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Category: Biz Tips

Horse-Cents: Repurposing Even BETTER Than Recycling!

July 3, 2011 at 1:53 pmCategory:Biz Tips

Great new uses around the barn for used industrial items.

Billboards as tarps? Used conveyor belt beds as stall and trailer mats? You better believe it! Repurposed Materials, Inc, a company in the Denver, Colorado area is taking “going green” to a whole new level for the horse industry!

Company founder, Damon Carson, believes his company’s tagline: “Repurposing and Re-using Waste and Byproducts of Industry” so much he’s building a career out of it!

A great new career for a street weeper brush!

From street sweeper brushes (repurposed to horsie in-pasture back scratchers) to used airline flight cases as mouse and waterproof grain bins – these guys are thinking outside the box when it comes to industry cast-offs. Right now they are headquartered out west – but conceivably this is an idea that could go national almost immediately!

flight cases make GREAT grrain bins!

Find them at:

(720) 378-2491
Repurposed Materials, Inc.

Win • Win • Win!

June 8, 2011 at 1:40 pmCategory:Biz Tips

Questions

The question and top vote recipients

I recently experimented by holding a quickie contest on my Merry Horses Facebook page. I used the “Questions” feature and asked:

Add the Equine rescue or advocacy org I should donate 1/2 the $ from one of my fun paintings on etsy (Songpony). Tell your friends to vote for your choice below!

I left the “edit options” box open so people could add the name of their organization.

My goals were to:

  1. experiment with the concept of this “Questions” feature to see what kind of interaction I could inspire
  2. see who’s paying attention to my feed
  3. and to find out who among those is willing to interact with me
  4. get folks to help me get more “likes” for the Merry Horses page by bumping into it through this contest process as people added and/or voted for their organization of choice
  5. and help create a conceptual pathway to my online art store building awareness for part of its Mission to give back to equine rescue by helping support this blog and it’s many creative features!

The Prize

For the winner, 50% of the proceeds from a painting (any painting, winner’s choice) out of my SongPony store.

Results

  • A steady uptick in fans to my page, perhaps as many as +50 new fans.
  • 94 individual rescue organizations named
  • 2399 votes cast

Getting the Word Out

I announced the contest on Monday, May 30 (ok I know a holiday – maybe not the best time to start something like this – or is it? This particular population pretty much works all the time at what they’re doing)  and stated vote tallying would go through 11:59pmEST that Friday. Another confession: vote tallying would go until whenever it was Saturday morning I logged on, turned out to be about 7amEST.

I tweeted the contest too – via @merryhorses but even though my Merry Horses page is set to be very public the tweeted link didn’t work across all platforms, particularly mobile devices. So I had to instead tweet links to my page where a link to the contest could be found, actually a better result for my page.

I re-shared the question 2-3 times a day so it would have a chance at being higher up in people’s newsfeeds.

By Wednesday I noticed there were some front runners and these people were starting to share the question with their peeps and fans fairly regularly too. Awesome! Word was getting out!

The Wrap Up

First Place. What a pleasure it was for me to get to tell the winners, Horse Rescue United that all their lobbying efforts to rally their fans had been effective – they won with 398 votes!

Click to go to their Facebook Page

Somewhere along the way they had formed a notion that I’d be creating a new piece for their organization’s benefit, not just letting them select from what I already had for sale. I thought about it for about half a minute and loved this new angle. Of course! Let them choose a size and subject that appealed to them. So that’s what has happened. I’ve begun a piece, a 16″ x 20″ painting of a rescue they’re sponsoring named Tristan; a big drafty blonde dude without a whole lot of days left. He’s got cancer – but for HRU he embodies joy. So that’s what his painting is about – his living life to the fullest. Nice, nice image, no?

Click to go to their Facebook Auction Page

Second Place. Voting had been really heated between our winners above and another organization Frog Pond Draft Horse Rescue. The “ponders” as they call each other managed to bring in 301 votes. I couldn’t let this go unrewarded. They’ve been asked to select any item under $250 in the SongPony store and will be sent 50% of the price when it sells. The text will be changed to reflect this collaboration and you can bet I’ll be sending them a link to it! Of course I’ll be tweeting and sharing these items for sale a bunch until they sell and I can forward the split to these rescues.

