Not a day goes by when we don’t see Twitter and Facebook as being talked about as essential social networks for bloggers to be investing time into – but over the last few months I’ve been investing a little extra time into another social network – one that I wonder if some have forgotten about a little – LinkedIn.

I’ve long had a LinkedIn Account (I’d love to connect with you there) but I’ve not really known what to do with it for a long time – but lately I’m seeing more and more opportunities in the network. Let me quickly mention a few:

1. Companies

In the last week I set ProBlogger up as a ‘Company’ on LinkedIn. I always knew you could do this but didn’t see the point, that was until I saw that you could also add your company’s products on LinkedIn. I’ve now set up all of the ProBlogger eBooks (and the hard cover ProBlogger book) as products on Linked In.

The cool thing about it is that you can also seek recommendations for those products from your LinkedIn network which helps to build social proof for your products. For example check out the ’31 Days to Build a Better Blog’ recommendations that have already come in.

2. Groups

Start a ‘group’ on your blog’s topic – it can open up opportunity for you to become a leader and authority in the niche and opens up some interesting networking opportunities (join the ProBlogger Group here).

3. LinkedIn Today

I’m still in the process of exploring this more but LinkedIn have recently set up LinkedIn Today which aggregates the most news from around LinkedIn (and Twitter). It breaks it down into categories and lets those who view it share and save what they’re reading. I’ve been using LinkedIn Today as something of a news reader lately but today when TechCrunch announced that LinkedIn have become their 2nd largest source of social media traffic (bigger than Twitter) it struck me that there are opportunities for publishers to generate traffic from it. Getting aggregated involves putting a LinkedIn Share button on your site and you’ll probably need to be on a topic that is relevant – but it could be worth exploring (more details on how to do it here).

4. Finding Guest Writers

One of my most successful experiments on LinkedIn has been in identifying people to write guest posts for my photography site. The search features on LinkedIn help you to hunt down people on topics of expertise and to send them emails – I’ve gone on hunts for a variety of photographers over the last few months and sent them messages to see if they’d consider writing a guest post for me (or to consider being interviewed) and it has landed me some great posts.

5. Status Updates

Lastly there’s the common status update feature that most of us are familiar with – similar to Facebook and Twitter. There are all kinds of opportunities here to share links to your posts, to share links to other sites, to ask questions and generate discussion etc.

Looking to Learn how to use LinkedIn Better?

Just as I was about to hit publish on this post I noticed that Lewis Howes (MR LinkedIN) has a special running on his amazing product – LinkedInfluence at $97 for his 4 Module teaching series on how to use LinkedIn effectively.

If you’re looking to increase your LinkedIn features I’d commend Lewis and his teaching to you.

This guest post is by Dona Collins of CreditLoan.com.

For anyone starting a revolution, or a business, Twitter can be a success. For the rest of the world, it can be a waste of time that doesn’t get the message out to people they want to reach. And for some, it’s no more a bunch of nonsense limited to 140 characters—as this infographic shows. I’ll discuss it in more detail below.

Twitter was very popular during the crises in Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen earlier this year as it worked to spread the word about where protesters could meet, and tell the world what was happening. Indeed, it and other social media platforms (mainly Facebook) have been attributed with helping to keep the revolutions moving.

Businesses also prosper from Twitter by keeping in constant contact with their customers—within limits. The Flowtown blog recommends posting tweets every few hours, not every few minutes, and planning promotions a few weeks out with videos and other links. Having conversations with customers on Twitter is better than preaching to them.

Most Twitter users spend their time on the service getting information about companies, with 42 percent learning about products and services, and 41 percent providing opinions about products and services. A good—and bad—point about Twitter is that 33 percent of its worldwide traffic is inside the United States. That’s great if you want to reach a global audience, but not so good if you only sell domestically.

Twitter, like Facebook, is also a popular way to learn about news. The death of Osama Bin Laden was all over social networks before news agencies reported it, and some Twitter users have used it as a way to report news live, before websites do.

