Serenity VA Tweets of the Week–SEO Tips for Business Blogging: What You Need to Know

Twitter_birdHere are my Top 10 tweets from this past week, great for retweeting! If you missed these, follow me on Twitter.

Couple saves their home with steamy romance novels  CBS News Video Michigan couple Jack and Jasinda Wilder became best-selling romance novelists almost overnight. Anthony Mason reports on their inspiring story that came out of desperation.

Blog Commenting has become a very popular strategy for getting more traffic and backlinks for SEO.
Blogging is becoming more popular these days and Blog Commenting has become more popular among bloggers and web masters.Blog Commenting has become a very popular strategy for getting more traffic and to cultivate useful backlinks for SEO purposes.

3 Steps to a Systematic Approach to Writing Successful Blog Posts 
Every blogger has a different goal in mind, too, and that’s really what defines your success – Are you achieving your goals? It’s not whether or not you’re seeing the same results as other blogs, it’s whether you’re seeing results that move you closer to your own goal.

Top 10 Must-Have WordPress Plugins for Bloggers
One of the best things about WordPress is its nearly limitless ability to expand. Whether you’re looking to add images, security, RSS feeds, social media integration or any number of other features, you can do so through plugins.

How To Set Up Your Own Video Studio For $90 Or Less by Vertical Measures [VIDEO]
Mike Huber talks about how you can set up a great video studio for less than $90 that will get you on your way to creating quality content for your website and your blog. Set up your studio today: shop for your microphone, tripod, and lighting, and download the editorial calendar to schedule your videos and get rolling with creating great content!

Social Media – Free and Paid Ways to Promote Your Brand on YouTube
Can a marketer combine free and paid YouTube promo methods in a campaign? Of course. Moreover, if you do it the smart way, each individual method becomes more effective.Just as with Google search, you have both free and paid advertising options with YouTube. The free ones include 
optimizing for YouTube search and social networking, while the paid alternative is using AdWords for video.

SEO Tips for Business Blogging: What You Need to Know.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a huge issue for anyone who’s got a website or blog and wants to get found on the first page of search 
results. Many small business professionals, without any computer technology or Internet experience, can easily get overwhelmed. SEO specialists seem to have their own geek-speak.

Here are three steps to help you write successful blog posts.
Internal linking is vital to the overall structure of a blog. These are the best days to post to your blog for optimal traffic in descending order. Consider the day and time of posting for the biggest impact on your specific audience. You might write it another day but post it on a high volume traffic day for your blog.

When are the best days to blog?

I was recently asked this question from a client and quite frankly I advised that any day is okay.

Au contraire!

I did a Google search and found a blog that writes about this specific subject. Mark Biernat says:
“Consider the day and time of posting for the biggest impact on your specific audience. You might write it another day but post it on a high volume traffic day for your blog.” And he came up with a ranking of days in descending order in which to blog:

Ranking of the days

These are the best days to post to your blog for optimal traffic in descending order.

  • Thursday – this is the best day to post to your blog for a one day impact.  Many people are tired of working and just surfing the web at work. Thursday tends to me one of my highest traffic days. It has a great impact for people in their 20s, who are counting the days to the weekend. So if your target market on your website is the 20 something crowd try this day.
  • Sunday – early evening is a very good day to write a blog post for personal items or even e-bay type sales. most people are at home with nothing to do waiting for their weekend to end, especially Sunday late in the afternoon. Most people are pretty depressed. I generally do not like to work on Sunday as it is against my beliefs, but often I find myself posting any way. In fact, it is Sunday morning before everyone is up and I am writing on my blog now.  I guess I justify Sunday blogging as a mix of fun and work so I classify it as a loophole.   Anyway, any topic connected to buying and selling personal items or self improvement does well, including blogging.
  • Monday- This day has the impact that work web surfers have the whole week to pass it one and share something interesting.  Especially on Monday morning when people are getting adjusted to the shock of the work week.  Great for businessmen looking at financial news. Business blogs do well on Monday and Tuesday. I have noticed big market swings occur at the start of the week, not on Friday afternoons and holidays. At the start of the web, I often surfed at work, then in the last few years I had a rule no web or personal e-mail at all at work.  I tried to work and get home as soon as possible. But I think most jobs today are so boring that most people do a reasonable amount of personal e-mail and surfing.
  • Tuesday and Wednesday are good days.  They are workhorse days. If you post of these days you usually get a reasonable number of hits. News and practical information does well on these days, less people surfing the web for gossip than answers to concrete useful questions.
  • Friday light non- political subjects do well. People are ready to go, take time off work or leave early.  Further, the next day is Saturday so there is a lot of momentum lost as you can read about Saturday for posting to your blog, it is the worst.  People are tired of CNN and all the political nonsense. Even the politicians. Things to do on the weekend and travel type posts do well obviously.
  • Saturday is the worst day to post to your blog- Everyone is either shopping, spending time with the kids at the gym or day tripping. Life is too short to spend online. Saturday is not a supper day for traffic or posting.

