When 765 width Fan Page was the shizzy back in the day, I wanted to have themes for these pages. I use Facebook Fan Pages as actual mini websites to capture leads and to drive traffic to an affiliate offer. The only problem is I was consistently creating my own. There was no template or even a basic template to start off with. I decided I would create such a marketplace and I bought an amazing domain, but haven’t done anything with it until now.

Introducing Fan Page Themes!

This is a project that I recently started. When I was researching for Fan Page templates, I kept finding WordPress engines and ‘guru’ style templates. Garbage. I wanted something that was authentic and brandable. So I asked my designer to create a simple one for me and he came up with a really simple and nice concept. I thought, I bet we can turn Fan Page themes into a WordPress style theme marketplace. We would remove the ‘guru’ concept everyone else pushes because fan page themes targets everyone from music artists to home gardeners.

Growing a brand online is easier than ever especially with the power of social media. Facebook, being one of the biggest social platforms out there is a great place to start to grow a brand or an online presence. But sometimes it is hard because there is no presence, so with a fan page the brand recognition is automatically brought to life. I thought that if a user has a brandable page, they can be easily trusted.

Fan Page Themes is a marketplace of themes and templates for Facebook Fan Pages. It isn’t a wordpress plugin where you can create a fan page from within your WordPress site. These are actually themes in which you can download and easily install within your new Fan Page. We have a community forum and easy directions to follow when installing and creating your first fan page.

Fan Page Themes are…

• a great way to quickly brand yourself
• pre made templates, so you don’t spend hundreds on a designer
• simple. Quickly install it right after download
• fresh and clean, quickly relating to the end user
• fun!

With the new changes Facebook is doing with their Timeline, branding will be more important for big businesses and your online venture. If you are a musician or a blogger, with the new changes Facebook is doing – online presence will be the most important. How brandable are you and are you utilizing your Fan Page the right way?

… we have an affiliate program too!

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Leveraging Facebook is a must. You should definitely use it to your advantage in your marketing arsenal. One strategy you should be doing is utilizing insights. Facebook insights are used on Fan Pages, to allow you to better understand your audience who “liked” your page. Facebook extended this feature a while back allowing you to get insights to any site.

In this instance I installed Facebook insight on this blog. If you are like me you probably log into Facebook before you even get breakfast. Do you even log out? Probably not. This makes it easier for you to like a site or blog post without re-logging into Facebook. With Facebook insights you want to track the shares of your posts and its reach.

Let’s take a look at my recent insight. As you can see (9/29/11 – 7:22pm est) there has been a total of 20 interactions. It may seem small and my goal is to get it higher ofcourse but look at the reach – 5,336 total impressions with 26 clicks. Just the impressions amazes me. I have a potential to reach an additional 5,336 new readers.

This means I should probably work on my title, the image that Facebook uses as a thumbnail, first couple words Facebook uses from the post, etc. There is just a lot of factors to consider to get the CTR higher. But besides that there is a spike on September 15th, new information which I can use to. Why did that happen, what did I post, how many likes did it make?

This tells me what kind of posts I should write in the future, maybe it even tells me that users are more active on a Thursday? Maybe it tells me more Facebook users are logged on and see the feed of liked posts? So many variables but it is a variable to try to exploit and take advantage. I now have new data which I can use to my advantage.

In this case you can see from the first graph the interaction is higher than the rest of the days. With that interaction came Shares which is distributed on Facebook. With that distribution, came clicks (third graph) from users that were interested enough in the blog post. From the graph it looks like that Thursday produced 2 likes, but provided 804 shared impressions which resulted in more shares. Sharing is caring!

Now the best part is who are clicking and interacting with my blog?

Facebook insights breaks down in who is interacting with your site demographically. Meaning, you will know the age range of your readers, males vs females, what country, and what language. This alone is amazing information because it will be very accurate since this is user inserted data.

Now you can dig deeper and find the actual demographic of your readers without being too creepy. This gives you a big advantage and gives you a clear understanding of who your target audience is. There are other sites out there that does demographic research but Facebook data is bar none the best to utilize.

Now the question is are you using Facebook insights on your blog? Affiliates are you using it on your LP? I know I am!