Everybody Else. So how was I to recognize all the others who participated? I had read that people don’t always care that they in particular win a contest – but seem to be able to share in the delight of others when they do after the process is over. Cool.

The painting for Live and Let Live Animal Rescue

So I decided to do a random drawing for the 92 other organizations that weighed in. Their vote tallies went anywhere from 1 to 164! Using the random number generator at random.org it came up with the number 20 – so I counted twenty down from our two top winners and came up with Live and Let Live Animal Rescue as the runner up winner. I selected a painting for them and when it sells I’ll be sending them the 50% of the purchase price.

Win | Win | Win

I believe this was an amazingly successful contest. Here’s why:

  • it raised awareness of the Merry Horses fan page among a specifically targeted population (equine rescuers and their fans)
  • it heated up some friendly positioning among compassionate like-minded people from a standpoint of gain rather than competition
  • it helped, and continues to help, draw some horse loving traffic to the SongPony store
  • it highlighted the social media savvy among the participating organizations showcasing them as successful leaders in this setting

 

5 Do’s and Dont’s For Your Org’s Facebook Albums

May 25, 2011 at 2:27 pmCategory:Biz Tips

With over 4900 Facebook friends, Merry Horses sees a lot of album updates in her news feed. Some better than others. To help you get the most out of your Facebook albums on behalf of your rescue or advocacy organization I’ve compiled the following two lists: Five Mistakes to Avoid and Five Imaginative USes for Your Facebook Albums.

Five Top Mistakes to Avoid in Your Facebook Albums

1. No organization or contact info given either in the album or individual photo captions. Often people share your albums or even individual photos with their friends (that’s what you want, right?) but now they’re unattached to your page – none of your info is available, and the viewers either have to hunt you down or give up. They’re probably as busy as we are – so they give up.

2. Telling us in your regular status update that you’ve posted new photos doesn’t help us navigate to them, so, remember, we’re busy! We move on. Always include the link. I know you want to announce your photos and a link turn s your update into a link – so just add the link in the first comment below your update!

3. Be careful with overloading us with too much bad news and need. Sprinkle some success stories now and then or we’ll just all get too depressed. Look, we know there’s too much need, too many horses needing better situations – but break it up for us with some good news too occassionally.

4. Where is the needy horse in the photo right now? Tell us in the photo caption. Name the album by geographic location too. Where the horse is can help people think of who among their friends might be in the region who may be interested.

5. Include a link to your organization or informative web page (where you state your 501c3 status, Mission Statement and all other wonderful aspects of your work) even if you’re an individual doing this from the deep well of personal compassion! This is all important information and helps people who don’t know you yet understand what you’re all about.

Five Truly Imaginative Uses of Facebook Albums

Those Facebook albums can also be used for more than just posting needy equines. Below are some ways I’ve seen organizations use them creatively.

• Online auction
I love this one, Frog Pond Draft Rescue has even set up an entire fan page for their ongoing online Facebook auctions. Check it out here:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/pages/Frog-Pond-Farm-Auction-Page/117926208238466?sk=photos
How it works is in the comments section below each item you type in your bid. The last bid in the comments wins!

Frog Pond Draft Horse Rescue Works the facebook album auction thing really well!

• Sale
Merry Horses has used this one a lot too. I’m an artist so I created a bunch a fun small items and posted them in an album around the holidays last winter. In the comments below each piece whoever wanted the painting or ornament in the photo simply typed SOLD and then followed the payment directions I included in each photo’s captions. Those sales funded the recent overhaul of this site!

• Contest
I’ve seen organizations do impromptu fundraisers with topics like “Name the Horse in the Photo” or “Give us a Funny Caption” please. Great for connecting with folks!

• Volunteer Jobs
Post funny or engaging photos of jobs around your organization’s facility you’d love to entice some volunteers to do. Example: a photo of somone grooming a horse, or cleaning a stall, or tossing hay…etc. Ask them to sign up or express interest in helping in the comments below and then contact them!

