Many people don’t know what to do with Twitter when they first take a look. How can anyone connect with only 140 characters sent off to who knows where?

I have met many people in my geographical area, New Jersey or more specifically Central New Jersey, through Twitter. Some of them I have later met in person; they continue to be valuable business contacts. I have been saving many of the New Jersey in a folder in my email; I decided to organize some of those Twitter contacts (tweeps? tweeple?) on a page called New Jersey on Twitter. I organized the page by professional area, so if you are not from New Jersey, you may still find valuable contacts on that page in fields such as web services, social media or public relations.

Note: on this post, I used “New Jersey” often as the example. You can substitute your city, state, country or other geographical area.

Suggestions on how one can use Twitter to build a network of people in your area:

Find Some People on Twitter in Your Area

• Use TweepSearch to search bios. You can put in “New Jersey” and get results of all sorts of people with New Jersey in their Twitter bio.
• Put keyword “New Jersey” in http://search.twitter.com/ and see who is talking about New Jersey. Chances are, some of them are from New Jersey. Or try “new jersey network.” Follow the ones that interest you.
• Nearby Tweets – I demonstrated this application at a Twitter research workshop I conducted to find people in New Jersey who were in the pharmaceutical business. We used keyword #pharma to narrow our selection to pharmaceutical tweets.
• UberTwitter for Blackberry – if you have a Blackberry, Geri Rosman recommends this app.
• Follow some people from New Jersey (or your chosen location) and then ask them for suggestions of more people from that location.

Find the Power Users in Twitter in Your Area

How do you know someone is a power user of Twitter instead of a casual user? Large numbers of followers might be a clue, but not always. Look to see the content of their tweets. Are they talking about your area? To others? Do they ever mention networking or Tweetups? A Tweetup is a gathering of Twitter users face-to-face – great way to network with others. Do they have a Twitter list of your geographical area? See next section for more on Twitter lists.

Using New Jersey as an example, I would suggest Eva Abreu, who has a website devoted to social media in New Jersey or njfamilymag who tweets many New Jersey events. Do you have someone in your area that you would consider to be a power user of Twitter? Look to see who that person is following or who follows that person to find more people in your area. Perhaps they also know about networking events in your area.

Create Twitter Lists

Create your own geographic lists. Visit the lists of others in your area. Follow some of those lists.

Examples of Twitter lists organized by location:
http://twitter.com/leoraw/newjersey – my own list (most are some with whom I have had at least one exchange on Twitter – by no means an exhaustive list of Twitterers in New Jersey)
http://twitter.com/Brightfarm/areastuff – Barbara Lopez lives in Sacramento.
http://twitter.com/eric_andersen/boston-social-media – Eric Anderson’s list of social media in Boston.
http://twitter.com/mominisrael/israeli-bloggers – Hannah Katsman’s list of Israeli bloggers

Some areas are harder for forming social media connections than others. Ron Graham, who used to live in New Jersey but now lives in Akron, Ohio, put together this Social Media Akron Facebook page in the hopes that he could build a local Akron Twitter list. Know any business people in Akron? Tell them to connect with Ron Graham.

Share Your Location Feature

New on Twitter is a Share Your Location feature. This seemed to go live as I wrote this post. Not much information yet.

What have been your experiences connecting with others locally via Twitter? Feel free to share the good, the bad and the I-don’t-get-it.

Photos: upper left – Boston Public Gardens (Wikimedia), bottom left – Sacramento (Wikimedia), upper right – Cape May, lower right – Jerusalem

One easy way for a small business to get some presence on the web is by creating a Facebook Fan Page. Can you fill out an online form? Then you can create a fan page. Here are two small hurdles for you to overcome in creating the page:

1. Where do I create the page? Answer: Create a Page.
2. What kind of avatar do I need for the page? Answer: a vertical one (or a square) – size can be up to 600px in height – maximum size is 200px by 600px.

Use Keywords on Your Facebook Page

When you create your page, if you are a local business serving a geographical area, be sure to put keywords describing the area in your description if it is not already in your name. So, for example, if you are in New Jersey, and you expect people will use the search term “New Jersey” to look for a business like yours, be sure to use New Jersey. Put keywords into Google and see where (or if) your page shows up with those keywords.

Update the Page

Update your page frequently, but not so much to be annoying. Provide a service in your updates!

A. Harrington Limousine Services is one example of a small business with frequent updates related to travel, snow, spring, supplies and local charities. Note also the creative use of the professionals in the photo welcoming you to their limousines. You can use your logo, but if it’s longer in width than in height, it’s going to get cropped, so be prepared to experiment with the avatar that you use for the page.