Still, having thousands of followers may still be a colossal waste of time, especially since Facebook has three times as many accounts as Twitter, and 20 percent of Twitter’s users produce at least 80 percent of the site’s content. It looks like a few are preaching to the masses. Looking at the statistics, it seems that a lot of people get on Twitter and give it a try, then give up: 25 percent have no followers, about 20 percent have been followed by no more than 11 people, and only five percent have more than 50 followers.

As with any form of communication, how well you use Twitter will determine whether or not it’s a waste of your time. Blogger Darren Rowse says Twitter benefits him by acting as a research tool, expanding his personal brand, promoting content, and finding new readers, among other uses.

Twitter can definitely be a way to get things done. The UFL conducted its draft by live tweeting on Twitter. The United Football League isn’t as widely known as the NFL, but UFL coaches Dennis Green and Jerry Glanville make it a league worth following on Twitter with their updates on what their teams are doing.

Beware that famous people have been phished on Twitter, including people as disparate as President Obama and Miley Cyrus. Twitter, like any other website, can be hijacked by hackers. And remember, Twitter messages are archived and searchable, so anything you say is online forever. Just ask anyone who has been fired over a tweet.

Do you consider Twitter to be a waste of time?

Dona Collins, a part-time financial blogger, along with CreditLoan.com, helps to unravel these fascinating complexities.

Few things will replace SEO, providing great content, posting frequently, or building relationships with your readers and with other leaders in your niche as ways to help bring visitors to your blog.

However, I’d like to introduce you to another way you can find targeted followers who are interested in the content, products, and services you create: Twitter contests.

Anyone can put on a Twitter contest. The actual steps you go through are not difficult. And anyone can find a lot of followers with a Twitter contest. But what I want to share is how you can craft a Twitter contest to find the people who are interested in your niche, and build excitement around them following you on Twitter.

What is a Twitter contest?

Simply, a Twitter contests is a marketing activity designed to cause people to follow you and tweet a predefined message in order to be entered into a drawing for a prize. At the end of the contest period, you randomly draw the winner from those who:

• followed you, and
• tweeted the predefined message you created for the contest.

The results, if the contest is crafted right, are a lot of new followers who are truly interested in the messages that you tweet. These are the people who will most likely stay connected with you on Twitter and take action on your tweets. These are also the people who will be most likely to visit your blog or website long after the contest is over.

Each Twitter contest I run yields between 20% and 25% new targeted followers over ten days. My contests are big, so I run them about a year apart. That way, they don’t become so commonplace that they lose their novelty and appeal for either the people who enter, or the sponsors who provide the prizes.

Elements of a successful Twitter contest

While I concede that there are a lot of reasons why a person or company may want to conduct a Twitter contest, the reason that I’m discussing focuses on the blogger’s desire to find targeted followers. All other things being equal, we would rather have 2,000 followers who are interested in the information we tweet, than 10,000 followers who follow us but have no desire to read our tweets.

Depending on how you craft your contest, you may spend a lot of time, energy, and money attracting the wrong people. Alternatively, you can take specific steps to attract those in your niche.

There are several essential elements involved in attracting targeted followers in your niche:

Be clear on the purpose of your contest

Before you go through the work of crafting a Twitter contest, make sure you are clear on what you’re looking to get from the exercise. With me, it’s more targeted followers, targeted being the operative word. Once I have them, I have other activities in place to move them to my blog, my books, and my products. If you’re not clear on the contest’s purpose, then you are setting yourself up for disappointment when it’s over.

Choose prizes wisely

This is perhaps one of the biggest mistakes people make when they conduct a Twitter contest. If you are looking for targeted followers, bigger is not always better—bigger can cost you a lot of money without delivering the results you are looking for. For example, $5,000 in cash may not be as good a prize as a $500 camera or a $30 signed photography book if you’re looking to find photographers as targeted followers.

Sure, $5,000 is empirically worth more than the other two prizes, but consider this: $5,000 may attract a lot of people to your contest who want nothing to do with photography. All they want is the prize—then they’re out of your life. And the truth is that not everyone is motivated to enter contests for cash. Don’t believe me? When was the last time you entered the Publisher’s Clearinghouse $10,000,000 sweepstakes?

