Katie Hellmuth's blog

Facebook is committed to enhancing the social experience online, which is currently helping many local businesses. Therefore, they have teamed up with partner websites like Pandora, Yelp and Microsoft Docs to share what you are doing on those websites with your friends on Facebook. They call this "Instant Personalization". When Facebook rolled this out, they automatically included your account to be accepting of this, so have set your account to an "opt-in" mode.

Facebook explains that in order to share this information, you would need to click on a Like button on the partner website. However, as pointed out by Mashable, the tool is on by default, so if you don't click a "No Thanks" button, the information you transmitted over that partner site will be shared. 

If you want to opt out of or disable Instant Personalization, here's how:

In Facebook, go to Account (top right of your screen)

Click on Privacy Settings.

Click on Applications and Websites

Click on Instant Personalization, then click on Edit Settings box to the right of it.

Uncheck the "Allow" box you'll see on the next screen (pictured below).

Facebook points out that if your friends don't do this, they will be sharing information about you. In order to block and disable this, you must block the application of that website on Facebook.

The link will be on the application's business page on Facebook, and will look like this:

You will get this message: "You can prevent Yelp from getting any info about you. This will also prevent you from seeing Yelp if other people have it installed."

Click for Yelp's application

Click for Pandora's application

The ability to share goings-on on Facebook is fun, and it has helped several businesses get the word out. However, the decision is yours on how public you would like to be, so use this article as a tool should you decide to opt-out.

Melody Biringer is the founder of CRAVE, the guide that innovatively connects urban gals to the sassiest, gutsiest, most inspiring people they need to know in town.The idea for CRAVE came about in 2001, when a then 39-year-old, Melody Biringer realized how much she missed spending time with her girlfriends. As Melody and her girlfriends followed their various journeys through life, it was clear that their busy schedules allowed for little time together.

Melody wanted to reconnect and have fun. As a result she created the first CRAVEguide: CRAVE Seattle, The Urban Girl’s Manifesto, was published in 2002. Women from around the Sound bought copies and called their girlfriends for shopping and lunch expeditions. A movement was born.

CRAVEguides came to life in 2003. CRAVEparty rocked the Seattle social scene. Melody and her team of girlfriends designed a one-of-a-kind party just for urban-minded women, bringing together clothing boutiques, original jewelers and spa service providers for the ultimate girlfriend get-together. Hundreds attended that first party and thousands have attended CRAVE Parties since. In 2005, CRAVE expanded from Seattle and into more than 15 additional markets, delivering an excellent excuse for girlfriends to get together across the world.

Now prominent in US and international cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Vancouver, and Amsterdam, the CRAVE team is hard at work developing new CRAVEguides, bringing entreprenesses together, and spreading the word about women-owned businesses.

Check out all the CRAVE has to offer, and add a little splash to your day!

To get to know more of our members, visit our Entrepreneur Directory.

To become one of our members join today.

Perry Mateson is an artist, drawing on everything she can get her hands on. And she doesn't just draw - she draws tiny, intricate patterns on the fly. Perry realized her talent needed more of an outlet than just the Post-Its she'd doodle on while working her day job in the production departments for feature films including "The Taking of Pelham 123" and "Sorcerer's Apprentice". Perry produces her drawings on anything from tote bags to Converse shoes to bike helmets to leather jackets. She can do custom designs around a company's logo, and is currently exploring wallpaper and removable wall designs. You'll want to get your hands on Perry Mateson Designs while they are still new, because she's taking off quickly!

Visit www.perrymatesondesigns.com to see examples of her work. Buy a unique Perry Mateson Tote Bag right now.

To get to know more of our members, visit our Entrepreneur Directory.

To become one of our members, join today.

Google blogged about tax season as told in search. This means that the people analyzing all search results for social implication over at Google narrowed their focus down to just searches done around the term "tax", found all related searches, and noticed a trend, as they do every year. As the months inch close to tax season, the keyword searches that people conduct change and follow trends. For example, as we get closer to April 15, searches for tax filing extension increased. In January and February, when W2s are normally sent out, searches for W2 forms increased.

What does this mean for your website? This is especially important if you have a blog that coincides with your website or business. Not only can you be thinking of possible keywords for your industry, but you can be mindful of current events right now, and how those fit into what you write about. This approach to SEO falls into the creative writing approach we've talked about before. Search engines such as Google have gotten very fast at indexing new content on the web. A blog post you wrote this morning may show up later today or tomorrow in search engine results, thus improving your SEO quickly.

Think about current events as you are brainstorming content. What TV shows are on? On which celebrity or model did you see your product on, in which magazine and issue? What legal guidelines have just been passed and how does that effect your industry (especially good for financial planners, accounting, etc.)? Chances are you will write about these things anyway because they inspire you to action. Be the first to write about it, and you may earn high rankings because bigger websites haven't caught up yet. So take those few days of spiked traffic!

For example: when the Feist song came out for the Apple iPod commercial, I didn't know who the singer was. I did a search in Google, and found slim pickings. I wrote a blog post to identify the artist, using the search terms that I myself used when trying to find the artist's name. Note: I didn't know her name, so having that in the title wasn't as important for SEO because people weren't searching for Feist, they were searching for "1234 song" or "song in iPod nano commercial". Only later did I add the artists name into the title, as a way to grab clicks from the sea of search results. I was one of the few to write a blog post in this manner, and my traffic shot up for about 3 days, before the big boys like Yahoo's writers caught on. Plus, the searches were short lived, as more and more people learned Feist's name and the commercial stopped running. But, it was enough time to increase my earnings from my Amazon Affiliate program, as well as Google Ads.

Think about it! Timely search for SEO is very important. If you need brainstorming, we're here to help.

Thanks again to Sabina for digging around the online news sources for PR angles, and stumbled upon this Op-Art piece from the New York Times for freelancers (which can translate into small business owners and entrepreneurs). Ha! Our favorites:

• If you do you not use Twitter, you do not qualify as a freelancer and may not use this form
• The deductions you got for using different Twitter symbols, such as # and RT
• If you have health insurance, you do not qualify as a freelancer and may not use this form (health insurance as a hinderance to small business and entrepreneurs for taking the risk is a particular pet peeve of ours...this is obviously a sarcastic fake form)
• The popularity of food blogs

We hope you enjoy.

As you plan your SEO (search engine optimization) strategy, factor in the importance of copywriting and how your page titles will be written. The page titles are the blue underlined links that you see in search results at Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. They are what people read (or skim over in the blink of an eye) when evaluating which link in the search result that they want to click on.

If you've done your keyword research, you will have an idea of which keywords to target. That's the first step. The next step is looking at your website stats and in live search results to see how your website is ranking. If your website is ranking well for a specific term, but your traffic for that term is low, then you could have a problem with how your page title was written. Not a technical problem, but a creative copywriting problem.

Here is a breakdown of how to approach your page titles to increase your website traffic for a specific term. Even if you're hired an SEO team to do this work for you, you'll need to be aware of this angle as they try and build your traffic. If you've left your SEO work to the technical person who built your website, and they told you in an off-the-cuff way that they SEOed your website, then you really better read this article.

Yup, time for some creative writing with a fresh cup of coffee! And visit our Workshops schedule to see if we have any Private SEO Blitz Sessions available.

We are proud to feature Mark McDevitt, for his fantasic ability to create solid and well-thought out reels for business promotion and brand clarity: