I have been actively working towards the promotion of Facebook Fan page for the last few months. And by now, I’ve been able to get 5000 plus quality fans for my Facebook page. Do you have a Facebook fan and want to take your fan base from two figures to four or even five figure; I can help you with that. In today’s post, I going to share 8 killer tips you should use to see lots of fans coming on your Facebook Page. But one thing I want to make sure that, it will require lots of hard work and determination from your end to see thousands of fans against your Facebook page in the next 6 months time.

1. Get your first 25 friends very quickly

So your first target will be getting your first 25 fans very quickly. You should ask your friends, relatives to be fan of your Facebook page as they will be the people who will be your early fans. And once you have 25 plus Facebook fans, use http://www.facebook.com/username to get a short and seo optimized URL for your Fan Page.

2. Show Facebook Page Widget on your Blog

Next step will be showing a widget for your Facebook page on your blog or website whichever you are running. You can think of showing Facebook fans widget in your blog sidebar or just after the post body. And It’s a good idea to write promotional content on your blog inviting your blog readers to be fan of your Facebook page.

3. Keep on Adding Friends

This is a very vital process. You should look at adding 10-15 friends daily on Facebook and once you have some friends, invite all of them to be fan of your Facebook page. With this, you should request your friends to invite their friends to be fan of your Facebook page.

4. Run Contests

Holding contests can really help you get some quick fans for your Facebook page. So its a good idea to create contests on your Facebook page and give away some prizes to the winners. You can create a list of things to do to be part of your contest like:

• Suggest this fan page to your profile and upload screenshot (ss) for the same
• Share this contest on your Facebook wall and upload ss for the same
• Write about this contest on your blog and share the url for that

5. Advertise on Facebook

Although I haven’t yet used Facebook advertising to get fans for my Facebook page, but you can get some quality fans for your Facebook page if you have the budget. There are lots of marketers actually using this method to increase their fan base and for lead generation purpose.

6. Email Signatures & Business Cards

I would recommend start sharing your Fan Page on all of your outgoing emails and your business cards. This way as well, you can stay in touch with other people whom you communicate with on Facebook.

7. Exchange Fans

Get in touch with other bloggers and website owners in your niche and offer them you are interested in exchanging Facebook fans invite with them. This way, you will be inviting your fans to be fan of their Facebook page and in response, they doing the same. But I would suggest you recommend only quality fan page to your fans only.

8. Customize Welcome Page

Create a customized welcome page for your fan the way I have in place for my SFM Fan Page. You have to use FBML (Facebook Markup Language) to create customized landing pages for your fan page. Generally most of HTML tags will work fine with FBML. So you should not have any problem in creating welcome landing page for your fan page.

These were 8 quality tips one should you to increase their Facebook Fan Base, do you have something more to add, please share in the comments section below.

Related osts:

• 13 Quick tips to increase fans for your Facebook page
• Help me reach 1000 Fans to my Facebook Page Before 2011
• 10 Tips to Create a Killer Facebook Fan Page

I recently made a big change to my SFM blog. What was this change?

I changed the URL structure from /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ to %/%postname%/. So I removed the year, month and day parameters from all of my blog post URL’s. Here is an example of my previous URL Structure:

http://www.scopeformoney.com/2008/04/27/top-5-ppccpc-advertising-programs/

And Now It becomes:

http://www.scopeformoney.com/top-5-ppccpc-advertising-programs

So what do you think is the better URL? There are some people who used to show their category as well, being a part of their URL. So in that case, their permanent URL Structure will become: /%category%/%postname%/. With this, I have smaller, meaningful, easy to remember, generic and SEO friendly URLs. I will not have any problem in case I switch to any other blogging platform in near future.

And how I did this SEO Friendly URL Migration?

There is a Permalinks migration Plugin available for WordPress blogs designed by Dean Lee. Best thing about this plugin is that, it will do SEO friendly and permanent redirect. This plugin use 301 redirect while migrating your old URLs to the new URLs format. So your posts will not lose any page rank, backlinks or rankings in the long run with this plugin.

With this URL format enabled, I will have the flexibility of republishing my blog posts quite easily as the post URL will remain the same even if I change the publishing date. But if you are thinking of republishing any of your old posts just after installing this URL migration plugin, wait for some days by the time Google stores all of your new URL’s into your database. And if you happen to publish any of your content just after migrating your URL’s, you will be storing your content into a new URL and the URL stored in search engines database will show 404 error.

Have you made your mind of switching to this URL format for your WordPress blogs, use this SEO friendly plugin. Drop me a comment if you have any doubts or face problems in installing this WordPress URL Migration Plugin from Dean Lee website.

