To enter the giveaway, just comment on this blog post and I will randomly select 5 entries on December 15, 2009.

What is Google Wave?

Google Wave is a personal communication and collaboration tool. Google Wave works like previous messaging systems like email and Usenet, but instead of sending a message along with its entire thread of previous messages, or requiring all responses to be stored in each user’s inbox for context, message documents (referred to as waves) that contain complete threads of multimedia messages (blips) are perpetually stored on a central server. Waves are shared with collaborators who can be added to or removed from the wave at any point during a wave’s existence.

Creating a Facebook fan page is easy and takes just a few minutes. If you don’t have a Facebook fan page, go here.

Let’s look at some of the things you can post on your fan page:

- Overview of company
- Website and contact info
- Press releases
- Videos
- Blog RSS
- Twitter updates
- Company news and status
- Customer interaction

1. Recommend your fan page to your friends

Your friends are your first step in promoting your fan page. Not only will this give you a solid base of fans but will also help spread the word about your fan page. Be sure that your page is configured correctly and you have added a good amount of content like photos and links before suggesting your page to friends.

This can be a tedious task when you have a large number of friends (+500)  but expect a solid return. In recent “suggest” tests, I’ve converted 30-45% of my friends into fans of particular pages I am promoting. Of course depending on how interesting or popular your nice/business is the numbers will vary.

Here is where you will find the link to suggest your fan page to your friends

When one of your friends becomes a fan of your page 2 events occur

1. its published in your friends “live feed”

2. your friends profile is updated.

How does this help me? If your new fan has a decent number of friends (200-300+) , and a large amount of them are active, those users will see the activity in the live news feed. I imagine conversion on these actions are about 1-2% of the total suggest test.

2. Promote your fan page on your website or blog.

Blog

If you are a blogger or run a website that is updated frequently you should consider placing a Facebook widget inside or around your content. Promoting your page this way helps grow your core audience on Facebook and will be the major force of your fan page interaction. In recent months, Facebook has made many improvements into promoting profiles, pages and groups.

Here is an example over at Zeropaid.com where I place a widget at the end of the content below “recommended posts” and above my comments.

Facebook Widgets here: http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/

Facebook Fan Box: http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/fanbox.php

Website – Business | eCommerce | Corporate

Many websites struggle with how to push social networks inside of content, sometimes they don’t even bother because of old school internet ideology. Some even fear these marketing tactics can bring unwanted brand tarnishing in an uncontrollable internet wild west. I am hear to say PROMOTE, PROMOTE, PROMOTE your Facebook fan page!

Somewhere on your website you need to declare your fan page and push your loyal visitors to it. A great place to start is your “About Us” or “Contact Us” page. I would suggest using a “fan box” but without your “stream” included. This is a great place to quietly announce your fan page and gain some fans.

Facebook Fan Box: http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/fanbox.php

3. Posting to your fan page

Posting relevant links, photos and events on a consistent basis is vital to your page’s viral growth.

For those of you looking to tie your business and Facebook more together, consider a contest and utilize Facebook as the voting booth.

Let me make one thing clear, when you write on your page’s wall the information will be posted for all your fans to see. So if you think posting 5 times a day on your wall is a good idea think again, you will only loose fans… Focus on consistent posts about relevant topics and never go off topic.

In some cases, fan pages don’t even need posting, the fans do all the work by discussing among themselves. Example: Minnesota Vikings fan page http://www.facebook.com/minnesotavikings

I hope article gives you some ideas on how you can promote your Facebook fan page. If you want to share some of your ideas, please post them in a comment.

I had a great time on the trip and I can’t thank Shawn & Caleb from Surf Zone enough for showing me the real Nicaragua. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to have a local show you around town when you’re in a foreign country.  Without Shawn and Caleb we would have had a whole different experience. The guys at Surf Zone Nicaragua are outgoing hosts and I recommend them to anyone looking to travel to Nicaragua.

We did everything we possibly could do like zip lining, horseback riding, surfing, four wheeling, hiking and best of all eating and drinking our way through San Juan.

You can find more photos from my trip on Facebook. Here is another trip that I took earlier in the year.

Let’s face it, Google is telling you what keywords are popular and how often they are searched for. Google is giving you the information you need to succeed in blogging, all it takes is time.

What is Google Trends?

Google Trends shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages. Google Trends also allows the user to compare the volume of searches between two or more terms. An additional feature of Google Trends is in its ability to show news related to the search-term overlaid on the chart, showing how new events affect search popularity.

Visit Google Trends

Creating Content

For this example I am going to choose the keywords ‘Natalie Smith’. Natalie Smith is rumored to be Tony Romo’s new girlfriend.

After doing a little bit of research I created the blog post Natalie Smith – Tony Romo’s New Girlfriend

As you can see, I wrote a simple blog post about a hot internet topic. With football around the corner, this post will generate impressions for months.

From a SEO perspective I can target the following keywords for the SERPs “jessica simpson, natalie smith, tony romo, tony romo’s new girlfriend”.

Proof is in the Pudding

Give it a try and let me know how it goes.

After dumping Jessica Simpson on the eve of her 29th birthday he has been quoted as having an “emotional affair” with Ms. Smith.

A source close to Smith says, Romo, 29, and Smith, 22, “are are not officially dating, but they are having an intimate relationship.”

Earlier this year I designed and deployed a complete WordPress solution for Zeropaid.com. The migration took about 6 months and I learned many things about WordPress and how to utilize plugins.

Using the data in the previous version of the site which was a mash up of several open source systems and internally developed code, I migrated all the data to a manageable solution for my company while adhering to SEO standards.

If you are looking to generate organic traffic, it is very important to properly label content with the correct keywords and descriptions. Google has a great keyword suggestion tool that I recommend you use as a research tool when deciding on your contents keywords.

Here are some great tools that I recommend for any webmaster looking to setup a WordPress website.

• All in One SEO Pack
• Yet Another Related Plugin
• Robots Meta
• Automatic SEO Links
• WP No External Links
• Google XML Sitemaps
• Keyword Optimizer
• WP Render Blogroll Links
• SEO Friendly Images
• SEO Title Tag

If you looking for ways to make money with  your WordPress blog, check out WP Tag Ads.

Cars For a Grand also allows visitors to search locally and email when new cars are listed on the site.

The site also offers an extensive list of bittorrent tracker sites and computer related software.

Two months ago, EPN was giving away $25,000 to the best daily deals site. I didn’t hear about the promotion till very late in the competition. However this gave me an idea..

What if I could take the data supplied by ebay.com and slurp it into WordPress using a plugin?

Here is what I came up with.

ebay.com offered a XML feed of the daily deals data in XML fomat, from this I create my XML file containing the days deals. Every 6 hours I slurp in this data using WP-o-Matic, creating posts of the various products offered by ebay.

You can stay current on the antique furniture listings by subscribing to a RSS feed inside of search results.

Categories are broken down by popular antique furniture keywords and popular search keywords.

The site utilizes a technology that I built for many of my other niche sites, using this technology makes it very easy to publish niche sites.