Give your blog a bit of pizaz with a banners, animated text or animated banners

When starting your own business, as you may well know, advertising is essential in getting the word out. There are sites that allow you to create your own banner for advertising that can be posted on variety of sites. These banners can be very important when advertising your business on sites that charge a fee for advertisement, such as Google. Google Blogs have an option where you can replace your regular blog title with animated text, banners an other options.  There are quite a few sites out there.  The above banner was actually created with a site called Bannerfan.  This is a quick and easy banner that allows you to post the HTML code to a variety of sites.



The above banner was created using FlashVortex.com.  A Google search will give you many options, these two sites though are pretty easy to work with. FlashVortex also has the option of allowing you to enter your site link so that the banner is clickable. Of Course, if you are a knowledgable in using imaging programs for creating your own banner, you can easily created an animated banner using something like PhotoShop or Gimp for your blog title. I used Google Sites to upload my that was created on my new business page, "Elizabeth's Digital Business Cards".

Click Here to See how my banner looks on my site as a title

This above banner was created using Gimp, which is suggested if you can create your own custom banner that suites your own sites image.  This will receive the most notice and the feeling of accomplishment will help you to move forward successfully with your business.  After this banner was created, it was uploaded it here so that it was easily accessible to post on sites.  Whenever this banner is updated using the same name and re-uploading it to Google Sites Image section,  it will than be updated on every site over the internet where it has been posted.

Create a free digital business card - receive more hits to your blog

Because this blog is all about how to earn more visitors to your site without paying anything, I am going to tell you another way of doing this by creating a digital business card. Next you are going to learn how to distribute that business card and earn more hits to your website/blog at no charge. Business cards are great incentive for advertising your business, yet, can be quite expensive when printing and passing them out.  Next the business card will usually be reused for having a telephone number written on the back of it and next, shoved deep into somebodies wallet.

Now imagine being able to create a digital business card, at no charge, that could be posted on your website, distributed throughout the social networks and emailed to prospective customers. This actually can be achieved simply by creating your own business card in a document processing program, like mine below, exporting it into Google Docs and from there Google docs allows you to distribute it in many different ways, including pasting it onto your website in an IFrame. Once you import the business card into google docs, in the top right corner is a share button.  Click on that and you will see that there is the option to share your business card document in, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.  The best way to upload your business card is in a PDF format, this way it is protected from being edited and most websites support the PDF format.

You can create your own Digital Business Card in a word processing program, such as Microsoft Word or Openoffice. OpenOffice is a 100% free and safe Office program that supports, spreadsheets, word processing and PowerPoint.

Starting as low as $25.00 you can purchase your own Digital Business Card, just visit me @ Elizabeth's Digital Business Cards for more information.

Advertise your blog, website and business simply when playing games Facebook games!

This sounds crazy but it is true, interacting with your friends on facebook through Games and applications is actually a great way of advertising your site.

About six months ago, while using my FaceBook account,  it came to my attention that having over six hundred friends was making it very difficult to keep track of what was going on with my FaceBook account.  The games that were being played was getting jumbled up with what my friends and family were posting in the newsfeeds.  Also, there were the people on my friends list that were more acquaintance then actually friends whose photos, videos and Farmville postings were mixing up with people on my friends list who's personal information was more of an interest than the ones that play Farmville.

That is when I decided to create a second account for just my friends, family and coworkers, it made the ease of Facebook much better for me and on my personal account all games and applications are blocked.  My old account is mainly used for playing games on and my new account is for interacting with my closest friends.  To create a second Facebook account, you will need a second email address since Facebook does not accept the same email address for two accounts. 

A problem I ran into started when both accounts had the same profile picture on it and it was beginning to really get confusing, for myself and my closest friends. A few weeks ago after updating my old Facebook profile by changing the profile name and picture, click here to view my new profile, it made things so much easier.  Instead of using my name, I use my blog name, Elizabeth's Miscellaneous Topics along with the blogs URL imprinted on the bottom of my profile picture.  Also for the new timeline feature I have created a logo with the name of my blog and the url to my blog.

