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Hey everybody Mike Linville here from Black Dog Education with another
installment of Office Hours. Now today's question comes from Jacob over on YouTube and he had
a question about his website. So Jacob's got this website called the GreenAlternative.com
or green -- alternative.com and just had it redesigned a couple months ago and was having
some questions about Facebook and the interactivity so the first thing we did was took a look
at the website ran it through Hubspot's Website Grader and he was already pulling down 83
out of 100 which is actually really good. This goes to show you the power of what WordPress
and what a couple months can do for you in terms of having a marketable websites. We
took a look at the source code, basically what we could take a look at saw that he had
a couple of good plug-ins in then. He's got All In One SEO Pack he's got his Facebook
opengraph so he's got that plugged in there. Those things seem to be working, so he's got
all the are there you know. It's definitely a great starter website. So to get back to
his questions you know the first question that Jacob had was, I'm not sure if the like
button on my pages is working. We went out and took a look at his website and you know
we did indeed click the like button it changed showed my picture. Said I liked it and so
on and so forth. So the like button is in fact working on the site, Jacob. The second
issue was Jacob didn't have the ability to add friends, suggest the site to friends.
So being able to suggest the site to friends is a function set aside for administrators
of a page. So the first thing you have to do to invite people over to your page is to
become an administrator over to that page and do it from that place. Once you go to
that page, and you're an administrator for that page, over in the right-hand side in
the top right hand corner you're going to see a bunch of administrative actions. Things
like promote this page with an ad, view your insights, you can browse Facebook as that
page now which is a relatively new functionality. And one of the other options there is to suggest
to your friends. Make sure Jacob, that you're an administrator when you go to that page
once you're an admin you should be able to and get right in there and suggest that page
to your friends. As I was reading through the rest of Jacob's post it seemed to me you
know the real question or the real thought behind the e-mail itself was just one of traffic.
How long does it take to get traffic, or you know basically the idea was I'm not really
seeing a whole lot of people sharing my stuff so the question then is you know if we're
not getting a whole lot of user engaged. You're not getting a whole lot of people commenting
on your posts, or you're not getting a whole bunch of people sharing, or retreating posting
stuff on Facebook or liking your pages there's really two questions we need to ask. The first
question is are you getting traffic and you know because there's two options. There's
one where the site is just dark, you're not getting any traffic at all and that could
be why you're not getting any kind of engagement. The second option is maybe you are getting
a lot of traffic but for some reason those users are having a hard time with your with
your site and we really can't answer the second question until we get to the first. So the
first thing we do is go ahead and put some analytics on their. Jacob, for your site what
I would do is I would make a couple of suggestions and they're all going to be centered around,
around analytics and kind of more of building the thing up so the first thing I would do
is you got social media sharing buttons on your site but I noticed they're really small
and are just listed at the bottom your post so what I'd probably do is to make those bigger
maybe come up with another way to somehow call more to attention to those. Maybe put
them in a box or do something else and make them appear a little larger or take up a little
of the page because your posts are long. They're good sized blog posts and if you have a really
tiny Facebook button on there, it doesn't really stick out, it doesn't pop but if you
kind of make that a little bit larger that might bring a little more get people's eyes
to look at it. The other thing I would do also is I'd go ahead and place a button at
the top of the page as well. Or if you're going to sociable plug or something like that,
that's going to scroll down the side of the page, do that but you want to make sure you
get a little more visibility to those social media plug-ins. Next thing that I would do
is install Google analytics. Took a look at the source code like I'd said. I didn't see
any analytics code on there so you know absolutely positively take advantage of Google and tools
they offer. Google analytics is going to tell you about your traffic how much, when, where,
who they are, where they're coming from, all that other good stuff so you have to get that.
Get that started today. The second up for with that same Google login is Google Webmaster
tools and what that Google Webmaster tool does is it allows you to submit a sitemap
to Google. So that way instead of having them come by and crawl through the site to try
to find the links, what you'll do is you'll have your website create those site maps automatically
and with the Web Master's tools tells Google, hey this is where my sitemap is come by and
check it occasionally and you tell it how often to check it. And so every time you put
a new post in there Google, Yahoo, Bing they're all going to know about it. So that would
be my suggestion. And then the last thing is that's going to tell you about the type
of traffic my guess is because it's a new site because of either the level of readership
on your YouTube channel level of readership on Facebook page my guess is it's just really
a matter of you not necessarily having a lot of traffic, not an engagement issue so then
you know my last suggestion would be what are you doing for marketing? Just because
you build a website you have really good content on there doesn't mean somebody is necessarily
going to find it or like it or love it. You have to be a little proactive about that and
get the information out there so my question is what are you doing to market the site?
Who are you talking to you know who would be who would be interested in this type of
information where are you going out to share this information things of that nature so
again I hope this helps you know if you have any more questions please make sure to submit
it to us you can either e-mail it over to us at officehours@blackdogeducation.com, you
can go ahead and throw those up on our Facebook wall and we can go ahead and pull those out,
you can send them over to us as a tweet, if you do that make sure you use the #officehrs
so that way we can pull those out. Again this is Mike Linville from Black Dog Education.
I hope this was valuable, and we'll talk to you soon, thanks.\
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