When you select a prize for your Twitter contest, it needs to do two things:

1. Encourage people in your niche to enter the contest.
2. Discourage people who aren’t in your niche from entering.

Generic prizes like cash, electronics, and vacations appeal to a wide range of people without doing anything special to reach out and grab the attention of a photographer. A camera, however, might raise the eyebrows of someone in your niche, as would a signed book from a renowned photographer.

Spending time choosing the right prizes that appeal to your targeted Twitter followers can make or break your chances of contest success. It can also save you a lot of money by helping you focus on the prizes that your targeted followers really value.

Don’t offer only your own prizes

Here is another mistake that people often make when they launch a Twitter contest designed to find targeted followers. Instead of reaching out to others for help in providing cool prizes, they only offer a book they wrote, a product they created, or a service they offer. While your prizes may be worthy of prize status, you will be missing out on a huge opportunity to find new targeted followers if you don’t invite others to contribute prizes.

When you reach out to experts and leaders in your niche to donate prizes to your contest, you are in essence setting up a sure way that the sponsors will send their followers to your blog or website—where they’ll find out how to enter your contest. You’ll also capture a lot of their followers on Twitter when they enter your contest. These are targeted prospects who may never have known about your contest had it not been for the sponsor your recruited.

As an example, I recently launched a Twitter contest for my blog with nearly 20 sponsors. Each of these sponsors will play a huge part in sending traffic my way; and since I chose sponsors and prizes related to my niche, the quality of visitors should be in line with the target audience I’m aiming to attract.

Give away the spotlight

In order to get the best experience from your contest, you need to take a step back from the limelight during the contest, and make your sponsors shine. This will give them all the encouragement they need to enthusiastically promote your contest to their followers and subscribers. Remember—these people are business men and women who are constantly looking for ways to promote their business. If you set them up as experts with a prize worthy to win, then they will help you communicate that message.

Another way you provide value to your sponsors during the contest is by highlighting their prize, linking to it, and linking to their website. By doing this, you’re increasing the chance that someone who’s looking at your prize list will see something they like, and decide to buy it instead of waiting for the contest to end.

Make the contest period the right length

This is where some finesse comes in. If you make the contest period too short, it will be over just about the time that its exposure is ramping up, causing you to miss out on a lot of potential traffic. Conversely, if you make it too long, people will not get the sense of urgency to enter it now.

We all know that if we don’t get a prospect to take action when we have them on our page, the chances that they will come back to do so later are dismally low.

With my contests, I’ve found that ten days seems to be a good running period. I run them over two weekends and the week between, starting on a Friday and going through the second Sunday. However, the length and the days you choose may be different for your niche. Don’t be afraid to test the contest length to find the optimal one for you.

Plan your tracking system

You need a plan for tracking all the people who enter your contest. The worst thing you can do is run a contest and then realize that you forgot to track it. Or worse—find that the tracking system you planned to rely on doesn’t give you accurate results.

For example, if you rely solely on Twitter search to find your entrants, you may find that the results don’t go back far enough to capture all the entries.

I like to use redundancy by choosing two tracking methods and cross-referencing the results. There are a number of great services that can send you alerts whenever someone enters the retweet phrase you create for your contest. When your contest starts, you need to immediately confirm that your alerts are capturing data accurately.

Communicate who the winner is and measure your results

When the contest is over, you need to contact the winner and announce on your official contest page that the contest has been won.

I wait until I receive confirmation from the winner before I publish his or her name. I also give the winner seven days to respond to my contact before I choose another winner. The last thing you want to do is choose a winner who doesn’t accept the prize, or one who comes back a month later and wants to collect the prize package then. Be clear in your rules and you can avoid issues like this.

If you’re like me, the real fun begins when the contest is over. This is when you get to crunch all the numbers to see how well you did. The data you get can help your next contest become more effective.

Creating a great retweet message

As I said earlier, for a follower to have a valid entry in your contest, they need to:

1. follow you on Twitter
2. retweet a specific message that you create.

