We’re on a bit of a Facebook Fan page mission here at NikkiPilkington.com – it seems that all of a sudden we’re building Fan Pages for clients large and small!

We love to see what others are doing with their Fan Pages, and with this in mind we’ve created the Here’s My Fan Page Fan Page!

Join as a fan, and post details of your fan page so other fans can find it! We’ll spotlight selected pages, post some of the on our other Fan Pages, and generally try to help you out with the gaining of fans.

All we ask in return is that you forward details of this page to your friends and contacts, and encourage them to join!

So please, become a fan, post details of your Fan Page, and help to spread the word!

And the other Facebook fan page post? Keep checking in or subscribe to the Feedburner feed top right to be alerted to it when it is posted!

Thanks to Dan at eco friendly hosting company Light Being Creations for helping us to point our clients to the Solar Powered Directory.

The guiding principle for the Solar Powered Directory is to only list businesses, NGO’s, charities and organisations that show a dedication to making this world a better place through ethical & sustainable business practices, care for the environment and valuing people.

As well as accepting business listings, the directory accepts personal sites and articles, and offers you the chance to create your own META tags in order to help your listings.

It’s new, so we can’t judge just yet, but it’s free and only takes 2 minutes – why not submit your site now?

If you know of any other ‘green’ directories, please let us know in the comments below.

One of the things I hear most often when I talk to people about promoting their websites themselves, is that it ‘takes too much time’ and they ‘don’t know where to start’.

Well, while I can see where they’re coming from on the second point, the first one doesn’t ring true with me. It’s not about spending loads of time every day, it’s about doing SOMETHING every day and seeing the effort pile up and bring results. It’s about not giving in because you ‘don’t have the time’ and not putting things off because you’re ‘not sure how’.

Promoting your website can be done by you, it can be done a little every day and it doesn’t need to take up your time.

I’m challenging you right now to do 3 things every day to promote your website. That’s all – 3 little things that take up less than half an hour of your time.

Here are a few ideas to get you started – pick 3 and do them today!

• Post a blog – it doesn’t have to be 1000 words, just something you think people would be interested in. Make a comment about some news related to your industry, write about a new product or service, announce a new client, offer some tips and help (like this blog!) to help others – it shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes.
• Schedule some Tweets. Use Hootsuite or similar to schedule a few tweets throughout the day – links to your website, blog or services, but also relevant news, funny things you’ve found, thoughts you’ve had. It should take about 5 minutes and means you have a steady presence on Twitter throughout the day. Don’t forget to still check in and post in real time too though, don’t automate the lot!
• Add something to your Facebook Fan Page – a link to your site, a video you found on YouTube, a news item, a new discussion, or just ask a question in the status. Another 5 minute job, if that.
• Add a client testimonial – hopefully you’re always asking clients to say nice things about your work – instead of hoarding the testimonials to post all at once, add one every so often. After all, this also gives you something to talk about on your Facebook and Twitter profiles. Time: 5 minutes!
• Comment on a blog. Read a blog related to your industry and make a comment – you’ll get a link back to your site, and might even generate some discussion. The more you comment he more you will become known. Make your comments relevant and knowledgeable though, not just ‘Me too’ type posts. Time: 10 minutes for reading and commenting.
• Post on a business forum. Again, a great way to link back to your site, share knowledge, help people out, get help yourself, and get yourself known. Time: 10 minutes to read and post.
• Add yourself to a directory. Find a local business directory, or one related to your industry, and add your website. Some directories provide great backlinks, and some have good traffic. Time: 2 minutes.

There you have it, just a few things you can do off the top of my head – and that’s before we’ve started on SEO, landing pages, newsletters and articles!

What 3 things are YOU going to do to promote your website today? Do one right now by commenting below
photo credit: Robbert van der Steeg

We’re looking to run another series of interviews with people who are using Twitter for Business purposes. It’s very simple, all you have to do is answer a few questions, in as much detail as you like.

Obviously, the more details you give us, the more likely we are to publish your interview first, but we’re not turning anyone away.

Simply copy and paste the questions here into an email and send to nikki@nikkipilkington.com, then follow Nikki on Twitter to be alerted when your interview is published!

You can find more information here.

One of the more frequent questions we get asked here at NikkiPilkington.com is ‘Where can we submit our press releases for free?’

Usually we tell people to ‘Google’ for free press release sites, but it always makes us feel a bit mean, so the lovely Leigh has put together a list of free sites for you!

You can download the Free Press Release Sites PDF here

For a long time I used Google Analytics to provide webstats for me and for my clients – and it worked. Great stats, pretty graphs, nice figures – everything I needed.The problem I had was that I couldn’t get real time stats – I had to wait until the next day, by which time in some cases it was too late to react to surges in traffic.

