A few days after the impending Armageddon when every Facebook page would apparently disappear forever, vapourized as if they were never there in the first place, guess what happened?

The answer is ‘nothing whatsoever’ happened for most Facebook page owners, with the overwhelming majority of fanpages every bit as ‘live’ and visible as they ever were.

So, what was it all about and why did most notice no changes?

Allow me to explain.

There are two different ways of adding content to your Facebook page.

On the one hand, you have the mass of users who build a ‘standard’ page using only the tools and resources that Facebook makes available through their account. For these good folks, nothing changed at all and I dare say that most were entirely unaware that changes were afoot in the first place!

On the flipside however, there are thousands of marketers who are keen to take fanpage usage to the next level by using ‘custom’ page designs. This cannot be done from inside the Facebook system, but the page can be constructed and hosted elsewhere before being ‘iFramed’ into or onto Facebook.

Think of an iFrame as a framed page that overlays the page over which it appears and you’ve got the basic concept.

An iFrame must be pulled in from outside – most commonly from a hosted WordPress blog – and Facebook saw this as a potential security issue. Hence, if you use a custom page and an iFrame, it can only be pulled in from a secure hosting account from October 1st.

Most page owners are happy with the tools and resources offered by Facebook, so this change did not touch them at all.

So there you have it, that’s what happened or more accurately, didn’t happen for the vast majority!

Still, I’m sure that your life is eminently richer for the experience of being part of such an important global non-event, eh?

If you are going to make a fanpage, have a Facebook page already or – even more crucially – if building pages is part of your business, there’s a big change coming. It’s a big change that you need to be aware of, and more importantly, it’s just around the corner. You must make a fanpage secure, and I’m going to tell you both how and why.

As of October 1^st, all Facebook pages must be secure, because as the Facebook people themselves suggest, ‘As the Web evolves, expectations around security change’.

If you have an account, Facebook holds your personal data and – perhaps because they have been so widely criticized for apparent security lapses in the past – they’ve decided to protect your data by securing every single fanpage. If you make fanpages, this is something you cannot ignore, because it isn’t going to go away.

Unless you’ve secured your pages already, the URL that they are served from begins with a plain vanilla ‘http’. To make a fanpage secure, it must be served from an ‘https’ address which indicates that the URL is secure and that the data being passed back and forth is encrypted.

So, what does this mean in practical terms assuming that your fanpage – or for when you make a fanpage for your clients – is currently in an unsecured environment?

Step one to make a fanpage secure is to have an SSL or security certificate attached to the domain where that fanpage is hosted.

There are a few possibilities here.

To begin with, your current web host may offer a shared security certificate. In other words, some hosts offer a security certificate that covers all domains on their server, which should in theory be all you need.

In practice, I’ve found that whilst his seems to work well with some hosts, it’s far less effective with others.

The problem with this is that whilst his seems to work very well with some hosts, others are far less reliable. For instance, I use IX Hosting for some of my sites and their shared security certificate seems to work very well but with other hosts, the performance is patchy at best.

Nevertheless, option one is to use or switch to a host who offers a shared certificate, in which case, IX Hosting are a good choice.

Option two is to approach your existing web host to see how much an SSL certificate for a single domain is going to cost from them. Under normal circumstances, you’d expect to pay $100 or more per year, although you may find that they offer cheaper alternatives.

If you’re going to use a dedicated SSL certificate (i.e. one that is specific and unique to your domain), you also need a dedicated IP address as well. With most decent hosting companies, this shouldn’t cost more than a few dollars a month.

The third option is to buy an SSL certificate from a third-party provider.

This gives you the opportunity of scouring the market for the best deal. Before doing so however, check out Namecheap because they currently offer the cheapest SSL certificates I’ve found at $8.95 a year.

Be sure to check with your hosting company that they are happy to accept a third-party security certificate before you buy. Most are but I haven’t checked every host, obviously.

