Some of you may not know this about me, but I work full-time as the manager of Envato’s educational network, including FreelanceSwitch, Nettuts+, Psdtuts+ and 9 other sites. Each of our sites have had Facebook Pages for a while now, but they never really took off until I set aside the time to do an in-depth investigation on Facebook marketing strategies, and worked with my team to implement them. The results surprised all of us.

We saw the number of daily new fans for each site skyrocket, and today these 12 Facebook Pages, as of this writing, have 126,244 Facebook Fans.

I’ve poured all the insights gained from this process into my new book (published through Rockable Press), Successful Facebook Marketing. It was released today, and yes I have been doing my “book launch” happy dance around the house :-).

Since I know not everyone wants to put significant effort into Facebook marketing, I thought I’d briefly share some of the key insights here so that, even if you never pick up a copy of the book, you can still learn the basics of how to knock it out of the park with your Facebook Pages.

The full breakdown

• 36,891 Fans of Psdtuts+
• 16,480 Fans of Nettuts+
• 16,500 Fans of Vectortuts+
• 4,376 Fans of Audiotuts+
• 11,554 Fans of Aetuts+
• 7,479 Fans of Cgtuts+
• 4,027 Fans of Activetuts+
• 11,038 Fans of Phototuts+
• 3,147 Fans of Mobiletuts+
• 8,230 Fans of Webdesigntuts+
• 5,294 Fans of FreelanceSwitch
• 1,228 Fans of RockablePress

Each Facebook Page is run by the editor of the site the Page is dedicated to. Feedback from the editors suggests that running one of these Pages takes on average about 15 minutes a day. We’ve highly automated the process so that minimum labor is required to keep the Pages healthy and growing.

Why this is important

These days there’s a huge focus on Twitter as a source of new visitors to your site, but on our blogs, we’ve discovered that Facebook traffic regularly beats Twitter traffic, even when comparing a Twitter account that is bigger than our Facebook Page. We’ve discovered that, in general, Facebook Fans convert far better into visits and pageviews than Twitter followers.

For example, on Psdtuts+ we have 36,891 Facebook Fans and 42,472 Twitter followers. Even though our Twitter account is bigger, Facebook regularly sends more traffic.

And then there’s this day, where we had 12,638 visits in 24 hours, all from Facebook:

If you’re reading this, you probably care enough about social media and attracting new visitors that you have a Twitter account. With the above in mind, it’s important that you also create a Facebook Page for your website or business as soon as possible. The sooner you get started, the sooner you can begin building your core group of fans.

If you want in-depth advice on how to set up your page for highest conversions from visitors into Facebook fans, well, you’ll need my book for that ;-).

Strategy 1: The Like Box

No single factor bumped up our daily new Facebook fans more than adding a ‘Like Box‘ to each of our sites. Not only does the Like Box give your website some fantastic social proof, it makes it very easy for people to ‘Like’ your Page without ever leaving your site. If you only do one thing to promote your Facebook Page, it should be this.

The Like Box we added to Nettuts+.

The arrow points to the day when we first added the Like Box to Nettuts+.

Strategy 2: Fan-only Content

With a little bit of effort, you can create a landing page for your Facebook Page that only triggers when the person visiting it isn’t already a fan. They’ll be greeted with a call to action to Like the Page, and some enticing goodies they’ll receive if they do so. Once they become a fan, the goodies are ‘unlocked’. Here’s the funnel we use on the Psdtuts+ Facebook Page:

As soon as the visitor clicks ‘Like’ and becomes our fan, the page reloads with a fan-only tutorial they can download immediately. This system is another key reason why our fan count has grown so quickly across all our sites. There’s no better way to convert visitors into fans than a call to action and exclusive fan-only content.

Setting up this system requires a little bit of technical savvy (or technical help), but it’s something anyone can do if they know how. You’ll find the instructions for the system we use inside the pages of Successful Facebook Marketing.

Strategy 3: Automation

When people become your fan on Facebook, they’re expressing that they’re interested in what you do. If you run a website, it’s likely that they want to know about new content you publish. If you run a business, they probably want to know about new products or services you offer.

