For the time being at least, Facebook is the 800 pound gorilla of online social media outside of China.

Over 400 million users and growing,
most distributed in the US and Europe,
the average user spending a hefty 55 minutes per day on the site,
half of all users logging in per day,
the average user having 130 friends and memberships in 12 groups. Facebook now arguably drives more traffic than Google.

Of course, the majority of social interaction time no doubt is spent between a few close family members and friends (and increasingly so on iPhones), but if you want access to where people are, Facebook is the place.

Of course, you have to play the game according to the rules. No commercial pitches are allowed to interfere with social interaction. If they did, Facebook’s popularity would suffer.

But there are ways. On Facebook fan pages, commercial content is allowed. And fans see fan page status updates. If fans interact positively with fan pages, they are more likely to be or become loyal customers.

The content must ideally be fresh, frequent, and interesting to fans. Contests, videos, quick polls, open-ended questions, comment sections, and games or puzzles may add spice to engage and increase the viewer’s attention. Ever been to a family-style sit-down restaurant with paper place mats? See a crossword puzzle on the back for kids?

You can also cross-pollinate on (or link to and from) other social media sites like Twitter or blogs, forums, or whatever is most appropriate to your business. And although one can put autoresponder widgets on fan pages, there would have to be good reasons to divert the viewer’s attention away from where-they’re-at on Facebook to busy email in-boxes.

Specials and sales can be for Facebook fans only, so there is usually no need to redirect to emails for those reasons. Become an affiliate of different products and services that may be of use to your niche or target market so that products and services complement each other and your product(s), if any, in particular.

Google Analytics and Paypal is now available on Facebook with obvious benefit to businesses with fan pages; Facebook is planning to have its own conversion tracking software and see Webtrends Facebook Analytics.

OK, so maybe I finally have a profound grasp of the obvious. Now how do you accomplish the … obvious?

Think of it this way. First, keyword research. Think of keywords as the titles to your posts, offsite articles and videos, whatever. They can also be your headers and alt tags. Or rather, your keywords get worked into titles and headers that make sense to the reader.

Remember the first rule of rhetoric as taught by the ancient Roman orators: say one thing. Let each video, article, audio recording (like a Roman speech), even every comment say whatever can be put under a single umbrella topic.

Put another way, all the content of your article relates to one keyword or keyword phrase found in your title. The keyword is the umbrella and the all the content fits under it.

And every keyword fits under the umbrella of your site topic. Ideally your homepage site URL is at least representative of the umbrella, so every keyword is relevant to what your URL means in plain English (or whatever language your site is in).

Now it gets a little more complicated. But don’t make it too complicated. Its just that there’s a difference between onsite and offsite content. Onsite content is your stuff. Offsite content is like votes about your stuff. Or independent witnesses. Even if you write it.

Ideally, each page, post, audio, and video ON your site will act like an umbrella term for as many OFF-site pieces of content as possible. To illustrate in keyword terms, the titles of, say, five offsite articles or guest blog posts are subtopics of a single onsite page topic. Actually, the titles need not be subtopics, but should at least be directly relevant to the onsite keyword.

For your marketing purposes, the idea is for your offsite content to advertise your onsite content. Offsite stuff should point viewers to click to your site so that they have a chance to sign up or buy from you.

… Which introduces a complicating wrinkle: Anchor text. Anchor text is the “click here” words that link your offsite content with your relevant onsite content. Anchor texts are keywords, or that’s the way the search engines look at it. Anchor texts are like titles in that they convey a unifying, umbrella topic, notably the one topic of the onsite content to which the link points.

Anchor text in your offsite content should relate that offsite content with your onsite content. As a matter of fact, anchor text can ALSO relate one piece of onsite content (or one onsite page) with another piece of onsite content.

For example, see another post on this blog regarding how to write headlines–isn’t that relevant?–or another post on tips for choosing keywords.

I suppose the old principle of saying one thing was intended to maximize the potential to capture and hold the audience’s attention. Its easier to organize if you have a single guiding light or pole star.

Of course in the internet age, people type in searches looking for one thing. If they find your offsite or onsite content in their search, you have a better chance of capturing and holding your viewer’s attention if your content stays on topic.

P.S. Much of the above I owe to Niche Profit Classroom, with which I am affiliated.

OK, so there are some questions we may not be able to answer. But do you think color has an affect on how you feel?

