LunadaVistaDesign

Clear “How To” for Facebook Promotions

Pamela — Thu, 09 May 2013 00:31:11 +0000

If you are using social media to promote your business, you’ve certainly run or have considered running a Facebook Promotion or contest. There are a number of things to consider when running a contest… do you know the steps to take and the elements to include?

Read this and SCORE with your next Contest

This infographic created by the folks at ShortStack is the best “how-to” guide to Facebook promotions I’ve seen to date. I hope you’ll find it helpful. Comment to let me know!

Not a “do-it-yourselfer”?

Give us a call! We’d be happy to understand your goals and objectives and put one together for you.

–Pamela

She has creative ways to add value to my site…

Pamela — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 16:47:55 +0000

April 10, 2013

I have had the continuing pleasure of working with Pam Boboc of LundaVistaDesign as she revamps my four year old website. I love working with her because she has creative ways to add value to my site without my having to redo the whole thing. She very quickly turned my site into an e-commerce one enabling me to now sell classes and gift certificates right from the website.

Did I say a pleasure yet…seriously, she is so thorough, organized and knowledgeable, she has made a difficult task for me to accomplish a very simple one for me by hiring her to do the work!

I will continue to tell friends and business contacts that if they are interested in new web design, updating existing sites, SEO utilization strategies or going mobile, they need to contact her today!

Tastefully,

Chef Mary Ellen
http://personaltouchgourmet.net

Share and Share A LIKE

Pamela — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 19:52:40 +0000

Sharing is good in real life. Sharing on Facebook is good in your virtual life! It gets you more visibility, helps you grow your likes, and ultimately can contribute to helping you meet your social media goals.

Take a look at this infographic for 14 ways to get more shares from the content you post. Share your thoughts by commenting as you share this post with your friends and business associates who will benefit from it. And, call LunadaVistaDesign for more tips, advice, and strategies to support your social media marketing efforts.

LunadaVistaDesign, helping clients communicate effectively through websites, social media, direct e-mail, and face-to-face networking.

Texting … Love & Marketing

Pamela — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 18:04:04 +0000

Text me if you find this infographic helpful!

What to Do when your Email’s been Hacked

Pamela — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 00:41:21 +0000

When your email account is hacked and suddenly “you” are sending messages saying that you’re stranded in Peru, please send money, it’s a really horrible feeling.

Trying to figure out what to do can be a challenge since there is no flashing link saying, “Click here to speak with someone who can help you.” Your heart is beating like crazy and going through the knowledgebase files is just not going to happen.

Watch a quick video to learn the first 3 things to do, and then click to view step by step instructions for either Yahoo! or Hotmail.

Yahoo E-mail Hacked…What Do I Do?

Pamela — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 19:47:09 +0000

Read this document in it’s original location on Yahoo.com

What to check when securing an account that has recently been compromised

ID: SLN3516

Refers to: Yahoo! Account , Mail , Mail Classic

Description

How to review your account settings to ensure that your account is functioning properly following a possible compromise.

Resolution

First, if you suspect that your account has been compromised, you should change your password immediately. After you have changed your password, we recommend you review your account settings. Hackers sometimes change these fields, so you should check them to ensure the security of your account.

To review the forwarding address listed on your account:

Sign in to Yahoo! Mail.
Click the gear icon () in the upper-right corner of the window, and select Mail Options from the menu that appears. (In Mail Classic, select Options | Mail Options.)
Select the POP and Forwarding at the left.
See if there is an address in the field next to “Forward Yahoo! Mail to another email address” (in Mail Classic, “Forward your Yahoo! Mail”). If there is no address, you are finished — proceed to the next section. If an address is filled in there that you do not recognize, delete it.
Turn off forwarding by selecting the radio button next to “Access Yahoo! Mail via POP.” When you turn on POP, you automatically turn off forwarding.
If you have made any changes, click Save (or Save Changes in Mail Classic).

If you do not see a forwarding address set, then mail forwarding is not set up for your account. Mail forwarding may require a Mail Plus subscription in some countries.

To change the name in the “From” field and adjust the “Reply-to” address:

Sign in to Yahoo! Mail.
Click the gear icon () in the upper-right corner of the window, and select Mail Options from the menu that appears. (In Mail Classic, select Options | Mail Options.)
From the list on the left, select Mail Accounts or Accounts (depending on the version of Yahoo! Mail you are using).
Select Yahoo! Mail under Accounts.
In the “Sending Name” or “Your ‘From’ name” field, provide your name exactly as you’d like it to appear within your outgoing messages. You will need to write something in the name field.
If you’d like a different return address to be included, you can change this information at this time too. Just enter it in the “Reply-To” field, you may need to select Change reply-to address to bring up the ”Reply-to address” field depending on your version of Yahoo! Mail. If you leave this field blank, your Yahoo! Mail address is the return address in your outgoing messages.
Click Save (or Save Changes in Mail Classic).