A great retweet message will look like this one, which I created for my last contest. This retweet message is not for my current contest, so please don’t retweet it! I’m using it for illustrative purposes only:

RT @tonyeldridge Win a $1300 book marketing prize package from top book marketing experts in the business: http://tinyurl.com/ljn7y6

A great retweet message has these elements:

• It’s 140 characters long, or less. Don’t forget to make room for the URL when crafting your message. Some blog platforms won’t provide you with the post’s URL until after the post goes live. In those cases, you’ll have to grab the URL, shorten it, and edit your post with the complete RT message once you publish the post.
• It begins with “RT @YourTwitterID.” If you don’t place something before your Twitter ID, then Twitter will treat the tweet as a reply, rather than a mention. This can limit your contest retweet message’s exposure.
• It makes mention that this is a contest, and summarizes the prize. It’s harder than you think to craft a small message that packs a big call-to-action, but it can be done. Your goal is to craft a message that makes people want to visit your page to read more about this great contest you’re having.

Twitter contest launch tips

Based on my experience, here are some parting tips to help make sure your Twitter contest takes off smoothly:

• Don’t roll out a contest on the fly. Until you get experience with running these contests, there are too many places for things to go wrong. A little planning goes a long way for a smooth contest launch.
• Give sponsors plenty of time to respond. If you don’t have enough planning time, you will not give potential sponsors enough time to digest the benefits of donating a prize to your contest. Chances are, you will be the first person who has approached them about being a sponsor. If you give enough time for this process, you can truly win them over to this marketing activity.
• Test all links to your sponsors’ pages. You will be reaching for the antacid tablets if you get a bunch of calls from sponsors saying that their links are broken. Broken links are a rough way to start a contest.
• Make sure you understand exactly what your sponsors are offering as prizes. Here’s where you grab the rest of the antacids in the bottle. You post that your sponsor will donate a 60-minute, free consultation; they come back after the contest is live and say, “No, I said I’d donate a signed copy of my book.” You really don’t want to have to change your prizes after the contest starts, nor create hard feelings between you and your sponsor.
• Don’t change the rules mid-contest. People expect rules, but they don’t like to see them change. It tends to make them feel like they’re not being treated fairly, or that they’re being taken advantage of. You don’t want to create ill-will by changing rules after the contest launches unless it’s absolutely necessary.
• Tweet around the clock. Twitter is global, so make sure you are tweeting about your contest around the clock. Even in your own country, you may have target audience members working all hours of the day. Someone is always around to read about your contest.
• Don’t charge for an entry into your contest, or require someone to purchase something to enter. In many places, it’s illegal to require someone to purchase something to enter a contest. The laws of gambling take effect then. To be safe, make a “No purchase necessary” contest.
• Don’t trust your sponsors to promote the contest. Prompt them. I often create special tweets that highlight an individual sponsor’s prize and tweet it three or four times during the contest run. This almost always catches their attention and causes them to retweet the message, thus increasing their followers’ exposure to the contest.
• Follow Twitter’s contest rules. Twitter contests are popular, so Twitter has weighed in on rules they impose for contests. Their rules are simple and very practical, so make sure you follow them. Here’s a summary:
  • Discourage the creation of multiple accounts. If your contest encourages people to create multiple accounts to better their chances of winning, you are in violation of Twitter’s Terms Of Service.
  • Discourage posting the same tweet repeatedly. While it’s okay to have one tweet that everyone needs to use, you cannot encourage users to tweet it multiple times to increase their chances of winning.
  • Ask users to include an @reply to you in their update so you can see all the entries. You can see this in my Retweet example earlier.
  • Encourage the use of topics relevant to the contest. If I have a Twitter contest about photography and I say, “Cool new Apple phone out now” just to get people to click on the contest link in the tweet, I’m breaking the rules. You can use specific hashtags in the tweets, but even the hashtags need to be relevant to your contest.
• Have fun. You may find a contest stressful when you launch it, but take a breath and relax. I’m betting this will be one of the most memorable marketing experiences you’ll engage in!

Twitter contests, conducted correctly, can be a fun, viral way to uncover targeted Twitter followers and ultimately send them to your blog or website. If you conduct quality contests on a regular basis, you will find sponsors lining up to be part of your next contest, and you’ll build an eager niche anticipating your upcoming contests. Once you have these followers, it’s up to you to keep them, with valuable tweets that relate to their interests.