Thanks for everyone liking my posts!

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I got a couple emails asking what associated marketing was from one of my posts, so I decided to explain it.

Just a couple days ago I showed you my CTRs for my Facebook Campaign, which took advantage of a buzz. In that post I talked about how I brought a specific item or in this case color, to represent something. That something can be a person, brand, item, groups, etc – it can be anything. This is why a lot of big brand companies spend so much time and even money on the right brand logo, slogan, color, etc. They want to make sure that this logo will surpass years of bombarded media.

The video above talks about how I created the campaign and how I use association to my advantage. One good example that happens offline is when you are with a group of friends, a person or a cop will quickly categorize you base on your surroundings. It is just an instinct to survival and it happens all the time. We often think and judge someone base on who they are with because it assets the situation.

Another simple explanation is in advertising. We are always looking at a logo or some item that represents a company or brand. Car logos we continuously see everyday, on the road or commercials. It is being embedded in our minds that this is a Cadillac, this is a Chevy, etc. We have such good brand recognition, we can point out a logo without the company’s slogan. By the mere fact we consistently see a brand or logo means we are neurologically programmed to just know it.

Apple does a great job at this and several other big companies. Now lets take a look at my ad below:

As you can see I used orange as the associated variable. My reason for this is Mayweather wore orange trunks, orange shoes, orange gloves. So in the end users will know that Orange = Mayweather. This specific campaign was wrap around the buzz of the punch. As you can see I created an orange border around the image campaign while also showing the orange gloves. I didn’t have to put Mayweather in the image at all, the color orange is already doing that for me.

Even though the fight was an obvious of who is fighting who, I can extend this campaign way pass the actual fight date and users should still remember orange = Mayweather. Remember during the 4 weak rounds, orange sticks out and it is consistently being fed to the end user. This in turns just neurologically embeds who is who by the color of their trunks.

So that is what associated marketing is about. I hope I answered your emails for those that asked about it. It is a simple concept that can be utilized for any sort of marketing campaign.

…. btw wrote this quick ….

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… but once I got home I created a campaign from an affiliate offer I was already promoting. I thought to myself, I should be able to take advantage of this buzz (sneak punch) that will probably last a couple days. I am assuming there will be a controversy about the fight.

So that night around 2am, I started to create a small Facebook campaign around that sucker punch. Below are my ad CTRs from my campaign and also my targeting:

1. United States
2. Age 25 – 45
3. Categories: Health and Well Being, Outdoor Fitness, All Sports, Out Door Actvities
4. Reached: 17,314,780

So I think one main reason why my CTRs were so low is because of my ad copy. Now that I am looking at it, I could have done better – but at 2am after the fight with some alcohol in my system, it was sub par. Also one big thing about this campaign is I only did 3 ads instead of my usual 5 ads for testing. I was not able to find any other pictures from the fight except these. I was pretty limited.

One part of this campaign is one of the ads has an orange border. I did this specifically because its bright and it relates to Floyd’s trunk colors. So I was playing an association campaign here. Meaning I was trying to bring some sort of relation from an obvious to an ad. In this case, the trunks had orange in them, his gloves were orange, even the shoes were orange. So I tried to bring that association to the ad. Which is why I think it received a higher CTR than the rest.

I really wanted to use another image from the fight but I could not find it. The only thing I can say I could have improved on this the ad copy. The next morning from Saturday, I forgot about it until this morning (I need to stop drinking). So I was not able to adjust my ad copy, which I think would of made a difference from my CTRs.

Another interesting thing I noticed was there were a lot of Internet Explorer users after 1am. When the ad ran during the day I saw more FireFox and Chrome brower users. This was just interesting to me seeing such a dramatic change from day and night.

Also, these ads were very cheap all less than .41 cents a click. Let me know your thoughts about these ads and more importantly about the fight that happened this weekend. Weak.