Related posts:

1. 5 Plugins you must install in WordPress before Blogging
2. Optimizing WordPress blogs from Seo/User prospective
3. List of things to do after installing wordpress on your blog

There are millions of blogs on the internet and there are a lot of other blogs that are giving the same information as you – and may be in a better manner. So there is only one way to attract your readers and that is by making your blog more interesting. It is very difficult to survive in todays competitive blogging world if you do not have an interesting blog. The readers in todays world are spoiled for choice.

In this post I have discussed ways to make your blog more interesting and create a much more loyal readership base.

Make Blogs that Can Come to Use

Start a blog that will prove beneficial to your reader. It is not worth maintaining a blog if all your blog talks is about where you went for a vacation and why your cat got sick. In fact, these are such mundane things to write that even if world-wide know bloggers like Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki write about them – their readership will go down by 50%. This is why it is important that your blog should serve a purpose. This is a fundamental requirement for an interesting blog.

Don’t Cramp your blog

It is important that you do not make your blog about too many things. If you are writing a blog related to bicycles, then do not put in posts related to bikes and unicycles. Sometimes it is okay, but if you start introducing ambiguity into your blog then you will fail to get targeted readers and it become too confusing. Therefore you will end up losing reader interest. So know what your blog is about and stick to topics that are related to it.

Use Pictures

Don’t be lazy to add an image into every post you make. A good image really takes your post to another level and enhances your reader interest. Some images are very communicative and it can literally speak a thousand words. Intelligent, colorful pictures make a blog more attractive and fun to browse. Don’t forget this point if you want to make your blog interesting.

Be Interactive

Stop being a zombie author who simply accepts comments of their readers. Reply back to them, share your views on their comments and be interactive with your readers. A personal connect with your readers will help you establish a much more interesting and popular blog than many others – no matter how good content they may provide.

Related posts:

1. Tips for Writing Compelling Blog Content
2. Successful Affiliate Marketing Tips for your Blog

A GROWING number of U.S. companies are holding their annual shareholder meetings exclusively online in spite of shareholder concerns that virtual-only meetings may undermine board accountability and exacerbate plunging retail voting rates.

Although they are uncommon, online-only annual meetings are not new. As Broc Romanek at TheCorporateCounsel.net points out, it was nine years ago that Inforte became the first U.S. company to conduct its annual meeting solely online.

Since then, a handful of other companies have opted to hold their meeting proceedings online only, including Herman Miller, Inc. (NASDAQ:MLHR), ICU Medical, Incorporated (NASDAQ:ICUI), Adaptec, Inc. (NASDAQ:ADPT) and CIBER, Inc. (NYSE:CBR).

In 2009, Intel became the first company to enable live online voting at its annual meeting.

However, it wasnt until last year that shareholders were able to cast their votes and pose questions online during live meetings. Prior to that shareowners had to lodge their votes in advance of the meeting date. When Inforte did its online-only meeting in 2001, 97% of the shares were voted by fax before the meeting started.

Real-time voting offered by Broadridge and Wells Fargo

Intel Corp. (NASDAQ:INTC) became the first U.S. company to enable live shareowner voting online during its 2009 hybrid online and physical meeting. The semiconductor giant used a platform developed by Broadridge Financial Solutions Inc. (NYSE:BR) to validate shareowners and record their live votes.

Since then Broadridge itself and several smaller companies, including Warner Music Group Corp. (NYSE:WMG), and technology company Conexant Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CNXT), have used the Broadridge platform to hold virtual-only meetings.

And in the coming weeks several more companies are slated to replace their physical meetings with web-only ones. Medical technology company Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN), asset management company Artio Global Investors Inc. (NYSE:ART), electronic manufacturer Winland Electronics, Inc. (AMEX:WEX), and holding company PICO Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:PICO) all plan to go virtual-only this year.

Meanwhile, several other companies will be holding hybrid online and offline meetings with live Internet voting. They include electronics retailer Best Buy Co., Inc. (NYSE:BBY), utility American Water Works Co., Inc. (NYSE:AWK), and investment firm The Charles Schwab Corporation (NYSE:SCHW).

Interestingly, Schwab is the only company Ive seen that is not using Broadridge for its live voting. The company is using a system developed by the stock transfer division of Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC), which requires shareholders who hold their stock in Street Name to obtain a legal proxy from their broker and then fax or email it to the transfer agent (not the friendliest method, for sure).

Charles Schwab Corp. is using Wells Fargo for its 2010 virtual meeting.

