Posts

Posted on

How to Create a Vanity URL for Your Facebook Fan Page

It is easy to do a vanity URL for your profile page, but how do you do one for your Fan Page and can you even do one. Yes you can! Here’s how.

1. Log into your Facebook account. Make sure you have set yourself up as an administrator for any Fan Page that you work on as well or you will need to login to each account as the owner separately to do the following.

2. Go to this URL: http://www.facebook.com/username/ Select your Fan Page name from the drop down if you have multiple pages your work on. If your fan page is not selectable you may not have 25 fans yet and so you will need to get a minimum of 25 friends first to be able to have a vanity URL. If your page name shows up, enter your desired easy to remember name in the field and then click check availability.

3. Confirm that this is the URL you want and then update your Facebook Fan Page badges and links on your website.

Sometimes the name that matches your business is not available. There could be several reasons why.

  1. Facebook may not be allowing this name.
  2. Someone may have tagged this name but not published the Fan Page yet.
  3. The name is too generic.
  4. The name selected may be a recognizable trademarked name.
  5. The name or combination of words may be considered offensive.
  6. Some other unknown Facebook criteria has prevented you taking the name.

If this happens to you, you can visit the Facebook Fan Page support center: http://www.facebook.com/FanpageHelpCenter where you may be able to get additional help with your problem.

Have fun with this tip and leave a comment with your new Facebook Fan Page vanity URL below! Mine is facebook.com/mccordweb

Posted on

Yikes, I Can’t See My Blog Posts!

This has just happened to a prospect, and I wanted to share the situation in case you ever come across it. First the prospect is using WordPress for their blog. They had recently moved to a new web host and mentioned to me that when you clicked the blog post title of any posts on their blog their browser returned a blank Internet Explorer page.

I have seen this before where a Word character such as a long dash or an ampersand has not set well with the version of MySQL on the hosting server and then the post needs to be deleted and totally reentered to make the title be clickable, but that was not the case with this client. The title of the posts were simply not clickable.

What ended up happening was that the client had to actually reenter all the blog posts on their blog after they had upgraded to a new version of WordPress. I am not sure if this was due to an issue on the MySQL server, the blog template, or as I suspect the permalink settings that were not updated to match the database when the blog was moved, but it was a very thorny problem.

If you have seen this and have a recommendation for other readers on what you have done to repair this issue on your own blog, just leave a comment below.

Posted on

Getting Banned on Reddit!

Wow, Reddit is tough! If they don’t like your content or you don’t get enough article views, just plan on getting your account closed, all your links dropped, and your user account banned. All without letting you know anything short of “we don’t like the quality of the content you are linking to.” In my case, the content was in real estate!

What I have found is that Reddit will not like you if you are using their service to create backlinks to content that although may be unique is not catchy, trendy, or from their view point newsworthy.

Although Reddit has a Google PageRank of 8 and does allow dofollow links, be very careful what you ad. You can identify if they are targeting to drop you by the note that says you are adding too many links when you are simply adding three links a week. Additionally they will display a note you are adding links too fast add this link in one hour. Hey, the last time I added a link was Monday and it is now Wednesday, how is that too fast?

Well enough on my rant on Reddit. Just be cautious what you add is your very best quality and you may want to consider not using this service for clients where you can’t control content.

Posted on

AdWords Makes It Hard to View Reports

Effective September 15th AdWords is changing who can be emailed reports. In fact after that date AdWords won’t even be emailing you a report, rather will email you a link to view the report online.

For me this has totally wreaked havoc in the way I do reporting. I have an assistant who does reports for me. She takes the Excel data and pastes it into a letter where I have noted important comments about an account monthly. Previously she was emailed a zip file by AdWords on the first of every month.

Now I will have to add her as a read only user on every AdWords account so that she will be able to now manually and repetitively login and download a report. Worse yet is that there is no real column control on the report as there was before which means that adjusting the columns in Excel becomes a task that must be done for each report for each client.

Man, I hate this change! I have tried inviting her to my My Client Center, but that does not give the report access she needs, so I will now need to add her to each individual account. I understand the security issues involved but AdWords should have polled professionals such as myself before making this seriously bad change!