Using Facebook to Promote a Business

by John Eberhard

Facebook is a great medium to promote your business and get more people hiring you for whatever you do. I think it is equally workable for small businesses and for big ones too.

The first thing to do once you have a Facebook account, is to get lots of Facebook “friends.” You do this by finding people that you want to be your friend on Facebook and proposing to them to be Facebook friends. I currently have 3861 Facebook friends. The max they will allow you is 5,000.

The way I built up this fairly large list was to work it a little bit each day. Initially I found people I knew and proposed being Facebook friends to them. Then I started connecting to people who had 20 or more mutual friends. Now that I have a fairly large friends list I am a little more selective now, proposing being friends to people who have 30 or more mutual friends.

What to Communicate on Facebook

Facebook allows you to post what is called a status update as often as you like, and this will then go out to all your Facebook friends. It will appear to them in their feed of items from their friends. You can post just text, or you can upload photos, a video, or post a link to some other page on the web.

I have found it to be very effective to post text 1-3 times a day, saying what I am working on with my business. For example, for me, being a web designer and Internet marketer, I post things like:

• I am designing a new web site for a landscape designer
• Working on a search engine optimization project for a new client
• Just closed a new client for pay per click advertising setup and management
• Working on social media marketing for a client
• Reviewing my pay per click advertising client accounts

This method is extremely effective in letting people know what I do, and putting it out there that I am the guy who does Internet marketing services. It keeps establishing in people’s minds that that is who I am. Plus it shows people that I am busy and getting a lot of work. I recently saw some people at an event, that I had not seen in a while, and the lady said “I see you’re pretty busy.” I inquired as to what had given her that impression, and she said Facebook.

It is also important to post status updates occasionally about your personal life, like your weekend trip, or that your kids are coming over for Thanksgiving, or commenting on how your favorite sports team is doing, or posting a link to some video you like. I have been known to post a link to an article on politics once in a while, as that is an area of strong interest for me.

Here is what you do NOT want to do. You do not want to post status updates all the time that say “Buy my stuff,” “Come to my webinar,” “Buy my book,” “Attend my seminar,” “Buy my CD.” It is OK to do this once in a while. But if you do it all the time and every communication you send out to Facebook is pitching something for your business, it sort of offends the agreement of what Facebook is for, and people will either un-friend you, or block your updates. Or at least be annoyed. Surprisingly I do see some people do this, supposed gurus who should know better.

I find it much more workable to simply post updates on what I am doing. It puts out there what I do and what I am doing, in a way that people do not find offensive. I have followed this same technique with my client social media marketing accounts and it has worked well for them as well.

Following these techniques you will find that you can get new business from Facebook.

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A Three-Pronged Approach to Link Building

by John Eberhard

Link building is a vital part of getting your site to rank well with search engines. Google says that the number of links on other sites pointing to your site is the primary criteria for their determining how high they will rank your site for any given keyword.

Internet marketers used to do something called “reciprocal link building,” where they would contact other webmasters for other sites and offer to put up a link to that webmaster’s site if he would link to them on his site. I believe it has been two years since Google totally devalued these types of links, making them of no value any more. But I still get emails from other webmasters asking to do reciprocal linking. And incredibly I still see articles where the author promotes doing it. Get with it guys!

I have found that three actions are the most successful ones for developing links to a web site today.

Article Directories

For some odd reason in the SEO community, many of the writers look down their noses at article directories, don’t use them or even talk about them. I once posted something on a forum on a major SEO site about article directories and the moderator removed it!

So I don’t know what these SEO types have against article directories, but I have been taking articles about my clients (and my own company) and posting them on article directories, for about four years, and have built up thousands and thousands of links for clients. My own site as of today has 34,300 links to it. I have taken client web sites with practically no links and built them up to thousands in just a few months.

The article should be 400 words (some sites have a minimum), and should be written about some topic of interest in your industry, but should not directly pitch your company. Then you create a “Bio box” which contains a short blurb about the author, his company web site address (actually you can have up to three web addresses) and can contain a phone number.

