This post will walk you through the steps of creating a Facebook page so that if any questions come up, you will feel confident about what decisions to make.

Step 1: Create a Page

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Follow this link to start your page and Facebook will give you 6 initial options.  You will need to “categorize” your business according to their breakdown.

• Local Business or Place
• Company, Organization or Institution
• Brand or Product
• Artist, Band or Public Figure
• Entertainment
• Cause or Community

As you can guess, a few of these categories have some crossover and it might be hard to choose at first which of the 6 categories you should be a part of.  The good news is that Facebook now leaves room for you to change your mind.  Once you choose a category and create your page, you can later go into your page and edit your settings.  So don’t feel like you are signing away your life on this first decision.  (But you will not be able to change your Business Name so be sure you spell it right!)

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Once you choose your category Facebook will ask you to specify a bit more about your business by choosing a more detailed category and depending on which of the 6 main categories you chose, they will also ask you for your business or product name, and if you are a local business, your physical address.

Step 2: Add to your page

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Congratulations!  You have a page.  The next step is to flesh it out, add some meat to the bones, and make it welcoming for all of your new guests.

Upload an image

Do you have a logo for your business, or a photo of your product?  Add a photo so that you can personalize your page, and brand your business on Facebook.

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Edit your profile

You will notice that Facebook has a 1,2,3 process of how to Get Started which is great, but I suggest that you don’t follow it to a ‘T’.  Before you invite friends to follow you, it would be best to have some content on your page.  So the next thing to do is click on the Edit Page button in the upper right of the Get Started page (see above) and then go to the left sidebar and choose Basic Information (see image below).  Now you can start telling your viewers all about your business.  Since you are just starting your page, you will need to come back later to create a username, but once you hit 25 followers be sure to claim your name.  Also, be sure share links to your website, blog, Twitter account and more so that your Facebook followers can connect with you in their favorite ways.  Once you have added to your profile, be sure to “Save Changes” at the bottom of the page.

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Manage Admins

You will notice many other options on the left sidebar.  Many of the default settings that Facebook has will be great to get you going, but definitely familiarize yourself with these while you are moving about so that if you ever want to change something you will know where to go.

If you have employees or colleagues who will also be adding to your Facebook page, be sure to add them as an admin as well.  They will need to have a Facebook profile themselves, and you can invite them by email or by their Facebook name if you are already friends with them.  This will give them the ability to add posts, photos, and communicate with your followers, so do no give this out to just anyone!

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Step 3: Post, Write, Link, Show

Great!  So your visitors will now be able to find out more about your business.  The next thing that they are going to want to see is your Wall.  Right now it probably looks something like this:

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So, start sharing a little more.  Create an album of images from a business related event.  Share a link to a blog article that you wrote about one of your products.  Attach an instructional video about a skill that you have mastered.  I would suggest having a least 3 items on your wall that will draw in your fans before you start inviting people to follow your business on Facebook. Make it fun, informative, and offer something attractive.  If viewers are not interested in what you are sharing on your business page, they are not going to become a fan.

Step 4: Call out to your Fans

If you already have friends on Facebook on your personal profile, you can invite each of them, or a selected group of them to become a fan of your business.  On the Get Started page you will have an option to Invite Friends.  Once you click on this, it will pull up all of your friends and you can choose from this list which ones you would like to invite.

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Facebook also gives you the option to Tell Your Fans which is a little different.  This is an opportunity to send an email to any of your clients who are not friends with you on Facebook, but might be interested in becoming a fan of your business.  Depending on which mail agent you use, you will be able to import your contacts and select which of those you would like to connect with.  Note that there is a limit of 5,000 contacts you are allowed to import, and don’t spam!  It is just not cool!

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Step 5:  Promote Your Facebook Page on Your Website

You can promote your Facebook page in a number of ways by referencing your page within the text of an article, having Facebook buttons on your site and more.  Facebook has a great Like Box feature that is pretty easy to set up and install, and is a great way to start gathering more followers.  You can adjust the features including the width, whether the background is dark or light, would you like to show the content of your wall and more.  Just be sure to insert your Facebook URL into the parameters so that it actually pulls your statistics, and not the default.

