224
INTERNET
RICH
YOUR BLUEPRINT
TO BOOK SALES
Mike Bray
With L. J. Martin
Internet Rich
Copyright 2011 Mike Bray & L. J. Martin
Wolfpack Publishing
PMB 414
1001 E. Broadway, #2
Missoula, Montana 59802
No part of this book may be reproduced without the explicit written consent of the publisher.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Mike Bray is president and CEO of Geo Marketing, Inc. With over 30 years of marketing experience. The past 16 years Mike devoted strictly to SEO (search engine optimization), SEM (search engine marketing), and, IM (Internet marketing). He has worked with hundreds of companies, from the one-man-band to large public corporations. Through his vast and diverse search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and Internet marketing ex-perience, Mike has successfully increased online visibility and sales in just about every industry from call girls (he’s Las Vegas based) to political campaigns, and from jet charter services to fishing charters. Although primarily focused on Geo Marketing’s corporate owned web properties, Mike finds it hard to resist a challenge and still accepts an occasional client.
L. J. Martin is the author of 26 works of both fiction and non-fiction from Bantam, Avon, Pinnacle and his own Wolfpack Publishing, and is the author of dozens of articles in national publications. He’s also a video producer, audio book producer, lyricist, cover artist and photographer. He was the early author of webpages, writing html in longhand long before computer programs eased the process, and among the first to take advantage of print-on-demand and e-book publishing. He’s married to inter-nationally published NYT bestselling romantic suspense author Kat Martin whose over fifty novels are printed in a dozen languages and twice that many countries, and handles the promotion of her work as well as his own.
Table Of Contents
Author’s Note
Introduction
Chapter One – It’s A New World
Chapter Two – The Author Website
Chapter Three – Domains, Etc.
Chapter Four – Facebook & Social Sites
Chapter Five – YouTube
Chapter Six – The Press Release
Chapter Seven – Outside Help
Chapter Eight – SEO
Chapter Nine – List Building
Chapter Ten – Social Bookmarking
Chapter Eleven – A Book In Word
Chapter Twelve – A Cover In Photoshop
Chapter Thirteen – CreateSpace
Chapter Fourteen – Amazon & Kindle
Chapter Fifteen – Smashwords
Chapter Sixteen – Nook
Conclusion
Glossary
Authors’ Note!
Most of this book is original, however, like any how-to book or manual, much of it is a consolidation of factual material gleaned off the various websites/ opportunities on the web discussed herein. It’s the author’s intent to present those websites and opportunities in a form as close to what you’ll face in trying to publicize and publish your books (if that’s what you’re selling) as possible.
Caution: the Internet and the web is as hot, fluid and changing as a lava flow. What was a “fact” as this book was written may have changed by the time you read a page. We will continue to upgrade this manual; however no one can move fast enough for the net. Cut us a little slack, we’ll do our very best.
Introduction
By L. J. Martin
Social Media is about relationships, about people, about exposure. Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30 years old, and those under 30 are adept with computers, iPhones, note-books and teachers are complaining that students are texting with one hand in their pocket so as not to be caught. Facebook has topped Google for “weekly traffic” in the U.S. One in five couples now meet online. One in five divorces are blamed on Facebook. Kinder-garteners are now learning on iPads, chalk-boards have gone the way of buggy whips.
If Facebook was a country, by population, it would be the third largest in the world.
A new member joins LinkedIn every second.
If you want to be part of the world, the Internet world, the social networking world, and you must be if you’re to be in business, then it’s not a question of “if?” merely a question of “when” and “how well?”
Who does it well? Britney Spears, Justin Bieber, and Lady Gaga have more Twitter followers than the total populations of Israel, Sweden, Greece, Chile, Australia and North Korea.
Over one half the total Internet traffic in the United Kingdom is Facebook. YouTube had 37 million viewers for a single VW ad during the Super Bowl. An ad for the introduction of the Ford Explorer had more viewers than a Super Bowl ad.
If Wikipedia were a print book it would be a mere 2.25 million pages and take you more than a lifetime to read.
The e-book has overtaken conventional paper book sales.
You must be a part of social media, otherwise you might as well go into the buggy whip biz.
There’s only one way to get in front of the better part of a billion people in this world…short of marrying an heir to the British throne…and that’s what we’re discussing in this book.
When my wife and I decided we would become writers, more than two dozen years ago, there was no Internet, at least not one which had found its way into every office and most bedrooms and dens in the country and across the world.
The marketing of books consisted primarily of bookstores, supermarkets, drugstores, and general stores such as WalMart and Target. There were also a number of book clubs that dealt via the mail. At that time there were over 1,500 wholesale “book buyers” in the country who bought books for placement in those markets. Most of those books were bought by buyers at Independent Distributors (ID’s) across the country. We soon learned that although booksignings were occasionally wonderful for the ego, they were unproductive other than making a friend of a particular bookstore owner or manager—not that we don’t admire and value hard working bookstore owners and personnel.
As bookstores began to fade from prominence and book chains captured a good part of the market, it became less and less economically important in the long-term to make a friend of a bookstore person, as they’d be going back to college in the Fall or moving on to take a job at Sears or in the underwear department at Target. Your time was much better spent visiting an ID book buyer or taking donuts to their 5 A.M. driver meetings…after all, the driver was the one who racked the books and often made the decision if your title was eye high or could only be seen by the book consumer’s dachshund and those distributors and store sold 80% of mass market books in the United States.
