Facebook Fling!

You’d have to be living under a rock (and trying to do IM) to not know about Facebook…

Love it or hate it, Facebook marketing products are everywhere. There’s the usual WSO collection. Some good, some bad.

There are high end $1500 (and up!) courses on social media marketing with Facebook. Some good, some bad.

Depending on who you listen to Facebook is going to replace Google advertising, email marketing, blogging, and just about every other thing we do in our little sub-culture.

Enter Justin Brooke. Justin’s the author of the SEO Lies 2011 report I told you about a bit ago. The price has gone up but it’s still a steal for basic, simple, take action SEO information. Justin’s also the owner of SiteFling! (http://SiteFling.com) – his home base in the internet marketing world for his blog, coaching program, products, and generally good stuff.

OK, back to Facebook…

Justin wrote a great email about a “New Free Web Traffic Method” – and it wasn’t about the latest bullpooh $37 Clickbank product with 23 up sells, cross sells, and down sells. It was about (drum roll please…) Facebook.

This wasn’t the usual “Facebook is great… here’s my affiliate link for some product you should get” – it had ACTUAL CONTENT.

I know, shocking. This along with his love of bluebery beer proves Justin just doesn’t understand this internet marketing stuff. I mean, providing actual content to your readers? Tool.

Here’s what Justin wrote. It’s at least as good as some of the “courses” out there today. And it’s super brief and too the point.

After you read it I have two things for you:

1. A little soapbox rant on “what vs. how”

2. The limitations of Facebook marketing that nobody wants to talk about.

Justin Brooke’s “New Free Web Traffic Method” Post:

Now about that traffic method…

It involves Facebook

If you just groaned and thought “I don’t have Facebook
and don’t ever want to be on there” then you are doing the
rest of us a favor. Thank you, we appreciate all the f’ree
traffic and sales you are leaving for us. ;-D

Here’s how it works…

1.) Make a fan page with an attractive title. For example
Extreme MMA Workout Routines

2.) Make a nice profile pic and welcome page. You have
200×600 pixels for the profile pic, USE IT. For the welcome
page you have 520×650 pixels, make sure you give them an
irresistible reason to “like” your page.

3.) Populate your page with tips, videos, links, and blog posts
you find from around your niche. Don’t be afraid to share other
peoples content… Social media isn’t about ME, ME, ME. It’s
about THEM, THEM, ME. Just get in the habit of sharing the
coolest stuff in your niche so people want to hear from you.

4.) Now over on the right hand side there is a link to use
Facebook as your page. Now your fan page can “come alive”
and start commenting on other fan page.

5.) Search keywords related to your niche in the Facebook
search box (located at the top center of the screen)

6.) Click the “like” button for the most popular fan pages
in your niche. This will let you be able to leave comments.

7.) Start commenting on the most popular posts and everyone
that liked or commented on that post will receive a notification
that a new comment was left. This is how you get seen!

If you leave good valuable comments, have an attractive fan page
name, and a good fan page then people will click “like” on your
page. This means your audience will grow and you can now start
linking them to your blog posts, videos, and offers.

source: http://archive.aweber.com/sitefling/277.2/h/New_Free_Web_Traffic_Method_.htm

This is seriously good stuff. Kind of a Facebook meets Michael Campbell’s Goobert approach.

There are two things you could do with this email:

1. Use it. Take action. Implement the steps. Cash checks. MAYBE repeat in another niche or two.
2. Make a product.

That second one might have thrown you for a loop. And that brings me to my little soapbox…

How You Can Profit From
“What” & “How” Marketing Products

(I know, not exactly a good headline…)

Here’s the point. Justin’s little email step-by-step is a classic example of “what” reporting:

1. Brief.
2. Actionable
3. Relevant

Justin (or you or pretty much anybody else) could take these 264 words and make a front end product consisting of:

1. A 1-page cheat sheet (basically these very 264 words and/or a rewrite with attribution)
2. A 5-7 page report expanding a little bit on the cheat sheet, setting the context of Facebook’s growth, popularity, opportunity, etc.
3. A voiceover PowerPoint presentation movie (put each step on a slide and record a voiceover with CamStudio or your favorite tool)
4. An mp3 (use Super or another tool to extract the voice only from the movie

Now, whether you give this away to build your list or charge a low entry price (say $7) or a SUPER-HIGH fee is up to you and how you build your sales funnel. But fundamentally this is a prime example of a “What” product — it describes the opportunity and a high level of the step-by-step without going down to the nitty gritty details.