We have software which partially automates the article submission process, and we will submit to usually 50 to 100 sites per month for our clients. Some of the top article directories includes http://www.goarticles.com, http://www.isnare.com/ and http://www.dime-co.com/.

Online PR

I write press releases about the client company and something they are doing, then submit them to several online PR sites that contain lots of press releases. I have selected PR sites that, if they accept your press release, it will automatically also go onto Google News.

Getting these press releases onto the PR sites creates high quality links. When you check your links for your web site, these PR sites will come up high, on the first couple pages. Some of the online PR sites include www.pr.com, www.24-7pressrelease.com, and www.prlog.org.

So posting articles on article directories creates high volume links, and press releases on the online PR sites creates high quality links.

Blogging

Another great way to create links to your main web site is to write blog articles, post them to your blog, and link certain words in your article back to pages on your main web site. I think this has the most value if your blog has a different address from your main web site.

You should write your article so that it contains keywords that you are trying to rank well for, and then link up to three of those keywords back to appropriate pages on your main web site. Most blogs today are made using either Wordpress or Typepad.

I go one step further on blogging, which is to set up blogs on all the free blogging sites; www.wordpress.com, www.blogger.com, www.posterous.com, www.livejournal.com, and www.blog.com. I used to use www.tumblr.com, but they recently contacted me and told me it is against their policy to allow blog posts with links in them (!?!), so I no longer use them.

I then put my blog article on all these free blogs too, with links pointing back to my main web site or client web site. So if the client has a Wordpress blog, and then I have set up five free blogs for him, that is six blogs. So one article, with three links in it to his main site, will, by this action, create 18 links.

I also use a feature on www.Posterous.com where you can hook up all your blogs to it. Then you send out your article on Posterous and it automatically goes out to all your blogs.

So if I am doing an article and press release for a client each month, I will submit the article to the article directories and the press release to the online PR sites, but I will also post both the article and press release to the client’s blogs.

Summary

I have found, over several years and with much trial and error, that a three-pronged approach to link building, as described above, is the most effective, gets tons of links, and moves a web site up in the search engine rankings.

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Google Maps

by John Eberhard

Google is definitely the place to be found online, with 72.11% of all Internet searches, compared to 14.57% for second place Yahoo. And page one is also the place to be, since 83% of all search engine searchers do not go past page one.

But getting onto page one for Google for your top keywords isn’t always easy. Getting onto page one for the regular or organic listings, via search engine optimization (SEO) and link building, can take 6 months or more. And for a really competitive keyword, you may not get onto page one at all.

You can get onto page one via paid ads with Google AdWords, which is great. But it’s also a continuing expense.

Google Maps is a feature of Google whereby when Google perceives through the nature of your search that you are searching for something local, it will bring up a map on page one. The map will have balloons on it showing the location of different vendors, and there will be listings shown to the right of the map.

So the Google Maps feature is a great way to get your business listing onto the elusive page one of Google. And with the graphic, it pulls your attention right to the map, which is partway down the page.

This new feature is great for local businesses like restaurants, home improvement companies, health care practices, dance studios, attorneys, private schools, or any business that services a local area. When you consider that 66% of Americans use the Internet to find local businesses, and 73% of all Internet activity is related to local content, if you have a local business, you need to get onto Google Maps.

The tendency is to think that if your business is listed somewhere in Google, that you will automatically be put onto Google Maps. Not so. You have to go through a whole process to get your listing up there, and the link will click through to sort of a mini web page for your business on Google, with your contact info, a map, description, pictures, and customer reviews.

Part of the process of getting your business on Google Maps involves “claiming” your listing, then putting up all the information, and uploading photos. It also helps your placement of your listing (how close it is to the top) if you also have listings on Yahoo and MSN, and on other sites such as Yelp and Hotfrog.

Once a searcher clicks on “more info” on the map, they will be taken to your Google Maps page, which includes, as mentioned before, customer reviews. As I covered in an article a few weeks ago, with customer reviews, as Don Henley says “This could be heaven or this could be hell,” depending on what kind of reviews you get. A couple bad reviews can have a way of killing online business, and somehow they have a way of going to the top of the review listings and staying there a long time.