Shortly after we began writing (75 books ago) and schlepping our books, the business began to consolidate, and eventually ended up with three or four major distributors owning all the others. The word was that those hundreds and hundreds of book buyers were consolidated down to a dozen or less. And it became more and more difficult to “schmooze” a book buyer. If you weren’t John Grisham you didn’t get in the door.
One thing you can be certain of, and that is, just like the weather here in Montana, you only have to wait a short while and things change. The major change in the scenario of selling books was the Internet, and a company called Amazon. I must confess that I thought Amazon was a passing fancy, but then I would never have invested in a company that wanted to put water in plastic bottles and sell it for a buck, or wanted to put a coffee shop on every corner and sell coffee for five bucks a paper cup. Who the hell would drink coffee out of a paper cup? Now there’s Amazon and lots and lots of other selling opportunities, most of which are included in this volume.
I am not a techie, but I saw the writing on the proverbial wall as the Internet began to grow. And I learned how to write a webpage when HTML was done by writing code, but I thanked the hyperspace gods when programs came along that would shorten the process. I never did master the ins and outs of the Internet, even though I was fairly early into the game of print-on-demand books, e-books, and selling via your website.
Then I received a call from an old friend. Mike Bray was also early into the game, but his slant was pure selling on the net. It didn’t matter to Mike if it was water or widgets, he sold it via the web, and sold it very, very well, and he wanted to help me sell books.
I’m still not a techie, but I know a whole lot more about the web now than I ever thought I’d know, or need to know, or want to know, thanks to Mike. The good news I’m selling a hundred times more books than I ever sold before. And that, my friends, is why you need this book.
It’s Mike’s know-how and my meager contributions and poor editing, but this book will make your life much easier if you decide to attack the Internet and sell your own stuff; and that doesn’t just apply to books. As I’m both a fiction and non-fiction writer, and my wife is a novelist, we’ve concentrated on books…but selling on the net is selling, and it doesn’t matter if your selling books or boomerangs, it’s all the same to the Internet.
The links alone, and the glossary, are worth a hundred times the price of the book, but you’ve got to put them to work.
We can’t do that for you.
Chapter One
It’s A New World
Now, more than ever, it’s get aboard or be left behind. The Internet is the engine driving the economy, and no matter what you’re selling, be it books or bullocks, if you’re not using the web you had better dust off your old concepts of selling and take a hard look…it’s a new world, full of new opportunities. Most of your competitors already have jumped on the bandwagon. This book is about how to get to the head of the pack…the alpha wolf. It concentrates on books, but applies equally to bullocks or battleships…after all, selling is selling.
The bankruptcy filing by Borders highlights the trend from the traditional brick-and-mortar book retailer to the digital model. A model fueled by the booming sale of handheld digital readers, the convenience of purchases being shipped tax free to the consumer’s door, and an unlimited selection of titles with the pricing advantage that online retailers enjoy through lower overhead.
Borders made the fatal mistake of turning over their early Internet sales to Amazon. This made them late to the dance with the development of their own e-commerce site. Even by this year, as e-books grew to make up about 9 to 10 percent of trade book sales, Borders’s online efforts never took off in a significant way.
According to the Association of American publishers, total sales of e-books jumped 366% between 2007 and 2009, an increase of nearly a quarter of a billion. In the same time, sales of adult hardback titles dropped 7%.
But the real magic of the Internet is: it’s the world’s most cost-effective promotional tool. Seventy five percent of the western population has Internet access—in three out of four homes there’s a computer capable of talking directly to your sales opportunity. Online book sales are just the icing on the cake. It’s not just the 80 million readers who purchase their books online, it's also the millions and millions of readers who shop online through catalogs, reviews, and social network recommendations, then make their purchase offline through a traditional brick-and-mortar bookstore or other retail venues.
In Steve Weber's book, “Plug Your Book”. He tells the story of Joe Simpson's first book, Touching the Void. Simpson a British Mountaineer wrote the book in 1988 about a climbing accident in the Peruvian Andes. The book received great reviews but only modest sales.
Ten years later American journalist Jon Krakauer, who scaled Everest on an expedition that claimed eight lives, wrote Into Thin Air, which was a number one bestseller and an international blockbuster. Soon bookstores started getting requests for Simpson’s book Touching the Void. Harper Paperbacks rushed a new addition onto the racks, and Touching the Void started out selling Into Thin Air by 2 to 1.
Simpson’s book was brought back to life by the world’s largest bookstore and its 81 million customers, Amazon.com. Amazon's suggestion tool recommended the older book to millions of people based on their buying history. If you shop on Amazon, you have seen these recommendations yourself: “People who bought this book also bought…”
A lot of the new readers enjoyed Touching the Void, so much that they wrote great reviews on Amazon, spurring on additional buyers.
Ten years after the book’s initial launch, Internet powered word-of-mouth did something that no team of marketing pros could accomplish. It landed Touching the Void on the bestseller list. In geek terminology the book went viral. We saw Charles Portis’s True Grit hit the new New York Times bestseller list last year, following the release of the remake of the great John Wayne movie.
Here’s a quote from a recent Publisher’s Weekly (the bible of the biz) article:
After revealing Tuesday on a YouTube video that the title of his next novel is The Fault in Our Stars, YA (young adult) author John Green made a second announcement that has some of his 1,140,780 Twitter followers, 61,714 Facebook friends, 525,676 YouTube subscribers, and other fans buzzing. Not only buzzing, but also rushing to preorder The Fault in Our Stars, even though its tentative pub date isn't until May 2012, and the cover art hasn't been designed yet. The book shot to #1 on Amazon.com and bn.com, and it remains at that position on both sites as of press time.