To view my Facebook Photo Cover Timeline click here for an example.  What was done first is the logo was created using cooltext's free logo creation site.  Next using Gimp, a photo editor that comes with Linux, I opened the logo and resized it to 850x320.  Not all logos will look good after they are created using CoolText.com so you will have to probably select a size that works for you several times before it comes out right.
 
Now when playing games, such as Farmville and Hidden Chronicles, people see my blog name and business logo and it will always stick in their head.  At the same time I am interacting with people on my facebook friends list by playing games, giving my business a more personal touch without having to spam.

Because of Facebook's new policy when requesting friends in which you are not allowed to randomly request friends you may not know, you can click here to view my timeline profile add me to your friend list!  

Please help me out by liking this page

Some ways to advertise you business and website for free

Free Tip:  When viewing your google adsense account in Classic mode using Firefox/Mozilla, the page is blank.  This is because some Adblock Plus included with Firefox is blocking the scripts google uses for adsense.  Go to your Google Adsense account than on the Menu select, Tools --> Adblock Plus and disable on Google.com.

Occasionally, while doing a Google search for business you will run across a website that the business is listed on.  A few that comes to mind is YellowPages, AT&T Solutions and Yahoo Local Listing.  What is amazing is I stumbled across these sites by accident while searching for information about other businesses.  Once the information was discovered, so was the fact that the sites listing the company was in fact a great place to list my own Ideas About Starting A Home Based Business From Blogs, Elizabeth's Blogger Wikis and Elizabeth's Miscellaneous Topics blogsites.  These little things are important in earning visitors so that I can earn more money with my Google Adsense Account.

The moment I come across a site that allows me to list my own site for free, immediately, before it slips my mind, I will sign up and enter my own URLS.  Daily, because of doing this my blog receives more and more visitors.  It takes me probably an hour a day going through google searches before the jackpot is hit.  Than is the process of signing up, adding the information needed to obtain visitors to my site and submitting the URLs for approval.

How you can have a Facebook Groups to promote your blog, website and business!

"Free business website and blog advertisement tips using Facebook's group option.  Free Google Blogger Tip:  When creating Groups, Applications and other Facebook site promotional items, use your logo so that your readers and fans become familiar with it".

Approximately a year ago Facebook launched their option where you can create a group and add your friends to it.  The option can be profitably for a small business just starting out, especially since, when used in moderation, is a great way to freely advertise your business.  The downside, anybody can invite you to a group they created and use it to spam their business with but low and behold if you visit the Facebook Group Help Center, there is an explanation on how to leave that irritating group.  Later in this post I will explain how you can avoid receiving unwanted emails from these groups that you wish not to join and how you can select the groups that you would like to be notified when somebody posts to a favorable group that you created or joined.

Once you have created your group for your company and added the friends you wish to be members you want to now post to the group.  This is especially handy to use whenever a new post is created on your Google blog.  After a post is created all the members in your group will receive an email notifying them that the site you are promoting has been updated.  When doing this though, take into consideration that updating and posting to your group is going to cause you to lose your audience.  If posting excessively throughout the day make you think that you are drawing a large audience to your sight, you are wrong, it will only cause you to lose Facebook group members and friends.

Like myself, when I awaken in the morning to check my emails and see somebody added me to a useless group and than spammed it, the good news is, there is a way around that.  You can change the group settings in your Account Settings --> notifications --> Groups and select how you want to be notified via the groups. 

Step 1: account settings

Step 2: Notification

Step 3: Group Settings

Once you create your own private, join a group or are added to a group of interest, from there you have the option to setup how you want to be notified in the group individually.  As you can see from my settings above all notifications are disabled.  In my personal group, Ideas about starting a home based business from blogs, notifications are enabled.  This way people can add me to as many groups as they wish but notifying me of anything is useless.  Unfortunately, until Facebook finds a way for people to have the option to not be added to groups without their permission, you will have to go through and remove yourself from groups occasionally to quite often depending on the size of your Facebook friends list.

