So let’s jump straight in. Here are some of my biggest Twitter tips:

Do the Basics and Do Them Well

When I first joined Twitter I have to admit that I was extremely annoyed at the low signal to noise ratio. There were and still are heaps of spammy Twitter accounts out there. As a result, I pick and choose which Twitter accounts to follow. What do I base this on? Two things – first thing is whether they have filled out a bio that makes them sound like a real person or brand. So make sure you fill out your bio well, be descriptive and include your website address if you have one. Secondly, I look at the profile picture and whether it is a real life looking image. Not just some good looking guy or girl. Do the same and upload a real image of yourself or your business logo.  These are the very basics on getting more followers.

Follow and Be Followed

This is the oldest follower acquisition strategy around. The basic etiquette behind Twitter is that if you follow someone, they will follow you back otherwise it becomes a one way conversation. However, this isn’t a rule so you don’t have to do this, but many people on Twitter still follow this principle. We are going to use this to our advantage. So the first tip is to follow some people! As a result, you will start to gain followers. Moreover, find a couple of popular Twitter accounts in your niche and then start to follow their followers. For example, if you sell golf products search for a golf related Twitter account. Similar to my previous post where I talk about how to target your Facebook ads, you are in effect creating a targeted Twitter following.

If you’re completely new to Twitter, I would start off doing this manually. Aim to follow around 100-200 people per day and space it out. Don’t try to do it all at once. If you attempt to follow too many people in a short period of time, it will raise a red flag and Twitter will lock you out for a period of time. There is software out there (which a lot of people do use) to build up their Twitter following by automating the above process. This software includes TweetAdder, TweetBuddy and TweetAttacks. However, word of caution I would not recommend using these software tools as Twitter is now suing them for spamming. You run the danger of having your account banned by Twitter so just be very careful if you do decide to take the risk.

Retweeting and Mentions

Another great way to get new followers is to have your followers retweet your content or to mention your handle in their tweet which then gets tweeted to their entire list of followers. These tweets can then be retweeted by one of their followers and so on and so forth. This is where the viral nature really kicks in. But to get people to retweet you is a different story which I’ll cover in another post about content curation. But for now, just aim to provide useful and relevant content for your niche. If you’re stuck for content, read my previous post on how to get content for your Facebook fan page. Remember content is king!

Make sure you leave about 20 blank characters at the end of your tweet so that people can retweet you. Also mix up your tweets and include images, hashtags and tag other Twitter accounts in your tweets using the @ symbol. For example, in my last post I gave a reason why I love social media. I used a hash tag to include LinkedIn into my tweet (I should really have used an @ tag) about LinkedIn’s IPhone app. See the image below:

Also you will get a higher engagement with your fans if you engage with them too. So I highly recommend replying to tweets and retweeting tweets. In terms of retweeting, make sure you add your personal touch to it. So what I like to do  is to add a “RT” in front of the tweet and in brackets add my comment to it. For example, here’s a retweet that I’ve done:

Twitter Contests

Twitter contests are relatively simple to implement and are great for growing your following. The basic idea behind a Twitter contest is to get people to follow you and then to tweet about the contest in order to win a prize. Make sure this prize is worthwhile by offering something of value. If the prize resonates as something people want and must have, the whole contest will go viral. Imagine winning a brand new Apple MacBook for about 1 minute worth of work. You get my drift! Twitter does have a list of guidelines when running contests which you can view here.

Twitter Directories

Another great way of getting more followers is to join a Twitter directory such as Twellow and WeFollow. These directories allow users to search for Twitter accounts to follow based on different categories. Add yourself to these directories.

Paid Tweets and Promoted Accounts

Whilst on Twitter, you may have noticed promoted trends, promoted accounts and promoted tweets as seen below:

This is Twitter’s version of paid advertising. I haven’t tried this yet although I’m keen to give it a go. But these promoted accounts are popping up all over the place on Twitter. Check out the Twitter business page if you would like to find out more. The great thing about promoted accounts is that Twitter also provides you with analytics.

Another version of paid advertising on Twitter is to actually contact the owners of Twitter accounts in your niche with large followings and pay them to promote your tweets. With Paypal it’s actually quite easy to do monetary transfers to anyone in the world so you could negotiate a rate with the Twitter account owner.