Interact with the Customers

Use the opportunity to interact with your customers! In this example, a restaurant called Fiddleheads in Jamesburg, New Jersey writes a comment back to an enthused customer:

Shorten Your URL

It used to be that you had to wait until you had 100 fans before you could shorten your Facebook Fan Page URL. No more: see
Create a Facebook Fan Page URL in 2 Minutes or Less. So what are you waiting for? Make it is easier for customers to find you.

Get Fancy: Learn FBML

Facebook even has its own mini language for manipulating your fan page. If you are a small business, you can probably do a lot without many of the bells and whistles of FBML. Know it’s available so if you want your page to have an extra special zing, FBML might have a way to do it. FBML can help you add video, change the look of your fan page, or add more boxes to your page. See more on FBML in the “Learn More” section below.

Learn More

For more information:

• How to Create the Perfect Facebook Fan Page by Jesse Stay
• 3 Really Simple Ways To Spruce Up Your FaceBook Fan Page by Donna Maria
• Why Doesn’t Your Organization Have a Facebook Fan Page? by Ryan Hanley
• 26 Facebook Fan Page tips for business users. Or the Fan Page cheat sheet. by Jimmy Gilmore
• 13 Ways to Move Your Facebook Fans to Action
• Tutorial: Customize Facebook Pages with “Static FBML” application
• Add Multiple Boxes on Facebook Fan Page Using FBML

Do you have a favorite Facebook fan page, your own or someone else’s? Feel free to leave the link in the comments, and I may feature the page in a future post.

Feel free to follow this blog on Facebook at:
http://www.facebook.com/websitesforsmallbiz
I welcome you and your input.

You have a small business or organization. You have limited time, funds and energy. How should you approach SEO? In my post called Intro to SEO, Ken Cleveland argues:

the most important thing when doing search engine optimization is get a good amount of backlinks first. when you have a sufficient amount of backlinks, then you can start optimizing in page links, keyword density and other factors which affects your ranking.

And Navaro says:

internal linking is an important factor also and is worth looking into.

On another blog, a commentator felt strongly that page optimization (keywords, meta tags, body tags and more) was the most important factor.

We could argue about what is MOST important of the big three (Incoming Links, Page Optimization or Great Content). Instead, make sure to familiarize yourself with all three of these approaches and apply some of each to your site.

I would suggest that the most important place to put your energy is in building great content. If you have content worthy of a link, the links will come. Of course, there are many ways to “nudge” along the process of getting links. But if you have limited time, put some of that time into a blog for your business. This will give you an opportunity to write more valuable content that others can link to. Here are few examples of a blog for a small business:

• Jaydien Network Solutions blog
• Law Office of Donald D. Vanarelli Blog

More information about SEO, incoming links and page optimization:

• SEO 101 All You Wanted To Know About Incoming Links
• High Quality Inbound Links Can Boost Your Rankings and Site Traffic
• SEO Chat Forums
• How to Grow Your Google Authority
• 5 SEO Tips for a better keyword research process
• Organic SEO and Tracking Your Social Networks
• How We Got a Link from the New York Times
• Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization

Painting is by Lesser Ury, a German Impressionist

After years of building and updating websites with straight code or other content management systems (I’ve used Joomla and Drupal), I now almost always recommend WordPress to clients who are looking to build their small business websites. The reason? Ease of use.

Administrative Area is Easy to Use

Compared to other content management systems, it is so easy for someone to dive into the WordPress admin section and start to edit and write posts. I just remind my clients to add the posts to the correct category, and the theme will take care of places the posts where they belong. You can start a draft and leave it there, updating it as you want until you are ready to publish it. Then you can just as easily unpublish it so it becomes a draft form again, in case you want to use it again later.

Easy to Upgrade

Click, click, click and you are done with upgrade. No need to FTP files or get into shell mode or remember what you customized. Oh, do backup your blog first (but with a variety of backup plugins, this too is easy).

Many Plugins and Plugin Developers

The range of plugins available for WordPress is numerous and growing. And often plugin developers are happy to answer your specific installation or use of plugin questions. See the WordPress plugin directory.

Easy to Customize

Want a header specific to your site? Easy with WordPress. With any WordPress theme, you can edit the header.php and style.css to make it your own. Or you can hire a professional to design and install a header that will make your shine stand out from the competition. WordPress appearance and functionality can be tweaked and changed via the theme files, so your site can function specific to your needs. If you take a look at the layouts on this post on Highlighting Upcoming on a WordPress Home Page, you can get some ideas of how you could customize your site.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Even if you do nothing extra to your site, it will have an advantage in search engine optimization by utilizing the WordPress set up. If you add the plugin All in One SEO Pack, you can fine tune each post so keywords will appear in title tags and description tags.

