I had a chance to interview Heather Havenwood, author of the book Sexy Boss. Always staying ahead of the curve, Heather gave us some insights into an amazing technique to improve your digital marketing game.

This interview is all about Chatbots.

Even though I have played with chatbots quite a bit, I am not currently using them for my pages.

Also, Heather's book:Sexy Boss - How Female Entrepreneurs Are Changing the Rule Book for Money, Success and Even Sex, and How You Can Too!

I know I'm sharing this almost a year after I recorded it, but it is still relevant as the chatbot race hasn't been settled yet.

Affiliate Summit takes place throughout the year and all over the world so take a look at it if you want to learn more about Affiliate marketing and related fields.

As more companies join the chatbot world, how do you feel about it? I asked my friends about it on Facebook and they had mixed reactions to it. I'd love to hear how you feel about them.

The post Interview About Chatbots with Heather Havenwood aka Sexy Boss appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

But how do you know the person behind that profile is real? If you don't have any connections with mutual friends, or if you don't recognize the person from a previous place of employment, education or even a recent event, chances are the profile trying to befriend you is a scammer.

If you're not very active on Facebook or social media then this may not be obvious, but let me tell you that there are tons of people out there looking to scam you. Maybe they want your money, or your connections or they are simply using you as a pawn to a larger more nefarious goal. Stay alert, and be cautious when new people approach you and don't seem to have a clear purpose or intention.

Don't get me wrong, everybody is looking for something. Most people just like to add you as a friend to truly connect with you. But some of them want to use you, some want to abuse you. I'm here to help you spot the ones that want to abuse you, to take advantage of your good nature.

Video: How to spot a fake profile scammer on facebook

NEVER click on a link you didn't ask for or were not expecting until you are absolutely certain that the link is harmless. Better yet, just don't click on it.

Some Telltale Signs They Are A Fake Account

• The user tries to make chit-chat conversation, often repeats it all over every time they make contact. There is no purpose to the conversation.
• The user has only a small amount of personal pictures or none at all. They may have a profile photo, but since they aren't real, they don't have other photos with friends, family, etc.
• They have very few posts. They just put a few things up to appear legitimate.
• They claim to work for high-visibility trustworthy school or work at a very prominent company or institution, i.e. Harvard, Yale, Oxford, or they work at a governmental institution. It's almost impossible to verify this unless you run an employment background check.

This is a video I made to show you how to spot a scammer on Facebook. It works about 75% to 80% of the time based on my personal experience.

In conclusion

Spotting fake profiles on Facebook can be pretty easy and with time, you'll be able to guess which ones are real and which ones are fake even without doing the steps I outlined in the video. It just takes practice. The method I describe just confirms your suspicions, and it takes just a couple minutes to complete and it's totally free, just use the Google image search.

A tip I didn't mention in the video if the image you search for doesn't turn up any results, you may also want to "reverse" it. You can do this with almost any photo editing software, just flip the image horizontally. Sometimes scammers will do this to throw off the image search in Google.

You should also know that it's perfectly possible for a scammer to have a legitimate profile. These type of scammers are a totally different kind and this video will probably not help you with that. When I said that this works 75 to 80 percent of the time, that's because sometimes scammers don't use photos from other people so the image search will not work in those cases.

The post How to Spot Fake Profiles and Scammers on Facebook appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

By the way, recently Youtube changed their "Watch Later" playlist and removed the "removed watched" button. I was pretty irritated with that change because it is such a critical function for the whole thing. BUT... I am happy to announce that they brought it back. There's a removed watched button back on the Watch later Youtube playlist! Yeay! -- Okay back to our normal programming.

I thought I'd share with you some of the tips and tricks I use to help me keep my digital life somewhat in order. Each year I do quite a bit of this cleaning up and I try to keep it up during the year, but you know what Sweet Brown says.

Email Cleanup

First, email. I use Thunderbird to backup my email and as a side effect I get the benefit of sorting email quickly by date, or sender or even subject line. All I have to do is click on one of the columns and the email instantly sorts that way.

The benefit of this arrangement I've just described is that I can sort my email by sender and scroll down just looking for "big senders," these are easy to spot. You can't quite do that using the web interface of Gmail (or any other web client).

Some of these bulk messages are social media alerts, or software updates and newsletters. So as I scan down the list I'll notice sometimes more than a screen's worth of email messages so then I click on the first email, then scroll down to find the last one on the list.