Well there you have it, some of my tips on how to grow a large Twitter following. Have you got any other tips? Would love to hear them via the comment section below. Also don’t forget to follow me on Twitter here

This is the key – engagement. I repeat once again, engagement! One of my clients bought a thousand Facebook fans thinking that it would make his Facebook fan page popular. Except he didn’t count on the fact that when he posted something on his timeline, no one engaged with him. Not one single person. Of course, this makes your fan page even worse than it was before. Give me 10 fans who like or comment on my Facebook timeline posts any day rather than 10,000 fans who don’t engage at all.

Back to my story. One social network that I use quite frequently is LinkedIn. In fact, I’ve written a previous post on how to use LinkedIn for marketing. One of the things that I found annoying about LinkedIn is that there was never an IPad version of its IPhone app. So I let my frustrations be known on Twitter seeing if anyone would join me. Here’s my tweet:

Notice I didn’t tag LinkedIn properly. I should have used @LinkedIn rather than #LinkedIn. But it didn’t matter I received the following tweet:

How good is that! Now this is the reason why I love social media. Notice how I received this tweet about 2 weeks later. Imagine if you were a customer who posted a complaint or frustration on Twitter or Facebook and you received a reply like that. Would you promote that business to your friends? This is why businesses need to be developing and executing a social media strategy. One tweet can make a huge impact. In fact, check out my previous post on some Twitter horror stories. Have you had similar social media stories to share? Would love to hear about them in the comments below.

But I’m not going to talk about how to use LinkedIn to get a job or to find an employee. I’m going to share some of my tips for marketing your brand on LinkedIn and for finding potential clients and perhaps forming joint ventures with other like minded people. So here are my tips on how to use LinkedIn for marketing:

1. Start with Your Profile

This is LinkedIn 101 – the very basics that you must do. Not might do, must do! Fill out your profile completely so that LinkedIn tells you that your profile is 100% complete. LinkedIn will guide you through this process of what you need to add in order for your profile to be complete. For example, one thing LinkedIn requires you to do for a complete profile are recommendations from other people. Send off a couple of recommendation invites to people on your list of connections.

Secondly, add skills to your profile. Don’t hold back. List your skills and expertise that make you, you. Your brand is you and your business so make it count. Next, add in your social networks where people can connect with you. For example, if you see my profile below, I have my twitter account there.

Also customize your URL links. For example, do NOT do this:

But see below where I have customized my URL links. For example, I have customized my blog URL as a call to action with “Become a Social Media SEO Guru” and instead of naming my company by its name I have customized it to read “My Web Design Company”.

Also be descriptive in your summary section and add a bit of personality there. Remember when you are using social media you want your brand message to come through. Everything needs to have specific intent. Are you a B2B business or are you a thought leader in your niche? Think about what your brand is and align your profile with it.

2. Connect with Others

Now that you have set up a pretty cool profile, the next step is to connect with others. LinkedIn has an import function where you can import new connections from your email account such as gmail. Start building up your network. Why is a network important? Well as Seth Godin talks about in a book called “Tribes” having a network or tribe of people going in the same direction is unstoppable. Add colleagues, clients, friends, family you name it. Network exactly how you would if you were networking offline in a conference or coffee shop.

3. Join Groups

This is massive. Find groups in your niche and join them. Join them all if you can. For example, one group I’ve joined has 172,000 members!! That’s absolutely massive. The next part is super important. Read on.

4. Post Quality Content and Participate in Discussions 

Post quality content to your groups. Do not spam them, but share your content with the group. Make sure it adds value to the group. Imagine having a conversion rate of 5% of people that saw your post who then clicked on your link and read your content. Using the above group as an example, let’s say 20% of the group saw your post which equates to 34,400 people. Then 5% of these people clicked on your link, that equates to 1,720 people visiting your website! This is why I love social media, you can drive a lot of traffic to your website without relying on Google and search engine traffic. Also you know that the content will generate interest because you are posting to a targeted demographic who are in your niche. The other great thing about LinkedIn is that by default unless you turn it off, LinkedIn sends all members of a group an email with new discussions which opens the door for more people to see your content.

Also give back as well and participate in discussions that people post in the group. It is a community and it’s all about relationships and building a network or tribe of like minded people. This is where your connections will increase because you will meet great individuals in some of these groups. I’ve met some great people in these groups whom I feel very fortunate to have connected with.

