For the record, I do not recommend you spend any significant time right now building up a list of people who like your business page. Here’s why:

The whole idea…

This is why email marketing has been the mainstay of any successful business online–it’s a cost-effective and easy way to keep in touch with a lot of people.

The Dead Sea of internet marketing

When someone comes to your business page, and they click the “Like” button, that’s about where the interaction ends. Once they leave your business page, there’s no good way to get in touch with them again.

You can’t send them a message (like you could if you were a Facebook Group owner) and you can’t post something on their walls.

It’s like having a large email list that you can’t send email to. Your fans just accumulate and sit there.

The News Feed

“If a tree falls in a forest and nobody’s around to hear it…”
So unless a bunch of people happen to visit your business page and all decide to comment on your most recent wall post, then your message isn’t going to get out to your fans. So the question is “If you post something on your business page and nobody’s there to see it, does it make a noise?”

And the answer is “not enough noise to actually help your business”.

The future of FB Business Pages

I would hope Facebook would give businesses the ability to send messages directly to their fans.

I would hope Facebook will create a direct message autoresponder of of some kind (this comes standard with most email services–see “Email Lists Basics: Email Marketing that Pays” if you’re not sure what I”m talking about).

Final analysis…

But it might take months or it might take years, and business owners should focus on the things that will make them money today.

Facebook Business Pages will not give you a return on your efforts at this time. There are many other things I would recommend you focus on that would give you a much better ROI.

Other popular Social Marketing tutorials (Premium Members):

• How To Quickly Find Your Best Prospects via Social Networking Sites
  
• How to Launch a Successful Facebook Group
  
• Social Marketing Tour: The Latest and Greatest Social Marketing Sites
  

But if you’ve never created a site using Wordpress before, it can take a lot of time to figure out just what Wordpress has provided you with.

If you know what to expect, you can get up and moving quickly. Here’s an overview to get you oriented.

Yours in success,
-Jarom Adair

Unlike a lot of my videos that just focus on a single tip or strategy, this is a beginning-to-end blueprint for finding new clients and customers on social networks.

These strategies are not only very effective, but you’ll learn how to drive traffic to your site in such a way that your customers will love you for it!

In case you didn’t know…

Membership to this web site includes:

• Access to the daily Coaching Calls
  
• 100+ Advanced Tutorials (like the one you just watched)
  
• An inside look at how I market my web site (the Mentoring Program)
  
• A free collection of resources like the book “Think and Grow Rich”

Special Gift Code: “socialmkting”

Continue here!

These are sites like EzineArticles.com that don’t have any particular theme to them, but generally attract a lot of traffic and have high search engine rankings (both good things for you).

Here’s a list of some popular generic article submission sites (in order of their Alexa ranking):

Articlesbase

Go Articles

Article Dashboard

Article Alley

Idea Marketers

Article City

Once you write an article for one of these sites, submitting it to the others is pretty straightforward. They require, for the most part, the same information and have you fill in the same fields.

I’m also reviewing article submission services and article submission software (both reviews coming soon).

Other popular Article Marketing tutorials:

• Quantity vs. Quality–How to Get the Most from Your Articles
  
• How to Get Your Articles Read
  
• How to Find More Quality Sites to Submit Articles To
  

These are sites like EzineArticles.com that don’t have any particular theme to them, but generally attract a lot of traffic and have high search engine rankings (both good things for you).

Here’s a list of some popular generic article submission sites (in order of their Alexa ranking):

Articlesbase

Go Articles

Article Dashboard

Article Alley

Idea Marketers

Article City

Once you write an article for one of these sites, submitting it to the others is pretty straightforward. They require, for the most part, the same information and have you fill in the same fields.

I’m also reviewing article submission services and article submission software (both reviews coming soon).

Concerning these two articles I haven’t written yet, here is the way things work: the information that will eventually become those two articles will likely reside in my head for the next couple months, accessable only by my daily conference call. Once I get around to writing a tutorial on them then I will only make them available as advanced tutorials. Then I’ll eventually, maybe sometime next year, release them to the general public as free tutorials and send them out to my email list.

If you don’t want to wait till next year, you can get immediate access to everything on my site and in my head via the conference call and advanced tutorials here. Just something to think about.

