10 Proven Ways to Optimize Your Facebook Page

By: Terri Seymour

Social media marketing is absolutely essential in today’s online business world. It has taken the internet by storm both professionally and personally. Social media marketing means to market your business with the use of social networks, blogs, message boards, discussion groups, online communities and other such media. Some of the most popular social network sites are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Social marketing involves a lot more than just signing up and pasting up your page. You need to maximize your page’s effectiveness and keep it fresh, updated and alive. Below are 10 things you can do to optimize your Facebook page to make sure your business is getting the maximum benefits.

1. Create an Effective Profile – Do not use a half-done profile. Fill in your profile completely. This is for your business so be professional yet show people you care about your customers and will be there for them. Make sure your photo (if of yourself) is professional. You could also use your logo. Let people know what your business can do for them. Write an effective mission statement. Let your visitors know why they should do business with you but be careful what you reveal for security reasons.

2. Get Your Visitors Involved in Discussions – This is a great way to get your visitors to “Like” you and to keep coming back. Start helpful and informative discussions about topics related to your products or services. For example: if you sell home décor, start discussions about home decorating ideas, budget decorating, home improvement, etc. Encourage people to join the discussions and leave their business signature for more exposure.

3. Customize Your Page – Don’t let your page be one of the cookie cutter pages like everyone else. Customize it to fit your business needs and the needs of your visitors. Use images that brand you and your business and make it enjoyable and memorable.

4. Events and Contests – Keep your page alive and active with special events and contests. Each time a fan RSVP’s the event, it shows up in his profile. And so on and so on. Thus creating a ripple effect for your business.

5. Special Offers and Sales – People are always looking for good deals and special offers so don’t disappoint. Show your visitors you want to give them the best possible deal on your products/services.

6. Multi-Media Integration – Use audio and video content for your page. Audio and video can be extremely effective in capturing and holding the attention of visitors. According to webnox, video is 58% more effective than just using plain text!

7. Make Your Tabs More Memorable – Facebook does allow you to change the usual boring tabs to more suit your needs. Make them unique to your page and business. You can also change the order in which you present your tabs. You can find easy to follow online tutorials on how to do this.

8. Utilize Your Sidebar – Take advantage of your sidebar space. This is a great place for testimonials or newsletter sign-up forms. You can also use this space for affiliate links, a survey for your visitors to help improve your page/business. Add links to your main website or special offers you may have going.

9. Add a Poll to Your Page – People like knowing their opinion matters so add interest to your page with a poll. You can add them using a free poll creator from Vizu. Polls can attract attention and encourage your visitors to interact with your page.

10. Post Regularly – I cannot stress this enough! Do not start your page and then let it sit for weeks at a time. You have to be there every day updating, adding new content, checking things over, and finding ways to improve your page. I recently started using social marketing and unfortunately need to take my own advice on this one. I have just not been involved enough with my Facebook page but that will soon be changing. The hold that social media has on the internet is astronomical so do not be left out in the cold!

So far I am involved with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn so feel free to come over and see me. I would love to see your page as I am learning more about this phenomenal marketing tool. I hope we all can use these types of sites to help each other improve our business and increase our sales!

Article Source: http://www.wahm-articles.com

Terri Seymour has over twelve years online experience and has helped many people start their own business. Visit her site for resources, $1 and $2 resell ebooks & software, articles, and affiliate programs. Sign up for the RSS Feed for a free business ebook with MRR. www.SeymourProducts.com

This article may be reprinted for free so long as the author’s resource box is kept intact and all links remain live and clickable. The Article Source must also be included. All rights are reserved by the author.

Are you a shopoholic that loves retail? Are you looking for a way to profit and help other people profit too? Are you already doing reviews and recommendations for the best deals out there? Consider starting your own online consignment business and profiting from what you are already doing.

A consignment business is a store that sells other people’s belongings. You take a commission on the sale and they earn money by selling their items. It’s a great way to make a nice monthly profit. Here’s how to start an online consignment business.

Step One: Decide what you’re going to specialize in. If you are thinking of selling retail then you definitely have products you love and can easily sell.  Remember that you can start with some specific specialties and add more as you grow.  There’s actually a great deal you can sell. For example, you can specialize in:

• Baby clothing
• Maternity clothing
• Housewares
• Pet items
• Art
• Collectibles
• Sports memorabilia
• Fitness equipment
• Formal wear
• Wedding attire
• Vintage items
• Designer clothing
• Teen clothing

The list can go on and on. Find a market where you see a need. Find a market you enjoy and would enjoy selling.