Once I find the last email on the list I press the SHIFT key and then click on that last message and this combination selects all the messages in that block. Then I just press DELETE and the messages will get deleted. Even though I am doing this on Thunderbird, the changes get synchronized up to Gmail automatically.

You could also do this on the web based version of your Gmail, but you'll need to do searches instead of just scrolling through. Some people might actually like that approach better, but I'm not going to cover that today.

After a quick pass looking for big senders, I then sort the email by subject line. This gives me a view that helps me find alert notifications, newsletters and other repetitive emails that get sent out daily or multiple-times per day. Facebook email notifications for example, or Twitter alerts, Google Alerts and other similar ones.

Some of my big senders were: Google Alerts, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Empire Avenue, Youtube, Zendesk, Instagram, Hubspot and a few others. They'll probably different for you.

As I scroll down the list sorted by subject, it is pretty easy to spot the bulk of the emails that I'm looking for and I can then delete them just like the ones before when I sorted by sender.

Then I just do another quick scroll up and down looking for any other big blocks of patterns. I'm looking for blocks of 100 or more emails at a time so I'm looking for senders, or subjects or anything that stands out and even maybe a few of these searches:

• "mentioned you on Twitter"
• "is now following you on Twitter!"

Once you do a major round of cleanup you'll see why I like using Thunderbird for this. Outlook would work as well, or any other visual email client like these two I've just mentioned. All you have to do is make sure the bulk of your email is downloaded locally to your computer using IMAP. If you don't use IMAP then the changes won't be saved on the cloud (generally).

After all that I've mentioned above, I take a look at the drafts folder and delete as many as possible. Really, if it's not something you started in the past 2 days and needs to go out today or tomorrow, it shouldn't be in there. I'm guilty of keeping over a hundred drafts in there. I usually get rid of them indiscriminately.

If I feel a draft is worth saving then I copy and save it into an Evernote for more incubation. Clearly the draft wasn't ready to be an email to anybody if I didn't send it  yet. So back to the drawing board for a few messages, but for the rest of the drafts emails. Just delete them.

At last I move down through the folder or tag list whatever you want to call them, and some of them get emptied completely but the folder remains. Some of the folders get deleted themselves along with the contents.

This is the last round of cleanup I do through my inbox and I do this all throught Thunderbird. Why? Because Thunderbird helps me sort emails quickly, lets me do background searches and I can look at all my accounts in one location without having to login to one, then log out. Login to the next, then logout. This way I can do it all at once!

In this case I was able to delete about 15,000 emails or more which gave me about 1GB of space back in my main Gmail account!  So that works for me!

Notes Evernote

You know how I told you before Evernote is my second brain? It's like my extended memory. But it also needs some TLC from time to time. This one is a little bit simpler than email I think.

I do a couple of things for Evernote:

• I search for "Untitled note" - This will usually bring up a bunch of blank notes that had potential but just weren't meant to be. Nuke em!
• Switch to all notes view and sort by date. Go to the oldest and scroll up for a bit. This does two things, highlights any notes that may just need to be deleted and reminds you of possibly forgotten projects.
• Check folders from automation system and other apps. For example, I use Skitch a lot, skitch creates its own notebook so I go in there and clean that up. Do the same for any apps you use in conjunction with Evernote, like IFTTT, or Docusign, Zapier or even other Evernote apps.

A quick note in practicality. Evernote, like Gmail encourages you to save everything and just file stuff away without deleting stuff. For the most part that has worked out for Gmail quite well, and it works okay with Evernote but I still think it's good to do some housekeeping once in a while. Sometimes I just want to get rid of things, so this is how I do it on Evernote.

I think that's good for now, I will show you a little bit about files and a few other places where cleanup is needed on a regular basis, and at least for spring cleaning. It's funny how fast you can write 1,000 words about something you like. So if you liked this, let me know in the comments!

The post Digital Spring Cleaning appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

So I was glad to see this pop-up the other day when I logged into my account. At least it seems like they're trying to keep our information safe.

The paranoid in me tells me that this is just a way to make us feel like they're doing something but really maintaining the status quo.

It reads:

Hi Oscar -- Sorry to interrupt. You haven't changed who can see your posts lately, so we just wanted to make sure you're sharing this post with the right audience. (Your current setting is Public, though you can change this hwneever you post.) Learn more

Then it asks who do you want to share this post with?

The post This Made me Feel Better about Facebook appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

She is irreverent, creative and right down awesome. Here is what she says about herself.

