Where to find photos for your pet business marketing materials

Whether you are blogging, or writing newsletters or articles for your pet business, it's always good practice to include a good photo to go along with your writing. Studies show that photos engage readers more effectively, and get more attention in the newsfeed of Facebook than other posts.

The best photos you can use are personal ones, ones of your own pets - dog, cats, ferrets, hamsters and more. I always have a camera with me, whether it's my cell phone, my point and shoot or my digital SLR to be sure that I can always capture a good shot of my dogs and cats. I have a library of 1000's of photos I've taken over the years that I can pull from anytime.

But if you don't have the right personal photo, several sites offer free to use photos listed under the Creative Commons Public License. Remember it's very important that any photos, illustrations, or images you use fall under this license, otherwise you are not legally allowed to use them and can risk facing legal action.

Here are my favorite sites to find photos that fall under the CCPL:

EveryStockPhoto.com - a search engine for free photos, that come from many sources and are license-specific. You can view a photo's license by clicking on the license icon, near the photo.

Stock.xchng - owned by Getty Images this site is one of my favorites for free stock images. Make sure you check the license under each photo for instructions on reciprocal linking requirements if required.

FreeFoto - another free image site under CCPL, but with less photos. A search for animals returned about 2000 images. But could potentially be a good resource.

And if you can't find just what you are looking for with these free sites, you can always check IStockPhoto.com for very inexpensive professional looking images. They have a vast library of a wide variety of photos, illustrations, images and more that I've used for years for my clients.

Photo credits: Camera and Johann and Gracie Google

Link building: the good and the bad.

Some believe that large efforts in link building with their website is very helpful in improving your search results on Google. If you've ever been contacted by an SEO company, that is one of the things many of them tout as the way to get you #1.

I've never subscribed to the notion of large link building strategies as a way to fool Google and improve search results. Why try to game a system?

According to Google, this type of 'gaming the system' linking building is not a helpful tactic for increasing SEO, and may now be very harmful.

Google's Penguin update has been operating now for about a month. One of the most significant algorithm changes in the update is the de-emmphasis on links that serve no real purpose or are not relevant. Google is putting more emphasis on quality content and quality links, real links that come from respected sites, and not from low quality sites, just for the sake of a link.

There are two parts to the Penguin update that may or may not effect your website.

• The first one is site-wide links. These types of links are usually found in the footer, header, or side bar (of a blog) and appear on every page of the website. They are attempts at SEO improvement, but many times just appear as a long list of random links with key words.
• The second part are low quality links, or links to pages with no real value, including websites built just for links or links purchased or connected from low quality websites or networks.

According to Matt Cutts, "we've done a good job of ignoring boilerplate, site wide links. In the last few months, we've been trying to make the point that not only is link buying like that not doing any good, we're turning the dial up to let people know that certain link spam techniques are a waste of money."

If your website has been effected by the Google Penguin update because of link building tactics there is a way to recover.

• The first step is to remove all site-wide and low quality links from your website and/or blog.
• The second step is to not purchase links from companies that sell them just for linking sake. Don't trade or drop links just to get a link, and delete these links if you can.
• The third step is to concentrate instead on building relationships with trusted, high quality sites, other companies, bloggers and media, that will take an interest in your content and share with their audience.

And those spam comments you get on your blogs with links? We delete them, of course, and hope you do too. These are perfect examples of low quality links, especially if those comments are not relevant to your content. Hopefully with this update, link farms that sell these services to companies will fade away as folks see that links won't help and can hurt a website. And, those somewhat reputable companies that aren't technically spamming, but just leaving semi-thoughtful comments with the ultimate goal of getting a link back will fade away, as well. We can dream!

The most important step is to be true, sincere and honest in your website development, appearance, and at the same time provide valuable, engaging and link worthy content on your website and on your blog. With that, you will attract attention from higher traffic, quality and respected sites that will be interested in linking to your site and, with this new Google update, improve your SEO, as well.

