Why Do You Need a Facebook Fan Page? You may ask, “Why do I even need a Facebook fan page?” Here’s why: Right now Facebook has an Alexa ranking of 2. They are the 2nd most trafficked website next only to Google!

This means your Facebook page will get indexed faster on Google and other search engines, so if you don’t have a fan page, be sure to create one and promote it.

Here are 5 Killer ways to grow your Facebook fans:

#1: Invite People From Your Facebook Friends List

Do you have your personal friends and professional colleagues segmented into lists on your Facebook home page?

I have a number of lists in my personal Facebook account.

You can invite these lists as groups to your Facebook fan page rather of sending individual invites. This is the easiest and fastest way to jump-start your fan base.

When you click “Suggest to Friends” on your fan page, start typing in the name of your friends list in the filtered friends section; for example, “Social Media Experts.” This will automatically send an invitation to your facebook fan page to all of your colleagues listed in that category.

It’s possible that it may take a while before you start seeing those known faces pop up in your fan page because people are busy. There have been a few occasions where I’ve softly nudged them with an individual invite, but I keep that to a minimum.

As you add more people to your network, remember to go back to your same lists and send the invite to the new people you have added. The names of those who have already been invited will be “grayed out” and the invite will only be sent to your new contacts.

#2: Find People With Facebook Search

The updated Facebook Search feature (see the Search bar at the top of Facebook) gives you a view into conversations of your friends and status updates that may even show you who may be looking for the services you offer.

There is even an option to search “Posts by Everyone,” which gives you a glimpse into conversations of people who may not even be connected to you. After entering a search term, there will be a display, “Posts By Everyone.” This allows you to view conversations from others who aren’t in your friend lists.

Here is a screenshot when I entered “buying a home” in the Search field:

As you can see, there is a person saying “I think we are buying a house tomorrow.” If this person is already in your contacts list, the following is a very easy conversation starter: “Hi ______, I saw your Facebook comment about your plans to buy a house tomorrow. Do you need any help with school information in that particular area?”

There is another person stating that they plan to stay in their house for a long time. This can be a potential candidate for a loan refinance. Again, if this person is already a friend on Facebook, it would be very easy to start a conversation without sounding like an annoying salesperson.

#3: Attract People With Facebook Social Ads

Social Ads provide advertisements alongside your Facebook sidebar which show related actions your friends have taken on the site. These actions may be things like “Leah is now a fan of The Offspring. Would you like to become a fan too?” It is possible to tailor ads to your friends and their interests, which makes it more appealing for them to take action because you are interested as well.

This strategy requires a small budget, but can be very effective in finding your target market. It is very important to do a Facebook search with specific keywords in your particular niche to find out if it’s being talked about on Facebook (see #2 above).

If you click on “Promote With an Ad” on your fan page, you can start a campaign.  You can set a daily spending limit of $10, $25, or other appropriate amount. Because I market mostly to businesses with my keywords (such as real estate broker, loan officer, real estate investor, and so forth) which are in numerous profiles as job descriptions I have been able to use Facebook Social Ads effectively for my fan page.

It’s possible to run your Facebook ads for only 4 to 5 days with a $25 per day budget. Then stop the ad for a few weeks if you like and run the same ad again. This allows your fan page to grow in spurts and I have found it to be very effective in growing my fan base without spending a lot of money at once.

#4: Facebook Fan Page Twitter App

The Facebook Fan Page Twitter application is a great tool that brings your Twitter following back to your fan page. When you post a status update, a link or a photo (you can choose) on your Facebook fan page, there will be an update to Twitter with a shortened bit.ly link back to your fan page. This is just pure genius to drive traffic from another source right to your page.

There are other Facebook and Twitter integration applications; however, this is the one that leads people directly back to your page. This gives them an option to become a fan of your page right at that moment if they click on the bit.ly link from Twitter.

#5: Facebook Fan Box Widget

The Facebook Fan Box Widget is a great feature to add to your blog or website. This widget allows you to show your fan base and allows others to become fans instantly. This is just one way to promote your page across several social media sites. It is important to cross-reference all of your social media sites so others can find you and your websites on other networks.

So what do you have to add to this list? Are you finding other effective ways to promote your Facebook fan page? I would love to hear from you and your successes in promoting your pages in the comments below.

If you have any question in this regard, don’t hesitate to ask. You can contact me through our Contact form or just send me an email at Wahid@wahidqazi.com.

I am about to bring out some of the hottest techniques to promote a video on YouTube. We’ve used them with clients from all over the world and a lot of them have seen thousands of new visitors as a result of these powerful tactics.