Other popular Article Marketing tutorials:

• Quantity vs. Quality–How to Get the Most from Your Articles
  
• How to Get Your Articles Read
  
• How to Find More Quality Sites to Submit Articles To
  

It’s pretty simple–search engine spiders are trying to look at each web site they encounter as if they were human. If something is good or helpful for a human visitor, a search engine will give you a better rank. Here’s what I mean…

Humans like fresh content: Human visitors like new content to read. If you put new pages and text on your web site on a regular basis, people will come to your site more often to read it.

Likewise, the more often you update and add new content the more often search engines will search your site and index your new content. If you post new stories on your blog a couple times a week, Google might visit your site once a week to see what is new and add it to their search results. Google will visit larger sites (like, for example, CNN.com) several times a day because the web site is updated continually throughout the day.

So, to get your web site visited regularly by a spider, you want to update your site as often as possible. If you stop adding new content for 6 six months, a spider will act like a human visitor would–they’ll visit less and less frequently until they stop visiting completely.

Making content accessible: Humans like to be able to find new content. If you create a new page and you put a link from your home page to that new page, it’s easy for people to find the new page. Whereas if you put a new page on your site but you don’t link to it, human visitors can’t find that page.

Spiders find content by following links too. Once you’ve got a new page on your site, you want to make sure there is a link to the new content so a spider can find it.

One thing you can do to make sure search engines visit all the important pages on your site is create a site map. A site map is simply a list of links to each of the important pages on your site. For an example, visit MyEZBills.com. This is an old client of mine, and if you look in the lower right-hand corner you’ll see a “site map” link.

A search engine that finds this link will quickly gain access to all the pages on the web site. The spider can just go down the list. A site map is also helpful for your human visitors. If someone can’t find the information they’re looking for, a quick visit to the site map can point them in the right direction.

Outgoing links: If you’re giving a human visitor useful information, you would probably link to other resources around the internet that would also be useful for your visitors to visit (like my link to MyEZBills above). If you have a lot of content, it’s expected that it will include links that leave your site.

Without outgoing links you become a stagnant “Dead Sea” website–links go in but they don’t go out. Since links to other resources off of your site are helpful to humans, search engine spiders want to see them on your site.

Things that spiders can’t handle

Flash navigation: If the links on your web site are made of Flash animation, it’s hard for spiders to follow the links. Search engines will eventually be able to navigate a Flash site, but for now it’s difficult for them.

Password protected pages: All of the advanced tutorials on the IMFBO web site can’t be searched because spiders don’t have a username and a password to get to the content. So that content on this web site will never be searched by the search engines (until that fine day arrives that Google trains their spiders to open a PayPal account and pay me money each month) (that’s unlikely).

External scripts: Sometimes the links of your site are created using external scripts. Some advanced navigation, like drop-down menus, use external files that make it hard for spiders to follow (e.g. <script type=’text/javascript’ src=’menu_nav.js’></script>).

Dynamic HTML: Any DHTML scripts where the <a href> link is found within javascript code is harder for spiders to read (e.g. <a onMouseOut=”MM_swapImgRestore()” onMouseOver=”MM_swapImage(’document.link’,'document. link’,'images/link2.gif’,'#930247173868′)” href=”link.html”> <img src=”images/link.gif”></a>).

(if that previous line made any sense to you whatsoever, you’re a bigger nerd than I am)

Frames: Frames are a way of displaying two html files on one page. They were used a lot to let you scroll around a page while keeping the site navigation in one spot. An older way of creating a web site, frames still have their uses but spiders have a hard time indexing them properly.

If you want to see an example of frames in action, you can visit Jarom’s very first web page created in 1998 (warning–this is, in fact, the very first web page I ever created. It’s a collection of jokes, and it’s not very pretty…).

Other popular Search Engine tutorials:

• How to break a search engine’s heart
  
• Optimize Your Site for the Right Keywords
  
• Thwarting the Search Engines
  

It’s pretty simple–search engine spiders are trying to look at each web site they encounter as if they were human. If something is good or helpful for a human visitor, a search engine will give you a better rank. Here’s what I mean…

Humans like fresh content: Human visitors like new content to read. If you put new pages and text on your web site on a regular basis, people will come to your site more often to read it.

