Simply Shiny Life

I found this great list of company phone numbers for places like Facebook and Twitter.  I’d recommend bookmarking it to reduce your Google time.

GetHuman.com

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From Artfire

“Are you lost when it comes to social media?  Do you have a Facebook page or Twitter account that you’re not sure what to do with?  Are you trying to find new ways to target and engage customers?  Then our upcoming social media boot camp is just for you!

Our social media boot camp, in partnership with our friends at Postling, will cover the most important social media topics for you and your business.  Starting on April 4th, each week’s session will cover a different topic to help you get the most out of your social media efforts.  There are no pre-requisites and no costs, don’t miss your chance to take your social strategy to the next level!”

Here’s a bit more info at the Artfire Blog: Social Media Boot Camp

And you can sign up FOR FREE here: Social Media Boot Camp Registration

And by the way, if you are unable to participate, all the materials shared in the sessions will be posted later in the Artfire forums. Nice.

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Good tips from The Mogul Mom. Make sure you talk to your state’s small business and tax office to get the details about what you really need. For instance, in Kansas, as a self proprietor, I just needed to register to obtain my ID and then I file my business taxes along with my personal ones.  But each state varies a bit. And the state tax folks I spoke with? Oh so very helpful.

Is your business legal?

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I ran across this very good post called

7 Tips for Tweeting Links that Get Clicked

with some good tips about generating good click throughs on your tweets.

Enjoy!

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Asking yourself where to list your handmade items? What sites have the most traffic? Which sites have increased their traffic? Which sites have decreased over the last several months?

I’ve updated my list.

You’ll note that I’ve added several new sites this iteration, including Meylah.com, cargoh.com, boocoo.com and efreeme. Any I’ve missed?

Where to sell handmade online?

Etsy vs artfire?

Etsy vs zibbet?

Here are the top 10 according to Compete.com’s metrics:

You can see the entire HUGE list at the links above.

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Facebook Fan Page Notifier

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this tool previously, but if not, it’s definitely one to bookmark. Doesn’t it bug you that you get email notifications for your regular personal profile page, but not your Fan page?

I use a tool called Fan Page Notifier to ensure that I don’t miss pithy comments to my own ShinyAdornments Fan page as well as the latest from BBCAmerica or the Daily Show.

Just visit the site, log in with your Facebook credentials and then place a check mark next to the Fan pages you’d like to receive updates. You can choose to see when anyone adds an update to a particular page or only when an Admin adds one. Or both.

Enjoy!

I received $50 credit towards Facebook advertising and figured I might as well experiment and see what kind of results are possible. This was my first time using Facebook’s advertising functionality, and I found it pretty easy to use.

I created a pretty simple ad and added appropriate verbiage. Then I determined who I would target this particular campaign, and decided to whittle my audience down to Facebook users that:

• live in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Oklahoma or Texas
• are over 30 and female
• are college grads
• and aren’t already connected to me in some way, like members of my teams, or current fans, etc.

This group of users was still over 2 million people. Wow.

My $50 lasted about a month, with nearly 103,000 views. Of those views, my ad received 114 click throughs and 22 of those click throughs actually became fans of my ShinyAdornments Fan page, which was the intent of the campaign. Those 22 click throughs cost slightly more than $2.25 each. Was it worth the expense? Well, sure, because this time around the funding was free to me. Would I do it again? I don’t know. I honestly have no idea if that click through is good or bad without a bit more research.

Have you experimented with Facebook ads? What kind of results did you see? Would you try it again?

wow…looks like there is a class action suit in the works for Google AdWords users.  I received this email message earlier today:

Google is sending you this notice of a proposed class action settlement that may affect your legal rights as a creator of an AdWords campaign between October 2007 and July 2009. This notice is being sent to you by Court Order so that you may understand your rights and remedies before the Court considers final approval of the proposed settlement on March 11, 2011.

This is not an advertisement or attorney solicitation.

A settlement agreement has been reached by the parties and is pending approval by the Court. Under the proposed settlement, Google will pay a total of $3,500,000 to the settlement class, including attorneys’ fees and costs, for charges accrued by AdWords users who left the “CPC Content bid” input blank upon creating an AdWords campaign, and were charged for content ads appearing on Google’s Content Network.

IMPORTANT. If the settlement is approved, your legal rights may be affected whether or not you act. You should therefore carefully read the documents filed with the Court concerning the settlement, the reimbursement of attorneys’ fees and litigation expenses, and the litigation generally.