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Step 6:  Follow Other Pages

You have done a great job!  You have completed everything you need to get your business page running, and as long as you stick-with-it on a regular basis you will continue to learn and grow.  My last bit of advice on the basics of building your Facebook Business Page is to follow other pages.  Associate yourself with other business that either collaborate directly with you, work in a similar field, market in a manner that you would like to learn more about or a business you want to support.  By following other pages you will learn from them, and will be able to share ideas.  It will help you grow, and that is the goal, right?

Have fun with Facebook.  If you don’t look at it as work, you will enjoy it a lot more.  If your clients see you having fun, they will have fun with you too!

Note:  This instructional article was designed to help you with the basics of a Facebook page.  If you have further questions or issues feel free to visit the Help Center of Facebook or contact me if you would like to hire me for more advanced services.

As I have mentioned in previous articles Facebook is one of the leaders of Social Media Marketing for your business, and a key step to boost your SEO.  Facebook currently has over 500 million users, which is a vast market that you can easily have access to.  A new field to grow your following, promote events, new products, giveaways, and more.  Once you grow a fan base through Facebook, you are opening up a new avenue of traffic coming back to your website in incoming links, new visitors, more people reading your blog articles, and more clients interacting with you.

Here are just a few of the benefits:

• Promote your Brand
• Access over 500 million people
• Drive more traffic to your website
• Promote Events
• Integrate with your Blog RSS
• Get to know your fans and interact with them
• Its Free!

Facebook Page vs Facebook Profile

Starting out, it is important to understand is the difference between having a Facebook Profile and a Facebook Page.  Facebook Profiles are for individual people looking to connect with friends through Facebook.  It is specifically designed to facilitate personal interactions between individuals, family members, friends, colleages, but does not have all of the features that Facebook Pages offers for business.

Facebook does not want businesses creating Facebook profiles for their business, so they have set a limit to the number of friends that you can have on a Profile.  If you reach the limit, they will encourage you to change your Profile into a Page, but they do not facilitate that process in any way.  So don’t make the mistake of creating a Profile for your company, only to find out after all of your hard work, that you have to start over again as a Facebook Page.

The benefits that Facebook offers for businesses are also convincing for why to create a Page instead of a Profile.  As mentioned above, you are not limited to the number of fans you can have which is great for a growing business.  Also, Facebook offers analytics (insights) so that you can see statistics on the success of your business page.  How many fans do you have, how many join each week, which posts are the most popular, how much feedback are you getting etc.  This will help you see currently how successful your Facebook page is and give you ideas of how to improve it.

There are also numerous applications that you can add to your Facebook page to customize it for your businesses needs.  You can run sweepstakes on your page, set up a newsletter sign-up so that your mailing list can grow through Facebook, upgrade your slideshows and more.

Facebook also offers advertising options for their Business Pages.  You can promote your Business Page to their entire pool of users, you set up the pay-per-click pricing, and you can be growing your fan base daily.  I have one client who has received 165 new users over the 12 days she has been running her Facebook ad.  She sees great value in the growth.

If you have never ventured into Facebook before, don’t be shy and don’t feel like you have to understand it all in one big swoop.  I have many clients who start out slowly, and with time I am pleasantly surprised with all of the fun they are having using it to promote their business.

Once you have created your Facebook page, be sure to check out my article on creating a username for your Facebook Page.

Now that you have a page your next important step is to promote it.  Let people know that you have a page on Facebook…encourage more fans to follow your page and most importantly make it easy for them.  You can invite people through your Facebook friends on your personal profile, which will hopefully get you started, but what you really want is to gain more fans from outside of your intimate circle.

There are many ways to gain fans, but one big step is to have a personal username for your page so that you can market yourself outside of Facebook.  If you are advertising via print, the web, or telling someone in person that you are on Facebook no one is going to remember a URL like this: http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/your-business/299019657350…and don’t assume that many clients will do the “work” of searching for your business through Facebook search.

Facebook now has a super-easy way of claiming your username.  Follow this link: facebook.com/username.  You will then see a page like this:

You can of course select a username for your personal profile, but we are here to talk about your Business page.  As you can see, you will need to select which page you would like to claim if you have more than one.  Select the appropriate page from the list and Facebook will then give you the option to claim a username. **

You are basically building a URL for your Facebook page, so choose something that is short and easy to remember, appropriate to your business name, and hopefully it will be available.  Once you enter the name, Facebook will tell you if it is available, or if you have to choose something else.  That is where the fun starts!  Playing with words, arrangements, spelling etc.  Once Facebook says it is available…your are done!  Wasn’t it easy?