I'm a SAHM of six, one who's in the Navy and five at home from ages 6-17. We have five boys, one girl and I blog to "vent"

It's a family/humor blog with the tag line "A blog with sprinkles of truth" because I exaggerate. A lot, and my kids suggested the tag line because they don't want people thinking they really do eat green food out of our fridge. Looking forward to getting to know y'all  http://sharon-moms-madhouse.com

Once you read her blogposts, you'll be hooked and you will want more. She blogs about parenting, and about life and trust me it is a madhouse! You now have two choices, one is to go to her blog and subscribe and the other is to join our blogging group so you can get to know her better. The choice I'm not giving you is to ignore this awesome blog.

The post Sharon Ulery Ruggieri Featured Blogger. appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I can only assume that because of the way the files are named. wpid-longass-id-with-date-and-time.jpg So anyway, enjoy.

The post Random Pictures From Last Year appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

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The next step was easier than I thought, I just had to delete dead pages or pages that never took off. A few weeks back I tried to just do it but I missed the option where I could do this and just kept putting it off. But it is actually super simple to delete a Facebook page.

Do it with caution. In coupled cases Facebook asked me for my password to confirm I wanted to delete that page; other cases the page was simply deleted it once I clicked on the confirmation button.

The post How to delete a Facebook Page appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Facebook.

I spend a lot of time on Facebook. I answer all kinds of questions for people in chat, I'm usually answering something about websites, WordPress, tech or something I know. I'm also part of many groups so I asked some people and groups to share my post if they found it interesting or useful. Who wouldn't? But I was careful to only ask those people I've helped before or those that have shown an interest in what I do and also have mentioned to let them know when something like this is going on so they can tell their friends. I've built rapport with these people.

If you want to use Facebook to bring attention to a blogpost or charity or event or something, you must have built some friendships first. These happen naturally, and at the end of the day it is really your friends that will be supporting your efforts so if you don't have rapport with your friends then Facebook isn't really the place for you to share your stuff organically. As this is a give and take system, when you have an opportunity to help others, do it, so that when they need your help they know they can count on you. It just all goes round and round.

I will also share that blogpost on my own Facebook business page and maybe pay to promote it.

Twitter.

Twitter is my favorite social network. I spend a good amount of time on it and I share a lot of stuff in there. In case you haven't noticed, I have a constant stream of fresh blogpostst you've never seen before. These come from my blogging group members and also from news and articles I've read recently. The previous post will be promoted on twitter in several ways. Automatically when I hit publish on my article on my blog, it goes to twitter. Then I also bookmark and curate my article on my OGLink.it website. This also shares the post on twitter across several accounts. Then after it has been posted in there, it goes into a random rotation for the next 30 days and it will be tweeted out anywhere from 5 - 12 times in 30 days.

I also may point out the article to people individually via mentions or dms if we've talked about it before or if I know they could find the post interesting.

Empire Avenue.

Empire Avenue is the "Social Stock Exchange." You can purchase stock in other individuals and their stock price goes up and down based on various factors. Social network activity, perceived influence and other stuff I guess. Empire Avenue is more or less a popularity contest and social network and scoring system all rolled into one fun game. But it has a cool element called "missions." - With Missions, you can ask a group of people or the entire network to do something in exchange for money. So I made a couple missions to help me spread the word about the special for May. And I paid the participants millions! Oh the calamity! I paid for social media distribution! (you can hear the purists cry right now!).

Now, it's all monopoly money, but it's tough to earn lots of money. It pays to be an early adopter I guess. But the money is phony money. It's not real and it's just for fun, but it still is effective marketing tool. It's a way to reach into other people's networks of influence and it's a lot of fun. Check it out if it interests you, I love it and been in it for 3+ years, this is my profile. So I used and will use it to run missions and promote the blogpost.

Google Plus.

On Google Plus, probably on Monday I'll share the post and make some comments about it. This way people that are only on Google + will see the message but more importantly, I will give Google a signal, that this article is mine, it is about this particular topic and this will help get it indexed and found in new ways. Also, when I post to Google+ my "circles" get a chance to see my post and they may share it or add a +1 to it. The beauty of social networks is that when you have something valuable to offer, the ripple effect becomes really powerful. Sharing and promoting in social media can mean the difference between a handful of views and thousands of views. We know it's all about eyeballs, then the content must be valuable enough for people to stick around. Promotion brings it, but value proposition keeps them.

