Big Profits with Facebook

Facebook Profits on Steroids

Facebook Profits On Steroids - Page 1

Facebook Profits on Steroids

FACEBOOK PROFITS ON STERIODS MAKING MONEY AND RUNNING A BUSINESS FROM FACEBOOK

Facebook Profits On Steroids - Page 2

Facebook Profits on Steroids

Table Of Contents 1 Why Put Your Business On Facebook............ 6 Changing The Way We Do Business............................................. 6 Social Networking And Web 2.0 .................................................. 7 Why Facebook? ........................................................................ 8 Your Customers Are Your Friends...............................................10 Develop Your Network ..............................................................11 A Free Service, But Don't Abuse It! ............................................11 The KISS Principle ...................................................................12

2 What You Need To Succeed ....................... 14 Get A Referral .........................................................................14 The Handshake........................................................................16 The First Product You Sell: Yourself............................................17 Opt For A Casual, Conversational Approach .................................18 Classic Internet Marketing: Storytelling ......................................19 The Call To Action ....................................................................20

3 How To Generate Income .......................... 22 Market Your Own Products ........................................................22 Use Affiliate Marketing..............................................................24 Advertising Revenues ...............................................................25 Sell Services ...........................................................................26 Invest ....................................................................................28

4 How To Establish A Facebook Presence ..... 30 Create A Profile .......................................................................30 Find Friends ............................................................................32 Network..................................................................................34 Facebook Profits On Steroids - Page 3

Facebook Profits on Steroids The Sales Call To Action............................................................35

5 Identifying Your Target Audience .............. 38 Your Sales Brand .....................................................................38 How To Locate Clients ..............................................................39 Psych Them Out ......................................................................44

6 Strategies For Sales Promotion.................. 46 Facebook Pages .......................................................................47 Networks ................................................................................48 Groups ...................................................................................49 Virtual Gifts.............................................................................51 The Wall .................................................................................51 Social Ads...............................................................................52 Beacon ...................................................................................53

7 Applications For Marketing ........................ 55 Facebook Marketplace Application ..............................................56 RadicalBuy ..............................................................................56 Appsaholic ..............................................................................57 Business Cards ........................................................................57 Introduce Me...........................................................................58 Testimonials............................................................................58 Ether......................................................................................58 ProBook Facebook Application ...................................................59 Ebay ......................................................................................59 Garage Sale ............................................................................59 Free Gifts................................................................................60 Other .....................................................................................60 Final Word On Applications........................................................61

8 Creating Your Own Application ................... 63

Facebook Profits on Steroids Characteristics Of Viral Applications ...........................................63 How To Make Money With Your Application .................................65 Creating It To Sell It ................................................................65 Creating It To Market It ............................................................67

9 Building Your Business Using Facebook..... 69 Direct To Your Outside Website .................................................70 Conversion..............................................................................72 Know Your Product Niche And Market .........................................75 List Building ............................................................................76 Consulting ..............................................................................78

10 Things To Avoid On Facebook .................. 79 What To Do If You Are Warned Or Banned ..................................84 The Most Important Thing To Avoid On Facebook.........................85

Resources ...................................................... 87

Facebook Profits on Steroids

1 Why Put Your Business On Facebook The global economy is here to stay and the Internet is one of its primary vehicles of commerce. The old ways of doing business are quickly changing to be replaced by entrepreneurs who know how to reach customers all over the world and in the privacy of their own homes. However, to do that, today's business owners have to be technically savvy to reap some of the benefits of the Internet. They have to change their way of thinking about how to run a business and they need to go to places where there are potential clients ready to be approached for a quick sale. This is where Facebook comes in.

Changing The Way We Do Business In the past, the only way to do business was through a retail or mail-order store. Either way, to find your customers you had to either do substantial marketing research on your own, a mass-mailing campaign, and/or have a storefront business that attracted walk-ins. That limited most small entrepreneurs because they needed a large amount of startup capital just to get started with their business.

The Internet has changed all that. Now, you don't have to hire someone to do market research to find your customers. You can speedily find them on your own in social networking communities like Facebook. With the power of email and other electronic applications, you don't even need to spend money

Facebook Profits on Steroids on a mailing campaign. And, you can even have a business that has a virtual storefront and no retail space and do very well too.

In addition, the Internet has changed the dynamics between people who sold services like advertising or their own products, to make it advantageous to them to go with small players to do some advertising or selling of their own products online. The biggest change is that the Internet has made the act of starting your own business much easier and given everyone an equal opportunity to become a success! It just takes a little know-how and a bit of persistence to eventually establish yourself as a business on the Internet.

Social Networking And Web 2.0 At first, the Internet was developed by scientists as a repository for information. It was only later that it began to be exploited for marketing and entertainment purposes. As technologies got more sophisticated, pure text messages began to be replaced with video and music clips. People began to gather into different communities to share not only information, but anything and everything that was of interest to them. Communities like eBay took off for auction sites and MySpace is popular with many teenagers. Facebook had its one defined marketplace when it first started: college students.

As these community sites grew and started to extend their influence, they became known as social networking sites. In addition, a new moniker of “Web 2.0� was given to anything on the Internet that fostered a sense of community versus straight informational downloads. In that respect, many people see the first version of the Web as being very straight vanilla, almost like a news read, and Web 2.0 is for anything beyond that that is more interactive with surfers becoming community participants too.

Facebook Profits on Steroids

Why Facebook?

It became obvious, quite quickly, that where people gathered online there is a huge potential for traffic generation and eyeballs to your business and products. However, places like MySpace attracted a younger crowd and weren't suitable for business purposes, unlike Facebook. Since Facebook first started as a place for college students to meet other college students, it was natural for it to expand into the professional market once these students graduated. Not only that, but it is one of the fastest growing social networking sites out there with over 75 million registered users online.

In this ebook, you will learn how to use Facebook to develop a business that is not only profitable, but cutting edge. As the Internet and social networking evolves, you will be stepping into markets on the bottom floor as an early adopter of Internet technology for business purposes. We will guide you through the process to help you navigate new and exciting areas in business that can give you an idea of how wide the marketplace really is on the Internet.

You will learn the following: Chapter 2 – You will go about learning how to use a community site to develop a business. It takes quite a different mindset than one where we know the person is walking into our store with a product already in mind, ready to buy.

Chapter 3 – We will tell you different ways you can generate income using various strategies that make use of the Internet's power to mass market quickly and effectively.

Chapter 4 – Learn how to setup a Facebook presence that is attractive to people who will want to get closer to you and become loyal customers.

Facebook Profits on Steroids Chapter 5 – Find out how easy it is to locate customers and your target market using features already present in Facebook.

Chapter 6 - We will go over different ways to promote your products and your business through Facebook networks, groups, and social ads.

Chapter 7 – This chapter will talk about the use of applications within Facebook and some which make sense to investigate for your business purpose.

Chapter 8 – If you want to become very sophisticated in the world of Facebook, you can attempt to create your own application. We'll tell you some of the pros and cons of doing this and how it can help your business.

Chapter 9 – Ways to expand your business model will be discussed, including an offline website (outside of Facebook), traffic conversion to sales, information product markets, list building for future promotions, and offering consulting services.

Chapter 10 – As with any new activity you attempt for your business, there is a whole list of things you should avoid to help you succeed more quickly. Some business techniques may seem great for business, but ultimately kill your reputation on social networking sites leading to banning of your account. So, we will discuss what to avoid to keep yourself in good standing with your customers and the Facebook staff.

Facebook is really the ideal onsite community to develop a business. You can even link it to other sites and show your eBay listings or other information on Facebook. More and more social networking sites are trying to engage each other to broaden their appeal and service offerings. You may find that adding your profile into Facebook can zoom sales somewhere else, and vice-versa.

Facebook Profits on Steroids

Your Customers Are Your Friends Unlike a regular business interaction, interactions in Facebook are more social. In fact, the main reason Facebook exists is to socially gather together and meet other people. Doing business on it was not the main reason it grew and this has become an offshoot of a popular place to meet. It doesn't mean that the staff of Facebook frowns on doing business on Facebook, since they even have a marketplace for you to do so. However, if you want to be successful on Facebook then you have to learn how to do business in a different way.

Here, you will have to spend some time becoming an active participant of this site to generate some business leads. It is important to start building a network of friends because eventually those friends will also be your customers. However, you can't approach someone with a solicitation like: ”Friend”, would you like to buy my x product?” This is obviously a solicitation even if you are using the word “friend.” Being a friend means much more on social networking sites than just a word. They are your trusted network and the people who will help you promote your Facebook profile, and thus, by default your business. But, the trick is that you never hard sell your friends, you always have to approach them with the soft sell.

If your friends buy your products, they might share the results with groups or it will show up on their news feed. Facebook is set up to tell other friends about what their friends are doing, whether it is installing an application or buying your product. There are so many different interconnected pieces to Facebook, that you must remember to be polite and professional to everyone you meet, even those that may want to antagonize you. You never know who will read that exchange and get the wrong impression about you and your business, rather than wondering why somebody else is being unpleasant.

Facebook Profits on Steroids

Develop Your Network As you start to attract attention through your interaction on Facebook online, you can start building a network of people who are interested in you and your products. This is very helpful to build a contacts list and customer database. Whether someone buys or not, remember that they are a potential customer and try to get them into your sales pipeline. This can be done a number of ways to help convert traffic into sales.

You will have to devote some time to building your presence on Facebook and some of this can be outsourced as you become more successful. It isn't an overnight, turn-key, operation and every Facebook business should be as unique as the business owner. In fact, this is the primary reason people join social networks: to express their unique identities. So, in order to build a network of people who would be interested in your products, you need to concentrate on resonating with people's unique identities. For instance, if you were selling tattoo designs online, you might want to create a group on Facebook on what makes designs appealing to some people and not to others. This is less informational and more identity oriented and would attract people who are interested in providing their opinions in your target market.

A Free Service, But Don't Abuse It! Facebook is a free online service open to everyone. It used to be that you had to be a part of someone's immediate network in order to be invited to join Facebook. That was because it dealt mostly with college

Facebook Profits on Steroids students who were still enrolled originally and it was intent on spreading by word of mouth. Now, the service is open to everyone and attracts a number of young professionals.

If you think that because it is free, that you can do anything you want on this community, you had better think again! The community is monitored by the Facebook staff to make sure that people are abiding by the terms of the service agreement. If you are doing something against the terms of the agreement, you can expect your account to be banned or suspended. Without your account, you won't have a business presence. So, be sure to read the terms of the agreement before starting. You don't want to lose your account due to ignorance.