Anyway, here is the list:

• Copy the Top Performers: Look for the three most popular videos with more views in your category and get ideas from them. Copy their video title, video tags and description. Don’t copy anything verbatim, change things up a little and make some difference.

• Create Your Own Channel: Create a new channel and customize to feature your best videos. This alone will drastically increase your views.

• Use the Bulletin Board: This is a great feature that allows you start a conversation around your own videos. But don’t limit yourself to your own bulletin boards, use others as well.

• Add Friends: YouTube is not just a video sharing community; YouTube is a social network. Add friends to your list and connect with them.

• Use Video Responses: Search for most popular videos related to yours and post your video as a response to them. Leverage the views that other videos get.

• Create Something Worth Spreading the Word About: If your video is boring, all these tactics will go in vain. The videos that work best on YouTube are either hilarious, controversial, unique, current trend or very useful.

• Complete Your Profile: Don’t leave your profile empty, YouTube allows you to fill out a profile do it by all means including a “link to your website here” field.

• Link the Videos to Your Profile: You can place your videos link to any page within YouTube. Set it up so when people click on your video they go to your profile directly. And from your profile they are able to click on your website link.

• Create Playlists: Create a playlist of related videos. Include much popular ones on a certain topic and, of course, your own video.

• Join Some Groups and Create Your Own: Join some groups and post both, text and video comments. You can also create your own group.

• Encourage Viewers to Subscribe: End each video asking viewers to subscribe. Many people don’t know they can subscribe or they will forget unless you remind them.

These are some of the techniques that we have used for our best clients. Most of them got more than a Million views. How would you like to get your business in front of a million potential new clients?

If you have any question in this regard, don’t hesitate to ask. You can contact me through our Contact form or just send me an email at Wahid@wahidqazi.com.

Facebook Profiles

Creating a profile is the most basic thing you can do on Facebook and it’is required if you want to do anything else such as create a group or fan page. Make sure you completely fill out your profile because a full profile looks much more interesting than an empty one. You can also add your website URL in several locations and be sure to discuss about your business/brand and plug your website URL in the appropriate spots as mentioned.

Then you have to start adding friends to your profile every day, the current limit is 5,000 friends but this may be lifted in the future. If you add 20 friends a day which would take you possibly 5 minutes, in one month you will have 600 friends! From my testing you will have to type in a CAPTCHA or anti spam code for the first 10-15 friend adds, but after that it seemed to go away and it was much quicker to add friends. I wouldn’t recommend adding to many friends each day because it will come off as spammy.

Now that you have your profile created and optimized, you are able to create a Facebook group or even better a Facebook page, both of which we will go over below.

Facebook Groups

Groups were available before pages and are more of a place for users to discuss topics such as logo design or automobiles. It’s almost like a mini forum. The benefits for group owner is that they are very viral and you can bulk invite all you friends to join your group. The problem is they are not indexable by Search Engines and not available to view unless you are a member of Facebook.

I would recommend creating a Facebook group for your business, but frankly Facebook pages are really where it’s at and you should focus your efforts on your page instead of your group.

Facebook Pages

Facebook pages are all about business and have many of the same features available in groups, but with some extra key features available. The main advantage of pages is the fact that they are indexable by Search Engines and available to view even if you are not a member so promoting the page is easy.

When creating your facebook page make sure you use your most important keyword as the page name so that it shows as the page title, making your page more SEO friendly. Like you did with your profile, fill out your Facebook page with all important information about your business, website URLS and so on.

The best way to promote your page is to offer some sort of discount offers, coupon codes etc, if you are not a major brand. This way you give people a reason to become a fan of your page. Once they become a fan you can send updates which is the best part of having a Facebook page for your business.

Facebook groups may work well virally, but so do Facebook fan pages. Whenever someone becomes a fan of your page it shows up in their profile and looks something like this: Person’s Name, Became a fan of Your Business/Brand/Company Name.

So if you give your fan page a good jump start it could really take off. The number of fans you can have has no limit and some pages have anywhere from several thousand fans to over 5 million fans!

So if you want to focus on one thing I would highly recommend you to create a Facebook fan page, instead of a group and putting all your advertising efforts towards the Facebook page.

Facebook Applications

The introduction of Facebook Applications is most likely the most popular move made by Facebook to date. They released their API so developers and business owners could cooperate to create fun and cool applications that engage users. The applications created so far vary in purpose; some are cool games, some are useful and some are directly related and tied into businesses.

