Rice Blogger

Marketing through other sites like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, or Youtube would be consider as Social Network Marketing. SNM is still very new as you can see those sites above are only created few years ago and today, there is more and more people using these channels to promote and advertise their website or products.

Previously I have covered some tips to do some of the Social Network Marketing on Facebook like making pages and having a ads banner on your facebook profile. I have been using them on some of my websites and blogs and some proven to be pretty successful and there is more interaction day by day.

I started using full feeds on my facebook page that I have created, then slowly I do only excerpt rss feed because my final intention is to have visitor to visit my website.

It has been a month and although it is not as high as search engine traffic but I am currently getting 5.67% of my traffic from Facebook alone and as my fan grows, I will actually increase this value / or increase the visitor referred by facebook.

I am doing a trial for Malaysia purchase since I got the advantage of getting supplies of Surgical Face Mask and earn a small margin out of it. Previously I have tried various software for ecommerce. OS Commerce was the first but it has limitation because it is very very hard to edit things, but I still maintain the website with OS Commerce. After that I tried Zen Cart, I think it is better in terms of theme editing, new add on module and admin panel is much better, but still remain a lot similar with OS Commerce. While choosing Zen Cart I have tried Joomla’s Virtuemart and CubeCart but each have its own limitation and I ended up with Zen Cart.

My third experiment on online shopping cart is WordPress E-Commerce, I wanted to try this a long time but did not had the chance until yesterday I setup a WordPress E-Commerce site to sell only 2 items, which is the highly demanded Surgical Face Mask. Although I will not recomend this plugin for a full fledge e-commerce site whereby you have a lot of item because the order handling, receipt, invoice and quite a lot of features in a normal shopping cart is not there. Nevertheless, I like the fact that it is using WordPress, and I am very comfortable with adding more plugin to make it search engine friendly.

My first 2 E-commerce site had fail, although not making lost since I could still make the money to pay for the domain renewal. This is my third, and purposely built on top of my 4 years old Classifieds to gain credibility. So if you are interested to purchase some 3-ply face mask or surgical mask.

Get them here: Surgical Face Mask

This is simply an application whereby you could add a custom box. In this custom profile you could add your own banner promoting your website, fan page, groups, or even write a message. Previously I have covered how you can create a facebook fan page, and this would be a great tool to promote your fan page.

Simply go add custom profile box as your facebook application. You will even get a WYSIWYG text box to write your own message there. There is also different type of fonts to choose from. The only down side is that the box title always remains as “custom profile box”. You custom box will look something like this:-

As you can see, I am always promoting my Malaysia Classifieds as I am competing with large companies with 5-6 digits budget that is competing with me, so I am always trying to take the first step in doing Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization for my site. Hopefully I will win this challenge.

My first Facebook Pages was actually created by accident. It ended up pretty good as a method to do Marketing via Facebook. The main reason is that you could collect fans and admin them over at the page. Rather than creating a whole new facebook profile, whereby you will need to have a saperate login.

Publicise Feeds

With pages, your feeds are published at the page where user login. This is also the page where everyone tries to keep up with their friends status update. As you can see from the screenshot below.

Message to all fan with just one click

Compare to having another profile, you will need to type the username one by one. What if you have more than 100 friends, or if you have 1000 friends. Are you going to send one by one? With pages, you can just send message to all fan.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

On top of all that, your page is indexed by Google. Search for Malaysia Classifieds Listing, you will see my page third on Google. And it actually have a PageRank with it too (although mine is not high).

I believe the three reason on top is more than enough to have you creating your very first Facebook Page and to market your website right after this.

I have actually succesfully done this by making a Malaysia Classifieds Facebook Page whereby friends could add them as Fan. (you should too if you want classifieds updates on your facebook). So far, I had 147 fan, which is not bad, and I will be expecting more to join. So here is how you can make your own Facebook Page.

Go to Application on the bottom left corner, look for “Ads and Pages”

Click Pages

Then you will come to a blank pages if you have not created one before, click on the “Create Page” on top right corner. Then you continue with the name of your pages.

Now you have you own Facebook Pages. But you are not done yet, because you want to use it to market your feed. And here is how you can add your feed into Facebook Page. Look for the Edit Page on the left panel below the image.

Scroll down, then look for notes, click edit.

Here is the magic that will import your rss feeds into your facebook pages.

You should know the rest after this, there is only 2 steps left, one to write your feed and another to confirm.

It is recommended to at least include some information on your facebook page, also a picture would be decent too.