Wordpress Development, Email Marketing Australia, Magento Development, Facebook Design and Development

How can businesses leverage facebook today, in the next 10 minutes with very less resources. If you run events (offline or online) you are in luck. One of the things facebook does very well and the reason why a lot of people use it for is event management.

You should however use other channels as well for better response, however if it’s a personal services event and all of your contacts are on facebook already, you could potentially use facebook just your event invites.

Advantages of using facebook for your events

– you can set up an event invite in 5 minutes and send it out to your fans
– the event has a viral effect, once your contacts RSVP, their friends will see that and might attend themselves
– you can build up your business fan base through nice events
– It’s FREE!! can’t top that

So how do you set up and event in your facebook business page? 

Pre-requisites:

• A facebook business fan page. If you don’t have one follow this link below:
  How to set up your facebook business fan page

1. Log into your facebook account

2. If you haven’t already, Add Events as a tab

Click on the plus button next to the tabs and select events. This will add Events as a tab. All of your fans can now find your events under the events tab.

3. Create a new Event

It will now ask you to create an event if you don’t already have one.

Enter Details of the Event. You can add a street address if you like, select the times and click on Create Event.

4. Add picture and describe your event

Leave the default settings as is. If you select Meetings, then you should get a good fit of business events.

5. Publish to  page’s Wall and fan’s home pages

Click on Publish to publish it to your home page.

6. Invite Friends with a personal Message

As a final step, you can now invite all of your friends to this event and also add a personal message. If you have a list of email addresses for your business associates, use the Invite people via email box

Happy Inviting!!

Facebook has traditionally been viewed as a personal social networking tool by many businesses. The perception for some companies is that it exposes public lives and public information to your business contacts. Obviously no one wants that.

Facebook over time has evolved into a very good business platform. It is a bit of work and hard to leverage some features of facebook from a business perspective but some features are done in 5 minutes and businesses can leverage those advantages almost immediately.

The first thing to understand is that TODAY and NOW, facebook is not just a personal social media tool. It is a thriving business community and you can generate leads, inform prospects and customers, build better relationships and expose your brand to a massive community without having to put pictures of you drunk at the last christmas party 🙂

Over the next few weeks we will look at scenarios where you can leverage these functionalities for your business. The first one in the series is using facebook events to lift attendance to your online/offline events.

To showcase the capabilities of our Email Marketing platform, here is a quick video that shows you how you can import a list of subscribers, set up a professional email campaign, deliver it to that list and view reports all within 5 minutes.

You can essentially have this email marketing platform set up with your customised email template within 24 hours. Contact us to find out how you can send out your email within 5 minutes.

To view a larger full screen version, please click on the video and use the fullscreen button.

Need a DIY email marketing platform to quickly send out emails and track them? Contact us at info@dzineclub.com

Lately a lot of our clients have started using wordpress as their blog/website engine. So to help them understand and utilise wordpress themselves, here is a guide. We will cover in this guide

– How to add pages to your wordpress site
– How to add blog posts to your wordpress site
– How to create a menu for your wordpress site
– How to add and remove widgets from your wordpress site

We will endeavor to update this guide over the next week, so if you are a client who is getting this implemented in the next week, bookmark this page to get the details.

If you are looking to use wordpress or wanting a new website with a blog that you can manage yourself, drop us a line at info@dzineclub.com Our team can send you a portfolio of wordpress websites that we have done for our clients in Australia.

Some recent good articles on social media and measuring value:

Value of a ‘Fan’ on Social Media: $3.60 – Adweek
http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/e3iaf69ea6718351232c91d680533e7bdf5

Measuring the Value of Social Media Advertising
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/20/social-media-advertising/

Understanding the Value of a Social Media Impression
http://www.scribd.com/doc/30205471/Understanding-the-Value-of-a-Social-Media-Impression

How to measure the value of a fan or follower In Social Media
http://searchengineland.com/how-to-measure-the-value-of-a-fan-or-follower-in-social-media-26456

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for a last ten years, you probably know what Google Adwords is. If you have been living under a rock, welcome to the wonderful world of Google.

Google Adwords is the advertising product for Google. Using Adwords you can run ads for your business in Google Search Engine and Google’s Advertising network. Putting up Ads is free, however if someone clicks on your ad, you will get charged a fee. The process of putting up your ad on a Search Engine like Google, Yahoo, Bing is called Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and the way you get charged per click is called Pay Per Click (PPC). Businesses use Google Adwords to advertise their products, improve their brand awareness and to get on the front page of Google (if they can’t get there by SEO alone). From an advertising perspective, the front page of Google is the most valuable space in the internet.

