Facebook Marketing

Niche

What is your unique proposition for your customer? To stand out from the crowd it must be loud. You must have a guarantee that stands out and grabs their attention.  There are millions of products and services on the net you must stand out by action and deed.

Facebook Biz page

Having a business page programmed will make you stand above the pack. The present method is to use FaceBook Markup Language (FBML) to create your facebook business page however this approach is only temporary. FMBL can be used and will be grandfathered into the new system coming this fall or next year. The capabilities of the new system has been rumored to have the ability to sell from your facebook business account. IF so this could present a brand new opportunity for sales.

Marketing to followers

Followers are the key to any online effort. Content must be valuable enough for them to visit.  Just marketing products to them will get you ignored. Consistant direction must be maintained. If your site about Iphone applications suddenly changes to being golf centric your followers abandon you in droves. Adaptability is also key. If one segment of your site gets a  lot more attention than others consider using that subject more often.

Related articles

• How you Can Use Static FBML Language to Customize your Facebook Page and Drive More Leads (cash-bandit.com)
• Facebook Starting To Leave FBML behind(marketingconversation.com)
• How to customize your Facebook page(publishingtalk.eu)
• ‘The Social Network’: A Reminder to Create Value(techaffect.com)
• Facebook Marketing(seomoves.org)

Sun Tzu Marketing Art starts from a simple premise.

If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be in peril.
Sun Tzu

If you don’t know who and how your opposition is positioning their web site keywords you are in peril. If you are not sure what keywords your site is made for you are in peril. Adjustments can happen only if you have intelligence of your  competition.

It is only the enlightened ruler and the wise general who will use the highest intelligence of the army for the purposes of spying, and thereby they achieve great results.
Sun Tzu

The enlightened web marketer will use tools like www.spyfoo.com to spy on their competition. Understand what keywords they want to control. If they are weak take control if they are strong attack where they are not strong  use a different set of keywords throughout your marketing.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
Sun Tzu

By the time they know you are competing the enlightened marketer will have seized control. Take control where there is little opposition.  

To see victory only when it is within the ken of the common herd is not the acme of excellence.
Sun Tzu

Following the accepted path is not enough. Excellence can only be achieved by expanding into new realms (social networks!) where your competition is not watching.

Summation:

1. Know what you want to control
2. Know what needs taken and what can be acquired without opposition
3. Spy on your opposition. Use their information to choose where and how to attack
4. Be like water and flow around your competitors.
5. Compete where there is little competition. Better to be on page 1 for a seldom used keyword than on page 5 of the most popular keyword.

Sun Tzu Marketing Art can be applied to any marketing campaign.

There is an ongoing war on the Internet. You don’t hear about it because the only causalities are web site ratings and wasted money.

Imagine what could you do knowing what keywords your competition was using and how much money they are spending for ads. Try http://www.spyfoo.com/  and look at www.navypier.com. It shows they spent lots of money on Pay Per Click in June of 2009 but since then their outlay for PPC has dropped immensely. They paid for keyword coverage on an event basis. That focus allowed them to pull in readers even when they had very little to do with the event. Keep that in mind drawing readers to  your site with a special page devoted to a  local event could yield a nice advantage. They also report on the value of the organic traffic. Organic traffic is earned by having the right keywords and content to  draw visitors without paying for it. They have a great organic value of $691.99 – $2.08k per day!Consider using spyfoo to track how your competitors are positioning themselves on the net. Notice what they do and don’t adapt to.  Take advantage of any opportunity it shows. Either try to take away the keyword by making your page more powerful for that keyword or go in a completely different direction. The best method might be to use an auxiliary event to add for rather than the main event.Spy vs. Spy I spy on your website and then change mine.  Spy on your competitors they are spying on you!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Big words wrapped around making your web site more visible to the search engines. Even if you have the best web site and product online unless the search engines can find you it won’t do any good.

Tuning your site to match let the right audience find your site on line is an art. The name of your web site, company name and meta keywords you place are what the search engines see. There are two levels of visibility in the site to consider. One that the customer sees and the other that the search engine sees.  Both have to properly aligned to make it work. There are special tools to see those hidden data segments in the web site that allow adjustments of the meta data.

Search engines can’t read flash displays so although it looks pretty to the consumers to search engines it doesn’t exist. If you hire a graphic artist to create your site you might end up with this issue. The site that makes you drool over how it presented but if doesn’t create traffic it is a waste of your time and money. Nothing against the graphic artists by the way it’s just that they consider how the site looks to be their goal and the SEO focus may not seem important.

Programming to control your site in JavaScript is a common practice but the search engines can’t look into that code so any text you output from there will be ignored.

The organization of your site counts too. The name of your file structure can also influence your rankings.  Using the right keywords for each page with the right title for each page makes a big difference. You do know that search engines don’t rate an entire site they rate each page of the site.

WordPress straight out of the box starts up with a 48% rating with http://www.websitegrader.com. The organization of the site and the fact it includes a blog automatically gives the site a better rating. The website grader is a free site. Take a look at your site using that lens and see what is really happening with your site.

If it has problems give me a call. Mysteries of SEO can be explained and your site can be improved.

Lots and lots more data on search engine optimization. I’ll cover more in future blogs.

http://riseteck.com

rogerrichardson@riseteck.com

Branding

Creating your brand online requires a concentrated effort to control all of the web site names as well as the same social network ID’s. The selection of the site name ,business name and social network ID should be consistent for best results.  Lots of things need to be right.

Company Branding

Your company name needs researched first. It should be wrapped around the product or service you plan to sell. Dealing with a single state most of the time the name can be researched online. Be prepared to gather alternates as you go. Better to have 4 or 5 available names to work with for the next steps. 

Domain Branding

    Then research the domain names. Not just .com includes .net, .biz, .fm, .am, .info, .co, .ca, .me, .ws  and .tv in the mix. If you plan to deal in the Asian market consider checking out an .Asia account. While you might not be able to use all of these initially consider how much a scalper could charge you to acquire these domains after you get big. Again play with alternatives but realize that having the proper alignment of the company name with the product you intend to sell is crucial. You could also get fancy and do research on how valuable the keywords in the name are. If they represent an area with little online competition it could make getting traffic much easier to your web site.

Social Network Branding

 Social network identification needs researched next. Considering all of the free visibility that can be done there imagine what happens if you don’t control your company’s name. There are tools like www.namechk.com to find out if your chosen social network name is available.

During this process hitting a blockage by any area could derail your entire effort. Then it’s back to the first step and through the process with a new business name. Best results well be done by getting all of the research done right up front. It takes a lot of effort to get the everything to fall in place right  but it’s worth the effort. Consider how easily a competitor could get one of your un-owned domain names and siphon off your customers.

Branding won’t wait

Once a full research turns up good do not wait grab control of your name throughout the internet immediately. One fellow I am working with had a business name selected and when back two hours later and it was claimed. Be decisive and make it happen ASAP when things line up. 

Proper internet branding puts you in charge of your future.