4. Make a Group

Next thing you can do is make a group! Imagine building a group of thousands of professionals. It is a marketer’s dream because you can then send everyone in that group an email with whatever marketing you want in it. Liken it to email marketing and building an email list. LinkedIn makes creating a group easy because you can also invite your connections to join your new group.

6. Answer Questions 

There is also an “Answers” area in LinkedIn where you can post a question and also answer other people’s questions. It is broken up into different sections as per the image below. This is where you can position yourself as an expert in your niche because the person asking the question can mark your answer as the best answer. It’s also great for networking with others.

7. LinkedIn Ads

Just like Facebook, LinkedIn provides paying ad space. If you’ve read through my blog, I’m a big fan of Facebook ads and have used them alot. But I haven’t tried LinkedIn ads as of yet. But from speaking with other social media enthusiasts I hear LinkedIn ads have terrible conversion rates. I could be wrong though. Do let me know your experiences with LinkedIn ads in the comments below. I have added it in here though because it is still a viable source of traffic to your website.

8. Integrate your LinkedIn Account with Twitter

Under your Account & Settings, there is a setting to “Manage Your Twitter Settings”. Enable this and hook up your Twitter account with this so that all your tweets get posted to LinkedIn. It’s great for leveraging your tweet to make sure it gets maximum exposure.

9. Allow People to Know that You Have Viewed their Profile

By allowing people to know that you have viewed their profile, you can then see who has viewed your profile. I’ve made connections with many professionals through this way. If you turn this option off, then you won’t be able to see who has viewed your profile. Some people are very private about this and that’s fine. But if you really want to network then I recommend doing this.

That’s it – these 9 tips are what I do on LinkedIn as part of my social media strategy. Have you got any other LinkedIn tips? Then please share your thoughts in the comments below. It’s midnight over here so off to bed I go!

You see what has happened in the last week has been massive in the search engine optimization world which is what I wanted to talk about today. Google has made some massive changes to its algorithm via Panda 3.3 and now has started penalizing websites for having spammy or unnatural back links. There always use to be a hot debate on whether you got penalized for having unnatural or spammy back links to your website. The argument being “well if you got penalized for having certain back links, then you could easily build back links to your competitor websites and get them banned.” Well this almost looks like this is the case. If you relied on SEO as your primary source of bringing traffic to your website, then you would be stuffed. That’s why you need to focus some of your efforts into social media marketing.

Most of the SEO specialists I’ve spoken to and confirmed with have also suggested that Google are now penalizing sites for bad back links. Having a look around the Internet, more and more people are getting the following message from Google in their webmaster tools account:

We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

Wow!! Moreover in the last week, one of the biggest paid blog networks out there has had all their blogs de-indexed by Google. They have now shut down. The network – Build My Rank. This network is one of the strictest blog networks out there when it came to submitting content with your back links in them. It had to be unique content or well spun content (not poorly spun content that was not human readable) with no grammar and spelling mistakes. Build My Rank did not want to leave any footprint for Google to catch them out. Unfortunately they did.

Now Google are after Authority Link Network as well having de-indexed thousands of blogs in that network. I believe it won’t be long before Google de-indexes all the blogs in ALN. So the big G are cracking down hard on people trying to game the system. This now begs the question is SEO dead? Will it still be viable in 6 months time? I still believe there is a place for SEO but it’s definitely now becoming harder to rank websites higher. So below I’ve listed some of my tips on getting your website to the top of Google:

1. Create quality content – I’ve mentioned this many a time and it will never change. Content is king. Produce quality content that helps users and create it regularly! Keep your site content fresh with new content added continuously.
2. Get natural back links – linked in to my point above, by creating quality content other websites will naturally link to your website.
3. Social media – you need social proof for your website period. Once again linked in to point 1, create content that creates a buzz. Get people tweeting your content, liking it on Facebook, sharing on Google+ or pinning it on Pinterest. Google are using social signals more and more to determine the value and rankings of websites.
4. Link diversity – get a variety of links from different sources such as article submissions, social bookmarking, wiki submissions, press releases, RSS feeds, forum profiles etc. The more your link profile is diverse, the better it is in Google’s eyes. Do not put all your back links in one basket. For example, imagine your only source of back links was from Build My Rank and you got hit by Google, compared with someone who also had Build My Rank back links but also had back links from a multitude of other sources. The latter will still be fine.
5. Guest posts- always great to write posts for others and also get them to write posts for you. Guest blogging is great also for your brand awareness.
6. Anchor text diversity – don’t create links to your website all using the same anchor text which is your keyword. This looks so unnatural. Mix it up – use different keywords and variations of keywords. Include anchor text keywords such as “click here” and “here”.
7. Use a fast and reliable website hosting company – Google looks at page load times and bounce rates as metrics in ranking your website. So make sure your website is quick upon loading and you direct your website visitors as soon as they view your web page. If you use wordpress, you can use a caching plugin to improve the loading speed of your website.

