A lot of businesses – big and small – are using Facebook to market their products and services, and it is quite understandable why. Facebook provides organization of all kinds with a unique platform to not only market their products, but also get more exposure and drive traffic to their blogs and websites (the latter is something that a lot of bloggers will particularly be interested in doing).

An essential part of being successful with a Facebook page is to get a large number of people to ‘like’ your page. Normally, this takes time, and/or a serious effort on your part, however here are a few tips that you can use to boost the number of likes on your Facebook page:

1. Content is king! Yes, that not only applies to your blog, it is equally applicable to your Facebook page as well! Share unique, interesting, informative, thought-provoking, and the best-possible content on Facebook, and it will tend to get a large amount of ‘likes’ as well as shares. When people share you updates on Facebook, it appears on their wall, and is put up on their newsfeed for their friends to see, maximizing your exposure and providing you with more fans. If your content is good, it may end up getting a large amount of likes and shares. My recommendation would be to use a combination of text and images.

2. Always interact with your fans. In my opinion, this is the golden rule for being successful on Facebook. The best (successful) pages on Facebook are those that promote interaction between the organization and its fans/followers (as well as among the fans and followers). Make sure that all contributors and publishers on your blog – or people in your organization, whichever’s applicable – spend a few minutes daily to speak with their Facebook fan, respond to questions, take part in the discussions, etc.

3. Network with other page owners. Once again, this is similar to networking and building strong relationships, as a blogger, with other bloggers. You should seek and look up Facebook page owners with pages related to, or similar as yours and try finding mutually-beneficial ways of promoting each other’s pages. For instance if you have a blog on tech, you might want to get in touch with other technology page-owners, to show an interest in sharing their posts on your page, and in return, ask them to do the same with yours.

4. Put the address of your Facebook page on all your products, services and any other places where your customers will be able to see it. After your page reaches a certain amount of likes (25, last time I checked), you can go into the admin panel of the page and create a custom URL (something like facebook.com/YourPageName). Put this up on all your products, services, business cards, advertisements, outlets, email signatures and any other place(s) where people will see it.

5. Add a Facebook Like Box on your blog as well as your website. You can get one for your blog here. Simply customize it – add the URL of your page and change the width, height, etc. (you’ll get a preview of the box in real-time), and add it to the sidebar of your blog. This gives you a lot of exposure, and whenever someone visits your blog/website, they’ll be able to easily go to your page in order to become a fan.

6. Promote your page through a contest. What kind of contest it is really depends on the kind of page it is. For instance a Facebook page for a photography blog could ask its fans to submit interesting photos through the page, and the best 3 entries get a prize (cash, the new Nikon lens, etc.). A computer tech page on my Facebook ran an interesting contest a few days back: all you had to do was to ‘like’ their page, and share one of their posts on your wall, and you would become eligible to win a gift worth $500! This gave them a large number of ‘likes’ and shares, instantly maximizing their exposure and bringing a lot of new fans on their page. PS. Remember that with a contest, the prize has to be valuable enough for the people in your niche.

7. Use your Facebook page! One of the best ways of getting the word out is to actually use your Facebook page like you would use your personal profile. Use the page to ‘like’ and comment on other pages’ walls, or on their updates. Make it a point to log into your page at least a couple of times every day, and comment on interesting stories in your new feed, participate in a conversation, and so on.

Source : http://succesful-internetmarketer.blogspot.com/2013/02/tips-and-ways-of-getting-more-likes-on.html

» Read More...

WHAT IS SOCIAL MARKETING?
People call it social marketing, web 2.0 or new age marketing but the fact of the matter is this – you need to be using the social marketing websites to your advantage because there’s tons of free traffic to be had from them.

The big names like MySpace, Facebook and the rest are not only dominating news stories now and people’s minds they are starting to play a really big part in driving traffic to marketers pages online. The problem though is this…

… social sites don’t like marketers! It’s true! So you have to be careful when you are using them that you don’t get banned or caught out. The key is to adopt this simple “5 H’s” approach;

Humor
 Honesty
 Have fun
 Help people

As long as you can inject a little piece of humor into your social marketing profile or even just a little piece of who you really are then you will start attracting lots of friends and widening your network.

You also need to maintain an honest approach throughout. No point uploading photos to your profile of P Diddy or Pamela Anderson pretending they’re. People want to get to know you so be honest.

Have fun! That’s one of the great things about social marketing is that you can have lots of fun doing it. Meeting new people, learning new stuff and making money from the traffic that you get from it all at the same time.

Also remember to help people. The more you can help people the more they will help you in return. So add useful links and recommendations to your profiles. Point people in the right direction and answer any questions people post on your profile or contact you with.

Source : http://succesful-internetmarketer.blogspot.com/2013/02/top-traffic-tips-using-free-social-sites.html

» Read More...

Blogger it's a very powerful platform to publish your blog. It's free and with some features which you can customize how you prefer, without limits.

In this post I want to illustrate some tips which can help you to improve your Blogger template to design a professional layout for your blog.


