Sharing content through social networks is not a new concept (infact nothing is really a ‘new’ concept anymore!). You will have seen blogs with lots of sharing options to bookmark the blog, to retweet the blog & to share links on Facebook – something that is used a lot on this blog too in order for our readers to easily share this content.

Until recently, sharing a blogpost on Facebook has been slightly clunky in that you had to use Facebook Connect to share the content as a status update.

Last week, Facebook users will have noticed a few changes recently to some features, most obviously the change that got rid of the ‘Become a Fan’ on Pages and replaced it with ‘Like’. The ‘Like’ feature is now pretty much uniform across Facebook – incorporated into status updates, wall posts, individual pictures, photo albums etc..and now Pages.

Those of you who have WordPress.org blogs setup can now install one plugin which puts a ‘Like’ button into your blog posts so that your readers can ‘Like’ your post and it will publish the fact that they like your post on THEIR newsfeed. This instantly gives the blog post viral & sharing possibility through facebook unlike before where sharing on facebook was always a little clunky (clunky being a technical term, of course). It is now on par with the TweetMeMe button and others on blogs to share on Twitter etc. You can see this in action on this blogpost. Why not click on the Like button so you can see how it works.

Here are two places you can get this plugin - here or here (two versions, essentially the same thing though). You can choose to put it at the top or bottom (or both) of your blog posts & pages.

Add Facebook’s ‘Like’ button to your blogs is a post from: Internet Marketing Highway

Advertising on Facebook is one of the bandwagons that many business owners will jump on this year to promote their products & services online, however it was actually launched back in November 2007 so it’s been around for a while. I’ve been using Facebook’s pay-per-click platform for about 12-months now and can now say, with experience, that I actually prefer it over Google’s Adwords platform for a number of reasons.

Before I get into that, I just want to frame this up properly and share some common stats about Facebook that you may already have heard about, but are worth being repeated:

• Founded in February 2004 with a $500,000 investment (followed by 2 further rounds of private investment injecting $12.7million in 2005 and $27.5million in 2006 into the company). Microsoft also took a $240million equity stake in 2007.
• 400million (400,000,000) active users reached in February 2010 (6 years since launch)
• 200million users log-in every single day
• Facebook stock is valued at $10billion (May 2009)
• There are 1.5 million business Pages created by business owners

Now I’m not here to convince you that Facebook [or the Internet in general] is a powerful way of increasing the exposure of your products or services and that you must use it. The above facts speak for themselves and I merely want to show you how I use these tools and hopefully that will inspire you to look further into it for yourself.

Why I prefer Facebook advertising to Google’s Adwords

In my opinion, not only is Facebook’s platform much more user friendly than Adwords but it’s far more intuitive & accurate for me to be able to really target my advertising.

For example (this is an extreme example here), if I wanted to advertise a product aimed at 18-25 year olds living in London who are single female students at university who like reading about astrology and are interested in networking then I could very easily setup my advert to only target this particular demographic within Facebook. That is, of course, an extreme example but it shows how far you can drill down using the data that your target market provide on their profiles.

A real example that I used for one of my Facebook ad campaigns is this:

Using a Pizza Hut & Dominos Pizza affiliate scheme, I setup a Facebook advertising campaign with a budget of about £300 over 3 days during the week.

These are the settings that I used for that particular ad:

• Male
• 19-25
• Student @ university level
• Location: London, Manchester & Birmingham
• Interests: drinking, clubbing, eating, sleeping, pizza
• Keywords in profile/status: hungry, pizza
• Timing of ad: between 5pm and 8pm on Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday

You can see that I was able to drill down to the exact demographic of the user that I wanted to target with this particular ad. This avoids unnecessary ‘wastage’ of the ad being shown to anyone who I don’t want to target. As the data is pulled directly from the user’s current profile I can be confident that it is all up-to-date and accurate. Facebook also tells you how many users you will ‘reach’ after you have setup your ad, depending on your settings.

The above ad generated enough revenue for me through my affiliate scheme to cover the ad spend of approx. £300 and made a tidy profit on top.

This feature of being able to target viewers of your ad to such detail can be used to target users working for a specific company or competitor too.

Some pointers when using Facebook ads (although most pointers here will apply to any paid advertising platform that you use online):

• Use images in your ads, unlikes Adwords which doesn’t allow images
• Put yourself in the mindset of your potential customer – who are they and what would they be interested in?
• Don’t rely on one advert – use at least 2-4 ads to compare against each other and split-test
• Keep monitoring your ad spend & click-through-rate (CTR)
• Set your budget from the start & limit the daily spend to gather data
• Choose when to show your ad – weekends and weekdays will give very different results

As with all forms of Internet marketing, especially paid advertising, you still need to ensure you have setup your adverts correctly in order to maximise the potential return.