If you stick to the above tips, you will be fine. Also your website visitors will also be happy because they’re getting great and useful content. This keeps the big G happy.

Before I begin, the good news is that business pages won’t be forced to upgrade to the new timeline feature until the 30th March 2012 which gives you a little bit of time. Of course, you can upgrade anytime before that deadline. Now the first thing you will notice with the new timeline for business pages is that there is now no default landing page. The first image that users will see is the top banner which is an 850 x 315 pixel banner. The Facebook terms of service clearly states that your top banner cannot include:

• Price information.
• Calls to action.
• More text compared to imagery.
• Any references to “like” or “share” ala previous landing page designs where you had an image of an arrow pointing to the like button directing people to like their page.

Next have a look at my Facebook business page with timeline below:

Now just underneath the banner photo, there is an “About” area of 150 characters where you can give a short spiel or description about your business or fan page. Next to it is your photos, followed by the total number of likes or fans, followed by your default landing tab (110 x 74 pixels), then finally the rest of your custom apps.

The biggest benefit of this new layout is that when a fan clicks on one of your custom apps, you have a full 810 pixels in width rather than 520 pixels without timeline. This is great! You now have more room to play around with your app and you don’t have the distraction of the left hand tab menu anymore.

Another great feature and benefit of timeline is that Facebook ads (which I’ve blogged about heaps) can now be linked to one of your apps rather than your default landing page. This means you can create extremely targeted campaigns. Also you can fan gate these apps which means you can allow people to view your content only if they have liked your page.

One other feature that I really like about timeline for business pages is the ability for people to message you directly whether they are a fan of your page or not. See the screen shot below. You will notice a message button just underneath your banner photo.

This is great as it promotes people to interact with your page and with your business more. Previously it was more complicated to contact the page owner but now it’s much more clearer. In addition, Facebook timeline for business pages also allows you to pin content to the top of your timeline for 7 days and also to highlight content that will expand the story or content wide screen.

Having browsed through other fan pages that have enabled timeline, I have found that the biggest benefit of timeline is that fans can now clearly see the evolution of a business or brand. You can see how that business has evolved over the years. For example, what was the culture and services offered by that business 2 years ago compared to now. Have they grown? How has the brand evolved? This gives fans a great insight on a business and brand.

So there you have it, a run down of some of the new features of Facebook timeline for business pages. I’m a huge fan and am looking forward to optimizing my page for timeline.

That’s absolutely massive! Anything that gets that sort of traffic always grabs my attention. If you’re into internet marketing or have a website or business, then social media is a huge leverage point. Just like what I shared in this article about how to use social media, social media is great for driving traffic to your website. Gone are the days on just relying on search engine traffic (whether it be organic or PPC).

Now I’ll give a quick run down on Pinterest first. It’s invite only at the moment, which is a great marketing tactic. But basically, you create different boards where you can either pin images or videos onto your boards. All of your followers can see your boards and pins along with people all around the world. The viral aspect and social sharing aspect of Pinterest is driven by the fact that people can repin your pin which means take your image or video and then post it onto their own board for their own set of followers to see, people can like your pin, people can comment on your pin or people can also share it on Facebook or Twitter. Pinterest is entirely visually driven. Check out my own personal Pinterest screen below:

So you can see it is very visual. Now I’ve been playing around it with heaps and trying different images and seeing what works and what doesn’t. Here’s what I’ve found.

Creating Boards

Be creative with your board naming and also be specific with your board names. For example, if you want to pin images of food avoid naming your board “Food”. Be interesting that people want to follow that board. I called mine “My Food Journey” so that people know that these images taken with my IPhone are of my culinary journey. People get a glimpse of my personality and what I get up to.

