Preneur Marketing - The Blog of Entrepreneur Pete Williams

This is the first in a short series of posts on Facebooks new advertising programs - Social Ads, Facbook Pages and Facebook Beacon. .

So you may have heard about all the hype around Facebooks answer to Googles’ Adwords, I know Ed Dale, Dan Raine and the boys over at the Immediate Edge have been talking it up alot.

Well I am here to tell you - The Hype Is Justified, and my predication on November 9 was right on the money, even if I do say so myself

For niche marketers this is the biggest thing to happen on the internet since Googles’ Adwords program launched - it really is going to change the way you drive targeted traffic to your niche sites.

Now before I get into Facebooks Social Ads, I want to touch on why Googles PPC program is so effective…

With traditional advertising, online or offline, it was all about eyeballs - In most circumstances your only option was to pay for the ‘privilege’ to show your advert to prospects, be it via a magazine advert, a radio commercial or a TV slot. And, you’d be charged whether your you received a response or not.

This was all revolutionised when Google launched their Pay-Per-Click program - Adwords.

Adwords gave power back to the advertisers, by allowing them to only pay when their advertisements illicit a response - in the form of a click through to a particular website.

It was truly the best of times, because website owners were able to select the keywords and phrases most aligned with their content and only show their adverts to the target group of prospects who are pro-actively searching for those topics.

It was not only the most target advertising available but it only cost (mere cents) when it worked…. It was a marketers wet dream… until now.

Welcome in the New Era - Facebooks Ads.

By now you would be well aware of the phenomenon that is Facebook - and if you are one of the 25+ million people who use it twice a day add me as a friend. Yes, I said 25+ million people using it TWICE a day.

To be honest, when Microsoft paid $240 million for 1.6% of Facebook, I just couldn’t do the math - it just didn’t add up to me - but that’s just changed when Social Ads was launched on Nov 6.

During the launch, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg hit the nail on the head when he said “Facebook Ads represent a completely new way of advertising online… For the last hundred years media has been pushed out to people, but now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation. And they’re going to do this by using the social graph in the same way our users do.”

Social Ads appear either within a user’s News Feed as sponsored content or in the ad space along the left side of the site. Instead of random messages from advertisers, Facebook launched to provide advertisements alongside related actions your friends have taken on the site.

These actions may be things like “Fleur is now a fan of Louis Vuitton”, “Justin wrote a review for Barnes ‘n’ Noble” or even “Rob just joined the Renegade Publicist newsletter” - (more on Facebook Pages & Facebook Beacon in future posts)

Wait For It… Drum Roll Please… Facebook PPC Social Ads

Yep, along with everything else, Facebook also launched a PPC program. Facebook Social Ads allow your business to become part of people’s daily conversations. Your ads can be displayed in the left hand Ad Space — visible to users as they browse Facebook to connect with their friends — as well as in the context of News Feed — attached to relevant social stories.

Instead of creating an advertisement and hoping that it reaches the right customers, you can create a Facebook Social Ad and target it precisely to the audience you choose - based on demographics.

See, Google PPC is great in that it allows you to target your ads based on keywords… but where Facebook takes it to a new level is the fact that it allows you to target based on keywords in a persons profile and demographics such as age, sex or martial status.

So as you can see above, you can get very specific and targeted with your adverts on Facebook… Now, imagine having an info-marketing business that sells products to say a ‘wedding market’, a ‘retired golfers’ or ‘male college students’ - you now have the ability to get really targeted and qualified with your advertisements online.

Which is what the boys inside The Immediate Edge are doing with one of the projects they are working on. If you are an internet marketer and not a member of The Edge, I really encourage you to consider joining because, word around the campfire is that Dan and Ed are in the process of creating a ‘course’ on Facebook Advertising and will be releasing most of the content to Edge members for FREE before they launch the actual product. - You can join here, and send gifts later.

Oh yeah, did I mention the clicks only cost around 5 cents again ?

P.S. Make sure you subscrbe to the RSS Feed, to keep on top of the next few posts covering Facebook Pages and Facebook Beacon… If you thought Social Ads were great, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

If you want to know more, here are some links: Ed Dale’s Facebook Podcast: http://tubbynerd.com/2007/11/22/the-podcast-is-back-and-what-a-return/ Facebook Social Ads: http://www.facebook.com/business/?socialads Facebook Advertising Guidelines: http://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php Facebook Advertising Terms & Conditions: http://www.facebook.com/terms_ads.php How To Use Facebook Ads [You Tube Video]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aj8VRwxtlg How Facebook Social Ads Work: http://infotech.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/msid-2528347.cms Facebook’s Social Ad Network: What We (Think We) Know So Far: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/30/facebooks-social-ad-network-what-we-think-we-know-so-far/

Technorati Tags: facebook, social, ads, beacon, pages, ppc, pay-per-click, Google, Adwords, ed, dale, dan, raine, online, internet, marketing, immediate, edge, pete, williams, preneur

My mum has always been a huge chess fan, there was a stage when I was younger where we played together often… That period didn’t last very long though, because she was the one who often got to signify victory with the almighty cry of “Checkmate”, not me - and I hated that with a passion as I am not a good loser.