Mr. Green couldn’t have reached that many folks by conventional paid advertising mediums unless he’d sold his house, car, and borrowed against his inheritance.
All successful books have one thing in common and that is that they owe their success to word of mouth recommendations. Through the Internet’s email, search, and social networking opportunities, today’s author has the opportunity to blow his or her own horn. Creating the word of mouth buzz that was once restricted to the few with deep pockets and/or deep connections in the publishing industry.
One of the favorite success stories of 2010 was Groupon. Rumors were everywhere about the possible purchase of Groupon by Internet giant Google. The well-known group coupon and discount site was founded less than two years prior. Despite this, if you were to believe the rumors, Google was poised to buy Groupon for upwards of 5 Billion. Analysts were talking about how great this buyout would be, how this was a needed part of the Google infrastructure in its battle against Facebook. However, what those analysts did not know and what Groupon and probably Google seemed to be hiding from them is how Groupon became so successful, so fast: Through Cost-Per-Acquisition Affiliate Market-ing. In other words Groupon purchased their subscribers.
Yes, Groupon owes their success to Performance Based marketing, where they have paid affiliate and CPA networks and their armies of sales people to promote their product over the Internet expanding their subscriber base. For those of us in the Internet marketing industry, we all know this method: pay for every new person who subscribers to your news-letter. It’s a true and tried method and can generate enormous success for anyone who wants to grow their fan base fast and can afford it. Depending on genre, some authors have had outstanding success marketing their product through affiliate networks.
They want to hide this, because although much of the market knows that Performance Based Marketing is one of the quickest ways to get new users, a lot of the media, from the NY Times to the Wall Street Journal, seems ignorant of this method and doesn’t understand that almost any company, with enough cash, can generate enormous value based on subscribers. If Groupon can generate that much interest that fast, it means that all of the other Coupon sites that are popping up can easily take a significant part of the market share, very quickly.
We have no idea how much money Groupon spent on Performance Based Marketing, but have read reports that it was upwards of $150 million in 2010. Groupon was considered a huge failure until late 2009 when they started to acquire new subscribers via CPA Advertising. A look at Alexas traffic chart for Groupon confirms that they had very little traffic until 2010, when they suddenly skyrocketed out of nowhere.
In today's online world any dedicated author with a computer and the ability to draft an email can publicize their own work worldwide; kicking off and amplifying the word-of-mouth buzz; critical to the success of any book.
“The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side”. James Baldwin
On-line book promotion is simply IM (Internet marketing). Internet marketers pick a niche then target their efforts and assets towards that niche. Savvy Internet marketers carefully study supply and demand, identifying opportunities that offer a high return on investment. They then carefully filter the list based on competition, total return, available domain names, experience, motivation and scala-bility.
Only after completion of their due diligence does a savvy Internet marketer settle on a niche. And yes there are savvy Internet marketers making a fortune off online book sales by following a simple blue-print:
1) Identify a high demand, low competition topic. This is the exact opposite approach from the typical nonfiction author who writes a book based on his passion and then looks for a market.
2) Buy and totally dissect the top selling books on the subject, looking for a different angle or a better way to tell the story.
3) Once comfortable with the topic they name the book and purchase an exact match domain name, based on keyword research.
4) Draft an outline for the book.
5) Write, or hire a freelance ghostwriter to write, a book based on their outline at 1 to 2 cents per word.
6) Hire a graphic designer for the cover, website header and promotional material.
7) Hire a copywriter for website and promotional material.
8) Build the website and turn on the traffic.
9) Rinse and repeat.
The savvy Internet marketer knows that Internet marketing is simply a numbers game, consisting of views and conversion. By crunching statistics he will quickly determine his conversion rate. For example if one out of every hundred people who learn about your book online makes the purchase, your conversion rate would be 1%; or in the bigger picture, if 1 million people are exposed to your book online you would expect to sell 10,000 books at a 1% conversion rate. Armed with his initial statistics the Internet marketer goes to work on both increasing traffic to the books product pages and web properties as well as increasing the conversion rate.
You may have heard that the best way to sell more books on Amazon is to write more books. Well it's true, as these savvy Internet marketers add more books (product in their mind) to the major online booksellers, the dynamic nature of these sites kicks in. Each buyer of one of this author’s books is exposed to additional books by the same author, thus promoting purchases of multiple books. And the more subjects an author covers, the more keyword generated lists his books will appear on. We will introduce you to some of the tools and techniques these gurus incorporate into their online book promotions. However, the grossly unethical or illegal stuff you'll have to find on your own.
John Locke, author of the first independently published book to hit the million mark on Amazon (read self-published), says exactly the above in his book on how he sold a million books.
As in all aspects of book marketing, it helps to write a great book that generates word of mouth (the only form of book marketing less expensive than the Internet) because of its quality.
"Sometimes the best helping hand you can get is a good, firm push." - Joann Thomas
We love that quote and it is applicable to our on-line book promotion adventure. Enlist a right-hand man, someone that will appreciate your success and keep you on track. This can be a spouse, parent, child, sibling or friend. The more vested in your success the better.
If you are under contract, you might want to get formal approval for your marketing plan from your publisher prior to implementation.
Chapter Two
The Author Website
The author’s website should accomplish three goals:
1) Add additional value for the reader through content. The goal here is to build trust and rapport with your audience. The benefits for the reader should be obvious and make it more likely that the reader joins your opt-in e-mail list, returns to your site and/or makes a purchase from the website. The content can be an article or series of articles, free report, reviews, interviews, book excerpts, blogs, video (the Google search engine loves video), or anything else you like, as long as it is relevant.