You can save yourself countless hours in admin of your Facebook Page by automating updates as much as possible. The simplest way to do this is to add your RSS feed to your Facebook Page so that new content is automatically cross-posted to Facebook.

Once you’re logged in to your Page, click ‘Edit Page’ and then select ‘Apps’ from the left-hand menu. You should see something that looks like this:

Make sure the ‘Notes’ app is installed, then click ‘Go to App’ underneath the description of the app. You’ll be met with a customized Page for your notes content. You want to look at the bottom of the left-hand sidebar for a small link that says ‘Edit import settings’.

This will take you to a page where you can paste in an RSS feed to import. Once that’s done, Facebook will start automatically publishing new content from the feed to your Facebook Page. If the content has an accompanying image, it will automatically use that image as a thumbnail for the update, meaning that even auto-generated content looks great.

Even though we do publish some great custom content on our Facebook Pages, the majority of content we publish is piped in automatically via RSS. It takes zero time to maintain this, but our fans love being able to keep up with new content this way and are constantly posting comments and ‘Liking’ these automatic updates.

Strategy 4: Targeted Content

As I mentioned above, we publish great custom content alongside our automatic updates.

When we want traffic we publish questions about our content, we ask for opinions on our content, or we recommend our content – and every update has a link back to our site. Not only does this bring traffic, it also heightens the feeling of community on the Page.

When we want discussion we use Facebook’s Questions feature, publish polls and ask for opinions. Comments are extremely important for the growth of your Page because when a user posts a comment it also shows up in their News Feed to be seen by all their friends.

When we want to build loyalty we interact with fans in the comments, thank them for their support, run special promotions and give fan-only gifts and bonuses.

When we want sales we post teaser updates about new products, share images of a products in development, share news about new products, and give fans discount coupons.

And though we are not in this field, if we wanted clients we would post examples of newly completed work, share testimonials from clients, post about our services and talk about what we’re currently working on.

That’s a good start, but…

Though these 4 key strategies are an essential part of building popular Facebook Pages, there are so many more things you can do to grow faster and build a fanbase who adore you, your website or your business. Unfortunately, good information on Facebook Marketing is scarce. Facebook Pages are are only just starting to be understood by marketers, and those that do ‘get it’ are reluctant to share what they know. I guess they don’t want to give up their $500/hour consulting fees… and who can blame them?

Luckily, consulting for big companies is not my thing. I’m a writer. So, when I realized how powerful these strategies were I couldn’t help but to start writing…

Successful Facebook Marketing

$19 for 3 Days Only

To say thank you to those who believe in the book and are willing to be ‘early adopters’ you can save $5 by purchasing the book before June 18th. It’s currently $19, but will go up to $24 soon.

Rockable Press have given me the nicest book landing page I’ve ever seen, so I won’t say too much here. If you’re interested you can read all about the book over on the Rockable Press site.

If you’ve already decided you want to learn the complete Facebook Marketing strategy, you can buy the book via eJunkie.

Book FAQ

How many pages is it?

The book is 139 pages, which I like to believe is neither too long nor too short :-).

What if I already have a Facebook Page?

That’s great! It’s means you’re ahead of the curve. Still, there are lots of strategies in the book that can be applied to already existing Facebook Pages. Though you can start from scratch, you don’t have to.

Why doesn’t your personal Facebook Page have more fans?

Good question!

In comparison to 100,00+ fans, 270-odd seems tiny. I created the Facebook Page for this blog very recently, mainly as an example in the book of how to set up a brand new Facebook Page. I haven’t done much to market it besides put a Like Box in the sidebar of this site because, to be honest, it seems a little strange to use all these blockbuster marketing strategies to promote the Page for a blog that doesn’t update anywhere near as much as it should!

Instead, I focus my efforts on the Pages for our 12 sites and, 126,244 fans later, I think my team and I know a thing or two about Facebook Marketing :).

Do I need a dedicated team?

Nope! One person can easily run a Facebook Page by themselves. It’s only after you start directing multiple Facebook Pages that you need to call in some reinforcements.

After lots of experimentation over the last couple of months, I’ve found a very easy way to kick-start a topic based blog with an immediate influx of search traffic. This strategy will be useful for anyone starting a blog from scratch, whether you’re creating a blog as a passive sales funnel, or if you eventually want to build up a big following. The main requirement is that your blog has to cover specific topics, preferably from a how to/advice perspective.

