Just 24 hours ago, I bought a new domain name which I set up with a blog, and launched almost immediately. I won't disclose the site name, or any information about it for the simple reason that I want to continue to write about this. I will say, I have learned a TON in the past 24 hours.
So I set up my blog, design a header, add a few features and post 1, yes 1 blog entries to it. Normally I wouldn't recommend launching a site with so little content, but I did it because I was going to solely market this site using Facebook. I wanted to be able to add more content as my Fan Page built up in numbers so that I could have posts on my page and direct people to my blog. That said, at the end of 24 hours, I still have just 3 entries on my site.

Let’s look at the numbers over the past 24 hours:
Hits to my site: 358
Fans on my page: 803
Number of posts I made on my page: 24 (1 per hour)
Number of comments on my posts: 420
Number of people posting to my wall: 32
Number of comments on those wall posts: 20
Number of users banned from my page: 1

These numbers tell a whole story. First of all, if any of you have done Facebook marketing, you know, that these numbers of nothing short of pretty much incredible! Second, I didn't spend any money on advertising at all. My total expenses for the day were $6.99 for the domain (good for a year), $7.25 for hosting (a month), and I spent $15 on promotional products. That all translates out to a HUGE bang that I got for my buck!

Now you are all wondering how I did it and what I learned. First, the initial group of people that I invited to my page were HIGHLY targeted people that would be interested in what my page was about. Once I got them there, I engaged them. The promotional products that I got were selected VERY carefully for the niche that I was targeting. They were an in demand, hard to find item that EVERYONE wanted. That worked for me because it got my fans involved in my page, and motivated them to do all of my marketing for me, which, looking again at the numbers above, you can see, I accomplished my mission.

In the 24 hours, I posted 24 post, if you average all of my comments out, each post got about 20 each. That wasn't the case at all, different posts that I made had differing amounts of comments. For instance, one post just had 3 comments on it, while another had close to 80. The difference in those two posts is simple. The one with 3 comments just simply TOLD the people something. The one with 80 comments ASKED them something. Bottom line, create posts that call the members to action. Get them interested and get them posting.

Another thing that I learned was to develop a team feel. Instead of acting as though I was the one giving out all of the information, I asked them to help me come up with the information. I also asked for suggestions, and implemented many of the suggestions that I did get. I really developed a group sense that everyone was in it together, and I also did my best to diffuse any negativity in the best way possible. On the subject of negativity, on a page that grows as quickly as the one I have done, did, there is going to be some negativity that comes in to play.
People will ALWAYS find something to complain about, and I promise, no matter how happy 99% of the people are, someone will not be. I ended up having to ban one person from my page, and the reason was that they just would not STOP with the negative comments. I tried to change the persons outlook on things several times, but it wasn't working. Other members on the page were joining in with me to help this particular person turn their opinions around (this is another thing that developing a team feel helps with). It didn't work, so I started deleting the users negative posts. They kept posting more, so finally I just banned the person from my group. Can't win them all over I suppose!

By the end of the 24 hours, and I am not kidding, I had people posting picture of what they had done to my wall, I had people commenting saying "THANK YOU SO MUCH MYDOMAIN.COM". I had people telling me how much they appreciate me, how much they love me, and I had them begging for more. I also had people telling me that they invited all of their friends to my page and some even told me how many. There were SEVERAL people who invited over 800 people to my page! That is where I will leave off and pick up later with more details, perhaps evaluating the page again after a week. I am very interested to see where exactly this page is heading, I know for a fact that there are a TON of invites from people on my page to join the group, it being a Saturday night however, I am also guessing most people will be responding to that invite on Monday morning. I can honestly say, this page I am doing now, I have it set up perfectly with numbers and buzz to explode into something HUGE. We'll see where it goes..

PS. In the time that it took me to write this, I am now up to 819 fans!

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Creating a presence on Facebook is a great way to promote your website. I use Facebook very successfully for one of my sites, and when I post new material, I can immediately see a spike in my internet traffic to my sites. Most people however make some mistakes when setting up their business Facebook, so here are some tips on doing it right.

When you set up your Facebook account, you pretty much get one shot at doing it, so make sure you doing it in a way that will maximize your visibility in the future. Most people tend to just go in and create a new account for their business, problem is, Facebook limits their regular accounts to just 5,000 friends, so once you get to that amount with a regular account, you would have to make a new one! For this reason, we make fan pages for our Facebook pages.

There is one important thing to note about a Facebook fan page though, you CANNOT assign it to different ownership than the page it is created under. For instance, say you create a fan page under your personal one, if you ever sell your website or wish to transfer it to another person, you would have to give up control of your personal page as well. For this reason, I would suggest you create a mock Facebook page for each of your fan pages. That way, if anything ever comes up that you need to transfer your fan page, you can assign over the whole account without worrying that your personal stuff would be lost!

Now that we got that out of the way, you will want to create your fan page. To do this, you will go to an existing fan page, and on the bottom left, you will see a selection that includes "Promote My Business". That is where you will be creating your page. Put in the required information, make sure to provide a link back to your website on it, and upload a few pictures. This could be of your product, your logo, or even you!

Once you have created your page, you will need to activate it so that it is published online. After that is done you are ready to promote your page! What some people don't know, is that a Fan page, unlike a regular Facebook page can be made to go viral! When this happens, the results is a massive amount of fans to your page, all of which you will be able to reach with your postings!

So, now you are asking yourself, how does a page go viral, and how do I do it? There isn't an exact science behind getting a page to go viral, but there are things that can be done to help it along its way. First, you should know how it happens. A page goes viral when multiple people fan it, it will show up on their wall that they became a fan of your page, and in return you get more fans. If several people become a fan that are friends with 1 person, it will even show up under suggested friends, or on the right hand bar near the top of the page!

Helping a page go viral is no guarantee, but if you pay attention to the trends on popular pages, you will quickly see. Some things that you can do to help a page out, is first, suggest the page to all of your friends, let them know that it is your new site and you would like them to become a fan. This will get you started and get you some fans built up. Second, don't be afraid to have a contest. Benchmark contests work well, say for every 200 fans you get, you will give a certain number a gift card, itunes card, or any number of other things of value! People like free stuff! As a last method, you can consider advertising your fan page on Facebook. I would use this one if the other methods mentioned have been exhausted, but it is worth the money if you have a good product to advertise on there as well.

This is by no means as tell all on how to make a page go viral, however, it is a good guide on how to get started and set you on your way. Don't be afraid to play around a little, Facebook fan pages are free, so create some experiment ones and see how well you do, you might be surprised!

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There are several reasons you should perhaps consider blogging, and I will go over some of those with you! One of the first reasons, would be that it is very simple to do, it isn't very technical and is a very easy way to break into the world of internet marketing and establishing an web presence.

That being said, one shouldn't just consider it to be something for a beginner, I am a firm believer that everyone, beginner or advanced to the world of making money online should have a blog in their network. I operate over a dozen blogs, and they by far are one of the biggest sources of traffic for me!

How do they get traffic? Well several ways really, but the main one being from search engines and links. Search engines like blogs because they are updated frequently, and are very rich in text content. Search Engines cannot see images on a website, they can only read the text on it.

Blogs are also easy to get links to. Once you get some posts going, you can email some other blog owners that are similar to yours and ask for a link exchange. While that may seem difficult, WordPress makes it very simple to add links to your blog, it is something that you can do on your own without ever having to get your designer to do it for you!

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