The KISS Principle The formula for Facebook appears to follow the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid). The layout is more generic, making a more favorable impression as a business site for professionals. You will be asked some simple questions to register to help you start creating a network without knowing anyone online yet. They will ask you for your high school and graduation date, your college and graduation date, and your town. This will help put you in touch with people you might already know.

Most everything that is used on Facebook is kept to a simple format.

You can search for people by way of businesses, schools, or geographical areas. You can even search by search terms in the Friends Finder and pull up all people with the word “computer

Facebook Profits on Steroids programmer� or such in their profiles. This can be a very quick and simple way to look up people in your target demographics. All of the categories for searching groups also have subtypes that make your searching for specific demographics very simple and easy. But, before we get into the actual way to work with these features, let's discuss the proper mindset you need to succeed in a social networking site like Facebook.

Facebook Profits on Steroids

2 What You Need To Succeed If you are from the old school of marketing, you might think you have to psyche yourself up for a whole lot of fast and furious cold calling, except instead of using the phone you'll use email. This type of activity is called spamming and unsolicited sales emails are a great way to get your account banned. So, you have to learn the art of the soft sell while trying to establish a business presence in Facebook. The immediate intent of reaching out to contact others should not an immediate sale, but actually it should be about building relationships and establishing a growing network. This takes time and it takes finesse.

In some cases, you will be using some of the more gentile mannerisms taught as classic marketing maneuvers, except instead of doing it in person, you will be doing it online. If you have ever been a consultant in the real world for any line of work, you probably already have some of those skills. All you have to do now is translate them into an online web of business contacts.

Get A Referral One of the easiest ways to build a contact list, and also the most effective, is to get a referral from someone you already know. In fact, Facebook was created on this premise when it originally was created

Facebook Profits on Steroids with a closed network that you had to be invited into by someone else to access. This is no longer the case, and you can simply choose to sign yourself up without a referral from anyone. However, then you find yourself in Facebook and you're all alone! Instead of sending out emails to anonymous people, you should always start to try to build your network with people you already know who are on Facebook. This way you never find yourself in the position of having to make an email cold call. Someone will have already introduced you as a friend. This will give you a degree of credibility when you go to approach people you don't know on Facebook, who you would like to get to know. If you have no friends, you can bet others will not trust you as easily as if you have a few friends on your side already willing to vouch for you.

When you sign up, you will be asked for a variety of personal information. You should be truthful with where you went to school, where you live, and where you work (if you don't mind an employer finding out you are on Facebook). Some people have even tried using screen names, but found that when building a business, it makes more sense to use your own name. After all, hopefully you are not online to post pictures of the latest frat party, but rather to make money. So, if you keep to some decent business standards, you shouldn't have to worry too much about using your own name and it can help to start to brand you as an expert in some field.

The reason for using your own personal information is because you are going to use it to find your friends! If you go in and can find no one there who knows you, you will have to start trying to make friends, without having any friends to speak of. That's like being the new kid in school who no one knows, no one trusts, and everyone thinks is a bit

Facebook Profits on Steroids weird. Friends are important because they can help you establish your identity and verify who you are. And, identity is everything in social networking.

So, after answering the profile information, you can start to look for people who might have attended school with you at some time in the past, your prior co-workers, and even people in your specific geographical area. Another great way to find people you already know on Facebook is to think about the types of organizations you have joined in the past. Is there a church you attended? Plug in the church name in the friend finder and you will be surprised how many people pop up. Any organization is fair game, whether it is a library book club or a business organization. It doesn't hurt to look and it can be a great way to establish a presence from the physical encounters and time you've already spent doing your regular activities in your area.

The Handshake Any savvy marketer will tell you that if you meet someone new, you shake hands firmly and you look the new person in the eye and try to establish some personal rapport, as soon as possible. Well, when you find those friends online, you're already a bit ahead of yourself because you should have some rapport from past associations. Now, all you need to do is seal the electronic deal by sending them a message that you want to be their friend. So, in a way, you have to re-introduce yourself to them as if they were a semi-stranger because you are online and they can't see you through their PC screen.

Facebook Profits on Steroids When you find someone you know, you can choose to “Add as Friend” and then a message box will pop up. Here, you can remind your old friend of who you are and what you shared together. Did you sing in the same choir at church? Why not say:”Hey, Buddy, great to see a fellow choir member here online! What have you been up to since we last saw each other?” It's always great to ask a question to get a reply.

The idea is to establish that handshake, make it as firm as possible by identifying who you are and their connection to you, and then try to establish a rapport or connection with them so that they will agree to add you as a friend.

Keep in mind that there are advantages and disadvantages to networking online. Sometimes they are often the same thing! For instance, the great advantage to online networking can be that you can approach many different people to try to build your network, in much less time than if you tried to do this physically. The disadvantage is that so many people are trying to get to know each other, that you can quickly be lost in the crowd or simply ignored by people who no longer want to be anyone's friend! Hopefully, by starting out with people who you already have some relationship with in the physical world, you will have a firm footing in the cyberworld to help you grow your network bigger when it comes time to do that.

The First Product You Sell: Yourself Now, that you have someone's attention, you might think it's time to make your sales pitch. Hold on! The first product you have to sell on a social networking site is yourself. That means that these types of

Facebook Profits on Steroids interactions will take a little longer upfront than conventional methods of marketing where you are trying to contact as many people as possible and then issuing a sales pitch in the hopes you get someone who is ready to buy. That's a very quick way of alienating all your friends on Facebook and they probably won't come back. Since your friends lend your online presence a degree of credibility and trust, once all your friends leave, you are basically bankrupt on a social network. You might as well leave and start a different profile (although Facebook only allows one profile per user) or a use a different site.

So, instead, focus on getting to know your friends a little better and finding out what about their identities has attracted them to you.

Then, promote that part of your image more to gain more people from their network to join your own network. You should try to remain in your targeted niche for the products you are selling. So, if you are selling mail order office products, you shouldn't try to promote an image of non-professionalism and get all your friends from the local pub to join.

Now, if you were selling sporting goods, the same crowd could yield great sales leads and buy a lot from you in the long run. So, do sell your traits, but gear them to your image and the identities of those people you are trying to attract. The more interesting you are to them, the more likely they will tell a friend about what you are doing on your Facebook account.

Opt For A Casual, Conversational Approach

Facebook Profits on Steroids Unlike the real business world of corporate sales, Facebook doesn't give you kudos for putting on a virtual tie and acting robot-like. Your main intent may be to eventually make a sale, but that is not the intent of Facebook or its creators. So, you don't want to send out a vibe that you are only on Facebook to do business. In the corporate world, a business-like demeanor is seen as very professional and efficient, on Facebook, it's deadly.

You have to remember that your audience on Facebook is one made up of college students or young professionals, for the most part. They still haven't spent a whole lot of time in the corporate world and are more likely to view this type of approach as irritating and somewhat ridiculous. They will also immediately go on the defensive if they think they are being cultivated for some sales gimmick and your behavior will clue them in rather quickly.

So, you don't want to act like a professional salesperson or marketer.

You want to act a little more congenial and try to reel them into your virtual world by giving them a little trail of bread crumbs to lure them into your fairy tale world.

Classic Internet Marketing: Storytelling Now, this is where the marketing model diverges completely from the conventional model. In a conventional model, you might get up in front of a group of people (particularly if you are consultant) and explain the benefits of your products or services to the people

Facebook Profits on Steroids attending your sales presentation. It would be geared to be snazzy, eye-catching, and full of information that meets the customer's needs.

In Facebook, this will only bore people to tears and send them scurrying to the exit door. Instead, after you establish rapport with someone, you will want to opt to begin to reel them into your sales funnel using storytelling as your main technique. Of course, this can take a little longer, but this is not really a business proposition, it is a seduction.

Some of the greatest examples of this type of marketing technique for online sales can be seen at eBay. Who can forget the story of the Virgin Mary

grilled cheese sandwich? It wasn't just the image of the

Virgin Mary that made it sell for $28,000 and become an Internet story for weeks, it was also the story behind the grilled cheese sandwich that helped increase its value in the eyes of the Internet bidders. The person who posted the sandwich claimed it was 10 years old and responsible for helping her win $70,000 at a casino. And, as proof of its holiness, the sandwich was said to have never exhibited signs of mold.

While we all find this story incredibly humorous, the fact is she walked away with $28,000 from the auction of a grilled cheese sandwich. And, that's the power of storytelling when it comes to Internet marketing.

The Call To Action At the end of every classic sales pitch is the “call to action.� In Facebook, you can't solicit other people but you can sell your benefits.

Facebook Profits on Steroids So, the call to action may be more of a soft sell at the end of a personal communication and it should be done in stages. The first call to action might actually be in your signature file that goes with your emails in private communications. It can give an example of how you've helped others achieve some goal of their own and how you can help others too. Then, you should ask them to contact you for further information or to go to a particular product or service in the marketplace to get what they need to solve their problems. If that doesn't catch someone's interest, don't push it. Instead, build a relationship and after four or five interactions, you can then begin selling them a little harder on your products and services.

Facebook Profits on Steroids

3 How To Generate Income Generating income online is probably easier than generating it offline, for an entrepreneur. The reason for this is that this that the startup costs have been significantly reduced and the World Wide Web (WWW) is much more egalitarian than real life. If you were an entrepreneur trying to get an advertising contract with a major company in real life, your odds would be slim to none. On the Internet, however, advertisers are relying on the average Joe to plug their products and services.

The same is true if you have a product that you've developed and are trying to market in local retail stores. The time and money you have to put in to get it into a single store can eat up any profits you might obtain from the sale. It's a lot of work and you haven't even begun to generate income. The Internet makes that process easier too by allowing you several avenues to sell your wares online simply by placing photos and descriptions of them on the Internet in the right areas. We will discuss, in this chapter, five different ways to generate income on the Internet and how they can be adapted to Facebook.

Market Your Own Products If you decide to market a product or service, be sure it is something you stand by and that it resonates with you personally. First, and foremost, Facebook is a social networking platform. If you are selling

Facebook Profits on Steroids products that don't appear to resonate with your profile or your mission in life, people will quickly spot you as a marketer and you will not get many people wanting to be your friends. The key is to always market products that you believe in and that make a difference in other people's lives. That way, when they see who is selling an item, it won't reflect badly on you and your Facebook profile.

