I’m told the smart thing to do is to

make one of those squeeze page thingees

and get more people on my list by making them sign up to my newsletter,

THEN make the landing page my Fast Facebook Traffic guide or the one about getting more leads, fans and customers from your Facebook page, before

finally giving away the video for free.

And sometimes I do that. I use my free content to generate leads. Anyone who thinks that’s wrong is welcome to provide for my family or keep walking.

Free is known to have a price – time investment, and email address… but that’s not what I’m doing today.

Because I also believe something is to be said for being more open and accessible with your information and giving out as much value as you can beforehand.

I’ll let you watch the video, then I’ll come back to why I’m giving this away at the bottom of the page.

If you can’t see the video below, because you’re reading this via feed or syndication, you can take a look at today’s newsletter about the Basic Facebook Strategy video.

Hope you enjoy this and find it useful.

So where were we? I was saying how great it is to give things you could charge for away, right?

It’s not to destroy the competition that creates products that aren’t as good as the free tips you give away. Not everyone puts a value on free unless they trust you. So that’s not it.

And there’s more benefit than just the good feeling it gives you. When you invest the hours and hours it takes to produce a 40 minute video, edit it so it makes sense to people, then make the format digestible to a web browser, and give it away completely free, you provide assistance to the world.

I believe that comes back to you, especially in the days when you’re absolutely aching for a break, or help or… some form of good luck to come your way after almost 6 weeks of not being able to work at full speed because you were sick or unable. That’s the spot I’m in today, and it always comes back to – give until it hurts.

But it’s not the spiritual reward that makes this a valid tip. It’s not the belief that I have that any good you put into the world will come back to you ten-fold.

Yeah, I hope you buy my products. I believe $8.88 is reasonable for techniques that over the past four years have put over $100k in my pocket

Now, that could be taken as me making a testimony to my own greatness. And I’m pretty arrogant about the things I’m good at, so that’s probably true.

Or it could be taken as an extra free traffic tip – giving away valuable information that others would charge for, because you believe it’s the right thing to do for that situation. Also true.

Because the real tip here is that when you put valuable information into the world, when you do a service that you are in no way obliged or even expected to do, you can’t go wrong.

Your reputation will improve, no matter how high it already is. The information you share speaks to your expert status and functions as a free trial.

And if nothing else, you helped someone. People don’t easily forget that.

Back to belief systems though – I am certain this small deed will come back to me. It may not come from where I’d like or hope, but somehow, it always returns, greatly multiplied.

The video above, also found on YouTube, is based on the article, “Facebook for Business: A Simple Spam-Free Way to Get People on Facebook to Visit Your Site“, which is free for republishing.

If you’re an affiliate of Fast Facebook Pages Traffic , then you can replace the link in this article with your affiliate link when you publish it to your site or newsletter. This video is one of those that will soon be available in the affiliate section, if you want to embed the link in the video, and publish it to your site, as well.

This free presentation, called One Very Simple Way to Use Facebook for Business goes over one simple 7 step process for finding out whether Facebook for Business will work for you. You can find out in 15 minutes a day for a week. I also have a free video and an article about this process coming up for anyone who is a free member of this site.

As always premium Free Traffic Tip & Traffic Reality members will get it first, as well as a few extras.

This morning, as a result of jolted into a state of hyper-alertness by a way-too-early but important phone call, the following headline, which I ironically found on Twitter, came my way:

“Is Facebook for Business Overrated“?

And after a brief glance at it, I realized that I would absolutely LOVE it if more people even took the time to think about this question.

The reason is found in this brief clip:

As a business owner I favor results over hype, which means; Are we selling more stuff based on our marketing effort? If we aren’t selling more stuff, we typically make changes and tweaks until we see sustainable improvement. As is the case with most small business, our marketing budget is constrained, so we need to employ things that work. Things that work in business are much more simple to determine than folks want to admit.

Return on investment does not need to be complicated. So, if you were advertising in a certain magazine, with no measurable leads or sales, wouldn’t you change something up, like deploy your marketing resources elsewhere? Of course you would, except when it comes to Facebook, most of us continue to drudge on, trying new things to engage prospects.

Now, I’m not going to go into my usual spiel about how Facebook marketing isn’t for everyone or that whole thing. Or the fact that the vast majority of people who are on Facebook for business reasons are doing the absolute most completely backwards things to get anything out of Facebook.

The very simple secret to Facebook is that it’s really not a marketing vehicle.

Square peg. Round hole.

