In dealing with many clients throughout my career as a web designer and Chicago seo specialist I’ve come across a pattern among small business client’s or those clients who come to me with “an idea.” When dealing with small business clients you never know when or if you are going to get paid!  I always ask for 50% up front and usually see the remaining 50% after a few emails or a few phone calls, but there are a few clients who just don’t respond or keep making excuses.  One of the biggest excuses right now is of course “the economy.” Of course those clients who use the economy as an excuse are the same ones you find  paying $600 a month or more to a Google ad campaign or a directory where their site is listed, but they can’t seem to give you the $600.  I think I need to get beefed up and start breaking some legs around here like Stewy in this Family Guy clip:

Yeah, you got money to pay for fake mustaches huh!  How much did you pay for that fake mustache?

$2.99

The lesson learned is to get your money upfront for any work that you do.  So those of you just starting out with web design, please take this advice and save yourself a lot of time and money!

Now we’ll move onto the client’s who come to you with “an idea.”  I’ve had several clients come to me with “an idea” and the vast majority tell me that their idea is like Facebook, lol. Once you hear that their idea is like Facebook, run!!!  Nothing is worse than dealing with clients who have no idea how the web works, they just come up with elaborate ideas that they think can be whipped together for about $1,000. Tell them to take a hike, stop being so nice and don’t waste another second of your time with “an idea” client.

Of course there are many more pet peeves, but I will save them for a later time.

Hey everyone, Chicago SEO here with a few tips on how to use Facebook to gain some links and business.

• Add everyone you know on Facebook.

• Make sure to put a photo of yourself on your profile, dont put any pictures of yourself doing a keg stand or anything criminal, duh.

• Look for 8 or so groups  to join that are relevant to your business, make sure whatever groups you choose have 40 plus members.

• Add relevant content to the group.   Talk to other members of the group.   Make sure to answer any questions you can, be real.

• Try to add as many of the group members as your friends as you can.

• Look into which of your new friends from the group have a blog with content pertaining to your company.  Check their profile info to see if they have a blog.

• Add some good comments to their blog or see if they will let you contribute some content to their blog.

• After you write the content for them, see if they will give you a link back to your site.

Don’t expect to go onto Facebook and advertise your business in any other way, it’s not going to work.  Don’t expect to accomplish the above steps with out a little work. Put the work in and the results will follow.

Faced with competition from the microblogging site Twitter and a burning desire to make lots of money off of its social networking platform, Facebook is redesigning its user home pages. The new design focuses on real-time streaming of friend posts.

Facebook is revamping its Web site with several new features that give users more information about their networks in real time. The changes have been widely compared to the updates people send and get via microblogging site Twitter More about Twitter, which Facebook apparently now views as one of its competitors.

The new site, which can be previewed here, allows friends’ posts to be streamed in real time. Changes you make are updated instantly on friends’ home pages as well, which are now called “profiles.”

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Other changes gives users more control over what they see. Users, for instance, can create their own filters using Friend Lists. They can also filter by applications, like Photos.

Facebook, the Internet’s largest social network, wants to let you take your friends with you as you travel the Web. But having been burned by privacy concerns in the last year, it plans to keep close tabs on those outings.

Facebook Connect, as the company’s new feature is called, allows its members to log onto other Web sites using their Facebook identification and see their friends’ activities on those sites. Like Beacon, the controversial advertising program that Facebook introduced and then withdrew last year after it raised a hullabaloo over privacy, Connect also gives members the opportunity to broadcast their actions on those sites to their friends on Facebook.

In the next few weeks, a number of prominent Web sites will weave this service into their pages, including those of the Discovery Channel and The San Francisco Chronicle, the social news site Digg, the genealogy network Geni and the online video hub Hulu.

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