There is more to know about Facebook advertising and I will be creating a guide to using Facebook’s advertising model in the near future.

Facebook Advertising – 2010’s Internet Marketing Bandwagon is a post from: Internet Marketing Highway

There are a number of differences between a Facebook group and a Facebook page that many people do not know about, or that are not very obvious to the uninitiated.

If you are thinking of starting a group or a page on Facebook, here are some things that you should know and consider when deciding which to go for to promote your business/cause/hobby etc:

Pages (i.e. ‘Become a Fan’)

In my opinion, the most important distinction here is that a Facebook Page can be crawled & indexed by Search Engines which means that any content on a Page can be found online through Search Engines such as Google or Yahoo!

• Send updates to fans
• Updates are seen in your fans’ news feed
• ability to add various 3rd party applications to your page such as Twitter which can personalise your page further.
• Great for feeding RSS links into page from your blog
• Restrict access to your page by user age and location
• Pages are not seen as an extension of your personal profile – i.e. great for companies. The page admin is not listed anywhere on the page so a fan would not necessarily know who owns the page
• Can create events
• Stats to monitor page activity such as number of fans, post interactions etc
• No limit as to number of fans

Groups (i.e. ‘Join This Group’)

Groups on Facebook are seen as much more personal and are visibly linked to the person who created the page and the admins.

• Can send messages to all group members (up to a maximum of 5000 members)
• Can setup secret by-invite only groups and moderate much easier than Pages
• Can create events and invite all members of the group to the event
• Not indexed by the Search Engines
• Cannot add 3rd party applications or link blogs/Twitter to groups

There are other differences between the Pages and Groups but the above comparison should get your started when deciding whether to have a Page or a Group.

Groups are great for promoting personal hobbies or interests whereas Pages get my vote when you want to promote a business or a raise brand awareness.

What’s the difference between Groups and Pages on Facebook? is a post from: Internet Marketing Highway

So you’ve got a website or a blog…great. You are already one step ahead of millions of others who don’t even get to that stage (i’m not even kidding).

The biggest misconception out there is that by simply putting up a new blog or website that you will suddenly get bucket loads of traffic and visits quickly. I won’t beat around the bush on this point – that’s not how it works.

Having a blog is a great way to improve your online presence for both business and also personal reasons. You can build a blog for free using tools such as WordPress, Blogger and Typepad and begin posting content right away. However, if nobody is reading that content that you spent ages creating, then what’s the point of it all?

I hear people saying things like “blogging doesn’t work” all the time. It turns out that they tried blogging for a few weeks, published a few random blog posts and then expected the traffic to pile in. No wonder blogging didn’t work for them! My advice, which is hardly rocket science, is that you must treat your blog/website almost as a business in itself: you need to put the time and effort in and treat it seriously to make a success of it.

Here are ten things you need to be aware of when blogging for business or personal reaons:

1.    Fresh Content

Have you ever been to a website that said ‘last updated 1997′ or ‘last updated 254 days ago’? What impression does that give the reader? Nobody wants to visit a blog to see the same content all the time. Update your website and blog content at an asbolute minimum of twice a week to keep your content very fresh and current. Your content can be things like industry news, tips, advice, warnings, an update on your work/projects, feedback received from clients..etc.
It’s perfectly fine to write content and upload it to your website/blog and set it up to publish every few days. This way, you do all the hard work at the beginning and put your updates on auto-pilot whilst you research more ways of improving your blog.

2.    Article Marketing*

This is where you write articles not only for your blog content but also to distribute to article submission websites. You can usually put a link back to your website or blog within your article (usually in the author’s bio box). Article marketing is a great way of putting yourself “out there” as the authority and go-to person for your expertise area.

There are thousands of article submission websites that you can use to distribute your articles, but to start with i’d recommend Ezinearticles.com

*The same applies for Video Marketing

3.    Social Networking

The buzz word for the past few years. Incase you’ve been living under a rock recently this includes Facebook, Twitter, Squidoo, LinkedIn, MySpace etc. Social networks are great to find like minded people who you know would be interested in your content. It’s very easy to target the demographic of your ideal blog reader using different social networks and by connecting with those people and sharing your thoughts you can easily gather quite a following.

It’s also very easy to link your blog to all your social networking profiles, so that when you update your blog all the other profiles get updated too.

