I recently had a discussion at an online network with a fellow member about using Facebook to promote our businesses.

I’ve been doing a lot of research in the area of using Facebook to promote a group or business, so I’ve got quite a few tips to share.

In the coming months, I’ll be posting about promoting your business on Facebook.  The first post in the Facebook for business series will likely be about one of the following:

* Why it’s important to create a “Page” at Facebook vs. using your personal Facebook profile, more…

No, we’re not talking about blogs, today.  I’m going to share some tips with you that I’ve followed, for the best results in a professional looking web site, which is easy on the eyes and looks pretty, too.

* If the header of your site has just plain text for the title and no panache, try to create an interesting header to be a bit more eye-catching - the top 1/3 of your website is your sales pitch.  Go to Cooltext.com and create your own.  Or if you have a couple hundred dollars to invest, hire a graphic designer to create one for you.

* If you are selling something on your site, tell us more about your products–Entice people to buy with a statement of how I need the things you’re selling.  Use a few photos of them on your homepage. more…

So you have a web site.  And it’s great.  It’s getting you some exposure, and perhaps even good traffic leading to sales.  But just having a web site is not enough!  In beefing your marketing efforts arsenal, you must also consider web site statistics (stats) and what they mean.

Some folks think that a site counter/hit counter is all they need, to tell them what they want to know about their web site’s traffic.  They couldn’t be more wrong!  A counter not only gives inaccurate data, (usually counts each page visit–regardless of whether it’s the same person visiting more than once) but a simple web site counter does not tell you the real info you need to know.

You invariably need to know the following, to really understand your website traffic and stats: more…

If you are moving your blog to another host, I’ve got three words for you. Backup, backup, backup.

Having successfully run a couple of blogs in the past, I am all-too-aware of the things one ought to do when moving a blog or starting a new one, but importing the old one’s posts. In the past few months, I’ve noticed a rise in folks complaining about losing blog posts, when moving their WordPress blog from one place to another.

Here are some tips: more…

If you want to promote your Twitter profile with something more than just a plain old text link, feel free to visit this page.  There are quite a few to choose from.

You can even design a graphic of your own, for the background.

Here is the link to the code:

http://twittercounter.com/?inc=buttons&username=YOUR-TWITTER-USERNAME

Hint: if you are lazy with HTML code or don’t know how to change it, simply append the end of the link with your username, like so

username=YOUR-TWITTER-USERNAME

Replace “YOUR-TWITTER-USERNAME” with your Twitter name, exactly as it appears on your profile.