Other than employing the proper advertising techniques for Facebook in the area where ads are sold, I’ve been saying since 2007 that using Facebook for business is a completely different animal.

(And it’s partly for this reason that I’m still not all that crazy about Facebook’s Social Ads, but that’s for another day.)

Can you use Facebook to get measurable improvements in sales? Yes. Can you do it with the traditional marketing processes you’ve been taught. Absolutely not.

I’ve written three very practical how-to guides on Facebook, none of which I’m going to link to here.

(They’re linked from the sidebar and the Massive Traffic page if you’re that interested. I welcome your business, but as always, I want you to try something simple and free first to test before you ever buy something from me.)

Instead, I’m going to give you a quick daily routine to try on Facebook in the next post.

If this helps in a way that impacts your website traffic, then continue to move on to the more refined techniques.

This assumes that your site, particularly if it’s a blog, is set up to properly capture leads and convert them into sales. If it’s not, ANY marketing, networking or promotional activity you’re doing is far less effective, so fix that first, and then come back to this.

Hint: If you can’t wait for the next post, there are more on Facebook – no need to log in to see them.

Facebook may not have been built with marketing in mind, although the four choices under “looking for” on your Info tab are Friendship, Dating, A Relationship and Networking.

However, if you choose to take that invitation to network, you still have to be careful about the way you market yourself.

I could do a whole article on staying within Facebook’s terms and conditions alone. For now though, I’m going to focus on the subtleties of networking online, particularly Marketing in Facebook.

If you think about when you go to an event to network, you behave a certain way- even if the point of the gathering is networking, you don’t open with your business card.

People would think you were a lunatic if you came to the event dressed inappropriately, and ran in circles around the room, throwing a handful of your business cards at each person’s face.

Yet, somehow the perception is that this kind of behavoir is not just accepted, but welcomed online.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m no purist.

Far be it from me to say “don’t network” or “never try and make some money”, even on Facebook. I say take business where ever it comes.

It has just been my experience that in a networking environment, online or off, you get more of your products sold and services ordered, if you forego the hard sell.

The Age of the Hard Sell is over now, anyway. It’s the Age of the Educated Consumer, who has dozens, sometimes even hundreds of choices about where to shop, not to mention sources of information about you or your company.

We sell more by serving better.

To take the discussion back to networking, this is why we tend to be buy from the well-dressed person who cares and offered their help. We should be asking ourselves – what’s the equivalent online?

I’ll answer that question another time. In the next post, we’ll go over some common marketing mistakes here on Facebook.

I’m back again, continuing the Facebook Business Basics series.  

If you went to my Facebook page, you saw two videos about how you can find people on Facebook who may be interested in you and let them come back to your site. This video talks about  what to do once you have someone viewing your profile.

Okay, so when we last left our discussion, I was talking about what’s considered spammy at Facebook, and why spam at Facebook will ultimately fail. That leaves us with the question – how do you get people in Facebook to visit your site without spamming them?

How can you increase your exposure at Facebook without seeming like a spammer?

As I’ve said before, if you want to blatantly market on Facebook, you have a several options you can exercise without looking like a spammer.

1. Get a Facebook Business Page,
2. Buy a Facebook Ad,
3. Participate in or Create a Group,
4. or Leverage Your Profile.

Now, I’d never discourage you from doing any of these, in fact, you should do them all.

But I’m not going to write about them all here today. The first two are pretty self-explanatory. You create a business page – if you know how to build and manage a community, you’re all set. (If you don’t, still a discussion for another day.) And who doesn’t know how to buy an ad? Yes, there are more effective ways to use ads on Facebook, but at the end of the day, the basics don’t need to be covered.

Networking through groups and leveraging though? Not as common-sense based as you might think.

For now let’s take groups. It’s an easier topic, and leveraging your profile will probably take an entire day of videos, which I’ll start on tonight or tomorrow.

The reasoning behind joining groups on Facebook is simple: groups are mini-communities that have discussion boards, and often links, photo and video sharing areas, where people have agreed that they have a common interest, and want to exchange information about it.

Let’s say you teach people how to turn a $39 book into a $300 info-product with videos and audio CDs. You search groups and you find a book marketing group for authors.

Awesome, perfect market – if they’re marketing their books, they want to make more money, and if they want to make more money, your program is custom-made for them. There’s 2000 people in this group and you can just count the money flowing in…

Here is where most people go wrong. They go into a social group with an ad mentality, and start posting what are essentially, ads for their products on the wall (the general guestbook type area) or in the discussions. And it will backfire every time.