• Thanks & Recognition
Post photos of people who help you. Make sure they’re nice photos and express your gratitude freely! You can tag them in the picture too just type the @ sign and start typing their name. Facebook will automatically make that a clickable link to their page and alert them on their feed that they’re your superstar!

Facebook Brand Pages vs. People Pages

May 25, 2011 at 2:19 pmCategory:Biz Tips

If you’re feeling a little ‘left in the dust’ with the Facebook thing, you’re not alone! Things have been changing rapidly over the past 24 months with how organizations, businesses and individuals are connecting with each other.

The Merry Horses Facebook page!

In many ways these new developments are a godsend to organizations with limited marketing budgets. In other ways the confusion from the the quickly changing offerings have confused all but the most stalwart! How did we get here and where should we go next?

These days it’s pretty easy to accidentally blur the lines between our public and private personnas online. Most of us started with Facebook with a personal page. Eventually as more and more people signed up we all started getting friendship requests from those we might better describe as colleagues or business associates or even professional acquaintances and contacts.

How should we deal with that? Do we inadvertently risk insulting these folks by not accepting the friend request so we can keep our private life private? Or do we resign ourselves to some new open permissiveness in personal and professional relationships?

Some people quickly and cleverly began setting up two accounts for themselves:

  1. One for their personal lives and
  2. another for their professional selves

Facebook took the hint (remember they’re inventing this as they go too) and started encouraging users to create “Pages” for their organizations and businesses. But migrating ‘friends’ from the professional account to the new Page is a task not accomplished easily.

So, where are we today?

As of today you’ll get the most from your Facebook experience by organizing your accounts to optimize the available services. Here’s how:

Have a Personal account you keep for your personal life.

Facts

  • a. keeps your secrets safe
  • b. you’re limited to just 5000 friends.

Create a Page for your business or organization – multiple pages for multiple organizations!

The Good Stuff:

  1. Exists solely to represent the business or organization without compromising the privacy of the page administrators.
  2. A Page can have unlimited fans
  3. Has Privacy settings separate from your personal account
  4. Can have multiple Administrators so more than one person can maintain the content.
  5. Can have its own media sections (videos, links, notes, discussions, photos, music, etc)

The Drawbacks:

  1. Most people don’t click deeper than the wall
  2. Everything slides off the bottom of the wall pretty quickly
  3. You must maintain and keep fresh
  4. Pages can comment on other Pages that “Like” them but
  5. Pages can not coment on individual Fan’s walls. Not now anyway. This might change.
  6. Pages used to be able to send a message to all their fans at once – but this feature seems to have changed recently as well.
  7. So that’s sort of the big challenge – you might be a Page Administrator, but Facebook Staff continue to be in charge of what content is available and how.

 

Regardless of the imperfections and limitations this is a powerful tool! Facebook Pages are used to their best advantage when they encourage their Fans, entertain them, give them useful info, offer specials, announce contests and otherwise socially engage people!

Facebook Pages should not be thought of as a complete replacement for your regular website. Why? Facebook:

  • • is ever changing
  • • has limited design capabilities
  • • limited functionality

    My personal Facebook page

  • • not fully search engine optimized
  • • you have limited control over the users experience
  • • you never know when it’s going to change
  • • who owns that content you’re posting anway?

That said, Facebook Pages offer an amazing social dimension to your organization’s goals. In this it is second to none (sorry MySapce!).

Photos: The author’s EquineConnection.org Facebook page, Her “Merry Horses” Person page (created before Pages started becoming so powerful – now how to make the switch!) and her personal “Person” page.

SEO for Equine Rescue

May 25, 2011 at 2:14 pmCategory:Biz Tips

Search Engine Optimization or SEO may sound intimidating to the uninitiated but you’ll soon discover you can get a useful handle on that puppy in just a few minutes!
Basically SEO encourages you to add meaningful tags and keywords into your online posts and websites. Meaningful to whom? The people you want to connect with! Why? So you are easily found within typical seach results by the people you want!

Here (1.9MB download – totally worth it!) is a marvelous white paper on the subject written and made available for re-distribution by Ana Hoffman (whose website is http://www.trafficgenerationcafe.com ).

