Are you using the right Instagram filters ?

With more than 100 million users worldwide on both iOS and Android, Instagram’s success as a mobile platform is clear to see and now with its expanded web presence, there are now more opportunities than ever to show off your photography skills.
However, how many times do you take a photo and use a filter without really thinking about it? For many of us, we just slap on a filter because it just happens to make it look better, but what you mightn’t know is that each filter suits a certain types of image. Knowing which one to use, and what effect it will create, will go a long way to improving your photos.
Here is our guide showing you what filters are available and when you should be using them. We’ve also provided images to show you exactly what effect they have and the best places to use them.

AMARO

What it does: Adds more light to your image, but focuses it mostly towards the centre. The darker the photo, the more you will notice this effect.
Use When: You want to give your photo a somewhat aged appearance.

RISE

What it does: Gives images a nice glow and provides softer lighting on the subject.

Use When: You’re taking close-up shots of people.

HUDSON

What it does: Gives your images an icy look. The slight tint and altered lighting gives these images a colder feel.

Use When: You’re outdoors. It’s particularly effective when you’re taking photos of buildings or monuments.

 XPROII

What it does: Makes the colours in your image more vibrant, giving a warm appearance.
Use When: There are strong colours in your image, can be used both indoors and outdoors depending on the subject

SIERRA

What it does: Makes images appear softer, but unlike Rise, Sierra gives a faded look.

Use When: You want your nature and outdoor shots to appear calm and soothing

Lo-Fi

What it does: Adds rich colours and strong shadows to the image.

Use When: You want to show off what you’re eating.

Earlybird

What it does: Mostly faded and blurred colours, making an image appear older than it is.

Use When: If you want your image to look ‘cool’

SUTRO

What it does: Gives images a smoked look, with particular emphasis on purple and brown colours to achieve this effect.

Use When: You want to give images a creepier feel.

TOASTER

What it does: Gives the centre of your image a burnt look, making the image look aged.

Use When: You’re taking photos of a summer event, so nights out, BBQs, picnics, etc.

BRANNAN

What it does: Provides a greyish tint that gives images a darker, more metallic appearance.

Use When: Your image has strong shadows

INKWELL

What it does: Turns your image black and white.

Use When: Light and shadow are prominent in your image.

Hefe

What It Does: Similar to Lo-Fi, but the colours aren’t as dramatic.

Use When: Anywhere you want to enhance vibrant colours, but not to the same extent as Lo-Fi.

Valencia

What it does: Gives your image a faded quality, as if it was taken in the 1980s.

Use When: You want to give an image an antique feel.

Nashville

What it does: Gives your images a nice, warm feel. Also, includes a slightly pink tint to help achieve this effect.

Use When: You want to give your photos a nostalgic feel.

1977

What it does: As the title suggests, gives your image a brighter, faded look.

Use When: You want your image to look like it was taken in the 1970s.

Kelvin

What it does: Gives images a bright, vibrant feel and provides it with a radiant glow overall.

Use When: You want to give a photo a nice, warm feeling.

Free Advertising on Google

INTRODUCTORY

It may surprise some, but many small businesses new to inbound marketing are unaware that you can get some free advertising on Google through Google Places. And because Google is always looking to increase the value of its local search results -- as well as its Google Maps application -- the search engine giant has a simple way for you to provide them with that valuable information about your business, which it infuses it into its search engine results.

The benefit? Basically, a way to advertise your business on Google for free. And honestly, who doesn't love some free advertising? This not only helps your business get found through searches; it can also help you get more traffic, leads, and customers.

Consider this example: When you search for "hotels, Boston," the Boston Harbor Hotel ranks #1 in the Google Places search results. And to the right of the result, you can see all the information that the Boston Harbor Hotel has placed in its Google Places listing. They've included reviews, hotel information, and pictures of the hotel and its surrounding area. Not too shabby a setup, is it?

Are you ready to get some free advertising on Google? Let's get started.

What You Need to Get Your Free Google Places Advertisement

In order to set up your Google Places listing, you'll need the following information at hand:

• A description of your business
• Your phone number, address, and any other contact info you want to advertise
• A logo or image that represents your business (for example, some people use a picture of their office, store, or restaurant)
• A coupon or special offer you want to advertise (Google also lets you add a coupon for FREE if you want)

In your listing, you can include any information you think is relevant to your business and will attract people to your company. To set up a Google Place listing, follow these simple steps:

Step 1: Set Up Your Account

Visit http://www.google.com/places/. To set up your business on Google Places, click the 'Get Started Now' button below the text, “Get your business found on Google.”

Your Google Places account will be connected to your Google account. Here, you can enter the country and phone number. Keep in mind that you will need to connect this to a valid phone number, as it's important to have your business’ number in your Google Places listing. When people search for you, you'll want them to easily be able to call you, especially on mobile devices.