Easy to Edit and Add New Content

Did I use the word “easy” enough times in this post? Yes, it really is easy to use and publish your pages. You can edit, add, add categories, backup, add links, upload photos and docs and add widgets, all with a few clicks.

If you use WordPress, what do you like about it?

With this post I am starting a new section of my blog in which I will highlight posts from elsewhere that might be useful to you as you think about your website and growing your business. Each post of Link Picks with include one of my photos; if you want to see more of my photography, please visit the photography category of my Here in HP blog.

Four Common Steps Every New Blogger Would Face When Starting A Blog

Marcell Purham writes about approaching a new blog: design & code, posts & tutorials, building a list of followers, and making money. If you need help with design and code, these are some of the services I can provide.

How to receive notifications when someone posts to your Facebook fan page

If you have a Facebook fan page (and these are really easy to set up and useful for a business or organization), you will discover that you don’t get notifications when it is updated as you do for your personal Facebook account. Pete Codella has a workaround, where you “like” your Facebook fan page update and thus get notified. As you will read in the comments, it’s not perfect, but it could be useful to you.

How small businesses can use Twitter lists

Location, subject or theme and thought leaders are some ideas of how you can organize Twitter lists to the advantage of your business or organization.

How Many of These Social Media Questions Can You Answer?

Shari Weiss is teaching her students about social media. She asks some great questions to get one thinking about social media. I like “How can you detect if someone is insincere?”

Hope you find these useful. As always, feel free to comment on any of these topics.

Every day people are tweeting links on Twitter with jQuery tips (see how do I learn jQuery). If you want to see, go to Twitter search and type “#jQuery” or “jquery”. Recently Kevin of Queness posted Create a Fast and Simple Toggle View Content with jQuery. At quick glance it looked good; in fact, it looked like a tutorial that might enhance my old Services page. So, as one does with hair salon makeovers, here is the before:

If you click on it, you can see the after, how I redid the page with the jQuery tutorial.

As with many links I find, I don’t have time immediately to implement the tutorial. So I save the links I like to Delicious, a social bookmarking site. See my Delicious bookmarks here. Another place you can save favorite links for later perusal is StumbleUpon.

One of the reasons why I liked the idea of switching from the previous way I had set up the page is the new version is much easier to edit. The original way I set up the page, way back in about 2001, was with separate HTML files for each page. That method, if you have ever tried it, is a real pain to edit. Every time you make changes to one page, you have to update all the others. Then about two years ago I redid the page in PHP; better, because now I only had one page to edit, but one had to remember where everything was on the page and search if one wanted to do edits. With Kevin’s jQuery plugin, I am editing simple unordered lists – here is a sample piece of the code:

And here is how the page looks now:

Just to be sure it looked OK in IE6, because despite web developers and designers disliking the rendering abilities of IE6 many people still use that browser, I checked the new Services page with IE NetRenderer. It looked just fine.

When one posts a link on Twitter, one only has 140 characters available. This has resulted in an increase in demand for link shortening services.

Whenever I can on Twitter, I try to use the actual URL of the post instead of a shortening service. Two reasons:

1. People can then see the URL directly and know what they are clicking on. It also gives some branding to the domain name.
2. If I search for that domain using Twitter search, I can see what has been tweeted of that domain.

So this is the code that you need to remember:

What’s that 1234? That’s the number of the post. If you go to the Admin section of your WordPress blog, you will see the number of the post when you hover with your mouse over the Edit button of the post. As an example, this is the link to this particular post:

It’s a good idea to memorize that ?p=POST_NUMBER so you can use it in a hurry some day when you want to tweet something with the original URL, and you don’t have much time.

Let’s say you have an upcoming event, holiday, tax season alert or some other post that you want to appear differently on your WordPress home page than the other posts. Perhaps your home page looks somewhat like this, with thumbnails (you can learn more about thumbnails in this post):

Or maybe your home page looks like a list of excerpts, like so:

What if you want to make one post in particular show up on top? You could use sticky posts, but then that top sticky would like exactly like the other posts.

Here is code that I’ve used to get one or a few posts to show up on top of your regular posts. First, write one of the posts and designate it in a new category. Call your new category “special.” Look in the Categories section of your admin panel to see the number of the category. Jot down the number. Now add the following code to the top of your index.php page:

You may just need to insert the code from START SPECIAL SECTION to END SPECIAL SECTION; the key is to put it in the right place, so it just appears on the home page. The posts from the special category will now show up as clickable links on top of your home page.

