Are you active on Facebook and yet you don’t seem to get many visitors coming from Facebook to your blog?
Let’s first define what we’re talking about:
You probably have a personal profile page on Facebook. This is the type of Facebook page that must be about a person and NOT about a business. You have your own name and your own photo on the page. And people can “friend” you.
Now do you have a (business) page for your company or blog?
Until recently this type of page was called a fan page. Now it’s just a plain page – very confusing. And instead of becoming a fan of such a page, you “like” a page, which actually makes you a member of this page and is different than the “like” function of website pages off Facebook.
But an innovative way that you can use Facebook to send more people to your blog is this two-step process:
Buy Facebook ads that are extremely targeted (age, location, gender, etc.) to send people to your Facebook (business) page.
On that Facebook page have an attractive offer in exchange for an email address:
When people give you their email address through the email marketing vendor whose software you’ve put on your Facebook page, you can send these people followup emails with links to your site or blog content.
Alternatively, you could buy Facebook ads that send people directly to your website or blog. But in the little testing I’ve done of Facebook ads, it seems to me that it is more effective to use Facebook ads to send people to a page on Facebook rather than to a page off Facebook.
You can dip your toe very slowly into the water with Facebook ads and only spend a little money each day for only a few days. And Facebook makes it easy to create ads that send people to your Facebook (business) page.
What Facebook doesn’t do especially well is make it clear how to clearly target your ads. That’s why my company Miller Mosaic Power Marketing created a video to show the steps for doing this. (See http://www.millermosaicllc.com/video-how-to-create-facebook-ad/)
And, of course, the more activity you have on your Facebook (business) page, the more interesting you will make yourself and your site to your target markets.
Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) and her business partner Yael K. Miller (@MillerMosaicLLC on Twitter) are committed to taking the mystery out of social media so that individuals and companies can utilize the power of social media to attract more business. See their Quick Start Social Media Track.
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Last Updated: May 21, 2012
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{ 22 comments… read them below or add one }
I think individuals(rather people who do blogging for fun(and not for much monetary benefits prefer free traffic, which i believe can be acheived with a solid facebook base and bringing on the feed to face book. make sure that the first few lines of your article is always interesting. that helps a lot in converting the reading in to click to your website.
Exactly. A good start of the article will ensure that the reader reads the full article and possibilities are there that he also clicks on other articles or ads.
Facebook ad’s are extremely successful. I was given a free trial by facebook to advertise and i got a much increased rate. The direct targeting is much better than other ad networks.
WOW! Hope I too get free FB advertising pack!
Vishnu, Saksham and Peter –
Thanks for these comments on my guest post.
My number one tip for getting people to read more of your blog post (besides interesting content, of course) is a short first paragraph. If the first paragraph goes on and on, people may stop reading before they get to the second paragraph.
Use short paragraphs that offer the eyes white space between paragraphs to draw people into reading your good content.
Phyllis Zimbler Miller
http://twitter.com/ZimblerMiller
Nice tips my friend! I also should try out the Facebook ads…. Advertising on a world’s largest website will surely bring more traffic to our sites :D
Exactly Pubudu!
If you are going to advertise on Facebook, check out the how-to video we produced about how to do this — http://www.millermosaicllc.com/video-how-to-create-facebook-ad/
While it appears “easy,” I missed several important steps until I took a paid course about this.
How can I add these Tabs on facebook?
You add the FBML (Facebook’s simplified version of html) application to your Facebook page — go to http://www.facebook.com/#!/apps/application.php?id=4949752878&ref=ts and click on “add to my page.”
Then you go back to your page, click on “edit page” and click on the FBML application you just added. You can then add code in the FBML box and use the title you want on the tab for the “box title.”
Finally you click on the plus sign at the end of the tab row and drag the new box title up to the tab row. As currently you can only have six tabs showing, you have to rearrange the tabs by dragging to include your new box title tab.
You can learn more about social media at my blog at http://www.millermosaicllc.com/blog
Very well said there Saksham :) I’m also preparing for that kind of methodology, but it does require some funds to really make the campaign very effective. But for now, I’m just developing link bait materials (specifically with headlines) that will really get the interest of targeted audience, then just sharing it through Facebook.
The real trick to getting traffic from facebook is to have your “targeted traffic/market” join the fan page. And constantly interact with them or much better, build relationships with them through email. but if you can’t afford email marketing yet, then link baiting is the best way to it :)
Regards,
Jason
As a blogger I would personally never consider paying for any kind of advertising, whey waste money! Blogging is a marathon, not a sprint. For those selling products or services I can see the point!
I found an effective way to use Facebook is to target links in relevant fan pages with relevant content. By adding value to the conversation and offering a follow-up link I see a good return for a couple minutes of free effort.
Nice post.I get 40% of my blog’s traffic from Facebook.If you have a nice networking between you and your friends then there’s no need of Facebook Ads…
IMO,ads of mostly for whom who wanna sell products,announce something[contests etc.] or stuffs related to that ..If we wanna advertise that “xxxx..Come to our site and all…blah blah..” then chances are that Facebook will not accept it.
I tried facebook ads and I got 30% more visits.
WOW! Your comment is encouraging me to try it too! :D
Facebook ads can be very effective if you sell something but i don’t see the point of ads for bloggers.
It can work for professional blogs / affiliate blogs I think.
I recently saw that exact same technique in a webinar called “$10,000 by the end of the year.” They were creating FB Fanpages based on “super niches” (ones with a lot of interest especially on FB). They used WOW as an example. A fanpage was created with a good image and professional looking. Then, about 10 posts were made on the FanPage. You don’t want the FanPAge to be empty when people arrive. Finally, they used FB paid ads to get people to “like” the page. There would be some offer to entice the “Like”. After posting some useful content, you could market to your fans and profit.
That’s an interesting way and let me tell you, I am already into it. I have created several niche targeted fan pages, just I have to market them properly :D
Ricko..I like that..lol.
You must! I am totally against spamming. So I change the names of those who post valuable comments, but use keywords in the name field. Your name didn’t suggest your real name, so Ricko was the one that came in my mind.