My recommendation for local businesses is:

1. Get your company listed on Google Maps. We can do this for you if desired.
2. Put up an autoresponder email system like I described in my article a few weeks ago, whereby you enter the email addresses of happy customers into it, and then the system sends them several emails over the course of a week or two asking them to write an online review for you. The emails also include links to several places where they can write reviews. This allows you to be proactive in getting good reviews that will soon outnumber any bad ones.

Using this system you will get onto page one of Google and hopefully will get you good online reviews that will outnumber the bad ones. I am relatively new on this whole line so I don’t know what the numbers are like, but getting onto page one of Google is always a good thing.

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The Full Social: How to Put the Pedal to the Metal with Social Media Marketing

by John Eberhard

Most people these days are familiar with Facebook and Twitter, and maybe MySpace and LinkedIn. And certainly Facebook and Twitter are the two 800 pound gorillas in the room with social media marketing.

But what if you’re not content with just using one or two sites for social media marketing? What if you want to really put the pedal to the metal? Go the distance? Be a world class social media marketer?

The Full Social

As a nod to “The Full Monty” movie I am outlining the Full Social, which is a program of all or nearly all of the social media marketing actions one can take.

First Tier Sites

The first tier social media sites are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace. The importance of these sites is roughly in that order. The goal is to start accounts, get lots of friends or followers, then put out regular updates on what you are doing with your business. The idea is that by putting out regular updates on what you are doing, you keep yourself high in people’s awareness as the provide of ____ (your product or service). You should also post things occasionally about your personal life, and comment on other people’s posts, so as to develop and maintain engagement. I recommend that people start an account on Ping.fm and hook up all your accounts to it. Then you can post your status updates from Ping.fm and they go out to all the sites at once.

Creating a Facebook fan page gets you a really high quality link to your site or sites, but so many people are doing these now that it is getting harder to get lots of fans.

Second Tier Sites

The second tier social media sites include Plaxo, Plurk, FriendFeed, Bebo, Friendster, Hi5, Orkut and PerfSpot. Same handling as above.

YouTube

Some people consider YouTube a first tier site but it is sort of in its own category because of the way it is used. The idea is to create some videos that promote your business and then get them up on YouTube. Be sure to include your web address and some of your top keywords in the description box. Creating videos these days is not that expensive, using a Flip camera and software such as Camtasia. But it is definitely time consuming.

Squidoo And HubPages

Squidoo.com and HubPages.com are similar in that you can start an account and put up pages on any given topic. You can add pictures, videos, links to your blog and so on, to your pages. For a while these two sites were devalued by Google for some reason but that is over now. The pages you create give you very high quality links and both sites get a lot of traffic. Squidoo is much more friendly to marketing than HubPages, which only allows you to put one link per page.

Business Directories

There are a variety of social media business directories online today, where you can create a listing for your business that includes your contact info, a company description, and links to all your web sites. Some of the sites include HotFrog.com, AboutUs.org, and Mashable.com. One of the advantages of putting up listings on these sites, aside from people seeing your listing and contacting you, is that these listings create very high quality links back to your web site.

Blogging

Blogging is really its own activity but some people consider that it falls under social media. I recommend creating a main blog, using either Wordpress or Typepad, then post something to it weekly. I also recommend starting blog accounts on the free blogging sites, including Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Posterous.com, LiveJournal.com, and Blog.com. Then using your Posterous.com account, you can hook up all your other blogs to it (including your main blog) and posting on Posterous.com will then send your content out to all your blogs at once. Be sure to include 1-3 links in your post back to your main web site. Some people, when I mention this setup, voice concern over “duplicative content penalties.” However, Google states there is no such penalty so this is apparently a stubborn urban legend. Make sure to send out a “ping” or notification to all the blog search engines after each post, using Pingomatic.com.

Social Bookmarking Sites

Social bookmarking is a way for people to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Top bookmarking sites include Delicious.com, Digg.com, StumbleUpon.com, and Reddit.com. Aside from being a sort of online listing of your favorite web pages, each counts as a link. So you can create bookmarks of all your web sites, individual pages within the sites, and of your blogs.