Congratulations, your new Facebook page address is: http://facebook.com/yourusername.

**Note:  If Facebook says that you are “not eligible for a username at this time” it is most likely that you do not have enough Facebook followers yet.  They wait until you have at least 25 fans to give you a username…so don’t get discouraged, just keep it in mind once you have 25 fans.

Don’t have a Facebook page yet?  Stay tuned for my future articles explaining the benefits of a Facebook page and a guide on how to make one.

Now is the time to start the design project you have been musing on.

• Website
• Blog
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Social Media Optimization (SMO)
• Logo Design
• Business Card Design
• Rack Cards
• Brochures
• Newsletters
• and more…

Be sure to view the portfolio to see examples of some of the great projects I have been a part of in the past.

Contact Budding Lotus Designs to discuss plans for your new project.  Space is limited.

This discount is available to new and returning clients and is applied to working hours completed during the month of January.  If any project continues past the month of January, the additional working hours will be billed at the standard hourly rate of Budding Lotus Designs.

Inbound links can bring new users to your site, and when the links are merit-based and freely-volunteered as an editorial choice, they’re also one of the positive signals to Google about your site’s importance…relevant, quality inbound links can affect your PageRank.

So, inbound links are desired, and quality is important.  As explained in my previous article Get me to the top, please, blogging is a great way to boost your quality inbound links.  As you add meaningful content to your website through blog articles that relate to your business you increase your chances of others voluntarily linking to your articles in order to share your content with their readers.

Once you have applied yourself to improving your SEO, you will surely like to see your progress.  As I have explained in a previous article, Google Analytics is a great way to view the progress of traffic to your site.  But, if you would like to view the detailed list of inbound links to your website, hop on over to Yahoo Site Explorer.  This tool will show you every page of your website that is indexed by Yahoo and also a full list of every page that links to your website as in inbound link.  This tool will give you a detailed view of your current inbound links and you can check in over time to see how your links improve.

Because Yahoo Site Explorer also itemizes each link, you can analyze the quality of your inbound links to see who you are attracting so far and to give you an idea of whether you want to target your blog articles to attract other readers.  The default settings for “Inlinks” will show links “From all pages” to “Only this URL”.  As you will see in the image below, if you change the settings to “Except from this domain” you will be eliminating links coming from your own website, and if you change the second setting to “Entire site” you will see all incoming links to your website, not just to your homepage.

So take the first step.  Find out how your site is doing with inbound links.  It will give you a good idea of how you might want to improve you website content, and attract new readers to your site.

So do you know how all this is helping you?

Yes, you may understand that all of these things are good for your business, but doesn’t it feel good to see the results?  Proof that this hard work is paying off?  If you haven’t already…set up Google Analytics for your website.  Google offers powerful tools for you to be able to monitor activity on your website.

This way once you post a new blog article, and inform your followers on Facebook and Twitter that you have something new and juicy to read…you can hop over to Google Analytics to see how it all pans out.  Did people find your post interesting?  Did it lead them to read more on your site?  Did people find you through the search results too?  Are people linking to your articles?  All these things, and more can be seen with Google Analytics.

Example of the Google Analytics Dashboard

Once you have created an account with Google and installed the verification code on your site (to prove that you have the right to track the site) you are on your way to new horizons.  Google gives you statistics on the number of visitors you have per day, the number of pages viewed, how long the viewer spent on your site, how they arrived at your site (google search, direct link etc) whether they were a new visitor, and so much more!  The benefit of this service is endless, and this is only the tip of the iceberg.  You can also set up custom tracking tools to look at specific features on your site that you wish to analyze.

Have fun and feel proud once you see the benefits of all your hard work!

Blogging

This is your platform, your soapbox if you will, where you can express to the world your knowledge, your skills, and the wonders of your product.  As a business owner, you might consider yourself quite knowledgeable in your field…so start talking about what you know.  For example if you are a personal trainer looking for new clients, share workout tips, write about exercise equipment and blog about healthy recipes.  All of these topic will help to present you as an expert in your field and each article that you write will also boost your SEO on the internet.

Most importantly, don’t forget to keep it interesting, and fun.  If people just think you are trying to sell yourself or your product, they won’t stick around for more.  But if they like reading your articles because of your down-to-earth, candid personality they will return again and again to find out more…and they will tell others about you.  And then you are on your way to SEO heaven!

