Facebook Marketing
I have never blogged about Facebook Marketing before, however, after some research and reading, here is what I have for you. Facebook currently has over 350+ million users and over 70% are active on the popular social network. Facebook connects users from all over the world under one single domain, which is why it becomes a great platform for marketeers. I am sitting here in India, but I can still connect to users in the US or in Europe via Facebook.
How can Facebook help marketeers?
Facebook provides a great platform to market your product for free — Fan pages. A fan page is a page created by a user (usually the marketeer) to promote his product. The marketeer then uses this page to connect to more people all over the world and displays his product/services to interested users. Normal users like you and me become a fan of the product/service if we’re interested in it. But to make your page visible to normal users the marketeer has to use another Facebook platform known as — Facebook Advertising.
Why use Facebook Ads?
Facebook ads is a great way to reach your target audience. Your target audience might be college students, singles, men, people between the age of 25-35 etc. Facebook ads make it easier for you to get more customers/fans towards your services/products. Setting up an advertiser account with Facebook is easy, just sign up for a regular Facebook account and then visit their advertising page. Facebook’s advertising program converts way better than any other advertising program because it allows you to select the age, gender, occupation etc of the target audience.
What’s next?
Many marketeers try to gain more fans (by black hat/spam or legit advertising methods), but it always doesn’t guarantee you better results. A good marketeer would always try to keep users engaged by holding contests, asking questions or posting stuff which interests users (quotes, offers, images, videos, news etc). User interaction is always needed on a fan page or it won’t convert well. Having a large number of fans doesn’t guarantee sales or conversion. The best is to allow your fan page to grow on it’s own while you keep posting content on your fan page on regular basis.
Tip: Run your campaigns on international holidays, for example Christmas. Facebook was the most visited website on 25th December 2009. Conversion is higher on holidays (according to my research).
Dont be an appam *******
This is a Guest Post blogged by Annkur P Agrawal from OnlyGizmos. Views and opinions are entirely as expressed by him.
If you are one of those who visits FIP to notice the blazing traffic and thousands of comments and still don’t read the blog posts? you had a thought of cashing in the next time there is a fakeXYZ blog possible? the moment you hear of a new online service/blog/website, do you start to think - “why didn’t I make this?” If yes!! then my friend you are in good company here 
Money making over the internet is not easy, but if you have the right approach and the right advice – you will do just fine. Often money making on the internet is mistaken for just getting that idea and launching the product. Thinking that you have a domain name that gives you an edge over another company, doesn’t mean that you will beat it to glory. And in most (and by most I mean 99.9% cases) you would give up before you even make that first dollar out of the venture, thats if you get started at all.
As you enter the world of making money online, you realize that you have entered a cave with no sight of an exit on the other side. Its easy to stray and get lost within the darkness. There will be hundreds of ideas for you to start a reseller business, get into affiliate or monetize your ideas with killer products. But that doesn’t mean that you jump on it with the idea of making a million dollars every month and end up quitting your job! Not everything on the web is meant to be started by you, pickup your strengths and work towards it. Starting a hosting service or a link shortner might not be a great idea. Why get into the hammered competition zone? Innovate, rather than just doing something for the sake of doing it!
Making money on the web has two simple ways:
1) Without investing
2) With investment
If you are just looking to start a blog and put good content there in your free time, go ahead. Spend some time marketing it as well. But if you are looking to invest a decent sum into a website? be the next twitter? than beware – don’t get lost in the darkness. I don’t mean to discourage you but the point remains simple, start something only if you are genuinely passionate about it, only if you feel a need for it. Ask yourself “will I be a user of this service?”, answering that honestly might automatically give you the green light to go ahead with your plans. Else quit now!
P.S : I didn’t read FIP much, I don’t know what appam ******* is but sounded good 
Evil Alexa Ranking
Do you know how is your Alexa rank calculated? Alexa rank is not calculated on your page rank, google analytics or any other stats! It is calculated on the number of visitors that visit your website with the Alexa toolbar installed in their browser. I never believed this until I did some research and found more on this.
Evil way to increase your Alexa Rank
This might be one of the only blogs that might give you this method. As I mentioned above, Alexa ranking depends on the number of visitors you get with the Alexa toolbar installed, hence the visit is not a unique visit. Alexa toolbar doesn’t check the IP and counts 1 refresh as a visitor.
2) Install the Auto Refresh Firefox Addon
3) Open your website and turn on auto refresher
Longer auto refresher is on, the better. Open it in atleast 10 tabs for 10x speed. Keep the refresher at minimum 10 seconds.
4) Do this everyday for 1-2 hours
Depending on your speed and the time you do it everyday, your alexa rank will rise faster and faster. ( Rise = lower in number)
This is what Alexa is! People feel proud of being in top 100,000 Alexa but it is really worthless! I can get there by having a blank website, so can you 
Advertisers fall for the Alexa gimmick. It is not always that way, many websites have a legit Alexa Rank.
Sensonize.com has an Alexa rank of 118,784.. Interested in advertising, anyone?
Evil way to make commentators subscribe to your blog
Not exactly subscribe to your blog, but subscribe to your blog comments. I was just browsing the Wordpress plugins directory to checkout some new plugins which could be useful for my blog. I found the plugin Subscribe to Comments 2.1 which is an amazing plugin if you are running a blog which gets alot of comments on your articles or a blog which gets a few (like Sensonize.com).
