This is the 6th (bonus) post in 5-part series social media marketing using Facebook by guest blogger, Alexander Alaric. You may read his other posts here.

I decided to add this post in response to questions about “where’s the money on Facebook?”. Since you have a decent understanding of Facebook now having read my other posts in this series, I’ll tell you about the 3 basic ways I use Facebook to make money.

Although you could use their PPC system which has profitable possibilities. I know people who are making good money using this but since I’ve not personally tested it I’m not qualified to advise you about it so these are ways to use it without spending money in the process.

• Groups
• Events
• Live FB on-site Chat

Groups

You know about groups already. The benefits (and drawbacks) of setting and having your own group have been discussed. However, when you have a group of 200-300 or more you can get good leverage by sending an email to the entire group. Build the community side of it.

Here’s a picture to show you that there are all kinds of groups on Facebook… there’s even one about rodents.

To make this work, you could develop a 3-6 part email series and a schedule of when you are going to send it out. Start by encouraging conversation on the group’s wall and posting interesting threads on the group bulletin board. This gets people active in your group and further bonded to it.

It’s no longer “just another FB group I’m a part of”. It becomes something they remember and the sense of community is stronger.

Then start asking them questions. Ask them about their concerns and how you can help. The more you engage your members the better.

Finally, you can send out an email inviting them to join you on your webinar/teleseminar or even your ustream.tv channel. The benefit of the ustream is they can see you making the presentation, your body language and gestures. It is almost like being live and face-to-face which is the most powerful communication.

This bonds them to you even further.

You’ll want to use a webinar if you’re doing a highly technical subject where you are going to walk them through how to do it on your computer so they can watch step-by-step what you are doing.

You could compile some of the biggest questions they asked and just do a Q&A call. That’s the easiest way to get your content for the call and it’s most VALUABLE TO YOUR MEMBERS.

This gives you a good running start.

Events

Events can be handled in similar fashion. In fact, I recommend that you combine Events with the Groups strategy. After you’ve finished the mailing series to your group, you invite them to the Events page that you have setup with the details of your call.

The really cool thing about events is that you can invite all your friends. It’s the ONE AND ONLY safe way to invite all your friends without being caught in the facebook spam filters.

Once you have sent out the invites to the friends who’d be interested (or all of them) you have the ability through your events page to follow-up with them. It separates into “attending”, “maybe”, and “not attending”. You can send different messages to each category of friends.

You can see from this image how someone raises their hand to confirm that they’re attending your event. Be sure to send a reminder and bonus info to the “attendees” to further pique their interest and increase your attendance rate.

Include additional reasons explaining why the “maybes” should attend. Make it so desirable that they want to cancel whatever else they had planned because the content of the call will be of such MASSIVE benefit they’d have to be complete fools to miss it.

When you can make it more important than their wedding anniversary you know you have a winner. Okay I’m young so have never been married, and this level may be unattainable but making it really desirable for them is the goal.

To the “not attending” you can send a “hate for you to miss out on this valuable advice, but here’s some bonus info now and maybe I’ll make the recorded version available to you” message. This gets some of them to want your info.

Live Facebook on-site Chat

The chat bar “floats” down below. It’s a standard php bar you’ve seen.

Although I haven’t experimented with this much yet I see the widest potential of this for 1-on-1 client acquisition. For someone like me that does copywriting at $100/hr I can get on here and talk with Facebook friends whom I know are looking for a copywriter. I can see what they are needing done, what they’re looking for, and how I can create a valuable sales piece that will pull high response and ultimately make them more money.

You could be a plumber and contact local people you know are having plumbing issues (no double entendre here). You’d be surprised what people post to twitter and their Facebook status updates.

Also, if you’re an article writer, web designer, seo underground guru, graphic designer, publicist, business coach, or a host of other remote-ready consultant/service based provider the possibilities for this type of 1-on-1 communication on-site are endless.

One piece of advice…make any potential client jump through a few hoops before getting involved in a long-winded conversation with them. This will save you time and eliminate the proverbial “tire-kickers” and “looky lous”.

Nothing fancy just send a couple emails back and forth. Have them send some info to you about what they need from you, and some kind of qualifier that lets you know they’re in a financial position to pay your reasonable fee.

This saves you headache, frustration and ultimately makes you more money because you’re more efficient.