Facebook pages are changing forever in just a few days, and if didn’t know how to make a fanpage secure previously, you do now. If haven’t secured yours yet, you need to take action without any further delay. Following these simple guidelines will set you on the right road.

One final request. Please ‘Like’ this to ensure that your Facebook friends all know about it too. After all, you want to help them protect their Facebook resources as well, don’t you…?

PS. In the spirit of total disclosure, yes, I’ve included affiliate links in this article and yes, I’d be really grateful if you click through them. But if not, c’est la vie, non?

PPS. More about how you make a fanpage secure next time. Which won’t take another year, promise…

The fact that I’ve posted squat here for such a long time could be taken as a sign of laziness , a charge of which I would usually have little chance of acquittal. In this case however, I plead not guilty M’Lud.

In fact, I’ve been incredibly busy with creating my own stuff, working a ‘normal’ job (in an International School), building a new business and putting together content for other online marketers as well.

However, I’m back, and I’ve got something incredibly important — and free — for you.

Unlike my wife and the rest of the population of planet Earth, I’m not a big Facebook user.

However, I’ve been putting together a lot of Facebook materials recently, and the next post is going to highlight some critical Facebook changes that are just around the corner which you may be unaware of. If you are and you’re using Facebook in your marketing efforts, your ignorance could kill your business.

I’ll tell you more about it very soon.

I had one of my WordPress blogs hacked last week and whilst I did not lose too much – dumb asses hacked a blog that made about $0.03 a year – it did get me thinking about how you can prevent it.

Okay, wrong phrase. You can’t prevent it.

If they can hack into the Pentagon and the White House security records, my blog is never going to be too difficult.

But here are some steps you can take to make it more difficult, maybe to the extent that for $0.3, it’s no longer worth it. Course, you’re blog might earn $0.04…

Anyway, this is what you do:

• Make sure that you always upgrade to the latest version of WordPress. When you log into the wp-admin area, it’ll always tell you if you should upgrade and there’s a free plugin that makes doing so a breeze.
• Resist the temptation to use your name as the ‘username’ and ‘admin’ is even worse. I know you love your name, but don’t do it.
• The password should be 12 characters and a mix of upper and lower case as well as numbers and keyboard characters (e.g. *,# etc). Don’t use two characters that are next to each other on the keyboard together either.
• Install the following free plugins to provide a decent level of protection:
• Antivirus
• Paranoid911
• Secure WordPress
• WP Security Scan

One more plugin to use. Install WP-DB-Backup so that if everything does go bums up, you have your main database (and anything else you choose to save) backed-up. Hence, you can delete everything and start again fairly easily and quickly.

Finally, I’ve heard suggestions that if you use Filezilla as your FTP program of choice, it makes you more vulnerable to hacking. People I’ve heard this from have changed to a different FTP and never had a problem again so it’s one to think about.

I know that Google are not always everyone’s cup of tea, especially when they start doing things like closing AdWords accounts seemingly at random.

On the other hand, they do provide an awful lot of excellent resources completely free, one of which you should definitely start taking advantage of if you are not already doing so.

This is Google Alerts, a service where Google will monitor any keyword term you want to keep an eye on and deliver information about when it is used to your e-mail inbox.

For example, if you wanted to track ‘linkbuilding’ and every time it is searched, you would enter the word on the Alerts homepage, click the link, confirm the request in the e-mail that Google send and that’s it. Now, every time someone uses ‘linkbuilding’ to search for information, Google will tell you all about it.

This is a superb resource (completely free as well) which you can obviously use in many different ways. However, I would recommend using it to keep an eye on when people are searching for information about you by name.

This is very convenient because it not only lets you see when people are saying nice things about you, but also when they are being less pleasant.

Knowing when people are ‘having a go’ is crucially important for your online business activities, because if someone is criticizing you or your business, it could cause irreparable damage to the reputation of one, the other or both.

Consequently, being able to pick derogatory comments and criticisms as quickly as possible allows you to get to the root of the problem before any real damage has been caused.