2) Capture e-mail addresses. If you fail to capture the readers contact information (email address) transforming the reader to a lead, you have missed an opportunity to add more value in the future and almost unlimited opportunities to sell to that reader. E-mail marketing or database marketing is one of the strongest tools in the author’s tool belt and deserves a prominent position in the author’s marketing strategy. Successful business owners in today’s “Internet economy,” both online and offline, all have one common element that is critical to their success their DATABASE! Database Marketing is without a doubt the #1 common element to successful selling. We have included a chapter devoted to developing, growing and utilizing the author’s e-mail database.
3) Finally, SELL your book/books, and or additional products and services. In short, make money.
Recommended Components of the Author’s Homepage
Header: The header is simply a jpeg image and tag line running across the top of your homepage. Basic marketing principles teach us that repetition is the key. Consumers seldom purchase the first time that they are exposed to a new product. It is important to stay consistent with images, tagline, logo, slogan, etc. throughout the online marketing campaign.
Video: Google loves a YouTube video, in fact they love YouTube so much they bought the company. It is not uncommon to see a well optimized video ranking higher on the search engines than the parent website. A website featuring video holds the reader’s attention longer and quite often video converts better then text. Give the video a great headline which shows a benefit if appropriate. Be sure to include your keywords in the description and tags as well as links back to your website. With 80 to 90 million visits a day YouTube is by far the largest video directory on the Internet, but isn't the only game in town. You can submit the same video to multiple video directories and have it appear to the search engines as original content simply by changing the description and tags with each submission. The professionals use software that automates the submission to all of the major video directories. Our favorite is a program called Traffic Geyser. However, unless you're publishing a lot of video this software avenue at $1,200 a year will not be cost effective. Once the video is embedded on your website or YouTube, you can easily outsource the low risk task of publication to the major video directories for five dollars. Fiverr.com is an ideal source for this low risk task. We will go into detail on outsourcing and working with freelancers later in the book.
Opt-in: to convert your website visitors to leads, you will have to provide a benefit in exchange for that website visitor’s e-mail address. This can be as simple as, “Sign up to my e-mail list and stay up to date.” Or, “Get your free report, video, excerpt, training, short story, or a sweepstakes,” but be careful of your wording here (more about that later). The higher the perceived value, the more visitors will convert to leads by completing your opt-in form, or joining your email list. One of the primary goals for your website should be to capture contact information.
Other suggestions:
1) A section featuring the book, consisting of a clickable visual image and some text that links to the books info page on your website or to the product page on one of the online book sellers sites.
2) A short biography and image linked to your about me page.
3) In the bottom right-hand corner should be buttons to your social profiles on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. A contact button and finally a button to your RSS feed.
4) One of the advantages of using a WordPress platform is that you can blog from it. The blog portion of the site can accomplish a lot. Amazon allows the author’s blog to be included on their author profile page. The WordPress dash board makes it simple to add additional keyword stuffed content to your website without a webmaster on the clock.
Additional information that should be included on the website would be book cover, title, publisher, ISBN, description, excerpts, reviews, contact information, links to purchase and a press or media tab.
Website Press Kit or Media Kit
Your media kit should be included on your website under its own press or media tab. This will eliminate time consuming e-mails and help with quality control. Note: There is nothing worse than a careless webmaster cutting and pasting a poor quality image of your book cover from the Internet.
Suggested items and/or information for your media kit would include:
1) The title, publisher, author and ISBN at the bottom of every page. The ISBN number should be big and bold. Your goal here is to make it drop dead easy for webmasters to add your book to their catalogs, product pages and or widgets. This is all accomplished with the 10 or 13 digit ISBN number. Your goal should be to make it as easy as possible for on line booksellers to sell your book and earn their modest commissions.
2) An author bio.
3) The book summary.
4) Reviews, endorsements and testimonials.
5) A list of previous press coverage.
6) Interview questions and answers.
7) Images, at minimum, would include book cover and author pics.
8) Video would include book trailer and author interview. The documents should be set up as individual PDF files.
Chapter Three
Domains, Etc.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg knows a little about domain names. Zuckerberg’s original predecessor to Facebook was a short lived site with the domain name Facemash.com which launched in October 2003. Four months later in February 2004, Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook.com, followed by the purchase of the domain name Facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000. In October 2010, Facebook purchased the domain name FB.com from the American Farm Bureau Federation for $8.5 million.
The original domain name Facemash.com, Zuckerberg allowed to expire. A sharp Internet marketer snatched up the domain name for just the registration fee and sold it on the website auction site Flippa.com for $35,000 shortly after the Facebook movie, “The Social Network”, was released.
Spend some time selecting a domain name. What is the brand that you want to promote? What keyword will Internet surfers use to discover your website? If you plan on only one title, the domain name should be the title of your book, but if the book sells a product or a program, the product or the program should be the domain name. If you are a nonfiction writer covering one topic then by all means the domain name could be topic driven an example would be weight loss. In almost all other cases the domain name should be the author's name. You should also take into consideration competition for your name. If your name is Barrack Obama, number one, we feel sorry for you, and number two, you will never get your name to rank on the first page of any major search engine unless you either spend a fortune on a long term search engine’s optimization program or figure out a way to become more newsworthy than that other Obama character.