Comments.

As you may imagine, as a blogger, I read a lot of other blogs. I often comment on them too. This is an indirect way of promoting your blogpost. By leaving comments on other people's blogs, you may entice someone to see what else you have to say or what you're all about and readers or the blog's author may check out your site. In this way, when I leave a comment, they may come back to my site to check it out and depending on the date in which they do this, they may see my blogpost at the top and then get a chance to read it.

Youtube.

I don't usually make a video just to promote a blogpost, but because of the #31DBBB challenge, I will give this a try and later today or tomorrow I will create a video dedicated just to that blogpost. The idea is to promote the blogpost and get people to go from my video over to this website to check out the blogpost. We'll se how that works.

There are many other ways I'll use to promote this but I'll leave those for another blogposts. Mainly I use other networks to make my content crawlable and indexable and make it so other people will re-share it.

The only problem with all this is that it is hard to track. There are tools out there that try to track how many shares something has and how many people looked at this or that, and tweeted that but sometimes they're not very accurate. In the next couple of posts I'll take sometime to show you the numbers that we are able to measure for each of these channels and methods. Some are more effective than others, but you'll never know until you try it.

So that's it for the blogpost for day 4 of the #31DBBB even though I'm posting on the 5th! So go out and have a beer for me. It's Cinco de Mayo!

The post Promoting a Blogpost #31DBBBday4 appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

So far the group has been awesome and we are growing. We host monthly blogging challenges and help each other out with our blogposts. We encourage each other and keep each other motivated. If this sounds like something that interests you, why don't you join us?

We have bloggers of all levels and in all niches. It doesn't matter if you blog about food, or technology. We even have some internet marketers in the group. So long as you like to make new friends and meet new bloggers at a more personal level then this group is for you.

Simply visit the group page and request access.

The post Facebook Bloggers Group. Come Join us! appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Introduction to the site

When you first visit the website, you are immediately presented with a great slideshow of the results of Moving Mountains Design's work. It takes just about 30 seconds to get a great idea of the type of work you can expect from Michelle and her team. The pictures draw you in and set the expectations high!

Effective Site Design

The website is nicely built and the colors and design are appealing but simple enough to keep the focus on the value proposition. Selling your home faster and for more money. After all, that is why you would stage a home. So that you can sell it for the most money and as fast as possible.

If you don't think staging a home works, take a trip to a new housing development and take a tour of the model homes. I would find it hard to believe if the interior decorations don't make you want to buy the home. After that, try to take a tour of a finished un-staged home, you'll notice the difference.

The site is well targeted

Los Angeles and Southern California are very competitive and desirable real estate markets, so making sure your home is staged and ready to attract the highest bid is important. That's something I noticed from the home page at Moving Mountains Design. This is clearly stated above the fold. They take care of preparing and staging your house to sell. Everyone knows Los Angeles, but the site also explains that they focus on specific cities like San Marino, Sherman Oaks, Pasadena and surrounding areas. All of these areas are hot real estate markets so it's nice to know that you can find a trustworthy and reliable home stager for these areas.

But you could just hire any interior decorator right? I guess you could but I believe you'll have better chances of selling your house if you hire professionals that know the area well instead of just being general interior decorators. They'll be able to match the work to the culture and local trends; it's definitely a plus to hire someone that knows the local market!

Functionally the site is pretty great

The website itself is speedy and functional and provides tons of information about the industry and also showcases the lastest work performed in the blog. The services are clearly listed and easy to find. I found that the blog section could use a few changes. At least in my opinion. I prefer when a blogpost has a date and also an author, I think it gives it more credibility. I'm also turned off by large watermarks in what would otherwise be some terrific photography.

A good feature on the site, and one that I would use if I were looking for a company to stage my house is the estimate request. They have a form that allows you to give some very detailed information about your home so that Michelle and her team can get back to you with an accurate estimate. I prefer this approach instead of the usual "call for quote" method because I know that is just going to take forever and I won't get a clear answer.

With the form they have on there I can submit my information and be on my way while they prepare an estimate. The information I can provide is pretty detailed, things like square footage, number of rooms, whether the home will be vacant or not during the selling process, and other pertinent info. This is a plus for me. Unfortunately at the time of testing, the form seems to be broken. The number of bedrooms input field seems to be broken. Hopefully it will be fixed soon, this little glitch prevented me from testing the entire form submission process and makes me wonder if Michelle has lost any business due to this tiny mistake. update: I let Michelle know about the problem and she fixed it!