On the Internet you can market your own products at a fraction of the cost it would take to promote them physically from one retail store or outlet to another. Examples of products that do very well on the Internet are virtual products like reports, ebooks, music downloads, photographic content, and anything that you can sell in electronic format that might appeal to someone viewing it online. These products are usually referred to as “info-products.� The nice thing about infoproducts is that they lend themselves very well to low overhead costs.

You can produce one product and it takes no effort to create multiple copies and have them delivered automatically through autoresponders.

Your sales cycle is very short and your costs are minimal.

You can also market physical products that you deliver in your geographical area or through postal mail. Of course, this takes a lot more effort and you would have to include shipping costs to the price of your product to be able to make a profit. You can even choose to offer your products in several different formats. For instance, maybe some people want the electronic download and others want a physical book. You can offer them a variety of different formats and pricing to find one that suits them.

Facebook Profits on Steroids Multilevel marketing can also be done on the Internet and Facebook. If you've found a product that you want to market, then you don't necessarily have to own the rights to produce it, just the rights to distribute it. And, you might find it easier to recruit people in your down line using Facebook.

The applications to use for marketing your products on Facebook is called Marketplace and RadicalBuy. We will discuss more about this application in Chapter 7.

Use Affiliate Marketing You can also do affiliate marketing online. This is where someone else pays you to sell their products for them. The commission you receive on the sale will depend on the affiliate offer you are promoting. In some cases, you can get up to 50% of the sale, if you pick the right offers. Here again, you should pick things that resonate with your profile in Facebook. Affiliate marketing links could end up cluttering your profile page, if you included them as website links, and probably people wouldn't appreciate them. So, affiliate marketing on Facebook can be a little tricky. You should be a little stingy with the number of affiliate links you post on your profile or within your status line. This is an area you can update daily with new offers, but if you do it too much, you will turn off people who come to view your profile.

You should also want to start to build a demographic section of people on your email list who are already in your sales funnel from your contacts on Facebook. Once they opt-in to your email list, you can

Facebook Profits on Steroids start to contact them about your affiliate offers off the Facebook platform. This means that you might have to also set up some ads within Facebook to generate the cross-section of people that you want to market to. Or, you might start them into your sales funnel by offering a free resource on your profile in exchange for their email address. This way, you've not placed affiliate offers on your profile directly, but you have gathered the necessary information to start generating a mailing list for affiliate offers.

The application to use for affiliate marketing on Facebook is also RadicalBuy. We will discuss more about this application in Chapter 7.

Advertising Revenues There are a number of people generating revenue through sponsored ads, Facebook Social Ads, and pay per click ads on Facebook. If you end up with a large cross-section of people are friends that might be easy to market for a particular advertiser, then they might be willing to pay you for some sponsored ads, however, this can't be done on Facebook without violating the terms of the service agreement. So, you can still attempt to get advertising revenues from sponsored ads, but they aren't allowed to be put directly on your Facebook profile.

They will have to be placed elsewhere, on your personal website, or an outside blog. The trick is to have them pay for the ad for a period of time, like a month. Then, you have a residual monthly income coming in from a single text link, banner, or button on your other content. You can direct Facebook viewers to your other areas by way of links on your profile, even if the sponsored link is not directly on your Facebook

Facebook Profits on Steroids profile. This can generate significant income from your Facebook profile in a short period of time by building relationships within Facebook first, before you market them elsewhere.

Facebook also offers Social Ads. They come in CPC or CPM variety. The cost to you as an advertiser choosing CPC ads would be based on a pay per click ratio. The cost to you as an advertiser choosing CPM ads are based on a cost per number of impressions ratio. So, you either pay for some action, like a click on the ad, or for the number of eyeballs who see you ad. Even though you are paying to get your ad in front of other people, you should be able to figure out how that converts to additional sales in your business model. If your business increases significantly then the ads can be well worth running.

You don't necessarily have to sell your own products with Social Ads. You can sell affiliate offers and other types of advertising. There are people who don't even have a Facebook presence online who just buy ads and generate income through this model. They aren't interested in getting friends or being on a social networking platform, they are just interested in the advertising and potential revenues from running small ads to generate business for themselves or others.

Sell Services Facebook can be an excellent resource for professionals who sell services. That's because the Internet has made it very easy for people who need your services to connect with you, regardless of whether you are in their geographical location or not. Add to that the technological

Facebook Profits on Steroids advancements that make online consulting and teaching very simple, and you can see that there are quite a few advantages to selling services online.

The down side of selling services, instead of products, is that your time is limited. If you don't make good use of the technology available to help distribute yourself over multiple platforms in digital format, you could easily find your profits being limited by the amount of time you have. Some of the ways this dilemma can be resolved is to outsource the smaller tasks, so that you can concentrate on the ones that are highly profitable and need your particular attention.

You can sell many different types of services online, but they should resonate with the persona that you've established on Facebook. If you are a business consultant, for instance, your profile shouldn't have a collegiate feel to it, even if you are in Facebook. Some people make the mistake of thinking that the Facebook audience still only includes college students, which isn't true. There are more and more professionals going online and these people will want to see profiles and services that speak to them too.

The types of services you can offer are many. You can choose to offer custom services for anything out there from graphics design and computer development to social services. You can mentor people oneon-one either through a chat or phone service. You can set up individual plans for people you are coaching on any number of goals, from business to personal life goals. You can even offer these services in digital format like downloadable media files that offer them the

Facebook Profits on Steroids chance to view whenever they have time. You can even offer email support on the downloadable media and classes for a set fee.

You can even sell your own services as an Internet marketer on Facebook. Are there any local businesses that want to enter the social networking media? Well, you could be the person to offer them that service. You can set up a profile for them, using their details, and use their credit card information to buy them Social ads and build their business for them online. You will have to show that the services you provide are actually helping them to promote their business in order to be a successful Internet marketer. Once they are up and running, you can even charge them a monthly fee to manage their online profile and businesses as a social networking presence manager.

Invest Other popular ways to make money on the Internet are through investing schemes. Some people buy foreign currency online and others are becoming more invested in peer-to-peer lending schemes like prosper.com. If that is where your interest is in making money online, you can still use Facebook to generate leads for people who might have good investment information for you. You can also use the affiliate program from your investments to help generate extra cash.

However, the best way to invest in Facebook is to invest in yourself.

You can invest in yourself through Facebook by building up your reputation and becoming a participant in groups that will help to build up your online skills and money making capabilities. Social networking

Facebook Profits on Steroids is a great way to meet people who are already successful at doing something that you may just be starting to get into. You can add them as a friend and hopefully generate a one-on-one relationship either through emails or groups. This way, you can get much of the advice and information you need to succeed on your own with only a small investment in your time. From there, you might even learn other ways to invest online that you can use with Facebook to help generate even greater profits.

Facebook Profits on Steroids

4 How To Establish A Facebook Presence The key to a great business model on Facebook is relationships. In order to build relationships, you start with yourself. What makes you interesting? Why would someone want to be in relationship with you?

This is the question that you must answer when you set up your profile. The more the profile represents you and your business, the more you will attract the type of person who might end up buying something from you. The second step is to make some friends!

You can't do business on a social network without friends. These are the people who are going to vouch for your authenticity and credibility.

So, you want to start with people who know you. This can be done easily through the Friend Finder feature in Facebook. Finally you will want to network with other people of similar interest. This is where you will begin to expand your friends from people you know to people you originally did not know before you contacted them. And, then, once you've established friends and begin to build a list, you will want to make sure your products and services are out there to buy in the right way. You will want to have the art of the soft sell down pat and you will want to eventually have the Internet version of the “call to action� available at the right moment.

Create A Profile So, you've logged in and now you are faced with a blank page and no friends. Don't let the initial vanilla layout fool you about the power of

Facebook Profits on Steroids the profile to draw attention to you as a business. It is the fact that the profiles are so clean and uncluttered that attracts professionals and people who hate MySpace to Facebook. You will want to keep your own profile somewhat uncluttered, but put in the information that best brings you business. It is also a violation of the terms of service to create more than one user profile per person, so keep that in mind.

Here again, we have to warn conventional marketers that the profile page is not a sales page. Those long-winded sales pages that include every known benefit that might draw a buyer in, with the option to buy at the end? Well, that's not good Facebook marketing. Your profile should not look like a sales page because the audience in Facebook will recognize it and be turned off by it.

Instead, create a profile that includes many of your own interests and activities, even when they seem to have nothing to do with your business. It may seem unusual for a marketer to spend time on the Internet posting their favorite books and music online that have little to do with their products or services, but that's going to help you build social relationships. So, although you might be joining to create a business person, you private persona is essential to share on Facebook if you want to be accepted as part of the community. This can cause some discomfort with regular marketers, but you don't have to disclose everything. Just enough to making make a connection with someone else. You never know what someone will see on your profile that will click with them, it could be a movie you watched, a book you read, or hobby you engage in. This type of profile not only helps to make you more approachable, but it also will come in handy when you are searching demographics later.

Facebook Profits on Steroids

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in Facebook on your profile is not including a picture. Even if you are not photogenic, no one likes the idea of conversing with a huge question mark, which is the default picture on your profile. A personal picture is actually the best idea, and again, that can make some people uncomfortable. Facebook is about genuine connections and human relationships, so if you can't get into that spirit you may end up being hampered down the line. If you can't find it within you to post a picture of yourself, upload at least some picture. Some people are intrigued by photos that are blurred or show only part of a face. This might send the wrong message, however, if you are trying to appear genuine and likable.

Don't worry about everyone on Facebook or the Internet seeing your profile. There are privacy options that allow only friends on people in your Facebook network to see your profile. There are very few public profiles online. All they will show in the listing is a thumbnail of your picture and your name. You will have to accept someone as your friend most of the time or belong to the same network for them to be able to view your profile.

Find Friends As we mentioned earlier, finding friends is not as hard as it may first seem when you log into your blank profile page. Facebook makes it extremely easy to get started building a network of friends. If you are truthful with your profile, you will start to find people easily by looking for them in the various categories that match your own profile. In fact,

Facebook Profits on Steroids if you filled out all the schools you attended, you are almost guaranteed to find someone online to be your friend, particularly if the school experience was recent. You can even find coworkers from all the jobs you've had in the past if they are members of Facebook.

Facebook will give you these options at the very bottom of the “Find people you know on Facebook” page. They will already have links set up to point you in the right direction saying: “Find classmates from (name of your school here)” or “Find current or past coworkers.” It's just that simple to do after you've already filled out your profile correctly.