Facebook

Here is another fun way of connecting with others to share the excitement of your business.  Sure, Facebook is a place where you can reconnect with friends from elementary school, but it is also so much more.  Start a business page, share photos of your products, write status updates about the latest news, share links to new blog articles, let your fans know about special sales and offers, invite your fans to special events…

There are so many fun ways to express your business on Facebook, and once again, it is all in your hands.  The more you put into it, the more it can benefit you and it will all connect back to your website!

Twitter

Do you tweet?  Its quick, its easy, and it is another great way to enter into the social pool and play with like-minded people.  Tweets are limited to 140 characters, so it doesn’t take a lot of your time, but another great way to share quick updates, pointers, advice, stories, links to a great article you think your followers would be interested in.  Introduce yourself, make friends and soon you will have lots of followers who want to hear your latest update, and who are drawn to your website to find out more about you.  Another boost for your SEO.

So to recap:

SEO is in your hands.  You have the power to present who you are and what makes your business special.  In an internet world where everyone can become anonymous, many people are actually looking for someone who is real.  Someone who presents an authentic, honest and fun approach to their business.  So have a good time: blog, tweet, and create your facebook world.

Think about the different elements of your website each as an employee, working hard to boost your rankings in the search engines.  As you have read in previous articles, your blog can be seen as your Employee of the Year.  Your blog (if you are using it well) is constantly being updated with content relevant to your business, and feeding the search engines with reasons to “pick you” when an appropriate keyword comes up.  So, why wouldn’t you want your blog in-your-home, rooting for your team?

Many people don’t even realize it, but if your blog does not sit on your domain name, it is not helping your search engine rankings.  Check the domain name of your blog.  Does it end in wordpress.com, typepad.com, blogspot.com or something of the sort?  If so, your blog isn’t in your home.  I am sure it would be much happier to be a member of your team, living in the spare bedroom, or even above the garage.  As long as it is in your home!  So, check right away to see where your blog is living, and if it is not on your own domain name, fix that asap!

Feel free to contact me if you have questions about this.

Every article that you write on your blog offers you an opportunity to tell search engines “Keep checking back, I am adding more all the time”.  Search engines visit your site depending on the frequency that you actually add information.  So if you had your 10 page website designed in 2005 and you haven’t edited or added new pages to it since, it is pretty likely that search engines don’t visit it much.  Not very exciting for the search engine, huh?

If you start out with a 10 page website and then add 4 articles to your blog per month, you are also making it that much more likely that you will be found in search engines.  Over a year you will accumulate to 58 pages, over 5 times the amount of chances that Google will choose you when someone searches for a keyword associated with your business.

And to get to the nitty-gritty details…what you write about is really important too! If your business is web design, but your blog articles are about daisies, you are not helping your cause too much.  The search engines will read every word in each article to determine when you match a search engine query.  So if you are writing about how to grow daisies, it is unlikely that a search engine will list you in the results of a search on web design.

So if you want to improve your rankings (SEO):
Start a blog
Commit to writing a few articles a month to start
Write about topics related to your business

These are the first steps.  From there, have fun with it!  Write in a manner that engages, entertains, and informs.  If people enjoy reading your blog they will also want to subscribe to it, suggest it to others, link to it, and eventually you will be drawing in new clients too!

Image courtesy of Smashing Magazine

Have you seen this image before?  The ubiquitous circle with two arcs?  You have probably seen it on tons of website, and if you have no idea what it means, you are not alone.  Many of my clients are not aware of how this little icon can help simplify their lives.

It comes in all different colors, but it is there to tell you one simple message:  “subscribe here”.

There are so many blogs on the internet these days – you can learn about anything and everything.  Whether you want to stay up-to-date on your niece’s travels through Europe, or the latest cell phone innovations, RSS will bring the articles to you.  This way you don’t have to check each individual blog to see if there is anything new…you can just subscribe using the RSS link, and voila! the updates are delivered to you.

But…how does it get to you?  Well the next step is to have a “feed reader” which will gather the subscriptions for you.  There are tons to choose from!  Personally I am very happy with the one that I use: Newsfire, but if your computer does not meet the requirements for Newsfire, you can also check out this list of other options.

Do you already have a feed reader of choice?  Let me know what you use by leaving a comment below.

An example of a browser which provides an RSS button for subscriptions.