Fanpage Challenge – Results After Week 2

Fanpage Challenge - Results After Week 2 1First off, I'd like to update everyone on my results of week two of Sue Worthington's Fanpage challenge. My time has been cut short by a few problems in my “real life” work, but even so, I'm impressed with my improvements. Today's results are:

Increase in “Likes” to one of my Facebook pages from 167 to 179, which is almost double the likes I had before the challenge started, and those had taken months to build up. Excellent! Those people who have had more time to devote to the challenge have been getting even better results.

It's not just about “likes” of course. It's about making contacts and sharing each others' content. I'm starting to narrow down to interacting with a few people in a similar niche to my own, so that we can share relevant content to our readers. This will be the long-term legacy.

As well as learning from Sue's daily tasks, I'm also picking up lots of tips and information from working with others in this group. Thanks Sue!

Google Authorship

Another challenge this week was establishing Google Authorship. Quoting from the blog of my friend Jan Kearney:

Authorship is a way for Google to know who you are and what content you have published around the web.

I had a go at doing this a few weeks ago, exhausted myself, thought I'd done it but didn't manage to achieve the desired effect. The visible evidence of success is when your picture appears against your site's results in a Google search. I'd quietly (deliberately LOL) forgotten about it when Jan's post hit my inbox and, because her instructions are so clear to follow, I had another go.

I won't say any more about the procedure other than to refer you to Jan's post on Google Authorship for the benefits of doing this and – more importantly – her easy-to-follow instructions. I did it for my blogs and also for my websites. Woohoo! Thanks Jan! (Jan is a lady I met through one of Sue Worthington's groups and I've had no end of help from reading Jan's blog.)

Exit Pop-ups

The only other big project I've started this week was putting onto another coplementary therapy site exit pop-ups offering readers my free ebook in return for their contact details going onto my list. As you'll realize, I'm trying to increase my list building efforts.

I'm personally not a fan of pop-ups, I find them intrusive – especially when I haven't read enough of a site to decide if I want to hear from them again! But at least with an exit pop-up someone was just about to leave the site anyway. So it's a last ditch attempt to give them my free ebook – or let them escape, which is what they were doing anyway.

The plug-in I'm using was recommended by a trusted colleague who has used it himself. I'm not going to name it yet because – err – I've not got it working properly!! The problem at the moment lies with the split testing routines. (You can let it display different wording / webforms to see which convert best.)

At the moment I've seen ONE form once and never again. SIGH. The plugin lets you choose the number of days before the pop-up will pop-up again, which is controlled by a cookie. In theory I've cleared the cookie (so that I should be able to test the different windows), but nothing is popping up still. I have an open question at the support desk, so hope to have an answer soon. Once it's working, I'll probably tell the window to only open every ……….. days.  Well, what do you think? Should the exit pop-up appear weekly, daily, fortnightly? I'd really value your opinions in the comment box below.

Thanks for listening to my summary of the week, and catch up again soon!