Summary

Pursuing a full program of social media marketing will get your company out there broadly across the Internet, create a lot of links to your site, put your regular communications in front of a lot of people, and drive in business.

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No Longer Recommend Tumblr.com

Over the past few years I have developed a link building method for myself and for clients, whereby I set up blogs for the client on 6 free blogging sites, including Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, LiveJournal.com, Posterous.com, Blog.com and Tumblr.com.

The purpose of doing this is more distribution for the client's content, but the main purpose is to develop more links to the client's main site.

But recently I was contacted by Tumblr.com and told that they had disabled my blog there for my business RealWebMarketing.net, because I was including links in my post. After email clarification going back and forth I verified that that is what they meant and that their reason was they objected to my including links in my blog posts.

I think this is idiotic, similar to the objection that HubPages.com has to people including multiple links in their articles posted on their web site (you can't have more than one link). Being a marketing person for 21 years, I have never understood the strange "anti-marketing" bias that is exhibited by some techie types.

I can no longer recommend Tumblr.com and predict their eventual demise.

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Google AdWords Quality Score

by John Eberhard

Google AdWords has a sort of measuring stick they use called “quality score.” The quality score is applied to your campaign, and to your ad group within a campaign, and to your individual keywords within the campaign.

Your quality score is important because the better your quality score, the less you will pay for whenever someone clicks on one of your ads. And conversely, with a low quality score your cost per click goes up significantly.

Here’s what Google says about the quality score:

“The AdWords system calculates a 'Quality Score' for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user's search query. A keyword's Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).”

So we can see that your quality score is important because it affects how much you will pay for each click. This is vital because, especially with the amount of companies using Google AdWords today and competing for your keywords, if you’re not careful your costs can get out of hand and your campaign will not be viable. And when I say not viable I mean that you can end up paying too much for each lead or sale that you get.

“In general, the higher your Quality Score, the lower your costs and the better your ad position.”

“Quality Score helps ensure that only the most relevant ads appear to users on Google and the Google Network. The AdWords system works best for everybody -- advertisers, users, publishers, and Google too -- when the ads we display match our users' needs as closely as possible. Relevant ads tend to earn more clicks, appear in a higher position, and bring you the most success.”

It’s a little bit of work to sort through what they are saying and what you actually have to do in order to improve your quality score. So here it is simplified.

1. Relevancy: Your keyword, your text ad, and the content you have on your landing page have to all be the same topic. If for instance you have a set of keywords that are all very similar, and your text ad is about that same topic, and then the content of your landing page is all about that same topic, that’s good. You will get a good quality score. This also means that you should eliminate from your ad group any keywords that are only slightly related to what is on your landing page, as including them will lower your quality score.

1. Clickthrough Rates (CTR): In general, the higher your overall clickthrough rate is for a given ad group or campaign, the higher the ad group’s or campaign’s quality score will be.

There are several important implications for this. One is that between the search network and content network (which Google is now calling the “display network”) the search network always gets higher clickthrough rates, by far, than the display network. So it is best to set up one campaign that only goes to the search network, and another that goes only to the display network. That way, the quality score of your search network campaign will be much higher than if you just had both networks together in one campaign.

Another implication is that you should remove keywords from your campaign that have really low clickthrough rates, because including those in the campaign will lower its quality score. I called Google recently and found out from them that if you have a keyword which is getting impressions but has NO clickthroughs, that will not affect your quality score adversely. But as soon as that keyword gets one clickthrough, if the percentage is low, now it will affect your quality score adversely.

1. Search and Display Network: I recently read a book called the “AdWords Manifesto,” where the author said that for your search campaign, you should choose tightly focused keywords that are only on one topic, so that it has good relevancy. Then for your display network campaign, you can throw in related keywords and make it more broad. I actually called Google about some of the things in this book to ask if they were true. The Google rep said that this is not true, and the opposite is true, i.e. you can have a broader selection of keywords on the search network and a more focused group on the display network.