This particular client is a wedding/event planner, so according to the ranking, I would suggest that they blog on Sunday’s and Friday’s. For that matter, depending on the topic, any day would suffice.

On reflection, I will stand with my original statement, any day is a good to to post!

Read the entire article on when to blog.

Serenity VA Tweets of the Week– 4 Ways to Treat your Blog like a Business

Here are my Top 10 tweets from this past week, great for retweeting! If you missed these, follow me on Twitter.

4 Ways to Treat your Blog like a Business
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times, if you want to make money with your blog then you need to treat it like a business. Here are four tips that will help:

5 Best Mystery Novels Of All Time,
Which Are Some Of The Best Mystery And Crime Novels Ever? I hope you will enjoy the list, and if you have some other favorites than what I have reviewed below, feel free to list them in the Guestbook section below.

The Take-Charge Patient by Patient Advocate and Author Martine Ehrenclou, M.A, Wins 16 Book Awards 
The Take-Charge Patient, by patient advocate and award-winning author, Martine Ehrenclou, has won 16 book awards. The most recent is gold winner of The Benjamin Franklin Awards sponsored by the IBPA.

Social Media Marketing: 4 questions to ask yourself about social media buttons
A common question we often hear about social media is “I put some social media elements onto my page and have not seen much of a difference …”

Business Blogs: Guest Blogging Etiquette from Patsi Krakoff
Last month, we contributed a post asking if guest blogging is really a necessary element to a good blog. The answer was a pretty resounding “yes.” In light of that, I thought I should elaborate on a few tips for how to be a good guest blogger.

 5 Ways to Increase Your Newsletter List
Newsletters never go out of style. With everything that is available in social and new media, newsletters are still a primary source of customer contact. Whether you have one, had one, or want to start a new one, there are several things you can do to increase your newsletter reach. Here are 5 ways to add subscribers to your newsletter list.

How to Promote Your Book on Twitter
Can Twitter sell books for you? Well, no, not all by itself. But Twitter is one of the tools you can use to promote your book.Twitter is a wonderful book promotion tool. Take a look at these clever, effective, and powerful Twitter ebook promotion tactics, tips, and ideas.

10 Simple Ways to Get More LinkedIn Company Page Followers
Your LinkedIn company page is a great outlet to share, influence, educate, and attract your target audience–but only after people make the choice to “follow” your company. Learn how to create a LinkedIn company page that will get maximum attention AND attract “followers”.

 Wondering what size is best for Linkedin graphics?
Oh…you didn’t know that you could use graphics on Linkedin? Well, you can! The primary place to use graphics in Linkedin is in the corporate pages. Here you go! Share it with friends and let me know how it works for you.

Safety net saves you from Internet marketing rip-offs
Have you ever been invited to a free event hosted by an Internet marketer who promises you’ll walk away a lot smarter, and then you get to the event and find out it’s nothing but a sleazy pitchfest for a $2,000 product? PR expert Dan Janal finally got tired of attending those events, seeing those scams, and hearing from many of his clients who were ripped off by them. His new book is the safety net you need to avoid being rolled.

Amazing Frozen Lemons

All it is…..is a frozen lemon

Many professionals in restaurants and eateries are using or consuming the entire lemon and nothing is wasted. How can you use the whole lemon without waste?

Simple.. place the washed lemon in the freezer section of your refrigerator. Once the lemon is frozen, get your grater, and shred the whole lemon (no need to peel it) and sprinkle it on top of your foods.

I am forever squeezing the lemons to extract the juice, either freezing it in cubes or even canning it. This makes it so much easier!

Sprinkle it to your vegetable salad, ice cream, soup, cereals, noodles, spaghetti sauce, rice, sushi, fish dishes, whiskey…. the list is endless.