Have you had experience with Twitter competitions? How have they worked for your blog? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Tony Eldridge is the creator of the Marketing Tips For Authors blog and the author of the Twitter marketing book, Conducting Effective Twitter Contests, and the action/adventure novel, The Samson Effect, that New York Times bestselling author Clive Cussler calls a “first rate thriller brimming with intrigue and adventure.”

This guest post is by Marcie Hill of The Write Design Company .

Facebook has taken the Web by storm in a very short period.  In addition to being the highest ranking social networking site, it is the second most visited site in the world according to Alexa, the popular blog measuring tool.  Facebook’s popularity is so great that it unseated Google as the king of the Web one day in 2010.

Even though Facebook offer relationships, fun, and exposure, following are five reasons why I think your self-hosted blog is more valuable than your Facebook Page.

1. You can control your own media and space

You have limited control on Facebook. You have access to the profiles and pages you create, but having access isn’t the same as ownership.  And your design options are minimal. Your blog, on the other hand, is your space to do what you want, when you want, how you want.  From design to set up to content.

I recall a time when Facebook sent a message to their millions of members information them of content ownership.  Apparently, anything shared on Facebook belonged to them.  After loads of protests and opposition, the social networking giant backed down. I am not convinced.  Generally speaking, if you do not own something, you cannot control it.  If Facebook shuts down or suspends your account, you will not have access to the content you entered.  Thus, your self-hosted site is definitely a better option for media creation.

2. You can reach a very targeted group

People who sign up to receive your blog updates tend to be most interested in the content you provide.  It is more likely that this group will convert to loyal followers. You can have all the fans you want on Facebook, but if those people are not taking interest in what you share on your blog, all you have is a big remote fan base on someone else’s site.

3. You have the chance to get paid for advertisements

On Facebook, you have to pay to get your message to your targeted group.  On your blog, people have to pay you to get their message across to your audience.  Because you control the site, you determine the type of ads you want, how long you are going to let them run and how much they should cost.

4. You can rank high on Google

If someone conducts a Google search on your name or company, your Facebook pages may appear within the top five search results.  That’s impressive.  However, if you blog quality content consistently, your site will also rank within the top five—or at least on the first page.  Even if your self-hosted site appears below your Facebook page in the search results, at least you own the site.

5. Everybody is not on Facebook

Some people may never join Facebook; others are leaving.  Even with these transitions, people will always have access to your blog.  You don’t want to alienate people who are likely to support you just because they’re not on Facebook.

Above are five reasons why I think your self-hosted blog is better than your Facebook Page. Use Facebook as a means to an end—not as an end in itself. Use it to make contacts and drive traffic back to the site you own and control.  Remember, if you don’t own it, you can’t control.  And you will never own Facebook.

Marcie Hill is the Founder & President of The Write Design Company help clients develop creative conversations that will lead to long-term online and offline relationships.  She also shares information on culture, education, employment, health and youth programs and activities on her community site, Shorty: Your Chicago South Side Resource.

This guest post is by Ryan Barton of The Smart Marketing Blog.

Until I began receiving notifications of Twitter followers “favoriting” my tweets, I admittedly hadn’t thought much of the Favorites feature.

Some use it as a reminder to follow-up on a tweet’s topic. Others favorite a tweet they find funny. And some users go as far as importing favorite tweets on their Facebook page, email signatures, or even packaging them as an ebook.

There’s no wrong way to favorite a tweet (unless you’re favoriting every single update you read), but it’s worth considering a few other applications.

1. Completing your profile

I’d make a case that your favorite tweets tell a follower as much about you as your bio does.

Your Twitter bio tells followers what you want them to know about you, while your favorite tweets are a visual representation of what’s actually important. And more often than not, what’s important to you (humor, follow-ups, etc.) is more telling than any marketing copy.

Especially as Twitter continues to explode with spam bots, follow-backs aren’t obligations: they’re earned. And that earn process now includes more than a bio, a few tweets and a URL. Even bots have those.

But filling your stream with @ interactions and marking some of your favorite tweets, visually-demonstrate that you’re more than a casual stalker observer.

2. Word-of-mouth recommendations

It’s no secret—social media is the digital form of testimonials and word-of-mouth marketing. And that means platforms like Twitter are hugely-effective methods of growing your brand.