Enough to lure retail investors back, or bigger drop coming?

The emergence of virtual annual meetings comes at a time when many U.S. companies have seen a sharp drop in retail shareowner voting rates, largely due to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) decision to allow companies to publish their annual meeting materials on the web instead of mailing printed copies to all shareholders.

The Notice & Access process (see prior articles), approved by the SEC in 2007, has resulted in a greater than 75% drop in voting by retail shareholders at meetings where it has been used. While many observers have argued that the change in the default delivery method has caused confusion among shareholders, my view is that retail investors dont go online to participate because the experience is tedious and insipid.

Some observers believe virtual annual meetings could help to engage more retail investors in the annual meeting process. Getting out the retail vote has become a major concern this year after the SEC approved a New York Stock Exchange rule barring brokerages from casting uninstructed client votes in director elections.

However, based on what Ive seen and experienced firsthand at virtual-only annual meetings, Im thoroughly unconvinced that live voting will make a meaningful difference beyond some initial interest in the novelty. Broadridge and the transfer agents have a poor track record of providing good online user experiences. And until directors and executives are willing to interact online with shareholders before, during and after the meetings, investors really dont have an incentive to get involved.

Indeed, there is a reasonable risk that virtual-only meetings could lead to fewer retail votes being cast. This is because shareowners who otherwise would vote in advance of the meeting date might now wait for the live meeting and then miss the opportunity to vote for any number of reasons, such as not being able to connect to the meeting during work hours, which typically is when meetings are held.

Its noteworthy that most of the companies opting for online-only meetings thus far have been fairly closely held by insiders and a handful of big institutional investors, who typically always vote their shares. There are few potential downsides to these companies if retail investors fail to vote.

A demo screen of Broadridge's virtual shareholder meeting interface.

Concerns raised over accountability

There is also a potential reputation risk to boards and executives if shareholders perceive that a company is moving to a virtual-only meeting to avoid being confronted by shareowners on important governance issues.

As reported by James McRitchie on CorpGov.net, Intel Corp. decided to cancel plans to hold a virtual-only annual meeting this year after shareholders filed a proposal urging a continuation of physical stockholder meetings. The proponents worry that eliminating the physical meeting will lead to a lack of accountability of the Board and top management if there is no physical meeting with in-person interaction. The company will now hold a hybrid online and physical meeting May 11.

The United States Proxy Exchange (USPX), a non-government organization that champions shareowner rights, plans to hold a conference later this year to discuss issues around virtual meetings.

In a news release following Intels decision, USPX said that while it believes virtual meetings can improve shareholder participation, it is concerned that the technology could hinder shareowners from exercising their rights and reduce meaningful interaction with directors, executives and other shareowners.

Bottom line

The debate around virtual-only meetings is only just getting started. Most of the companies moving to them are doing so because they dont see value in having a shareowner meeting at all if only a few people show up. Theyre out to do the bare minimum they can get away with. A few forward-thinking IROs and corporate secretaries, however, see virtual meetings as a way to involve more people in the governance process. Ultimately, though, its not the technology that will change things, but the willingness of directors and senior executives to get involved and muck it up with the unwashed shareholder masses.

There is good news for webmasters and bloggers who use Google webmaster tool to keep track of top search terms for their websites and blogs. Now they have access to more statistics around top search queries for their website with charts. For all top search terms, impressions, clickthrough and % clickthrough statistics are available.

What these terms used here for:

Impressions total number of impressions for that keyword during the selected period for your website

Clickthrough gives the total number of clicks on your website for that keyword in a selected period of time

% Clickthrough gives the total percentage of clicks that your website gets out of total impressions. Suppose for make money online keyword, my website gets 5,400 impressions in the last one month and get 140 clicks, so my blog clickthrough rate for make money online keyword is 3 percent (approx).

For each keyword, we will have impressions, clickthrough and clickthrough rate as per our website positions on Google with respective URLs. This data is really useful to make estimates about the kind of traffic we can get for a keyword according to our website position in search engine results. From these statistics, I came to a conclusion, most of the time; 70-80 percent of traffic for a keyword is controlled by top 3 listing in the absence of paid results.

So if your website is placed on 9 or 10 position for a keyword and getting 5-10 clicks per day only, this count can increase 10s of time or even more if you are able to bring your website in top 3 listings.

Before this update from Google, we have access to top 100 search queries only. But now we have access to 1000s of search queries.

Related posts:

1. Google webmaster tool benefits for webmasters
2. Ultimate Keyword Research Ranking tool from KeyRow
3. Google adwords Keywords suggestion Tool