Let’s say you want formatted in a more special manner, like so:

Instead of

Try this:

Then you will need to write up some CSS code to make the box stand out. You can try some of the code in this post on Fancy Boxes in CSS. Also, be sure your theme has the new thumbnail code applied – see the post on thumbnails in 2.9 for more information. An alternative to the special category is to use a custom field – you can then do a similar page layout as above with rewind_posts() or with a custom query_posts().

Eva Abreu is exploring ways that people use Twitter to connect and produce new business relationships. In her column for the Home News Tribune, she wrote: “I recently posted a query asking my “followers” for Twitter business success stories for this column.” One of the two stories she highlighted was how I connected with Kacy Campion Renna of CCW Insurance.

Leora Wenger (@leoraw), a Highland Park-based freelance web designer, met Kacy Campion Renna (@NJInsuranceGirl), owner of CCW Insurance Company, Belmar, on Twitter through another user, Deborah Smith (@jerseybites), a Social Media consultant in Ocean County. After about four months of exchanging informal tweets, Kacy needed emergency help with her website. They connected by phone, and Leora solved the initial problem, which then led to their business relationship.

Amy Boroff (@njdevmgr), development manger for Junior Achievement of NJ in Princeton, discovered one of her new Twitter followers was Kate Specchio (@ecsfoundation), co-founder of Morris County-based The Emily C. Specchio Foundation. Through their tweets, Amy recognized the potential for working together. They continued to communicate on Twitter in real-time, after working hours, to learn more about each respective organization. After several weeks, JANJ submitted a proposal to ECS for funding for an inaugural event: the Women’s Future Leadership Forum. The ECS Foundation accepted the proposal and granted funds to help support aspiring female high school students become future leaders.

Have you experienced a business success story through Twitter? How has Twitter helped you?

•   •   •

Coming next week to Websites for Small Biz blog: highlighting a specific post (or posts) on your home page in WordPress.

This post is a sequel to 8 Small Business Blogs – look there for more great small business resources. You should also learn about Twitter chats.

Your small business or organization website is online – but is anyone finding it?
Learn the ins and outs of social media networking from some experts.

Larry Brauner

Larry Brauner is always coming up with great online networking ideas – last week he ran a worldwide networking party in honor of his 58th birthday. He talks about why one should have a blog for one’s business and 10 Easy Ways to Improve Your Blog or Website. Larry doesn’t just spout out his ideas and then walk away; if you ask him to give you feedback on your own business or organization, he will give thoughtful suggestions and ideas. Follow Larry Brauner on Twitter.

Shari Weiss

I met Shari Weiss through Larry Brauner (see, online networking really does work, if you take the time to have a conversation with people, listening to them and adding your observations). Shari writes in a friendly, easy-to-connect manner about how one can use social media to develop your business. And Shari has even more blogs for you to read. Follow Shari Weiss on Twitter.

Debra Askanase

Debra writes a blog called Community Organizer 2.0. The description says “a forum for discussion and opinions on web 2.0 and non-profits” – I found the information Debra presents to be useful to small businesses as well. When you leave a comment on Debra’s blog, she responds in a thoughtful, intuitive manner. Check out her category called Listening. Follow Debra Askanase on Twitter.

Janice Tomich

Janice Tomich has a blog called Calculated Presentations. Here’s how she introduces her site: “Ever experience death by PowerPoint? Find people falling asleep when you present this year’s financials? I will help you build better presentations and create messages that stick.” Find out Why Being Yourself and Passionate Trumps Distracting Habits. Follow Janice Tomich on Twitter.

Shirley George Frazier

Shirley Frazier has a blog called Solo Business Marketing. I particularly liked her post Marketing and Free Advice Doesn’t Always Mix – what do you say if someone asks you for all sorts of free business advice? Shirley might have some business advice that is just right for marketing your business. Follow Shirley George Frazier on Twitter.

Chris Kieff

I feel like I *almost* met Chris Kieff, as he runs a networking group in northern New Jersey, and we talked via Skype at recent Tweetup. Chris writes about internet marketing, web site promotion, advertising, blogs, SEO, and social networking. He provides great information such Top 10 Social Media Guides or his predictions of Social Media Trends in 2010. Follow Chris Kieff on Twitter.

Eva Abreu

Eva has recently started a column for the Home News Tribune in Central New Jersey. The information she writes about may be local to New Jersey, but anyone anywhere in the world can take Eva’s ideas and apply them to their location. Eva has been great about organizing Tweetups in New Jersey, and her enthusiasm is contagious. You can also read more at her website New Jersey Social Media. Follow Eva Abreu on Twitter.

Are you reading a great small business or social media blog? Care to share?