Note: You have to write something in the “Name” field. If it is left blank, whatever was written there before will be restored, and your changes won’t be saved. The “From” name field can’t contain special characters such as the “@” symbol. Also, it isn’t possible to hide your email address when sending messages from a Yahoo! Mail account and the address in the “Reply-To” field can’t exceed 40 characters.

Please also note that any contacts to whom you sent mail prior to changing the “From” field may still have your address saved with the old name, or with any name of their choosing. This means that their replies to you may display whatever name their address book contains for you.

To review your security questions and alternate email address:

The alternate email address and security questions can be used to reset the password listed on your account. We recommend that you review your security questions to make sure that you recognize them. You can review your questions by following these steps:

Sign into your Account Information page.
Under “Sign-In and Security,” select Update password – reset info.

Your security questions will be displayed with the answers hidden for your protection. If you do not recognize the questions displayed, we recommend that you add new questions. To check your alternate email address:

Sign into your Account Information page.
Select Update your contact information.
Review the email addresses listed on your account to ensure that no suspicious addresses are listed.

You should make sure any alternate email address listed on the account belongs to you. If you have an alternate email address listed that is not verified, we strongly recommend that you verify your alternate email address so that you can easily recover your password in the future.

Hotmail Account Hacked…What Do I Do?

Pamela — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 19:40:58 +0000

Read this document in it’s original location as published by Microsoft

My Hotmail account has been hacked

Hotmail Help & How-to

If your account has been compromised—or hacked—it means that someone stole your password and might be using your account to access your personal information or send spam. To recover your account and prevent it from being hacked again, follow these steps.

Install an antivirus program on your computer

Most hackers get your password through malware (malicious software) that’s been installed on your computer without your knowledge (for example, when you download a new screen saver or toolbar). It’s important to clear your computer of viruses or malware before you change your password. That way, the hackers won’t get your new password.

After you install an antivirus program, set up the program to get updates and scan your computer on a regular basis. If you’re running Windows, you can download and install Microsoft Security Essentials for free.

Change your password

After you install an antivirus program, try to sign in to your account.

If you can still sign in to your account, you should change your password right away.
If you can’t change your password, try to reset your password.

Prevent your account from being hacked in the future

You can take the following actions to keep your account safer and make it easier to recover if it’s ever compromised again.

Create a strong password for your Hotmail account
Make sure your operating system has the latest updates
Never reply to email asking for your Hotmail password
Be careful signing in to your Hotmail account from public computers or unsecured wireless networks
Make your account easier to recover in the future
Change your security question
Reset your account settings

Since someone else had access to your account, we’ve cleared your account settings and removed any send-as addresses, email forwarding, auto-replies, and linked accounts. You’ll need to take the following steps to reset these options.

Reset sending/receiving mail, forwarding, and auto replies
Reset linked IDs
Reset reply-to addresses

Restore deleted email and contacts

As soon as we detected that you might be hacked, we started saving your deleted messages in a safe place. In the left pane of your Hotmail window, click the Deleted folder, scroll to the bottom of the window, and then click recover deleted messages.

Hotmail will recover as many messages as possible and put them in your Deleted folder. If you don’t see the deleted messages that you wanted, it means they’re permanently lost.

If some or all of your contacts have been deleted, you might be able to restore them. See Restore deleted contacts to your Microsoft account.

Note

Email deleted from children’s accounts can’t be restored. This way, parents can be confident that when they delete messages from their children’s accounts, they stay deleted.

Dealing with Difficult Clients and Succeeding!

Pamela — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 16:22:17 +0000

As we start the first full week of the new year it’s a great time to take a look at your client list and define strategies for how to provide the best services possible in an effective, efficient, and most of all profitable manner.

Difficult Can be Costly

Not every difficult client is an unprofitable one, but your most challenging customers can take more than their fair share of time and energy. Read this infographic for tips on how to maximize your time and profit with even the toughest clients.

Consider Your Customer List

Then take a moment to highlight your most challenging clients and write a SMART goal for each one. This strategic approach will clarify how you can work together in a way that benefits both of you. If you can not find a good strategy for a particular client, you may want to consider referring him or her to another source which may be a better match. Perpetuating an unpleasant and/or unprofitable partnership is not in either party’s best interest.

Let me know what you think using the comment form below.

Here’s to a wonderful new year!

Search Engine Optimization

Pamela — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 15:18:47 +0000

10 Basic SEO Tips to Get You Started

You know that being found on the Internet can be a challenge. You’ve heard that paid-for SEO can be very effective, yet very expensive. But did you know that there are some very basic things you can do to position your site for better search results?

Here are a few simple steps you can take to increase your search engine ranking. I found this on Entrepreneur.com and felt it was worth sharing. Take a look and feel free to comment and share below.

Really Basic: What is SEO?

