“The Complete Bloggers Guide to Facebook Marketing” plus 1 more |  |
| The Complete Bloggers Guide to Facebook Marketing Posted: 05 Dec 2011 08:27 AM PST This guide to Facebook Marketing is written by guest writer Amy Porterfield. Amy will be presenting with Darren Rowse and Lewis Howes in a free webinar for ProBlogger readers this Wednesday. Register to get access to this Webinar here now. One Billion. That’s the number of users Facebook will hit in a matter of months – if not sooner. The powerhouse network continues to climb. Did you know that two billion posts are Liked and commented on each day and, on average, Facebook users spend over 700 BILLION minutes a month on Facebook? There’s no doubt your ideal audience is on Facebook right now. The key is to figure out how Facebook's mega population can help you position your blog as the leading source in your industry while helping you increase your overall traffic and leads. When it comes to Facebook marketing, you’ve got to have a plan. If you go at it without a strategy, your Facebook efforts could quickly become a huge waste of time. To help you get clear on your Facebook plan, consider these four steps as a roadmap to Facebook success. Step #1: Set Up Your Foundation For Facebook Success A closer look at each step will help you understand how these steps can grow your online presence, attract your ideal readers and build your blog. Step #1: Set Up Your Foundation For Facebook SuccessBefore you can attract high quality leads to your blog, you must establish a solid Facebook foundation. The first step is to make sure your Facebook Page is optimized and reflects your brand impeccably. With almost a billion people on Facebook, you need to make sure your Page stands out from all the noise. Facebook is the ultimate platform to brand yourself and your brand. You can do this by creating a customized wall image as well as a custom welcome tab. A welcome tab is the page all non-fans land before they see the activity on your wall. This customized page will allow you to create a strong call to action that will get non-fans to click the Like button and become an instant fan of your Page. A custom welcome tab can get you up to 50% more Likes than if you sent non-fans directly to your wall on their first visit. To get instant momentum on Facebook, begin my creating a solid foundation right from the start. To better understand how to build your Facebook foundation, check out these useful articles:
Step #2: Quickly Grow a Lucrative Fan Base of Quality LeadsWhen it comes to Facebook success, numbers matter. Hubspot [http://hubspot.com] completed a study of over 4,000 Facebook business Pages and found that Pages with at least 501 fans drove 3 times more traffic than Pages with less than 501 fans. But even more promising, Pages with 1,001 fans or more generated 21 times more traffic than pages with less than 1,000 fans. That’s a huge jump! Your fan count matters, however, numbers are an empty metric without quality. You must attract high-quality fans that will become avid readers of your blog and are invested in your business. A Page full of fans who will never become paying customers is a huge waste of your time. To attract your ideal audience on Facebook, you first want to make sure you understand who you want to attract. Get clear on your ideal blog reader so you can craft Facebook posts that will grab their attention and keep them coming back for more. To explore new ways to attract your ideal audience on Facebook, take a look at the following articles. They are all packed with valuable fan attraction takeaways you can test out on your own Page.
Step #3: Create Ongoing, Massive EngagementEngagement equals massive value. The key is in knowing what triggers drive your fans to discussion. Once your fans are engaged with you on your Facebook Page, you can easily move them to take action. If you want to use Facebook to attract new blog readers and drive leads, it's essential you provide a high level of content and quality information that delivers massive value and entices your fans to share it with their friends. If you want your fans to take action, you must make an effort to educate, empower and entertain your fans. Don’t worry; you don’t have to do all three at once! But the next time you post, make sure you pack your post with a punch and deliver content your audience will want to devour and share. Facebook recently added a new public metric to Facebook Pages. In the left column, right below the number of fans, you’ll see a number that reflects the number of people who are talking about you on Facebook at that moment (sharing your posts, liking your content, commenting on your updates, etc.). The metric is labeled “Talking About This” and when it reflects a lot of conversation, it’s great social proof. The challenge is that most people struggle to get their fans talking and in turn, increase this metric. If your “Talking About This” number is low, it’s likely that your content is falling flat with your audience. If that’s the case, do this quick test. Look at your last 10 posts and answer these four questions:
If you answered no to any of the questions above, reevaluate your content and get clear on the type of posts your audience will want to devour and share. If you don’t know, ask them! Facebook is a great place to get great feedback from your ideal audience (and it’s free market research!). To learn a few new strategies to get your fans talking even more, check out the following articles:
Step #4: Turn Your Fans Into Profitable Super FansWhen Facebook first started to gain massive popularity, there was a lot of talk about how it was a great place to network with potential customers and build relationships. And while that’s still true, …… If you only focus on building relationships with Facebook, you’re missing out on an extremely important fact – Facebook is a thriving marketplace where you can turn lukewarm fans into Super Fans. What's a Super Fan? Super Fans are Facebook users who have opened their Facebook profile, giving you access to their name, email address, likes, interests, connections and so much more. In addition, they've purchased from you, spread the word about you and your business to their friends and connections and have encouraged others to purchase from you as well. Super Fans do what any marketing department would kill for, all for free. You want as many Super Fans as you can get. The key to moving your fans up the ranks to Super Fan status is by setting the foundation for your Facebook Page, attracting quality fans and providing value via your posts and conversations on Facebook. Each of these steps will ensure that your audience sees you as the go-to source in your niche. When you know your fans challenges or needs, and can offer them solutions, you are positioned perfectly to move your fans to action. Here are some useful articles that will help you move your fans up the ranks to Super Fan status:
