This guest post comes to us via Tara Swiger, Instagram-enthusiast.  She guides creative biz ladies to explore a sustainable business with workshops like Pay Yourself. She leads a Starship full of explorers + a Solo Mission for the brave. You can become an explorer of your own business with her (free) mini-course here. 

A quick definition: Instagram is a free photo-sharing app for your phone. It allows you to share photos with your Instagram followers and post them on your other social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr and more). It’s kinda like Twitter, but with photos instead of words.

So why all the fuss? And can this fuss be useful, to you, a savvy (but busy!) business owner?

The magic of Instagram is that it feels personal. It allows you a peek into my world, through my eyes. Instead of approximating the beauty (or quirkiness) of what I’m looking at with words, I can quickly show you.

Is it for you?

If you answer yes to any of these questions, then it might be worth your time to start using Instagram:

• Do you work with or create physical products? (a maker, crafter, or artist, or an online or local seller-of-goods)

• Are you based in a location that clients and customers visit? (A shop, studio, spa, classroom)

• Is travel a part of your brand or service?

• Do you want to develop a personal relationship with your customers and clients, and give them a “behind-the-scenes” look into your life?

If you choose to use Instagram to reach your customers, remember to:

Be a person. Instagram is a personal medium, so unless you’re Macy’s or Starbucks, it makes sense to use it as a person, with a single point-of-view. (This doesn’t mean you have to share personal photos of kids or cats, but do use your name + photo.) Include your company name (and what it does!) in your profile + include a link to your website.

Take photos of the new. When new items come into your shop, take a picture to share. When you create a new product, take a picture of it. And when you go new places, take a picture.

Show the process. A stream that only shares finished products will get old fast, but your customers will love to see how you create what you sell. Show the successes, the failures, the drafts. Take photos of your workspace during every part of the process. Even if you don’t make a physical product, something about your day has a process (your 10th cup of coffee?) so share it!

Share the useful, entertaining, and educational.  Think about your role in your customers’ lives. Are you inspiring, educating or entertaining them? Use your Instagram feed to continue this message in photos, whether it’s images of your work, a great book, or the best local cupcake shop.

Make your client the star. With their permission, share photos of your happy customers - wearing your dresses, knitting with your yarn, or decorating with your pillows. Even if you don’t sell physical items, you can snap a photo of your thrilled client.

Do you use Instagram for your business? Share your best tips in the comments!

We’ve all got professional heros, right?  That roster of people whose books you devour, whose videos you watch, and who you’d pay to see in person.  I mean, I certainly do.  (I love you, Anne Lamott, Cheryl Strayed, Bill Bryson, David Sedaris).

Let’s say - for the sake of argument - that your professional idols made their names through the internet.  Maybe you love Marie Forleo or Jenna Marbles or Ramit Sethi or Matthew Inman.  They’re so awesome!  Everything they do is amazing and gilded in gold and met with praise and adulation!  It’s really easy to imagine that
a) they are a completely different species and meant for success in a way that the rest of us aren’t
b) they never filmed a bad video, launched a product that failed, were ever anything other than hugely successful

You guys?  That’s simply not true.  No matter how awesome our heros currently are, they were newbies once, too.
And do you want to know something really amazing? If you want to see exactly how they got where they are today, all you have to do is click the ‘older posts’ button.

Some people call it ‘creating a case study’ but I’m calling it what it really is: internet stalking.
When the internet is your medium (and your professional heros’ medium) it’s incredibly easy to see how/when/why they’ve made a name for themselves.

Here are some things to look for when you’re stalking your heros

Blogging
How often do they blog now?  How often did they blog when they started out?  How long are their blog posts? How are their blog posts formatted? Are they essays? Filled with tips and actionable items? Do they include photos? Do they include outgoing links? How often do they link to their own products?  Do they host guest posts? Do they interview other people? Do they use images in their posts?  Do they have on-going post series?

Social media
Which platforms do they use?  How do they use them?  How do they promote their own work on those platforms? Do they promote others’ work on those platforms? Did they join, then abandon, any social media platforms - and if they did - why? How often do they link to their social media accounts in their blog posts?  How much personal information do they share on social media?

Email list
How do they get people to sign up for their email list? How frequently do they promote it? Do they have different opt ins for different people? How often do they send it out? Is it unique content or is it the same as what’s on their blog? How is their newsletter laid out?