UNDERSTANDING ADWORDS
She begins by carefully showing you how to discover your rescue’s best keywords by using this free adwords tool at Google:


Pretty cool, right?

COST PER CLICK
She then delves deeper in allowing you to consider how to assign a monetary value to visitors to your site(s) through some not too tough to handle mathematics. You end up with a tailored “Cost Per Click” or CPM. But you don’t have to get that into it – you can just search out the terms your potential donors use to find organizations like yours and start using those and be way ahead of the game!

YOUR COMPETITION!
Ms. Hoffman also advises you to study your competition! She provides detailed step-by-step ways to do this too. She examines both the quality and quantity values of targeted keywords and how to use these effectively. Here are several links to get you started:
http://www.nichewatch.com/
http://spydermate.com/
http://websitegrader.com

She mentions some software you can employ to get you even better situated….
Turn your website into an unshakable search engine leader with the only world-standard SEO software. Right here:
http://www.trafficgenerationcafe.com/seopowersuite
Yep, there’s a free version!
So it isn’t magic and there are no wizards involved – just some applied knowledge and a little ‘sweat equity’.

Improve Retweetability Instantly!

May 25, 2011 at 2:10 pmCategory:Biz Tips

  • 8 posts
May 2, 2011 4:19:45 AM PDT

(Reposted from an email I received from Ana Hoffman – her website offers an awesome free enews letter – find it here: http://www.trafficgenerationcafe.com)

 

For everybody who wants to increase their social media
traffic by improving retweetability INSTANTLY,
here are some practical tips to get you there.

1. Hours of the day: Peak tweet hours – business hours (between
9am-5pm; I guess that’s one of the very few advantages of having a
J.O.B. – you get paid for tweeting). Peak retweet hours – 3pm to
midnight.

Moral: if you want to be read, tweet in the morning; if you want to
be retweeted, tweet at night.

2. Days of the week: The worst day for RT is Sunday; it picks up
from there and peak RT day of the week is Friday, going back down
from there.

3. Use links: Tweets with links are retweeted much more often -
meaning: send your social media generated traffic to good content.

4. Use Bit.ly: Bit.ly URL shorteners are retweeted the most
(tinyurl is retweeted the least – don’t ask me why).

5. Length: forget 140 characters, the shorter the better. 120
characters is the new maximum if you have any chance to be
retweeted.

6. Use hashtags: using existing hashtags greatly increases your
findability by Twitter users and Twitter bots alike.

7. Short profile names help. This one is optional, but very helpful
for obvious reasons. The shorter your name is the more space you
leave for retweeting.

8. Punctuation matters: Overwhelming 93% of all retweets contain
proper punctuation in them, particularly colons and periods. So pay
attention to those small details.

9. Most Retweetable (read: generate the most targeted traffic)
Words & Phrases social media increase your targeted website traffic
image

1. you                              11. please retweet

2. twitter                        12. great

3. please                         13. social media

4. retweet                       14. 10

5. post                            15. follow

6. blog                            16. how to

7. social                          17. top

8. free                             18. blog post

9. media                         19. check out

10. help                           20. new blog post

As you can see, the word “YOU” ranks as number one – a reminder
that we all like to be talked to on a personal level. If you are
talking to “me”, then I am more likely to retweet you.

The word “PLEASE” is very important. If you want to be retweeted,
ask for it and be polite while you are at it.

Tweeting about your new blog posts, particularly on social media,
is a smart thing to do as well.

10. Least Retweetable (read: generate the least amount of targeted
traffic) Words

1. game                            11. well

2. going                           12. sleep

3. haha                             13. gonna

4. lol                                 14. hey

5. but                                15. tomorrow

6. watching                      16. tired

7. work                             17. some

8. home                            18. back

9. night                            19. bored

10. bed                             20. listening

As you can see, if you are talking about “you”, like telling
someone we are going to bed and such, you won’t be retweeted.
Generally, the -ing verbs, like “going”, “watching”, “listening”
won’t get retweets either.

Happy retweeting!

Ana