Once you locate someone who is a potential friend, be sure to click on the “Add as friend” link. It will notify them that you are out there and want to be included in their circle of friends. You can even add a little message in the request, which is highly recommended. A great way to make sure you get a positive response is to remind them of how you know them and reminisce a bit or ask a question. This will help them to realize that here is someone from their past that they already know.

This is important because people forget names and faces, as well as, some people get multiple friend requests and you can get lost in the crowd.

Finally, you will want to also search your email addresses from various accounts you might have to see if you can locate someone on Facebook who is already an email buddy. Not only can you locate people through your email address book, but there are also options to AIM buddy list and Windows live contact. When looking for friends you already know, be sure to explore the friend finder interface carefully.

Facebook Profits on Steroids

Network Once you have a few friends signed up who can vouch for your credibility, you can start trying to network. Before that, it might be anyone's guess whether the profile represents a live person or a creation of someone's active business imagination. So, friends are crucial to giving your profile some authenticity. And, we all know that people do not buy products or do business with people they don't trust.

Now, you will want to join some networks. This will be under your Accounts link. After getting into your account page, you will want to select the network tab. You might already be included in a network, others you will have to join. University networks may require you to be a current student with an email address on the university server to confirm sign-up to the network. You can only join up to five networks.

Now, don't confuse networks with networking. After all, networks facilitate networking on Facebook, but you can network with anyone whether you join their network group or not. Probably for that reason and the groups option, Facebook is staging out networks in the near future.

So, see, networking in Facebook is not difficult. That's because there are already various networks and groups in existence on Facebook, from geographically based networks to university networks. In fact, if you filled out your hometown, you can easily start to network with people in your area by clicking on the name of your home town in the profile. Voila! Now you see one of the most powerful features of Facebook and why you should be accurate and thorough when creating

Facebook Profits on Steroids your own profile. It will lead you to numerous networking opportunities based on your profile alone, whether a network or group for that particular demographic exists or not.

Networking, as mentioned earlier, can also be accomplished by clicking on any link in your profile. If you want to find people who might have a book you read in common, just click on the title and Facebook will come up with all the members who picked that as their favorite book too. This can lead to very interesting and social ways to network and get market leads. For instance, if you were selling beauty products, you could go to Amazon.com and find out what might be selling under beauty books. List that as one of your favorite books, click on it, and find many other people who make a perfect demographic for your business. Then, you can ask to be their friend by noting in your message that you both like the same book. You haven't sold them anything yet, but they might be more inclined to add you as friend if they perceive you and they already have a connection.

The Sales Call To Action In most conventional marketing, your call to action comes at the end of every marketing interaction and it usually is pumped to be a hard sell. This is the wrong approach for Facebook where this type of maneuver will easily get you branded as a marketer and persona nongrata in the community. So, you must try to follow a more subtle approach in your call to action. You must think about why you are on Facebook and how you can contribute to the community. You have to change your mindset from one of selling a product or service, to

Facebook Profits on Steroids understanding that a call to action can mean various things on a social network.

One thing you will want to attempt to do is to move them off Facebook to your own website or sales page elsewhere, so your sales call to action will not just be about making an immediate sale, but preparing them to enter your sales funnel.

For that reason, you can ask them to: Read your blog You can post some excerpts from your outside blogs into notes and have them continue reading offline to your personal blog where affiliate offers and such won't be as jarring. In fact, many marketing experts believe a blog to be the ideal transition point from Facebook to your own website.

Sign up to a mailing list Once they are on your blog or website, you can ask them to sign up to a mailing list in exchange for some free item.

Download a file You can do this to establish a rapport with your viewers and to help you promote your business.

Join a group Many marketers find people in groups are a great way to start building a mailing list and contacting people one-on-one. Also, you can post your links to outside offers in any group you create.

Facebook Profits on Steroids

Post a comment Write an interesting note? Want to know about something on Facebook? Whether you ask a question or just ask for feedback, you can get people to comment and thus help you build community and rapport. It will also help you to gear your products and services to the likes and dislikes of your audience.

Order a product Finally, you can do this, but you want to be very careful not violate the terms of the Facebook service agreement. You also don't want to lose your friends just as you've started figuring out Facebook's networking possibilities.

Don't forget that you can promote your own products and services in your email interactions with people. Just use a signature file for your outside emails and always look for an opening where a particular product or service may solve someone's immediate problem. Then, it will be a case of you being helpful, not so much being driven to make a sale at any price.

Facebook Profits on Steroids

5 Identifying Your Target Audience In order to figure out what audience to target, you have to understand the types of people who join Facebook. Adonomics.com is website dedicated to understanding what people are doing on Facebook by tracking the applications that are being created and downloaded.

They've broken down the types of communications that occur in Facebook into three categories: identity, factic, and other.

Factic would relate to communications that one engages for the sake of the social task being performed. For instance, when someone hands you something, you automatically communicate, “thank you� even though it performs no function directly other than to be polite. The biggest category of communication is identity, which comprises about 43% of all communications on Facebook. This should tell you that people who join Facebook are interested in asserting their identities, whether individually or as a group. And, that's how you are going to attract people to you and figure out your sales demographics too.

Your Sales Brand Your profile is your sales brand on Facebook. It is your identity and, as such, is the brand that will either attract or repel people to your products and services. If you've spent a good deal of time setting up the perfect profile, it will help you to generate interest in people

Facebook Profits on Steroids joining as friends. So, you identify who you are first and foremost.

Then, you will want to continue to communicate this identity through your Facebook interactions and eventually participate or create communities that strengthen this identity. The reason for this is simple: If your brand, or identity, appeals to people on Facebook, then it will flourish and generate traffic and income.

How To Locate Clients After you've established your own identity, then you want to locate the demographics within Facebook that will resonate with your brand. This is straightforward marketing philosophy. In order to make your marketing efforts pay off, you want to either approach or engage people who might be likely to buy them. If you waste your time just chit-chatting with everyone, you may end up being the most social person in Facebook, but making poor sales. So, you should always seek to engage people in the demographic segment that is likely to buy your products and services, as well as engage in social interactions. You can do this several ways: by using the search bar, Lexicon, or polls.

Using The Search Bar

One of the first ways to locate a demographic that might be beneficial to your business is to look at the professions of people who might be interested in your products. Are you selling physical fitness products?

Look up physical fitness trainers, yoga instructors, and/or sport coaches. These are three very viable demographics for these products

Facebook Profits on Steroids and they are based on people's professions. So, by opening the search bar and just typing one in at a time, you can easily locate people in these professions and begin to start building a contact list.

When you get results from the search bar, they will pull up on an “All Results� tab. However, don't fail to notice that there are other tabs available that can narrow down your search metrics much more efficiently. They are broken down into their own tabs as follows: People This tab will show you all the people who matched your search query. You will have to check each individually to see where the search term was found in their profile to see if it makes sense to add them to a potential contact list. If the keyword you searched shows up in areas like hobby instead of the job title, you may have to decide whether they could be a serious buyer or not. You want to create a streamlined list of contacts that have good potential, not every person who's name shows up in the results.

Pages This tab will show you all the pages created by people on Facebook. They typically represent businesses, interest groups, non-profits, or even political campaigns. These are not for individuals as much as for groups, so keep that in mind if you are wanting to sell to individuals. If you are looking for businessto-business interactions than the pages results can steer you in the right direction.

Facebook Profits on Steroids Groups This tab is for groups created by people, not just businesses.

They can comprise anything under the sun. They typically do not like to be marketed, but can be a great resource for developing new friends and to learn how people in your demographics are interacting. You can join a few groups and start to network this way very efficiently.

Events If you have some local events that you are using for marketing purposes, or you want to connect with people specifically in your geographic zone face-to-face, then you can check out the events page. You may find groups of people in your area who make a perfect sales demographic for your products or services.

Applications These are tools helpful to your marketing efforts, not people. So, you will be able to find helpful applications that might be highlighted in the application tab by using your demographic search result. They won't lead you to buying customers though unless they are tools to help you do that.

When you are building your contact list, be sure to check out as many tabs as necessary to get a good cross-section of people and businesses that might be helpful in your search.

Facebook Profits on Steroids

Lexicon

Lexicon is a feature in Facebook that measures trends in different content posted to Facebook. It can be used as a market research tool by comparing how popular different search terms, associated with your products or services, are on Facebook. It can also give you an idea of what people are saying about these keywords as it tracks the information that is posted to the Wall section of each person's profile.

This is an area where people post messages to each other and it can give you an idea of what the latest buzz is in Facebook and help you to capitalize on that interest level. Or, if you are trying to decide whether your cat or dog products might sell better, you can compare the trends by placing the words “cat, dog� into the Lexicon search area. Then, you can see that dogs are talked about more than cats recently. You can put in up to five words separated by commas to search this way and get a good idea of recent trends in Facebook.

It may be difficult to find a direct link to Lexicon, so we are providing it here: http://www.facebook.com/lexicon

Polls

Polls are a great way to figure out what is of interest to people who are coming to your profile or who are in groups. You will want to either get permission to post a poll to a group or be the group's creator. This is not a free service, so it can cost you a bit to do market research and demographics investigations this way. If you don't want to pay to do

Facebook Profits on Steroids it, you can always use your contact list from a group you created to direct them to a survey outside of Facebook using a free tool like surveymonkey.com. Or instead of using the poll tool, you can conduct a poll in the discussion area of a group to get started without spending any money. This is a great way to get feedback on whether your products and services can use some enhancements or if you might be able to cross-sell some new product or featured based on a new underutilized need in your market segment.

Mini-Feeds

Mini-feeds show the actions that you've taken as a member of Facebook from the most recent to the less recent. It will show what networks or groups you've joined, when you edit your profile, or added friends and applications. You can view other people's mini-feeds on their profiles too on the right-hand side to do some market research on what interests particular targets. This can be helpful if you notice people are doing the same sorts of things across a particular segment of your market groups.

News Feeds

These are different that Mini-feeds in that they are automatically generated by Facebook to keep friends connected and to use content in a viral manner. What stories show up on your news feed depends on a number of different variables from what your privacy settings are to what your friend's privacy settings are. Sometimes stories show up just because Facebook finds them interesting. At any rate, watching

Facebook Profits on Steroids the news feed is another good way to figure out what your friends and potential customers are interested and especially, when some topic is about to go viral.

Psych Them Out Now, that you've done your research and identify your demographics, you want to be able to convert Facebook users to paying customers.

