With more than 800 million users Facebook is the #1 Social Network and a very powerful marketing tool. As I have mentioned a couple of times before Facebook isn’t static, it changes all the time and it changes fast. At times it is hard to keep up. So anytime I come across new information about Facebook my antennas go up.

Last week I was invited to a webinar about FBinfluence an All in One Facebook Marketing course.

Right away I knew two things…

I knew I had to be on this webinar and I knew I was going to buy this product ….even BEFORE I attended the webinar.

This Thursday, people in the United States will be celebrating Thanksgiving Day. To me this is a special day, not only because of the delicious food I will be serving my family, but also because I will be surrounded by my loved ones, those who are dear to my heart.

That alone is enough reason for me to be “thankful.”  But another reason Thanksgiving is special to me is because it marks the beginning of the holiday season which has always been a very special time of year for me.

Referring to my Paper.li Twitter Newspaper my friend Michaele asked me …“Where do you find the time to catch so many great stories every day?”

My answer was simple…”Once you’ve set it up, it’s pretty much on autopilot.”

You can read about how to set up your own Twitter Newspaper here…

It is really THAT easy!

I published my first issue back at the end of May and have enjoyed sharing the stories of my friends and followers ever since. If you come across great content and valuable information why wouldn’t you want to share it with your followers?  Paper.li provides the perfect platform for this with its visually appealing magazine-style layout. Statistics say that people are much more likely to read a story with pictures than one with text alone.

At 200 million registered users and a 100 million active users (as of this writing) Twitter is an excellent platform to help you connect and interact with your customers or clients and grow your business.

Did you know that over 50 million active users log in to Twitter every single day? That’s a lot of eyeballs that potentially could turn in to a lot of traffic for you.

I have been on Twitter for a couple of years now, but I still don’t know all the little tricks, but here’s a cool one I just learned about …

What does success mean to you? If you don’t know and don’t have a clear vision of what success means to you it will be almost impossible to achieve it.

Since we are all different, success will mean different things to you and me. To some people success is just getting up in the morning. To others it means reaching the lifestyle of their dreams.

Success isn’t a destination. It’s a journey. It has peaks and valleys, twists and turns and yes, also the occasional road block.

Success needs planning. But before you can plan you need to know exactly what you want. That’s where the clear vision comes into play.

In my previous post I wrote about how you can Make the New Facebook Ticker Work for Your Business. Today it’s all about that dreaded Facebook Unsubscribe option.

As we well know by now, Facebook keeps life interesting with its constant changes. Some of them we like others not so much. You may have noticed the new Facebook “Subscribed” button in the top right corner when you are at a friend’s Profile Page. You can use this button to either subscribe to or unsubscribe from their updates. Provided of course they have turned that option on.

If a person is your Friend they are automatically subscribed to your Profile Page and vice versa. But you also have the option to subscribe to the updates of somebody you find interesting without having to add them to your Friends.

To tell you the truth, I haven’t paid much attention to the Facebook Ticker until I watched a webinar this week. I had absolutely no idea how powerful this little gadget is. It blew me away!

Here is what I learned and why I will be paying closer attention from now on to the updates rolling by in the Ticker while I go about my business on Facebook.

First off, what is the Facebook News Ticker?

When you look to the top right after logging in to Facebook you will see the activities of your Friends roll by. These are LIVE updates of what your Friends are liking, sharing, commenting on or doing.

The first of November logically always follows the spooky night of Halloween. Did you have many trick or treaters knocking at your door? It seems like every year we get less and less here in our community. Not even all of our neighbors’ children visited … or maybe I just didn’t recognize them in their Halloween costumes.

The first day (or first week) of the month is also traditionally the time when I acknowledge and say thanks to my top commentators. At least it’s been like that for the past year or so.

Where has this year gone? A few days from now we will be celebrating Halloween, one of the biggest holidays (at least where candy sales are concerned) here in the U.S.

There are 36 million kids ages 5-13 in the United States, and more than 93 percent of them report going trick-or-treating, according to the Washington Post.

Do you realize that all of those little ghosts and goblins who will be coming knocking at your door for some tricks or treats can help you spread the word about your business?

Absolutely! Halloween presents a great opportunity to get really creative and think outside the box as far as your marketing is concerned.

I had oodles of fun this weekend painting our deck with my husband and one of our sons. Well, let me specify, I had fun Friday and Saturday.  Sunday was alright, but Monday it wasn’t fun anymore at all. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t wait to finally be done.

It would have been nice if we had a couple of extra days to spread the job out a bit more, but unfortunately that wasn’t an option because the deck had to be finished before our first major snow stormed arrived. It started snowing last night and it’s still going strong.

So we were putting in eight hour days, getting up and down that ladder, standing on footstools or just crouching down. Oh our achy bones! This morning, admiring the fine work we had done, my husband and I looked at each other and agreed, “We will never do this again.”

FreeArtisticPhotos.com

Finding free images for blogs is not as simple as performi­­­ng a Google Image Search. As a matter of fact, doing that might land you in hot water because you could be violating copyright laws.

Many of the images that will show up in your browser when you do a simple image search on Google are actually copyrighted and belong to whoever upladed them to their website or blog.

See, when you upload an image to your blog, it will be indexed by the Google search bots.

For example, if you do a search for anti “spam plugin” you will find that an image I created for a previous blog post will show up in the search results.

I am very honored to have been nominated for the Versatile Blogger Award by my friend and fellow blogger Stacy Claflin. Thank you so much, Stacy for thinking of me!

To be quite honest with you, I had to look up the word “versatile” in the dictionary as I had no clue of its meaning. Cross-checking various online dictionaries as well as my trusted Harper Collins German-English dictionary I came to the conclusion that it means…

1. Capable of doing many things competently. 2. Having varied uses or serving many functions.

Pretty cool!  Now that I know what it means I’m even more delighted and only too happy to pay it forward.