I’ll trust my followers’ opinions about a product exponentially more than I would an integrated marketing campaign for the same.

So using Favorites as a way to establish my authority through others’ tweets is my primary use of the feature.

Should a user check my favorite tweets, they’ll see kind words about my guest posts and the same about my book release.

I didn’t solicit their tweets, but now that they’re out there, I’m capturing them—curating them—in an online presentation of some of my favorite things.

It’s significant when those tweets are coming from some of the Internet’s most influential players. And if it means a lot to me, chances are it’ll mean a lot to a user who’s considering following me.

Seth wrote a post a while back about a prospect’s first impression of your digital self. In his case, it was watching reading his blog. It was tempting to run over and tell them to ignore this one or that one, but look at that one because he really put a lot of thought into that one.

It’s similar with Twitter. “Noooo, I didn’t want you to see those tweets, look at these … over here, instead, these tweets are more representative of who I am.”

Using Favorites like your digital refrigerator— showing off your A+ work—ensures that no matter where you are or what you’re doing and saying, your best side will always be showing.

3. Encouraging others

I’ve had followers favorite some of my most random tweets. But I’ve also had followers favorite some marketing advice they thought was valuable, or a link to one of my latest blog posts they wanted to reread at a later time.

Often, seeing the way users favorite my tweets tells me what’s resonating with my community. It’s a valuable real-time feedback mechanism. It’s also a new form of encouragement.

I think of encouragement like a fuel tank. I fuel my late nights and long hours from the tank; eventually it’ll run low. But through one form of encouragement or another—in this case, as simple as favoring a tweet—my encouragement tank is refueled a bit.

Think of favoriting as a new form of Twitter interaction that’s perhaps more meaningful than any @ reply. It’s more than “nice article,” it’s validation that your writing struck a chord; you’re on to something.

What’s more, you’re encouraging the user to continue producing quality content—and that makes the Internet a more intelligent place.

Do you use Favorites differently? Are the rules different for a business account? Leave a comment and share your thoughts below.

Ryan Barton is the author of the “Smart Marketing” eBook and he writes at The Smart Marketing Blog for Small Business Success; you can follow him on Twitter, where he shares entirely too much information. He wrote “Smart Marketing” with the intent that small businesses would glean insightful information and tangible marketing strategies so they too, could compete competitively with industry giants.

This guest post is by Matt Robison of Propdrop Web Development and Marketing.

In mid-April of 2010, I officially launched Pitbulls.org, a site for Pit Bull owners to connect with other owners and read accurate training and health information about their pets. At the same time it would help curb some of the myths out there about the breed, and promote rescue shelters in general. This was a cold launch with no prior promotion, and the blog started with only 20 articles.

By October 1st of 2010, after less than six months, the Pitbulls.org Facebook page had almost 40,000 Likes, and the site itself was ranking in the top three Google results for some of our main keywords.

I did no guest posting. I did close to zero link building. These more traditional, mainstay-type methods do work and they should always be part of your repertoire, but for this site I decided to go in a radical direction, ignoring the regular methods and seeing if it would pay off.

And it certainly paid off.

A steady stream of Facebook Likes

The initial key to everything rests in a Facebook ad that I ran sporadically from April to July. It was targeted at people in the US who had some mention of “pit bulls” in their Facebook profiles’ interest lists, and who had not already liked the page. Here is the ad:

Note that when I originally ran this ad, it had the old Facebook ad formatting, which had the image above the text instead of to the left of the text. Everything else is the same.

Three points to note about this ad, besides the targeting:

1. The image used is also the main image for my Facebook page, establishing clear continuity.
2. The ad asks a question, getting the user to say “yes” internally. Honestly, who would think that this dog is not cute?
3. The ad contains a clear call to action: Become a Fan (when Facebook still used Fans, not Likes).

Most importantly, this ad did not link to my website. When someone clicked on this ad, it did not send them to Pitbulls.org. Rather, it sent them to the Pitbulls.org Facebook page.

Now this seems crazy. I’m paying Facebook to send traffic to Facebook. Imagine paying the girl behind the counter at your local coffee shop for a cappuccino, and instead of giving the cup to you, she drinks it herself.