Using this plugin the good way
You can use this plugin in 2 ways. 1 is the good way which would be simply installing the plugin and allowing your commentators to choose if they would like to subscribe or do it yourself for them This good way will make readers subscribe and stay, the evil way might make them unsubscribe and never visit your blog again.
Using this plugin the evil way
The people who have been following me on Twitter, know exactly how evil am I lol. Lets get started -
1) Install the plugin
Installing the plugin is really simple, if your using Wordpress 2.7.1 just search for “Subscribe Comments” and install it. If your doing it the manual way: download the plugin, upload it in wp-content/plugins and extract it, then activate it from your Wordpress Admin Panel.
2) Tweaking some codes
This is really simple. Once your done installing the plugin, login to your Cpanel or any other panel you use File Manager and open the wordpress directory you have installed your wordpress blog in. Then open: domain.com/wp-content/plugins/subscribe-to-comments After you have done the above you will see a 50.41 KB file named subscribe-to-comments.php. Right click on it (in Cpanel 11) and click “Edit”. Once your there, Press Control + F(find) in Firefox and it will open a search box. In the search box search for: This is the text that is displayed for users who are NOT subscribed. You will see that line highlighted on that long page full of codes.
Just few lines below that you will see a code like this:
<input type=”checkbox” name=”subscribe” id=”subscribe” value=”subscribe” checked=”no” style=”width: auto;” <?php if ( $checked_status ) echo ‘checked=”checked” ‘; ?>/>
Replace it with:
<input type=”checkbox” name=”subscribe” id=”subscribe” value=”subscribe” checked=”yes” style=”width: auto;” <?php if ( $checked_status ) echo ‘checked=”checked” ‘; ?>/>
All I did in the above code was, changed checked="no" to checked="yes"
Now the visitors that leave comments to your blog will automatically get subscribed to the blog post they have commented on. This is a good way to make them subscribe to blog posts without letting them come to know But yes, a visitor can uncheck the subscription option in the comment box if he/she wants.
Benefits
- It subscribes the commentator to a single blog post and informs him/her about the new comments.
- The commentator will visit your blog again to see what has been posted and will also reply to the comments.
- The commentator will also subscribe to your blog if you have quality posts.
- You can also add text in the email – Eg: There are new comments on so-and-so post, please check back and give your feedback and also add a line below that: “If you like reading my blog, do subscribe to my RSS feeds”
- Your blog becomes more active and gets feedback from the visitors that like your blog and would leave comments back again and again.
Loss
- That commentator might not come back if he is bombarded with alot of emails for a single post.
- The good way can gain you readers but the evil way will just make you lose readers.
My suggestion would be to use the good way if you get 5+ comments on your blog posts. If you get less than 5 comments on your blog posts, use the evil way!
How To Convert Daily Blog Traffic Into Loyal Readers
So you’re a blogger, eh? Who are you actually blogging for? Readers or yourself? Well.. If you don’t have any readers, do you think it is worth ‘investing’ your time on blogging? Blogging is an ‘investment’. The time, content, money you spend on writing your blog pays off later on when you grow big. The traffic you get from Social Media sites is more of one-time visit traffic. Those visitors won’t visit you’re blog again unless you have something interesting to offer. I have got over 200k visitors from Stumble Upon but only about 8k have bothered to come back. Well.. I don’t blame them! Its entirely my fault. I never made an attempt to make use of that 200k traffic which I got from Stumble. I could have used it, seriously!
What to do when you are getting huge traffic from StumbleUpon?
1) Don’t panic!
The first thing I was afraid of was getting suspended by my WebHost. Which never happened, I quickly opened a support ticket as soon as I got the huge traffic of frekkin’ 1300 users online!!! This was the craziest thing that ever happened in my virtual life and I hope I have more crazy moments like these in the future
2) Setup a quick comment contest and link it to your post
This traffic won’t last longer than a week or two and after that the effect will die off slowly. Setup a small 1 GB iPod Shuffle contest or something which is between $20-100 and attractive to the Social Bookmarking kind of traffic. When your done, link it back at the bottom of the post which is getting thousands of visitors. Your done! Atleast 1 from 10 quality visitors from Social Networking traffic will check it out. You also need to keep in mind to reply to the comments you get. You have your loyal readers list building up Also add a message at the bottom of your Stumbled Post asking youre visitors to leave an comment This is gonna build your reader database too. Read on to know how…
The Traffic And Contest Are Over – What do I do next?
So you have got about 100 comments? 200? 500? Lets just leave counting and go ahead with out next step! Download the Wordpress Plugin – Thank Me Later, Install it and activate it. Not many people are yet aware about this plugin as I hardly see only 4,000 plugin downloads – all time. This plugin emails the people who have left comments on your blog a “Thank you for commenting on my blog” email. You can modify the email format as you like. Add your subscribe URL, your furture updates and whats new with your blog. The best feature is that this plugin makes your 1-time commentators into a mailing list/loyal readers. Thats right! You can send them an email every X weeks/days or you can also send them a custom email. How cool is that?
This is one awesome way to make your one time readers into daily blog traffic. No, this is not an evil way. A more evil way is yet to come 
Muwahaha..