Waves of visible light hit the retina in your eye. A chemical chain reaction sends a signal down the nerve to the brain. This signal has an effect on the brain that is more than just triggering an interpretation of the scene the eye sees. Hormones and moods are affected depending on visible color.

You may be thinking that individuals and cultures may differ in their reactions. I know a Chinese woman who lived through the Pol Pot genocide in Kampuchea in the late 1970s. She hates wearing black. Why? Because that was the preferred clothing color of her persecutors. In her case, the trauma triggered an intense emotional reaction and color associations in the brain. No black, thank you.

The odd thing is that studies show certain colors are associated with particular mood reactions in a wide spectrum of people.

If you are into online web design and copywriting, that’s good news. We all buy things from emotional motivations. From color therapy or chromotherapy, for example, we learn that:

1) Blue tends to stimulate relaxation, peace, a lower heart beat, and trust. It is also said to inspire creativity. Violet and green are similar.

2) Red has the opposite reaction. Red stimulates energy, action, a higher heart beat. Yellow is similar to red, but to a lesser extent. Pink, by contrast, has a tranquilizing effect.

3) Black and violet tend to suppress appetite; orange to stimulate it. Black also typically stimulates self-confidence.

Perry Belcher, for example, has found that a light blue background (outside the black-on-white text area) best increases conversions in website sales copy (clicks, sign ups, and sales). Similarly, a light gray background converts better than a white one, if you don’t want to use the superior light blue. (Bright or dark blue is too harsh.)

Like it or not, red headlines have been tested and convert best. Amazon’s orange “Add to Cart” button with a blue border has proven to convert to more clicks on that button than competing color schemes.

But I can’t help wondering if color schemes are tested uniquely in mono-cultural or “mono-demographic” markets whether some differences will not show up. Color symbolism in context, for example, may alter results. As always, split testing in time shows any statistically measurable difference.

But why not begin with what has proven to work best and see if you can improve on it?

If I may end with a word of caution: Play fair. Color schemes are better seen as helping to remove unnecessary hindrances to doing business than they are as tools to manipulate suckers. In the long haul, your business will do better using color with the former goal in mind than the latter. In the long haul, honesty is the best policy.

And of course, color does not force anyone to do anything; it is only a possible subtle influence. If you have anything to do with online copywriting and website design, try it.

As elsewhere, the talks include intriguing and promising illustrations of the ways social media have been used for good, whether by facilitating communication between family members or by enabling solutions to problems like earthquakes or excessive whaling.

Also introduced were ways social media use has been controlled (or attempted to be controlled). Schools and employers fine people for texting and iPhone use in an effort to keep people focused on task. Municipalities or states prohibit the use of portable devices used for social media (among other things) in an effort to decrease car accidents.

Some governments like China have restricted or attempted to restrict social media use in an effort to control news potentially embarrassing to the respective government or to cut off objectionable content like porn and drug traffic, or perhaps to stifle foreign competition or time-wasting entertainment.

Consensus opinion in the liberal west (as elsewhere) has probably been favorable on the whole toward the new internet-based social media boom, on balance probably for various good reasons. Vices have been brought to the light of day. Solutions (whether charitable or business-related) have been brought to the place where the need was. Education has taken place. Popular opinion galvanizes action.

What I would like to suggest is that there may be a downside to the social media boom which I have not seen discussed. I take my cue, oddly enough, from James Madison’s reaction to democracy and from the fact that social media in some ways mimics pure democracy.

Madison, with many of the influential founders of American republic, viewed democracy with deep suspicion. As the tyranny of the few could be fomented on the governed, so the democratic majority could become a vehicle for oppressing the minority. Sometimes, the majority is wrong.

Translating to social media, what might happen during bitter conflict at war where news of somebody’s purported treason got out to various social media outlets? Remember that “the first casualty of war is truth.” And declared war need not be the only dangerous situation. During time of social unrest, what might a social media majority foment upon those of a disfavored minority opinion?

Possibly on a more benign level, slander and libel may spread like a virus while the boring facts don’t even catch our attention. Social media can kill business rightly or wrongly as well as make it grow.

In popular social media, where is accountability when this becomes a problem? Everybody becomes a publisher and a broadcaster. Majority opinion rules. No wonder some individual sites (like forums) prohibit and monitor negative comment. No wonder some helpful backtracking has taken place on a popular level.