1. Start creating a custom template
A nice template is important for the success of your blog in terms of visits and return of money using AdSense. Before to start your custom template, writing code from zero, I suggest you to download a simple basic Blogger template, for example "Minima": so, copy and past on your preferred HTML editor HTML source (remeber to check "expand widget models" option) and remove everything is contained within b:skin tag. This is the only code which have to remain:

<b:skin> /*</b:skin>

...and, below the previous line, add this code into the <head> tag to create your custom CSS style. I suggest you to use the following CSS structure:

<style type="text/css">
/* -- 1. Standard HTML elements reset --*/
/* -- 2. Custom Page Elements --*/
/* -- 3. Redefine blogger standard elements --*/
/* -- 4. Other custom classes --*/
</style>

In this way CSS code will be simpler to manage and update. This is a screenshot of a part of CSS code I used to design my blog:

At this point you can start writing HTML code, adding layer, sections and other elements to your template. When your template is ready, copy the code and paste it on Blogger Layout editor and save it. If you need more info about Blogger customization, I suggest you to take a look at BloggerBuster a "Blogger-dedicated" site mantained for my friend Amanda which provides useful templates, tips and tricks for Blogger users.


2. Create single custom pages on Blogger
Using Blogger you can create single custom pages like on WordPress. How do you do it? Simply creating a post which you will use like a web page for example adding links or in general contents organized for category. On my blog I created some pages (Tutorials, Showcases, Freebies) and, for each page, I added a link on navigation bar:

...and each page contains links organized for topic (take a look at the page Tutorials). When you have to modify the content of the pages you have simply modify the related post directly from Blogger Post editor.


3. Display some HTML elements only on home page
Sometimes it's usefult to display some page elements only on home page and not on each single post. To do it, you have to use Blogger <b:if> statement, adding the following code on your Blogger template:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != "item"'>
<!-- ... HTML code if you want to display only on home page here... -->
</b:if&gt

In this way, if the current page isn't an "item" page (but for example it's your home page) , will be displayed all code within <b:if> tag.


5. Page title and meta tag description
For a better indexing of your blog on Google I suggest you to make these simple changes on your template. Change this line (blog title):

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

...with the following code:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != "item"'>
<title>My site | This is a short description</title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
</b:if>

...and add Meta tag description below the previous <b:if> statement.

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != "item"'>
<meta name="Description" content="Add here a short description of your site" />
</b:if>

For example on my template I added: "Woork is a popular tech blog mantained by from Antonio Lupetti. Topics focus on web design, tutorials, resources and inspiration", so when someone looking for my blog on Google, search results display the following description:

4. Design custom categories section
By default, categories on Blogger are displayed on one column. If you want to modify the default layout showing labels on two columns instead one column, you have manage manually your labels using this simple trick: adding on your template, for each labels, a link like this:

<a href="http://yoursite.blogspot.com/search/label/Category Name?max-results=max numbers of posts to display">Category Name</a>

For example, to design my categories section I used this code:

<a href="http://woork.blogspot.com/search/label/ajax?max-results=2">Ajax</a>
<a href="http://woork.blogspot.com/search/label/blogger?max-results=2">Blogger</a><a href="http://woork.blogspot.com/search/label/coldfusion?max-results=2">Coldfusion</a>
...

...and how you can see on my sidebar the result is:

I know, the process is not automatic and each time you add new categories, you have to udate your template manually... but this solutions renders more flexible template design.


5. Republish Feed RSS to manage recent entries and comments
Personally I don't like Blogger default archive widget. So, on my template I used FeedBurner BuzzBoost service to add a section with recent entries and recent comments. If you have a FeedBurner account login, clik on "Publicize" tab and select "BuzzBoost" service:

Follow instructions on the page and copy and paste BuzzBoost code on your Blogger template, within a new layer with class property = "recentPost" (you can insert this layer, for example, within sidebar):

<div class="recentPost">

/* FeedBurner BuzzBoost Code*/
<script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/your feed here?format=sigpro" type="text/javascript" ></script><noscript><p>Subscribe to RSS headline updates from: <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/Woork"></a><br/>Powered by FeedBurner</p> </noscript>

</div>

To customize recent entries section add a CSS class (recentPost) using, for example, the following code:

.recentPost li{background:url(arrow image URL) no-repeat left top;
padding-left:14px;}

Final result is something like this:

You can repeat the same process to add a new section which contains links to recent comments, simply changing the feed URL.


6. Add custom subtitle to your posts
If you want to add a subtitle to your Blogger post you can use a simple "trick" using CSS. On your Blogger template, create a custom class ".subtitle" (for example, I used this code for Woork's subtitles style):

.subtitle{

font-family:Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
font-size:20px;
color:#555555;
line-height:28px;

}

Now, when you add a new post, to add a subtitle, add a div layer with class property = "subtitle" before the post content:

<div class="subtitle">This is a subtitle</div>

This is a screenshot of Blogger Post Editor:

So, add the rest of your post below the div layer and the result is:

7. Add social web buttons
Social web buttons are a extraordinary solution to share and make popular content you write on your blog. Delicious, StumbleUpon and Digg are my preferred social network which drive on my site a lot of traffic but also Mixx, Reddit, Yahoo Buzz!, DZone can help you to increase your visitors. For more info about how to add social buttons on your site take a look at this post for the full list.

 

 source :http://succesful-internetmarketer.blogspot.com/2013/02/7-tips-to-design-professional-blog.html

» Read More...