This strategy is almost purely content based and does not rely on inbound links. I don’t enjoy link building and article marketing much, so the extent of my link building for the test blog was to participate in a forum on the topic of the blog and put a link in my signature. I’ve participated in 2 forums in this way, left a few comments here and there with the blog linked via my username (no links in comments), and that’s it for inbound links I’ve created.

Yet, I was extremely happy with the blog’s first week of traffic, and more than 80% of it was from search:

654 visits and 1,175 page views. A month after that, the traffic increased to 1,303 visits in one week, 87% from search. This strategy is an excellent way to kick-start new blogs, especially in niches where guest-posting is difficult. In this post I’ll show you exactly how to use this strategy for your own blogs.

The idea

When working to create a blog that gains traffic passively, you need to set up an automatic stream of traffic. Search is the obvious answer, yet I didn’t want to spend hours and hours on directory submissions, forum posts, commenting and article marketing. I thought that if I could create enough content that targeted long tail search terms within a particular topic, the dribs and drabs of search traffic for each long-tail phrase would snowball into something bigger.

Most of the time when I search for a long-tail search term myself (like ‘is convolvulus poisonous to cats’) I end up on some kind of Q&A site. I often use Google like some kind of oracle, asking questions like ‘how do I’ and ‘where is’ and ‘what is’ and searching for answers. Based on the huge amounts of traffic these Q&A sites get, I’m confident in saying that I’m not the only person who uses Google like this!

I decided to seed the blog with Q&A style content. I’d target keyword phrases people were using to find answers, and then give them the answer they were looking for.

But how do you know the questions people are asking?

Google Auto Suggest

As you’re typing a search term into the Google search bar, you’re met with a bunch of suggestions for what other people searched for – people who started their query the same way as you’ve done. Here’s an example of how Auto Suggest looks for a search about kayaking, and then starting to type a word beginning with W:

I realized that by starting a search term about my topic in the same way someone is likely to begin asking a question, I could get dozens of ideas for content. Let’s run with the Kayaking example. You could type in:

• Kayaking how
• Kayaking why
• Kayaking when
• Kayaking where
• Kayaking what

Here’s what Auto Suggest gave me when I started typing ‘kayaking how’:

Immediately, I have 10 ideas for articles I could write. To make sure the article is good quality, all I need to do is thoroughly and carefully answer the question asked, or provide the information the searcher is looking for. This doesn’t mean the article needs to be lengthy, just so long as it provides what the searcher is looking for.

Searchers regularly use this form of search query: ‘topic’ + ‘phrase to search within that topic’. For example, ‘Kayaking how to get in’ really translates to “Within the topic ‘Kayaking’, show me articles about how to get in.” While this is a very sensible way to search and likely to return a more varied range of potentially relevant results than the phrase ‘how to get into a kayak’, it’s not the way people speak. If I wanted to know how to get in to a kayak, I would never approach an expert and ask:

“Kayaking how to get in?”

And for this reason, it’s very tough to find content with exact match titles for these terms, even though searchers are using them in droves.

Yet it’s perfectly reasonable to create content with an exact match title for these kinds of searches, which will help your site punch above its weight in search results. In this case, all you’d do is use the following title format:

Kayaking: How to Get In

From Google’s perspective this is no different to ‘kayaking how to get in’ as it ignores punctuation, but to the reader this sounds like a perfectly reasonable title. Using this method it’s easy to publish posts that are exact matches for hundreds of long-tail search terms, many of which may have no prior exact match results. This makes it easy for you to rank highly in search results without hundreds of inbound links.

If you need more topics from Google Auto Suggest, try typing in the name of your topic, a space, and then a letter from the alphabet. You can get topics from all 26 letters.