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Since I started getting birthday wishes on my Facebook wall, I was curious to see how many of my Facebook friends will wish me a happy birthday by either writing on my wall or sending me a message. The reason why I decided to see what percentage of users will write on my wall is the fact birthdays is always displayed in the upper right hand corner of Facebook. This means users will almost always see whose birthday it is everyday. This can tell me 2 things…

1. Percentage of users who log into Facebook
2. Percentage of users who will communicate

I found this intriguing because, I personally seem to log into Facebook everyday and randomly. I wanted to know personally is this ‘syndrome’ happening to everyone else that I am friends with? and if so will they wish me a happy birthday. It is hard to know who logged in and then find out who wished me a happy birthday, that specific data is hard to get. So I just went with the total friends I am friends with. I also try to keep my friends list under 1000 because I want users who I personally know or have at least communicated with in the past.

Anyways, out of 987 friends on Facebook only 237 wrote on my wall wishing me a happy birthday, which is 24% of users. I am grateful for the friends that have wished me a happy birthday yesterday. I definitely enjoyed my bday yesterday, thanks everyone. 

So this tells me that maybe only 24% of users either logged during the day and saw the Facebook notice of my birthday. So I thought this was interesting mini study to find out who actually would want to extend their text to keep the friendship or relationship strong. It is interesting to see that about 24% of my friends either logged in during the day and saw the notice and they took action on it.

The other interesting part of this is also new friend requests, I get some everyday. I did notice an exponential new amount yesterday. I would contrast this to the friend relationship. If someone wrote on my wall, there is a small notice on their wall stating they “wrote on Ian Fernando’ wall” – thus expanding the reach of my birthday.

So this tells me even at 24% the reach I can get with someone just commenting or leaving a note can greatly influence other users to take action. Being it was my birthday, it might have been more proactive for users to write and interact than if it wasn’t my birthday. I definitely do not get 200 wall posts on my profile, I either get 1-3 a day if that.

This tells me users will interact if there is a need to do so, example someones birthday. There is a need to interact with that user because Facebook notifies that user or others are influencing them. It was just a curious thought and a thought I thought worth sharing.

Thanks again for everyone who wished me a Happy Birthday and Happy Born!!

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The things that took the most time out of my day was Twitter, Skype, and Facebook. It is definitely an attention grabber with status updates, skype calls, and video shares. It just breaks my concentration and I end up clicking on the link and looking at everyone’s statuses. I even found myself on youtube for almost an hour.

Not good when I got a whiteboard filled with things to do. So this week experiment was born and I think I did pretty well. I got a lot of things done, contracts reviewed, offers going up, products needing traffic, research keywords etc. I did a lot of things. Instead of me reading DamnYouAutoCorrect.com or finding new mixtapes on Datpiff.com – I was full productive on what I had to do.

… and yes the occasional cat pictures.

Here are somethings that has helped with my productivity….

• Every morning I write my goals for TODAY and what I want to accomplish for today. This puts me in a goal oriented mood where I want to cross one of those task off the white board, and it feels good doing so.

• LeechBlock, is one Firefox plugin that I used to help stop myself from going to WorldStar, Facebook, Datpiff, Youtube, and all these other sites that I tend to randomly go to.

• SimplyNoise, replace my Winamp player and Grooveshark.com because I notice myself picking and choosing songs I want to play and listen to. This actually helps  a lot and relaxes my brain actually as well. It did take me getting use to but it definitely is worth it to have playing in the background.

• Close out Tweetdeck and try not to open it. Twitter, I do not know why I find it so interesting maybe because of what certain celebrities say that interests me or the funny remarks from music artists. I did manage to not look at twitter on my PC but did tend to look at my iPhone twitter app – but not as often – so that is a plus.

• Closed out my email. I started responding to emails more so towards later in the day and via my iphone especially if it was important. This help a little with more screen real estate, allowing me to move more windows around when necessary.

I think that was it. Just these things alone definitely helped with my daily productivity and how I manage things. It s a good thing that I have workoffice to help with managing my VAs and partners. In all I think I had a hell of a week, so cheers.

enjoy your weekend!

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I do not know why but I like utilizing Facebook a lot, it is a portal of just pure traffic. I have been using a specific site to find trends base on a keyword I type in. Today, I have decided to share this site with you. The website is called YourOpenBook.org.

This specific website looks at your search term and then searches Facebook statuses. You can see what people are talking about and if they mention something important. This is similar to twitter search and twitter trends, but it uses Facebook statuses. I am uncertain how often it updates but it does provide some value to research.

