Why I Created A Facebook Fan Page
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Apr 19, 2010
 |
After over a year of thinking about it, I finally created my first Facebook fan page. Actually, officially Facebook has moved away from the term “fan” and just calls is a Facebook page. I like that also because thinking about having people become “fans” of mine, rather asking them to do it, just seemed so narcissistic; definitely not normally my style. Anyway, it’s under the name of my business site, so if you’re on Facebook and would like to take a look, check out T. T. Mitchell Consulting, Inc, which is my main business name.
Why did I create this page? After all, I’ve had to think about it for so long that you’d think anything I had to basically convince myself to do that I probably would walk away from it. That’s my normal pattern, for sure.
Truthfully, it was an impulse decision. There was some research and thought over all this time, and the truth is that I’m now looking to push all aspects of my business just a bit further than I already have. After all, with my SEO Xcellence site, where I market myself as an internet marketing consultant for small businesses, I talk about helping businesses find ways to maximize their online presence. Turns out that, for SEO purposes, creating a page to link to your business is more effective than creating a group page. I don’t know why, but there’s some history out there, so it makes some sense. Kind of like some folks and Squidoo pages.
However, Squidoo just doesn’t work for me personally; can’t really say why. I wasn’t sure Facebook would work for me either, but I have more than 300 friends there, or do I believe, and that’s more than I would have on Squidoo.
I also know you’re probably remembering what I had to say about Facebook group pages, but since the focus is much different, and what I’ll be doing is much different, I don’t really need participation on that page as much as people just seeing what’s going on with me.
What do you do? You go to a page like this, where it tells you what you’ll be getting, kind of, and then there’s a link that says “create a page.” You click that, and follow the instructions, which is to answer a few questions, and you’re on your way.
Okay, that’s not quite it. I wasn’t sure what to do with my page once it was first created because unlike a group, you can’t just start writing all sorts of stuff in free form. Groups aren’t supposed to be for advertising purposes anyway, and since pages are, they’re trying to keep you in some kind of format. What did I do? I contacted one of my friends, Shirley Frazier of Solo Business Marketing, for some assistance.
Basically, what she said was to add all my business and product links to the page so people would know what to follow and look at if they came to the page. Also, you can write something on your wall, and I also wrote a message in the discussion area. I’ve told people they can write comments, ask questions in the discussion area, and I’ll answer whatever I can. I added all my business links, which consisted of three websites and 3 blogs. I have other sites, but I’m not considering any of those business related, per se, so I won’t be adding those. I added a link to my newsletter page and my books and CD, and samples of my articles.
Then, instead of doing a blast out to all my friends, which just didn’t feel right for me to do, I wrote on my status wall that I’d created it and asked people to take a look. Yeah, I know, I get tons of page suggestions all the time, but I just didn’t want to do that back to anyone. My friend Kelvin says I’m not thinking like a business marketer, since I am talking about my business, and he’s probably right, but so be it. I’m writing about it here, I put it on Twitter, and I’ll put it on LinkedIn, and I think that’ll be enough.
Anyway, I hope you check it out, if you’re on Facebook; thanks.
9 Instant Tips On How To Leverage The Power Of Squidoo – Guest Post
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 19, 2008
Today we have a special guest post from Jerry Low of Web Hosting Secrets Revealed. The basic thrust of his business is reviewing web hosting companies, and man, do they need reviewing! One of his major reviews was for a site called Lunarpages, which you should check out. I don’t know a lot about Squidoo (although I know John Dilbeck does), so this should be a very informative post for everyone.
It is no secret that many web marketers are now leveraging Squidoo as one of their marketing tools online. If you have no idea what ‘Squidoo’ is, you are losing a lot of opportunities in pulling web traffics for free.
So what is Squidoo?
Squidoo is not an Asian dish, nor a new cocktail, nor a sea creature (though their mascot looks like one). Launched in October 2005 by Seth Godin, Squidoo, in their own definition, is a website manufactured to make web content publishing free and simple.
