google's words stating that meta description tags won't affect your rankings. They do, however, still display them when it's a good fit.

So. Just when you thought "Great! One less thing to worry about!", you could argue: "Hey wait: Google can pick up and display a meta description tag, and so can Facebook, so I'll use it by creating some great marketing copy that reflects my overall website or blog."

This is the angle I usually take. However, this is not the case when it comes to blog posts. Recently, I "shared a link" on Facebook, which means that I posted a link to my Facebook profile, which then signaled to all of my friends there that I had posted a link. Not only does Facebook let me post a link, but it will display a photo if I so choose. The link that I wanted to share was just a silly one: I had just gotten my hair colored brown and blond, and had put it into a ponytail, and it had split itself into the two colors, and it looked interesting. I didn't color one side brown and the other side blond, as it's all blended when styled normally, but the ponytail was visually interesting, so I shared it with my friends.

Now. To be a good little SEO person, I had just recently installed the code to show a meta description tag on my blog template. Years have gone by, and I have never done this. So I did it a few weeks ago. I was in a rush, so the only thing I put in was "girly stuff", which of course has almost no use SEO-wise at all, but was a descriptive start at what you could find at my blog, FashionMista.

I have shared many links via Facebook, and always knew that Facebook automatically pulled the blog post title, the first line of my content on my blog, and a picture. The pulled content did the job, and I never had to make a "Comment" about my own post to explain what was going on.

Until now. Because I had altered my meta description tag, which said only: "girly stuff", when I went to post the link, Facebook showed everyone this:


The blue content, "FashionMista: Look at the Two Tone" is the blog post title. Since "girly stuff" is meta description tag, and hence the content that Facebook automatically displayed, it doesn't explain much about the hair. If this had been a normal article (aka not about a picture), the user would not be very inclined to click on my link, or at least let me explain the style. In fact, nobody did click on the link, which would have explained the style. They only commented based on their reactions to the picture. My mother in particular, was not pleased. She thought I colored one side brown, and the other blond, and looked like that every day. She almost went into shock and I did consider "unfriending" her to temper any social networking damage control.

Right away, I removed the meta description code from my blog template. I waited a day for this to absorb on the internets, and posted a new blog post with a new photo. This is how the new link has shown (with my boring hair style):



You see the blog post title: "FashionMista: Hair in 'Normal' Times of Styling". You see the photo, and you see the first few lines of content.

It is for this reason that I am advising not to fill in the meta description code on your blog. The overall meta description tag, for SEO uses on blogs, are not helpful and should not be used. They are too limiting. Blog posts are so specific to one topic or sliver of a topic, that you do not want that insight to be lost under a blanket statement of what your blog is.

For example: which statement is more effective for this blog post?
Content from the blog: "Who knew a ponytail gone wild could have launched a motherly protest in Facebook. There were honest to goodness revolts going on. Mom threatened to pull out of her highly anticipated trip to NYC, and dad ..."

Meta description tag for entire blog: "FashionMista is a chronicle of a designer who quit her day job to really design, and do a whole lot of other things."

Which do you resonate to? Especially if you were following my stream of link postings on Facebook? The statement that is more direct? Or the statement that is an umbrella term?

If you've noticed a trend in what makes people click on your shared links, do tell.

How to Add the Meta Description Tag in Blogger Blog Templates

If you want to include the Meta description and keyword tags to your blogger based blog template, here is how you can do it.

Note: meta tags aren't that important anymore SEO-wise. However, they may show up when data is pulled from a social media outlet like Facebook, so if you do have something there, make sure it makes sense. BUT: It is not recommended. I did a writeup of why.

If you are still set on adding the meta description tag to your blog, here are the directions. The meta keyword tag will be pretty worthless because it is designed to include a string of words that are found on a specific page. Well, your blog has many pages on it, and if you are making this change at the root level, you only get to put in 1 meta description and 1 set of meta keywords in, which most likely will not include what one of your blog pages is talking about.

Log into your blog.

Click on Layout.

Click on Template and Edit HTML.

Make a copy of your code first. Do this by just Selecting All if it (Edit > Select All) and pasting it into a neutral program like Notepad or Text Edit. Try not to use Word, because that will add yuchy stuff to it without you realizing it.

Once you are looking at the code in your Template, find this line at the top of the code:
b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/

This line is already there. Leave it, don't edit it at all, and place the meta content code beneath it.

The code you will place will be:

meta content='TYPE YOUR DESCRIPTION HERE' name='description'/
meta content='TYPE YOUR KEYWORDS HERE' name='keywords'/

I didn't wrap these lines of code with the <> symbols because if I did, the code would actually kick in, and you wouldn't be able to see it here. So remember to close your code with the <>.

For your keywords, you can just put a string of words and you don't need commas. There is no need to repeat words in there. That won't help ya.

Once you have entered in the code, click to Preview your blog. This is very important. If your blog doesn't show up or looks funnhy, then you added the code incorrectly, and you need to go get the code you copied and pasted from before into Notepad or Text Edit, and start again. Or, just click Cancel and start again.

Good luck!

What is a Hashtag (#) or Pound Sign on Twitter?

