7 Simple Facebook Page Tips
I’m working on my Facebook strategy, and decided I’m not going to work multiple pages. It’s too much of a pain in the neck. I have an existing page for my personal brand, Escape The Matrix, and was about to create a whole new page for the Social Marketing Blackbox. But the two are so similar, and I can accomplish everything I need with just one, so I’m going to follow the K.I.S.S. rule. No, nothing to do with the 80′s big hair band. KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid!
Sooooo, as I’m doing my research and preparing to use and promote my page better, I came across this article with 7 great tips on working a Facebook Page:
1. Target Your Posts To The Right People. Translation: customize whether you hit all your fans, or only a certain demographic.
2. Get A Link To Your Website. Exploit the info tab by adding a link there to your blog or money page.
3. Create a custom URL. It’s called a “Vanity Link” and I created a video on it on Youtube showing how to do it.
4. Get Into Your Fan’s “Top News” Unless people are commenting and liking your stuff, it may not appear on your friends news feeds. Make sure and encourage people to comment and like. Worst case, have your family and friends do it until you get traction!
5. Link To Your Business Page When You Mention It Personally.
6. Use “Insights” To Learn About Your Fans.
7. Post At The Best Time. In short, mornings and Fridays, and never on the weekend.
Check out my new and improved Facebook page here, there’s some great videos etc. (check out the latest on 2 killer, simple, FREE ways to raise ANY website in the Google rankings!), and while you are there, please “comment” and “like”! 
Thanks to aboutus.org for this great tips, see the whole article here.
9 Commandments Of Social Marketing
Well, as if there isn’t enough social media about social media marketing, Inc magazine is throwing in it’s hand at identifying 9 key elements to effective social marketing. They are:
1. Don’t just start the conversation… be an integral and evolving part of it.
2. Either keep your personal brand out of it… (understand when and where you should build your personal brand over your corporate brand…)
3. … of dive in and make the headlines!
4. Don’t favor edge over consistency.
5. Be persistent in finding and targeting your niche.
6. Excel at telling your customers “About Us.” Believe it or not, people really do read the about us page! I finally added an about us to my own site because I was so inspired by this
7. Fully integrate social media into your site. You not only look savvy and connected, but you really will get traffic! I have found this to be true, a simple Facebook widget and keeping up a Facebook page accounts for 10% of my sublingual hcg drops website, and only takes minutes per week to maintain.
8. Monitor your brand’s reputation, and be ready to respond.
9. Showcase your best work.
Of course, I have only summarized the article, but if you want to dig deeper, find the whole enchilada here.
Facebook Ads Grow Up
If you’ve tried Facebook ads, you were probably disappointed. I’ve dabbled in them two to three times over the years, and always gave up in frustration. My most common complaint was lack of impressions, and when I could get impressions, lousy CTR (click through rate). Well, apparently, Facebook ads grew up in 2010. According to search engine watch:
“We recently ran a campaign for our client (Intel) on paid search and on Facebook. The campaign was designed to drive visitors to a specific landing page designed specifically for the campaign.
The campaign was run in seven countries: Argentina, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Philippines, Thailand, and the U.S.
In the past, we would get low CTRs on decent, but not great impression counts. The CTR rates were “display like” — in the .02 to .04 percent range — compared to search results in the 2 to 5 percent range. Essentially, a two-order of magnitude difference.
Facebook would deliver more impressions, but not so much to overcome the CTRs and deliver noticeable, significant inventory.
With this recent campaign, we saw 100 times the impressions delivered on Facebook as we saw delivered through paid search on Google, Yahoo, and Bing during the campaign run. The CTRs were still a two-order of magnitude below the search CTRs — essentially, for the same $1, the same number of clicks were delivered. We haven’t seen this before.”
Soooo, looks like I’m getting back in the Facebook PPC game, starting with my Social Marketing Blackbox site. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes! BTW, there’s a whole free training in the Social Marketing Blackbox that explains exactly how to do it, check it out.
The Curation Method Of Blogging
The Curation Method of blogging is a controversial method that lies somewhere between what Jack Humphrey calls “Pure Blogging” and at the other end of the scale “Splogging,” which is simply a method of fully automating a blog to grab content from elsewhere and shove it into your blog, in an effort to game the system and get traffic with no effort.
So here’s the three most popular methods of blogging:
1. Pure Blogging. This is where a true expert creates high quality, original content on a regular basis. It requires knowledge, hard work, persistence, and time, but is by far the best method for those with the skills and time available to them.
2. The Curation Method (sometimes referred to as the “10/30″ method.) This is where a blogger becomes an aggregator of other peoples content. They find relevant information on their niche or topic from the “Pure Blogs,” then comment on it, post the original content (giving full credit to the original blog) and provide a link to the source.