Please go to http://www.largocargosettlement.com for full details on the settlement and further instructions on what to do to submit a claim, opt out of, object to, or otherwise comment upon the proposed settlement.

Please do not reply to this email.

Please note that Google will never ask you for password information or other personal credentials when sending you notices.  If you suspect someone is improperly using Google’s name or products to obtain your personal information, please report the message as phishing.  See http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=184963.

This mandatory announcement was sent to certain AdWords users in the U.S. as part of a legal settlement and was authorized by the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

Google Inc. | 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway | Mountain View, CA 94043

I’m not sure that I’m part of the users stated above and will need to read a bit more details to determine.  Just wanted to share in case you were an Adwords user too during that time.

This list of words disallowed by Google Base shopping was posted last week in the Artfire forums.  You might want to review your item titles and descriptions to ensure that your items are being successfully submitted. Note: this list ONLY pertains to Google shopping. Items with these terms will still appear in the regular Google search results.

1. #1
2. 100% satisfied
3. 4U
4. Accept credit cards
5. Act Now!
6. Additional Income
7. Affordable
8. All natural
9. All new
10. Amazing
11. Apply online
12. Ash
13. Bargain
14. Beer
15. Best price
16. Billing address
17. Buy direct
18. Call
19. Call free
20. Can’t live without
21. Cards Accepted
22. Cents on the dollar
23. Champagne
24. Check
25. Cigar
26. Cigarette
27. Claims
28. Click
29. Click Below
30. Click Here
31. Click to remove
32. Compare rates
33. Congratulations
34. Cost / No cost
35. Dear friend
36. Do it today
37. Extra income
38. For free
39. Form
40. Free and FREE
41. Free installation
42. Free leads
43. Free membership
44. Free offer
45. Free preview
46. Free website
47. Full refund
48. Get it now
49. Giving away
50. Guarantee
51. Gun
52. Here
53. Hidden
54. Increase sales
55. Increase traffic
56. Information you requested
57. Insurance
58. Investment
59. no investment
60. Investment decision
61. Knife
62. Knives
63. Legal
64. Lose
65. Marketing
66. Marketing solutions
67. Message contains
68. Money
69. Month trial offer
70. Name brand
71. Never
72. No gimmicks
73. No Hidden Costs
74. No-obligation
75. Now
76. Offer
77. One time / one-time
78. Opportunity
79. Order
80. Order Now
81. Order Status
82. Order Today
83. Orders shipped by priority mail
84. Performance
85. Phone
86. Please read
87. Potential earnings
88. Pre-approved
89. Price
90. Print out and fax
91. Profits
92. Real thing
93. Removal instructions
94. Remove
95. Rifle
96. Risk free
97. Sale
98. Sales
99. Satisfaction guaranteed
100. Save $
101. Save up to
102. Search engines
103. See for yourself
104. Serious cash
105. Sex
106. Sexy
107. Solution
108. Special promotion
109. Success
110. The following form
111. Tobacco
112. Unsolicited
113. Unsubscribe
114. Urgent
115. US dollars
116. Vine
117. Wife
118. Win
119. Wine
110. Winner
111. Work at home

This list is probably far from being complete. What other terms do you know about?

How many twitterers do you follow that aren’t following you? How many do you follow that haven’t tweeted in over 2 months? I spent Sunday morning looking at mine, and you know what? There were a LOT. A lot that I followed that didn’t follow me and a LOT that hadn’t tweeted in months; some years! So I Googled “easy unfollow twitter” and several links appeared with tools to use to review followers. I tried out several and determine that the one I liked best was Manage Flitter.

Log into your facebook account using oauth. (If you find a tool you’d like to use, I feel more comfortable using the ones that use oauth instead of requiring you to enter your twitter user name and password. Given that my twitter account has been hacked once in the past, I’m a bit more careful which sites I let have access to my credentials now.) Then Manage Flitter will compile the list of folks (like the image below) that you follow and don’t follow you back.

You will be able to view your list of non-followers and choose to unfollow them by checking the box located next to their twitter names. You also have the option to unfollow those who haven’t posted tweets in 30 days or more. I actually had accounts following me that hadn’t tweeted in over a year.

Now that you’ve cleaned up your twitter followers, would you like to know who has unfollowed you too? I’ll post about the tools I’ve found to do that, later this week.