If blogging does your head in and you wonder what the point of it all is, 299 Steps to Blogging Heaven will set you on the path to success.

• How many times a month do you need to blog?

• How do you get people to read them – and comment?

• What should you be writing about?

And what happens if you can’t write for toffee? Does that mean you should abandon all attempts to blog?

Whether you’re an accomplished blogger or a complete beginner, you’ll find lots of really useful tips in this great ebook.

Why am I giving away all my secrets? That’s easy – I love to share my expertise and I’m only one woman, I can’t possibly share everything I know with all the people who want to improve their online marketing on a one-to-one basis. That’s why I originally wrote 299 Steps to Website Heaven – which has now been downloaded by 11,000 people, and, although it’s out-of-date, requests are still coming in for it daily.

“Nikki has a very easy style of writing, but one which is both informative and clear to follow – and often fun!

Nikki speaks from experience and expertise and that comes through as she holds your hand and guides you through the minefield of topics to achieve Website Heaven.

An opportunity to have Nikki and her team working for you is not to be missed!”

Jackie Groundsell from 1230 The Women’s Company

As a keen blogger – I’ve learned the hard way and spent lots of time working my way around the various blogging tools that are available. I blog for clients and have got really good results. I’m always being asked how I get them – so I decided to put 299 Steps to Blogging Heaven together to answer all the questions.

So, if you part with your hard-earned cash (not much though) what will you get?

Lots of step by step guides, hints and tips to make your blog stand out from the crowd. You’ll find out:

• Plugins and additions to make life easier

• Time saving hints and tips

• The best way to write blogs

• How to word titles to get more clicks

• Ways of encouraging comments so your blog doesn’t look like the Marie Celeste

• and more!

PLUS from the moment you download your copy you’ll also have email access to me to ask questions – your own personal blog consultant!

If you’re still dithering – don’t, it’s only a tenner and, if you put even a few of the tips into action, you’ll get enough followers to leverage your lead generation activities.

Don’t worry if you haven’t blogged before – 299 Steps to Blogging Heaven guides you through starting, running and promoting a blog. It’s really straight forward – and puts you in control of promoting yourself and your business.

As they say – just do it – you won’t regret it!

I have a client with an almost finished Wordpress site that now needs some programming.

The client restores art and frames pictures. The programming is needed to create some sort of ‘engine’ that will walk a customer through the framing process so that they can choose and buy a frame.

The client has very specific needs and expectations, and after 5 people not understanding the process via email feels that he needs someone he can sit down with over a coffee and explain while drawing diagrams.

Some work has been done on this, but it may be easier to start from scratch on the framing engine.

If this sounds like something you could do, please drop me a line to nikki@nikkipilkington.com with your hourly rate. Remember this is a Wordpress site so you need to be familiar with Wordpress installs.

Please note that I will not take phone calls on this – all approaches to be email only please with an hourly rate. I will then put you in touch with the client.

Lots of the questions I get on Twitter and Facebook relate to blogging and SEO, and as I was typing up a quick and dirty guide to SEO Blogging for a client, I mentioned it to someone else and they asked for a copy. Then I mentioned it on Twitter and others asked. So I tidied it up a (little) bit, put it in PDF format and here it is

It covers:

• Thinking of what to write
• What not to blog
• How much should I write?
• How do I get people to comment?
• Should I tweet and facebook my blogs?
• Blogging for SEO – a quick and dirty guide
• Making sure Google knows about your blogs

It's not an advanced guide, it's not rocket science and hopefully it's not full of jargon.

I'm offering it free – no sign up, no cash, nothing – all I ask is that if you like it, you drop me a line in one of the many places you can find me, and then direct someone else to this page by either Tweeting about it, Facebooking it, mentioning it on Linked in, writing a blog post about it, or shouting on the High Street with a megaphone (special kudos to those of you who do the latter!).