Community
Do they interact with their readers and respond to comments on their blog and on social media?  Do they end blog posts with a question? Do they link to other people? Do they provide their readers with freebies? What sorts of freebies? Do they answer readers’ and clients’ questions in blog posts or videos?

Professional trajectory
Who do they write guest posts for? Who has interviewed them? What sorts of products did they launch? How was the launch structured? Which products were successful? Which ones weren’t? Do they mention having a team that helps them? Who have they collaborated with? Did they mention any trainings or workshops that they went to? Did they mention the books that they’ve been reading?  How do they stand out from their competition?  What are they doing differently?

There are two reasons why this internet stalking is insanely useful
1. It will provide you with heaps of insight into success and tons of ideas you can implement yourself
2. It will remind you that everyone - even rich internet celebrities - started with five Twitter followers and poorly filmed Youtube videos.

There’s absolutely no reason you can’t be just as amazing and successful as they are.

Who’s your favorite internet celebrity?  Whose career are you going to stalk?

Wait! Before you get to those awesome links!  

Last year my friend Rachel finished her degree, continued to be the only person I know who can pull off her hair color, and had a freak accident in a mosh pit that left her with thousands and thousands of dollars in medical bills. I wanted to do my part to help out so over on Facebook, I’m running a little silent auction for four hours of my time - even copywriting! Which I don’t offer anymore!  If you’ve interested, pop over and leave a comment on the picture with your bid; auction ends February 28th at 6 pm CST.

Anyway. Here are some of the best, brightest things I’ve found online recently!

This is insaaaaanely helpful, no matter what time of year you read it. Finding inspiration and motivation to blog better this year.
New Stimuli - one of the best ways to get your creativity levels up is to expose yourself to new stuff. Buy a book, watch a movie, meet someone new, go for a walk, spend time with your family, listen to some music – get out of your normal daily rhythm and expose yourself to some new sights, sounds, tastes, touches and smells. Remember that what you put into your life has a direct baring on what comes out.

Related: if you’re feeling uninspired, think about why you follow your favorite bloggers.

This is a long read that’ll inspire you to take a lot of action when you’re finished: how to optimize your hottest posts.

Reminder: it’s totally possible to work on projects you’re excited about.  AND ACTUALLY MAKE MONEY WHILE DOING SO.  And you don’t have to get an accounting degree if you don’t want to. When everyone is making the same bet, there’s more competition. And when there’s more competition, there’s fewer winners. Those winners range from soul-sucking middle-management at T-Mobile to soul sucking stockbroker at Goldman Sachs.The money’s different, but the sad man in the uniform is the same.

Yes!  I struggle with this soooo much: when to do something important (but not urgent.)

If you have a physical product that you regularly pitch to magazine editors, you probably need this.

Almost every women I know (myself veeeeery much included) would benefit from watching this: five tips to start negotiating like a badass.

What posts have you loved as of late?  Leave ’em in the comments!

This guest post is from Olivia of Early Bird Strategy. She helps small businesses, entrepreneurs, and bloggers create and grow their online presence. She digs process, content strategy, SEO, A/B testing, Oregon IPA and email marketing. You can sign up for her free resources newsletter here - don’t worry, you can sleep in.

Google judges you based on your technical issues. Even though you have awesome content - sometimes the Googlebots can’t find you (which means awesome customers and potential Internet-besties can’t either).

Thankfully, you can play by Google’s rules, using one of their free tools. After plugging in your site, you can find any errors or areas for improvement and get back to focusing on the fun stuff like cat videos and writing.

In this post, I’m going to show you three smart ways you can use Google’s free tool Google Webmaster Tools to learn about - and fix up - your blog, to ultimately improve your SEO. When you’re a blogger, it can feel like you spend all your time writing and connecting. So more “technical” things might sound like a terrible way to spend a Sunday afternoon, but putting in a little effort can get big results.

1. Find out how people are finding your blog and what searches you’re showing up for but people aren’t clicking on

Sure you might know what some people searched for to arrive at your site from using Google Analytics, but do you know what people are searching for when your blog comes up in a search on Google, but they DON’T click on you? Would you believe me if I told you this was something you can find out?

If your mind just exploded from the above image, here’s what’s happening… This part of Google Webmaster Tools takes a look at some of your top posts, tells you about how many people saw it on Google (Impressions), how many of them clicked on it (Clicks), what that click through rate was (CTR is clicks divided by impressions), and what the average position on Google was (for example #1, would be the very first result).