Secondly, create boards for some of these common areas which I find get the most repins and likes – food, clothing, funny and cute stuff, inspirational quotes or words to live by, affirmations, technology, holidays and vivid scenery images.

Always remember this creates your brand and allows your followers to get a glimpse of your personality and who you are.

Branding

I touched upon this before. You would have heard the wise old saying of “a picture paints a thousand words.” Now imagine a whole board of images! How would that depict you and your brand? Will your followers and people around the world see dark and depressing images or will they see creativity, ingenuity, innovation and value? You get my drift.

Ecommerce

One of the great things about Pinterest is that it is great for ecommerce. Besides allowing you to pin a high quality image of one of your products, Pinterest allows you to attach a URL onto that image, which can land the user directly to the product page on your shopping cart. Not only that, Pinterest allows you to add a $ or £ sign in the description along with a price next to it which then adds a price tag on the top left hand corner of the image. This also means your image has a chance to appear in the Gifts category and of course, adding a URL to your image means that person can click through to your ecommerce website. As an example of this, see the image below:

Getting Repins and Followers

This is where the viral nature of Pinterest takes over. The trick in getting more repins and followers is to pin interesting images. It goes along the same adage as “content is king”. So examples of great images to pin are humorous pictures, inspirational images, images of vivid scenery and anything interesting. This includes videos as well.

Pinterest also has a great Facebook feature where you can find which of your Facebook friends are on Pinterest and then start to follow them. Another great way to get more repins and more followers is to simply repin other people’s pins, comment on their pins and also like their pins. The more you engage with people, the more people will start to follow your pins.

Driving Traffic

Now in this section, I wanted to talk about driving traffic to your website from Pinterest. A contest works wonders on Facebook (I’ll write about this in another blog post) and so the same principle applies here. Run a contest on Pinterest and invite people to pin images that inspire or motivate them. Then judge the best pin and offer a prize. You’ll increase your follower list in no time. Of course, the more people following you, the more eye balls on your images and videos, and hence the more people that will potentially click through and visit your website.

Another great tip in using Pinterest to drive traffic to your website is to create how to images. That is, one single image broken up into multiple images with each image teaching you something. For example, check out the image below:

Some other tips I highly recommend is adding a Pinterest Pin button onto your web pages where visitors can pin your content onto their own Pinterest boards, similar to Facebook’s like button. Also add your URL to your own images so that as your image is repinned, people can see your website URL clearly on the image.

Well there you have it. An overview of Pinterest and how you can use it to market your website or brand. But be careful, it can get quite addictive!

Now today I wanted to go into this in much more detail and how you can really target your Facebook ads. Using this method can also help if you want to know more about your target audience and not just with Facebook. It can also help if you’re an affiliate marketer, have an ecommerce website or you’re running a campaign using pay per click advertising.

So let’s use the handbag niche as our example niche. The first thing to do is to load up the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Then enter your search term. In our case, I will use the term “buy handbags” as this is a buyer keyword as compared to a very generic keyword such as “handbags”. If you’re selling handbags, then you will want to target a buyer keyword as someone searching “handbags” may just want to look at handbags for their design but not buy. In a future post, I’ll talk about keyword research. So as I type that search term, I get the following:

Now hover over next to the keyword and you will see a magnifying class as such. This is Google Insights which will give you even more search data.

Now viewing the Google Insights data we can see worldwide, over the last 12 months, which countries this search term came from the most. As you can see, Australia came out as number one as the country where the most searches for “buy handbags” came from. We can do more data analysis and filter by the last 3 years if we wanted to see the trends of different countries. This information is invaluable because now we can use these countries as the target countries in our Facebook ads.

Next we want to drill down even more into our target market. What we are now going to do is go back into Google and search for our keyword. Searching in Google US for “buy handbags” we get the following results:

We’re going to take the first or second website and grab its URL. In this case, I’ll go for the second result http://www.ebags.com because it looks like more of an authority type ecommerce site since the meta description for the first site is very keyword stuffed. Now head over to a website called Quantcast and type in the URL into the search box. You will now get a huge amount of US demographic data such as gender, age, college gradudate etc. This data is invaluable because we can now narrow down our target audience in our Facebook ads even more. Using our example above, we can clearly see the majority of visitors to the website ebags are female, aged between 25 and 64 and who have finished college or grad school. Perfect! We can now plug this data into our Facebook ad campaign and use CPM (cost per thousand impressions). As the ad will be displayed to a super targetted demographic, the click through rate (CTR) of our ads will be higher and in turn, this will reduce the CPC (cost per click). See my blog post here for more information about this.