Every business with a website should make search engine optimization — trying to get your site as high up as possible on Google and Bing search-results pages — a part of their growth strategy.
At its most basic, “SEO” means finding ways to increase your site’s appearance in Web visitors’ search results. This generally means more traffic to your site.

While intense SEO can involve complex site restructuring with a firm (or consultant) that specializes in this area, there are a few simple steps you can take yourself to increase your search engine ranking.
All it requires is a little effort, and some re-thinking of how you approach content on your site.

What You can Do Now, for Free!

Monitor where you stand ?You won’t know if your SEO efforts are working unless you monitor your search standings. MarketingVox suggests that you keep an eye on your page rank with tools like Alexa and the Googletoolbar
.It’s also important to check your referrer log regularly to track where your visitors are coming from and the search terms they’re using to find your site, according to PC World.
Keywords, keywords, keywords!? You should be conscious of placing appropriate keywords throughout every aspect of your site: your titles, content, URLs, and image names. Think about your keywords as search terms — how would someone looking for information on this topic search for it? The title tag and page header are the two most important spots to put keywords, PC World notes.
Beware: Putting ridiculous amounts of keywords on your site will get you labeled as a spammer, and search engine spiders are programmed to ignore sites guilty of “keyword-stuffing.” Be strategic in your keyword use.
Link back to yourself ?There is probably no more basic strategy for SEO than the integration of internal links into your site — it is an easy way to boost traffic to individual pages, SEO Consultsays. You should make it standard to link back to your archives frequently when creating new content. MarketingVox advises that you also make the anchor text search-engine-friendly: “The more relevant words point to a page, the more likely that page is to appear in search results when users run a query with those terms.
“As with all other SEO approaches, be sure your links are appropriate, and be careful not to cross the line into excessive linking — you don’t want your visitors to get annoyed.
Create a sitemap?Adding a site map — a page listing and linking to all the other major pages on your site — makes it easier for spiders to search your site. “The fewer clicks necessary to get to a page on your website, the better,” advises MarketingVox.
–> LVD NOTE: posting your sitemap to Google’s Webmaster Tools will help Google find your content more easily. If you use WordPress, there are several Google Site Map plugins you can use that will help you automate the process.
Search-friendly URLs ?Make your URLs more search-engine-friendly by naming them with clear keywords.SEO Consult explains: “For instance, it’s easy to understand what ‘www.puppyfun.co.uk/puppyhealth/vitamins’ would contain. It’s less easy to understand if the in-house classification system of the business is used, for example ‘www.puppyfun.co.uk/11789/s201.htm’.
A dynamic URL is similarly off-putting, even if it contains recognizable words: ‘www.puppyfun.co.uk/search/?s=”health”’.
Avoid Flash? Flash might look pretty, but it does nothing for your SEO. According to the Search Engine Journal, “Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem — you can’t link to a single page [...]. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.”"If you absolutely must have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold,” the post continues.
Image descriptions? Spiders can only search text, not text in your images — which is why you need to make the words associated with your images as descriptive as possible. Start with your image names: adding an “ALT” tag allows you to include a keyword-rich description for every image on your site. Perfect Optimization explains an easy way to do this.
The visible text around your images is valuable for SEO: MarketPosition suggests adding captions to all your pictures and being descriptive with the text in immediate physical proximity to your images.
Content? Your content needs to be fresh — updating regularly and often is crucial for increasing traffic.”The best sites for users, and consequently for search engines, are full of oft-updated, useful information about a given service, product, topic or discipline,” MarketingVox explains.One way to ensure that your site gets new content on a frequent basis is to integrate a blog. “Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless!” the Search Engine Journal suggests.
An executive blog is an excellent way to reach out to your clients, create more opportunities for internal and external linking, while giving your site a more personal voice.
Social media distribution? A CEO blog is just one element of social media distribution, an important SEO strategy according to SEO Consult. You should be distributing links to fresh content on your site across appropriate social networking platforms.
Whether displayed on your company’s account, or recommended, re-tweeted, and re-distributed by someone else, this strategy exponentially muliplies the number of places where visitors will view your links.
Link to others ?An easy way to direct more traffic to your site is by developing relationships with other sites.PC World suggests that you personally ask the webmasters of well-respected sites if they’ll include a link to your site on theirs. Be sure to return the favor — then everyone wins!Make certain that your partner has a good web-reputation, of course. MarketingVox warns against getting tied to a “link farm” whose bad SEO habits could bring you down.

Summarized from http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/217483

“Always produces a great product”

Pamela — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 03:36:06 +0000

“Pamela continues to work on my social marketing in all areas. She has done a great job with creative ideas and has an understanding of good marketing concepts. She is not afraid to tackle something she is unfamiliar with and always produces a great product. I highly recommend Pamela.”

–Lesley Siegel
Realtor, South Bay Home Styles & Lesley Siegel Real Estate