Anyway, please click on the link to get 67 SEO Pointer for Blogging Beginners – a free guide

==

photo credit: lumaxart

Hope all the Dads are having a fab day; did anyone notice Google get in on the act with their Father's Day logo?

We're getting a few calls about this at the moment, so I thought I'd write a blog post about it. Bear with me because it is quite long.

There could be many reasons for you to want content removed from Google – it could be that Google has 'cached' a page on your site with the wrong info or prices, or that an old version of your website is still hanging around. It could be that something is written on another site about you that's untrue or defamatory, or it could be one of many other reasons.

Whataver the reason, there are two areas to this – is the content on a site you have control of or not? The answer to this dictates the steps you take.

How do I remove content from Google's cache that is to do with a site I own?

This is the easiest. The steps are simple.

1) Remove the pages or site that you no longer want to appear (or add a 'no-archive' meta tag or a 'no-index' tag.)

2) Open up a Google Webmaster Tools account if you don't have one already

3) Within Webmaster Tools follow the steps to 'verify' that you own the site (this is done by either uploading a file, or adding a META tag)

4) Navigate to 'Site Configuration' –> Crawler Access and you'll see a tab titled Remove URL

5) Click on 'New Removal Request', add the URL of the page or site and submit. Give a reason for removing, and submit again – the URL will now show as pending removal. It can take a while, but check back regularly and the content should be removed

If you don't own the content, it's a little trickier.

How do I remove content from Google's cache if it's on someone else's website?

1) In the first instance you will need to approach the owner of the website that houses the information and ask them to remove or block it with the no-archive tag as above. Without this being done, Google will not remove the URL upon your say so – otherwise we'd all be removing our competitors' websites form the index on a constant basis!

2) Visit the Google Public URL Removal Tool and request that the page is removed. You have to give a reason, and please note that THE PAGE HAS TO BE BLOCKED OR REMOVED FOR IT TO BE CONSIDERED. Google will not even attempt to remove something form their index that isn't blocked or removed.

What if I can't get the website owner to remove the content, but it's illegal?

Google say on this page:

If a site that appears in Google's search results contains content that you believe violates your legal rights, please contact the webmaster who is responsible for that content. Once the webmaster revises or removes the page, you can submit a request for Google to update its search results so that the old content does not appear.

If you cannot resolve the issue with the responsible webmaster, there are some cases in which Google may be able to remove the page from its search results. This is not the preferred means of addressing a problematic website, because the content will still exist on that website and be available for people to see. The site may also still appear in results from other search engines. Google processes web search removal requests based on applicable law.

You can then fill in a form to give them more information, but as they say:

Please note that this form is solely for legal concerns about web search results. We will not be able to respond to non-legal communications submitted through this form.

What if the content says bad things about me but I can't get it removed?

It's possible we can help. It's not cheap and it's hard work, but we may be able to help you restore your online reputation. Email nikki@nikkipilkington.com for more info and an informal chat.

(A guest blog from Claire Jarrett of Marketing by Web.)

Hey – Facebook ads look easy, right?  Just set them up, add a pretty picture and off we go.  Easy!

Wrong! Facebook ads are getting more competitive day by day.  Run your ads without paying attention to these areas, and your Cost Per Click will very rapidly spiral, and your ads will be disabled unless you're willing to pay the higher prices.  Get it right by paying attention to the following  10 areas:

1. Remember people are having a conversation on Facebook, not searching for a product or service.  Therefore you need to GET their attention.  Bear this in mind when creating your ad copy.  Grab attention fast with your ad copy by asking a question, or being as creative as possible.
    
2. DO NOT send people to one of your standard website landing pages.  Create a specific Facebook landing page that carries the message through from your advert.  Make sure you have an opt-in box on the page and don't try to sell from that page – just collect information at this stage.
    
3. Facebook ads do not work for every business.  Examples where they will NOT work are for medical related businesses such as dentists, chiropractors or similar areas.  They are also unlikely to work for finance related businesses such as banking (including loans, credit cards etc) and insurance.
    
