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Dummies Guide To Facebook Marketing

By Martin Sejas in Featured

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 4 years, you would know how popular and widely used Facebook is today.

Just a few short years ago, you had to encourage all your family and friends to join this social networking website (just after others convinced you to join). Nowadays, it’s rare to find someone who hasn’t got a Facebook account.

At last count, there were over 350 million users on Facebook and this number is continuing to grow. It overtook MySpace as the number 1 social networking website on the planet last year and is just behind Google when it comes to online traffic. You are then able to understand how important Facebook marketing has become for all websites.

It’s Not A Pitch Zone

The most important thing to remember about social media is that it is not a place to blatantly and endlessly pitch your product or service. If you do this, then you will not get any favours from social media users and will get largely ignored and even bad reviews.

What social media is used for is for building relationships with potential clients. There are a number of ways you can do this:

• you can post helpful information (links) where you help them solve a problem
• you can personally chat with them and assist them you can create content addressing the needs of users and posting it

The bottom line is that you want to be seen as genuine and helpful. This way, word can get out that you’re the real deal and before you know it, people will become interested in what you have to offer in terms of products and services.

Of course, the things you share on social networking sites such as Facebook shouldn’t be the nitty gritty stuff that you have to offer. You should share helpful information in the form of teasers that will interest people enough to ask and wonder if there’s more. Offering free stuff is great for getting attention too.

How To Market On Facebook

The great thing about Facebook is that from the outset, it has encouraged all users to use the website as a means of sharing information and marketing whatever they please. As a consequences, it has created various ways for users to do this. You are not obliged to use every single one of them but a combination of them can only improve your Facebook marketing.

Pages

This is probably the marketing tool out there on Facebook. On its website Facebook describes Pages as “a public Profile that enables you to share your business and products with Facebook users.” It is specifically designed for promoting a business and everything it has to offer. People can then become a Fan of your page and when they do this, they let their friends know that they’ve become a Fan of your page via their News Feed. The potential for your Page to gain a lot of popularity in a small period of time is great.

Of course, it all depends on the content you put out there for people to use. You need to give them a reason to become a Fan of your Page and a reason for them to keep being one.

Events

This allows to create events to be held at a certain date and time. Depending on what type of business you are, you can create one to be held locally or internationally. It can be any one of the following:

• seminar – it should be introductory and free but you could promote a paid one too
• webinar – an online seminar and where anyone worldwide can join
• product/service launch – you may be about to launch a product or service and this is a way to gain attention

The best part about creating an event on Facebook is that it can go viral and before you know it people will be attending your event in droves.

Advertising

Finally, about a year ago, Facebook introduced an advertising service where people can put ads promoting their website or their Facebook Page and they pay per click (PPC) or impression (CPM). It works in a similar way to Google Adwords.

The best thing is that you can target your bads based on both geographical locations and social actions. For example, if you were a wedding photographer and wanted to promote your services, your ads can be set up to appear only to females between the ages of 24 and 30 and whose relationship statuses indicate they are engaged.

It must be noted, however, that Facebook Advertising is still in beta mode which only means that it will only improve in the near future.

Embrace Facebook

If you wanted to market your website online, you would be absolutely nuts not to use Facebook marketing as one of your key strategies. Just be careful not to get caught up in it too much because it can become a very time consuming activity.

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Martin Sejas is a leading online marketing consultant based in Sydney who specialises in helping local business use their websites to get more clients. Register for a free consultation today.

How to Persuade Without Really Trying

By Judy Murdoch in Featured

Recently, the owner of a consulting practice contacted me. In the email, she said that she needed an easier, more predictable way to find ideal prospects.

She had already tried a lot of different things but nothing worked.

So we set up a meeting so I could learn more about her situation and whether I could help.

As we spoke during the meeting, it became clear to me that, yes, I could help this business owner. I felt quite certain of this.

But when it was my turn to tell her what I recommended things bogged down. It was very painful because I was doing my best to communicate “Yes, I can help you,” and the person looking for help kept asking, “But what exactly are you going to do?”

Google 360 Street View

By Chris Holgate in Featured

For the good of mankind Google need to let the rest of us know exactly what they do to come up with such fantastic and innovative ideas. For now I will have to be content with the constant stream of material they provide me with for these articles. The most recent offering that has me climbing the walls in excitement being “Google Street View”.

I can practically imagine the meeting in which an employee stood up and proclaimed “let’s drive specially modified cars down every street in the entire world and create a three dimensional virtual representation that anybody can then browse at home for free”. In any other company you would undoubtedly be ridiculed but at Google this idea was taken on board and followed through so over a period of two years practically every major city in the developed world has been captured.

By now most computer users will have used Google Maps which has a birds-eye view of almost every square-inch of the planet. “Street View” enhances this is giving you a street level 360 view of your chosen location so can take a look around as if you were actually there.

This world was created by the vehicles photographing their surroundings at 30 to 60 foot intervals along each piece of road they are driving on, the result allows you to view the world 360 degrees horizontally and 270 degrees vertically. Additional freedom to explore is given by simply clicking the direction in which you wish to move down the street or even take a corner when you reach a junction.

The UK maps only came online very recently so the coverage is fairly limited, there isn’t any coverage of my local area in the South West. Cities added in the United Kingdom currently include London, Oxford, Cambridge, Nottingham, Derby, Sheffield, Leeds, Manchester, Bradford, Scunthorpe, Bristol, Norwich, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Birmingham, Coventry, Liverpool, Southampton, Belfast, Cardiff, Swansea, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen.

Number plates and faces have been removed to give users the opportunity to remove any views that are deemed inappropriate, however ‘Street View’ has given the campaigners involved with the ever present privacy debate yet more ammunition. The watchdog organisation “Privacy International” based here in the UK has issued a formal complaint to the ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office) requesting the service be switched off pending a full investigation. These concerns have been sparked by 200 complaints by the pubic who believe their likeness is verifiable despite the facial recognition software blurring their faces.

It seems odd to me that these two hundred individuals didn’t simply click the ‘report an image’ button to have their image removed permanently but instead choose to locate the address for Privacy International to compose a strongly worded letter of protest. For the sake of the other 60,954,800 people in the UK who haven’t felt the need to complain I hope that the service remains online as provided the privacy of the individual continues to be respected via face blurring and manual image removal tools I don’t see there being any real cause for concern.

To get started simply visit http://maps.google.com or alternative the feature is also accessible directly from the fantastic Google Earth which can be downloaded for free from http://earth.google.com

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Chris Holgate writes a weekly article of all things tech related. He is a director and copyrighter of the online computer consumables business Refresh Cartridges who sell cheap ink cartridges, toner cartridges, computer hardware and other computer consumables online. An archive of his work can be found at www.computerarticles.co.uk.

How to Hard-Wire Your Site to Google

By Titus Hoskins in Featured

Until Bing turns into David and slays Goliath, the only search engine game in town is Google. While the other search engines can’t be ignored or forgotten, when it comes to online search, Google will deliver the majority of your quality organic traffic. For webmasters and especially for online marketers, having your website virtually hard-wired to Google is a marketing Must-Do.

We are strictly talking about white hat stuff here. If you’re seeking the opposite color, look elsewhere. As a full-time search engine marketer, I have learned a few things over the 10 years or so I have been working on the web. One of the most significant factors running constantly in the background has been Google. And, the underlying fact is that the more I intertwined my sites and content with Google, the more success I achieved. There seemed to be a direct correlation between the two, making it a little more than ironic that the original name for Google was BackRub.

© Copyright 2012 All rights reserved. Jayde Online, Inc.

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