For that you have to learn how to communicate with people in your demographics in the language they are most comfortable hearing. It doesn't mean you have to go into college slang, just be aware that some words may be better sales tools than other words. You should strive to remain authentic to your persona, but always with a warm and approachable style.

As mentioned earlier, you will want to appeal to the identity of the individual or group you are addressing. You should stress how your product or service will enhance or promote their individual identities.

You will want to try to move them off Facebook to your other selling venues. Otherwise, it is very difficult to mass-market to individuals on Facebook. You can offer a single product now and then, but to get them into a sales funnel that will show them all the offerings you have on the web, it's a good idea to move them away from the Facebook profile. One way you can do this is to offer them something for free in exchange for signing up with their email address to receive the free offer. This will allow you to market them with emails that can send them information to them directly. Or, you can tell them about a blog

Facebook Profits on Steroids that is off the Facebook network, and from this intermediary step you can market them to your website later.

Facebook Profits on Steroids

6 Strategies For Sales Promotion At first it may not seem obvious how to promote your products and services on Facebook without either getting banned or ignored. First and foremost, Facebook is a social networking site. People who place ads on other people's walls or sent unsolicited sales messages will quickly get into trouble. There are genuine ways to promote your business, however, on Facebook which makes it unique from MySpace and other types of social networking sites. There are Facebook pages which were set up as a concession to businesses and organizations who wanted some page to promote their businesses, rather than themselves. These can be used to put information about your organization and some of your offerings without getting into trouble.

You will also want to join networks that are within your geographical location, school, or work areas to provide viewing access to your profile for people who might be searching for something along the lines of your business. Groups, as mentioned earlier, are different than networks and can provide a great way to meet people one-on-one and rub elbows with marketers that are already successful in their niche.

You can even do a little promotion of your business in these if you don't consistently spam the group.

You can use gifts as promotional marketing materials, much the same way a conventional marketer would give away free pens or mousepads to promote their businesses. And, finally, advertising can get your

Facebook Profits on Steroids message across to many people whether they are in your network or not, circle of friends or not. Don't forget that anything on your profile can also be used to market to others, if you do it with a little subtlety.

You don't want to be caught spamming anyone's wall or emails.

Facebook Pages Facebook pages are similar to profiles except that they are used for businesses, organizations, and a number of different types of interests.

You can expect to see a Facebook page about a restaurant just as easily as you might spot a Facebook page on pets. There are several categories to choose from: a local business, a brand or product, or an artist, band, or public figure. The interesting thing about Facebook pages is that you don't necessarily have to be the celebrity to put up a page about your celebrity. It can be a fan club or a Facebook pages extolling the virtues of Nutella, if that's what suits you.

The Facebook pages works very similar to profile pages except that they are public. They have some of the same features as your profile page like a Wall and the ability to upload files. They also have discussion groups and and a way for fans to join your Facebook page.

The service is free and promoted virally throughout Facebook and even comes up in the search results. The actions that people take on your Facebook page are also integrated in the news feed and thus your product or service can spread virally through word of mouth. If you use Facebook pages in conjunction with Social Ads, you can increase the chances of your product getting viral momentum.

Facebook Profits on Steroids

Networks Networks are important to join because they allow other people in your network to view your profile without necessarily having to add you as a friend. So, if you are interested in having advertising links and marketing to a wider audience, you will want to join as many networks as you can. Unfortunately, you are limited to five networks and most you have to have some identifying email address to confirm in order to join the network. So, you can't just say you work at IBM, you actually have to have an email address in that domain to prove that you work there before Facebook will sign you up for that network.

The exception to that rule is the geographic location network. You should pick a geographic location where you do most of your business, not where you live. The reason for that is that you may not be allowed to change your geographic network that often and you can only choose one. So, make sure you are careful when you choose the geographic network you would like to belong to. Facebook will not require an email address or anything for your geographic network.

The other types of networks you can join besides the regional and work networks are school networks. For these, you will have to have an email address under the school's domain. So, if you are a person who is soon to graduate, make sure you get in the network now, before it's too late and you lose the email address necessary to confirm that you are indeed a student at that school.

One of the interesting thing is that Facebook is now saying it is phasing out networks. Seeing that Facebook was built around the

Facebook Profits on Steroids concept of school networks, it will be interesting to find out what they plan to do with this area. Keep an eye out for future developments in this area, but until that happens be sure to add your networks immediately upon joining Facebook. It will also give you access to view other people's profiles in the networks that you claim.

Groups There are two ways to promote your business using groups. You can join an existing group and join in the discussions and at the right moment promote your product. If you do this too much, you will be labeled a spammer, so it's not the best way to promote your business through a group. Another way, which is very effective, is to create your own group. This provides several benefits to joining an existing group. You can control what segment of your demographics to target with a group topic and you can put up your own advertising in the group without offending anyone.

You don't want to create a group about a specific product or service you are offering. No one is going to join an obvious ploy to market your wares. Instead, you will want to choose a topic related to your products or services and then use the group to help you promote your business.

If you have no idea what might work, simply check out the existing groups on Facebook. Look up groups that are in your niche market area and see what they are doing to make the group successful. Then,

Facebook Profits on Steroids you can take the same approach to help you build a group that attracts members and is successful too.

One of the most important marketing tools for your group will be the name that choose for it. If you choose to name it something bland, it won't attract much attention. You typically want names that are long enough to promote some interest, but short enough to be catchy so that they will go viral. In fact, T-shirt sayings can best exemplify catchy titles or slogans that might work on group names too. It doesn't mean you can't be serious, if you are dealing with a serious topic. But, if you are trying to capture a younger crowd you might want to try something humorous or trendy.

Examples of groups with good names in either the serious or flip categories are:

•

Six Degrees of Separation (376,341 members)

•

I Don't Care How Comfortable Crocks Are, You Look Like A Dumbass (865,097 members)

•

You know you're from North Carolina when...(21,522 members)

As you can see, it doesn't really take a genius to figure out a good name for a group.

To advertise your group, you will want to join existing groups and post about it on the wall or join discussion groups where you can announce

Facebook Profits on Steroids its creation. Part of social networking is joining in and participating, so don't expect people to just storm the front door after the group becomes active. You do have to do a little legwork to get people through the door. As the creator of the group, you will be responsible for adding posts and keeping it from becoming filled with spam or hostile posts.

You want your group to have quality and substance so that people will want to join and feel they are benefiting from being there. This will help you to increase the number of active group participants and help you to build a contact list for people who can potentially become your friends on your profile or customers from the ads you place in the groups.

Virtual Gifts Virtual gifts are not free, they cost a dollar each to send. However, you can add a little message to them and this will end up on the recipient's friends news feeds. So, in a way you are paying to advertise your product. Virtual gifts should resonate with the recipients' identity to promote a sense of personal affirmation and to get them to appreciate the gift.

The Wall The wall is an area of each person's profile where messages can be posted by other people who are visiting the profile. You can put any

Facebook Profits on Steroids message you want on the wall and it will be public. You can use this to research the market trends of people's interests and you can also post some message about things that might interest specific people in your circle of friends. Be aware that if you spam the wall consistently with sales ads, you will probably be blocked, and if the staff of Facebook is alerted you could end up being banned from Facebook.

An interesting way to use the power of the wall, is to look for people in your circle who have a high number of page views on their profile.

These would be people who have a lot of friends or send a lot of activity to the news feeds. That's the only way to tell what type of page views they might be getting. Then, target these people for your comments on their wall in a way that pulls the people viewing back to your profile.

Social Ads Finally, Social Ads are a paid avenue for advertising on Facebook. The nice thing about Social Ads is that you can target a specific demographic within Facebook, unlike Google AdWords. You can target it by different categories: age, gender, interests, locations, and more.

You can set up a campaign in either the CPC or the CPM model and choose your budget. In the CPC you are purchasing advertising based on clicks and the CPM model is for impressions.

Social ads appear in news feeds and to the left of the Facebook profiles and can be paired with a friend's action. So, not only will you see that

Facebook Profits on Steroids your friend took some action on your website, but you will also have an ad served in the news feed as well.

Social Ads come with its own metric measuring feature called Facebook Insights. It gives you an idea of how well your ads are working and what you might change for another campaign. It will tell you who has engaged your ads and who hasn't providing some market research directly from the ad you choose to place.

Beacon Another feature on Facebook that deserves a mention is Beacon. It used to be a standard opt-in for everyone on Facebook, but users complained and now you the basic setup is that you are not automatically opted in to Beacon, you have to tell Facebook you want to opt-in to this special feature. The reason for this is that Beacon was a feature that tracked some specific actions that your friends did on your website and then broadcasted that information to everyone by way of news feeds or added as a story to a profile. Some of the actions that might be targeted are buying a product, getting a service, adding a wish list item, or more.

Well, people didn't necessarily want all their friends to know what they were buying, particularly if it was some other friend's birthday present or a bit embarrassing to have broadcast across Facebook. So, now Beacon is still online, but when your friend performs this action on your sight, they receive a message to opt-out of the broadcast if they want to. So, now the dilemma is whether it's worth it to use Beacon or

Facebook Profits on Steroids whether you will alienate people performing actions on your profile because they know they are being watched. It's too early to tell if the backlash of negative sentiment towards Beacon will continue amongst Facebook users, but one should be careful anyway about what one chooses to try to broadcast across Facebook, especially if it is associated with your profile.

Facebook Profits on Steroids

7 Applications For Marketing The user interface for Facebook is relatively clean. You won't see a lot of extraneous things on your profile, but that doesn't mean you don't have the choice to add extra features to your Facebook account. And, in fact, if you want to do some marketing on Facebook for your own products and services, you will have to install the Marketplace application to be able to buy and sell on Facebook, it doesn't come pre-installed.

The types of applications that are pre-installed on your profile are: photos, video, groups, events, and notes. These applications are listed on the left-side of your profile under the search box. You can add new applications by clicking on the word “Applications” and then choosing to "Browse" more applications. From there you can add new applications by clicking on the application name and opening the description and reviews area. To the left hand side, you will see a button to “Add Application.”

The Facebook applications area is not the only way to discover new applications for Facebook. There are tons of websites devoted to Facebook applications from serious applications to games and quizzes.

You can also check out your friend's profiles to see what applications they've installed and that will also give you an idea of whether you can trust the application to work or not. You should always read the reviews and decide to install or not based on whether it suits your purposes or not. The applications are not guaranteed to work by

Facebook Profits on Steroids Facebook, since they are provided by third-party developers, so it's important to do your research.