4. Facebook ads work best for specific interest groups, such as vegetarians, cyclists or animals lovers.  They have also worked especially well for politicians in the US (don’t tell our UK politicians I told you that  though or else we will see a real influx on here! )
    
5. Your images MUST relate to the message.  Choose either bright images or black and white NOT pale colours.
    
6. Remember you will be targeting people by INTEREST.  If they wouldn't mention a topic by interest your Facebook campaign is unlikely to work.
    
7. Your ad is charged per click, but the cost per click depends on the Click Through Rate per thousand impressions.  A good CTR is actually extremely low by Google standards – 0.1% is actually high!
    
8. Conversion tracking is now up and running, and works well.  Install the conversion tracking code on your thank you page to track them.  You MUST be tracking conversions.  It's also worth tracking your conversion as a goal in Google Analytics.
    
9. Facebook ads suffer from ad fatigue – and quickly.  Add new ads in weekly AND new images to combat this.
    
10. Run reports to test what type of users your ads are being seen by – run Responder Profiles and Responder Demographics reports as a minimum, in addition to your conversion reports.

Here at NikkiPilkington.com we're going to be partnering with Claire to provide a great 2 for one service – with our Internet Marketing knowledge and her Facebook Ads knowledge you get two heads for the price of one anda great Facebook Ads service! If you'd like to be alerted when we've finialised our packages, please add yourself to the update list by subscribing below:

Although the main purpose of a Facebook fan page isn’t for SEO, there’s no point ignoring SEO completely, so it was nice to come across this article on SEO for your Facebook Fan page on the SaveDelete blog.

Please go and read it over there, but in the interests of this post being more than 5 lines, I’ve summarised the bullet points below.

• Use your brand name as your Fan Page name
• Select the best Facebook username for your fanpage
• Install static FBML and create additional tabs and boxes
• Use the ‘about’ text box for optimisation of your fanpage
• Use the ‘info’ tab for high density keywords and text
• Create fresh content regularly
• Attach YouTube videos
• Post direct links and relevant sites on your wall
• Include photos with captions and events with descriptions
• Get more inbound links to your fan page

While I think that people may go a little overboard on the ‘about’ and ‘info’ boxes, I agree with the rest of the advice, and think it’s a great article, so please do read it if you’re interested in using your Facebook fan page to enhance your SEO.

I have to be honest and say that I’ve not paid huge amounts of attention to Google Buzz until recently. I mean I’ve played with it and I like it, but a lack of time has meant I’ve not used it particularly well. It’s just too easy to feed in my Twitter stream and hope for the best. Lazy, huh?

So I decided that I’ll try harder with Buzz over the next few weeks, and work out how to use it in a way that’s different to blogging and different to Twitter – my instinct tells me it’s somewhere in the middle of the two, practice should help me to help my customers use it in an effective way.

Already some people are preferring Buzz to Twitter, so this Google Buzz button plugin is a great addition to a Wordpress blog.

Simply download the plugin and install (see here if you’re not sure about installing plugins – and if you’re still stuck, drop me a line as we may be able to help) to put a  Buzz button on your blog posts. The icon can appear at the top of the post, as we have it, or at the bottom. (There is an option for manual insertion if you know what to do with Wordpress templates, so theoretically you can have the icon appear anywhere you like).

So download the Google Buzz button for Wordpress plugin and give your readers another way to share your blog posts.

If you need help installing a Wordpress plugin, please see our Wordpress Plugin Installation Help service.

We’ve been adding Google Analytics to clients’ Facebook fan pages over the past couple of days, and they’re loving it!

It’s not difficult to do – all you need is:

• A Google Analytics account
• A Facebook Fanpage
• The FBML application
• Some generated code
• 10 minutes spare

There’s a fantastic guide to it here: How to add Google Analytics to your Fan Page

The basic premise is:

1) Add a new profile in Google Analytics

2) Use the Analytics Tracking code here to generate some code

3) Install the FMBL application on your fan page

4) Add the code generated in step 2 to the FBML page you want to track.

