5 Ways to Celebrate Christmas Using Social Media

Christmas is here again (already). What better way to celebrate than by using the social media tools we use every day? Whether you’re always on Facebook and/or Twitter or just want to give your blog a holiday makeover, these 5 tips are sure to have you in the holiday spirit and spreading Christmas cheer across the Web.

Change Your Twitter Background

Since your Twitter background also shows on the Twitter homepage (where you check your timeline), this is a great way to stay in the Christmas spirit whenever you’re reading tweets. There are quite a few Twitter background sources that you can use, but my personal favorite is WishAFriend because they can update your Twitter profile with the click of a button (like a few others can too).

While you’re at it, why not change your desktop wallpaper as well? One of my favorite sites for high quality wallpapers is DesktopNexus.

Send Cards via Facebook

Nowadays, just about everyone is on Facebook. While some love sending traditional cards in the mail, most prefer to save a few dollars and send cards via the Internet. There are numerous apps on Facebook that are just for sending cards, postcards and other holiday greetings; one of the most popular is Blingee Book. There are thousands of cards and animated postcards to chose from and can be posted on the person’s wall or in a message.

If you have a friend or family member who happens not to be on Facebook, you can send them a free eCard by email. While you’re at it, why not join a Cause and help send Christmas cards to our Troops! Being the wife of a former troop, I know how meaningful just a simple card can be to them.

Spruce Up Your Blog

Not only can you dress up your blog with Christmas themed social media sharing icons, but you can also go all out and use a Christmas theme – you can still get away with it for another week or so. You may also be able to find a few Christmas widgets to decorate your blog with. You’ll be surprised at the holiday themed widgets available.

If you’re looking for more ideas, check out Amanda’s post last year (on Blogging Tips) called The Festive Toolbox: Decorate Your Blog For Christmas.

Watch Christmas Videos

No matter what your favorite video site may be (YouTube, Vimeo, ect), I’m sure they have Christmas videos for your enjoyment. You can also share videos you like on your favorite sites like Facebook, Twitter or by email. This is a another great way to share the Christmas spirit with your friends and family.

If you prefer just listening to music while doing other things on the Web, you can create a Christmas station at Pandora or listen and share music via Grooveshark (or whatever your favorite music site may be). If you will be spending Christmas with the family, you can even have music play in the background while you open gifts or eat dinner; it’s a great way to keep everyone in a cheerful mood.

Share Your Christmas Photos

Most people take lots of pictures on Christmas, so why not share them with the world? There are so many photo sharing sites on the Web that it can be hard to pick just one. A site that I’ve seen a lot of people using lately is Picplz. If you have an iPhone or Android Phone, you can share your pictures on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare all at once. If you don’t have one of those mobile devices, then you can upload your photos directly to the website and also share to Flickr, Tumblr and Posterous (in addition to the above-mentioned).

If you’re looking for something that supports even more services, Pikchur is a great option. You can share on: Facebook. Flickr, FriendFeed, Plurk, Tumblr, Twitter, Posterous, Foursquare and even more! Whichever service you choose, I’m sure others will enjoy seeing how you celebrated the holiday.

Which way way did you choose to celebrate?

Happy Holidays!

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7 Tips to Keep the Blogging Fires Burning!

You know how in the beginning of a relationship everybody’s interested and interesting? How we keep up our appearance? How we interact, engage and put forth our best effort?

Then with some time and familiarity we tend to take things for granted. The fun factor fizzles, or we simply lose steam. Or perhaps our attention is diverted by some other “new and shiny object.”

Well, the same thing happens with blogging.

Here’s the scenario.

In the beginning you work hard to create posts to bring people to your spot. You appear at the popular social media sites in hopes of “making friends and influencing people.” You’re consistent in your blog updates.
After awhile, you find you’ve hit your stride!

Your followers increase, you have repeat visitors, and your amount of comments are encouraging. Eureka, you’ve found success!

That’s the honeymoon stage.

Fast forward.

It’s a year later, or two, or five. And your blog has the excitement factor of a tax audit.

It’s like a ghost town. The activity level has dwindled and so has your motivation. In the words of singer Roberta Flack, “Where is the love?”

Don’t despair. It happens. But you can resurrect a dying blog and get back that lovin’ feelin’ with a few creative, strategic steps. Here’s how.

1. Take a break. That’s right—put up your “gone fishing” sign on your site, and disconnect. Take time to cultivate new ideas, to relax and rejuvenate. Sometimes absence makes the heart grow fonder.
2. Survey or poll your readers to assess their interests and to determine your future direction.
3. Schedule guest bloggers to bring a different perspective and new energy to your site. Which bloggers do you admire? Start there.
4. Study and analyze your most popular previous posts. What was the common denominator? Were they posted on Tuesdays? Were they technical in nature? Rev up that traffic by doing a repeat performance!
5. Post interviews with prominent people in your niche. A good rule of thumb is to diversify your content so readers won’t get bored.
6. Don’t be afraid to court controversy. (Remember the Dixie Chicks and President Bush)? Sometimes “stirring the pot” can have hot results!
7. Respond to comments. To cultivate an active blog community, it’s crucial to be responsive to readers’ questions and comments. There’s great truth to the expression, “people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” .

Follow these seven tips to keep the blog fires burning, and most importantly to avoid burn out!

About the Author: Jennifer Brown Banks is a veteran freelance writer, pro blogger and relationship columnist. She recently became a contributing writer for the ever-popular site Technorati.com. Visit her blog at PenAndProsper.blogspot.com.

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Solid Web Content Writing Tips

Even when you’ve been writing web content for a while it’s always a good idea to take a step back and read an article or two that will help you refresh the techniques that make for effective web copy. Even if you come to working on the Internet from another discipline like journalism or even business writing, there are a few things that are exclusive to Web content you need to keep in mind.