Some of the applications that are very useful for marketing on Facebook are: RadicalBuy, Appsaholic, Introduce Me, and Business Cards. We will go every each of these applications and tell you how to use them to get the best results on Facebook.

Facebook Marketplace Application Facebook Marketplace, once installed, will offer you a place to list things for sale, housing, jobs, and classified ads. There is even a spot for free stuff too. The opportunities will be divided up by your networks. So, don't be surprised if you don't see everything on your Facebook from the entire site. It is set up to be a community marketplace, so it makes perfect sense to see only those listings from people in your network. That is why you want to setup your network to be the place where you mostly do business, not where you live. It is the basic area where people within Facebook go to do commerce within Facebook. However, it doesn't complete transactions between buyers and sellers. That is done offline between the two parties.

RadicalBuy RadicalBuy is another marketplace application that is more robust than Facebook Marketplace. It will allow you to recommend products to people on your contact list. You can get feedback and offer feedback

Facebook Profits on Steroids on market transactions. You can cross-sell between RadicalBuy and Facebook Marketplace. It makes it easy to collect payment, unlike the Facebook Marketplace. It offers users the ability to collect payment using Paypal, Google Checkout, credit cards, and more. You can even choose affiliate offers through RadicalBuy, if you want to include that with or without your own offerings.

Appsaholic This application is for people who have created their own applications and want to monetize them. We will go over creating your own application in Chapter 8. However, if you choose to do this, you will want a way to track the performance of your application and to place ads on it so that you can get a return on your investment. This application claims to be the #1 Facebook ad network for application developers.

Business Cards The idea behind the Business Cards application is similar to a conventional business card. Except instead of handing it to someone for future reference, you can attach your business card to Facebook messages. You can browse other business cards and make connections that way too. It is a sort of visual way of establishing your identity in a way that keeps you from having to keep writing the same thing over and over. This application was a bit buggy in its inception, but appears

Facebook Profits on Steroids to have been fixed to allow a person to edit the business card information once it has been entered.

Introduce Me Introduce Me allows people you know on Facebook to introduce you to people they know. It facilitates networking. The application is placed in the profile making it easier for people who stop by to introduce you to other people they know.

Testimonials Since you are in a social networking environment, word-of-mouth from trusted sources can make the difference between a sale or a near miss. And, with this application, people can simply go to your site and add their testimonial very easily. The fact that their user name will be associated with the testimonial at times means the testimonials hold more weight on Facebook. Although this application is also still a bit buggy, it bears looking into. Right now, if people post a testimonial on your site, it may be difficult to delete it.

Ether This application is good for consultants, tutors, and pay-by-the hour types of people who can do business over the phone. The application will provide you with a special phone number to use for your business

Facebook Profits on Steroids and allow people to call you directly on that number once they pay a set fee that you set. The phone call will be directed to a phone number of your choice. Now you have your own way to set up an anonymous pay-to-talk phone number.

ProBook Facebook Application This is an application that allows you to add information about yourself in a professional directory. Friend and people you've contacted can offer feedback and rate you, which will give potential employers some measure of your worth.

Ebay This application will allow you to combine the power of Facebook for networking to showcase your eBay goods. This can work very nicely as people will often buy from people whom they trust. If you are in someone's network, it's likely you have a certain degree of authenticity that other eBay sellers won't have without Facebook profiles.

Garage Sale If you have a whole lot of stuff lying around that you want to get rid of, and don't want to incur fees for listing them on eBay or some other third-party site, you can use the Garage Sale application. There is a commission charged for any sale that you make, but it is only 5%. It

Facebook Profits on Steroids will do transaction processing too and your friends can use credit cards to buy the items from you online. This application is still a bit new, however, some people swear by it and others have some trouble installing it.

Free Gifts Want to send gifts but not spend $1 each? There is an application called Free Gifts that will allow you to do just that. These work just like the paid gifts in that you can add some text to your gift for the recipient to see. So, they make a nice way to stay in touch with your friends and add a bit of marketing oomph too.

Other There are some applications that show a lot of promise but may not be at the stage where they can be used with any reliability or they may not be in use enough to make that judgment. Developers are always working to improve their applications and remove the bugs from them, so you need to check back with them to see if they look like they are starting to gain traction. Here are a couple that you should keep an eye on in the future, for business purposes: •

Welcome Box This was actually pretty popular for a while, as it allowed people to post a welcome message on their Facebook profile that was individualized to the person visiting. Unfortunately, when people

Facebook Profits on Steroids figured out they could use it to pull the photo off another person's profile into the Welcome Box, it began to be used by some prankster's to make people take a double-take, sometimes with some very nasty associations near their pictures. So, the developer has removed that option, but it can still turn out to be a very good application in the future, and this is certainly one to watch. •

E3Buy This application does not have enough fans to be able to say that it works with any certainty, although the concept is very good.

You would be able to set up eBay like auctions on your profile without having to pay eBay commissions. Seeing that eBay now has a ban on infoproducts, it may be just such an application that brings people into Facebook from the eBay crowd.

Final Word On Applications Applications are coming out every day as the opportunity to make money with them increases. Many people and even companies are joining the bandwagon to develop an application that goes viral and creates a sensation in Facebook. This will eventually lead to more sales exposure, and even monies, if the application is monetized. So, you can check out new applications as they come out by browsing the applications, but you should always be a little wary of being an early adopter of an application. It may not work and it may cause problems and Facebook does not support third-party applications.

Facebook Profits on Steroids If you are trying to locate new applications, you can see them under the “Newest” tab when you are browsing applications. There is also a “Recently Popular” tab, a “Most Activity” tab, and a “Most Active Users” tab. You can check the profiles of your friends to see what applications they've installed to get a good idea of which ones work well and would appeal to your demographics.

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8 Creating Your Own Application

You can develop your own application and this is a highly profitable area, however, it usually takes a team of people to develop the concept and market it successfully. You will want to try to make a unique application that appeals to people's identities, as that is the main type of user that exists in Facebook. The more it ties in to current events or popular culture, the more likely it will be accepted and turn viral. And, that's the whole point of creating an application – to get it to spread virally over the Internet. However, you will have to have several skills to do that.

You will want to be able to program an application, you will want to develop a winning concept by doing proper market research, and you want to be able to test and support the application when it is released.

This can take someone who is either exceptionally talented or a group of people with some financial backing to make the application happen.

Characteristics Of Viral Applications There are some things that we do know can enhance the chances of your application going viral. They would have the following characteristics:

Facebook Profits on Steroids Opt-in for friends You will want to be able to allow people who install the application to invite their friends to install it too. This makes the process of spreading it just that much easier. You cannot insist that they invite their friends in order to use the application because that's outside the terms of Facebook's service agreement.

Post to news feeds Once a person installs the application, it should convey that information to the news feed to help other friends figure out that a new application has been installed. Friends may decide to try the application that they see their friends using.

Unlocking extras later This characteristic can be programmed so that it motivates a person to use the application more often and send it to more of their friends. For instance, the Send Good Karma application unlocks new karma gifts for every five friends that the user sends. This is what helps your application to become more popular as people try to see what new features are unlocked the more they use it.

Freebies Everyone loves a freebie and there's no reason you can't include them with an application. The types of freebies you can consider are things like blog postings, a compatible application, or other little tools to make the user want to come back for more.

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How To Make Money With Your Application There are a variety of ways to make money with your application. You can create an application and sell it on an application marketplace for a one-time fee. You can sell ads with the application to help pay off the costs of developing it. You can charge something to use the application or charge a commission from a sale generated by the application. Or, you can get sponsors and partners who want their name associated with a Facebook application to provide monies for development and implementation.

Creating It To Sell It There are some definite advantages to selling an application after you've created. Some of the positive aspects of selling an application are: Instant Return On Investment You get an immediate payback from the application regardless of whether it takes off or not. You don't have to wait for a lot of people to sign up to get back what you put into it in time and development. And, there's no guarantee it will be successful anyways.

Facebook Profits on Steroids Contract Out For Bug Fixes, Enhancements, and Support You can then hire yourself out to the buyer for bug fixes, enhancements, and general support of the application. If that's not your cup of tea, you can leave that to some other programmer and get busy on building a different application. The choice is yours.

The disadvantage of selling your application right away is that the return on your investment is usually a one-time affair. There are various places online where you can sell an application once it is finished.

Mashable Marketplace Also known as “The Web 2.0 Marketplace.� This website offers an area to list your application for a $50 listing fee.

Appbid You can create a listing for 14 days for your Facebook application on appbid.com. The simple Facebook category makes it easy to see who is selling what and whether anyone is bidding.

InsideFacebook This blog is willing to list your application for free, and it is rather new to do this. So, you have to keep checking to see how many people take them up on their offer. fbTrader You can set up an auction for your Facebook application for free

Facebook Profits on Steroids on this website. The listing itself is free, but there are fees for additional features to the listing, like highlighting and bolding.

If you choose to keep the application and market, there are other ways tool make money on it, besides just hiring out for programming.

Creating It To Market It If you own the application, you can still sell space within it. If the application is viral or theme-oriented to a specific market, this can be a viable way to not only recoup programming expenses, but to exploit the Facebook market to produce income on the creation of an application. The way to make money with an application is to either monetize it or to partner with sponsors who are willing to pay for the roll-out of the application, providing you some benefits as well as upfront income.

Sell ad space You can create an application with the idea that you will be using it for marketing purposes too. In that case, you can include ad space into the application that can later be sold in chunks to online advertisers. Appsaholic and other applications available in Facebook help you to sell ad space within your own application.

Obviously, you have to be sure that your application isn't just a promotional tool for advertising or you probably will be pulled from Facebook. You are allowed to sell ads in your application, but that's not what the entire application should be about.

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Sell virtual items This is like the gifts application that will allow people to buy virtual gifts and send them to friends. You sell items like ring tones or even physical items too.

Use affiliate marketing Maybe you don't want to sell ad space or create items to sell, then, you still have the option to include affiliate marketing offers in your application. This will use your affiliate id and provide some income based on how many people click your ads.

Viral marketing If you give away the application, you may still end up making money on it, if it provides branding for a website where you sell products or services. Don't think that you have to collect money upfront to make money at the end.

Facebook Profits on Steroids

9 Building Your Business Using Facebook

There is only so much marketing Facebook will allow their profile owners to do on its website. They police the website very carefully to make sure it doesn't become just an avenue for advertisers, full of spam and advertising tricks that will turn off their core audience. For that reason, if you want to build your business using Facebook, you will eventually hit a wall within Facebook.

