Facebook Fan Pages and New Landing Pages

by John Eberhard

Facebook has initiated some changes with fan pages, that make them more interesting and easier to use to accomplish social media marketing of your product or service.

The most interesting thing is that you can set up a separate landing page that a person will come to initially, before they have clicked “like” and become one of your fans. This uses new technology from Facebook called Facebook Markup Language, or FBML.

This initial landing page can have a large graphic in the middle of it that you or a designer can create, which is a major change from the way Facebook used to do it. You can also make parts of the graphic link to various things, such as your main web site or blog.

It used to be that whoever came to your Facebook fan page came to a “wall” which showed a feed of activity for the fan page, including things you sent out and things that fans posted.

Now you can select what people will see when they come to your fan page, before they click “like,” and after they click it. Default options include your wall, info (which shows basic text information and web site links), and photos. But using FBML, you can now make a new welcome screen that people will see before they click “like,” and you can put whatever you want there.

Here are two examples I made recently, one for RealWebMarketing.net, and one for Straight Talk Wealth Radio. Note that if you have already “liked” either of these Facebook fan pages you won’t see the initial landing page. You would have to log out of Facebook to see them. Then once you click “like” you will see something different, in both of these cases the “wall,” which shows the feed of recent activity such as things the fan page owner has posted.

Using FBML you can also create other pages, with large graphics again, pitching products you are selling or free offers you are giving away. These new pages will show up in the side or top menu. Here’s an example of one I made for RealWebMarketing.net, offering my free white papers and my book. If you give it some thought there are a wide array of possibilities for what you can do with this.

Note that one strategy you could choose would be to have the sole message of your initial fan page landing page be to push the person to click “like,” and offer them things they will get if they do so. For instance, they will get access to a free report you’ve created, if they click “like.” Then you could put access to that free report on one of the other FBML pages. So in this way you are offering an incentive for them to become one of your fans.

Getting lots of fans for your fan page, besides being an ego stroker, allows you to send them messages easily, market to them and keep in touch with them.

I’ll discuss more on strategies for getting lots of fans for your Facebook fan page in a future article.

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Twitter Marketing Strategy

by John Eberhard

In order to effectively accomplish Twitter marketing, you have to have a lot of followers. Then you should post messages or “tweets” (I hate that word) regularly to let people know what you are doing with your business. So how do you get lots of followers?

I use a software program called Tweet Adder to accomplish this. My own personal Twitter account now has 8,103 followers currently, and I am managing several other client accounts, several of which are close to 2,000.

The basic strategy for adding lots of followers on Twitter is to follow other people, a certain percentage of whom will follow you back. Then, using the software, you identify those who didn’t follow you after several days, and “unfollow” them. Then start again by following more people. At the same time, you start putting out messages (tweets) regularly, so that other people will see your activity and follow you.

Targeting

Tweet Adder allows you to identify people who are most likely to be your prospects, and add them to a queue to be followed by you. You can search for people based on geographical location, by certain words in their bio, and by certain words in their tweets.

Let’s say you have a veterinary practice in Indianapolis. You would target people within a certain mile radius of the city, and also people who mentioned something about pets, dogs, cats, etc., in their bio or in their tweets.

Or let’s say you make software for Mac computers. You would search for anyone who mentioned “Mac” in their bios or in their tweets.

There are a variety of ways you could approach this, but the basic idea is that you can use these tools to zero in and find people who would be your most likely prospects.

Following

Once you have located people who are likely prospects and have them in a queue, you start following them, several hundred per day. Twitter has some sort of system to determine what they think is your limit of people that you can follow per day or per every couple days. They are pretty tight lipped about how they figure out this limit, but from my observation it is between 100 and 500 per day, and apparently it is higher depending on how many followers you have.

You don’t have to worry about hitting this limit because they will just tell you that you’ve reached the limit. There is no penalty or threatening email or anything.

Un-Following

I have Tweet Adder set up so that it will identify people who have not followed you back within 3 days. Then you can tell it to un-follow those people. The idea is that you are following these people in order to get them to follow you back, so if they don’t, you remove them. You can also create a “white list” of people that you want to follow regardless of whether they follow you or not, such as celebrities, big media outlets, etc.

Your Bio

Make sure your bio is really clear and brief as to what you do or what your business is. That is so that people who scrutinize the bio to see if they want to follow you back, can see easily who you are and what you do. Don’t make it cryptic or hard to understand.

Tweeting

If you are following people aggressively, a certain percentage will follow you back. It helps with this if you are putting out tweets regularly, as some people will look at what you are saying on Twitter before following you back. But this also helps in another way.