3. Splogging (spam blogging, or auto-blogging) This is any automated attempt to grab content from elsewhere, post it to a blog automatically, and hope to get traffic with no effort at. The purists hate this method most of all, as does Google, and as do visitors to the site. Sometimes, the auto-blogger will use automatic language translation tools to pull content in other languages, convert it to their language, and post it automatically, thinking that this will look like original content to Google. This method is basically stealing.
I have been a “pure blogger” for two years, and earned a #1 position on Google for the term “online network marketing,” as well as about 17 other front page Google rankings, resulting in a steady stream of daily traffic and leads.
But the fact is, I find myself blogging less and less lately, and my desire to sit and write fresh, high quality content is at an all time low. So I am un-ashamedly embracing the Curation model, and for those of you who lie somewhere in between the purists and the lazy sploggers, you should consider it too.
The model consists of the following steps:
1. Create RSS feeds and or Google alerts from all of the best blogs in your niche.
2. Review the content daily, and choose the best content for your own blog posts.
3. Write an original review and commentary on the post, paste all or part of the post in your blog, and give a link back to the original author (they will love you for this!)
4. Rinse and repeat.
And while the SEO geeks out there may think they recognize two major flaws in the strategy, they would actually be dead wrong. Let me explain. Flaw number 1 is duplicate content, number 2 is giving out too many links from your blog, or giving away PR (page rank).
1. Duplicate Content. If you create enough original content on your post, you can paste other peoples content to your hearts content and Google will still love you. As a matter of fact, there is evidence that they appreciate those that “mash-up” other peoples content. If you don’t believe me, what do you think Stumbleupon, Digg, and Google itself do?! Try to provide a ratio of about 30-40% original writing to 60-70% pasted content in your post and you should be fine.
2. Giving links away and losing PR. Again, I have proved this false on one of my new sites. I have about 40 pages on this site, which is only four months old. About 20 of them are ranked between the 4th and 10th pages of Google right now, for very tough SEO terms. And the best of all? A page that provides commentary on a double blind study, with a link to the study! In other words, my best ranking is on the ONLY page on the site with an external link somewhere else!
So for those of you who just don’t have the time to be a purist, but want the fantastic benefits of blogging, I recommend the Curation Method as a great simplified strategy that will make your life easier but still get outstanding results.
Good Questions To Ask A Network Marketing Company
It seems like every network marketing company has almost the same pitch. They talk about:
-The Company
-The Product
-The Comp Plan
-The Timing etc.
And all are very important, of course. But I have yet to hear about a company that claims they have a mediocre company, product, comp plan, or lousy timing. They all sound the same.
For example, no matter how long a company has been around, or what their revenue trend is (up, down, sideways, or backwards) they can convince you that the timing just couldn’t be better! (whether they’ve been around for 30 years or 30 days!)
But I tend to have a different viewpoint, and I ask different questions than other people seem to be concerned about.
For example, here are some of the things I want to hear about:
-How well do your online systems convert?
-Can I buy relevant URL’s to promote the company or products?
-Do you have customer acquisition or lead acquisition programs?
-How much of the gross revenue is paid to the distributors? (A REALLY important question!)
-How much a month will it cost somebody to join? (the more it costs, the harder it is to create duplication)
-How much per month will my distributors have to pay to market their business?
-What additional hidden costs are there?
The fact is, these are sometimes hard questions to get answers to. Last time I asked somebody how well their corporate website converted, his answer was something like: “Really well, people are joining like crazy!” I re-phrased my question, and got an equally mushy response. Finally, like a math teacher trying to teach a child something new, I explained that the conversion rate means out of 100 people that visit my site, how many could I expect to join? No response.
So I don’t know what you are looking for in a company, but hopefully some of these questions give you food for thought. Because in this day and age, when everybody sounds the same, it’s important to align yourself with something that’s truly cutting edge and taking advantage of the digital age.
Fake Facebook Users In For A Slap
Are you doing some Facebook Marketing through a “fake” profile on Facebook? Get ready to be slapped down. According to Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, all fake profiles are about to be shut down.
If you have opened an account as a business, hurry and change your profile pic, and make your profile personal. Then open either a Fanpage or a Group for your business. But don’t expect Facebook to honor your fake or business profile, those are ONLY for real people. If you currently have more than one profile, choose the one you like best and shut down the other one. Quick!