Additional reading and resources:

Matt Cutts On Penalties Vs. Algorithm Changes, A Disavow-This-Link Tool & More
OpenSiteExplorer.org - tool for finding inbound links to your site.
Matt Cutts: Another step to reward high-quality sites

Free tools to help you monitor your pet business website uptime and downtime.

When your website goes down, it can really affect your business. That's why I have monitoring services on all of my websites.

There are free services you can use to notify you when your website goes down and when it goes back up. I highly recommend them so that you don't have to worry, monitor yourself, and know the instant your site is down, so that you can investigate.

Here are three free services you can use to monitor your pet business website:

SiteUptime.com - this is the one I use on my main site. One monitored site is free and you can pay a few dollars a month for multiple sites.

Ding It's Up - another free site that monitors sites. I haven't tried this one, but will be I will try out with one of my sites in the near future. With this service you can get alerts via email, text and Twitter.

Monitor.us - another free service for website monitoring, not only uptime/downtime, but application monitoring as well.

We highly recommend you use one of these, and save you time and worry.

The power of Pinterest for pet businesses.

You may have heard about Pinterest, and you may have signed up and are actively participating. If so, that's great!

If not, you will want to look into Pinterest as a way to boost your brand and traffic to your site, as well as attract attention for your pet business products and services.

At first I wasn't sold on Pinterest because of their early terms of service that stated anything that you pinned, they now owned and could sell. The terms also stated that all the liability of pinning content was on the user.

In the beginning their 'pin etiquette' actually encouraged users to 'avoid self promotion' because they state, "Pinterest is designed to curate and share things you love. If there is a photo or project you're proud of, pin away! However, try not to use Pinterest purely as a tool for self-promotion." That statement has also been removed from their 'pin etiquette.'

The old terms, along with Pinterest encouraging users to pin others content rather than their own created a major conflict. These issues have now been revised in their new terms of services released on March 23, 2012.

These early terms statements discouraged me from experimenting fully with Pinterest in it's early days. However since the change in these terms, I've reignited my test Pinterest account that I originally created for one of my other businesses, JohannTheDog.

So what is Pinterest?

Pinterest defines their mission as, "to connect everyone in the world through the 'things' they find interesting. We think that a favorite book, toy, or recipe can reveal a common link between two people. With millions of new pins added every week, Pinterest is connecting people all over the world based on shared tastes and interests."

Pinterest has been rapidly gaining users over the past year actually surpassing Google+ and Linkedin. Here are the current number of users utilizing the most popular social media tools (at publication date):

1. Facebook: 7 billion
2. Twitter: 182 million
3. Pinterest: 104 million
4. LinkedIn: 86 million
5. Tagged: 72 million
6. Google+: 61 million

Since the change in terms of service, my experiment has been with pinning my own content and sharing a wide variety of blog posts for Johann The Dog and Raise A Green Dog, as well as my Squidoo lenses.

What I've seen has been pretty amazing. Here is an example of one experiment:

While I was not actively participating on Pinterest someone pinned my blog post on Raise A Green Dog that outlines a recipe for Homemade Frosty Paws. The pinning and repinning of that blog post drove a good amount of traffic to the Raise A Green Dog blog; increasing my visits by about 100%. So when I actively engaged with Pinterest after their terms of service update, I decided to create a 'Dog Yums' board and pin that same blog post along with some other recipes. Within just a few days it went semi viral, increasing traffic to my blog by well over 4000%.

So what's key in getting attention from folks on Pinterest and getting your pins, repinned (or reposted)? First, I think you need to understand the audience on Pinterest, so let's explore that.

An infographic from Mashable, outlines the current demographic audience on Pinterest, stating:

• 87% of Pinterest users are female, 23% male
• Primary ages range from 25-54 with approximately 23-25% for each of the three segment breakdowns of those three age ranges.
• Two primary income levels utilize Pinterest - $25-49,000 and $50-74,000

See any similarities? Yep, it's primarily the same demographic for pet product and service purchasers, which makes it a super audience for pet business marketing.