Likewise, the more often you update and add new content the more often search engines will search your site and index your new content. If you post new stories on your blog a couple times a week, Google might visit your site once a week to see what is new and add it to their search results. Google will visit larger sites (like, for example, CNN.com) several times a day because the web site is updated continually throughout the day.

So, to get your web site visited regularly by a spider, you want to update your site as often as possible. If you stop adding new content for 6 six months, a spider will act like a human visitor would–they’ll visit less and less frequently until they stop visiting completely.

Making content accessible: Humans like to be able to find new content. If you create a new page and you put a link from your home page to that new page, it’s easy for people to find the new page. Whereas if you put a new page on your site but you don’t link to it, human visitors can’t find that page.

Spiders find content by following links too. Once you’ve got a new page on your site, you want to make sure there is a link to the new content so a spider can find it.

One thing you can do to make sure search engines visit all the important pages on your site is create a site map. A site map is simply a list of links to each of the important pages on your site. For an example, visit MyEZBills.com. This is an old client of mine, and if you look in the lower right-hand corner you’ll see a “site map” link.

A search engine that finds this link will quickly gain access to all the pages on the web site. The spider can just go down the list. A site map is also helpful for your human visitors. If someone can’t find the information they’re looking for, a quick visit to the site map can point them in the right direction.

Outgoing links: If you’re giving a human visitor useful information, you would probably link to other resources around the internet that would also be useful for your visitors to visit (like my link to MyEZBills above). If you have a lot of content, it’s expected that it will include links that leave your site.

Without outgoing links you become a stagnant “Dead Sea” website–links go in but they don’t go out. Since links to other resources off of your site are helpful to humans, search engine spiders want to see them on your site.

Things that spiders can’t handle

Flash navigation: If the links on your web site are made of Flash animation, it’s hard for spiders to follow the links. Search engines will eventually be able to navigate a Flash site, but for now it’s difficult for them.

Password protected pages: All of the advanced tutorials on the IMFBO web site can’t be searched because spiders don’t have a username and a password to get to the content. So that content on this web site will never be searched by the search engines (until that fine day arrives that Google trains their spiders to open a PayPal account and pay me money each month) (that’s unlikely).

External scripts: Sometimes the links of your site are created using external scripts. Some advanced navigation, like drop-down menus, use external files that make it hard for spiders to follow (e.g. <script type=’text/javascript’ src=’menu_nav.js’></script>).

Dynamic HTML: Any DHTML scripts where the <a href> link is found within javascript code is harder for spiders to read (e.g. <a onMouseOut=”MM_swapImgRestore()” onMouseOver=”MM_swapImage(’document.link’,'document. link’,'images/link2.gif’,'#930247173868′)” href=”link.html”> <img src=”images/link.gif”></a>).

(if that previous line made any sense to you whatsoever, you’re a bigger nerd than I am)

Frames: Frames are a way of displaying two html files on one page. They were used a lot to let you scroll around a page while keeping the site navigation in one spot. An older way of creating a web site, frames still have their uses but spiders have a hard time indexing them properly.

If you want to see an example of frames in action, you can visit Jarom’s very first web page created in 1998 (warning–this is, in fact, the very first web page I ever created. It’s a collection of jokes, and it’s not very pretty…).

If you’re still taking me at all seriously after that jokes page, you should seriously consider becoming a full member of my site so you can get access to the advanced tutorials mentioned above (because Google’s spiders certainly won’t be finding them any time soon). There are a lot of other benefits to membership you should be aware of too.

Other popular Search Engine tutorials:

• How to break a search engine’s heart
  
• Optimize Your Site for the Right Keywords
  
• Thwarting the Search Engines
  

Email users can be kind of careless when it comes to hitting the spam button, but there are a few things you can do to greatly reduce getting your email marked as spam.

Valuable content
First of all, sending out valuable and relevant content will cut down on spam complaints more than anything else. Even if somebody asked to receive emails from you previously, if you send them useless content people will penalize you with spam complaints.

Email them often
If you send out quality content, you’ll want to do so as often as you can.