We recommend WordPress as your publishing platform. WordPress is extremely user-friendly and highly scalable. In June 2010, Google rolled out their new web indexing system, or algorithm, “Caffeine”. Caffeine introduced a new term and a new component (activity) to Google's algorithm. Activity simply measures visitors and length of visits, along with how fast and consistent a website is growing. It makes sense that if two sites have approximately the same amount of relevant content, that the more active site would rank higher in the search results. By utilizing the built in blog feature of WorkPress it makes it simple to satisfy the “activity component” of the Caffeine algorithm.
Along with millions of bloggers, big companies like GM, UPS and Best Buy all run off a WordPress platform; in fact 55% of the top 1 million websites are WordPress. WordPress is an open source meaning you will never have to pay a licensing fee. There are, literally, thousands of WordPress templates (themes) available on the Internet matching any budget. WordPress started as an open source blogging platform and has evolved into the most user-friendly content management system available today.
On site search engine optimization is a piece of cake on WordPress sites thanks to simple and often free software called plug-ins, made specifically for WordPress.
Recommended WordPress Plug-Ins
All in One SEO Pack : This will optimize your Word-Press website for the search engines. It automatically optimizes titles for search engines, generates metatags, and avoids duplicate content quite often found on WordPress blogs and sites. Best of all it works right out of the box with no set up other than a simple installation.
Google XML Sitemaps: This plug-in generates a XML site map which will ensure that the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing index every page of your website. The site map makes it easier for spiders (see the glossary) to see and crawl over the entire site. In addition this plug-in will notify the major search engines every time there is a change and/or addition to the site. This is what is known in the industry as a ping.
SEO No Duplicate: This simple plug-in helps to eliminate the duplicate content issue caused by using or not using WWW in the sites address. The term for this is canonical.
Target Blank in Post of and Comments: This is designed to keep visitors on your website by opening a new window if the visitor clicks an external link from your website. This means that the visitor will not have to hit the back button to return to your site.
Automatic SEO Links: This eliminates the chore of manually linking. Simply pick a keyword and URL and this plug-in will replace the matches.
SEO Smart Links: This provides sealed benefits to your site by automatically linking keywords and keyword phrases in your post in comments with corresponding categories, posts and tags. The SEO Smart links also allows you to set up your own keywords.
SEO Friendly Images: These automatically add alt tags and title attributes to images. Which is an important element of search engine optimization.
cbnet Ping Optimizer: This will prevent your WordPress installation from pinging the search engines too many times. Normally, any change will ping the search engines. This tool prevents simple things such as post edits, or modifying an unimportant element, from pinging the search engines.
WP Super Cache: This is not needed on every site, but can help if your site loads slowly for whatever reason.
Google Analyticator: This can easily add Google Analytics to your WordPress site.
If you are techie by all means do your due diligence and build the site yourself; there are literally thousands of free tutorials on the Internet. If not the site can be easily outsourced.
Chapter Four
Facebook & Social Sites
Just a couple of quick comments about the power of etiquette on social sites: if you get a “friend” request on Facebook, or make a “friend” request, or a “I’d like you to join my network,” on LinkedIn, or any other social site, responding is not only good etiquette, but it’s good business. When you respond on Facebook with a “yes,” to friendship, it’s one thing, but when you respond with a comment on their page, such as “Thanks for the Facebook friendship,” then your link or profile picture appears on their page (if they have fairly open privacy settings). That profile picture is a hyperlink back to your Facebook page, where you, hopefully, have some casual comments and pics of that book you want to sell, as well as a link to a buy site. That link then will be seen by your new friend’s friends, so good etiquette is more than merely that, it’s good business, and always has been…good exposure for your product.
Facebook is more than just a great place to spy on your kids, stalk an ex or find your next ex. With over 650 million active subscribers, a presence on Facebook, and using a Facebook Fan Page, is mandatory.
To put the size of Facebook into perspective, the US population is only somewhat over 300 million. If Facebook were a nation it would rank third in the world behind China and India. Facebook's traffic runs neck and neck with Google. Facebook is also considered the third largest US based Internet company behind Google and Amazon.
The typical Facebook subscriber has 130 friends and is connected to 80 groups, pages or events. The fastest growing segment of subscribers is female between the ages of 55 and 65. Sixty-eight percent of Facebook Fans indicate they are very likely to recommend a product. A Facebook Fan Page can be an outstanding platform for your brand, allowing you to develop and maintain a dialogue with people who have publicly expressed an interest in you, your work, or brand.
Facebook users can "like" and the “like” is the engine driving the viral aspects of Facebook, since the posts and pages a fan “likes” shows up on their personal Facebook wall and on the news feed of their friends as well.
So Why Facebook Fan Pages?
There have been some estimates that a Facebook Fan is worth in excess of $100 (many think much, much more), but there are many other reasons you need to create a fan page for your brand or website.
1) Driving Facebook ad traffic to a fan page is much cheaper (even if only measured in time, as time is money), about 50% cheaper than driving traffic to a website.
2) It’s a great way to demonstrate social acceptance, and to accrue a loyal and engaged following.
3) Facebook Fan Pages are viral marketing at its best. Every time someone “likes” your fan page or a post on your fan page, it is posted on their personal Facebook wall as well as the news feeds their friends.
4) You are building an asset and adding another way you can interact with your readers, subscribers, customers, prospects and fans, by allowing you an easy way to keep the conversation targeted and the buzz going.
5) By using the Facebook Events function you can easily send announcements to your entire Facebook fan base. The create an event function allows you to create and publish the equivalent of a free ad on all of your fans individual walls.