Well there you have it. That’s how we can drill down further into our target demographic even more and tailor our Facebook ads to match this data. Also you could use this information if you’re an affiliate marketer or have an ecommerce website.

If you’re new to SEO I will quickly give you a run down on the basics of SEO. SEO consists of two main areas – on page optimization and off page optimization. In this post, I’ll talk about the first part which is on page optimization. This is where you optimize your web page that you want to rank whilst off page optimzation (which I will cover in another post) is all about backlinking and more recently (after Google’s Panda update) social media signals (which I will also cover in a later post).

Let’s take a step by step look into on page optimization.

Meta Tags

The very first thing you have to do is update your meta tags of your web page. If you’re using WordPress to create your website, I highly recommend a plugin called All In One SEO pack which can be found here. Next you have to make sure that the exact keyword phrase you are trying to rank for is in your title, description and keywords. This is the very basics of SEO.

Keyword In Your Content

Next, the second most important tip is to sprinkle your keyword phrase throughout the content. Make sure it is readable though to users and not forced into the content making it hard to read. It’s a fine balance between writing for Google and also making sure that the reader can easily read it. A lot of SEO specialists recommend repeating your keyword phrase about 4-5% of the total number of keywords for that page. I don’t follow this purely because you don’t want to SEO your web page in such a tight knit formula because Google is a super smart search algorithm and may penalize you. You want to sprinkle it so it seems natural.

Another tip is make sure you mention your keyword phrase in the first sentence of your content and also the last sentence. This is super important! Also, try to at least bold or make it italic at least once in the content.

Alternative Text for Images

If you have images in your content, make sure that the first image has what is known as an alternative text (e.g. alt=”social media tips”) with your keyword phrase as this alternative text. Only do this for the first image and not more than that because once again, we don’t want to appear to Google as trying to game it. We are merely making our web page appear natural. We don’t want to appear to Google as trying to over optimize our web page.

Links

Make sure in your content you have some outbound links to other websites that are related to your niche or topic area. For example, in the area of “social media tips” I could add a hyperlink to websites such as Mashable. This is really important as Google want to give the user the best user experience from using its search engine. By doing so, more and more people will continue using Google, and hence they can continue making money through their biggest money earner – Google Adwords. I would say aim for around 6 or less outbound links.

It’s also a good idea to link to some internal pages of your website.

Header Tags

Try to have at least your exact keyword phrase mentioned in either your H1 or H3 tags. I would aim to go for the H1 tag if possible. This highlights once again to Google that your web page is all about your keyword phrase.

Keyword In Your URLs

Google places a high emphasis on ranking websites if your keyword is in your URL. So for example, if you’re trying to rank for the keyword phrase “social media tips” then your URL should read like this http://www.yoursite.com/social-media-tips. If you’re using WordPress you can change these settings in the permalinks section and under “custom structure”. In there, make sure you change it to %category%/%postname%/

Well there you have it, some on page SEO tips that will improve your Google ranking.

So let’s begin. The first thing to remember is that this doesn’t apply to all niches. The technique I will show you works well for some niches and not so well for others. But I guarantee you if you experiment with it, you can pay for Facebook ads for as little as $0.01c per click. So if 100 people click on your Facebook ad, you’re only paying $1!! Not bad indeed. So that’s the first thing. This will not work for all niches but if it does work for your niche, it will work well.

The next thing to note is to know that people are not going on Facebook to view your ads. They are there to look up friends, waste time, see what other people are up to and to connect with their friends, family, colleagues etc. They are NOT there to view your ads. So your mentality has to be to keep it simple and not to sell, sell, sell. Now the third point I want to make is that you need to stand out from the rest of the ads. For example, check out these ads currently on my Facebook:

Do you see how they are all text and wordy? Worst of all, they all look the same. None of them stand out from each other, hence why they probably have a low CTR (Click Through Rate) which is the percentage of clicks per impressions or number of times viewed. So here’s how you do it.

