Of the many free Facebook marketing opportunities you need to know about, the following ways to advertise your business are suggested as the most productive.
All you need once you’ve set up your free Facebook account to maximize your advertising, is the ability to be creative.
Here are some the free Facebook marketing opportunities that you can get creative with.
Facebook’s Marketplace is frequently used by College students to find roommates, used books, and scout for cheap used furniture for their pads.
Creative business owners can advertise their products and services here, or even use the Marketplace to search for new employees.
One of the free Facebook marketing opportunities that is often overlooked by business owners, is the Facebook profile page. Don’t underestimate it’s effectiveness.
All members get their own Facebook profile page when they sign up for their free account. Here you can upload pictures, your business logo, your business URL, and any other information about your company that you think will encourage friends to visit your business.
Use the Groups feature to network with your target niche audience. Using the Groups feature, you can create a group for your business to create a “buzz” about your product or services; or you can join an existing group to promote your business.
You can lose a lot of business if you neglect to list the city that your business is located in, your market niche or industry, your neighborhood, or any other pertinent information that potential customers or business partners need to know in order to find your business. Don’t ignore the Networks question when you create your company’s profile.
- The Facebook Events Application
The next time you want to advertise a company function event; use the free Facebook Events app. You’ll find it more effective and economical than printing flyers, mailers, or other conventional advertising methods.
- The Facebook Badge Feature
The customizable Facebook Badge feature, allows your Facebook friends to be linked to your business website. It is a way to share your Facebook information on other websites.
The FunWall allows you to keep in close contact with all your Facebook friends. You can create messages or send greetings to all your friends at one time using this feature.
Facebook’s Inbox allows you to send secure, private messages to all your clients if you choose or just to individual contacts.
The Top Friends Network can be used as a marketing tool to group your contacts demographically, and to effectively reach your businesses best customers very quickly.
- Facebook Notes Application
You can use the Facebook Notes application as a marketing tool to post your company’s important news information. With it you can post messages, links, photos, or anything else you would like to promote your business.
There are many other free Facebook marketing opportunities you can create to promote your business if you just use your imagination.
Among other things, traffic generation requires the proper placement of keywords in your page title and other key locations in your website.
Keyword research is a basic requirement for any traffic generating strategy.
You need to know which keywords are being searched for the most in your market niche, which keywords you need to target for your site, and what keywords your competition is using.
Once you have identified those keywords, the most important places to use them is in the title of your web pages and in your articles.
All the search engines use the title of your website and webpages as a major determining factor in ranking your site.
The titles of your web pages and website are also used by the search engines for your listing in the search results.
It’s important to remember that if you have a multi-page website, not a one-page static website, every single page of your site needs to be optimized for the search engines using the keyword phrases you researched.
Every single page of your website will show up separately in the search results, not just your home page.
It is essential to place the keyword you want to rank for in the title tag, the title of the article, and at least in one (<h1></h1>), heading tag. This is how your visitors will locate you through their searches.
Many businesses that are just starting out online, will place their business name at the top of every web page in their website, and nowhere else. They then wonder why their traffic is not up to par.
Although it’s important to have your business name in the title of your webpages, the fact is that you also need targeted keywords in the title, to get organic search traffic.
Organic search traffic, is the traffic you get from people who locate you through searching a specific keyword that is relevant to your market niche.
The truth is that most people don’t even care about your business name until they discover your services.
Let’s take an example.
An alzheimers community in Savannah, Ga. is named “Shadowmoss Plantation”.
After doing a bit of research, we found that many people were searching for “Shadowmoss Plantation” because it is a golf country club, ranked in the first page of the search engine results for that keyword phrase.
In order to show up in the rankings for that phrase; it was necessary to include “alzheimers” in the title and change the keyword phrase to “Shadowmoss Plantation Alzheimer’s”.
After the change was initiated, the business eventually showed up on the first page of the search engine results.
Proper placement of keywords in your page title is not only important, it is essential if you plan on getting ranked highly in the search engine results.
It is important to know what constitutes an authority site if you are interested in achieving a top position with the search engines.
Linking to authority sites make the job of attaining a higher search engine results page (SERP) ranking much easier, than to websites that have not already achieved this status.
Achieving authority site status is what we should all be striving for if you are an owner of a business website.
Some websites that have not undergone search engine optimization are already authority sites, but are not recognized as such by the search engines.
Websites that either lack sufficient content or enough links, are normally not considered authority sites by the search engines.
Authority websites normally dominate the top ten results for the highly competitive, high traffic keywords on most of the search engines.
Except for a very few exceptional sites, the search engines usually smile favorably on websites they define as authority sites and reward them accordingly with the top rankings.
When it comes down to exactly what constitutes an authority site; several things come to bear.
Generally, authority sites have quite a bit more content and web pages than other websites.
Search engines love content rich websites and feed on them. Websites that are loaded with a lot of web pages that are filled with a lot of content per page, generally do much better with the search engines than a smaller website with only a “tickler” paragraph on each page.
Links from other authority sites to your website, will help your site become established as an authority site.
The search engines will give more weight to incoming links from authority sites that have the same or similar main keywords as your site, than inbound links from other less established websites.
Now that you know what constitutes an authority site; you can go about establishing your site as an authority site.
Here are three things you must do to move things along.
- Add more pages to your website.
- Add more content to your webpages.
- Find some authority link partners that are willing to link back to your website.
It sounds easy, but it takes a lot of time and work to achieve authority site status.
Before you jump in and start adding more web pages to your website; do some research to find out why your competition is beating you out in the search engine rankings, so you can take appropriate action.
You can usually get some good ideas by checking out your competition to see what they are doing and how they are doing it.
When you know what type pages you need to add to your site; go ahead and either write some additional content yourself, or outsource the task to a copywriter or ghost writer.
If you know how to incorporate keyword rich text into your content, you can do it yourself. Otherwise, delegate the work or hire someone to do it for you.
The web is loaded with good “hungry” writers looking to earn some money who do this on a regular basis, or you can go to article exchanges where you can grab content for free, providing you include the author’s resource box which usually includes a link back to the author’s site.
After you have posted more pages with additional content, you need to start soliciting authority sites and get them to link back to your site.
You can solicit backlinks from webmasters by email or by commenting on sites that allow HTML or URLs in the comments section.
Both methods will get positive results when done properly. You will find that some people will answer your emails promptly, while others will not even bother to take the time to respond.
The better your website looks and the higher quality content you provide; the more likely authority sites will consider linking to your site.
After you have uploaded more pages with quality content to your site, and have acquired at least 10 authority links back to your website; you will need to make sure that your web pages are properly optimized for the search engines.
Once all these steps are accomplished, you can resubmit your website to the major search engines and web directories so that their robots can crawl your site, re index it and move it up in the rankings.
In Search Engine Optimization, knowing what constitutes an authority site is the first and most important step to improving your website’s search engine ranking.