If you stop sending emails to your list for a couple months then people may not recognize you when you start again, and into the spam bucket you go!

Confirm their email
As described in the Email Marketing that Pays video, requiring that people go to their email and click a link to verify their email address will ensure that the person wants to hear from you.

If you don’t do this you may get people entering in other people’s email addresses, and those other people will mark you as spam when you suddenly start sending them email.

I’ve heard that one of the meanest email pranks you can pull on someone is to submit their email address to a certain “Klingon Email Group” (”Klingon” being an alien race in the “Star Trek” fictional universe), and if someone wants to be properly removed from that email list they have to submit a request to be removed using the Klingon language (yes, the Klingons have their own real language–there’s even a nonprofit “Klingon Language Institute”). How would you like someone else to submit your email to that list?

Well, that was way off topic…

The down side is you will undoubtedly lose some interested subscribers this way who forget to confirm their email.

Update: To double opt-in or not to double opt-in?
While monitoring my subscription rate, I’ve noted that over time between 25%~30% of my subscribers don’t opt-in to my email list.

Undoubtedly some of these are fake emails or email accounts set up as “junk accounts” (you know what I’m talking about–those spam magnet email addresses we each have that we give out to anybody who wants our email that we don’t want to hear from, and the last time we checked that account it had 26,732 unread messages in it–yeah, that’s the one).

So upwards of 1/3 of people submitting their information to my site weren’t confirming, so I’ve got an ongoing experiment happening on my site where I’m splitting half my sign-ups to a double opt-in list and half to a list they’re automatically added into (no confirmation email).

I’m monitoring the open rates, spam complaints, and click-through percentages on both lists for future tutorials.

Other popular Email Marketing tutorials:

• Where, when, and how often? Common email questions…
  
• How to Avoid the Spam Filters
  
• Writing Emails that Get Opened
  

Email users can be kind of careless when it comes to hitting the spam button, but there are a few things you can do to greatly reduce getting your email marked as spam.

Valuable content
First of all, sending out valuable and relevant content will cut down on spam complaints more than anything else. Even if somebody asked to receive emails from you previously, if you send them useless content people will penalize you with spam complaints.

Email them often
If you send out quality content, you’ll want to do so as often as you can.

If you stop sending emails to your list for a couple months then people may not recognize you when you start again, and into the spam bucket you go!

Confirm their email
As described in the Email Marketing that Pays video, requiring that people go to their email and click a link to verify their email address will ensure that the person wants to hear from you.

If you don’t do this you may get people entering in other people’s email addresses, and those other people will mark you as spam when you suddenly start sending them email.

I’ve heard that one of the meanest email pranks you can pull on someone is to submit their email address to a certain “Klingon Email Group” (”Klingon” being an alien race in the “Star Trek” fictional universe), and if someone wants to be properly removed from that email list they have to submit a request to be removed using the Klingon language (yes, the Klingons have their own real language–there’s even a nonprofit “Klingon Language Institute”). How would you like someone else to submit your email to that list?

Well, that was way off topic…

The down side is you will undoubtedly lose some interested subscribers this way who forget to confirm their email.

Update: To double opt-in or not to double opt-in?
While monitoring my subscription rate, I’ve noted that over time between 25%~30% of my subscribers don’t opt-in to my email list.

Undoubtedly some of these are fake emails or email accounts set up as “junk accounts” (you know what I’m talking about–those spam magnet email addresses we each have that we give out to anybody who wants our email that we don’t want to hear from, and the last time we checked that account it had 26,732 unread messages in it–yeah, that’s the one).

So upwards of 1/3 of people submitting their information to my site weren’t confirming, so I’ve got an ongoing experiment happening on my site where I’m splitting half my sign-ups to a double opt-in list and half to a list they’re automatically added into (no confirmation email).

I’m monitoring the open rates, spam complaints, and click-through percentages on both lists, and you can ask me for an update on them at any time on my daily conference call (get access to my conference call here). You can ask me anything else you want on that call too. I know you’ve got questions nobody’s giving you straight answers to…

Other popular Email Marketing tutorials:

• Where, when, and how often? Common email questions…
  
• How to Avoid the Spam Filters
  
• Writing Emails that Get Opened
  

Don’t worry. After reading this, you will never want for topics to write about again.

