The Real Facebook ‘Eldorado’

So far, we’ve looked in detail at most of the new advertising initiatives that Facebook has recently introduced such as Social Ads, Pages and Beacon, and concluded that, at least at this moment, there is probably not a great deal of money being made.

There is one aspect of Facebook, however, where there certainly is money being made, and quite large amounts of it too.

This is in the area of creating what are known as ‘applications’ for Facebook.

These are best described as additional third party software programs or modules that can be added to your Facebook profile or home pages to add functionality or simplify matters.

So, when we were looking at making your Online Store page as attractive as possible, it was suggested that you should add video and picture applications as one step towards doing so.

Applications for Facebook have been around for quite some time now, and with the recent creation of the F8 platform, application development has take another significant step forward.

Developers are now able to create applications that are readily and easily integrated into Facebook because they have been given access to the same source code that Facebook themselves use.

This clearly makes it far easier to build the applications that will then enable users to interact with their associates, friends and your business much more easily.

So, how does this allow the application creator to make money?

Take a look at this page of some of the most popular current applications that are available.

The first listed application here has been downloaded by over four and a half million users!

And every one of those users has been shown the application developers ‘Page’ at least one time! That is 4.5 million potential advert views driven by the creation of one simple little application!

So, how can that make money?

Here’s an example. Note that the third most popular application is called ’Causes’.

This is, as the name might suggest, an application that enables you to help your favorite charity or cause.

Causes are very ‘big’ on Facebook, which again fits well with the image of the average Facebook user that we have already built.

See, the big, big secret to Facebook advertising success is making sure that your advertising looks like anything but advertising. Do this well, and you can make money.

Here’s an example.

Find a cause that has universal appeal. For example, a charity supporting action against breast cancer would work.

Create an application, and on the Page that gets shown when it is added by a Facebook community member, add a toolbar for free download.

Monetize this toolbar with an attractive CPA offer that will pay you a $1 for every download of the toolbar that will then sit on the user’s desktop carrying that promoter’s advertising.

Pledge to give $150 to the breast cancer charity in question for every 1000 toolbars that are downloaded.

So, you make $1000 for every thousand toolbars downloaded and you pay $150 of that to the charity (cause) of your choice.

The net result is that the charity gets a nice little present for doing nothing and you get to pocket $850!

And, guess what?

This is no hypothetical scenario.

It actually happened a couple of years ago - and one and a half million toolbars were downloaded in the space of one week!

Does that seem like good money to you?

I would think that it probably does.

After all, $850,000 in one week for building one tiny application and a bit of creative thinking is not too bad, is it?

So, the key is thinking in what used to be called a lateral manner (i.e. sideways) and is nowadays called ‘out of the box’.

By now, I hope that this series of articles on Facebook has given you at least an inkling of the kind of users that you are dealing with at Facebook.

Generally (and, of course, this is an extremely broad generalisation) your average Facebook community member will be an educated person with a social conscience.

This is going to be someone that intrinsically wants to help others, who is at the same time extremely resistant to ‘ordinary’ advertising.

So, what can you do that will appeal to this individual?

Now, of course, the first step is to get your page in front of that community member so that they are in a position to take advantage of your offer.

What you need to come up with is an idea for a great application, but you do not have to come up with something that is totally original or world shattering.

Simply look at all of the applications that are already working, and see how you can improve them.

Remember that the Japanese built one of the world’s most successful car making industries based entirely on that theory, so it has been done before, and there is little doubt that it works.

Then, apply a lot more thought to what your killer ‘advertising, but not advertising’ offer should be.

What cause can you support, and how can you monetise your efforts?

Or, perhaps you might like to think of this as another money making idea.

A friend recently sold two applications for $19000 each.

He freely admits that if he had the patience to hang around then he could probably have got twice this amount, but he was happy enough with the quick sale of a couple of applications that took half a days work each to create, and were around a year old in both cases!

What he is sold here were not applications. They are nothing more than essentially worthless snippets of computer code.

