Want to Learn the Secret to Successful Facebook Ads?

Facebook ads are probably the fastest, easiest and most effective do-it-yourself platforms for obtaining traffic to your offers, building prospect lists, and for practically any other objective imaginable for your website. Ad campaigns are extremely easy to set up, include excellent targeting tools, and can be online within minutes. There is one factor to understand, however, when it comes to getting the best results and return on investment: That is finding the most effective images available. It has been shown that imagery is 70-89 percent of the success or failure of a Facebook ad campaign. Let’s take a look at some useful tips for getting the most from your Facebook ad images.

5 Awesome Tips for Facebook Ad Images

Creating an ad that produces a real impact and statement for your product or services is a matter of standing out from the rest. Here are five ways to do just that!

1. Use very high quality stock images – Since your images are going to end up very small, make certain you’re purchasing from a reputable resource. Fotolia and iStockPhoto are two of our faves. The XS size of available images will be fine, as even these are cut down to the size of a postage stamp (110×80 pixels).
2. Crop your photos to deliver maximum impact – Crop your photos tightly to focus on the most important aspect of your ad. Cropping faces from the eyes to mouth is the most impactful technique for riveting people images. Also, make sure that your model’s eyes have life. When using product images, get close!
3. Choose eye-catching colors – Using bright, visually arresting images can do wonders for your click-thru rates. Too many people opt to blend in with the pervasive Facebook blue, and thus consign their ads to a form of “banner blindness”.
4. Choose attractive images – Unless you are going for a certain statement, opt for the most attractive photos you can find. People are attracted to beauty. Period. This isn’t to say that sometimes beauty can’t be trumped by cute, funny or outrageous.
5. Use humor when you can – All of us love a good laugh. If you have the opportunity to inject humor into your ad, don’t miss it! It will surely result in a higher clickthrough rate!

For some really good examples of these imagery principles in action, check out this great article at Search Engine Watch.

Sitting throughout the day behind a desk? You might be putting yourself at risk of fatal heart related illnesses. A recently available article by NPR included comments originating from a researcher at South Carolina University who found that men that sit more than 23 hours a week are 64 percent more likely to die from heart disease than are their counterparts who only sit for 11 hours or fewer a week. That’s surprising news.

The Good News

The message is obvious: Get off your butt. Thankfully, it is easy to decrease your sitting hours by building a standing desk. A standing desk — which happens to be just what it sounds like, a desk where you stand rather than sit — is far from expensive. You can construct it with low-cost parts from Ikea. Here’s the recipe, courtesy of the Lifehacker blog.

The Easy Way

If you just need a simple desk, Lifehacker suggests creating a standing desk that employs Ikea’s Utby legs. Though this desk is going to be smaller, you’ll be able to fit your laptop, monitor and keyboard easily enough on top of it. You will have space, too, for a lamp and storage. To make this desk, buy a Vika Amon Top, Utby under frame, Ekby Jarpen shelf and one set of Capita legs. You can find all of these parts at Ikea for a total of around $140. Best of all? According to the Lifehacker story, you can put this desk with simply a screwdriver.

A Bit More Complicated

You may also use Ikea parts to build slightly more sophisticated wide standing desk, according to Lifehacker. Again, you can get the parts you’re looking for at your nearest Ikea: five Vika Byske legs, two packs of Capita brackets, one Lack shelf and one Vika Amon tabletop. These materials should set you back about $250. This desk offers you more space, for both your tech and your supplies. But it is going to be slightly more challenging to build. You’ll need a power drill. But don’t let that scare you. Lifehacker still ranks this desk as a “medium” with respect to difficulty.

5 Ways to Spring Clean Your Website

Just like your home, your small business website also requires a yearly spring-cleaning. It’s very easy to let things slip, and the results of that would be a steady decline in traffic, reputation and consequently sales. This is a rather insidious way to lose traction with your website, as you don’t immediately see it occurring. But it’s quite real, and can have very real results.

Here are 5 simple things you can do that can make a big difference in the way your sites appear, operate and prosper.

1. How quick do your pages load? – You have less than 10 seconds to load your page or the majority of people will exit and head somewhere else. Some reasons for slow loading pages are too many images, pages built mostly with Flash, and errors in your site code. This is something you want to check into, as Google will penalize your site in the search rankings if your pages take too long to load.
2. Old products, programs, links lurking – Make sure you remove any old product, programs and links that are no longer pertinent. Almost nothing says your page is stale and dated more than your PDF download from 2008 that’s not only dated but unavailable. Dead links and 404 pages will also not help your search rankings, either.
3. Old content and images – Likewise cull out stale, no longer topical content and images. Your old pictures from the company picnic in 2007 may not be what we might term fresh content, and that is what folks and search engines both want!
4. Social media – Make sure that your social media buttons not only link to your current social media sites, but that you are up to date with them. Pinterest and Instagram are later entries that may not be displayed with your social buttons.
5. Fresh content – Nothing will help nearly as much as fresh, updated content, in the form of posts, videos, audios, and images. If you’ve got posts on the first page of your blog that are over the age of a month, you might want to rethink your content strategy.

It’s spring, and time to get about cleaning. You’ll be glad you did!

You might think that you’ll never need to back up files, images or videos that you save in an Evernote notebook. Since of course, not only will your files be stored on your own computer or device, they’ll also be stored on Evernote’s own servers.

Is it really necessary?

You could very well be wondering: Do I have to back up my Evernote notebooks? How-To Geek would answer with an emphatic “yes!” The reason being Evernote isn’t a backup system. It’s a synching system. In a worst-case scenario, Evernote’s remote file store could be wiped. Then, the local file store can be wiped, too.

Protecting yourself

You can add an extra layer of security to your Evernote notebooks – and the data they contain – by backing them up. There are various ways to accomplish this – some, as How-To Geek explains, are quite complicated – however, there is one simple option: You can export your Evernote notebooks.

Export/import

One of the easiest ways to do this is to export your notebooks. This can be done by right-clicking on any notebook and selecting “Export Notes.” You can now export your notebook in a wide variety of formats. Then, if you lose the data in a notebook, you can import the exported notebook as what How-To Geek calls a wholesale replacement for the missing notebook.

Don’t Make These Social Media Mistakes!

Understanding what NOT to do when it comes to social media is nearly as critical as knowing what you should do. Here are several social media blunders to avoid at all costs!

Jokes in poor taste – It should be obvious, but you need to put on your thinking cap before you tweet, update or post. And above all, don’t try and benefit from someone else’s catastrophe as a way to promote your products or services. While a celebrity death or humiliation might appear to be easy pickings for trending traffic, you can actually end up alienating more people than you attract!

Offensive statements and political rants – Closely connected is the temptation to broadcast your preferences political, social or otherwise, which may well have the misfortune of NOT aligning with those of your clients and customers. Don’t go there! Refrain from sharing anything that might be misunderstood, or you’ll end up scrambling for cover! Once trust is broken, it’s very difficult to rebuild.

Failing to separate your business and personal accounts – Not to mention that it appears far more professional to create a company profile and page, many times there are benefits (depending on the social network) for a purely company account. This is definitely true with Google Local. A public business account will also be more likely to be seen in the search engine results.

No social media buttons on your website – They are readily available for all social media platforms, and you’re shooting yourself in the foot if they are not available on your homepage and every post you make. This will make it easy for your readers to share your posts and in doing so help promote your business.

Not using the links from your social sites – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google all will let you link back to your website from your profile page, as well as from posts. This is an great way to obtain some easy, authoritative links that will help others find you as well.