It’s also fairly easy to set up your own Search Engine Marketing (SEM)  or Pay Per Click(PPC) Campaigns. So how do you start? First let’s set up your account.

Pre-Requisites for setting up your account

Your personal Details
Existing Email address if you want to use your own email address

Start

• Go to http://adwords.google.com
• Click on “Start Now” Button

  

Setting up your account > Create Google Account

Now Google will give you a choice of either assigning an existing Google Account for Adwords or creating a new one.

Assigning an existing account:

• If you already use an email address to access other Google Services (Gmail, Google AdSense, Google Analytics etc) click on this radio button and select “I’d like to use my existing Google Account for Adwords”. Then enter your account email and password to log in.

Creating an new Account

• If you do not use any of the Google Services click on “I do not use these other services”
• Fill out your existing email address and set up your password.
• Set up your time zone and currency and click on continue
• Google will now send you a account verification email to your existing email. Log into your existing email. You should have an email from Google Adwords, open it and click on the verification link to verify your account.

Adding your mobile number

Once verified, Google will ask you to add a  mobile number to your account. We recommend you do this to make sure your account is more secure.

Congratulations!! Your Adwords account is now set up. Next time we’ll look at creating a small campaign for your business. For the next step you will need a credit card and some keywords that you want to target. To make sure that you don’t miss out on the next stage, please subscribe to the blog via twitter or rss feeds. To receive email notifications please send us an email at info@dzineclub.com

Lately we’ve been talking to a lot of small business owners who have the same questions about improving their online business. One of the bigger ones is

How do I improve my listings?

Here is what you can do today to improve your listings:

1. Break down your website pages into smaller pages and optimise the titles on them

The more pages you have, the bigger you look and have more options of changing titles on those pages to target Search Engines. If you have a page, that is longer than 2 pages, break it down.

2. Add your website to to Business Directories

Add yourself to Free Australian Business Directories. We don’t see a lot of advantage in adding yourself to a paid one unless you are trying to be a featured business.  We recently put up a list of Australian Business Directories here:
List of Australian Business Directories

3. Add your website to vertical specific Business Directories

Do a search on Google for your vertical specific Business Directories and list your website on them. Also Vertical specific online magazines, portals allow you to add yourself as a service/product provider

4. Share links with complimenting Businesses

Find out any local businesses that compliment your business and link to their website and ask them to link back to you. What’s even better is that if they put a little blurb around your business so that visitors to their site already have an idea about what you do. This will also look good from a Search Engine like Google perspective. Make sure you do not over do this or you might actually lose your listing.

5. Start a Blog

Think of a niche topic around your business and start a blog. Start putting down your thoughts and your product/service information on the blog. Make it more informative that product-based for best results.

6. Start Search Engine Marketing

Start putting a bit of money on Search Engine Marketing. Start a Google Adwords account and start out with $100 budget for a month and see how you go.

Please note that your site needs to look good compared to other sites for you to get any leads. Do a search on Google and view the pages to see how other competitors are working.

7. Put a reporting System to track and analyse

Because doing all these things take time and in some cases money, you need to make sure that you are tracking all your efforts to make sure that you are getting results back. We recommend using Google Analytics to track to see if you are getting more visitors to the site because of these efforts.

Next time we’ll tackle the second most popular question “How do I get more customers?”

Previously using dzineCMS you had to resize your images on a different software before dropping into the site. For some clients who didn’t have a lot of technical knowledge around image editing, it was a bit of a pain 🙂

Now with time, we have decided to make it easier for those clients and enable optimization and resizing feature in the image gallery.  You can now use the CMS itself to resize your photos that you have imported from your camera and make them web-ready.

If you are using DzineCMS to make changes to the SEO and Content of your sites, here are some instructions on how to resize images using DzineCMS itself.

1. Log into the dzineCMS system
2. Upload an image to the image library or select an existing image
3. Hover your mouse over the image and click on optimise

   This will load up an optimization screen. you can use this screen to make the following changes to your images:

   Basic operations

   – crop the file
   – resize the file
   – Rotate and flip the file

   Adjustments

   – Remove red eyes
   – whiten teeth
   – Automatically adjust levels
   – Adjust brightness and contrast
   – Adjust hue and saturation
   – sharpen the photo
   – blur the photo
   – denoise the photo
   – make the photo black and white
   – invert the photo
   – cross process photos

   You can also use a variety of photo effects.

If you have any issues with resizing images or would like one of our staff to take you through how it is done, please drop us a line at info@dzineclub.com

Do you currently have a website but no content editing capabilities?

DzineCMS can be a low cost but effective solution that can allow you to make changes to your text, images and SEO content. Contact us at info@dzineclub.com for a demo and to find out how you can implement it for your website.