Stay connected

Foursquare is essentially a location-based way to stay connected. Whenever you walk into a shopping center, entertainment venue or other business, you check into Foursquare with your cell phone and your Foursquare friends will be able to see your location on a Foursquare map.

Foursquare’s hook is the point system, which makes checking in a fun game, rather than a tedious chore. Whenever you check into a location on Foursquare, you’re awarded badges or points for doing so. Accumulate enough points for one area and you’ll become the mayor of that area. This makes checking in on Foursquare competitive and fun.

With regard to privacy, Foursquare doesn’t just let any and everybody see where users are at. Only your Foursquare friends (friends you’ve added on the application or imported from Facebook) will be able to see where you’re at, and only if you let them.

Checking in

Checking in on Foursquare is a simple process. All you have to do is pull up Foursquare on your mobile device. Once that’s done, click on the “check in” button and pick the location where you’re currently at from the application’s Places tab. Once you’ve been using Foursquare for a while, venues you frequently visit will be sorted into a “My Favorites” list, making checking in even easier. If you don’t see your location listed, the application has a convenient search option you can access by clicking the “Not in List?” button.

When you check in, you have the option of letting your Foursquare friends know where you’re at or keeping your check-in under wraps. You can also choose to publish your check-in to Facebook or Twitter.

How businesses can use it

Foursquare currently has more than 1.4 million locations registered in its system, and about 1,200 businesses offer special promotions via the application.

Foursquare is useful to businesses in that it can attract more folks as patrons check in and let their friends know where they’re at. This is particularly useful to restaurants and bars. To get the most out of Foursquare, make sure your patrons know that you have a Foursquare location and encourage them to check in often. Play along with the points race and give special prizes or discounts to the “mayor” of your location.

Another potential use Foursquare has for businesses is an analytics program that will let participating businesses valuable data on the demographics of folks checking in at their locations and the option of communicating directly with them.

If you’re a business owner, and you want to claim a venue on Foursqure, the process is simple. Just go to the application’s website and click on the button asking you to claim a venue. Go through the steps described and answer a few questions to verify your identity and you’ll be set up. The application will provide you with a neat business dashboard, which will allow you to manage your Foursquare account and offer special deals to consumers.

If you’re looking for a new, hot way to generate buzz for your business, get online and check your location in on Foursquare.

Google Places is an application that allows users to find nearby businesses and other spots they may want to visit. It’s an offshoot of Google maps that’s designed specifically for easy use by mobile devices such as Android.

Google Places essentially allows businesses or other locations to beef up the search result that pops up when Google users use the site to find locations. As Google is the place most people turn to when searching for a specific location or for a general service such as a local dentist, florist, etc.

Google Places allows business owners to “claim” their Place Page on Google via its Local Business Center. This gives the owners control of their page and allows them to tweak it by adding photos, videos, special offers and more. The owners can also update their page with hours of operation and other information. Another benefit of the site to businesses is that it allows direct communication with customers, which helps businesses better tailor their operations to customer needs.

Place Pages exist for more than 50 million locations around the globe. Place Pages include a wide variety of locations such as parks, zoos, pubs, dentist’s offices, etc. Nearly 4 million businesses have “claimed” their pages since last September.

How to use it

If you’re running a business or other location such as a park or a museum, you can “claim” your page by logging onto Google with your Gmail name and password (if you don’t have one already, they’re very easy to get) and going to Google Places. Once you’re there go the Google Places homepage and click on the “Add a Business” button. Once you’ve done that click on the “Find your business” button to search for your business.

Once you’ve found it, you can go to the Edit Details page to change information about your business. If you can’t find it, click on the “Add a new listing” option. Once you’ve done this you’ll be asked to submit some basic information and later be asked to post other details such as photos, hours of operation and special promotions. When you finish all that, click on the “Finish” button and you’ll be given a few options to verify your information.

Business applications

There are a couple of other nifty features Google Places offers business users. These features include:

Service areas: The application allows you to show customers what geographic areas you serve. This is particularly helpful to businesses that travel to serve customers, such as locksmiths or pizza delivery restaurants.

Advertising: Google’s recently rolled out tags that allow businesses to stand out on Google listings. For $25 per month businesses can purchase the tags for use in select cities such as Washington, Atlanta, Austin and Seattle and a few others.