What he sold was the fact that as a result of the popularity of these applications, thousands or millions of new visitors would be forced to view an advertising Page.

So, applications are a superbly effective way of making certain that your Page gets seen, hence the sales value that they have.

At this point in time, ‘applications’ is definitely the best and most effective way of making good money from Facebook.

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How do I get audio and video for my blog?

Just to set your mind at ease right away, you don’t have to shoot your own video or record your own audio.

You can do that, of course, if you want to and if you have the equipment and the know-how but you really don’t have to.

There are an abundance of sites on the internet that will happily (and freely) provide video and audio for you. All you have to do is download them, upload them to your site and tag them. That is pretty much it.

Google has videos that you can use. The link is right there on the Google search page. Recently Google purchased YouTube for a reported one point six billion dollars.

You can find free videos there on almost any topic that you can imagine and likely a few topics that you would hope to never imagine.

You can find videos on topics that are related to the topic of your website or your blog that will be of interest to your visitors and when visitors are watching videos they aren’t surfing away from your site.

How Do I Get Podcasts For My Blog?

Now, podcasts you do have to create yourself. The good news is that is a fairly simple process that can be done without a lot of technical knowledge or ability.

The term ‘podcast’ was actually coined by Ben Hammersley in the Guardian on February 2004. The word is a blend of the two words, ‘ipod’ and ‘broadcast’ but you don’t have to have an ipod to see a podcast or even to create a podcast.

Very simply; podcasting is a way to publish audio and video online which lets software automatically find and download new broadcasts over a period of time by using RSS feeds that contain a link to the multimedia broadcast file.

You can create and publish your own audio program or video program or audio/video program and feed them to your audience who can then listen to or view them when they have to time or are so inclined.

With nothing more than a personal computer, some software and a webcam if you are doing video, anybody can create a podcast and publish it. It isn’t rocket science.

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Social networking isn’t a new phenomenon. It wasn’t invented in the twenty-first century. Every Elks Lodge, Lions Club, Chamber of Commerce, Church, Sewing Circle, Book Club, etc. that ever existed afforded an opportunity for social networking. Some social networking groups are secretive.

They have passwords and secret signals that help one member identify another member. Others may be more open but they are aware of who is and who is not a member in good standing of the social networking group.

The members of any social networking group identify with and help other members of their group. They provide information to one another that is mutually beneficial.

They tell each other when something of interest or something of concern in happening that is interest to or a threat to their particular social network and the members collectively pursue the interest or ward off the threat.

These social networking groups can be either very close knit or very loosely organised or even have no apparent organisational structure at all. The organisation is of a great deal less importance to the members than the benefits that each gains from it.

Many times social networking groups are work related.

For example: you have very likely heard of the way that law enforcement personnel stick together and ‘watch each other’s backs’ so to speak.

This social networking group is often referred to as ‘the long blue line’.

Another work related social networking group is long distance truck drivers. By using their CB radios, they stay in contact with one another and warn each other of road hazards. If one of them has a problem, others go to his or her aid.

No, social networking was not invented in the twenty-first century and it didn’t come into being with the advent of the personal computer.

It has been around probably since the beginning of time in some form or another but the advent of the personal computer certainly put a new spin on social networking. Web 2.0 has really kicked social networking up several notiches.

No longer is social networking limited to people who work at the same jobs or who live in the same communities. Social networking is now world wide and easily accessible to everyone who has access to a computer and an internet connection.

It all started with the advent of instant messaging technology but it has grown far beyond that limited ability. With instant messaging it was necessary to let others see your email address and so you lost much of your anonymity.

In today’s Web 2.0 world, social networking and complete anonymity are both possible.

The online dating sites are a very good example of this compatibility. People can register and pay for memberships on online dating sites and conduct an entire relationship for many months without either party knowing the other party’s real name, ISP email address or the name of the city in which they live.

All communication is conducted on the online dating website itself thus affording both social networking and anonymity.

There are Web 2.0 websites that are dedicated to nothing BUT social networking. One of the better known ones among the younger age group is MySpace but there are at least a hundred different social networking sites on the internet and probably a lot more that that.