You will have to start to learn how to use Facebook as a part of your sales funnel to other avenues where you can sell products indiscriminately without offending Facebook policies.

Some of the ways you can do this is to advertise your outside website within Facebook, hoping to capitalize on the traffic and draining some of it to your own venues. Another way to do it is to convert friends into customers, but again you don't want to spam them with business offers as this will get you booted off Facebook. You will want to have a market niche and decide which types of products and services can be most easily converted to sales within Facebook.

Another way to build a business through Facebook, without actually making direct sales at the point of contact, is to start building a contact list. This list can be the starting point of a very effective sales

Facebook Profits on Steroids funnel. Finally, you may decide that what people want on Facebook isn't so much your products or services, but your identity. You can still capitalize on that by choosing to do consulting using various tools within Facebook that make it easy and profitable to do.

Direct To Your Outside Website You will want to do a fair amount of self-promotion on your profile page. Include in the profile page your outside website URL, as the first way to generate views and sales from your Facebook activities and contacts. This can be done in several places: Under My Websites This is an area that allows you to include your favorite websites.

You cannot add descriptions about the websites here, so all it will be is a URL. You can still get hits this way because people who cross your Facebook profile will be curious about your likes and dislikes.

Add To Your Wall Sometimes people won't take the time to click on the your websites, but they do take the time to scroll and view your wall.

Add a “share a link� to your wall so that your website URL is more prominently displayed. This is also a good area because you can give a description of the site and add some enticing web copy to bring attention to the link.

Facebook Profits on Steroids Incorporate your web copy to Facebook You can do this with various applications and features within Facebook. If you own a blog, you have the postings directly imported to your Facebook profile through the notes feature. If you want to show comments or discussions in your Facebook profile from your own websites, then you can use applications like Comments Site Conversations to do that. There are several applications that will allow you to embed your copy into your Facebook profile.

Embed outside copy to Facebook Maybe you are selling ring tones or music. You can also put up promotional videos with your services on outside websites like YouTube and then embed that to your Facebook profile directly using the Facebook link in Youtube. You can then put where to buy, your URL, in your YouTube video too.

The step to bringing customers to your outside website, even if you are happy with sales within Facebook, cannot be overstated. If you rely on any third-party website to develop your business, and do not establish some way to bring those customers under your own umbrella, you may find that what seems like insignificant policy changes to Facebook could wipe out your business model and your customers in a day. So, always, always, try to retain control of your own business model, whenever possible.

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Conversion Of course, having someone visit your own unique website is not enough to make a sale or even build your business. Directing people to your outside website, away from Facebook, is just the first step. Next, you will want to convert a visitor to a subscriber. What's the difference? The difference is that a visitor is someone who is anonymous and who is never entered into the sales funnel that you should have developed to sell your products. A subscriber is someone who has willingly given you their email address so that you can now attempt to market them, but hopefully not in a way that will make them unsubscribe.

So, there are two types of conversions we are interested in: conversion from visitor to subscriber and conversion from subscriber to customer. Let's discuss both of these so that you get a good idea of how to proceed once you have someone visiting your site.

In the first type of conversion, we want to create offers that appeal to someone visiting our website. We want to create an irresistible offer that grabs their attention and makes them stampede right to your door. You may think that's hard to do on the Internet, but it's really not. The thing that will bring them to your door is your sales copy.

Don't just add a “contact us� button on your website home page and expect people to offer up their email for no reason at all. People need a little nudge to allow you to add them to your contact list.

Some ways to do this is to:

Facebook Profits on Steroids Offer a newsletter or report Why did they come to your site? Did they want information on foreclosures? Maybe offer them a free and helpful newsletter or report that can give them the type of information they are seeking, for free as long as they sign up to your mailing list.

Create time-limited offer Maybe there is some hot commodity everyone is interested in and you are in the right market for it. Like a close-out sale, you can also have a close-out offer for signing up to a mailing list that is limited to a certain number of days.

Give out a sales coupon If your site is set up to automate coupon codes, you can offer a visitor a discount coupon for signing up to your email lists. Now, you not only have them on your mailing list, but you've also given them an incentive to buy.

And, if you check any marketing book, you will probably find hundreds of more strategies to convert a visitor to a subscriber.

Now, the second type of conversion that is crucial is to make them a customer. Again, your sales copy will play a key role, but you will eventually have to have them move off Facebook to close a transaction. The reason for this is that even in the Marketplace, Facebook does not collect monies. There are some applications that will allow you to do this, but they may be limiting your sales. You want to offer your customers the choice to use ALL the payment options

Facebook Profits on Steroids available to them: Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, or anything else that seems reasonable. If they don't have the cash, especially in the right format, you may end up losing a sale. You may be doing business online, but money is still the primary currency exchanged in the marketplace to purchase products or services.

You also have to have a strategy to convert your subscribers to customers. Do you have a sales funnel and a marketing strategy or are you just hoping your products or services appeal enough to make a sale?

You have to have a sales funnel online because the face-to-face contact is limited and without email contact or Facebook contact, you appear to be disinterested in engaging a friend, as well as a customer.

So, you should build a plan to send out emails and roll-out products and services in some enticing and fun format.

Do you know what you will be pushing in December, when the Christmas holiday is going to spur sales? You should. Do you know which demographics in your customer base like which products and services you offer? You should. Then, you can market them for repeat sales offering similar items or services, thus cross-selling and increasing sales. All of this is accomplished by setting up market research in Facebook, having polls, making offers on a scheduled basis and really listening to the customers' needs. Then, you won't be wondering if luck and chance will be smiling on you. You will be making your own sales luck.

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Know Your Product Niche And Market Many people doing business online prefer virtual products like ebooks, music downloads, and graphics. However, you can really sell anything you want online or on Facebook, if it doesn't violate the terms of the agreement, from real estate to tax preparation. What you want to do is to understand your product niche and what demographics will have a natural interest in your products or services. Once you figure that out, you can then customize your products or services to the online marketplace.

For instance, say you are a songwriter that sells your own recordings through a download service. You can promote your business on Facebook by dedicating songs to your friends and getting exposure that way. This not only appeals to people's identities, but will allow them to hear a snippet of a song you might be selling in its entirety on another site.

Another source of products that can appeal to all users of Facebook are those that have something to do with the topic of Facebook. So, it's not just applications for Facebook that you can sell, you can also create ebooks, like this one, that you can market on Facebook. Or, if you are very technically talented, you can set up podcasts, Youtube videos, and tutorials to help people learn how to use and enjoy Facebook.

There are a number of things you can't sell on Facebook. These include firearms, alcohol, mailing lists, and even stocks. Like eBay, Facebook does enforce its policies by terminating or suspending an account. If

Facebook Profits on Steroids you are in doubt that you can sell something on Facebook, be sure to look up the guidelines to make sure you are complying with the terms of the agreement.

List Building There are limits to how fast you can build your contacts list on Facebook. There is a daily limit of 50 new friend requests per day. So, don't think this is as easy as sending out a spam to every user of Facebook. It takes time and is deliberately set up to slow mass marketers down so that the contacts stay genuine. That shouldn't dissuade you in building your list, just remember to try and keep it real and go for quality contacts, not quantity.

The way your build your list is essential in helping you to define your market niche. If you are just picking up contacts without really verifying if they have a similar interest to your business products or services, you are just making additional work for yourself and the probability of a future sale is pretty low. The best way to attract the type of people who would be likely to buy your products and services in the future is to project the proper image that appeals to their identities.

Start with your immediate friends and business contacts who might be interested in approving your friend request. This will help to get your profile a reputation for not being friendless. And, you want to have something on your profile that will attract the people you are targeting. You can include notes from your blogs, Youtube videos you

Facebook Profits on Steroids like, the lists of your favorite books, music, and films. Anything that speaks to someone as being appealing to their identity and aligning with your core business will be sure to attract the type of friend you are looking for.

Join the networks that are going to be beneficial to you, whether geographically or by association. Look for people who are posting to groups and discussions in your core niche that may be high level networkers who can point you in the right direction for getting higher exposure or more friends. You can also build your own group and try to cultivate friends through this activity.

You can get email addresses from within Facebook from your friends profiles, but you are not allowed to spam people just because you can view their email address. For this, you need their expressed consent to use their email address to contact them. Also, the email addresses are embedded into the profiles as images, so it's not as simple as collecting them all in one place by exporting them out of Facebook.

There are always third party people creating scripts to do just that, but if you do use them, Facebook can recognize the script running and will automatically ban you from Facebook. It is a violation of Facebook's agreement to collect or harvest email addresses from profile pages.

So, if you are going to do that, you are left doing it the hard way: generating friends and then writing it down on paper or in an outside spreadsheet – one by one. Even doing this, if you spam them, they can complain and have you banned. So, the next best thing is to try to get them off Facebook to your own website where you are free to harvest their email address in exchange for a freebie.

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Consulting Selling consulting services is very appropriate to Facebook since you are first selling based on how you appeal to someone's identity. They will figure out whether you are attractive based on the image you project, and this makes selling consulting services much easier on Facebook than products and services. There are even applications like Ether that can make telephone consulting easy to track and bill.

Don't limit your consulting services just to one area. You can build multiple streams of income by offering various consulting services. The only thing to remember is that your income will be limited by the number of hours in the day. If you are selling personal services, you will have a hard time increasing your income unless you increase your rate or find some way to offer those services electronically via prepackaged tutorials and courses that don't require your presence when they are being viewed. Or, you can hire other people to work for you, through sub-contracting, as long as you are honest with your customers that you aren't doing all of the consulting services. This can detract from your business model if you don't train people to be the type of consultants you trust to carry your name and reputation.

On the other hand, if you can train people and have a good way to check the quality of your consultants, then you can build a very profitable business in a short amount of time using other people's time to increase your bottom line. Then, your role becomes more of a marketer and less of a consultant.

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10 Things To Avoid On Facebook As we've discussed various strategies to make money and build a business on Facebook, we've also indicated some strategies that will surely fail or get you banned. It's important to realize the boundaries of the playing field so that you do not make beginner's mistakes.

Getting your account banned is not only embarrassing, but it also is a sure way to kill your business opportunity or at least delay it a long time.