“But Tinu”, you might be thinking, if it doesn’t work, “why do people keep doing it”?

I’ll answer that, but first let’s look at why it doesn’t work.

The fastest revelation will come from the dating world. Ladies, please raise your hand if you would respond favorably to the following situation:

A guy walks up to you and says, “Hi, you’re cute, let’s have sex now.”

Anyone?

Yeah. If there’s 100 ladies in the room, maybe, MAYBE one chick has her hand up.

If I say, all desperate women put your hands down, that will drop to zero.

So why do people do it? The same reason why one in one hundred people respond. Desperation and/or just plain ignorance. Not stupidity, mind you. They just honestly don’t know the right way to do it.

And the desperate customer, you just don’t want to have. No matter what you offer them, they’ll claim it doesn’t work and ask for a refund. So, really, it doesn’t work at all.

Then what does work?

Value.

You will hear me saying this on the videos over and over again – add value, bring value, create value, enhance value. Value and being laid back.

Everyone wants the folks at Home Depot to help them buy a light fixture, but no one wants to be sold a lamp.

We’ll get into specifics in the next articles and videos, in just a few hours. Right now I have to stop for….

Family time. See you soon.

Before we continue, I want to let you know I’m aware of the video embed problem with videos from my Facebook fan page.

Apparently even if you embed a video to a page, which is supposed to be visible to Everyone even outside of Facebook, some people still can’t see it.

So I’m uploading the videos to our free member site over at Leveraged Promotion, and using that embed code to feature them here.

If you couldn’t see Why Facebook Matters, The Psychological Side of the Facebook Experience, or Leveraging Your Profile via News Feed vs Other People’s Profile Promotion (otherwise known as Why Facebook Spam Fails), the new embeds visible to everyone are now live at those links.

You can become a fan of mine at Facebook to see all the videos in the series in one place. If you’re looking to be able to connect with me directly and don’t know me yet, that’s your best bet.

However, if we already know each other, you might want to join me at the social members section of Leveraged Promotion, where I have a members-only blog that’s updated with less frequency, but juicer tidbits.

Members are currently moderated and approved on a case by case basis. Generally if you’ve made a comment here, know me on Twitter/Facebook/StumbleUpon or have bought a product from me, you’ll be accepted as a free member – apply here.

That’s it for announcements. Oh, and we are back on the old site theme until next week when I hope to unveil 09′s custom theme.

Find more videos like this on Website Promotion for Regular Folks

(You may need to click through to the original post if the video isn’t showing up. You can also click the lower right corner of the video to go full screen.)

Technically speaking, where does the experience of Facebook largely take place? See why you can get better results posting to your own profile (which updates the news feed that goes out to your connections) rather than publishing on other people’s profiles.

I’ve got lots more Facebook video for you, to view them just go to my Facebook fan page in the videos section. The next three videos in the series give you an airplane view of what you need to do to be in the conversational and activity stream of information we just talked about.

Why do you want to be in that stream? Because that’s where the interaction is happening.

Find more videos like this on Website Promotion for Regular Folks

When you’re learning how to get information into a conversation or activity stream, it helps to understand what’s already going on in that stream. If you were going fishing in a natural lake, the bait you use will probably work best if it’s something fish like to eat or would be attracted to the “ooo shiny” aspect of – and you can’t judge whether or not your bait is good if you don’t know what that is.

Tonight, I’m answering all comments on this thread with a video response. I’m looking rather cute today, LOL!

There’s one more Facebook for Basics video in this series within the next few hours.

If you’d like to see all the posted ones in order, right now join my fan page. I’ll be uploading free videos there and to my private social media group that goes with the Facebook For Business collection. If you already have the Facebook for Business collection, you have access to the private group, and you’ll find the updates there.

 Tinu Abayomi-Paul’s Profile 

Ever since someone told me I was on Facebook Grader’s Elite User page last month I’ve been in a constant state of amusement about it for three reasons. 

1. I was still getting Facebook traffic every day, whether I spend zero minutes or an hour there each day,
2. All the social media scoring sites amuse me to no end, because though they mean well, they miss the point,
3. At the time I had about half the friends of most of the people on that list, and while I updated Facebook nearly every day, I almost never logged into to do it. I had the stats to legitimately be on the list, but I worked about 10% as hard to get them as anyone else on that list.

Two years ago I wrote a book about my experiences with Facebook for Business, which I’m updating with some multi-media aids and more recent how-tos.

Because I’m seeing that two years later, most business people still don’t get Facebook, how it can help them, or what they’re supposed to be doing there, let alone how it can mean an increase in sales, more leads, more traffic, better business connections, or more business period. 