Let’s say you are regularly putting out tweets about what you are doing with your business, and those tweets contain certain popular keywords related to your business. People will search on Twitter for certain keywords, see who is writing tweets that contain those keywords, and follow them. I discovered this early on with my own account, where I would write tweets containing phrases like “pay per click advertising,” or “web design,” or “search engine optimization.” After one of those I’d get a bunch of people following me.

As a general tweeting strategy, I have found it works well to simply write tweets that talk about what you are doing with your business. For me this is “I just signed up a new pay per click ad client,” or “I am designing a new web site for a tree nursery in WA,” or “I am working on adding Twitter followers for clients.” This develops the idea in the minds of people seeing your messages that you are the guy who does ____ (whatever your business is). And I have found that this is a socially acceptable message to put on Twitter, Facebook or other social media sites, and works much better than constant messages to “buy my products!” You can occasionally tell people to buy your products but if you do it all the time, people will just block you or un-follow you. 

The 2,000 Glass Ceiling

There is a particular phenomenon to be aware of on Twitter. Once you reach 2,000 people that you are following on Twitter, it will not allow you to add any more until you have over 2,000 people following you.

So you can follow this strategy of just following people and getting them to follow you, un-following those who don’t, rinse and repeat. But, in order to get your followers over 2,000, you have to use the other strategy of putting out regular tweets with keywords in them and get people to follow you that way. That’s how I got my own account over 2,000. I have two other accounts close to 2,000 now and that’s the strategy I’m using.

Good luck with your Twitter marketing.

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The Philosophy of Marketing, Email and Spam

by John Eberhard

I have been involved in marketing since 1989, which was well before there was an Internet. I have worked for a number of companies as either a Marketing Director or VP Marketing, including three Inc. 500 companies, prior to starting my own business.

Early in my career, I worked for a man who had made it a company policy, that whenever the company acquired a prospect name, they would keep it on their prospect list and continue to mail and promote to the person until 1) he died, 2) he asked to be off the mailing list, or 3) he bought something.

I always thought this was a sensible policy and philosophy and have tried to follow it throughout my professional career in marketing. I have observed that in order to be successful in marketing, you have to be aggressive.

Even in the early days, before the Internet, when we were doing direct mail and a variety of display advertising, there was usually a tiny percentage of people that would react back at the marketing message with an angry or nasty response. Like asking to be off the mailing list in a really nasty manner or similar types of communications.

Well of course we would always take the person off the list if he asked to be off. But I realized a couple of things back then: a) it was always a tiny percentage of people that complained, and b) I couldn’t let that negative communication cause me to back off of aggressively marketing to the remainder. So I would handle the ask-offs but I would ignore the intent of the communications.

Now flash forward to the beginning of email marketing, in 2000-2001. I worked for a software company, and we started doing a lot of email marketing. It happened that all of the email that we sent in those days was to people who had opted in. But we would still get occasional, nuclear complaints from some person who accused us of spamming, wrote to our hosting company, even wrote to the Federal Trade Commission. In each case we could show that the person had opted in on X date.

Around that same time I discovered that our company had been put on a couple of email “blacklists.” These are lists that are compiled by some private person, based on some person accusing someone of being a “spammer.” These blacklist compilers are not part of any official or government agency of any kind. Then certain ISPs like Earthlink or AOL would subscribe to these blacklists, and block any emails going to their subscribers from the supposedly offending parties.

I discovered that anyone can accuse anyone of being a “spammer” and the supposed offender would be put on the blacklist. The person or company put on the list would not be notified in any way, and you had to contact the company and provide proof that you were not a “spammer,” and they would remove you – if they felt like it.

I began to refer to these people as “privacy Nazis.”

A few years later certain people abused the medium of email and sent out millions of emails, promoting sexual enhancement products, toner cartridges, and other products. They used deceptive practices and usually would not remove you from their lists. All this brought about the CAN-SPAM Act, which requires that you do not use deceptive practices, provide an opt-out method and remove people within 10 days if they ask, and include your physical street address in the email.

The CAN-SPAM Act does not make it illegal to send out unsolicited commercial email.

Yet despite this, it has somehow developed as an accepted idea in the world of the Internet and even in the society that sending unsolicited commercial email is called “spam” and is evil and wrong. Author Seth Godin has even written a book legitimizing this idea and saying that you have to always get permission from someone before you can send them email.

I have often wondered where this idea came from and how it became institutionalized in the society, because I believe it is inherently wrong. Certainly the medium of email was abused in the early to mid 2000s. And, having spent seven of my years in the marketing field promoting to IT professionals, I have observed that there is a distinct animosity in the IT field toward marketing of any kind. I believe this idea has spread into the Internet as a whole and has colored the attitude towards email in society.