A "hashtag" , or a pound sign, is a Twitter term for the symbol that looks like this: #

When used in Twitter, the hashtag signals that the person Twittering is referring to a subject, or common theme or topic that other people are talking about in Twitter.

Here's a good article that defines the hashtag and gives a bit of history. Side note: funny that 'history' now defines something that is not even a year old, as of this post.

TECHNICAL USES OF THE HASHTAG #
A technical side effect of using this term, is that depending on how you are accessing Twitter, either from TweetDeck, Tweetie, or the regular old fashioned way at www.Twitter.com, Twitter will activate the phrase that directly follows the #. Here is an example of the # (hashtag) in use:

@ktjames I love to follow @collectivee, @sabinaredbranch, @bethschoenfeldt, @popjudaica @TheEllenShow, #followfriday

This is an example from a tweet from me, @ktjames, to my followers. I am telling them that I like to follow these Twitterers (remember, the Twitter name is offset by the @ symbol, and Twitter automatically makes it a link for you). I end it with #followfriday. This hashtag phrase is a commonly used phrase that people us on Fridays to tell their followers who else they like to follow. It helps spread the Twitter love by helping your Twitter friends gain followers.

BRANDING AND YOUR HASHTAGS #
Anyone can make up their own reason for a #, but it's up to the Twitter community to pick it up and use the hashtag. If you are going to make up your own hashtag, keep in mind that what makes sense to you, might not make sense to your followers, or potential new followers. #followfriday is a nice example because it states what it is: It is an activity that happens on a Friday when people shout out who they like to follow.

If I were to make up a hashtag for an event series at Collective-E for our Industry Insights, I could name it: "#CEII", which could stand for "Collective-E Industry Insights". But that probably would not make much sense to you. A more effective hash tag could be: "#industryinsights". Yes it takes more space, but it gets to the point.

If I were to make up a hashtag for the brand of this blog, I could call it "#kjpblog", which would stand for Katie James Pixelated Blog. You tell me if that would catch on or not. ;) I use KJP to refer to my brand, but I would need to become pretty solid in my brand for others to recognize the acronym. I would also need to tweet a lot about my blog. Maybe I'll try it and report back. ;)

Have you created any hashtags? And have they taken off?

How to Create an Auto DM (direct message) for Twitter Followers

Note: This post was originally published on the Collective-E blog.

Here is how to create an auto DM (automated direct message) from your Twitter account to a new follower. For those who don't know, an Auto DM (or Automated Direct Message) is an instant message you get, that usually arrives in your email inbox, from the person who you just clicked to follow you in Twitter. You can access DMs in your side column of Twitter, or through a helpful application like TweetDeck. See below for the link of where you can access your personal DMs in Twitter. In theory, no one else can see them but you.

Once you have set this up, please share with us what you have chosen for your DM. What creative message did you think of? Auto DMs have been debated lately as a bad strategy, as they suggest laziness an wreek of infomertial-type people. So just be careful when you are creating them.

Go to TweetLater.com and register for an account.

Once you submit your registration, you may be taken to their newsletter page. Sign up or ignore this.

You'll need to log in again. Find the login button (as of this post, it's in the top right corner), and log on (even tho it seems like you would now be logged in, since you just created an account).

Now you must tell TweetLater about your Twitter account.

Click the blue +Twitter button in the top navigation.

Enter your Twitter username and password. I can't vouch for the level of security involved here. Making this decision is up to you.

Scroll down a bit and click the "Auto Welcome" button.

Also on this page, you can select if you'd like to auto follow those who follow you, or auto unfollow those who unfollow you. However, Twitter just decided to do away with the auto-follow feature because it seems disingenuous (which is my philosophy as well...and thanks @pegsamuel of @socialdiva for this Twitter Tip-off). TweetLater can provide this because they have worked with Twitter's API, which just means that Twitter allows them to use some of their technology to make fancy tools like this one.

The next question they ask you before you click "Save" is whether or not you want your @replies sent to you via email. @replies are the times that someone in Twitter is either talking to you or about you. This could be handy if you can't check your replies as often as you'd like. You can always see your replies in TweetDeck (for your computer), on Twitter itself (online), in Tweetie or Twitterific (on your phone) or other ways. You can also do a Twitter search for your name at search.twitter.com, or now from the new search box on the right side of your home page at Twitter.

NOTE: When I tested this, by way of following myself from another Twitter account, the DM did not come right away, or even for a few days. The Support people at TweetLater, who were very nice, told me that there was a delay/problem with the Twitter API that day, so things were a bit out of whack. It did send a day or two later.

If you've had success with the auto DM, do let us know in the Comments below. If you've noticed that you've actually lost followers (people who unfollow you in protest of your robotic DM), also let us know.

PS: You can also use TweetLater.com to auto opt out of DMs that are sent to you (um...would that be bad karma if you have created one and set up your account to send them...? Think about it.).

Testing the UStream Video Embed Link

Live TV : Ustream

Wow! This was a first test to see how the UStream from www.businessownersonline.tv could really work. Now thes question is, how to get a phonecall to be over the air as well, so that the listeners can hear other callers...