6) With the new addition of IFrames. The new Facebook fan page is almost fully customizable, thus kicking open the door to creative marketing campaigns and tactics.
7) Your personal Facebook account is limited to 5,000 friends, however the fan page is unlimited. Lady Gaga has 3,186,934 fans.
Creating a Fan Page
1) To create your Facebook Fan Page, login to your personal Facebook page, scroll down to the bottom of your home page, and click on “Create a Page”.
2) To create your new Facebook Fan Page for authors, click on “Artist, Band or Public Figure” If you are not an author or want to promote a brand or company, simply click on the appropriate category.
3) Open the “Choose a category” box, scroll down to and click on author. Type your name into the name box, bearing in mind this title should be consistent with the brand you are developing and will be used with all of your interaction on Facebook.
4) Next, agree to the “Facebook Pages Terms”, click on “Get Started” and you will land on the new page.
5) Finally, you need to edit the info page and publish your page so the public can see it. Facebook does a good job walking you through the final edit of your Fan Page.
Once you get 25 friends you can and should obtain a custom Facebook URL. This has branding benefits as well as can help the SEO of your fan page. And yes, the search engines rank Facebook fan pages.
Facebook allows individuals with personal Facebook pages to be much more aggressive in populating their page. A common tactic utilized to populate a fan page (and a blatant violation of Facebook’s Terms of Service), is to set up multiple fake personal pages as it is much easier to populate a personal page then a fan page. To migrate friends from a personal Facebook page to your fan page, post a non commercial article on your fan page then post a link to this post in a status update on your personal page. Then fans will go there to see the useful article. Most of the friends that follow your link will also “like” your fan page as well. Repeat this process every 2 or 3 days with different articles or posts and don't abuse posting.
Normally, a story about this activity can be generated on their friends’ News Feeds, which their friends may or may not see due to the dynamic nature of News Feed.
The New Facebook
It’s no secret that Facebook management is focused on unseating Google as the dominate Internet resource. We’ll bet money, marbles, or caulk, that within the next 12 months Facebook will announce a search feature designed to take on the big three, Google, Yahoo and Bing. E-commerce is slowly taking hold as well, and by the 2011 Christmas season self-contained e-stores will be common on Facebook.
On Feb 10, 2011, Facebook announced the new refurbished layout of Facebook pages designed to improve the user experience, while concurrently offering more design and innovative features for the online marketer.
Functional Changes
You can now access the admin-tasks with a single click which is one of our favorite changes. It is no longer necessary to search for the “Edit page” link, which to us was a long and tedious process. You can now easily access the admin-tasks by selecting the “See All” link located in the right-hand column of the Admin section. It is also much easier to edit basic information by choosing the “Edit Info” link located in the top right-hand corner of the page. The “Edit Info” link also allows you to change a pages category by selecting Category from the drop-down menu on the edit screen.
The old fan count located on the left-hand navigation column was a cluttered mess with fan pictures. Facebook has cleaned it up by eliminating fan pictures and it now displays a total number of fans without the individual pictures. To delete a fan or fans click on “People Like This”, located directly below the fan total. A box will open displaying all of your fans with names and pictures. Click the X on any fan you would like to remove. This is also the place to add additional administrators.
The old Facebook format included a brief page description as well as an information box. Both have been eliminated in the new format. Fans and visitors must now choose the “Info” link located in the left-hand navigation column, to find more information about the fan page.
"View Insights and Suggest to Friends" and “friends like this” have moved to the right column, below the Admins section.
All of the changes in the new revamped user-interface were made to reduce clutter and confusion.
The New Header, an Opportunity for Creative Users
The new fan page header now includes 5 images, called a “photo strip”. When an image on the photo strip is clicked, it now expands to full size and retains the user on the fan page, rather than transferring them to a dedicated photos page.
The “Photostrip” feature delivers obvious visual branding benefits; however there is not an option to set the photos in a predetermined rotation. Each time the page is loaded it spits out a different, re-shuffled set of images on the photo strip.
Your Personal Profile and Your Fan Page
One of the coolest features in the new Facebook format is the ability to toggle between the identities of the fan page and the personal page. Click on the “Account” link located in the top right-hand corner and select the page or identity that you want to use. There is also a shortcut located directly below the “Admins” section on the right-hand column that will allow you to toggle between personal identity and fan page identity.
Utilizing your fan page identity allows you the opportunity to comment on other pages as your brand quietly solicits new fans to your fan page. The downside is that any competitors that you have “liked” as your fan page, will also have unlimited opportunities to comment, post and solicit on your fan page, as well. It is only a matter of time until the spammers figure out and utilize this new feature, which will force Facebook to crackdown on the abusers. Facebook’s typical crackdown consists of banning or deleting accounts. In fact, Facebook recently reported that they delete over ten thousand pages daily.
This is a great new feature; use it, just don’t abuse it. There is nothing worse than losing an active and growing fan page, and you have no warning or recourse with Facebook. If they delete your page, no amount of groveling emails will convince Facebook to reactivate your page or pages.
What Happened to the Tabs?
The old Facebook interface featured tabs which made navigation on a fan page simple and allowed brands to clearly identify all of the options available to the fans on the fan page. Facebook has removed the tabs and replaced them with a list of pages located in the left-hand column, below the profile picture. The loss of tabs is the biggest loss in the new Facebook layout. We would not be surprised to see Facebook reactivate the navigation friendly tab feature
Email Alerts for Posts and Comments on Facebook Pages
There’s another new feature: administrators now have the option to receive an email alerting them each time a comment is made on their page. The email is automatically sent to the email address associated with the Facebook account.