Many popular applications have thousands of monthly active users and that information speaks for itself, so if you want to read and learn more about how to create a Facebook application, I highly recommend you to check out the Facebook Developers page. Once you have created an application, be sure to add it to your profile and to your Facebook group and page!

Facebook Ads

Facebook ads are a great way to really boost your exposure using highly targeted CPC and CPM Advertising. You can target users by age, gender, regional, interests, and even attach friend-to-friend interactions about your business to your ads.

The best part is you can also advertise an external website or a Facebook page. So if you created a fan page earlier for your business and you are looking to build up your facebook fan page you can do so easily by driving the traffic from your advertisements directly to your page.

So join Facebook today and start working on your Facebook promotions, because if your competition is not on Facebook already, they will be soon!

If you have any question in this regard, don’t hesitate to ask. You can contact me through our Contact form or just send me an email at Wahid@wahidqazi.com.

Organic Listings

1. Long Lasting Effect
2. Slow Results
3. Low Cost
4. Less Control Over Ranking
5. More Clicks Than PPC
6. No Management
7. No Monitoring
8. Assumption
9. Gigantic Exposure
10. More Text Space
11. Uncontrolled Title And Description

PPC Listings

1. Effect Depends On Budget
2. Quick Results
3. Expensive
4. Complete Control Over Ranking
5. Less Clicks Than Organic
6. Complete Management
7. Complete Campaign Monitoring
8. Authentic
9. Limited Exposure
10. Less Text Limitation
11. Controlled Title And Description

I’m sure, this comparison will help you take better decision and best use of your hard earned money, both these marketing are very effective in different scenarios, if you have big budget you must go for PPC first and also keep organic as secondary marketing for long term. If you have small budget then organic would be an excellent choice with some paid listings in directories and industry related portals.

About The Author

Wahid Qazi is a Researcher, SEO, Trainer, Speaker and Author, specializes in google optimization and promotion.

Search Engine Minimization!

The term search engine optimization is not valid specially after Google’s Florida update, in that update google introduced a new term called “Over Optimization” and it’s very well known today. Well there is no measurement tool to analyze either the practice is optimized or over optimized that’s why SEO should go for search engine minimization, what is search engine minimization? Search engine minimization is a technique that deals with basics and its primary purpose is to get the website listed in top 500 website rather looking directly for top 5 placements.

Focus on the Competitors!

When your website rankings stuck and you are short of ideas, what to do? How to move forward? The very first thing you should do is to not worry, but don’t get relax it’s time to keep an eye on your competitors, observe the top 5 competitors and the top 5 above of your rankings that means 10 for each keyword, look at them and try to find out either there is something missing what you are doing or your competitors are very intelligent enough. Your competitors can make you learn the best lesson sometimes.

There are certain areas in search engine optimization which should be improved with time, if you don’t take care of those elements, your website will be out-dated and miss-fit in front of your competitors, since all your competitors are fighting for top positions.

On Going Content Improvisation

Look at the content either your website has fresh original content with balanced keyword density, content is still king, never ignore the value of quality content, you can compare keyword density balance with your competitors.

Active Link Building Campaign

The more inbound qualified links your website has the better position it will get, never let your link building campaign die, link popularity is like oxygen for life, try to find out more relevant and qualified incoming links, permanent and one way links will be obviously preferable than temporary reciprocal links.

Optimized, Validated and Error Free Coding

Your website code is one of the very important element of your search engine ranking, you must check your website code for quality assurance periodically, sometimes everything looks fine but you never know your competitors, they might be doing something very special which you might have ignored.

Some other Tips to Get an Extra Edge over Your Competitors

• Increase domain registered period for at least next five years
• Keep the same address at website and at domain registration
• Apply proper formation technique such as H1, H2, Bold, Bullets…
• Don’t miss Alt tags
• Don’t miss title tags for image base links
• Proper directory and file structuring

Three major elements of Website Code Optimization:

1. Code Validation
2. Code Compression
3. Code Optimization

Code Validation

Today web designers and developers, who use WYSIWYG tools to design and development websites. These tools are really a great help especially when it come to time saving, these tools provide huge relaxation to designers and developers. All these tools can be very effectively used by trained and experienced designers and developers, but the real problem is that new designers and developers get trained using these tools that’s why they have very poor concept of coding. All WYSIWYG tools are very easy to use and if they are used improperly they can generate GARBAGE, which makes webpage HEAVIER and MEANINGLESS to search engine bots.