What are you still doing here? Get out there, expand your business and make more money right now!

Special thanks to Ros for her caring commitment and making this series possible. Get more social media facebook tactics here.

This is the fifth in a 5-part series about social media marketing using Facebook by guest blogger, Alexander Alaric. You may read his other posts here.

The news feed is quite probably the most powerful part of Facebook.

The screen capture show here to the left is the news feed that appears on the Facebook home page when you first login. As you can see, some of the activities showing up in the news feed are things your friends have done. In this instance Richard created a group and had added videos to his group, and 41 of my friends are now friends with Sean.

Other items that show up in the news feed include:

• photos
• videos (to your profile or a group)
• wall posts (when you post on your own wall, a friend’s wall, or a group wall)
• sponsored ads
• joining events (when you or friends join an event)
• joining groups (when you or friends join a group)
• posting link (to article or blog post)

It’s very important for you to stay in the news feed of your friends. This shows them you are active on Facebook everyday and keeps your name in front of them.

It keeps you in their “top of the mind consciousness”. When they see you everyday your name becomes more familiar to them, they feel like they know you better because they do, and you’ll find it easier to work with them because they feel closely connected to you.

You want these things working in your favor. Just do a couple of the things I listed everyday to insure you stay active in the news feed. It’ll only take you 2-3 minutes to do 2 of those things and this small time investment can pay big dividends for you.

Mini News Feed

The Mini News Feed displays on your profile when your friends come to check out what you are up to lately. They can see who have formed friendships with, what posting you’ve done, and anything that you Stumble will also show in the news feed once you have the Stumbleupon application installed.

Being active on Facebook will keep your news feed ticking along with new items and help you keep you in front of people… and more exposure means more TRAFFIC!

To learn more about Facebook and claim your free social media marketing bonuses click here.

This is the fourth of a 5-part series about social media marketing using Facebook by guest blogger, Alexander Alaric. You may read his other posts here.

Start Your Own Group

The advantages:

Although it does take time to administer and oversee a Facebook group, one of the main advantages to starting a group is that Facebook allows you to mass email your group members. You can notify all the members of your group about a new product you are launching, an article of interest or some other resource of interest to your Facebook friends.

However, once you get 1200 group members though Facebook cuts off your ability to send a mass email.

You can also post messages on your group’s information section with updates anyone visiting the group can see.

Each group also has a ‘wall’ on which you can post messages and start conversations with other group members. It is similar to comments on blogs.

The disadvantages:

It takes some initial time to setup.

It takes much more time to promote your group. With a good group name you’ll get people who naturally find you and want to join because they are interested. But you’ll also need to promote your group link to really build your membership.

I recommend including it in forum posts and you can twitter about it so that it will show to your friends.

Stumbleupon and Twitter on your Profile

Stumbleupon and Twitter are two sites you need to be using if you want to dramatically increase your website traffic.

As you build your Facebook network, your friends will be able to see what you Twitter and Stumble. You want to mark some cool stuff you randomly find on the Internet that’d be of interest to your business or personal contacts to build your reputation and credibility with your friends.

They’ll be much more trusting of you and connect with you far more when you provide them value. And articles you find of interest to them is very valuable because they may not have ever seen that article without you mentioning it to them. This is just like telling your friend about that super cool ‘Iron Man’ movie you just saw.

But what is really awesome for you is that you can twitter and Stumble your own articles and products and immediately your entire Facebook network can see that and click right through to your website.

This is a very powerful technique that can bring instant traffic to even a one minute old website.

All you have to do is search under the applications for twitter and stumbleupon. Then you can place those strategically on your profile so that people can see them.

What’s really cool is it will automatically show in your mini news feed. You get instant exposure to your entire network because people do read your news feed which takes us right into our next topic.

Here is my list other must-have apps:

• Blog friends
• Blog RSS feed reader
• Business cards
• Events
• Notes
• StumbleUpon
• Video

To discover more about Facebook and claim your free social media marketing bonuses click here.

This is the third in a series about social media marketing using Facebook by guest blogger, Alexander Alaric.

It’s great to have thousands and thousands of friends, but building a relationship with just one person who is highly influential in your market could be more valuable to you than all the rest of your Facebook friends put together.

To get these folks on board, start by making a list of between 30 to 50 of the top influencers in your market.