An Introduction to the New iFrame Application
Facebook's old static FBML (Facebook Markup Language) application offered the ability to develop custom tabs with help of Javascript, FBML, CSS and HTML. Many of the top brands and marketers used static FBML for promoting themselves.
Now with the introduction of the much more flexible iFrames, developers can easily create dynamic web applications and integrate with Facebook by registering them as a Canvas app that the end user can embed on custom pages through the iFrame application. Custom built iFrame Facebook applications will soon flood the market and become cost effective for the most serious brands and marketers.
iFrames also allow the admin to recognize individual users, track their source IP address and to generate a personalized response to suit their interests.
The new feature improvements, flexibility and cleaner layout are generally considered an improvement over the old Facebook layout.
Using Facebook
The important news for Facebook marketers is that brands might not need to try and pull people away from Facebook in order to introduce them to their website. There are numerous options available to accomplish the branding and sales goals for most marketers inside the new Facebook.
The revamped Facebook Pages are definitely useful for brands which have strived hard to use pages on social networks as a business marketing tool.
Photos can easily be tagged and will be automatically displayed in the photo strip located in the header at the top your fan page. You should upload images which are relevant to you and your brand, to create and convey a clear visual message to your fans and visitors.
Take advantage of the option to post as your brand.
Cross posting across multiple business partners and contacts is an easy way to promote your brand and yourself and expand your fan base. However avoid posting your brand on direct competitors who might consider your posts spam and delete you from their friends list and/or report you to Facebook for spamming their page.
Tips and Guidelines for Facebook marketing
1) Stager your posts throughout the day to avoid being buried in your fans’ news feeds.
2) Thursday's have the highest traffic. Save your best content to be published on Thursdays.
3) Do not use URL shorteners on Facebook. Full links are 300% more likely to be read on Facebook. Note: This is the exact opposite of Twitter.
4) Release major news early in the morning to avoid being buried in the news feed on your fans walls.
5) Size does matter – use a big profile picture; take a look at Oprah’s:
http://www.Facebook.com/home.php#!/oprahwinfrey.
Facebook will accept images of up to 200 pix wide and 600 pix Tall.
6) Mix photos and video in with your posts, making your posts stand out on your fans’ news feeds.
7) Use open questions, polls or quizzes to engage your fans and encourage comments and “likes”.
8) Reward your fans with exclusive content or content perceived to be exclusive. Such as an excerpt, interview or video.
9) Be creative.
10) Be like Coke – no brand has mastered Facebook as well as Coca-Cola. By occasionally visiting Cokes fan page you will be exposed to the latest marketing features available on Facebook and may pick up some ideas to incorporate into your own fanpage.
11) Get friends and family involved – before you start promoting your fan page, make sure you have a core group of fans and encourage them to participate in conversations helping to jump-start your fan page.
Populating the Fan Page
The first place to recruit fans to your new fan page is within your existing fan base, i.e. friends, family and contacts. This can easily be accomplished through email. Consider incorporating a link to your fan page in your email signature which will be included in all of your correspondence. Links to all of your social networks should be included on your website.
Software like Facebook Bomber is available to help populate personal pages; however, there is risk involved and it’s generally not worthwhile to the novice marketer.
Stay active on Facebook not only on your personal and fan pages but within relevant pages and groups.
Be wary of “Add Me” groups, there are literally thousands of “Add Me” groups on Facebook. The quality of the fan generated through the add me groups will be poor. Unless you are selling porn or a Farmville guide, the poor quality of fans generated through these groups makes the time investment a losing proposition.
Finally, the old fashioned way, buy them. Contests or sweepstakes, surveys and Facebook ads all bring in good targeted fans interested in your little niche. There are also venders selling fans and a Google search or a search through the Internet marketing forums will give you plenty of options. Please take note that these will, again, be poor quality. Also avoid any vendors requesting that you add them as an admin.
Twitter is another tool in today’s social, marketing and advertising world. Started in March 2006, Twitter was originally designed to allow a group of friends to communicate by text messaging. Twitter is outstanding for quick updates, the downside is the reader usually needs to click outside of Twitter to get the full story. Twitter is a simple and easy-to-use social networking platform, composed of tweets (the most influential feature of twitter used in the same way as a Facebook status message), followers (people who have “befriended” your feed), and your follows (people whom you follow the feeds of). Twitter also features a retweet (or “share”) feature, direct messaging, and tagging of other twitter users. By following fellow twitter users, you can stay up to date on a certain person, product, or business. By having a twitter account, you can allow interested fans, customers, and future clientele to follow your activities from day to day.
The first step in accessing the fruitful traffic that twitter boasts, is signing up. To do so, simply visit www.twitter.com, and fill in the convenient “sign up now” form located on the homepage. If you already have a Twitter profile, I urge you to take 5 minutes and make sure you have your profile optimized.
A correctly optimized profile is mandatory for growing a following and driving traffic.
Once you have signed up, and have validated the activation email, you are ready to go! Fill in your personal information, upload a picture, and get your profile ready for other Twitter users to view! Also, do not forget to place your keywords within your profile information- twitter profiles are picked up by major search engines, thus you can get your profile indexed. Raising awareness and presence of yourself and your business is always important, so getting your twitter profile indexed by search engines for your keyword can be a major benefit to your website.
The following are general guidelines for an optimized Twitter profile:
1) Always separate first and last names.