Step Two: Take a look around your community for your first consignment products. Eventually you may acquire goods to sell from all around the country. However, initially it’ll be good to build your store with easily accessible items. Consider asking your friends and family for items to stock your online store. You can look to purchase things inexpensively on craigslist.com at first as well to practice your listings.

Step Three: Build your online store. Once you have a few items to sell online, it’s time to build your website. In addition to building a website you may want to consider selling items on eBay and/or etsy.com. Etsy deals with vintage and homemade items so you’ll have to be selling those to qualify. Otherwise, eBay is a great option. You can build a store right on their site. This way you’re both selling via your own website store and eBay or Etsy. There are great wordpress plugins to help you with it and you can get a site functional within a few hours.  If you are interested in building your own site let me know. I have hosting, will get wordpress added and plugins and have private coaching available as well.

Step Four: Continue collecting items to sell. Your store is only effective and profitable if you have items to sell. This means you’re going to have to market to two audiences. You’re going to want to market your consignment business to people who have things to sell. And you’re going to want to market your business to customers who want to buy.

Initially, it may be advantageous to gather consignment items locally and sell them on your site. As your business grows you can include a form on your website about selling consignment goods on your site and how they can get their own items sold.

Step Five: Agreements and policies. This step is actually a tangent step to creating your online store. You’re going to want to create agreements with both your buyers and your sellers. For example, what commission do you make per sale? How long do you keep an item in your store before you consider it “unsellable” and send it back to the owner? How do you ship? What’s your return policy?

You can glean much of this information by visiting other consignment stores and learning what works for them. Then you can create your own policies and agreements to fit your business goals and needs.

Owning an online consignment store can be tons of fun. As your business grows, you can add other items to your store. For example, you can visit garage sales and find suitable items to sell for a profit. Plan your business well and launch with confidence. To your success!

photo © 2006 Cheon Fong Liew | more info (via: Wylio)

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If you are brand new to working for yourself I’m here to help. I support anyone using my hosting with a lot of knowledge and I’m willing to work a killer deal for anyone needing private business coaching. Yes, I want these sites gone to good homes that much. lol

For some this may not be a big deal, but sadly, I have a horrible habit of skimming. It’s something I really need to break and this lesson started it off. Short, to the point, and a bulleted list of homework to get started on right away. It worked, I did.

I’ll be running an affiliate contest in May. Oh, you didn’t know I had products let alone an affiliate program? Yeah, I know, hence Nicole’s lesson is getting me up and rolling. I’ve kept the affiliate program low key because I just had so much I wanted to set up before I recruited strongly. It’s time to get over that and just get it to working.

I’ll have more details coming up, but you can get a jump start and become an affiliate HERE. I immediately emailed my top affiliate Lauren to brainstorm prizes she’d like to earn in this upcoming contest.

So there’s just a few hours of pushing my education up a notch. What are your plans for learning in business this year?

Yes, it’s tax season and this means we all have the best account of what we are doing with our businesses. Everything is broken down to what we are spending, saving and what programs are working.

One area I’ve been seriously lacking in the last two years is furthering my education. I’ve been ignoring it by using the “I don’t have time” excuse. Not pushing my businesses to the next level is a big waste of time and that goes against everything I believe in. I don’t have time to waste, so let’s see how some learning can get me using my time even more efficiently.

So where to start? That’s been an easy choice. Two people I follow and look to for a lot of information have come out with group coaching programs geared towards things I’d love to keep pushing ahead. I signed up for Nicole Dean’s Income CPR today. What are you getting with the program?

==> Immediate Access To The Monthly Lesson with Case Studies

==> Ask Nicole – Yep! You can email Nicole your questions about the lessons & she’ll answer them.

==> She’ll help recruit affiliates for you via her FreeAffiliateArticles.com site.

The opening price is way underpriced. Nicole charges $500 an hour for consulting. You’ll be getting access to how she’s built her business for only $10 a month. However, that will change at any time as the program fills up. So don’t wait.

No, that’s not just a big sales blurb of poo from me. Well it’s a sales blurb, but I’ve “known” Nicole for years through forums and I trust that this program will not waste my time in the least.  I’ve downloaded the first lesson and will be opening it up as soon as I hit publish here on the blog.