When it comes to Facebook marketing, there’s a widening gap between those who get it and those who don’t. When you get clear on your own Facebook marketing strategy, you can more easily use this powerhouse network to drive more exposure and traffic to your blog. Want to learn more about using Facebook as a Marketing tool? Register for a free webinar with Amy Porterfield, Lewis Howes and Darren Rowse to be held his Wednesday here. Amy is the co-author of Facebook Marketing All-In-One for Dummies and a social media strategist for entrepreneurs and small businesses. Check out her latest Facebook marketing course, FBInfluence, by watching this video here. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger The Complete Bloggers Guide to Facebook Marketing     |
| Why Fresh Blog Content is Now 35% More Important Posted: 05 Dec 2011 06:09 AM PST This guest post is by Oz of OzSoapbox. I like to think of SEO in general as one giant cauldron of murky soup that’s never quite just right. The cauldron has been simmering on the fire for so long that we’ve kind of lost track of exactly what we’ve put in there. All we can do now is tweak the broth by adding different ingredients in a continual effort that will hopefully improve its taste. Taste, of course, being the positive effects good SEO brings to our blogs. One of the gazillion factors that makes up SEO, and one we’re going to explore today, is content freshness. Gone are the days of static websites and even the seemingly most mundane of web pages usually had some sort of dynamic element to them. Whether it’s a Twitter feed, Facebook integration, reader comments, or just a good old-fashioned constant stream of new articles, these days there’s a good chance even a website dedicated to your grandma’s cats is dynamically updated with some form of fresh content. And as far as SEO goes, that’s now indisputably a good thing. Measuring the impact of content freshness on our blogsPreviously, content freshness was something we knew was a good thing to do because SEO spiders loved new and updated content. Much like adding salt to a cauldron of soup, quantifying the exact impact content freshness had on our blogs has always been somewhat problematic. Whilst we still don’t have a definitive answer on this (coughcough trade secrets coughcough), Google recently announced a major change to their search algorithm “that would impact roughly 35% of searches”. That change? The quantification of the effect that freshness has on search results. Google handle roughly three billion search queries a day, and 35% of that is one billion and fifty million searches a day affected in some way by content freshness. That’s 1,050,000,000 daily search results … do I have your attention yet? Google’s freshness algorithm change and your blogNow obviously content freshness doesn’t mean that if you go berserk updating your content all of a sudden you’re going to be outranking Wikipedia. Yet this is a change to Google’s search results worth taking stock of. That said, note that even at 35% of searches, this change simply might not really apply to your blog. Let’s face it, some blog niches are timeless. For others, such as Digital Photography School, with digital camera models and new gear coming out all the time, Google’s algorithm change likely has huge potential. If you don’t do anything about it though, that potential could easily swing from positive to negative. Keeping your blog freshEven if you think your blog’s niche isn’t really impacted by time, it’s still worth keeping your blog fresh. In the vastness that is the Internet, the last thing you want is readers tuning out because they think you’re no longer relevant. If you’re serious about keeping your blog stocked with fresh content, these would be the first three things I’d focus on. Publish, publish, publish!You don’t have to publish every day, but a strongly maintained publishing schedule is easily your best bet for fresh fresh content. What better way to show the search engines you’re full of fresh content than providing them with new pages to crawl every time they visit? CommentsWhy do all the work yourself? Although some bloggers prefer to turn comments off, as far as SEO goes, comments on your articles most definitely count towards freshness. I’ve got some articles on my blog that I wrote a few years back, and to this day, they still receive the odd comment. This not only keeps the discussion going but keeps a page relevant, which is what Google’s latest algorithm change is all about. Update your old articlesEven if you think nothing’s changed since you last wrote about a particular area of interest, it can’t hurt to go back and visit the topic. I write a fair bit about current events in Taiwan. Often, a news snippet comes out that’s relevant to a story I’ve previously written about, but not significant enough to craft a new article around. In these cases I simply go back to the article I originally wrote and provide an update. You can see this principle in action in my post on the DEHP scandal in Taiwan earlier this year. I originally wrote the story in June. Since then I’ve updated the page no less than 19 times, with the last update on the 28th October. The end result is a page that combines both age authority and content freshness. In the eyes of search engine crawlers this translates to relevance, because the page has been constantly updated with fresh content that is strongly on-topic. Darren has previously written in more depth on keeping fresh content flowing on your blog, and it’s a great reference for some further fresh content ideas. 35% of over a billion searches a day are now quantifiably impacted by content freshness, and even a tiny percentage of this traffic is worth optimizing for. Fire up your favorite blogging platform and let’s get those blogs updated! Updated daily, OzSoapbox is an English language blog about Taiwan cataloguing life in Taiwan, the good times and the bad. Interrupted only by social commentary on current events facing Taiwan, feel free to drop on by and join Oz on his journey through this beautiful island. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger Why Fresh Blog Content is Now 35% More Important     |
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