As you can see in the above image, even though I only wrote the post on editorial calendars a couple weeks ago, I’m already getting Google traffic from it. It’s still pretty far back (#28, which would be the 3rd page) on Google results, but it included a free download of an editorial calendar template and was something I spent a lot of time on, so I expect it to continue bringing me traffic, potential customers, and connections.

Actionable homework #1: In Google Webmaster Tools, navigate to the Search Traffic>Search Queries area, and click on the Top Pages tab. Then, sort your list from largest to smallest, by Impressions. Make a note of the three pages with the highest CTR, and the three pages with the lowest CTR. What can we learn from this? The higher your CTR the higher relevance (or perceived relevance) someone searching on Google thought you had on those search terms. What a great way to know what your first impression is on what people are finding useful!

What else you could write about similar to those topics. For the low CTR pages, take a look at the post. Is there something in the post title or meta description that people aren’t finding your little preview snippet compelling enough to click on? (how rude!) What can you learn or change about this?

2. Use Google Authorship to have your profile show up in search results

Have you noticed sometimes when you’re searching on Google that you see a little picture of the author in the results, like this:

Did you think it was only for massive sites like Mashable and Gawker etc.? It’s not! You can show up here too. One of the most overlooked areas of Google Webmaster tools is bloggers passing up this great opportunity to have your Google+ profile linked to your content, and more often than not have your profile picture in the results! Hello higher click through rate!

One of the Google Webmaster Tools Labs features is showing you statistics for your verified author posts.

Actionable Homework #2: Get the ball rolling for Google Authorship, whether that’s first signing up for a Google+ account or verifying your email address. Here’s Google’s Guide for linking your content to your Google+ profile (2 options).

3. Fix those crawl errors

This section of Google Webmaster Tools can feel like homework. {Hey, where did everybody go?!} While it can be tedious to clean up some of the broken stuff on your site (especially if you’ve been around a while), it can also make a big difference in traffic. Think of it as spring cleaning and from a reader’s perspective how frustrating is it to click a broken link!?

With one of my clients, I found thousands of crawl errors that instead of fixing one by one, we were able to fix in one go, during my Website Audit and Action Plan, by adding an automatic redirect! This tiny change resulted in a significant increase in organic traffic that previously had just been landing on a broken page - while a few people had managed to find their way to the homepage, most had just abandoned ship.

Actionable Homework #3: Navigate to the Crawl>Crawl Errors area in Google Webmaster Tools. Click on the “Not found” tab. Clean up a few of these by click on the line item, which opens a little popup window with more info. The “not found” url at the top is the link that is broken. By clicking on the “linked from” tab you’ll find where this traffic is coming from. For example, if you’d mistyped when linking up this on another post, you could go in and correct it.

If you log in and find that you have a lot of crawl errors, try not to feel too overwhelmed. Instead, fix a few to get an idea of how it works, and then set a reminder to come back and do recurring maintenance in this area.

To wrap things up, even if people are finding you via social channels, overlooking organic search is like pulling a humble brag trick on your content. “No thanks, you don’t need to look over here, I just spent tons of time creating all this. Look away, I don’t want to be found!”. With a few small tweaks you can set yourself up to be found.

To learn how to add and validate your site in Google Webmaster Tools, here’s an in-depth post with additional advanced things you can learn.

Have you tried Google Webmaster Tools?

I spend huge amounts of time either:
a) telling people how to do things (use Twitter lists! find ideal clients! roadtrip solo!)
b) learning how to do things (why are fishtail braids so haaaaaard!?)
c) reading lady magazines and throwing themed dinner parties 

I also spend a lot of time Googling how to do things.  When people ask me if I know how to do something I usually say “No. But I just figured we could Google it.”

But here’s the thing about all those how-tos and tutorials and Google searches:
That information is worth exactly nothing unless you do something with it.

It’s incredibly easy to load up your RSS feed with blogs that teach you how to do things
to assemble link round ups of helpful posts
to retweet “5 Ways To Revolutionize Your Blahblahblah” links
But at some point?  You actually need to do that stuff. 

You need to read the whole article - not just the bolded headings.
You need to spend the hour installing that complicated-but-super-useful plugin.
You need to carve out a few hours to nail down your About page.
You need make your first video - even if it’s bad.

And this blog post is just as much a note-to-self as a call-to-action.
I’m just as guilty as the next person of reading headlines, scanning chapters, and having to encounter something 45 times before it sinks in that, yes, Sarah, you do need a newsletter.

