Expand Your Biz with Facebook ~ It's Fun!

My husband says it's stretching it to call it, "work."

There I am scanning photos from the late 60s saying, "Oh, this one's perfect!" as I upload one to Facebook and tag it with the name of a childhood friend. Or maybe I'm planting a flower on someone's "Little Green Patch," an act that helps save the rainforest. Sometimes I just write a little ditty on what I'm up to and send it out to all 403 (and counting) of my Facebook friends.

Yeah, 403 and more come each day. Sometimes it's a friend from college or high school, or maybe someone from my early childhood, or my current network. A lot of the time they're people I don't know but they find my profile interesting, or they connected with me through one of my websites, or from a Google search. Facebook is one huge community, 150 million and growing by about 10 million per month. I notice my friend requests and suggestions come in by about a dozen per day. This is a great way to let people know what I'm up to, what I care about and to NETWORK!

Facebook is so fun and such a great business tool that I've expanded my upcoming Attracting Perfect Customers Online 10-Week Webinar for Web Challenged Entrepreneurs to include a segment on growing your biz with Facebook. (see my flier for upcoming classes below) You really can do everything on Facebook: create a list, market your offerings, follow up with prospects, post a web page, invite friends to an event, post photos and portfolios, share links. It's quite a robust and amazing social network.

So for those of you who are ready to give it a whirl, here are some Facebook Tips to get you started.

Step One: Get a Facebook account already! Go to http://www.facebook.com and register. Write down your user name and password on a sticky note and post it by your computer so you don't forget it. You can connect with me there if you like!

Step Two: Set up your profile, and upload a photo of you right away. There's nothing as annoying as connecting with someone you haven't seen in a while, and going to their profile only to see that generic blue-boy silhouette. Spend the time to fill out your education and job information. You will be able to find old classmates and colleagues this way. Make sure you post a link to your website too!

Step Three: Have Facebook find your friends. Click on "Friends" and "Find Friends" to have Facebook search through your email account for people you've emailed who are already on Facebook. This is the fastest way to grow your network right off the bat. Once you're connected with friends, check out their friend lists for folks you know and request to be connected. You can also find mentors and people you aspire to be like and connect with them. Facebook makes it easy to create categories so you can sort your contacts.

Step Four: Share yourself authentically. The most compelling thing about you is what is most important to you. Share what inspires you, what you're challenged by, what you've learned. Post your own events and invite people. Create your own page and post notes on your latest discoveries. You never know who's curiosity you'll spark. Maybe your old school chum will show up at your next teleclass! It's happened to me.

WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR EZINE OR WEB SITE? You can, as long as you include this complete blurb with it: Magical Marketer Julia D. Stege, MFA helps people attract their perfect customers with a unique combination of Law of Attraction, wildly attractive logos and websites, and smart Internet marketing techniques. If you're ready to start attracting your perfect customers now, get Julia's free Magical Marketing Toolkit at http://www.magicalmarketingtoolkit.com

Where the !$?BLEEP?*%! Should I Blog?

You have heard all about the importance of blogging by now. Everyone says it’s the way to bring your marketing into the new millennium, and I agree. It's becoming more and more common for business owners to blog as a way to boost their visibility, share information with their customers, and network online. And when you’re blogging authentically, your perfect customers are more likely to recognize you when they find you. They gain trust in you and become more likely to work with you.

What I’ve discovered is that certain blogging or social network sites rank better than others. Though every web hosting program offers their own blog software these days, not all blogs are created equal. It makes sense that a blogging tool owned by Google, or one that hosts Google Ads, would rank better than others. Here are the sites I’ve found most useful for regular, every day entrepreneurs to get to page one of Google for their niche keyword phrases.

Blogger.com
Blogger brags that you can be up and blogging in ten minutes with their program, and that’s true. This is why I chose Blogger as my main blogging tool, and the first one I teach in my 10 week webinar “Attracting Perfect Customers Online.” You can see my Law of Attraction Marketing blog. Since Google owns Blogger, your posts will rank well when you use this tool.

WordPress.com
WordPress is a pretty sophisticated blogging tool with a variety of possible options for customization. I personally find this tool more complicated to use but it is more robust and vastly customizable. I recently designed a WordPress blog for my client the Creative Sage, and if you look at it you will see how robust the sites are. With WordPress you can customize a home page and link it to a blog. In this case, 3 blogs are linked from that one home page. I’ve also created some simple WordPress blogs that even with very little content are getting to page one of Google.

Squidoo.com
Squidoo is a site where you can share your expertise on a topic. Google puts AdWords on these pages so they rank really well. They’re easy to set up and you can put cool modules on them like YouTube videos, Amazon.com products for sale, pictures from Flickr, and the all important links to your main sites. You can see my squidoo lenses here.

HubPages:
Like Squidoo, HubPages is a social network site for folks who want to share their expertise in any area of life. Here’s the HubPage that got to page one of Google in only 22 minutes.

My suggestion is to post to these 4 blogging sites on a regular basis to exponentially expand the visibility of your message. But even creating one blogger post or Squidoo lens that links back to your website will help your site ranking. So what are you waiting for? Get off your bleeping butt and blog!