But wait, there’s more…

When you have this kind of “What” product there’s two basic ways you can go with it:

1. Coaching – expand on the information with some direct 1-1 or small-group coaching sessions to help people implement and take action.
2. Make the “How” report

(these aren’t mutually exclusive – you can do both)

I don’t have the time or space to talk about coaching programs. But I do want to talk about the “How” report (product). It’s super simple:

Take each step in the “What” product and show an example of how to do it (duh).

It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that. Sometimes you’ll find that a given step needs more than one “how” explanation. That’s cool. Just do the work. Make the videos, produce the report, yada yada.

Looking at Justin’s email here are the “how” steps that I would produce off the top of my head:

1. How to create a Facebook fan page (complete with links to some cool Fan Page creation scripts, background images, iFrame tools, etc.)
2. How to make your Facebook logo
3. How to pick a niche that actually WORKS on Facebook (hint – see below)
4. How to kickstart your Facebook “Likes” for $5 or less
5. How to “curate content” and build credibility by giving your list exactly what they want
6. How to open up your Fan Page and let your subscribers create content for you (this is key in the new Google Farmer world by the way)
7. How to integrate the new “online” (Facebook) and “offline” (your website!) world seamlessly
8. How to grow and track your Facebook “Like” list

This was just off the top of my head. Some are probably bad ideas, others should be deleted or split up or combined…

The point here is that you can take a product in just about ANY NICHE and split it up into “What” and “How”. Create these separately and always think about offering audio, text, and video versions of your content. Maybe not up front right away but as a progression path.

Disclaimer – this is NOT an invitation to rip people off. I am 99.98% sure that you’re smarter than this. I am not telling you to rip off Justin or anybody else. What I am saying is that you can create a swipe file of good ideas (emails, blog posts, etc.) and pretty quickly convert these into “What” products that add value. You do this in your own voice and you add value to the original source material. You should also credit the source and make sure you’re not lifting anything proprietary. No need to get sued in this.

“Who Else Wants To Know The #1 Thing You Cannot Market On Facebook
And How You Can Overcome It By Zigging While Everyone Else Zags?”

(cheesey, I know)

I’ll admit that I was a little late to the Facebook game. I didn’t for example cash in big time on the early days of Facebook CPA marketing and I only dabbled in Facebook Ads for much of last year.

But at some point the obvious became obvious to even me: Facebook isn’t a fad, it’s a shift in the marketplace (and world). We are on the cusp of a generation of 20-somethings that grew up on LiveJournal, Living Tree, MySpace, and now Facebook. This ‘kinda changes the marketing game.

Sort of.

You see, once I decided to dive in FB marketing I starting going through the usual courses and material and look for patterns. Things that “everyone” is saying – and more importantly, what they aren’t saying. Here’s a snippet of a mind map I made to guide my team’s FB efforts:

The big take-away is that using Facebook to target the classic marketing niches – “how to” and “pain” isn’t always easy.

Sure, Depression has groups with 70,000+ and 40,000+. Magic The Gathering has a group with over 300,000. World of Warcraft over 400,000. But “how to cure bronchitis”, “teach your parrot to talk”, “clean cat urine from your carpet” and a slew of others just don’t have existing groups.

Yes, you can target demographics — 35-40 year old females for fertility and getting pregnant information products and services for example — but this isn’t directly targeted traffic compared to keyword based PPC and site based PPV. In fact, a generalization you can make is that the longer down the tail you go, the better traditional search and context traffic performs (compared to Facebook).

Facebook works for big markets and their (obvious) sub-markets. It *may* work for your Kyokushin Karate Secrets niche but you need to do some research first and compare that against search traffic you can get with traditional sources.

The other challenge is that the younger generation — those teens and 20-somethings — HATE Facebook advertising. They see it as “The Man” co-opting their little universe. So clickthrough rates targeting this demographic will (usually) be naturally lower.

Now, NONE of this is “bad” or anti-Facebook. It just says that with limited resources you need to know when to target FB as your primary traffic channel and when to look elsewhere. It’s all cool and you can and should test most every niche. But just know that your anonymous microniche site pimpin’ the latest Dyson DC-25 Animal vacuum cleaner isn’t easy to translate to a FB page with buyers. Even if the Dyson company has 14,000+ “likes.”

Wrapping this up…

Justin’s email is a “what-to-do” on building a tribe in a niche using Facebook. It rocks at this and is the basic engagement marketing approach for FB.

But don’t throw out all your micro-niche information and product sites just yet and try converting them over to Fan Pages.

It doesn’t work that way.

You’re just going to have to put a little brain power and elbow grease into it (gasp!).