I needed something that showed me what my visitors were doing and where they were coming from NOW, not yesterday!

And then I found GetClicky.

As they say about themselves:

Clicky is a web analyzer that works great with any web site, even Ajax and Flash sites. It was originally targeted towards smaller web sites and blogs because it tracks a high level of detail on every visitor, and these types of sites find this information very interesting.

It’s the high level of detail, combined with the fact that I can see what visitors are doing RIGHT NOW that makes GetClicky the perfect stats tool for me.

So what do you get?

The Dashboard:

The dashboard is an overview of the traffic to your site – telling you how mny visitors you’ve had (and showing you trends in a nifty little graph), how many actions those vistors have taken (eg where have they gone in your site), where your visitors have come from, what search phrases they have used and which pages they have visited.As an overview of your traffic, it’s very useful, but it’s in the nitty gritty that getClicky excels, and that’s what’s more exciting to me.

Visitors

The Visitors tab gies you a list of all your recent visitors, and tells you where they came to your site from.You’ll know what time they visited, what their IP address is, how many actions they took on your site, and if the referrer was a search engine, what search phrases they used.

This can be filtered in a number of ways and is very useful information.

Actions

I love the Actions tab as it shows me what each and every visitor has doen on my sites. I can see that one visitor has come to the site from an article that was Stumbled on Stumbleupon, and has not only read that article, but has clicked on the links in it to go to external sites, returned to my site and read some more articles, and even whether they have clicked on an email link to email me. By the time I receive the email I probably already know who they are and what they’ve been looking at and can tailor my reply accordingly – how cool is THAT?

Content

The content tab shows me which pages of my site are being visited, which are the entrance pages, exit pages, which of my files are being downloaded (in my main site, www.nikkipilkington.com, I have PDF versions of my internet marketing articles – this view tells me how many downloads they get every day) and more.

Links

Like most other traffic stats, this tells me where my visitors are coming from. But unlike most other traffic stats, it also shows me which links a visitor is clicking on to LEAVE my site.

This is great – I know whether links in my articles are being visited, recommendations are being followed, links to other sites I own are being clicked – even down to whether someoneclicks on an email link. I can also track visitors that leave to read something I have recommended and then come back! This to me is vital information and one of my favourite GetClicky features.

Searches

The searches tab shows me the latest search phrases I am being fond for on search engines – it’s always interesting to see the searches that bring people to my various sites – intended and unintentional

Spy

This is my favourite GetClicky tab of all.

I can see, in REAL TIME, visitors on my site. I can see which pages they are clicking on, which files they are downloading, external links they are following, and more.

It allows me to react to visitors almost instantly – if I can see that lots of people are on Using Twitter for Business part one on my Business on twitter site, I can quickly amend the page to add a link to other more recent articles I may have written, in order to drive traffic there. If I see that lots of people are clicking on an external link to someone else’s blog, I can make sure I let the blog writer know, and investigate any synergy we may have to exploit the large amounts of traffic.

The spy tab has a multitude of uses – but I wanr you, it’s very addictive

All in all I think GetClicky is as close to perfect as a web stats tool can get.

Pricing?

There is a free service, which doesn’t include the Spy tab, and if you sign up now you’ll get a free 21 day trial of the Premium service, which is what I use. It’s only $60 for the year and you can pay monthly – it’s well worth the investment to have your traffic stats NOW instead of tomorrow.

So, why not given it a go? Sign up now at Get Clicky and let me know how you get on!

We Recommend:

Tagverts

We’ve already gained a couple of customers because of our no cost tagvert, so that’s good enough for us to recommend it to you

It’s easy to sign up, costs nothing and although it doesn’t attract millions of visitors, it’s starting to make waves and now is a good time to get in there!

They’re also offering a FOC front page banner. so if you have a banner that you use elsewhere, you may as well take them up on it.

www.tagverts.co.uk

Don’t forget you can claim a free local listing at http://www.yelldirect.com/freelisting/home.html – this tends to work particularly well for Business to Consumer customers. But also works for B2B, albeit on a smaller basis.

You’ll notice a funky new button on the right hand side of this page, below the blurb about 299 Steps to Website Heaven – that’s a Digg button and we’d love it if you could add us to your Digg account.

Haven’t got a Digg account? Why on earth not? That was one of the 299 Steps to Website Heaven!

Thanks to all of you lovely readers who decide to Digg us, in addition to those of you that have Stumble-d Us, Delicious-ed us and Facebooked us!

FeelGr8.co.uk is a UK based article repository that claims to have over 5500 articles in it’s database.

It can’t hurt to put yours in there – and it’s free!

Free article submission