Search engines can’t see your webpage, they send their BOTS to crawl all web pages, and these bots work on ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. They ONLY UNDERSTAND CODE, if your web page code is not validated they will stop reading from there and will evaluate your web page on the basis of received information. If you want search engines to read everything you have at your web page, validate your code before putting it online.

Code Compression

There is another very important issue, which can make your webpage more complex and less valuable when it comes to search engine’s point of view. Webpage visitors see only upfront of the webpage, they don’t care either webpage code is compressed or not. But you have to take care of code compression, so that your valuable content can be read by search engine bots and will be able to get good ranking in search engines.

Search engine bots always try to extract content from web pages, they don’t like to read code, though they can understand the code. On-page CSS and JavaScript declaration push your valuable content down, since top 2000 initial characters including code are very crucial to create good meaningful impression to search engines. That’s why you should try to call external JavaScript and CSS and also should try to make short naming for CSS classes, this way your code will be compressed and there won’t be any visual difference to your website visitors.

Code Optimization

Code Validation and Compression comes in Code Optimization, but there is more to do with the Code. Code Optimization is basically using search engine friendly CODE (Tags & Attributes) with their PRIORITIES and LIKINGS to search engines. Search engines like “TITLTE, HEADINGS, BOLD, ITALIC, UNDERLINE, ANCHOR LINK, TEXTUAL HYPERLINK, IMAGE HYPERLINK, PARAGRAPH, NUMBERING and BULLETS TAGS”, they also like “ALT and LINK TITLE ATTRIBUTES”. All these mentioned Tags and Attributes will give your content value to search engines. You should try to utilize all mentioned search engine friendly CODE (Tags & Attributes) as much as possible to take good rankings.

You should take care of your website code periodically (weekly or at least monthly), check your website code for BROKEN LINKS, MISSING and ORPHAN PAGES. Try to update “robots.txt and sitemap” whenever there is a change at the website. Check your website for CROSS BROWSER COMPATIBILITY, especially for Internet Explorer and Firefox.

What is SEO Copy Writing?

SEO copywriting is nothing but just a topical writing where content writers always write for topics / sub-topics and those topics or sub-topics are called Keyword Phrases. There are some other techniques with this, which are kept in mind when writing for search engines, but whatever they write is topical as a result search engines can easily understand them and give them the most valuable positions. There is a proper procedure & technique for SEO Copy Writing which will be discussed later on in this article.

Why Content is Still King?

There is a very obvious answer to this question, content is still king because content is the major source of conveying message to search engine. Search engines read the content and then realize the importance of the content, they their-self understand the purpose of the website and then compare it with other related websites in their database, on the basis of your website’s content your website is given some rank in search engines, it could be at 1st page and could be at 100th page. There are plenty of other elements but content is one of the very important aspect of your website optimization, whenever writing for your website, keep in mind that your website is going to be evaluated not only by human but search engine’s bots as well.

How to Balance Copy Writing Keeping Users and Search Engines in Mind

Website copy can be liked and disliked at the same time by different human readers, there are plenty of external things that effect on human mind when reading such as mood, time, easy & flowery language and interests. But to search engines it’s entirely a different thing, they are built on artificial intelligence that’s why it doesn’t matter how difficult the words are, how boring the topic is, they have to read your written content time and mood can’t stop them.

I would never recommend writing for search engines, in fact search engines will never like it. Search engines have a very clear policy and that is “whatever is important for human readers is also important for search engines” that’s why always try to facilitate your readers but there is a simple guideline for search engines by following that you can make sure to balance your well written copy writing for both Human readers and Search Engines.

Who should I Write for Search Engines OR for Visitors?

Another very interesting question, there are many content writers who are worried to either write for search engines OR for website visitors? The answer is very simple, search engines don’t like them to feed, that’s why focusing on search engines is only a waste of time. But you can’t ignore search engines, since search engines are based on pre-defined algorithm (artificial intelligence) and they are compelled on certain things, such if your website code is not search engine friendly then search engines will be finding difficulty to read and understand website content. Content writers should focus on writing for website visitors but keeping search engines standards in mind, so that their content will have good impact on search engines.

Well Targeted Written Content is more valuable

Whatever you are going to write, search the right term to use, it may happen that your written content will get good rankings on certain keyword phrase but what if that keyword phrase is not searchable in search engines. That’s why you make sure that your written content should be well targeted, to search most searched keyword phrase in search engines, and you can use WordTracker or Keyword Discovery

It’s a two part article series, in next part (Part 2) you’ll come to know, SEO Copy Writing Techniques, Does and Don’ts of Writing, How to Develop a Successful SEO Copy Writing Strategy.