All of the foods will unexpectedly have a wonderful taste, something that you may have never tasted before. Most likely, you only think of lemon juice and vitamin C. Not anymore.

Now that you’ve learned this lemon secret, you can use lemon even in instant cup noodles.

What’s the major advantage of using the whole lemon other than preventing waste and adding new taste to your dishes?

Well, you see lemon peels contain as much as 5 to 10 times more vitamins than the lemon juice itself. And yes, that’s what you’ve been wasting.

But from now on, by following this simple procedure of freezing the whole lemon, then grating it on top of your dishes, you can consume all of those nutrients and get even healthier.

It’s also good that lemon peels are health rejuvenators in eradicating toxic elements in the body.

So place your washed lemon in your freezer, and then grate it on your meal every day. It is a key to make your foods tastier and you get to live healthier and longer! That’s the lemon secret! Better late than never, right? The surprising benefits of lemon!

So, give those lemons a good wash, freeze them and grate them.

Your whole body will love you for it!!!!!

Serenity VA Tweets of the Week–Can You Measure Content Marketing & Social Media ROI?

Here are my Top 10 tweets from this past week, great for retweeting! If you missed these, follow me on Twitter.

Can You Measure Content Marketing & Social Media ROI?
The catch phrase of 2013 seems to be “Big Data” – the concept of how massive amounts of strategic data collection (can you say “google”), analysis and targeting can generate huge ROI for businesses

Google Launches Dramatic Redesign of Google+, Emphasizing Context and Content Discovery
With its Pinterest-like resemblance, there’s no doubt that the Google+ redesign puts a much greater emphasis on visual content.

How to Display Your Google+ Picture in Search Results [EASY TO FOLLOW]
When you search for information on Google, have you noticed that some of the search results have a photo next to them? You’re probably already aware that the image you see in search results comes from the author’s Google+ profile. Sure, that image lets you know who the content creator is, but it’s so much more than just that.

Rank your website high with Google, this is a must read!
The truth is you got to be one step ahead of the changes Google makes to its algorithm. The search engines are earning their genius status these past five years. They can detect the SEO techniques they don’t like fast.

7 Content Marketing Questions Before You Write a Word
Here are some key marketing questions to ask and answer before you write a single word of content, if you want to get good content marketing results.

How to Grow Your Blog to the Next Level With SEO
Blogging is kinda like a video game. You wander around collecting magical tokens and tools, but unless you spend those tokens and use those tools you never advance to the next level.Scattered throughout your archives you have dozens of popular posts and pages. These are your blog’s magical tokens. Find them and use them to leverage page views.

The TweetDeck Fiasco | [Why I use HootSuite]
Earlier this month, Tweetdeck ended support for Facebook feeds, becoming essentially nothing more than another Twitter client in an already overcrowded field, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to start with.

How To Monetize Google Plus Hangouts On Air 
Google+ Hangouts On Air are a suite of powerful interview and content creation tools. But no one wants to watch
your hour long video.Short, concise and to the point videos do very well on YouTube and YouTube is your back end to Hangouts On Air.

The best way to hit the New York Times Bestseller List
The wealthy with a quarter million dollars burning a hole in their pocket, can buy this credential. But the unfortunate truth is, when you cheat, it’s evident to everyone that you’re a cheater.

How to Price Your Book and eBook with Guy Kawasaki
Guy Kawasaki spoke at AuthorU in Denver, here he speaks about pricing ideas and pricing models he uses very successfully!

Serenity VA Tweets of the Week- How to Get Book Reviews on LinkedIn

Here are my Top 10 tweets from this past week, great for retweeting! If you missed these, follow me on Twitter.

How to Get Book Reviews on LinkedIn
Did you know you could get book reviews on LinkedIn? Joan Stewart, The Publicity Hound, takes you through some quick tips for getting reviews on LinkedIn.

Book marketing tip: Amazon lets you link to newer and older editions of your book.   
Have you ever wondered what happens when you publish a new, revised edition of your book (with a new ISBN) and make 
it available on Amazon? How will customers find the latest version? If someone finds the listing for the previous edition, how will they know a new one even exists?