With that in mind, here are my top thoughts on what pins are most likely to attract attention for your pet business:

• Extremely well written and thoroughly researched original content, whether written on your blog, or your website.
• An article, blog post or similar that's unexpected, unique and not a copy of the same old, same old information out there on the web currently.

These items mean more work, but also can reap more rewards. More advice is to stick within the realms of your brand, staying true to your brand; and write about what you know.

Here are a few additional articles that may be of interest:

• Seven useful tools that help you manage, view participation and more with Pinterest
• How larger corporations have initiated marketing campaigns on Pinterest.
• Source for Pinterest tools, including a pin button for your website, blog post and a pin button for your browser tool bar to make pinning easy.

Our new favorite blog traffic builder!

We've been testing out a few traffic building scenarios for a few of the blogs we manage recently and found a couple of amazing tricks we wanted to pass on to you.

First we signed up for Pinterest, pinning a few of our favorite and most popular blog posts.

Then we added a widget (utilizing LinkWithin) to our blog that showcases related posts just underneath all blog posts on our blog.

The result?

An amazing increase in traffic to our site. And to top that off, they are not only visiting the blog posts through Pinterest, once they read the blog post we are seeing amazing click out traffic on the related posts through the widget, increasing clicks to additional blog posts on our blog.

Give it a try.

How to set up your new pet business Facebook Timeline in five easy steps

If you have a Facebook business page, you may be aware that Facebook is migrating those business pages to the new Timeline.

Currently, you have the option of migrating to the new Timeline, however on March 30th, Facebook indicates that all fan or business pages will automatically receive the new design.

Here we've put together the five easy steps to migrate your page to the new Timeline, simply and easily:

Here is an example of the new Timeline on Pawsible Marketing's Facebook Business Page. Click to enlarge.


1. Login and navigate to your Facebook page. At the top you will see the message about the new Timeline. Click preview to set up your new look. You can set up your new look without anyone noticing until you click 'publish now'.

While in preview, click 'add a cover' to upload an image for the top of your Timeline. This is a great opportunity to promote your product and/or the branding message of your pet business, but not the place for specials, advertisements. Recommended size of this image is 851 x 315px.

2. Check your profile photo and upload a new image if the sizing is off. This is a where we recommend you place your pet business company logo. Sizing should be 180x180px.

3. A nice change in the new Timeline is the ability to create a custom tab image for apps. These app images are just under the cover photo shown with photos and likes. First, create a custom image for your app (size is 111 x 74px). To upload the new image to represent that app on your Timeline, click on 'admin panel' then 'manage' and select 'edit page.' Select 'apps' on the left, and then select 'edit settings' for the app. Next to 'custom tab image' select change and upload your new image.

On your Timeline page you can also rearrange the apps to the order you would like. Photos and Likes will stay in the same place. To rearrange the apps, simply click the arrow to the right of all the apps and it will populate all your apps in a box. Click the 'pencil' in the upper right corner of each app to move or 'swap' position.

4. You can “pin” status updates to keep them at the top of your updates for up to 7 days. To do this, hover to the right of the top of your status, and click the 'little pencil' to pin a post at the top. You can also 'highlight' a post and make it two columns at the top. Click the * at the top of the post to highlight. This is a great way to highlight a giveaway, fan of the week, contest and more special promotions.

5. This has come and gone over the years, but we are seeing this morning the 'share' button. This will provide you the ability to share your Facebook Page with your personal Facebook friends and family. To share, click the arrow next to the 'Message' to the right of your profile photo. There is a drop down option to share your page.

Other changes and what's gone:

• As of this date, you are not allowed to select a default tab as a landing page.
• Custom tabs are now 780px wide inside Facebook’s container which is 850px wide, with a 35px left margin, larger than before.
  
• Left navigation for apps and tabs is gone, replaced with the apps listed after the photos and likes images under the cover photo.
• Reduced size of the profile photo.
• Thumbnails at the top of the previous page are gone.

Once you have completed customizing your new Timeline, just press publish for it to go live.

Have fun!