Once you input your phone number and country, Google will search to see if your listing already exists. Keep in mind that you can edit a current listing at any time to display new information about your business. If you don't yet have a listing, you can also create one from scratch.

Step 2: Fill in Your Information

If Google Places doesn’t identify any business information online for you, you can manually add it. After filling out your phone number, Google will prompt you to input more information. As you complete your information, Google will automatically generate what the Places advertisement will look like on the right, including the map image. Make sure you're satisfied with the appearance of your listing. Keep the description short and to the point, capturing the main concept of your business and product or service. You can add anything you want, including a coupon link for your business to attract more customers to your website.

Making sure you include a phone number and email address enables people who are interested in learning more about you to contact. The volume of people who will see this listing can be large, so make sure your contact information is both up to date and checked regularly for people inquiring about your business.

Step 3: Specify Where Your Services Are Provided

You can also set up whether or not your business provides services in a certain area or areas. This will allow your business to appear on map listings. When people search for a business similar to your listing, your business will appear on a map within a specified range.

You can then select which location(s) your services cover(s). The map will show you what

area will be covered by choosing this option:

 If you choose option #1 (“Distance from one location”), the map will show a general area that will be covered by your services. You can then choose what location will be the central point:

If you prefer to serve only certain cities or areas within a city, you can choose the second option and pick the areas you serve. This option can be helpful for companies that are only able to serve a certain area, such as a pizza delivery company, or in a very niche market, like a jet ski company on a beach.

Step 4: Indicate Your Hours of Operation

Another aspect of an effective Google Places advertisement is the hours your business operates. Often, when people are searching for your business, they're looking to see when you're open, and Google allows you to include this directly in your listing.

Step 5: Specify Payment Options

If you sell products or services directly to your customers, either online or in-store, you have the option to let customers know ahead of time what forms of payment you accept. Specify which payment options apply in this step.

Step 6: Include Engaging Visual Content

Do you have a video explaining what your business is all about? Maybe something people often associate with your brand name? Add it to your Google Place listing to make your offer even more eye-catching. People are much quicker to respond to visual content than text. In fact, according to 3M Corporation and Zabisco, 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text. With this in mind, marketers can benefit from visuals to attract more eyes to their listing and, thus, more traffic to their website. 

Step 7: Input Additional Information

You can include other information that may be vitally important to potential customers at your place of business or at your online retail site at the end of the listing set-up process. This information can range from details about the location if it's difficult to find, to information about the products and services your business provides. Use this as an opportunity to tell potential customers why your business is worth a second look. For example, if you're a cell phone vendor, and you have a surplus of the latest version of the iPhone when all other local businesses are sold out, let people know! You might just get more business than you think. 

Step 8: Validate Your Location

Finally, the first time you create a Google Places listing, you will need to validate your location. This helps Google avoid fake listings and advertisements. Google will send you a postcard with verification information and next steps on it. Although it may seem like a pain to wait 2-3 weeks before your listing can get verified and become live, it saves us all in the long run from a plethora of spam listings when we use Google Search to find places in the future. 

Are You Making These 20 Mistakes on Your Blog?

Some bloggers wonder why they have no one reading their articles. I sometimes wonder how some blogs are ever found in an ocean of over 200 million blogs.

Writing a blog is both a joy and frustration as you try and work out the ways to let readers on the world wide web discover you and let them know you exist.

So the challenge is that the writing is just the beginning and promoting your posts is the next step in driving readership and building a loyal following in your industry or niche.

So what are some of the common  mistakes that a lot of “newbie” and other bloggers slip into?

1. Poor Headline

You have only a few seconds to help the reader decide whether they want to read your post or not so a headline that compels and teases the visitor to your blog or who sees your headline on a Tweet is a must in driving readership. List posts such as “10 Ways To..” or The 5 Top …” are always effective. These might seem redundant and overused but the fact remains they work.

2. No Other Media      

In a media rich web that we have all become accustomed t0, maintaining attention and capturing interest requires a blog that mixes good images with other media such as video. Mix up your text posts with images, screen shots, graphs and online videos but remember to not make it too cluttered or overdo it.

3. No Bullet Points

The snack that you serve up to readers to consume needs to be easy to quickly scan, don’t make it hard to get your point across by making the post too text heavy and the important information you are trying to convey buried in a sea of words. Academics quite often slip into this mistake in a blog post as this goes against their essay writing paradigm and rules that have been ingrained over many years of study. You are writing for a web audience not for a professor.

4. No Sub Titles

This is important because these provide teasers to keep the reader willing to investigate the next part of your post. They are like mini headlines that continue to provide enticing morsels to keep them reading

5. Writing About The Wrong Topics

A lot of bloggers can go off topic by forgetting to write about the topics that readers want to hear about, this will continue to change and sometimes you will not notice. Reading other top blogs in your industry will keep you in tune with the heart  beat of your industry. Also keep an eye on what resonates with your readers by measuring the popularity of each post you write by the number of retweets and pageviews.