Hashtags Gone Wrong: 6 Examples of Unfortunate Hashtag Choices
The implementation of the hashtag, which originated on IRC, is a big reason behind the popularity of Twitter. It is a useful way of both searching the site and tagging posts. On a more personal level, hashtags are used to emphasize points or even make jokes.Sometimes, they are even used in ways that make you fear for the future of humanity.

How to Boost Your Exposure on Goodreads
If you’re on Goodreads you really should be maximizing your exposure there. Not only will it help your book but could lead to more reviews.Here’s a short but helpful look at how to make the most of Goodreads.

10 very cool social media tools; Lots of uses for these in a PR and publicity campaign
It’s been a while since I’ve cobbled together a look at some of the newer social media tools making an impact.The aim is to highlight hidden gems that can ease your online life, as opposed to talking about mainstream tools that get big chunks of air time.

5 Proven Techniques to Drive Quality Traffic to Your Blog
Getting traffic to your blog is not the last thing. You should constantly keep working to increase the current levels of your site’s traffic.

Can You Measure Content Marketing & Social Media ROI?
Generating engaging content marketing media is already tough enough – we need tools and processes to know what’s working and what’s not in order to maximize ROI.

How to Sell Books by the Truckload on Amazon
Amazon is a great place to sell books, but most authors don’t realize that Amazon has an internal sales machine that will actually help you market your book, for free, if you trigger it? It’s called their internal algorithm and, not that dissimilar from ranking on Google, once Amazon’s algorithm kicks in, you could see a boatload of free promotion come your way from Amazon.

7 Steps for Writing Compelling Press Releases 
A well-formatted press release has 7 main components. These instructions will help you put together a useful press release for the media.

Long tail keywords are making a come-back
Amazon is a great place to sell books, but most authors don’t realize that Amazon has an internal sales machine that will actually help you market your book, for free, if you trigger it? It’s called their internal algorithm and, not that dissimilar from ranking on Google, once Amazon’s algorithm kicks in, you could see a boatload of free promotion come your way from Amazon.

How to Sell Books by the Truckload on Amazon

With Author Marketing Expert Penny Sansevieri

Amazon is a great place to sell books, but most authors don’t realize that Amazon has an internal sales machine that will actually help you market your book, for free, if you trigger it? It’s called their internal algorithm and, not that dissimilar from ranking on Google, once Amazon’s algorithm kicks in, you could see a boatload of free promotion come your way from Amazon. Here’s what the session will cover:

  • Optimize your Amazon page: what you must do to start showing up in more searches
  • Understanding categories and why eBook and print categories are always different. More importantly, you’ll learn why this matters.
  • How to optimize your book title, subtitle and keywords on Amazon.
  • Making your Author Central page work for you.
  • Amazon hacks: fun tricks you can to do spruce up your Amazon page.
  • Amazon reviews: simple ways to find more reviewers for your book and get more reviews.
  • and much, much more…..

Join us this Thursday, May 9th at 5PM ET for the last and final one-hour webinar from “Social Media KISS (Keep It Simple & Serene) for Authors.”

Click here to register.

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Serenity VA Tweets of the Week–Why Google+ Matters to Your Business and How to Use it Wisely

Here are my Top 10 tweets from this past week, great for retweeting! If you missed these, follow me on Twitter.

Authors, did you make the list? Best Books For The Summer To Take To The Beach
Summer is almost here and going to the beach usually implies having some of the best books for the summer ready to go. Here is my personal list of summer beach reads for 2013. In my opinion they’re all great beach reads and I hope you find something you enjoy, something that you haven’t read yet.

Why is Your Content Boring? by Vertical Measures
Whether you’re pitching yourself, your product, or your ideas, with any form of communication, the conservative approach is generally the risky one. The middle of the road is a danger zone. It’s where you find road kill.

Three Reasons to Embrace Video Storytelling
Storytelling seems to be the buzzword right now in video. It’s not just the interview style of storytelling clients want. No matter how you tell the story, whether using interviews or a script, keep in mind, the components of storytelling such as emotional characters, a fun or dramatic plot, and engaging settings are more likely to land a great response and be shared online.

Why Google+ Matters to Your Business and How to Use it Wisely
Google+ profiles and content are now part of Google’s new search algorithm.

Facebook EdgeRank Explained [infographic]
Now, you probably think ALL your fans should see your posts, but considering the amount of posting on Facebook, that’s just not possible. So the EdgeRank algorithm determines which posts are seen by whom – assuming they’re online at or near the time Facebook places the posts in their news feeds.