I’ll work on keeping more updates as I go along. I’m starting out with Nicole’s program and then adding another program this weekend or next week that I know will be a good one. But since I haven’t focused on learning in so long I don’t want to jump in over my head and not follow through. It’s all about the follow through.

So why not join me in the Income CPR program and we can both chat about our progress?

There are thousands of mom bloggers already online. Many of them are making money, and most of them are trying to make money. Do you have what it takes to be a profitable mom blogger? I believe that any mom blogger can start to generate a profit from her blog with the right approach and learned skills. That means you too.

It does take some study and some work. You will not become a millionaire overnight. Now that we have that cleared up let me reiterate that you can make money blogging. It might not be the same type of blogging that you are thinking of right now. How serious are you about making money blogging? You might have to adjust your thinking, your habits, and your schedule, but you can make a profit.

Here’s some ways to start a blog that won’t work very well.
**the willy-nilly-slap-something-up approach,
**the kiss-up-to companies approach,
**the controversial approach to get attention,
**the fake-it-till-you-make-it approach, and
**the guilt-my-family-and-friends-into-reading approach.
Go ahead if you want to try them. You might see a flare-up of popularity before everything goes down the drain. If you do try them you will learn some good lessons, but you will also waste some valuable time.

While you are working on building traffic to your blog you can add affiliate links and become an affiliate marketer. You don’t have to have your own product to sell; you can sell an already finished product for a commission. You can also use your sidebar as a place for an ad network. They find the advertisers; you wait for the profit.

Just because anyone can start a blog for free does not mean that there isn’t a necessary skill set. The good news is that the necessary skills can be learned and developed by anyone with the will to learn. There are profitable bloggers of all age levels from middle school to senior citizens; and of all skill sets from drop-outs to college grads. Blogging is a good thing to know. Most websites have them and the skill of blogging is a marketable asset in and of itself.

Just doing what you can and hoping for the best will only get you so far. If you want your blog to make a profit then you need to study and learn the best way to do just that.

If you want to learn more about blogging, gaining more exposure in the blogosphere, building great relationships and incorporating new profit points into your content be sure to sign up for the Smart Blogging Skills 10 week course.

A few weeks ago I had both my email inboxes well under 10 each. I can’t remember how low they both got, but it was probably 5 or under. It was AWESOME! I have two gmail accounts and I forward all my emails to these accounts. I came off of a very productive month of February and hit March by getting that inbox down. It was so easy to open my email and figure out exactly what needed attention. But somehow in the last 2 weeks it’s back to somewhat out of control. Not fully, but it’s not in a manageable state.

Thankfully Tishia Lee posted how awesome her inbox count was on her status. Yes, my first thought did include a swear word and I possibly even had to rewrite my first comment so it didn’t sound snarky instead of funny like I meant it. Then it hit me that this was possibly a direct correlation of how my last week of working has gone. I’ve let it overwhelm me.

Since I use gmail I dove in and cleaned up. I’m not down to where I want to be, but I started at 8:30pm and I really didn’t want to stay up too late working on it. How’d I work on getting a grip on it all?

1. UNSUBSCRIBE! This is always one of the first things I do when I notice my inbox is starting to add up. If there is an email list I recognize I don’t open regularly before deleting or hasn’t peaked an action from me in a while then I click the unsubscribe button.

2. Label and Archive. This is a major one for me and one I battle with. Of course it’s easy for me to label things that are directly site related, but I’ve had one of my gmail accounts for so many years that I worry about putting emails into labels and not coming back to them. If you have a suggestion for that I’d love to hear it.

3. DELETE! This one is such a hard one and I wish I didn’t take weeks to come to the decision that I am not going to act on an email. Typically these will be emails from a company that I’m an affiliate for and I mean to put up a post about the special or the new product. I need to set up a better system of adding a quick post (whole other story) or deleting quicker. I’m working hard at deleting emails about new products I really would like to buy. Needed products are purchased immediately, wants seem to end up holing up in my inbox.

These are my tops for instantly downsizing your email inbox. Sure they can be basic and things that you already have in place. But if you have over 20 emails in your inbox regularly then you are procrastinating on them. I know I’ve signed up for a few ecourses recently and have gotten overwhelmed now that I’m behind. Once it clicked in my head that my email was getting out of control, it dawned on me that this is a direct correlation to a week that I felt overwhelmed. I know that this month is going to finish strong because I’ve caught this much quicker than normal. I’m trying to burrow out from it and I’m on the way now. I have to prepare for spring break next week and much less time online!