I first found this website when the craze of Facebook privacy was a HUGE issue. Also this website arise when Facebook was posting FourSquare locations – showing people their friends are not home and the opportunity to rob them. OpenBook wanted to show to Facebook users their privacy wasn’t really private. It was a campaign to show everyone Facebook lacks and has privacy flaws.

Well I decided to take this website to my own marketing efforts and use it for good use. Market research.

Though this website will not search every Facebook’s user status, there is still a lot of information you can pull from the search terms you put in. A lot of users has protected their profile, but a good majority still have not adjusted their profile privacy. With so many users joining Facebook on a daily basis, they will not even know what their default privacy is. So this still benefits online marketers who want to use this service as a research tool.

For example this website is great to find problematic issues and create an info product or promote a specific offer. It is about putting in the right keywords to find what you are looking for. Even finding trends and then taking advantage of that specific trend with an affiliate offer.

One other aspect I like is you can filter this website by male or female, helping you create a Facebook campaign geared towards that specific gender. With each gender you can find the right vertical to promote to that specific group of users. Gender targeting is definitely a strategy when it comes to online promotions. In any case this specific website helps you find the niche or trend which you can immediately take advantage of.

If you see a trend in twitter, do a search at OpenBook to see if users are also posting to their facebook wall. Then look at the profiles and see their interests. Now you have a targeted campaign. It is repetitive and boring to go look at every profile, but it can help with your current Facebook campaigns when trying to target specific users. Outsource this!

The website is used to show the lack of privacy, but it still provides data such as – profile interests, genders, trends, new niches, etc. Again it is how you use the website and how you look at the data. Data and information is important in any business and in life, it is how you utilize the information.

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So this kinda of ticked me off. I use Facebook Fan Pages a lot for landing pages and obviously for my websites. I just upgraded and man I am in pain because it ruined my landing pages using the FBML App. The FBML App allows me to utilize HTML and CSS in a customized tabbed box. It also allowed me to create a facebook gateway, meaning I get to tell the end user to LIKE the page before getting a download. Incentivizing the traffic.

Now, I think they did away of that option. Allowing you to specifically show what “tab” to show when a new person arrives to the fan page. This was helpful because instead of showing the wall, I get to show a custom design or landing page to the end user. It provided an instant landing page, very helpful to all marketers branding and creating online recognition.

Since I just upgraded, everything is broken, not broken but only showing parts of images. My landing pages are usually full graphics, now with the upgrade the width of the Facebook Fan Pages are now 495 from the original 525, it sucks.

The new fan page designs are mocking the new profile upgrades we all received in the past, having the images at the top and the wall feed, etc. I do not know why Facebook is doing it this way as it isn’t a personal profile, it is a fan page. I may understand fan pages for public figures but what about websites? It doesn’t make sense to create a Fan Page similar to a profile.

Some other distinctions I found is you can log in as your fan page, since you are the admin you technically can switch who you want to be, pointless I think. Another interesting part is I share a link on Twitter about how to target facebook tabs.

So now this sucks for any company using Fan Pages as a landing page. Now Fan Page contest won’t be productive, branding will not be as powerful, capturing leads will not be doable, just a lot of down sides for marketers.

The best part about the Facebook fan pages is using it as a gateway and a upfront poster to incoming traffic. Directing traffic to the fan page wall will not help in any companies branding at all. Maybe I couldn’t find the option to show specific tabs to non “likers”, but  couldn’t find it and I thought it was the most powerful part of a fan page. In any case my fan page landing pages are useless, now time to adopt.

BTW March 11th, no more FBML it will be all iframes…

On March 11, 2011, you will no longer be able to create new FBML apps and Pages will no longer be able to add the Static FBML app. While all existing apps on Pages using FBML or the Static FBML app will continue to work, we strongly recommend that these apps transition to iframes as soon as possible. Lastly, we want to be clear that our deprecation of FBML does not impact XFBML, such as the tags that support social plugins.

source

FBML was the best part as well for all companies and businesses, it allowed to do so much. I wonder how companies like Lujure adjust to this change, since their services was all based on providing custom FBML tabs to companies.