Go to Facebook Ads in your Facebook account. Then click on “Create an Ad”. Now in the first section “Design Your Ad”, select your fan page as the destination. Then select “Facebook Ads” as the type and “Facebook Ads for Pages” as the Story Type. Now in the body text for your ad, write something like this “If you love social media, click like” where “social media” is your niche or your area of interest. See below:

This is simple and super effective. Imagine seeing this next to a bunch of ads that have heaps of writing! This stands out. Also it’s not so intrusive. Remember how I was mentioning that people are not there to view your ads and are simply browsing. Then they see your ad and because they do love social media, they will like it. You see, I already know that they love social media. Similarly if you had an ad talking about shoes, they will like it because they love shoes. How do I know they already like this? Keep reading I will go through that soon.

Also choose an image that is red or has red in it! Why? Well if you look at Facebook, the layout is all blue. So by using a contrasting color like red, this catches the eye of people much more and hence, a much higher chance they will click your ad!

Now the next part is the secret sauce. We know that they are already interested in our ads, because this is where we target those people. Under the Targeting section, we specify the countries where they would be interested in our ads (for example, people in Australia would be interested in Aussie rules which is a sport only played in Australia), their age and the demographic (for example, women would be interested in handbags). Now under Interests, click on “Switch to Precise Interest Targeting”. This is the secret sauce. Add in the niche and sub-niches your ad focuses on. For example, my ad targets “social media”, “social media marketing” and “social networks”. By targeting these specific areas, I know that the ads will only be served to those people interested in these. Hence, the CTR (click through rate) increases significantly higher! Then under “Connections on Facebook”, select “Only people who are not fans”. See below:

You will get better results the more specific you are with your targeting. So if you can narrow the targeting down even further, you will get an even better CTR.

Now complete the rest of the information as required. Finally, the last part of the secret sauce is under Pricing. Select “Pay for Impressions (CPM)” and for “Max Bid (USD)” put in  the lowest suggested bid value. You may have to tweak this as the ad runs so you can get an even lower CPC (cost per click). You see this Pay for Impressions means the cost you will pay for 1000 impressions or times your ad will be displayed to people. So because we have laser targeted people who we know are already interested in our ad, there is a much higher chance of them clicking the ad which means the more people click it per 1000 impressions, the lower the CPC. That is how we can get cheap Facebook ads!

Have a go and let me know your comments below.

This is by far the most powerful weapon in attracting new fans to your Facebook fan page. If you provide value to your fans, they will engage with you. The more they engage, the more your fan page will spread virally around Facebook through fans sharing your fan page links and recommending others to like your page.

So where do we get great content to post? Let’s start off with an example. Imagine you have a Facebook fan page that talks about Apple, one of the most talked about companies going around now. This fan page will talk about the latest Apple news including when the next IPhone will be manufactured.

One way to get great content is to go to Google and click on News on the top as follows:

Now search for “Apple” and you will get multiple news results. Now scan each of the results and find something interesting. I usually find articles that I would find personally interesting to read or extremely useful. For example, for my fan page I recently posted an article talking about Google pages which has just opened up. This is massive news in the social media world.

Once you find an interesting article, grab its URL and shorten it using a URL shortener such as bit.ly or my personal favorite that I use, which is Google’s URL shortener (see below):

This is important as you want to track the number of times each URL is clicked from your post. Google’s URL shortener provides a great range of different stats including the countries where those people have clicked from.

Now going one step further, go back to the news results and on the bottom you will find an option for creating an email alert for “Apple”. Then go ahead and create an email alert and schedule it to arrive in your inbox daily. Now you have just leveraged all of the above by receiving it in your email. If you have a fan page, you want to aim to post around 3-4 times a day. This is a great way to get the latest news for your niche delivered straight into your mailbox.

I’m a big believer in leveraging your time. One of the best tools that I’ve found if you are a part of multiple social networks is HootSuite. I use the above shortened URL and plug it into HootSuite and then it posts it to all of my accounts at once – Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and LinkedIn.

Another great way to get great content is to visit some websites in your niche and subscribe to their RSS feed. Plug these feeds into an RSS reader, then you will also get the latest updates from that website. Also follow the blogs of experts in your niche and share some of their articles.

One Facebook feature I highly recommend using is the question feature. This has a high EdgeRank value as I talked about here and gets your fans interacting and engaging with your fan page.

Finally, I also highly recommend sharing videos which you can easily find on YouTube or Vimeo. Keep an eye out on my next post where I’ll be talking about how to share your fan page on other fan pages without having your post deleted. Another great tactic to get more fans to your fan page.