Getting started with Squidoo
Squidoo is a web portal of user-generated lenses (single webpages) that highlight one person’s point of view, expertise, as well as recommendations. Getting started with Squidoo is easy – all you need to is to create a Squidoo account and start creating lens. Users who create and maintain these lenses are known as lensmasters.
To be user friendly for the non techies, Squidoo provides tons of handy tools so that web content publishing is ultra simple for all. The Web 2.0 portal also leverages other website services smartly. A single lens could contains written words by lensmaster, web gallery of Flickr photos, Google Maps, eBay auctions, YouTube videos, RSS from related blogs, NetFlix movies, as well as series of interactive features like polls and discussion boards.
Why Squidoo is a must have in your marketing plan?
Squidoo offers valuable marketing potential to millions. Everyday, millions of web publishers, readers, web surfers, and shoppers hang around Squidoo – sharing, communicating, interacting, shopping, and writing. By joining Squidoo, you get the chance (for free!) to build network and sell to millions.
If that is not enough to explain why Squidoo is such essential in your web marketing plan, check out these numbers: Squidoo, at the time of writing, has more than 700,000 hand built pages and had been reviewed by the New York Times, Mashable, as well as BoingBoing. More over they are one of the top 300 websites in U.S. and well recognized world wide, running a Google PR8 homepage, and guess what, the website along (excluding direct affiliate and ebay sales) generate hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to their users!
How Squidoo can be your best friend in web marketing?
So now you learned that web marketing Squidoo is advantageous and easy, how exactly can you benefits from the web portal? As stated in our article title, I am going to share a few tips on how you can leverage the power of Squidoo and win web marketing war:
1. Link Juice Power House – use Squidoo lenses to boost your websites Google PR.
2. Keyword Research – Squidoo provide comprehensive analytics tools, use that for long tail keyword research.
3. Community building – Meet people with the same interests or alike mind, join Squidoo groups and build your own fans base.
4. Sell your product directly – Squidoo allows affiliate links and provide direct eBay plugin, use that wisely and sell your products directly to millions of Squidoo users.
5. Find marketing partners – Don’t be surprise to meet other web marketers around Squidoo – they are all using Squidoo lenses to do web marketing. Take advantage on that and propose joint venture with other web marketers on Squidoo.
6. Better SEO quality – Can’t rank high with your websites? How about do it with Squidoo lenses! It’s no secret that Google tends to weight Squidoo lenses better in their SERP. Hence those with Squidoo lens stand higher chances in out-ranking their competitors on Google.
7. Draw free web traffics to your websites – Use Squidoo lenses as an entry point for your website and draw targeted visitors. There are various tools like ‘Big Arrow’ and ‘Black Box’ for those who are trying to market their website – use them!
8. Showcase your blogs – Publishing your blog entries via Squidoo RSS helps in many ways: one, your blogpost get link juice; two, with proper title writing it draws interested readers to read further – either ways increase your blog popularity and hopefully, profitability.
9. Get customer feedbacks and opinions – In the Web 2.0 era, gone are the days where your audience will just listen to you like a 5-year old kid. For continuous improvement, one can always use Squidoo features (like poll and discussion board) to collect comments and new ideas.
Bottom Line
Well, that’s 9 ways on how you can employ Squidoo in your web marketing strategy. A few points worth noting are that Squidoo is completely free. Also, lensmasters are enrolled in royalty payment where you can share the website’s profit for your own good or for charities (cool isn’t?).
Wrapping things up, I see there is nothing to lose for you to start Squidoo-ing. So why wait? Start a Squidoo lens today!
My thanks to Jerry for this great post. I hope you leave him lots of comments, and of course visit him at Web Hosting Secrets Revealed to learn more.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
I'm Just Sharing is where I share my thoughts on internet marketing, writing, blogging and many other things. You never know what I'll be posting on. So keep coming back, read, enjoy, and buy something! ;)