Web 2.0 social networking sites are divided in many different ways.

There are social networking sites that are dedicated to specific ethnicities; BlackPlanet.com is for African Americans, Babbello is for Australian teenagers, FaceBox is for European young adults, Gronco.net is for Poland, iWiW is for Hungary, Migente.com is for Latinos, Mixi is for Japan - just to name a few examples.

Social networking sites are also divided sometimes by interests. For example you can find such social networking sites as CarDomain for car enthusiasts, Flickr for photo sharing, Gaia for gamers, Gopets for virtual pets, Joga Bonita for football or soccer, or Last.fm for music.

These are only a very few examples. There are a great many more.

Most social networking sites, however, are not dedicated to a specific group. They are general membership sites and the members themselves divide themselves into appropriate groups according to interests and compatibility.

Almost all  social networking sites are free to join. There are just a few that have membership fees. The site owners make their money from advertisers rather than from users. A few sites are only open to those who have been invited to join by other members.

Most of these social networking sites provide you with your own blog when you join the site. You can make posts to your blog and you can invite others to post to your blog. The trick here is to also use the social bookmarking sites and upload links to your blog posts into them with the appropriate tags containing key words.

The blogs on social networking sites are in addition to and not a replacement for blogs on your own website if you are an internet marketer and the social bookmarking sites should be used to upload links to both blogs.

Social networking is easy and it is fun. It is a way that you can enhance your online business and have a lot of fun in the process. You can meet some of your very best potential customers on social networking sites. You can make friends and influence people as well.

It has long been a well established fact that more business is actually conducted in social settings than in offices.

More deals are made on golf courses than in board rooms in the real world and more sales are made through the use of social networking sites on the Internet than through all of the paid-for advertising methods combined.

People HATE commercials but they don’t mind hearing their friends recommend a product or service. Not only do they not mind, they even go to a lot of trouble to seek out such advice or information.

In addition to being a great way to advertise a business social networking sites are also a great research tool and one that should never be overlooked. Rather than having to conduct a lot of expensive and time-consuming surveys for example, you can simply look through a social networking site and find out exactly what people are thinking about.
You can find out what their problems are and what measures they are taking to solve those problems. You can find out what their interests are and how they go about pursuing those interests.

By using social networking sites as research tools, you can likely get more and better information in a single hour and for free than you could get by spending hours on sending out surveys and trying to decipher the results.

One very interesting social networking site is called 43 things. That is the name of the site. On this social networking site people list their goals and then other people with similar goals discuss how to best achieve those goals.

Some goals that have been listed are ‘learn a foreign language, be a good parent, improve my memory, get in shape, lose weight, be a better gardener and the list just goes on and on.

As a research tool it would be hard to beat 43 things to find out what people are interested in and concerned about.

Web 2.0 is great! It is driven by those who actually USE the internet and not by people who are sitting behind desks at large companies and who are out of touch with the real world.

Social networking is simply a group of like-minded people exchanging information that is of mutual interest. That is all it is and all it has ever been.

It is important that when you are using social networking sites that you remember this and conduct yourself accordingly.

If you join a site and start just posting blatant advertisements, you are not going to be doing social networking.

You are simply doing advertising - which people hate. If you establish yourself as part of a group, then you are social networking and you will find that those who are members of your online social circle are the best help you can find anywhere.

Social networking is valuable in and of itself but it can be made doubly valuable by using social networking in conjunction with social bookmarking.

Join a social networking website. Find a group of people who are interested in the topic of your website but don’t start out advertising that.

Make posts to your own blog on the social networking sites as well as to the blogs of others. Add those links to your social bookmarking account. Be certain that you use the appropriate key words in those tags otherwise they are worthless.

Altogether this is an excellent marketing strategy. It is a way to market your website and your products or services and have a lot of fun at the same time. You will meet people that you really do like and even admire and respect.

Friendships are not made for the purpose of profiting from them but they usually are profitable.

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