Example: John Smith instead of johnsmith.
2) Don’t skimp on the BIO. Your Bio is your first impression and sales letter rolled into one. Use the first few sentences to highlight yourself, background, credentials, accolades and accomplishments, followed by a few sentences about your book, brand, program or product.
3) Add a link to your website on your profile.
4) Turn off updates. Twitter gives you the opportunity to be notified by text or email if you haven’t updated in 24 hours and when you receive a new message and when you receive a new follower. And believe me no one needs a couple hundred additional daily emails.
5) Stay consistent with your image. Remember you are establishing a brand and a big part of that is to stay consistent with all images that will be repeatedly utilized throughout your promotion.
6) After you hit 2,000 followers Twitter will limit your account to a maximum of ten percent more following then followers. In other words if you have 2,000 followers the maximum you could follow would be 2,200. The easy way to overcome this limit is to un-follow those that are not following you. There is software to help automate this task. Hummingbird is the most popular and has a price tag of $197.
Once you have personalized your profile and you are ready to begin utilizing Twitter, you must learn the basics of tweeting. If you are accustomed to Facebook, Twitter’s “Tweet” is nearly identical to Facebook’s “Status Update”. One alternative benefit of a tweet is its option to “Add Your Location” to your individual tweets. You can tag users, add URLS, and talk about different promotions and news in your tweets. Hashtags are also an important aspect of twitter- use the pound (#) sign before any important word within your tweets. Be sure to use URL shorteners (such as bit.ly) to save much needed character room in tweets. This allows for plenty of room for your tweet to be re-tweeted by other interested users to their followers. Be sure to use your most important keywords in your tweets!
Now that you know how to tweet, it is time to learn how to optimize a tweet. ‘Optimizing a tweet’ means you make it more attractive to your followers and you encourage them to do what you are asking within the tweet (whether it be a coupon offer for a product to encourage them to buy it, viewing a hot new webpage that you have suggested, or sharing some interesting news). Offer fresh and interesting content, free snippets of a new book’s first chapter, informational content, and some humor. Humor is the spice of life, and will add spice to your tweets as well. Don’t forget to offer special deals to your followers: This will, in the long run, give you loyal followers and new followers.
Now you’re a master tweeter! It’s time to move on to gaining followers and following those you decide to follow. Twitter’s follow platform is a revolutionary tool in social media, and allows tweeters to follow the people or businesses to whom they are interested. All you have to do is find businesses or people that interest you or that may have an interest in you or what you have to offer. You then follow them. Some people will follow you back, if they are interested in what you have to say. So be sure that your twitter profile lures them in and encourages them to follow you back! Gaining followers isn’t exactly easy, however. It takes some effort, but once you put in a little work, you can easily reap the benefits of your followers later.
Now we will discuss the different methods of gaining followers. We will start with the cheapest and organic method of gaining followers. As in Facebook, twitter has an option to invite your friends and contacts from other social networks and email servers. It can directly link with your email account and social networking accounts to send them an invite in many different ways. They may be emailed, or even have the invite posted onto their wall on Facebook. Once you have invited all of your friends and contacts, you will begin to see them joining twitter, or if they have previously opened an account they will begin to follow you. To increase your followers organically, word of mouth is the best tool. Ask your friends and clients to tell their friends about your twitter profile, and to follow you. Once you have amassed those followers, you can also begin to spread your specialized twitter URL amongst forums, groups, and other web communities within your niche, asking them to follow you. Always follow back! This is a courteous reaction to new followers, and it shows them that you are interested in them too and that they are not JUST another follower.
However, if the previously discussed method of gaining followers is too time-consuming or painstaking for you, there are many sites where you can buy followers, or buy re-tweets from people who have massive amounts of followers. Of course this will cost you some money, but you are outsourcing the painstaking work to others. Many good sites to buy followers can be found simply by searching Google or Yahoo. You can also find cheaper deals on the Internet marketing forums. Be sure to inquire about the quality and origin of the followers as you generally want to obtain followers from your country of residence.
One other, yet more dangerous, way to gain followers involves automated software. Software for this use is frowned upon by twitter, and one must exercise extreme caution while using these programs. Just be sure to review each program’s instructions, and keep a close eye on the best practices involving the use of software. They are not typically used by every day twitter users; their purpose is to obtain mass amounts of followers, usually across multiple accounts. One example of auto-follow twitter software includes Tweet Attacks. If you properly educate yourself on how to use these programs, they CAN be used to your benefit. However, we will not discuss the different dangers, as they are ever changing and vary with different software…it would take a whole book to discuss these. The most important lesson to remember is protecting your twitter account. Suspicious activity can get your account deactivated by twitter.
Don’t miss LinkedIn and it’s 100,000,000 members (growing a member a second) as an additional social networking platform. LinkedIn Alexas ranking is number 17, just below Amazon while ahead of Bing and eBay. LinkedIn is the business professional’s social platform. This social media platform revolves around employers, businesses, entrepreneurs, professionals, and employees. It helps connect professionals, and is a great social media addition to most brands!
With this platform, you can generate leads, sell products or services, find investors, gain web traffic and PR (Page Rank), find reliable employees, and expand your network.
To begin, you must first go to www.LinkedIn.com and sign up. Once you have your account activated, begin to personalize and optimize your profile page. Add important keywords to your profile, and use them as often as possible. LinkedIn has a widget on the profile page that will tell you the percentage of completion you have reached with your profile. Take the time to make sure your LinkedIn profile is 100% complete.