6. No Additional Reading Resources

Keep your readers on your blog by offering other post relevant to the topic either at the end or littered throughout the post as hyperlinks.

7. Not Promoting the Post on Twitter

So you have written the post and hit publish and expect readers to rush in from all over the world wide web to read it. The challenge is that your blog is only a solitary planet in a universe of galaxies. Promote and hustle your blog.. let everyone know you have arrived and continue you remind them

8. No Share Buttons

This is vital and making your readers cut and paste to an email, Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin to share your post with their friends and colleagues will limit your content being spread significantly. Make it easy with a prominent two click share button at the top of the post for the major platforms where your audience is hanging out.

9. Too Long

Two thousand word essays on a post can work but it is better to keep it around the 500-800 words to make sure you don’t make them click to some where else after getting half way through. If it is going to be long then bullet points and sub-titles become absolutely mandatory.

10. Too Short

I have turned up to blog posts that are a couple of paragraphs and wonder why I bothered. Seth Godin is maybe the only blogger that can pull this off. Chris Brogan tries to do this but quite often fails. Provide some substance.

11. Too Fluffy

“If you want fluff go and pat a bunny“. You  need to offer real solutions and answers to problems and a good blog needs to have substance…offer useful tips readers can take away and apply.

12. No “About” or “Bio” Tab

Blogs still are personal unless you are Huffington Post or Mashable. Readers want to know who you are and what you have done.. they want to identify with you and start to connect.

13. Missing Credibility Evidence

Readers are still impressed by numbers and evidence that you are intelligent and that what you write will be worthwhile. As your subscribers build start publishing the numbers so that people will realize that you have an audience so you are credible. Awards that you have won or books yo have written  all add to the “expert” mix that positions you as a thought leader.

14. No Integration to Other Social Media On-line Properties

Provide links to your other “online properties” such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn or other social networking sites that you are a member of. If you are a photgrapher blogger make it easy for people to subscribe to your Flickr account and encourage to have them subscribe and follow you there as well.

15. The Subscription by Email is Missing

Subscribing by email is till vital in a social web. Delivering your daily post into their email inbox is still one of the best ways to build a loyal readership base.

16. Subscribing by RSS has been Forgotten

Bloggers and readers will go and check their RSS readers such as Google Reader most days and often first thing in the morning to get the latest updates and news from other bloggers they have subscribed to. Make sure you are pushing your latest content out to those readers by having a “Subsrcibe by RSS” button.

17. You Don’t Update your Latest Post to your Blog’s Facebook “Page”

Facebook is important for bloggers not only in the “B2C” sectors but also for “B2B” industries. Posting your blog headline description and link to your news feed is vital. Facebook is where most of the planet is plugged into and making it easy for your ideas to spread on Facebook is now essential not optional.

18.  Your Comment System only allows Login via Email

Implementing a comment system that also provides the feature to post a comment by using Twitter or Facebook is increasingly important in a social web.

19. Categories Are Missing

Make it easy for people to read in the categories they want to read about about by using the feature that is available to most blogging platforms and is included as standard in the WordPress.

20. Popular Posts Feature is Not Visible

Popular post provide a guide for readers that turn up to your blog about what your blog is about and why readers are turning up. It can also provide additional page views as they click through.

I promise you if you just some of these you will be surprised by the increase in the traffic and the the interaction and engagement that results. Happy blogging

4 Reasons Why You MUST Convert Your Twitter Followers To Email Subscribers

I have liked Twitter for almost 2 years but have loved email marketing more lately.

The reason my love affair with email marketing runs so deep is simple; it consistently provides me with a steady and reliable flow of clicks, conversions and CASH.

In case the explanation above isn’t powerful enough, the rest of this post will highlight the main reasons why you MUST commit yourself to growing and cultivating your email list.

To put it simply; all eggs in one basket = potential disaster. You will note that I reference Twitter throughout this post. Do not be misled! This is my preferred social platform but the same applies to your mega popular facebook page, LinkedIn profile, Google+ circles, catch the drift?

So why is neglecting to convert your faithful followers into email subscribers a risk?

Well… Pause for a moment to consider this scary concept….

What would you do if your Twitter account was suspended or deleted?

Got you thinking now… right?

Now consider these facts:

Why You Need To Convert Followers To Subscribers?

1.  As more advertising is rolled out your message will undoubtedly get hijacked by your competitors.

2.  You have no equity in someone else's platform. Your email list is your hard currency.

3.  Waking up and finding out all your invested blood, sweat and tears developing your social media presence has been in vain - account has been compromised, terms of service has changed, vanished without trace etc

4.  Shiny object syndrome (aka spreading your time too thinly over various social media platforms).

Email Marketing To The Rescue !