Photo shoots: Businesses in select cities can also request Google to do a free photo shoot of their business that will be used to supplement photos on their business page, allowing for a better representation of their business on Google Places.

QR codes: Businesses can obtain QR codes, special codes readable by QR scanners, mobile phones with camera, and smartphones, that they can place on business cards or other material. Customers with certain smartphones can scan the QR code and be taken directly to the Google Places site for that business.

Tips for using Google Places

Businesses can best take advantage of Google Places by taking advantage of all its free features. Uploading photos, posting hours and offering coupons and special promotions are all great ways to use Google Places to drive customers to your business.

Google Places has the potential to be a very powerful marketing tool for big and small businesses, thanks to the millions of users who log on to Google each day. Taking advantage of this powerful tool is easy and only takes a few minutes.

Facebook Places is an exciting new Facebook application that allows users to share their location with others via an app on their iPhone or other supported device.  Facebook Places allows users to tell others where in the world they’re at and why, and lets them read comments by others about that location. It’s a great way to learn about an entertainment venue, doctor’s office, restaurant or other business or attraction.

Right now only iPhone users or online users can use this application, but Facebook plans to add Android and Blackberry to the mix soon.

To tag a new location on Facebook Places, all you need to do is complete a few simple steps. Open up the Facebook Places application on your iPhone or other supported device. Once you’ve done that, click on the “Check In” box. When that’s done, click on the “Add” button. It will be located to the left of the search box entitled Place Names. You’ll need to type in a name for the new place, and you can also enter a brief description of it. Once you’ve gotten that far, just click the “Add” button that’s at the bottom of the page.

You can also write a description of what you’re doing there, or you can tag your friends who are there. Click the “Check In” button and you’re finished.

If your place of business has been added by another user, you can claim it by going to the Place page from Facebook.com and clicking on the “Is this Place Page your business” button. Once you do this, the Place page will turn into a Facebook page. You can post updates for your fans to read, and update your business info as it changes.

Facebook Places also has an option that allows you to report Places that are incorrect, or are defamatory to you or your business.

Facebook Places’ primary benefit to business is its ability to generate buzz. By having a site on Facebook that your visitors can check into, you enable them to let others know they’re at your place, possibly enticing them to come check it out as well. It’s essentially word-of-mouth advertising in a written format available to a whole lot of people. With the millions of users signed up on Facebook, Facebook places is a potential goldmine of free advertising for your place of business.

You can start putting Facebook Places to work for your business by having your employees check in. Also ask them to encourage their friends and your customers to stop by and also check in using Facebook Places.

Individual users of Facebook Places will likely want to adjust their privacy settings to keep their friends from checking them into places they may not want to be checked into. Online reputations are increasingly important as more and more employers are checking out their employees online lives. A well-meaning online joke by a friend could land you in hot water with your work or significant other, so be careful.

Facebook Places is an effective and easy method of online marketing that costs little or nothing and can greatly help to generate buzz and goodwill about your business. Try it today!

For more infor: http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=1159

Before we go any further, you need to reread the title above….now breathe, that’s it…slow your heart rate…good job…now sit back and put your feet up…good. Now, that the panic attack is over, we can get started on getting you acquainted with the world of CMS, CSS, and HTML.

The abbreviations themselves are a bit of a pain, but rest assured that once you’re done reading this article you’ll be one step closer to using the web to get your message out to the world.

The Definition and Purpose of CMS
CMS stands for content management system. In layman’s terms it means that a CMS is a simple (although it sounds complicated) way to design, create, manage and maintain a website all from one place. It allows the website owner to add, remove, change and even update content on their site easily. Though you will probably need a web developer to set a CMS site up for you, ideally you want to be adding content regularly and quickly.

There are a few sites out there that offer CMS services for free:

Joomla- Is an award winning CMS that is easy to use, secure and very popular among the site building crowd.

WordPress- Is a free and popular blogging platform that is one of the most user friendly CMSs out there.

Mambo- With Mambo, you can create a simple or complex site using their full-featured open-source CMS.

Drupal- With Drupal you can create blogs, huge company sites, small ecommerce sites, or even a slideshow of your favorite pet.

The Definition and Purpose of HTML
No, the abbreviation HTML does not stand for Hotmail, although you can get HTML emails through Hotmail.