Attention Span

First of all you need to take into account studies have shown our collective attention span has become shorter over the years so that means that people in general can only process smaller bits of information. I’ve also read that the information age has made the whole  attention span issue worse by constantly distracting you and giving you all kinds of choices as to where you want to point your concentration.

So that means in the context of Web content that you want to write in shorter paragraphs and sentences. You should aim to have a concise and brief text as well that usually aims for half the words you would have used in the print medium. However, there are some rules that apply to Web content that are crossovers from the print way of doing things in general and journalism specifically.

Simple Word

For example when you are writing web content the simple word is the one you should always choose over the more elaborate model. Usually you will find that the simple word is the one that has a clear and concise meaning. You should also use the inverted pyramid style as another left over from the print journalism years because it allows readers to get to the information that’s most important quickly because you’re placing it at the top of the article.

There are several other factors that you need to take into account to make sure that you are holding reader’s attention and another one beyond style is credibility. It’s never a good idea when you are writing web content of any kind to make elaborate claims that you cannot back up. Wherever possible it’s even a good idea to include a URL or an actual link to the origin of the information.

You also need to supply your readers the information that you want them to have in bit sized chunks so that they find it useful. It’s an important consideration to keep in mind that people who are reading Web content on the Internet often suffer from overload of information. You want to be aware of the fact they often only scan articles or large portions of text so you can use bullet points and even bolding to direct their attention to where you want them to go.

While writing web content isn’t that much different than journalism in many different respects, it’s important for anyone who wants to make a career of this to be able to write in a conversational style so that the reader feels like they being made privy to information and not talked down to.

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How to Optimize Your Sales Funnel for Success

This post was written by the Web Marketing Ninja — a professional online marketer for a major web brand, who’s sharing his tips undercover here at ProBlogger. Curious? So are we!

As online marketers, we often devote a large amount of time to finding ways to attract eyeballs to our online assets. We put such effort into simply get the readers there that we allow the rest to take care of itself. Money will flow, Ferraris will be purchased, and we can all retire nice and young…

Then we discover the concept of sales funnels.

You may already know what a sales funnel is, but if you don’t, let me quickly describe it for you.

A sales funnel is a simple map of your lead-to-sale process.

1. Let’s imagine you start with 1,000 leads (visitors to your web site).
2. 100 might click on a sales page link for of one of your products.
3. 50 might click your Order Now button and enter your shopping cart.
4. Ten complete the checkout process and buy the product.

So your sales funnel starts and 1,000 and ends in ten sales—that’s a 1% conversion.

That’s a bare-bones view of a sales funnel, but as you can see it takes four steps, not one, to increase the amount of sales your site delivers. If we put all our attention on attracting new visitors, we’re essentially forgetting 75% of the puzzle—and we’ve all done that.

But that’s not where online marketers go wrong!

It’s not hard to sell people the idea of the sales funnel—it’s simple to understand and easy to quantify. It’s also been around for a long time. Offline sales professionals have been using it for decades.

The problem with the sales funnel is that in the offline world it’s a simple and straightforward methodology, but in the online world, it’s not.

The image below is a quick process map I prepared for a Managing Director of a large retail operation, who’s focusing heavily on online strategy.

As you can see, that organization’s sales funnel is a lot more complicated than the simple four-step process I mentioned above. There are some key points I want to highlight in this map:

• Seven different types of traffic that visit the site.
• There are multiple behaviors that we need to analyse: what pages visitors view, how long they stay, the navigational path, and their user profiles (locations, browsers, etc.).
• There’s a connection outcome, as well as a buy outcome.
• A visitor can become a customer in a range of ways.

Now my idea of a funnel resembles something I use to fill my car with oil, and this looks nothing like it. This depiction reminds me more of the tubes game I play on my iPhone. In even more bad news, I made this process map in five minutes. The reality is that this business’s online sales funnel is probably twice as complicated!

The key to sales funnel success

The key to creating a more successful sales funnel is: step away from the keyboard. While I work in an office, I actually have a whiteboard in my house. I actually use it, and it’s better than any online tool I’ve seen for laying out the bare bones of a real, live sales funnel.

I start by detailing every single way people can enter the funnel, identifying where they have come from, what their persona is, and where they’re at in the purchase cycle.

Then, I identify every activity that someone can undertake on the site: read some content, read some more content, subscribe to a newsletter, view a social media profile, buy something, or exit the site.

Finally I detail the measures I can put on each activity: time on page, entry path, exit path, and so on.

Then I start connecting the dots and putting together all the different pathways a visitor can take thought my funnel. The key here is not to change anything about your site yet.

Putting theory into practice

Once the funnel is mapped, and the measures are in place, I start collating reports at every step. What I’m trying to do here is understand how my funnel works in practice, not in theory.

Try this on your blog. Once you’ve collated enough information to start making decisions, I guarantee there will be obvious points of failure in your process, and they’re likely to arise in two main areas:

1. a page that does a great job at encouraging a secondary behaviour (that is, rather than keeping someone in the sales funnel)
2. a page that fundamentally fails to move a customer to the next step in the funnel.

Initially, you’ll probably feel like there is a lot to do, so you’ll need to prioritize the changes you want to make. Focus on the areas that are costing you the most sales (which might actually be at the bottom end of your funnel).
With time, effort, and focus, you could see huge improvements in the performance of your site, without your having to attract one new visitor to your site. Sounds good to me!

Have you tweaked your sales funnel recently? What changes have worked best for you?

Stay tuned from most posts by the secretive Web Marketing Ninja—a professional online marketer for a major web brand, who’s sharing his tips undercover here at ProBlogger. Questions? Suggestions? Email him.

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