In fact, if you follow what I talk about here, you’ll quickly run into the second concern most people have next, namely: “Where will I get the time to write all of these posts?”

Let me knock both of those questions out at the same time–I’ll start with a simple suggestion which will not only help you come up with a wide range of ideas on what to write about, but will also help you understand how blogging will actually give you more free time.

Great Blog Posts that will Free Up Your Time
The first thing I suggest you write about are common questions and concerns your customers usually have. It’s very simple–what are some of the questions you get over and over again? What are some of the things that stop your customers from buying? What doubts do they normally have when working with you?

By answering these questions you have a virtually unlimited source of great blog material. Are customers concerned about your pricing? Do they have questions about quality? When they’re trying to figure out why to choose you over your competitors, what do you tell them? All these things make great blog posts you can use to educate customers and win them over for your business!

Not only that but–and this is key to your busy schedule–as you answer these questions you save yourself all the time it use to take answering these questions over and over again for every customer that asks them. If you send these answers out by email as well as post them on your blog (yes–do both), then customers can read the answers whenever they want. It might take an hour for you (or someone who works with you) to thoroughly write out the answer to a customer question, but then you never have to take the time to answer it again.

Saving time in person
In many instances when someone asks me a question I’ve already written an answer to (this is great for any question that requires more than 30 seconds to answer), it works very well for me to say “I’ve actually written down the answer to that question, and several other questions that you may have such as…” then I list a couple other common questions people in their position have. Then I ask them “Could I have you read over that information on my web site after we’re done talking? You’ll get very thorough answers to your questions and I think it would be very informative for you.” If I’m at a computer, I’ll offer to send them an email with a link to the page answering their questions.

Most the time they agree and I continue on with our conversation without having to explain things or do any telling and selling.

Use your judgement here, of course. If putting off answering a questions is going to cost you the sale then don’t do this.

A long list of ideas
To give you some additional ideas on what you can write blog posts on, here’s a whole list of possibilities. See if some of these get your imagination going:

1. Insights from company officers
   
2. Tips and tactics
   
3. Product reviews
   
4. New product introductions
   
5. FAQ’s
   
6. Questions from other customers
   
7. Updates on products, services, and your business
   
8. Surveys and survey follow ups
   
9. Requests for referrals
   
10. Industry news
    
11. Your newest customers and current projects
    
12. Contests
    
13. Discounts
    
14. Coupons
    
15. Special offers
    
16. Articles
    
17. Sales
    
18. Customer testimonials
    
19. Tutorials
    
20. Downloads
    
21. Changes in business that affect customers
    
22. New applications for existing products/services
    
23. Statistics
    
24. Links to relevant sites
    
25. Create a series of emails on a topic and send them out over the space of several days or more
    
26. Tips and advice on how to find quality businesses to purchase from and work with (what to look for, what to avoid…)
    

I love that last one–there’s a lot of concern out there about buying shoddy merchandise, getting bad service, or getting involved with a bad company. If you teach them how to avoid businesses they don’t want to work with, you can then help your prospects understand how a quality business, such as yours, CAN help them.

Scare them
You can even educate your readers on all the bad habits most other businesses have. Horror stories are great. Any tales of caution you can supply will get read religiously.

You want to make it so that by the time someone gets done reading everything you’ve provided for them, it won’t matter if they look at other alternatives or talk to other sales people–they’ll return to you because you’ve educated them on all their alternatives and they’ve chosen to work with you.

What sets you apart?
Can’t think of anything that sets you apart from other business owners? You’d better come up with something fast. If there aren’t any good reasons for your prospects to choose you above all others, you won’t be in business very long.

There is no end to the things you can write about in emails to people. In addition to the suggestions in the article above, just put yourself in the shoes of the people visiting your blog and imagine what kinds of questions you would have. What kind of questions do people wanting what you offer generally have? When you talk to people or reply to emails, take note of the questions they ask and turn them into emails.

Other popular Blog tutorials:

• How Do I Make Money with My Blog?
  
• How to Be an Expert, Even if You’re Just Getting Started
  
• How To Keep Them Coming Back For More