Greetings and Salutations -

A great way to have material to promote to your forum and various social networking feeds more than once a week is to feature older articles. It's especially useful when the older article is relevant for some reason. But how do you keep yourself from accidentally re-featuring the same article multiple times in a month?

I've created a promotion tracker for you! This is a simple one-click way to note that you've featured an article in your various forum and social networking areas.

Just go into your Social Networking menu area. It's the first link on the page. This shows you every article in your site, with the date it was featured on your site. Then there's a column on the right that shows when you last promoted it. Just click on that date to reset it to today's date and time. Quick, easy, done.

At the bottom of the page I list these suggestions:
What I do is this. In Firefox, I create a set of tabs. One tab is my site homepage. One tab is this page here. And then the remaining tabs are the various places I want to promote my article - my Forum, my Twitter page, and my Facebook page. With one click Firefox will open this set of five tabs for me. If you don't know how to set Firefox to do that, post in our PC Advice forum and we'll help you with whichever version of Firefox you have. Once you have your tabs open, you use your normal site page to find the article you want to feature, either by navigating your subject links or searching for it. Then you create features for each social networking site optimized for that site's functionality (i.e. hash tags for Twitter, longer description for Facebook, etc.) Once you're done with those, you click the date on the tracking page here, and you're set! It should take under 5 minutes including the search time. Quick, easy, and highly effective!

Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions!

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Sample Facebook Fan Pages

It's fairly straightforward what a BellaOnline Site Fan page is about. It's a way for your BellaOnline site fans to learn about your latest articles.

What would a non-BellaOnline fan page be for?

Here's some examples to get you brainstorming!

Jeanne Daigle / African Culture has a business making soaps. Her business name is Eclectic Lady. She has set up a fan page for her soap making business here -

http://www.facebook.com/EclecticLadyHandmadeSoaps

You can see how she promotes her new soaps, offers discounts, and keeps her fans up to date with what's going on. This helps drive sales and traffic to her main soapmaking website! If you make any sort of product, or offer any sort of service, your fan page can be a wonderful way to increase sales.

The reason a fan page is important here - and not a profile / personal page - is that with a fan page the people who fan you do NOT reveal their personal information to you. Their personal stuff stays private. If you forced them to "friend" you on a profile page, they would have to allow you access to all their own personal information. Most fans don't want to do that.


Deanna Stevens-Joseph / Dreams is in a band. She made a fan page for her band -

http://www.facebook.com/Dreamwilde

She can talk about the band's upcoming gigs, offer clips of songs, and interact with her fans easily. This same system can work well for any type of artistic work you do. If you write novels, if you paint pictures, if you take photos, it's a great idea to make up a fan page for those projects. This lets your fans follow your progress, encourage you, and eventually buy your items, all in a safe, non-intrusive manner.


Rebecca Graf / History has a blog about fun word definitions. Her fan page for her blog is here -

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Little-Davys-Imaginary-Dictionary/313345209392

You might ask, why have a fan page for a blog? The answer is the same reason you have a fan page for any other website project you're working on. It's a way to get your message right in front of peoples' faces where they "live". If someone is on Facebook all day, and your promo messages pop up in front of their eyes, they're more likely to come visit!

Let us know in the Editor's forums if you need brainstorming help for your own projects in life!



Lisa Shea, owner
BellaOnline.com

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