But there is a larger context driving my thoughts here. I have discussed this context in terms of an economic theory, social mood, and bear market depression before.

Here I will only reiterate that mass social mood drives bull and bear markets. In the forthcoming greater bear market (such is my view), prevailing negative emotions will negatively affect social media use, putting greater pressure than hitherto on questions of social media control and civil liberty.

So do other people. The question then arises how to organize these favorites or most useful sites. Social bookmarking sites exist to organize what people find interesting. The one doing the sharing tags the preferred site on a given social bookmarking site with a word or words which describe the topic or content.

The tags, and sometimes descriptions, serve as handles to organize the sites for future reference. So if a group of people like your content or if you use social bookmarking sites to refer to your content, traffic to your sites can increase. If the tags accurately represent your content, the traffic can be targeted to your content.

Unfortunately, there are no standards for making tags, which introduces certain kinds of problems, and bookmarking sites have been subject to spamming and collusion abuse. And friends in various instances can limit the exposure of a given site reference to a small or private group. But on the whole, search engines still see value in bookmarking as a means to provide searchers with the content they seek. And you can get back links to your site this way.

Here is a brief list of some of the social bookmarking sites with heavier traffic. The list is ordered more or less from the most to the least traffic as of the time of this writing–save for the last entry, which serves to download to a number of social bookmarking sites at once.

Digg – for social news, videos, and images
Technorati – for blog searches
Del.icio.us
Stumbleupon – The “stumble upon” button randomly selects content in a given topic.
Mixx
Slashdot
Propeller.com – news
Folkd
Citeulike – scholarly and academic articles
Diigo – personal data saved or work collaboratively
Sphinn – for internet marketing
Faves
Blinklist
Simpy
Connotea – “Free online reference management for all researchers, clinicians and scientists”
Blogmarks

Onlywire – downloads to multiple bookmarking sites at once. Free (with ads) or paid (no ads) versions available.

Useful as social bookmarking may be for getting back links to one’s site, one wonders if Facebook won’t dominate in many ways. In any case as usual, the best long term strategy is to provide and share content people are looking for.

Website promotion for now and in the foreseeable future must include online videos. Here’s a short list of sites that may help in your online video production.

1. YouTube. OK, you knew that, but Julie Perry (retiring) and Paul Colligan have a bunch of advice on how the maximize your YouTube footprint.

2. One of Perry and Colligan’s recommended sites for free YouTube background layouts is YTLayouts.

On YouTube itself, color scheme and custom design are found in “My Account,” then in “Edit Channel” and then the “Channel Design” area.

3. Jivox – upload own or modify existing canned video ads (customized for your keywords, on-site URL, etc.).

4. Createspace – from Amazon. Sign up is free. Send in 20 minute+ DVDs, and they will create the accompanying online hosting and packaging, but for the free version, they will take royalties of 50% or so, and you won’t get money until after 60 days from a given sale. Video streaming, downloads, or DVD forms of your product are available.

5. Youreeeka – If you want to set up pay per view. You can specify the viewing time period. There is a $99 annual fee. You keep 60% of sales, but receive pay only after 60 days from sales.

6. Livestream Procaster – free software that enables you to move between screen capture and person shots, but online ads will pop up at bottom of your screen (like on YouTube). To get no ads, the premium version is expensive.

7. Screer – web based screen recording software like Jing and screentoaster. Twitter friendly videos. Nothing to download. Works on MS PCs and Macs.

8. Tubemogul – Submit your videos for free to a variety of online video host sites like YouTube, Metcafe, Yahoo and so on. You can follow the stats on viewings.

9. Much of the above, I get from Dave Kaminski of Webvideo University. Dave recommends certain video editing software, camera and audio equipment, and a lot besides.

10. Slide Rocket – software tool for video and audio presentations. Free trial offer.

11. Camtasia – screen editing software. Or see the free version Camstudio without all the bells and whistles.

12. Niche Profit Classroom – Within this training program for internet and affiliate marketers are a series of recorded webinars, five of which are particularly geared toward online video production. One of these five, for example, is on creating sales videos. Another covers the nuts and bolts technical stuff the speaker uses in his own production.

Any additions you might suggest?