In this section, we will go over some of the things we've asked you to avoid earlier, as a reminder, and include new things that you should be aware to avoid. Many of the techniques that are banned from Facebook are viewed as “black hat� tricks by webmasters all over the Internet. They are just more enforced within Facebook so that it remains a community of trusted connections, instead of another place where your privacy is invaded and your email box is stuffed full of spam. If you are wondering if something is wrong to do, you can always check the terms of your agreement, but if it's frowned upon in other circles, it's bound to get you banned on Facebook. Always err on the side of caution and protect the investment of time you took to build your profile and generate friend contacts.

Here is an overview of things you should avoid when on Facebook, either because they violate the service agreement or because they will produce poor results, or both:

Facebook Profits on Steroids Spamming This has to be the number one item that will quickly get you recognized as “persona non grata� on Facebook. Not only will you be reported to Facebook, but one friend will tell all their friends, and pretty soon no one will accept your friend requests.

Remember, the soft sell is the way to go with Facebook, and even this should be done only in places that are appropriate – not on other people's walls or private messaging multiple people.

Multiple profiles As stated earlier, Facebook does not allow multiple profiles, some with different names or identities. This is strictly against Facebook's terms of service and will get you banned. Aside from that, people who genuinely know you, may figure out you have multiple inauthentic profiles and begin to question your judgment and authenticity. The best way to go is to promote your own genuine name and image, rather than attempting to be everything to everyone.

Fake personas You must use your own name to set up a profile. There have been cases where Facebook could not believe that either a famous person wanted their own Facebook profile and banned it, or that a person was named something wacky by their parents.

You will have to prove it is your name, if they happen to question your choice of names for your profile.

Using nicknames Along the same lines, you aren't allowed to use nicknames in

Facebook Profits on Steroids your profile. It must be the full name given at birth, not some pseudonym, even if that pseudonym is the name you normally use in your business. If it doesn't pass the authenticity test, it will be banned.

Representing something other than a human being No, you can't add a profile for your business, your pet, or your imaginary friend. The profile has to represent one individual and that individual has to use their own legal name.

Harvesting email addresses No doubt you will come across third party software scripts that will try to do things that you are told are against the terms of service, like harvesting email addresses. If you use them, you will very quickly be spotted by the Facebook staff and be banned. Don't take the chance. It's always best to just abide by the rules of service and work within the guidelines.

Poaching friends from other friends Okay, so this is probably going to be one of the ways you network, but if you do it too much it will surely point you out as someone who is only interested in building a large friends contact list. When building your list, always seek to add quality, not quantity.

Being seen as needy This happens when you send out too many private emails, spam the inbox, or constantly send gifts and application invites for no

Facebook Profits on Steroids other reason than you want attention. People will quickly learn to ignore your overtures and you will be left with no contact at all.

Cloaking ads This is when you use scripts to change paid advertisements content that is viewed by Facebook versus what a viewer might see. This is also referred to as “gaming ads” and can get you banned.

Selling private ads on your profile This is against the terms of service, even though some people do it. If you do it and get caught, you will get banned. So, you will have to decide whether the risk is worth the income, but it normally isn't.

Selling inappropriate items There are some products that are not allowed to be sold online.

Check the terms of service to make sure you aren't attempting to sell something that is not allowed.

Using offensive content This can be anything from religiously offensive content to pornographic material. You won't really get a chance to defend the content you posted, you will either be warned or banned for “offensive content” and you will have to appeal that decision.

Adding too many friends at once You do have a limit of 50 friends per day, but excessive activity will get you tagged as a spammer. So, you don't want to attempt

Facebook Profits on Steroids to hit your limit every day, instead let your friends contact list be built in a more natural manner so as not to attract too much attention from the Facebook police. There is also a maximum of 5,000 friends to your account, so you won't ever have more than that on your list, so quality is important to obtain more than quantity.

Excessive poking There are applications that allow you to poke people as a way of getting the attention of people you like, but many people find it ultimately annoying. Facebook will suspend an account and issue a warning for excessive poking and may ban you if the offending behavior continues after the warning.

Too much self-promotion We have given some tips for promoting yourself on your profile page, but this can raise a red flag. Be careful not to attract too much attention to your own self-promotion by continuously posting too many posts to your own wall.

Joining too many groups or networks at once This will clue the staff at Facebook that you are harvesting contacts. So, be careful not to add yourself to too many groups or networks at once. Instead, spread them out over time and take the time to contribute to discussions with posts that are not self-promoting but add value to the community.

Using copyrighted material as your own If you post copyrighted material as your own on your profile, you

Facebook Profits on Steroids will be tagged for banning. Always seek to give credit or use the links in given outside websites to make sure the Facebook staff can see where you got the material you posted in your profile.

This can also be cause for banning if you take a copyrighted video and then change it to suit your tastes.

What To Do If You Are Warned Or Banned Don't panic, there may still be a way to get your account back. Don't get angry and spout venom to the Facebook staff because these are the people who you have to ingratiate yourself to so that you get your account reactivated. Instead, take an apologetic tone, try to figure out what you did wrong, and write an email to one or all of the following email addresses requesting that your account be reactivated: disabled@Facebook.com appeals@Facebook.com info@Facebook.com Sometimes, the email you receive from the Facebook staff can be ambiguous about what you did to cause your account to be suspended. You can ask for an explanation, but that doesn't mean they have to provide one. If you can't make heads or tail of the message you receive from Facebook, the best thing is not to demand an explanation, but ask what you can do to make sure you do not trigger any suspensions in the future. It can be tricky, especially when the reason they give is that you were suspended for “too much activity.� This generic reason could be anything from adding too many friends at once, sending out too many pokes, installing too many

Facebook Profits on Steroids applications at once, or just posting to your profile too much. They may not even know what exactly flagged your account for this message, but your best bet is to apologize, lay low for a while, and ask that they re-instate your account.

If you are re-instated and then subsequently get the same email that you've been banned for “too much activity� it will be harder to get your account back. So, try to stay within the guidelines of Facebook to keep your account active and the Facebook staff happy.

The Most Important Thing To Avoid On Facebook You have to remember that while building a business on Facebook can reap great profits, it can also be taken away in the bat of an eye. As long as your business is on a third-party platform, they hold the strings and any change in policy or even ownership of the site can drastically affect your business model. For that reason, the most important thing to avoid on Facebook is keeping your entire business on Facebook.

You can build a wonderful contact list and start to reach the 5,000 limit only to have your account banned for some unknown reason. Do you have that list of emails offline too? How many of those customers were you able to convert to subscribers on your own website ventures? It's not enough to just build the list and keep it in Facebook. Always have an exit strategy, in case somebody new comes on the scene and threatens to pull the rug out from under you.

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If you are using applications to help simplify collection of monies or to facilitate consulting services via telephone consulting, do you know what you will do if that shuts down tomorrow? Better to have a backup plan now than to be caught with no way to earn your keep as the systems are down. There is no guarantee that any third party platform you use will be in business tomorrow and that's why you must learn to convert your Facebook contacts into your own customers who know where to reach you outside the Facebook platform.

Learning how to do business on social networking platforms is a new way of doing business. You can learn great techniques that can make you an effective marketer on any site by studying ways to increase your sales on Facebook. Everything that you learn in Web 2.0 strategies can give your business the competitive edge it needs to not only make great strides in business, but to differentiate yourself from your competitors too.

While they are still trying to make that sale in the old ways, pouring money into television and radio advertising, making the hard pitch, you will be coasting your way into sales that are based on authenticity, trust, and familiarity. You will eventually be closer to your customers, can listen to their needs better, and should be lean and mean in operating and advertising costs. You will have positioned yourself to be a leader in the next generation of online businesses taking off right now.

Facebook Profits on Steroids

Resources Applications RadicalBuy – An application that allows you to buy and sell things to your friends for a commission. It is like a classified listing service, but you can leave feedback. It is located here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/#/apps/application.php?id=36538156 03&b=&ref=pd_r_a Appsaholic – An application that helps developers sell advertising with their new applications. It will even track the performance of the advertising campaign too. It is located here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/#/apps/index.php?q=Appsaholic Business Cards – An application that mimics the real-life business card function of networking and introduction. You can attach a business card automatically to your Facebook messages. It is located here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/#/apps/application.php?id=24579866 69&b=&ref=pd_r_a Introduce Me – An application that lets your friends introduce you to other people in their circle of friends. This is great for networking and contact list building. It is located here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2380168174&b=& ref=pd_r_a

Facebook Profits on Steroids

Testimonials – This application serves as a form of personal reference for others to view. They can let the world know why they should do business with you. It is located here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/index.php?q=Introduce#/apps/index. php?q=testimonials Ether – If you are doing any sort of telephone consulting, this is a great application to install. You can charge people to talk to you and track the time via this application. It is located here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/index.php?q=Introduce#/apps/index. php?q=Ether Probook Facebook Application – This application allows you to list yourself in a professional directory. Your friends and work associates can also rate you so that others can see you are authentic. It is located here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/index.php?q=Introduce#/apps/index. php?q=Probook eBay Marketplace – If you are selling things on eBay, you may want your Facebook audience to know about your listings. This application will allow your friends to view that, and will also give you to option to see what your friends have on their watch lists. This application is located here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/index.php?q=Introduce#/apps/index. php?q=ebay

Facebook Profits on Steroids Garage Sale – This application lets you sell personal items directly on your profile page. It is located here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/index.php?q=Introduce#/apps/index. php?q=Garage%20Sale Free Gifts – An application that gives you free virtual gifts to send to your friends. This is a great way to keep in contact with people on your list and generate some good will. It is located here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/index.php?q=Introduce#/apps/index. php?q=free%20gifts Ilike – An application that allows you to add music to your profile or dedicate songs to people. Great for musicians trying to market their music online. It is located here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/index.php?q=Introduce#/apps/index. php?q=Ilike

Places To Sell Or Buy An Application Mashable Marketplace - Also known as “The Web 2.0 Marketplace.”

This website offers an area to list your application for a $50 listing fee.

It is located here: http://market.mashable.com/ Appbid – You can create a listing for 14 days for your Facebook application on appbid.com. The simple Facebook category makes it easy to see who is selling what and whether anyone is bidding. It is located here: http://www.appbid.com/

Facebook Profits on Steroids InsideFacebook – This blog is willing to list your application for free, and it is rather new to do this. So, you have to keep checking to see how many people take them up on their offer. It is located here: http://www.insidefacebook.com/ fbTrader- You can set up an auction for your Facebook application for free on this website. The listing itself is free, but there are fees for additional features to the listing, like highlighting and bolding. It is located here: http://www.fbtrader.com/