Wrapping up

This method is frighteningly simple, yet it’s also a very powerful way to seed a new blog with a constant stream of valuable search traffic. By using Auto Suggest you can create dozens of exact match articles for long-tail search terms. If 30 articles bring in 5 visits a day, that’s 150 visits a day on autopilot. And, as your site ages and gets more backlinks, your articles will climb in the search results. Soon that number will be 300, 600, 900…

Now my test site for this method has been around for a bit over two months. During this time, I’ve been adding more and more brief articles that are exact matches for long-tail search terms. Here’s what traffic looks like over the last week:

4,508 visits and 6,713 page views in the last week, 86% from search. The only link building I’ve ever done is a few forum posts and blog comments, probably taking up 1 – 2 hours in the entire lifetime of the site. The site succeeds because I’m providing quality content where Google believes there is none.

This strategy is likely to be of extreme interest to people who start niche blogs for passive income, but it’s also a smart way to kick-start a new blog in a tough niche. Once you seed the site with Q&A style content and are happy with your initial traffic levels, you can move the Q&A content off your main page by changing date stamps, allowing you to switch over to more traditional styles of blog content.

A final tip: When using an exact match title for a question search term, i.e. ‘Kayaking how do I get in’, you may want to tweak your post title a little bit so it’s clear that your content offers an answer, rather than someone asking the question. You can do so like this: Kayaking: How Do I Get In? [Answer].

If one part of blogging has suffered in the last year or two, it’s blogging as an end rather than a means. Creating a blog for the sake of watching it grow, entertaining people, helping people, and making something you could be proud of. This blog started out in that spirit, and my best blogging days were the early ones, where I cared only about content and quality and writing things that people read. Things that helped people sometimes.

Then, collectively, we discovered that blogs could be powerful tools for making money. For many, posts became more about the ad impressions and affiliate sales they generated than about putting something of quality into the world. Some people held out (I did for a while), but soon people discovered that there were ways to make money without ads and affiliate marketing, like freelancing or book deals or speaking gigs (and this is where it got me). The bloggers measuring ad impressions and click-throughs were joined by bloggers counting Twitter followers and consulting gigs.

Then we discovered info products and courses, ways to make money by teaching. We’re good at teaching, and it’s more fun to make products than tweak AdSense, and products make more money than ads do. The measure of a post’s success moved from ad impressions and affiliate commissions to eBook sales and course sign-ups. In some cases, the content on formerly high-quality blogs turned into an endless stream of thinly veiled pre-launch material, where every new post has an ulterior motive and every word is another part of the sales process.

This sounds like a condemnation, but if it is, I’m condemning myself. I lost my passion for blogging for a long time because it changed into something I saw as the ‘I’ in ROI, part of building my personal brand (and all the while, the most popular and well-loved post on this guru’s blog is about putting Flickr images in blog posts!).

I started blogging to create and learn and teach, I stopped blogging because half of me got angry at myself for doing things to make money, and the other half was frustrated when I didn’t.

I’m not angry at myself for this, nor am I angry at other bloggers who’ve fallen into the same rut, but are much better marketers than me and have more confidence in what they’re doing, and so spent more time making sales than hesitating over the keyboard. We’ve got mortgages and sometimes kids and we all need money desperately, so if it’s a choice between making money and feeling fuzzy, we’ll make money. But the hard sell comes at a cost, and many bloggers have lost touch with why they started blogging, and the goals they hoped to achieve before they knew making money was possible.

It happens because we see money and freedom as one and the same. Most of us are not chasing luxury cars and designer clothes. We want to earn money so we don’t have to worry about money, so we can do the things we like doing when money is taken out of the equation. We work our butts off to reach an idyllic point where we don’t have to worry anymore, a mental state also shared with people who don’t earn a whole lot of money but want less (and smaller) stuff. The latter group tend to be the happiest people you’ll meet.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that you’ll get more happiness from your blog if you see it as something that has value and meaning in its own right, rather than being food for a very hungry sales-machine. When I say happiness, I’m talking about the lasting kind. The kind that contributes to a life well-lived.

Do what you need to earn a living, but this month, do some things you’re proud of that don’t have a hope of earning you money. Spend a few hours you’d usually spend marketing helping people who are not your target market, even indirectly, to the nth degree. Write a post about something you know nothing about, but would like to learn. Start something from scratch without leveraging what you already have.

Do you remember what it feels like to create for its own sake?

Make less money and more happiness.
Sell less, help people more.
Market less, create more.