The simple definition for HTML, or hypertext markup language, is that it’s the web code that talks to the browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox telling them how to display the images and text to users.

With HTML you can take something that is written in all black, lowercase letters and insert tags that will make them appear bright blue and in all CAPS when viewed online. This allows for a lot of different text types, colors, layouts and even picture inserts.

The Definition and Purpose of CSS
CSS, or cascading style sheet, is a kind of like a mix between HTML and Photoshop- you can change the appearance of text, colors and theme of an entire website simply by changing one file. Imagine how much faster updating a website has become with this nifty invention.

The CSS is a style language that creates definitions for the look and feel of a webpage. It makes sure that the style is consistent throughout, and tells the different web browsers how it wants the website to appear.

With a cascading style sheet, any web designer or developer, or even a novice website builder can make a certain set of styles that they can use to make fonts, colors, graphs, tables and other minutia of the website.

Use of a CSS makes the website look smoother, seamless and more professional.

Now that you’ve learned a little bit more about the abbreviations in the title, I hope this helps you to better communicate with your web developer and get a sense of what is possible for you in keeping your web content useful and fresh.

Doug Motel is a project and marketing coach with over 10 years of experience in internet marketing. He has helped major corporations and one-person businesses to profit from the web. To learn more about how he has used the search engines and social media to help clients get on Oprah, The View and into the Wall Street Journal call (845) 363-4728.

If you want to find information about a product or service, what’s the first thing you do? If you’re like the majority of earthlings you go online and use a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo. From there, you scan the results page and start clicking on some of the links, usually starting with one of the results in the top three positions (depending on which result sounds most promising for what you’re looking for).

Knowing this, it makes sense that if you have a business, you’ll want the people who are searching for what you’re selling to find your website, which means you need to get your website to the top of the search engines results pages (SERPs) for your keywords, so that people searching for your product or service will find you before they find your competitors!

Sponsored Versus Free Search Engine Listings
Many businesses will choose to advertise their websites using paid results (in Google you see these ads at the top with a slightly colored background and down the right side of the page) in the hope that people will see their ad when they search and will click on it instead of choosing one of the other listings. This can work if you know what you are doing, but it can cost a lot of money and some studies show that people are around 80% less likely to click on a sponsored ad. While it’s helpful when your business and website are new to advertise this way, ultimately you want to be at the top of the free (or organic) listings.

The first thing you need to do is understand a little about how the search engines work. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo are using increasingly complex algorithms for determining which pages rank highest (in the Wild West days of internet marketing it was easy to “trick” the search engines into ranking your page highly even if you provided useless information, now it’s much more difficult). In general, to get your site to rank highly it is best to do it naturally, by providing web content with good valuable information, while tweaking the code a bit to help the search engines know exactly what your website is about.

What the Engines Are Looking For
The main thing the search engines look for when ranking pages is which sites are most relevant to the search terms being used. Try to imagine a checklist of about 200 things that Google is taking into consideration when they “audition” your site for the role of #1. Though no one knows all of the ingredients of each of the search engine’s ‘secret sauce’ we know that they place great importance on being able to find the search term somewhere on the page (some believe about 3% of the overall word count). They are also very interested in how long your site has been around, if it is easy to crawl or read through the pages, and if it downloads quickly.

Another thing that the search engines look for is how many other websites link to the site in question. Google especially considers this to be a vote of confidence for a site. One that has lots of inbound links from good websites will tend to rank more highly than one that doesn’t. However, again it’s not just about getting thousands of random links from here, there, and everywhere. It’s about getting a number of good quality links from websites whose content relates in some way to your own.

Getting the right balance of keywords and phrases on your page and in your html code and garnering quality links is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This requires a little bit of know-how and hard work if you want to do it yourself or you can hire a company that specializes in SEO to optimize your website so that it will rank highly for your keywords in the SERPs. But unless your customers are people who have not heard of “this new fangled inner webs the kids are talking about” then you probably want to act now to help your site get traffic from search.

Doug Motel is a project and marketing coach with over 10 years of experience in internet marketing. He has helped major corporations and one-person businesses to profit from the web. To learn more about how he has used the search engines and social media to help clients get on Oprah, The View and into the Wall Street Journal call (845) 363-4728.