Other up-coming Facebook changes and improvements:
-New partnership with Bing allows for better people searching. 4% of all online searches are for real people, but the satisfaction rate of searchers is extremely low. For example, there are currently 498,000 pages online for my name, “dave sherwin,” but if you search that term, they’re mostly me, so the unfortunate other “Dave Sherwin’s” on the planet are 50 to 100 pages back. This is because I’m an online marketer and a writer, so I dominate the results for my name. Soon though, Bing will start using proximity, and other “Dave Sherwin” Facebook profiles in the algorithm, so the name results are more natural. Bad for me, good for the more reserved Dave Sherwin’s of the world.
-Facebook questions is growing rapidly. Worth looking into.
-If you don’t play games you will see less game info displayed in your feed. YES!!!! About time! I’m about ready to shoot a lot of my friends farm animals.
-The chat API has been reworked and improved.
John Wooden’s Pyramid Of Success
John Wooden was probably the greatest coach of all time, in any sport. If he had lived, he would be 100 years old today, so I thought I would post his Pyramid of Success, and 12 Lessons In Leadership. The Pyramid is available here: Pyramid Of Success Download
Here’s the 12 lessons in leadership:
1. Good values attract good people
2. Love is the most powerful four-letter word
3. Call yourself a teacher
4. Emotion is your enemy
5. It takes 10 hands to make a basket
6. Little things make big things happen
7. Make each day your masterpiece
8. The carrot is mightier than the stick
9. Make greatness attainable by all
10. See significant change
11. Don’t look at the scoreboard
12. Adversity is your asset
Great stuff, and happy birthday, coach!
The Myth Of Duplication
A few years ago I built an online recruiting system for a company. When we launched it, the owner of the company was absolutely shocked by the reaction.
He was convinced that everybody in his company used a certain “system,” that he had been teaching. They all nodded their heads when he spoke, and even gave testimonials as to how this system worked.
Then we launched our online system, and it was like throwing a fox in a chicken coop. The leaders freaked out, and started explaining to him how this would compete with their own, unique system (that they had never explained to him they were using!)
It turned out most of his leaders had adopted their own systems, and none were building the business how he thought they were. So the company was growing, but it was growing through about 10 different methods.
I’ve seen this time and again. Leaders get so hung up on duplication, that they forget Jim Rohn’s analogy that leadership is like herding cats. It really is. So I say, why fight it? Stop trying so hard to get them to do it your way, and allow them to market their business.
The best thing to duplicate is the 4 C’s:
1. Capture leads
2. Cultivate the leads
3. Close them into the business
4. Coach them.
That’s it! But if you think your “system,” whether online, or mailing DVD’s, handing out magazines, PBR’s, etc, is going to duplicate, get over it! Your cats are, in the end, going to do whatever the heck they want, and you can enjoy a massive income from a bunch of people doing it their own way, so why fight it?
Just be active, set a good example, and of course teach them what works for you. But if they run off and do something else that works, just be the wind in their sails.
Avoid “Auto Mass Traffic” Program!
Wow. The “Auto Mass Traffic” program is the biggest bait and switch I’ve seen in a long time. Mo Latif’s sales video is REALLY good, it sucked me right in. The basic message is, “Buy this software and it will get you a ton of traffic.”
Unfortunately, this is what I call a Wizard Of Oz app. Looks like a superstar on the outside, but just a little whimp with a big microphone on the inside. Pathetic. It’s just a glorified sales pitch to get you to do CPV advertising (cost per view) through directcpv.com.
Save your money. If you want to get good at CPV, just join the Warrior Forum and do it yourself. I applaud his sales skills, but this program is really far from delivering on what it promises.
My Biggest Social Marketing Mistake
I’ve been fascinated with Social Marketing since I took Don Crowther’s SMARTS course back in 2008. Since that time, I’ve done just about everything involved in Social Media Marketing, including video marketing, Twitter, social content posting, article marketing, blogging and more. And it’s worked. I’ve generated tons of leads and sales, recruited people into network marketing downlines, and built massive followings on Twitter, Friendfeed, and this blog, which is ranked #1 on Google.
But with all my focus on getting stuff out there, here’s the mistake I made. I have done a lousy job of responding. My focus has been on creation; creating videos, articles, blog posts etc. But then when people comment, or invite me to be friends on Facebook, or re-tweet my stuff, I have been sporadic at best in responding to these people.
Here they are, acknowledging my stuff, asking questions, or just saying nice things, but I haven’t been home! I’m like the person that answers the phone and doesn’t even say hi, leaving the other person yelling HELLO! It’s kind of embarrassing now that I realize it, but I’m turning over a new leaf. I am going to at least try to acknowledge every comment, message, e-mail etc. that I get.
So if you’re like me, maybe it’s time for you too to shift some of your focus from creating to responding, and put the “social” back in “social marketing!”
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