Whether you like it or not, if you have a Facebook business page, you will now be on the new Timeline format.

Thanks to a really useful webinar from Alicia Cowan and Tamsin Fox-Davies last week, I now have all the information I need to implement these changes. (Not that I’ve done them all yet, mind you.)

So here are five tips I gained from their webinar that I’m going to share with you.

1. Use a striking cover photo

It needs to be eye catching and should represent what you do. It also needs to be 851 pixels wide x 315 highs. Here’s the photo I have chosen for my Marketing Copywriter business page.

The other day our Lexmark colour printer went haywire: only printing in black and white and then spewing out sheets of solid magenta.

The diagnostics pointed to a print head failure so my husband called Lexmark to find out how to get hold of a new one.

We had bought non-Lexmark ink cartridges which we were told was likely to be the cause of the problem. Even so, the chap at Lexmark still said they would post us a replacement print head free of charge. And – get this – a set of inks as well (to ensure we were using the right ones). No payment required.

Now that’s customer service for you.

The power of word of mouth

Good customer service always pays off because, when you experience it, you tell others. You also tell people when you experience bad customer service, but human nature means that we tell an awful lot more people when the service was bad.

On Friday, I went to the excellent Women Unlimited 2012 conference at the British Library in London. There was a tremendous line up of truly inspirational speakers and I spent the entire day surrounded by successful, entrepreneurial women.

In no particular order, here are some of the key learnings I took away from the day. Some of the speakers run multi-million pound empires, but we can still apply their words of wisdom to our smaller-scale freelance businesses.

• Stop and enjoy the journey

• Integrity is paramount

• When you become successful you need to learn to be tough – with people and situations

• Go for awards; they are great for your business
Read more »

I continue to be surprised when people think search engine optimisation (SEO) is only about inserting the right keywords in the right places. While this is, indeed, an important element of SEO, there are other factors that work in tandem and you need to employ all of them.

So here’s a quick recap of the OTHER things you need to be doing to rise up the Google rankings:

Ensure your site is engaging

I’m told that Google records how long a visitor spends on your site and this will impact your search position. So, if Google sees people are taking time to read your site, then they figure it must have content that’s of interest. After all, Google’s role is to provide relevant information. That means you need to have a site that looks engaging, has compelling content, and makes visitors want to click through and find out more.

Email is probably one of the best things that happened to business. And I don’t mean the speed of communications and so on. Email makes pitching to new prospects dead easy. With email, you don’t have to cold call people any more. And you no longer have to worry about how you will get on during a live conversation, how you will react to your prospect’s questions etc.

Instead, you can take your time and craft your message and make it perfect for your recipient.

By its nature, email – and especially a cold call email – has to be short. These days no-one has the time to read through paragraphs of copy. In order for your message to be read, it has to be very concise, two paragraphs at most. Needless to say, that doesn’t leave much space for presenting yourself as an expert, right?

Luckily, you can use your email signature to help you achieve just that. Here are three tips on how to do it:

There are entire books devoted to the subject of search engine optimization (SEO) – indeed, I took an 8-module course on SEO earlier in the year which filled an entire ring binder. So this post is an overview to give you the essentials on how to optimize your site’s rankings on Google and other search engines.

There are basically three things that are key when it comes to getting your site optimized for search engines:

1. The number of links that point to your site
2. The keywords you use
3. How often you update your content. Quite simply, the more regularly you update your site or your blog, the more often the search engines will crawl it.

There’s not much more to say regarding point 3, so the focus of the rest of this post is on links and keywords.