I find the outstanding appeal of Site Build It! (”SBI”) in three areas. (1) The ease of step-by-step website building software for the non-techie. Create your own website look and feel without knowing html code. (2) A software package that enables you to find the low-competition, money-making keywords in your niche. That alone is worth the price. (3) The wide range of user-friendly and automated services, including some traffic building, for the modest fee.

They teach a four-step process: “C” for create in-demand content, “T” for build traffic, “P” for presell site visitors (build relationships notably through email follow-ups and repeat site visits), and “M” for monetize.

Whether you have an existing business with an online presence or want to start an new one, whether you are new or seasoned, there is something in SBI that will probably turn your head. That’s why I have become one of their affiliates.

Any downsides? If you are a techie or prefer a particular thing not provided in SBI (a particular autoresponder or web hosting service, for example), you may want flexibility and options not provided. And of course the program will take time to master … and they do expect you to come up with your own content for web pages, articles, and emails (unless you outsource these). In short, it will take time and work.

But SBI even has a free trial to test-drive their program. And check out their video Action Guide.

That may seem simple. But think about it.

If we all did our top priority things first, daily, and avoided interruptions, we’d all be a lot more successful. In fact, most of us often don’t “get” what is of top priority.

Pagan continues that there are three pillars of making money (for information product business): The customer (or “leads”), conversion (meaning sales or sign-ups), and content.

With many leads and great content, but low conversion … you earn little money. With a great conversion rate, but few leads … you earn little money. With many leads and a great conversion rate, but a lousy product … well, your reputation will suffer and long term prospects for making money are low.

You need all three pillars. And these three pillars are your top priorities, according to Pagan, in ranking order: first customer leads, second conversion rate, and third product. If you don’t put the time and effort in your information product business according to these priorities, your business will be less than optimal.

Yes, there may be brief periods where you need to spend more time on, say, content for a new product, but normally you should have a set daily schedule that includes these three top priorities first and proportionately.

Pagan repeats his warning against letting distractions of lower priority tasks interrupt the pillars. Not least because distractions actually take a long period to recover from. Not least because mental focus increases efficiency. Stay in your mental “zone.”

I am not affiliated with Pagan’s limited-admission Ignition Coaching Club, but you may want to get on their waiting list.

The difficulties in finding the sweet spot keywords for business, for example, are multifarous.

Some keywords may be ambiguous or not specific enough, crossing over between different concepts, so that they words may attract the wrong kind of people … for the split second before they leave you site. Some keywords may attract lots of viewers who have no interest in buying anything related to your site or in giving you their email address.

But probably the most difficult problem is competition.

Most keywords have too many competing pages on the web for most of us to get noticed. All the good watering holes have already attracted the mass herd. Or too few people search for other keywords to make it worth our while to bother. Or we get the popular keyword phrase, but not in the popular order … or we miss one important word, as Market Samurai notes.

Of course, if there were only ten competing web pages for your keyword, but each of these ten pages were found on large, authoritative, well established sites with thousands of backlinks and pristine ranking … it could take years for your site to appear on the front page of a search. You could be virtually lost on the second page. A few iron clad competitors may be as hard to beat as a million moderate ones.

Of course, you may be the first to capitalize on a new, popular niche, but statistically speaking, that is a bit like winning the lottery.

A more probable road to success for the small business person is to find a less competitive sub-niche possibly related to a popular one, and longer and less competitive keywords possibly related to a popular niche. Either assume the low hanging fruit in the popular niches has been taken and reach for the higher fruit or find a little tree few have even noticed.

Would you like a list of proven niches to give you ideas? Check out
Proven Niche Markets, with which I am affiliated. This includes keywords for each niche. Or see a free list of business ideas for more.

Keywords for business are best when they qualify on four different parameters: relevance, traffic, competition, and “commerciality.” Or so notes Market Samurai.

The keywords one uses on one’s site and in one’s ads or backlinks and anchor texts should be relevant to one’s site and business goals.

The keywords should have sufficient traffic … but not too much competition for the given traffic (or one risks getting lost in the crowd). A lot of traffic alone is not a sufficient indicator of a useful keyword.

And the keywords should give some indication that the people using them have commercial intent. A percentage of the people using the keywords should buy something relevant to the keyword and your site. Or if your goal is lead capture, the keyword is best if an acceptable percentage of people doing a search of that keyword sign up. And so on.

I for one am enthusiastic about this tool. You can even keep a very useful version of the research tool free if you decide not to buy after the trial period. See Dojo for training videos.