So let’s make a pact, shall we?
Let’s read less and do more.
Let’s close all those tabs and start writing.
Let’s stop skimming and start implementing.

Great things are coming for us.  We just have to make an actual effort. 

P.S. Did this get you all fired up?  Want some help actually making things happen for your business online?  I can help!

In internet years, I’m practically a dinosaur.  Yes and Yes has been around since 2008 and I’ve got 2,300+ posts in the archives. Crazy, right?  Now, it seems a pity and a waste to let all that writing sit there and gather dust so I’ve been brainstorming other things to do with them.  Want to try some yourself?

1. SEO-ify it, pretty-ify it, and re-promote it
When I started blogging, I’m not sure that SEO was even A Thing and if it was, I surely didn’t know about it.  While my content was good, my titles were too quirky and mysterious to inspire much click through and all my photos were saved as “008138ejplorb.jpg.”  This was also the age when people used any old photo they found - regardless of copyright and I wasn’t any different.

Here’s what you should do to make your old posts more awesome
* Find the best ones. Hint: they’re probably tutorials or how-tos
* Find a good, legal image for them. I like Flickr Creative Commons (sorted by ‘most interesting’) or Unsplash for beautiful, legal images
* Rename the photo as something SEO-friendly -  “woman-using-computer” not “9109282joli.jpg.”
* Put the title of the post on top of the image. This will make it more Pinterest and Twitter feed friendly.  I use Picmonkey for all my photo editing needs.
* Add spaces, bolding, or headings to make your post more readable.
* If you named your post something ‘clever’ the first time around (like song lyrics), rename it something obvious and Googleable
* Schedule out a few tweets to re-promote your newly awesome old blog post

Offer it as a guest post
Do you have internet friends? Of course you do.  Do they ever go on vacation or need a break? Dur. When that happens, offer up the best of your archives to fill that time while they’re off drinking margaritas on the beach.

Or you can rework the best of your archives and offer them as guest posts to any of the websites that syndicate content. Thought Catalog! Mind Body Green! Daily Love! Etc.

Put it in a different format
Some people like to read blog posts.  Other people want to listen to podcasts as they drive or watch Youtube videos during lunch. There’s absolutely no reason you can’t repurpose your old content in new forms.  I can take all of my most popular travel blog posts and turn each of them into a video.  I can turn old posts from this small business blog into infographics.  I turned my Real Life Style Icon interviews into a newsletter opt-in ebook that netted me 1,000+ new subscribers.  Please feel free to copy all of these ideas and use them yourself!

What are you doing with the posts in your archive?  Share your best tips in the comments!

P.S. Does all this advice ring true?  But maybe you need a little bit of extra help with your blog or a loving push in the right direction?  I can help!  For less than you’d think!

photo by ray from la // cc

It’s the end of the month!  Let’s look at some of the helpful, smart things other people wrote on the internet!

Oh my, but this is timely.  10 ways to switch your brain to writing mode when working from home.
Walk around the block
If you work at home, it can be tempting to work from the couch in your pajamas. And while that’s definitely one of the perks of the business, it doesn’t really help your productivity. Get dressed, walk around the block and pretend you’re walking to “work”. Grab a cup of coffee on the way into your office, sit down and start your day.

A lot of people ask me how to get their start freelance writing.  I’ve been getting paid to write since I was 20 and from now on, I’ll just be pointing everyone who asks about it here.

Alex Franzen strikes again!  Her favorite (free) tools for writing, creativity, self-expression, and what not.

If you, like me, are still using Blogger for your blogging platform, it’s still possible to SEO your posts without all those fancy plug ins. Here are 7 SEO tricks for Blogger.

What’s the difference between doing what you WANT and doing what you SHOULD?
Can you just not do it? I personally believe you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. If you’re in a bad relationship (with a client, a toxic friend, a significant other, a business partner) can you simply break up? If you have a day job you hate can you quit or just not go in today? If your answer is “No. I can’t just not do it…” ask yourself “why” a few times and soon you’ll get to why you choose to take on this duty or responsibility.

Remember how Allison told you that you can totally forgo the fancy DSLR and use iphone photos on your site?  Kara has an iphone-specific photography e-course!

Yes!  2014 Reboot: Blog Overhaul.  Tons of great ideas about how to fall back in love and get re-excited about your blog this year.

So interesting!  The Notecard System: the key for remembering, organizing, and using everything you read.

What awesome things did you read this month?  Leave links in the comments. 

photo by sailor coruscant // cc