4.    Viral Marketing

Ever seen one of those videos that everyone is talking about? Viral marketing is when your content (article/video/audio etc) is passed on from one person to their friends & contacts to see. Then those people will tell their friends about it, and so on. Before you know it, hundreds or thousands (sometimes millions!) of people have seen your content.

A good way of making your content viral is by discussing topical issues or adding some controversy into your message – it’s sneaky, but so what!

5.    Use RSS Feeds

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. The visitors and readers of your blog can ‘subscribe’ to your RSS feed and get an email update whenever new content is posted on your blog. It is an easy way for your readers to keep up with your blog without having to actually go to your blog. RSS feeds can also be used to update other sites and social networks.

6.    Submit Your Blog to Search Engines

By manually submitting your blog to search engines helps your website/blog to be indexed and get ranked. Google and Yahoo! are the most popular search engines you want to ‘crawl’ your blog pages. Manually submitted your URL does not guarantee top ranking or indexing…there’s much more you can do to get your blog indexed quickly.

7.    Joining Forums

Relevant forums are full of your target readers. You are marketing yourself to find traffic to your website because people are interested in what you have to say. Become a member of a relevant forum for your industry connect with new people and share ideas. You can add a link to your blog in the signature line so others can click on it and read & subscribe to your blog.

8.    Visit other blogs

If someone comments on any of your blogposts, show your appreciation by also posting comments on their blogs. This helps form relationships with other bloggers. Also, you can add a link back to your own blog when commenting on someone elses!

9.    SEO Marketing

SEO is an entire industry in itself but a quick word on it here. Do ensure you use your relevant keywords in your content to attract the search engines. Getting a keyword density (ratio of keyword text to all text) between three and ten percent is recommended by most schools of thought (although this can totally depend based on what your competitors are doing on their sites). Don’t forget to do your keyword research first though – it’s pointless doing SEO for a keyword that nobody is searching for!

10.    Social Bookmarking

Not to be confused with social networking. Social bookmarking is when you submit your posts to sites which allows others who are members of those sites to track you back to your blog. For example, sites such as Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon are social bookmarking sites.

10 Quick Ways to Boost Traffic to Your Blog is a post from: Internet Marketing Highway

The iPhone…officially the greatest gadget of the 21st century to date.

If somebody ten years before the iPhone had said that one day you would be able to run your entire business from a device that fits into your pocket…and is also a phone, most if not everyone would have laughed it off or just ignored the prediction.

The iPhone is not just a phone. It’s a mini-computer that allows you to maintain productivity for your business whilst on-the-go.

Below are the apps that I use on my iPhone to run my business. You will see that if I didn’t have an actual desktop computer, it wouldn’t really be the end of the world and I could still carry on my business as normal.

WordPress

I can control multiple WordPress blogs using the WordPress app. This app lets you add new posts, edit existing posts, moderate comments and add new pages. I can update my blogs whilst I travel without having to use the laptop so now I usually don’t carry my laptop with me.

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TweetDeck

As I have multiple Twitter accounts (follow me) and TweetDeck allows me to keep an eye on all my accounts at once. It also allows you to use Facebook too but I only use this for Twitter. You can tweet directly, reply, send DM’s, retweet other tweets all from inside this app which makes keeping track of everything really easy.

The really cool thing is that if you use TweetDeck on your Mac/PC too, the iPhone app will sync over the air any columns you have setup (needs a TweetDeck account to do this, which doesn’t cost anything).

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Tapatalk

This app gives me access to my favourite online forums such as James Schramko’s SuperFastResults Internet marketing forum that I use on a daily basis. The forum owner needs to have setup their forum onto the Tapatalk app which doesn’t cost them anything at all. There are two versions of Tapatalk – one which is like a ‘read-only’ version but the premium version lets you reply to threads, messages etc from inside the app.

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Evernote

I have a confession. I cannot function without a to-do list. Evernote is the mother of all to-do lists and is available as an iPhone app. I have the Evernote application on my Mac which syncs over the air with the iPhone app so both are always current.

Evernote lets me create text, voice and image notes of my thoughts & ideas. If I see something whilst out and about and want to make a ‘mental note’ of it, I take a quick pic of it (or a voice note) and put it through my Evernote app on iPhone. Then, when I get back to my Mac that note has been synced and I can take action on it straight away.

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Facebook

I use Facebook mostly to keep in touch with personal friends from school & university, but I also have a fan page for the Internet Marketing Highway which you can join by clicking here.

I like the iPhone app for Facebook as it gives me push notifications rather than clogging up my inbox with notifications.