As an example, if a customer is complaining about your customer service, it could very quickly get out of hand but if you step in to prevent this happening, you avoid a small problem becoming a much larger crisis.

It takes about 30 seconds to set Google Alerts up, which for the amount of protection it provides for your good name in business is time extremely well spent.  If you’re not already tracking what people are saying about you on the net, you should start doing so right now.

As a ghostwriter, I’ve created hundreds of top quality online marketing products for some of the biggest names in the business. This is not a boast, merely a fact – if they weren’t top quality, they would have been slung back at me.

Hasn’t happened yet, hence my confidence…

And one of the things that I’ve learned during this time is that consistency is massively important no matter what it is you’re doing on the net.

A couple of examples will explain why.

If you use Facebook or Twitter to market a product or service, the site users that you are promoting to must trust you. If you are not consistent, how can they?

Even if you are not promoting or marketing, your ‘followers’ need to trust and respect you. Again, if they do not, how can you expect them to believe a word you say?

So it’s been quite unnerving recently that so many marketers seem to be forgetting this.

For my sins, I am on almost every mailing list you can think of. This is not because I’m a masochist, or at least I don’t think so. But I do need to keep up with what is going on to make sure that today’s new product is not based on yesterday’s ideas and concepts.

And what I am seeing is information that is becoming less and less consistent (and therefore believable) by the day.

As an example, a few days ago, I received a video where a marketer I have actually worked for was pushing this great new ‘technique’ for making money using AdWords (a product that costs $49). Not a week later, I get another video for the same guy’s latest product which absolutely pans AdWords as the worst thing ever!

Total (almost moronic) inconsistency = complete lack of credibility from this point on…

It’s an object lesson in how not to ‘sell’ anything (a product, service or even yourself) on the net. What you post online is the only point of contact your readers have with you, hence, this is the ‘you’ that they know.

If you want to lose your credibility, changing your stance from ‘white’ to ‘black’ and back again is just about one of the quickest ways I know of doing so.

When credibility is important, you must be consistent, it’s as simple as that.

+++++++++++++++

What do you think?

Agree? Disagree? Think that I must be a masochist?

Let me know – I’d love to hear your thoughts…

Here’s an odd thing I’ve noticed over the past week or two.

I’ve had one of my periodical Twitter blasts where I follow a bunch of new people and many of them of course reciprocate.

So, here’s my question/query/beef.

I’ve got loads of people following me now who have lots of followers, they follow lots of people and yet they have posted a miniscule number of ‘Tweets’.

Can anyone tell me what the point of this is?

Twitter is a social networking site after all, so what is going on here?

What is the point of accumulating nearly 2k followers if you don’t want to communicate with them, pweeple (made up word…)?

Okay, I understand that everyone uses social sites in their own way.

But is it only me that thinks that folks like this are wasting their time and (more importantly), the time of others as well as site resources?

Further to the last post where I explained how Yahoo! can help you find both .edu and .gov sites that will link to you, try this one with Google. Run a standard search using variations of this string as your search parameters (make sure the spacing is correct):-

site:.edu inurl:blog “post a comment” -”you must be logged in” -”comment posting closed” -”comment closed” “<your keyword term>”

Do this and Google returns all of the .edu university and college blogs to which you can submit your comments to generate a link. It is probably a good idea to ping his/her blog after your comment is added to the post to make certain it gets picked up too.

Of course, you must ensure that the links are followable before posting a helpful and thoughtful comment. Install either the Google toolbar or the excellent (and free) Search Status Firefox add-on to simplify this latter task.

Social marketing has evolved into a VERY influential type medium whose effects are felt both on and off the internet today. From our recent presidential election, to the public opinion of the Californ…

audiences once attached to traditional media outlets. There is a lot of attention these days being paid to social media outlets, such as Facebook, Twitter and various internet blogs. But again, the audience for most individual sites (Barack Obama aside)