But it turns out that people are much more likely to convert if the action you want them to take is within Facebook. And the action, in this case, was to Like my page.

I set the daily budget to $40.00, and sat back to see what would happen.

Here are the stats for the first day the ad ran:

The Actions column shows how many Likes I got directly from the ad: 247. But that day the site actually got 498 Likes. So friends of people who Liked our page from the ad were also Liking our page, doubling our result. This is the other reason you want your call to action to be inside Facebook: instant viral potential. And due to the high click through rate (CTR) of my ad, the cost-per-click (CPC) was very low.

The results just kept getting better and better. Here are the final lifetime stats for the ad:

Yes: 18,575 clicks. And at that time, over 28,000 Likes on the page. That is only 3.5 cents per Like. And the momentum we gathered was priceless. The site continued to gather Likes organically, and three months after I stopped running the ad, it passed the 40,000 mark.

One question you may ask: why didn’t I just up the daily budget, and get a lot of Likes in just a few days? Why just $40?

The answer is in the previous paragraph: I wanted to let the momentum play out as much as possible and in turn maximize the ROI of the ad. We received 18,575 clicks, but over 28,000 likes. There are almost 10,000 people who would never click on the ad—costing me money—but who still Liked the page.

Engaging new fans immediately

The ultimate goal of all of this is not just a Facebook Like. I wanted these people to go to my site, become engaged, and start building the community.

Most people recommend that you have a clear, customized landing area on your Facebook page with a strong call to action—especially if you’re spending money advertising it. See the ProBlogger Welcome tab on this site’s Facebook page for a good example. You will hear that it would just be a waste of money to send users straight to your wall. And generally, this is true—especially if your blog is already established.

But if you have a clear call to action on your wall, and interesting content, I find this approach works just as well, and flows more coherently into the natural way a person uses Facebook. One the same day I launched the ad, I also launched our first photo contest:

This got people visiting the site, registering for an account, and sharing their entries. The contest announcement remained on top for a couple of days, before I started posting links to other articles on the site. People continued to Like the page, and continued to visit the site. All in all, our first contest garnered 205 entrie—not bad for a first run.

Photo contests also have another added bonus: you get to post about the winner. And usually the winning picture garners even more Likes and interaction than the contest itself.

Action items

Pitbulls.org now has almost 12,000 registered users, and 10% of those have opted into our mailing list. All of this is a direct result of the initial Facebook ad campaign. Our Facebook page currently sits at over 47,000 Likes and delivers consistent referral traffic.

The site now also ranks very well for its targeted keywords, even though I have yet to do an organized link campaign. Nearly every link the site has acquired has been acquired organically. Again, this is a direct result of the Facebook campaign. Without it, Pitbulls.org would be nowhere near as popular as it is today.

A campaign like the one I have described here would be even easier today, as Facebook has just implemented full News Feed displays for content that’s Liked by a user. Back when I implemented this plan, you had to get someone to actively share or comment on a story to get it to show up in their News Feed. Now just a regular Like will do.

Facebook continues to make itself more and more useful for people who are trying to market their websites. You can ignore it only if you want to deliberately sabotage your efforts.

I would encourage you to try out a Facebook ad campaign targeted directly at your demographic. You don’t have to spend a lot. $100 should give you a pretty good idea of the potential in your niche. Just ensure that the ad has a low barrier to the call to action, and gets targeted people to say “yes” to themselves even before they click on the ad. Here are some quick examples to help get you started:

• Photography niche: use a picture of the latest, greatest camera, then begin your text with something like “Do you drool at the thought of owning this camera?”
• Food niche: Use a picture of a fantastic looking meal, then begin “Wish you could cook meals like this?” or “Does this food look tasty?”
• Political niche: Picture of Obama or George W. Bush, depending on who you want to target, then begin with “Does looking at this face make you physically ill?” Best for US audiences, of course.

Have you found Facebook to be a good source of traffic for your blog? I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments.

Matt Robison is a web architect and entrepreneur who offers services and blogs way too sporadically at Propdrop Web Development and Marketing. In addition to Pitbulls.org, he also owns and operates a site publishing in-depth LCD TV reviews and several other online properties.