Phyllis Zimbler Miller's Blog: Phyllis Zimbler Miller Author, page 74

A Google Tool That Lets You See What Others See on Your Website

Home page of Miller Mosaic, LLC as seen by Google tool

Thanks to the ezine of book marketer Penny Sansevieri (www.amarketingexpert.com) I've just learned about this nifty tool from Google that enables you to see what others see — http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/

Now many of you know that your website doesn't look the same on every person's computer monitor. The size of the monitor affects the view as well as the browser you are using. (Internet Explorer 6 is especially poor at...

Learning to Create an Ebook Cover

Thanks to a video tutorial and accompanying pdf that Yael and I bought from www.makeebookcovers.com, we were able to make our first ebook cover using GIMP, a free open-source software product.

We used the videos and pdf in tandem to fully understand the steps to creating this ebook for our free report "Twitter, Facebook and Your Website: A Beginning Blueprint for Harnessing the Power of 3 for Your Business"

You can see our first effort above.  (Full disclosure:  Yael had already been using...

Is Your Website Transparent? See What Arianna Huffington Said

In a blog post today Arianna Huffington said in part: "I'm going to predict that the Internet of the future will deliver technology that addresses the greatest needs of the present: the restoration of trust through greater transparency."

This part of her prediction hit home because I had just been explaining to my 85-year-old father why the website that he had shown me was not effective. To put it simply, there was no there there.

In other words, even in the "About Us" part of the site...

Adding to Your Blogging Skills

Early reader, photo by dsb nola — Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

Remember how each year in elementary school you read more difficult books than the year before? This was to challenge you to expand your reading skills from the basic "See Dick and Jane" (yes, I'm that old) to more complicated reading passages and more advanced vocabulary words.

Now you may have been blogging for several months or several years. But if you are still blogging at the same skill level...

Twitter Power Proven: My Computer and StaplesTweets

When my computer turned on and immediately turned off, I knew I had a problem. My husband wanted me to use one of the home repair services we'd used before.

All three of the companies we'd use (names withheld to protect the guilty) were less than satisfactory – and in each case messed up or misdiagnosed the computer in question.

Because I'm a regular customer at my neighborhood Staples, I decided that I would take the computer to Staples. Why? Because Staples is on Twitter with the username ...

Twitter Profile Step-by-Step Report Revised

Two weeks after I write a free report that goes step-by-step through setting up an effective Twitter profile (I wrote the report with the Twitter screens in front of me), I discover Twitter has made changes to those screens that require changing the free report.

Actually, I might not have learned this if I hadn't been working with a client on making his Twitter profile more effective. A couple of the screens didn't look "right" (the way I remembered them). Thus I took my report and compared ...

Why People Are Wedded to Their Old Websites

And How the Miller Mosaic Social Media Make-Over Addresses This Issue

I spend a great deal of time looking at people's websites to evaluate how these websites could be more effective in the age of social media marketing.

I come at this evaluation with the mindset that, within a year of paying a web guy a lot of money to create four websites for me, I walked away from these websites when I realized that they were not as effective as they could be.

Why, then, are people I talk to so resistant to g...

How to Effectively Use Facebook Fan Pages and Facebook Ads

Facebook fan pages (not the same as your Facebook profile) offer powerful opportunities to promote your brand, book or business – IF you know how to effectively use these opportunities.

And it's important to understand these opportunities BEFORE you create your Facebook fan page for your business. And here's one important reason why:

I received an email from a friend asking me to become a fan of her page. I looked at the title of her page and realized that she's missed out on a major...

How to Write Keyword-Rich Blog Post Headlines to Attract Readers and Search Engines

Mike Clough of http://bestbizpractices.org/ in an email to those of us who are part of www.TheBloggersBulletin.org wrote:

"Many people type a question when searching. So if your title is a question or uses words such as how, why, what, when, etc., it will have more words that match and increase the chances that your article will rank higher."

By "rank higher" Mike is referring to higher in the organic (natural as opposed to paid) results returned by the search engines such as Google and Bing w...

The "Power of 3″ Video Tells a Story in 82 Seconds

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yael and I have just used video promotion techniques learned from @AndyJenkins to create a 82-second video to promote our new free report "Twitter, Facebook and Your Website: A Beginning Blueprint for Harnessing the Power of 3 for Your Business"

Both Yael and I feel strongly that just being on Twitter and having a Facebook fan page and a website aren't enough to effectively promote your brand, book or business online.

These three elements of Twitter, a...