Keep in mind that these are busy people and that they have new people contacting them all the time who also want to use their expert power, so you will need to decide how you are going to set yourself apart from the crowd to get their attention and make them want to help you.

The easiest way to connect with these power brokers is to offer to do something for them first because this starts the ball rolling.

In simplest terms, “you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours”.

So when you help get the word out about their business or their product or give them a testimonial they will be more inclined to help you after you’ve done that for them.

Most people I see make the mistake of asking for something before first giving something.

Don’t make this mistake because getting them to accept your friend request is all you want to do righ now.  Then you can deepen the connection with further communication and offers to assist them.

You do this because the power of your network can really be more important than the size of your network.  As well the strength of the relationships you have with those people in your network can be far more powerful than the size of your network.

You can open the lines of communication by sending them an e-mail asking about their business, what they’re working on, or what you could do to help spread the word about their business.

You can also make a text post on their “wall”. This is something unique to facebook (myspace.com calls it ‘comments’) which allows you to post a text message on to their profile that they and anyone who views their profile will see.

There is now also a cool floating bar that hovers at the bottom of your screen when you’re logged in to facebook which tells you how many of your friends are currently online and gives you the opportunity to have a live text chat with them. So you can have an instant messenger type conversation with those big influencers when they’re online. Using this tool alone could be a great way for you to get your foot in the door with power brokers in your industry.

Do it today. Make your list of influential people in your market and start making friends in high places.

To discover more about Facebook and claim your free social media marketing bonuses click here.

This is the second installment in a series about social media marketing using Facebook by guest blogger, Alexander Alaric . Be sure to read Part 1 in the series How I Got 2198 Facebook Friends With NO Profile.

When you’re building your network you want to do both active and passive networking. Especially in the beginning you’ll have to be more active in your networking to get your initial facebook friend networks started.

In that spirit here’s my profile. Because you’re one of Rosalind Gardner’s readers and I know that you’re interested in business and marketing, you can request to be my friend and you’re off and running.

One thing I definitely recommend is using your profile to build both business and networking contacts. Even facebook says that you can have two separate accounts one for your personal and one for your business contacts. It’s much easier to keep things straight when you have an all-business or all-personal account.

In that vein, here’s a time-saving trick using a tool called Roboform that allows you to customize the info that you put into forms. With one click of a button you can register at sites, login to sites, and fill out questionnaires and forms.

With all the Web 2.0 stuff out there that requires you to be a registered user this is an indispensable time-saving tool. There is a free version but I have the $30 paid version because it allows unlimited customization. I estimate this saves me between 30-60 minutes of typing logins everyday.

You can set up a custom field “message” and with one click of a button it will fill the message in on your friend requests on Facebook. This works best when you’re going through a group(facebook has many groups on a wide range of topics) and requesting friends from members of that group.

Only send 5-9 of these same ones daily or else your account may be suspended!

Here’s a pic of my friend request to T.Harv Eker (of Secrets of the Millionaire Mind book fame)

This is the personal message that I included in the ‘message’ field:

Harv,

I loved your book “Secrets of the Millionaire Mind”. Very good stuff in there especially the part about the financial blueprint.

Carol [redacted] suggested we should be friends and networking or partnering with you on your projects would be cool.

Alexander

Note: [redacted] means I removed her last name for privacy reasons and the [redacted] was not actually in the message I sent to Harv.

There are four reasons this personal message is so effective:

1. First, it addresses Harv by name. Many independent studies have shown that the most pleasing, sweetest, most desirable sound to the human mind that always gets attention is….YOUR OWN NAME. Unmistakable, undeniable just use it.

2. Second, I referenced his book. Especially when you are dealing with someone who has some fame or is recognized, talk about what they’ve done and flatter that work. Put in a specific detail about why you liked their work so they can be positive you actually know their work and aren’t just throwing out b.s. flattery.

3. Third, I used a mutual friend to connect Harv to me. THis is the 2nd degree of separation and is a motivator used in marketing that’s known as Social Proof. Basically it’s saying “You and Carol are cool, me and Carol are cool, therefore you and I should be cool”.

   I hate to take you back to math class but this IS actually a proven mathematical property. To refresh your memory it’s the transitive property:

when A = B and B = C then A = C

4. Fourth and finally, I offer to do something for him right out of the gate “networking or partnering with you on your projects would be cool” before even hinting at asking anything from him. This gets the very powerful Law of Reciprocation working in my favor (and will work in your favor when you use it because it’s a universal law).