Now you have seen the risks, let me show you how you can insure yourself against these:

1.  Your email will sit in their inbox until its read or deleted. Your message is less likely to get lost in the noise      of your recipients Twitter stream.

2.  Thankfully people guard their email addresses like highly trained ninja's. A new subscriber has taken the conscious decision to allow you in their inner circle. You now share their inbox with trusted businesses, work colleagues, friends and family members.

3.  A majority of your web site visitors won't purchase your product or service the first time. Capturing your potential new clients email address will give you the ability to forge further trust and authority.

4.  Low cost, efficient (easily test subject lines, links and content to maximize ROI) and measurable (click-through, open-rate, unsubscribe and sales) .

5.  Email is an amazing 57% more effective (kerching) for lead generation than social media.

How To Get More Email Subscribers ?

1.  Start with actually putting an email opt-in form on your pages (always helps:). I use Mailchimp as it's super easy to embed, customise and use.

2.  Produce great content. This way people will clamber to get on your list.

3.  Offer a great incentive (downloadable report, special pricing etc) for subscribing. The incentive must have some REAL value.

4.  The promise of future EXCLUSIVE subscriber only content.

5.  A friendly nudge or prompt (this is mine: I have some free email list building training to follow shortly ;);)) 

Nike becomes first UK company to have Twitter campaign banned

Nike becomes first UK company to have Twitter campaign banned

Let’s Be Honest, Size Matters

There’s a big white elephant in the room (or sometimes a tiny white elephant in the room) and that is size. You keep hearing people say that size doesn’t matter- in business, in social media, sometime in boxer briefs- but let’s call it like it is- it’s not really true. When you get to the debate of quantity vs. quality, the real answer is that both matter.

Anyone who purely says that size doesn’t matter is lying or gravely misinformed.

Typically, if you look at the people who say that size doesn’t matter, they usually fall into one of two categories

1- They have size. It is easy to patronize everyone else with the “size doesn’t matter speech” when you are in the “big” category.

2- They don’t have any size. On the other end of the spectrum, if you aren’t well endowed (in business or otherwise), you want to create a justification for being small and start believing your own delusions.

In social media, people say that size doesn’t matter- it is better to have a few loyal fans than 20,000 or more. I call bullshit. You want to have both. The big number, although perhaps not truly indicative of your following, establishes credibility that helps you secure partnerships, other followers and more. Of course, you want the quality fans too, but that doesn’t mean you should favor one over the other. Three loyal fans, unless they have a lot of influence (and money) are not the be-all-end-all to your business.

The same is true with business. Scale establishes credibility, which in turn helps you to secure better clients, vendor terms and relationships, service provider relationships and more. This doesn’t mean that you have to be the biggest company in your geographic region, but being teeny-tiny is going to have disadvantages, plain and simple.

And in other areas where you hear that the motion of the ocean is more important than the size of the boat, well that may be true, unless the boat is so small that you have no idea when it is in the harbor.

The point is that size does matter. You don’t have to be the biggest participant, but you have to have some critical mass to establish credibility in your selected domain.

10 Types of Social Proof to Turbo Charge Your Blog, Business and Brand

So you are in a new city, town or village and you are looking for somewhere to eat. You have walked past empty cafes and others that are busy and almost bursting at the seams with noisy diners.

Which one do you eat at?

You are browsing at a book store and you pick up a book with a catchy title and you check the flyer and you see the words “best seller” and more than 1 million copies sold! You also notice that it has been endorsed by other well known authors or celebrities.

Are you now more temped to buy it?

As you browse and search the web you find some blogs on the topic area of choice, one has no evidence of  how many readers subscribe or share but the other has retweet buttons with hundreds of tweets and dozens of Facebook shares.

Which blog is bookmarked first?

Why Social Proof  Matters

The reality is that most people are followers and providing social proof of popularity as provided by others can make people stop, engage and buy.

Social proof can make people comment on or “Like” your Facebook page. This again adds more social proof and encourages others to become engaged.

Newspapers include how many of its papers are read every day. Magazines list their subscriber count.

Why do they do that? …because it provides social proof and it draws in more readers and it sells more newspapers and magazines.

Movies that have won Oscars shout it out in their advertising and posters.

10 Types of Social Proof

So how do you incorporate social proof into your blog? Consider placing widgets and banners in your blog.

This includes:

1. Facebook Shares
2. Numbers of Blog or RSS subscribers
3. Facebook Likes or Fans
4. Number of ReTweets
5. Quantity of Email Subscribers
6. Awards or Rankings
7. Total of LinkedIn Shares
8. The Number of Google +1′s
9. The Number of Page views per Month
10. Twitter Follower Count

Remember numbers are persuasive and providing social proof and validating  your credentials publicly will help take your blog to the next level.

Has this worked for you? Look forward to hearing your stories.