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One issue that is very compelling is Jason Rubacky’s mother. Jason created a donation website for her, Save Jason’s Mom. She is ill and Jason would like her to get better. In just under 24 hours Jason was able to generate $2,500 in donations.

That is amazing to generate that amount in a short period of time with just social media. He is reaching out to his network, twitter, and facebook. Those are the sources he has been using and it has helped with his donations.

Now in just under 36 hours, Jason Rubacky has generated $5,100 of donations for a his mother. His mom is a very important person to him and by creating such a site he is definitely showing his love.

I first heard about this when Jason hit me up and just asked me to share. I read the original site and I contributed to his cause. Family is a very important part in one person’s life. I personally am very family oriented. Even though I may have my own ups and downs, family will always be there. I even go out of my way to visit my cousins across the US to just say hi. For Jason to want his mom to get better shows the bond they have.

Jason Rubacky is one person you want to get to know in the affiliate industry, he is also the reason why I am doing CPS offers recently than the traditional CPA/CPL offers. He has also shared a lot of insights and is one person that gives more than he can. If he had a plate of food and saw you were still hungry – he would give you his plate, the utensils, the table clothe, the table itself, the chair, and if possible the waiter/waitress waiting on you and anything else that he can. He just gives.

He is an influential person in the industry and one that always goes out and helps more than he can. I even went out to Chicago to just visit him and show my appreciation for the help he has contributed to my own business. Te time he spends with his daughter and own family is priceless, I was fortunate to have witness it myself.

If you have the time head over to Save Jason’s Mom read the issues she has and make a decision to donate, more importantly help a great friend and person. I Did.

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So the question becomes is how do you start a campaign that can’t get any traffic? Simple use Fiverr.com!

Fiverr.com is a site where users literally do anything for $5. They literally have a ton of users who will either prank someone or do actual work for $5 bucks. In this case we want to buy traffic for $5, specifically gathering fans.

You can see a list of people who are willing to receive $5 to spam…. ergh tell their loyal fans to visit your fan page. The only time consuming part is communicating with some of these users and asking their insight information or demographic of their user base. Some will be annoyed your even asking for that information and some are happy to give it to you.

You also have to make sure and certain they are either inviting their users or if they are just posting on their wall, which will show up on their friends wall. I personally found a personal invite from the end user to their friends is far more productive than a post on their wall. The invite actually gets sent to the end user instead of just a visibility factor on their dashboard.

Again, you have to figure out your offer and then find out the demographics of the fans the fiverr user is inviting. When I did my Halloween campaign, I was looking for young adults, college students, younger kids, etc. I wanted to make sure they participated with the Fan page to start the snowball effect of a viral campaign.

Some stats I found is about 7% – 10% of personal invites actually like the page. Enough likes means it will get displayed on the walls of their friends and that is the goal. If a fan page just gets 1 likes, it is most likely will not be noticed. If a page is liked enough, Facebook will push it up on the dashboard of users for visibility. Not sure the exact algorithm but enough likes gets visibility.

The only thing you have to cater too is your Fan Page landing page, does it have strong call to action?

1. Step 1 Like the Page
2. Step 2 Share this Page
3. Step 3 Download Game, or whatever offer you may have.

It can be just a 2 step action, like and receive the offer. To be more viral I tell the end user to share it with their friends. Personal recommendations is a powerful source of traffic, especially if the audience is young. So it really depends on your fan page, and your audience you buy from Fiverr.com.

You will have to buy a couple $5 personal Facebook invites via Fiverr to get the snowball effect going. If you have a good blast invite from one then maybe you will not need to buy others. I found it personally to buy several to get the ball rolling. Once you have enough solid users sharing and liking, the campaign is self sustaining. It may die base on the trend, example the Halloween offer died about 3 days after Halloween itself – there isn’t any interest in it anymore.

The important factors are your Fan Page CTA and the type of users that are being invited. Remember to ask the person on Fiverr about their audience, this is important. Ask for age, how often they interact, past invites response, etc. If you do not ask then you will not get the results you want.

Make sure to read my Fan Page Viral post here, if you have not read it already.

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