I recently had an interesting experience which brought this whole issue to the forefront for me. I had some problems with my hosting company and decided to change. I switched to a new company, one of the major ones, and foolishly did not find out first what their policies were on email. Because I am aggressive in marketing my own business and send out a fair amount of email every week, and although everything I do is completely legal according to the CAN-SPAM Act, not all of the emails I send are to opt-in lists (gasp, horror, OMG!)

I found out my new hosting company had a policy that I could not send more than 200 emails per day, which was just a tad below my quota. I called them and tried to find a solution, but no go. I checked on another hosting company that one of my clients uses, and found that although they would allow you to send several thousand per day, they had a “zero tolerance” policy towards “unsolicited commercial email.” I ended up switching back to my original hosting company, which had had some service issues, but at least they allowed me to send out the number of emails that I have become accustomed to.

So this brings me back to why I started writing this article in the first place. You have to be aggressive in marketing in order to be successful. You can’t be timid or afraid of the prospect or have an attitude like “Please Mr. Prospect is it OK if I communicate?”

And I have always believed that marketing is a positive thing in society. It lets people know about products or services that they need or that will help them. It helps companies to be profitable and successful, which is what creates jobs and allows people to earn paychecks (not government stimulus programs).

I have seen companies drop their marketing, or become careful or timid or backed off in their marketing. In every case I have seen the company go into a period of decline, come out of it smaller or less powerful, or go out of business completely.

So I have to disagree with Mr. Godin and the privacy Nazis and anyone else who thinks that a marketer should be careful or timid or backed-off. And although I will always obey the laws, if someone tries to tell me I can’t send out email, I will try to find a way around it. I think my old boss would approve.

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Marketing With Article Directories

by John Eberhard

An article directory, also called a content hub, is a type of web site that has lots of informational articles on it. A person with a web site, who needs article content for their site, can go to an article directory and download articles for free on a wide variety of topics, and then post them on their own web site. These article directories allow you to search by topic or category or by keyword.

Writers can post articles on the content hubs. The benefit for the writer is that he can mention his company and include his web site address in the article. And that provides in-bound links to his web site, from the content hubs themselves, and from every web site where that article is posted. In-bound links, meaning links from other web sites that link to yours, increase link popularity, which is the main criteria used by Google and other search engines to determine web site ranking.

So the article directories service both writers who want to get the word out on their company or products or services, and people who have web sites who need article content.

The key, for a writer, is to write something that will appeal to the general public, or at least to a sizable specific niche public, so that the article gets downloaded and used on lots of sites in need of content.

It is also key to include the name of the company, and links to the company web address in the writer bio at the end. Most article directories will allow you to include up to three links in the bio box. But most will not allow you to put links into the content of the article.

The article itself should not be written in such a way that it is just a blatant promo piece for your company. It has to be written so that it is about a topic that your company deals with or you are an expert on, and it mentions your company, but it doesn't say "call us now at 1-800-222-2222 for a great deal on tires" at the end. In other words, what in marketing is called a "call to action," where you tell your prospect to contact you or to respond for more information or to buy now, should not be included in articles for article directories.

If you have a list of keywords that you are targeting, where you are trying to rank well for those keywords, then find a way to include those words or phrases in your article, preferably near the beginning of the article.

It's a good idea to look over the type of articles that are currently being accepted on article directories, to get a better idea of what works there, and so you can write articles that will fit this medium. Some good article directories to look at are:
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.isnare.com/
http://www.articlecity.com/
http://ezinearticles.com/

There are currently over 700 article directories on the Internet.

Most of the article directories require that you register with them before they will allow you to post an article there. Some of the sites have your article reviewed by a live person before it goes up. Some will just post it without review.

Once you get registered on a number of article directories, it is best to post one article, then post more articles at intervals of about once a week. Make sure you include your company name and URL in the bio box.

If your company has any articles written already that were written for other purposes, you may be able to convert them into a form that will work for the article directories. The key is to read the types of articles that are already appearing on the hubs and convert your content into a similar form. Also, many article directories will reject articles of less than 400 words, so make sure they are at least that long.

I have been submitting client articles to article directories for about four years, and have found this to be an excellent way of building up the number of links to the client’s web site. I have built up the number of links to a client’s site from near zero to over 2,000 in 2-3 months. But I recommend doing this for 6-12 months at least.

I have observed that some search engine optimization (SEO) companies seem to look down on article directories or not consider it a valid form of link building. I have never been able to figure out why this is, since I have been doing it and seeing very valid, positive results for 4 years now.

Article directories are a great way to get out information on your company, and promoting on the net.

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