3 High-Powered Reader Engagement Tactics
Here’s a quick tip – Before you publish your next post, read it out loud, and pretend you’re one of your readers. After you’ve read it from start to finish, if you can sit back and say, “So what?” then I hate to tell you this, but you’re not engaging your reader. Here are three high-powered reader engagement tactics to help you out.

3 Tips For Writing A Better Press Release
When writing a press release, break away from the stodgy old model built before people and businesses started communicating constantly through social media and mobile devices. Grab people’s attention, speak their language, and tell a story to prove why your press release is newsworthy – and worthy of their time and attention.

Hashtags Gone Wrong: 6 Examples of Unfortunate Hashtag Choices [WOW]
The implementation of the hashtag, which originated on IRC, is a big reason behind the popularity of Twitter. It is a useful way of both searching the site and tagging posts. On a more personal level, hashtags are used to emphasize points or even make jokes. Sometimes, they are even used in ways that make you fear for the future of humanity.

Want More Visibility for Your Blog on Twitter? by Nestivity May be the Answer
Nestivity turns your Twitter handle into a “Nest”, a place for you to connect with your followers in a more organized and structured way. 

How Content Marketing Saved this Brick-and-Mortar Business
Marcus Sheridan’s pool company was hit hard by the recession in 2008; He and his business partners discovered that in order to save their business, they had to get creative — fast. They decided to try blogging, and they started writing content for their site by simply answering their customers’ questions through their blog posts.

Amazon: A 24/7 Selling Machine

If you think Amazon.com is just a place to sell books, you’re leaving money on the table. It’s a 24/7 marketing machine, but only if you know its idiosyncrasies, its hidden tools and the sneaky strategies you can adopt to trounce your competitors. Part of the problem is at that Amazon does such a lousy job of training authors on how to use the site. Enter Penny Sansevieri, a book marketing expert and publicist who is responsible for her clients’ books flying out of Amazon’s door.

Penny promises to pull back the curtain and teach you how to:

Choose the right categories for your books…and why they’re not the most obvious categories you’d think of first

–Target Amazon’s book reviewers and why the top reviewers might not be the best match for your books

–Use Amazon as a lead generator

Make the most profit and build the most traction using inexpensive ebooks

–Understand why timing is everything on Amazon and how to know what to do, and when

–Know what you must do AFTER you capture the lead on Amazon

Join us this Thursday, May 9th at 5PM ET for the last and final one-hour webinar from “Social Media KISS (Keep It Simple & Serene) for Authors.”

Click here to register.

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The Publicity Success Series with Diana Ennen

Getting publicity can be challenging? Between writing press releases, article marketing, social media and more, it all seems too much. But it doesn’t have to be.

With Diana Ennens’ NEW PR Success Series you will learn how to get more PR or be able to make better decisions with working with a publicist or a publicity virtual assistant? Introducing the PR Success Series . Everything needed to get more out of all marketing efforts.

The PR Success series is intended to help entrepreneurs, authors, speakers, coaches and more master their PR.

Presented by Diana Ennen, President of Virtual Word Publishing, a PR and Marketing firm for over 27 years, it will take businesses step by step into PR methods that work. Insider secrets will be revealed on how to write effective articles and press releases, best ways to pitch the media, how to go full circle to get the most from all marketing efforts, mastering social media and more. The classes will be held weekly starting May 23rd and all classes are recorded.

Diana walks the walk and talks the talk getting clients in major media that have resulted in not only getting one of her clients #1 status on iBookstore, but major media mentions including USA Today, Woman’s World, Fox News, CNN Radio, Reader’s Digest, Entrepreneur, Forbes, and so many more.

A breakdown of the classes are as follows:

  • Session #1 – Develop a marketing plan that works
  • Session #2 – Discover the secrets to writing press releases and articles
  • Session #3 – Pitching the Media
  • Session #4 – Social Media Magic
  • Session #5 – PR Secrets

Diana says, “I am thrilled to be offering this class again. No matter if you want to do your own PR or if you want to just be able to understand the PR process, these classes will help. Also, I know many virtual assistants who want to specialize in publicity and this is exactly the tools you need to be able to do that.

The Publicity Success Series got rave reviews when it was offered previously.

Need help with a PR campaigns and want to write a killer press release, article, blog, etc., then sign up now. Early bird rates apply.