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LinkedIn

This app is great for making new connections and keeping up-to-date with my business connections on LinkedIn. I’ll admit that this is the app that I use the least out of this list as I do have a LinkedIn profile but don’t regularly update it manually (all my RSS feeds and Twitter accounts are fed into my LinkedIn account though).

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Skype

What better way to use your phone than with Skype! I have a Skype subscription which gives me free calls and now rather than having to use a headset with my Mac, I can use Skype directly from my iPhone.

You don’t have to have a Skype subscription to use this app, you can have a normal PAYG Skype account too. This app only works over a WiFi connection though and not over a 3G connection.

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PayPal

As I make and receive lots of payments online using PayPal it helps to have access to my account when I’m on the go travelling or away from my computer. The app is good as it lets me see all my recent account activity and I can also send money through PayPal directly from the app.

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Billings

This is the name of the application that i’ve been using on my Mac to send invoices and track billable time spent on tasks. It’s a simple application and is nowhere near as complicated as other invoicing packages. It’s now been made available for iPhone and it automatically syncs with my Mac to keep both applications current. I can send invoices, add billable time, add billable tasks, track mileage, track expenses plus lots more through the app itself.

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Rowmote Pro

This app let’s me control my ENTIRE Mac from my iPhone. It serves as my clicker when speaking with a presentation, it acts as my touchscreen wireless mouse & trackpad, it controls dvd’s & itunes…and pretty much EVERYTHING else on my Mac. I can even shut my Mac down from this app. Just incredible!

I love this app the most for it’s clicker feature which allows me to use it with Keynote/Powerpoint when doing presentations & workshops on stage.

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Xe.com

As I subscribe to different forums and buy products online in all sorts of different currencies, the Xe.com app gives me the price of something that i’m looking at buying/subscribing to.

So as you can see, I can pretty much run my entire business from my iPhone without having to spend lots of cash on remote access systems or carry around my MacBook.

Using iPhone for business? Don’t miss these 11 apps is a post from: Internet Marketing Highway

One of my favourite tools that I use to update my Twitter and Facebook accounts easily is TweetDeck.

TweetDeck is no secret software and it is used by thousands (maybe millions) of Twitter users but I really think it is a fantastically easy way to boost your social networking productivity.

You can use TweetDeck to keep your LinkedIn and MySpace profiles updated too but I don’t use MySpace so I just don’t have a column showing that network.

I use TweetDeck to manage & keep an eye on multiple Twitter accounts for myself and on behalf of my top clients. Best of all, Tweetdeck is absolutely no-cost to use (whilst in beta mode, though this might change in the future).

I highly recommend TweetDeck for its

• ease of use
• features such as multiple account tweeting at once (or Facebook status updating)
• easy re-tweeting
• Automatic URL shortening service
• hassle-free spam blocking
• interactive notifications that don’t stop you doing what you are working on
• comprehensive search feature
• easy to follow & unfollow people
• nice way of seeing somebody’s profile by clicking on their username which shows vital info such as website URL, number of followers, biography and recent tweets
• dedicated iPhone app available for free

There are lots of other tools specifically made to manage multiple social networking accounts such as Hootsuite and Social Oomph but TweetDeck gets my vote just because it’s so simple to use and it does everything I need it to do.

You can download TweetDeck from their website which is www.tweetdeck.com and if you are on Twitter, you can follow my tweets too.

TweetDeck Makes Twitter and Facebook easy is a post from: Internet Marketing Highway

Something that i’ve picked up on through all the networking that I do (online and offline) is that people treat an online community massively different to an offline community, yet both are made up of the same people. It’s strange how human behaviour changes just because the engagement and contact is through a screen as opposed to being face-to-face.

An example used in a book I recently read by MD of the world’s largest joined-up networking organisation, 4Networking, makes this point perfectly:

You wouldn’t walk into a pub or a party (or any social scenario), find the first person that looks like a potential client and start hard-selling to them. It just wouldn’t happen….and if it did, you’d not have many friends at that event because you would be avoided like the plague. Nobody would buy from you and by the end of the event you would be disillusioned and probably conclude that the event wasn’t any good.

Yet so many people who wouldn’t do the above in ‘real life’ do it all the time online – in forums, blogs and on social networks (especially on Twitter), and then they complain that “social networking doesn’t work”. I wonder why!

My advice is to treat the online community the same as you would a group of people at a party or at the pub. Build a relationship, build trust, offer value, offer advice and have a laugh too. Some of the best business relationships can be formed at a party, purely because there is a good level of rapport and a mixture of business and social chit-chat. Nobody likes boring business talk all the time, mix it up a bit.

Treating the online community the same as an offline community is a post from: Internet Marketing Highway