I’m going to spend the whole week talking about this. But for right now, let’s just cover the basics. 

What Most Business People Think of When They Look at Facebook – and What They SHOULD Be Thinking

Most business people look at Facebook and think “I want to advertise or market to those 180 million people.”

They should be thinking “How can I help the targeted sub-set of those 180 million people see my business as THE solution to their problems?”

Facebook is a social platform. Now there’s a place to advertise and ways to market, but …. that’s not what the optimal relationship is, and that isn’t what will reach the most people.

Let me put it this way… naturally the best way to maneuver through water is in a boat, so doesn’t it seem silly to try and go up the Mississippi river in a motorcycle? 

It’s probably possible, sure. But there’s a better way. Why not do that instead?

The best way to get the most out of a social platform is to be social. Period.

Social meaning that you meet as many people as you can who you have something in common with, connect to them, then present them with the option to connect more deeply with you. This does not have to be:

• Time consuming
• A one by one process, or,
• Something you do every day

in order for Facebook to work for you. 

And you don’t have to market on Facebook. It’s probably better if you don’t.

I have never, not one time, solicited any type of business while on Facebook. Last year Facebook brought me tens of thousands of dollars in profit. 

While I was sick.

Not including book sales.

How is this possible? I set up my profile effectively, and let it speak for itself to the right people. Then I made them all come to me. 

I’ve never gone up to anyone on Facebook and said “hi, I’m Tinu, this is what I do, and how I can help you”. Not as a first conversation, not as a 50th. Everyone comes to ME, asks for my help, and how much it is to hire me.

If you can create that environment it’s a constant stream of prospects to you.

I’m actually going to reveal all the basic things you need to know about Facebook for free in a few days, here on the blog. Before we get to that though, let’s look at how people are screwing up their chances on Facebook, so that if you’ve been told to do any of these things, you can STOP.

Huge Mistakes I See Every Day on Facebook

1. People marketing in the wrong place, to the wrong people, in the wrong way, at the wrong time.
   
   You want to market on Facebook? Fine. You have 4 options. Get a Facebook Business Page, Participate in or Create a Group, Buy a Facebook Ad, or Leverage Your Profile.    

   Guess which one works the best, by far? Leveraging Your Profile. Most people don’t see this, and when they get an inkling of it, they do it in the most annoying way possible.

   And you can’t sell to people you annoy. They tune you out or they block you from interacting with them.

   No sale. 
    

2. Relying solely on building a large friends list.
   
   There’s a reason that the Facebook grader page doesn’t just list the first 50 people to make it to 5000 friends. If you make 5000 weak connections, they are actually worse than another person’s strong 50 connections.     

   Like anything else, you need to connect to the most targeted connections possible, and have a subset of influencers within that group.

3. Ignoring Facebook’s power to broadcast as well as receive. There is something to be said for having a lot of friends of Facebook – if they are the right friends. 

   If you’re picking people who are mutually beneficial to you, who have influence over other people in your target market, the nature of Facebook will amplify your efforts.The key to that here is the news feed.

   When you go to Facebook’s home page, you’re getting live updates of the people you’re connected to, and if you wish, a subset of the people you’re connected to, now that they’ve introduced filtering.  So when YOU publish items on YOUR profile, they’re going at least to all your friends, and potentially to the friends of your friends, if they take action on the information. 

   So why not just post your link on a more powerful user’s profile? 

   Well, first of all they can delete it, and block you, and then you can never leverage that relationship again. And you probably won’t find another powerful Facebook user to dupe into listing your spam, because we all know each other. I’m one degree of separation from all top 50 users on the Elite list, and half of them I either know or am connected to them on Facebook.

   Secondly, Facebook isn’t set up to drive traffic to profiles anymore, it’s set up to drive traffic to news feeds. I spend 75% of the time that I’m logged into Facebook on my own profile page, browsing the news feed. Unless I’m deciding whether or not to add you, I’m not going to your profile. Neither are other users. 

   Thirdly, you’ll get better results posting to your own profile, where people you know and the people they know can get your news when it pops into their news feed. 

If you take no other information away from our dialog about Facebook this week, let it be this: the news feed is where it’s at, where it’s going to BE at, and where it always WAS at. Master the News Feed, and learn to properly leverage your profile and your work in Facebook is done.

We’re gonna talk more about every day this week. For now, sign up for a Facebook account if you don’t already have one. I’ll show you the most important areas to pay attention to in an upcoming video.