Greetings and Salutations!

I hope you had a wonderfully relaxing summer and a highly educational September. We're now heading into the super busy season where traffic and income spikes to its highest levels!

Oct, Nov, and Dec are traditionally when our web visitors greatly ramp up their attention. There are the triple holidays of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. In conjunction with this comes a huge buying spree. Visitors are actively interested in all fully authentic reviews you can offer. Avoid writing press releases :) They are already deluged with ads. They weed out ads. They want to see reviews that talk about the good and bad aspects of an item, location, or service. That way they know they can trust the write-up and then make a buying decision based on it.

Be sure to take the advertising course to get fully prepared for this deluge of traffic!

One key is to write *ahead of time* and not wait until the holiday hits. You need your articles in search engines before the holiday so when someone begins searching you can be found. People tend to start looking for ideas at least a month ahead of time. That is, don't load your Christmas crafts article up on December 24th. It's far too late by then. Get it into the system at least by the end of November. That way Google can index it and people can find it when they need it.

We'll be making many more posts about this as we head deeper into the high traffic / high income season - so get yourself geared up for the fun!


FACEBOOK ICONS

When a visitor likes one of your articles, they often post it to their Facebook page to tell others about it. This activity is completely separate from fan pages. It is simply about that visitor, on their own Facebook page, providing a link to your article. You can see an example on my LisaShea personal page, to help get a sense of what I'm talking about -

http://www.facebook.com/lisashea.origami

If you're not a "friend" of me yet, go ahead and friend me and I'll accept you so you can see my example.

I've finally figured out how to code in the ability for you to customize what 90 x 90 icon you want to show up by your links in this situation. You can see on my examples that I have created a 90 x 90 green square which says "BellaOnline Low Carb". That way any time anyone links to my page it has a giant promo for my site name right there that stands out.

You set your icon in the social networking area of your admin menu. You can load up any image you want. Just make sure it's 90 x 90 to meet the Facebook standards! That gives you the maximum bang for the buck. If you have trouble making a 90 x 90 image post in our Editor Assistance forum and we'll help out.

The best images are crystal clear at the 90x90 size. Avoid images that are confusing. Go for a sharp, strong, clear message.

If you haven't put in a Facebook promo icon yet it will default to your editor photo. If you're a brand new trainee and haven't gotten your editor photo in yet, it will default to the generic blue box.

When you add in your icon, please send me a copy via email so I can post a few of them at the bottom of that admin page to give examples to other editors. That way editors can get a sense of what a few of their fellow editors are doing, to help them figure out what they want to do for their own site.

It is incredibly helpful to make a social networking post each day - especially as we head into the high traffic season. This is a great way to remind visitors to come to your sites, to make purchases through your links, and to earn you some money and attention for your efforts!

As always, let me know if you have any questions :)


Lisa Shea, owner
BellaOnline.com

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