5) Check stats tomorrow!

The guide in the link above is great, and walks you through the process easily.

If, however, you’re having problems and can’t get it installed, then we’re offering a basic no frills installation in return for a donation. You can purchase it below. Why a donation? Because although it takes next to no time, we can’t offer it for free or we’d be inundated and have no time for ‘real’ work. This way, if Leigh spends 6 weeks adding Analytics code to Facebook pages, at least she’ll get paid for it! You can choose the amount you pay, so just pay what you think it’s worth.

.

I don’t often have guest blogs here on the NikkiPilkington.com blog, as I’ve usually got enough to say myself!

However, things have been a little hectic recently so today I’m delighted to share with you a guest blog from Dave Thackeray, a man who came into my life about 5 years ago on a long day in Spain that involved watermelon, golf and ball gowns.   If you haven’t checked out Dave’s blog, please do!

And of course, please have your say in the comments below!

Buzz – night, dears…..
Sharing. It’s what we’re all about these days. New? Hardly. But where we used to share without talking about sharing, we spend more time expressing our desire to share than we, well, share.

Such a shame. All that time spend on vapid activity rather than committing to action itself.

And just when the buzz about Twitter had started to bottom out, Twitter is all about Buzz.

Google Buzz. Can you hear the faint flutter of wings on prayers?

I’m a spectacularly open-minded kind of geek, despite what you might already think. I’m prepared to buzz around Buzz like a moth to a blazing bulb.

It wasn’t a big job to unwrap it. “Would you like to Buzz?” went the auto-invitation, echoing memories of sitting in doctors’ waiting rooms waiting for the klaxon to sound for a date with destiny.

First time, it was a hollow gesture. Click, clunk, nothing. Gmail as it was last month, last year. A premature proposition.

The second time was barely more intriguing, although by now the Buzz icon had implanted itself squarely betwixt Inbox and Sent Mail on signing into the Gmail interface.

“Share content, start conversations,” blurts Google. Wow – this is what we’ve all been waiting for! Why didn’t someone else figure this out? Why is it 2006 all over again?

There are legion anti-climactic moments in the life of a man. Growing a beard, fixing the toilet.

Buzz felt like waking up with stubble. You’d seen it before, thousands of times. In a cloak known as Twitter. Only Twitter isn’t so cumbersome. Twitter is HTML5 to Buzz’s Flash.

It feels all so… Google Wave. Lonely as a cloud. Like the UK servers after a hacked copy of Gotham Racing invaded a friend’s Playstation pre-release.

There are a few people hanging around. A few people kicking the tyres. Ooh, I can link something! Hey, look, I can type something and IT APPEARS ON MY SCREEN!

It’s a contentious perspective. Or is it? To me, Google has arrived way too late to the party.

While Facebook continues on its inexorable rise to becoming The Web, Google has dropped its HUD.

Wave flails, drowning. Steve Jobs makes a derisory private/public statement about the search titan. Microsoft, the soft and cuddly bear of tech so often these days, prepares to release Windows Mobile 7, which could crush the phone fortunes of both these companies.

There’s something distinctly derogatory about the moniker flying around for Buzz users. Buzzards, buzzing off.

Mashable claims 50% of Twitter users dislike Buzz or have ‘already done with it’. Most, I suspect, haven’t even bothered to switch it on…

It’s been quite a month for undersights. First, angry Jobs unleashes the iPad in a less than sanitary climate. Its industrial design has great bodyform. Now there’s Buzzards.

And in the fastest-moving geek scene ever known, Buzz still feels so… kneejerk.

I’ll caveat everything I just said. It’s early days. Buzz could be amazing.

But I think someone just switched off the lights.

===

Dave Thackeray fuels ordinary people with extraordinary ideas. He’s a pen for hire and a higher pen you’ll never find – Dave’s 190cm in his stockinged feet. Join him at http://www.davethackeray.com on his quest to write a blog post of note every day until 2011.