The site is social, but needs a little work.

This is one of the first sites in real estate where I see social media connections and I think that is great. I also know Michelle on Facebook and I know she uses Facebook and Twitter effectively to showcase her work and talk about her current projects and satisfied customers. There's a few little quirks that I would change if it were my site, but maybe that's just because I'm picky like that. One would be the social media share bar on the left hand side. I tend to dislike those because they float and follow you around on the page and also tend to block out text if your browser window is smaller than these sidebars are designed for.

The Facebook widget that shows you how many people like your page seems to be broken as it displays "Invalid App ID". This isn't too bad, but it should be fixed soon because social proof is important and the more people that like a page on Facebook, the more chances a visitor will find one of their friends in that list of likes, and this builds a little more trust.

Besides this issue, it is nice to have links to Twitter and Youtube, and also to Michelle's Facebook page; but unfortunately the link to Linkedin is broken. I think Youtube could use a little boost in the amount of videos and a little more promotion would probably go a long way.

I know social media is all the rage now, and these little issues should be fixed but with that said, Michelle and her team are easily accessible via their contact form or directly via phone.

Digging deeper.

Digging deeper into the site, you'll find other sections that are very useful and informative. The FAQ section addresses questions about home staging as well as about the process that Moving Mountains design uses to deliver their service. These are all questions that most inquisitive buyers would have so it's nice to have them there without having to call and ask.

A section with a great portfolio lets you check out the work and several before and after examples are available for the different types of services that they offer.

One of the prominent calls to action beckons you with a question that many homeowners will have. Why isn't my house selling? And the three main factors in selling your house are explained on that page, Pricing, Marketing and Presentation. There is also a Home Staging Savings Calculator available which allows you to calculate how much money you would save if you stage your home when it is listed or if you wait until after you have listed it before you stage it.

Michelle's strongest suit and main service is staging and decorating homes to sell, but she also offers other lesser known services. I was surprised when I read about these because I would not have guessed them at all. For example, Color Consultation, Marital Transition Staging, and even Corporate or Commercial staging. Yeah... I did a double-take too, when I read the "marital transition staging" but once you read what this is, it will make perfect sense.

All in all, the site is good but it could use some work, but it is also effective and does the job. For example, the website doesn't provide a responsive design for mobile devices, or a mobile site. Granted, most people doing research to find a home stager are probably at home on their laptops or computer, but nowadays you can't neglect mobile. If it were me, I'd find a more creative way of watermarking the images or not watermark them at all. If someone wants to use your images for nefarious reasons, they're going to do it... very little you can do about it. But in the other hand, if I want to share your images on pinterest, or facebook or even twitter, I usually won't do them if there's a big watermark on them as it will tell my audience: this is solely promoting a product.

If it were my site, I would make sure all the forms work well and flawlessly since this is the main way for people to contact me. Second I would make sure my social links are active and take me to the right spot.

My closing thoughts.

I think overall the website is great. I don't know of a lot of other home stagers or interior decorators that have a website, much less a functional one. I think the key here is that the website delivers exactly what you need when you need it. Information about staging your house and a reliable, trustworthy company to do it for you. If I were to use these types of services I would seriously consider Moving Mountains Designs as my first choice!

The post Website Review – Moving Mountains Design appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

One thousand words should fit into this image nicely, but I still give you some annotations, check it out.

1. The link goes to a known website and it is not Gelson's own website where they might sell Heirloom tomatoes. In fact, if you think about it, the whole post almost implies that you can purchase this type of tomatoes at Gelson's. But they don't tell you that, instead they give you the link to a recipe where you can use these tomatoes. Also goes along with Seth Godin's idea of telling stories.
2. Niiiice picture showing the tomatoes. We're visual creatures, feed us!
3. The post was well received by the community.
4. Someone in the community thought it would be good to share this post with their own group of friends, somehwere outside of the Gelson's wall. This is huge for a business because it is an endorsement from your customer to their friends, family or collegues.
5. This is a good sign, the community is supportive of each other. Not everybody leaves comments, some people (the majority) simply read the posts. Other people like the posts and other people's comments to show support, agreement, or acknowledgment of the new post or comment.
6. This is also a good sign, the company is actually available and responsive to people's feedback.

I've told you about the good stuff I see with this post, can you spot any opportunities missed? Let me know in the comments.

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