   The recipient should feel compelled to accept the friend request and curious to see what I’m about with a “how could I help him?”. Here’s the email I got confirming that Harv had accepted my friend request.

Going through groups that are within your market or topic area are a great way to make many good business contacts.

For example, suppose you’re in the poodle market. You could find many groups for this. I just did a search for “poodle” and Facebook said this: “Displaying 1 – 10 out of over 500 group results for: poodle” so there’s many potential partners and contacts there.

You can customize your message based on “hey I saw you in this group on this topic I’m interested in, would like to be friends so I can network with you“. Quick tip: make sure you keep your message short because Facebook puts a 255 character limit on friend request messages. Too, this person doesn’t yet know you so you want to send them a short message to get their attention and make them want to accept your friend request.

To achieve the greatest success with Facebook or any social network keep real-world common sense networking strategies in mind.

In short, be real and you’ll build real contacts.

To discover more about Facebook and claim your free social media marketing bonuses click here.

This is the first of a 5-part series about social media marketing using Facebook by guest blogger, Alexander Alaric .

One of the reasons people use Facebook for networking, especially for business, is because it is a protected environment.

Unfortunately, many new users get caught by the Facebook spam Nazis and get their accounts shut down. These guys mean well but unfortunately sometimes the “baby gets thrown out with the bathwater”.

Even seasoned Facebook users have had their accounts disabled and banned. Robert Scobleizer (a long-time and experienced Facebook user) wrote about how his account got shut down here. He later got it reinstated but why make yourself go through the hassle.

So, let’s start out with some of the Facebook basics and avoid having your account shut down. Because after the effort it takes to build up 500, 1000, or more friends you want to protect your account and the time that you’ve put in.

There are some basic rules that you want to follow. When you are sending friend requests always include a personal message and only send the same message to 8-9 people before sending a different one. Realize this is a general guideline and Facebook changes their algorithm periodically. To be ultra safe at the start you may want to send only 5 of the same personal message each day.

I have successfully added 74 friends in a day (and know people who have done many more than that) but you must do it the right way and vary your messages to avoid problems.

This ‘message’ field is available when you do a friend request. To be clear here’s a pic of what I’m talking about :

They won’t tell exactly what their filter is but right now it seems if you send 10 or more of the same messages on the same day it triggers one of their filters and you’ll get an account warning. You get enough of those account warnings, seems to be between three and five, and your account will be disabled.

So the thing to remember is to vary your messages when you’re sending friend requests. I recommend, and this is what I do, that whenever you’re requesting a friend you include a personal message of how you know them or if you know one of their friends mention that name and what kind of business or reason you’re contacting them.

Also when you are e-mailing people within Facebook, you must vary your message here as well. If you are coming out with some new product or some new cool website you want to set up an event to notify all your friends instead of attempting to e-mail them all individually because that will cause your account to get shut down.

Events are one of the Facebook applications that I’ll discuss further later in this article series.

You now know some of the basics of the Facebook community and how to interact with people without getting your account shut down. Follow these basic guidelines and you’ll have a good Facebook experience.

Basically, don’t send the same friend request more than 10 times per day, and don’t send the same email to your friends more than 10 times per day. I’m talking when you’re doing cutting and pasting. These are guidelines that are working right now but to be ultra safe you could do only 5 of the same per day.

These guidelines are worth repeating because fb is very protective of their environment so play within their rules and everything’s cool.

Now for another huge bugaboo…mass emails. You know the ones that are sent to you and 100 other email addresses in the ‘to field’

Here’s an example:

>

As you can see there are many email addresses that this was sent to and this makes people (especially Facebook people) angry. You’ll often get angry messages back in response and even some hate messages. Also, many of those people may unfriend you and talk poison about you in the community. This can hurt your ability to make new friends.

It’s just not worth it. So Stay away from this. The right way to do it is by using the Events application. Setup an event and invite all your friends to it through the events’ invite function. That’s the only way to do this correctly.

Email is a 1-to-1 communication and you should always think of it as you have a face-to-face conversation with someone sitting across the table from you or next to you on a couch or in a chair.

Next time I’ll talk with you about powering up your networking using a huge time-saving tactic.

To discover more about Facebook and claim your free social media marketing bonuses click here.