1. Landing Page is Not the Home Page: Many people put up a Google AdWords campaign and have their text ad set up so that when someone clicks on it, the visitor goes to the home page of the advertiser’s web site. This is not ideal and can hurt your quality score, because chances are your home page does not specifically talk about the specific product or service you are advertising in detail. This is especially true if your company has multiple products or services. So if the visitor lands on your home page and it doesn’t even mention the product being advertised, or just briefly mentions it, that hurts your quality score. Better to create a customized page for your Google visitor to land on.

1. Keywords in Text Ad: Including your keywords from your campaign in your text ad improves your quality score.

1. Keywords in Headlines: If you include your keywords from your campaign in the H1 and H2 tags, which are used to define your headlines in an HTML page, that helps your quality score.

Good luck with your Google AdWords campaigns.

 

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Online Reviews

by John Eberhard

Online reviews are becoming an important aspect to a company’s online presence, especially with local service oriented businesses such as home improvement, health care, photographers, or restaurants.

This article is going to be in two parts. In the first I want to caution people that writing a negative review on a company can have a very negative impact on their business. In the second part, I will outline how you can take control of the online review universe.

Cautionary Tales

I believe that in this day and age, with all the communications that go on between people online, from email to Facebook to commenting on blogs and articles to writing reviews, the Internet has somehow cheapened the quality of discourse. Perhaps because online you don’t have to come face to face with the person, people seem more willing to throw manners and civility out the window and viciously savage others when writing to or about someone online.

In the past few weeks I have seen several instances where a company had one or more negative reviews written on them that were having a major effect on their business.

1. A wedding photographer got a couple negative reviews online, which has virtually crashed the business he gets from the Internet.
2. A veterinarian got one very negative review from a client on Yelp. The vet felt the review was unfair and mostly untrue, and appealed successfully to get it removed from Yelp. But even though the review is gone from Yelp where it originally appeared, it still shows up on Google who pulled it from Yelp.
3. A plumbing company got two bad reviews viciously savaging one of their salesmen by name, that the company believes were put up by competitors.

So I want to make an appeal to you right now, that if you have a bad experience with some company, before you write a vicious review on the company online, contact the company and give them a chance to make it right first. Especially if the company gets a lot of their business online, your bad review can seriously damage their business. You may be angry now, but bear in mind that most businesses are really trying to do their best and service the public well. Even the best companies can blow it sometimes, but if you give them a chance they will often try to do something to make it right with you.

Taking Control

OK, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I want to offer a method whereby you can take control of your online reviews.

If you get a bad review on your company on some online review site, first contact the person and see if there is anything you can do to make it right with that customer, and then afterwards, ask them to amend their online review. If the review is just untrue or really unfair, you can contact the web site where it appears and ask them to take it down. Sometimes they will.

But the method I recommend to really take control is to flood the Internet with positive reviews of your company. Here’s how you do it:

1. Open up an account on one of the online email services. I recommend Aweber or Mailchimp.
2. Set up a list which we will call your “online review list.”
3. Set up a private form page on your web site that is not linked to from your other pages, that has a form to dump emails into this new online review list. Bookmark this page so you can find it easily.
4. Set up a series of 3 autoresponder emails that will go out to the people that you enter on this list. The emails should each say “Thank you for using our company. We want to ask you to write a review on our company on one of the online review sites.” Then include links in the email to the online review sites (Google, Yelp, Insider Pages, Angies List, etc.). Also it is effective to offer some sort of incentive for the person to write a review, such as a $5 Starbucks card or something like that. Set it up so that the first email goes out right away, the 2nd goes out maybe a week later, then the 3rd goes out a week after that.
5. Go to your private form page and enter the emails of new customers you completed work for this week that were very happy with the service. Continue entering those happy customers onto the list every week.

In this way you will be sending out a series of emails to remind your happy customers to write a review on you, and giving them the links right there in the email to go to the review sites. This will make you proactive, put you in better control and significantly increase the number of positive reviews you get. Even if you get a few negative reviews, the positive ones will drown them out.

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