Advertising your blog with social networks - Adding share buttons to your posts

Adding a share button to your blog has to be one of the most important things needed when advertising your blog.  You can write ten posts a day but without a facebook share button, digg this or other social networking buttons your really not getting anywhere but maybe a lucky google search hit.

In past posts I mentioned different ways of advertising your blog through social networking that you will find useful but how you want to do it is even more important.  In blogger if you go to your layout and add a gadget, do a search for social network and there is a gadget that you can add to your blog that lists almost every single network that is available out there.

My favorite way is by integrating a comment gadget/widget in with my blog for comments.  Two that I have used with success are intense debate and disque.  When a user leaves a comment, they can share with their social network of their choice and are also able to leave a comment by connecting with facebook, blogger and a few others.

Facebook buttons and badges, like the ones you see in my side panels, are just as important as well.  The more you advertise through social networking, the better chances of being found by a reader doing a simple search in google or bing.

Make a youtube video from an image

Advertise your site for free on YouTube - Make money with YouTube by receiving more more visitors:

There are so many people using YouTube daily that the different possiblities to be able to receive more hits to your site is mind boggeling. Just think of all the people that use YouTube every single day to listen to music, and watch various types of videos. All of those YouTube users could be visiting your site.

What you need though is to find what people want, what is big right now. When you do a search in YouTube after punching the first two or three letters on your keyboard the drop down gives you suggestions. These suggestions are generated when many people are searching for the same thing. An example is, type in Michael Jackson and you will notice how many different search suggestions come up.

I have figured out a way to take an image and import a song to go with the image into a mpeg that can be uploaded to YouTube. Now you can of course use just an image, but this will only make a thirty-eight second video and those type of videos usually do not receive as many views. The ones that receive the most hits are the longer running ones, which is why you need some type of background sound. After testing one without sound and one with sound, I found that the silent one only received 17 views in a period of eight hours. So I re-created the video with a background MP3 and it received 17 views in a period of one hour.

Here is one that I just uploaded to advertise a blog post:


Note the title of the video, it is honest and it has two popular search terms, Michael Jackson Memorial and his song butterflies. The program handout isn't as a big search term from users, because most would not assume this would be a YouTube video, so you have to be creative with your video names as well. Also, you will see the annotation at the top. In the video description is where you put the URL to your blog and/or blog post. This makes an easy click that will redirect right to your site, you can also integrate your site URL into the video, which I will show you in a tutorial.

How to create a YouTube video from an image and MP3.

Free advertisement Hack

The hack part of the advertisement is actually legal. Using just the WidgetBox free membership, you can add it to a few other social networks. I added my blog archive type widget to my MySpace account and FaceBook account. Now when people look at my blog on MySpace they will see all of my blog posts.

I know that this widgetbox archive is something else to slow down my blog, but after doing a little test, I took it off for one day and my users went down, than I put it back up the next and my users went back up. Sorry people with the slower connection, it seems that more people have faster connections than people on dial-up these days.

As you can see, I added the WidgetBox YouTube widget to this blog, an advertisement for my YouTube Channel. It is only trial right now, but it would be well worth paying the $29.99 a year for pro membership.

When you are a pro member with WidgetBox, there are no advertisements of course, but that little YouTube widget is really neat. Last night I was playing around with the pro membership features, they give you that option under the trial membership although cannot publish it in their channel. As soon as I sign up as a pro member, people can click on my youtube videos and watch them in a new pop-up windows within my blog.

Being a pro member also lets you add other tabs to your widget, so you can run one widget with each of your blog posts, YouTube channel, twitter and a few other popular channels on the one widget. This lets you take all the other things you have on your blog and bulk it up into one widget which does help with space on your blog and speed.