In business however, checkmate occurs when a customer says YES, opens their wallet and decides to take you, the salesperson, up on an offer.

Traditionally this ‘checkmate position’ would be known as ‘the almighty close’.

However, since any “checkmate decision” actually takes place in the brain of the customer, that buying decision is really outside the salespersons control - and thus makes closing the sale an impossibility…

This is the theory of Newsell (where the customer, not the salesperson, closes the sale) put forth by Michael Hewitt-Gleeson, one of the greatest thinkers ever and the man whoco-founded the School of Thinking, with Edward de Bono, in New York in 1979.

Michael defines “checkmate” as occuring when a customer says I’ll buy it and offers her credit card, or when a buyer accepts the deal and signs the purchase order… or in show business, it’s when the director says, “You’re in!” and you get the part you auditioned for.

The main strategic feature of the checkmate situation is: the salesperson (you) CANNOT control checkmate.

In this “newsell” approach all the saleman can control is the check position…

And, the check position signifies any type of customer contact:
– check is a unit of measurement for ‘customer contact’
– check = CUSTOMER CONTACT = check
– check is when your meme enters the customers brain
– check is when one customer WOMs (word-of-mouth) another customer
– check is when it is possible for the customer to say NO or YES
– without check there can be no checkmate– check is the penultimate state, the set-up move for checkmate
– check is the position of the energy switch which makes it possible for checkmate to happen.

Whether you are making offers directly in person, via direct mail, an email auto-responder or even leaving messages on customers voicemail, in business, check is the moment of ANY customer contact.

Check occurs when you have put the prospect in a position that allows them to say YES or NO as a result of an offer made by you. In other words, the customer’s brain has been stimulated by some form of communication (check), so that the customer can/will respond by deciding whether to act or not to act - YES or NO.

Check is when;
– …you ask the customer a buying question
– …you mail the proposal
– …you meet in a boardroom for a presentation
– …you offer a free taste-test in the supermarket
– …you send out a press release to the media
– …you make the follow up call, after an earlier ‘check move’
– …you give an elevator speech; or
– …a hooker asks if you need some company for the night

The fundamental rule of Check Move Theory is that you the salesperson, CAN and must control check… It’s not about trying to “close the sale” with some ‘used-car-salesmann-swindle’, it’s about making as many “check moves” as possible… The more check moves you make, the more opportunities prospects have of saying YES.

On his website, ‘New Sell Coaching’, Michael Hewitt-Gleeson offers a free e-mail course which go’s into much more detail on ‘check move theory’ and covers things like – The UnCheck Position – What An OldSell Check Is – How To Implement A Check X10 Sequence – The T.C.B. – Even More Types of CheckMoves Pardon the punn, but “Check Out” the ‘New Sell Coaching Course’ and sign-up today here.

P.S. The really ironic thing about Michael’s course, is that he doesn’t try and sell a single thing throughout the course… Yep, not even one check is offered during the whole email course.



Download The Audio Version Here (Right Click and download it)

Technorati Tags: new-sell, check-move-theory, check, move, Michael-Hewitt-Gleeson, closing, sales, selling, sale, techniques, pete, williams, preneur

To celebrate the release of Catasia Studio 5.0, the team at Techsmith are giving away Camtasia Stuido 3.0 for FREE.

I’ve been using version 4.0 for awhile and can’t speak highly enough of the software….

To download the free trial version of Camtasia Studio 3 simply click the link below:
http://download.techsmith.com/camtasiastudio/enu/312/camtasiaf.exe

Then go to this promotion page, complete your name, country and e-mail address and Techsmith will send you the software
key to unlock the program.
Here’s the link:
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/pcpls.asp

Technorati Tags: camstudio, camtasia, software, free, techsmith, scree, capture

For those of you who follow my Twitter Roll, you’d already know that I have myself one of them there cool new iphone thingys and have fallen head of heels in love with it…

Well, whilst working on the new theme for this blog [a few final tweaks still to be made] I stumbled across two really cool must have wordpress plugins that make the iphone that little bit cooler. Yes, the iPhone can get cooler!

1. iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme

This little baby automatically reformats your blog’s content for optimized viewing on iPhone. It detects the browser being used and displays the content with a “special” theme only to iPhone visitors, whilst keeping the traditional WordPress blog skin for web-browsers.

Anyone who has used an iPhone to browse the web knows, first hand, the amazing job it does displaying web pages the way they were designed to be seen - unlike alot of mobile browsers available.

But what the iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme does is display an optimized version of your blog’s content, formatted perfectly to fit the iPhone touch’s screen - so visitors don’t have to zoom in to read the content or download large files etc etc.

Some of the cool features the team at Content.Robot included when designing this plugin are:

• Automatic formatting of your blog theme/content for optimized viewing on the iPhone and iPod touch.
• Simple iPhone/iPod-like theme with common interface elements that compliments the iPhone/iPod touch’s internal applications.
• and my favourite… Images larger then 300 pixels wide are automatically scaled down to fit the iPhone/iPod touch optimized width.

2. iPhone / Mobile Wordpress Admin Plugin

Now, not as exciting as the iphone plugin above… this funky tool adapts the WordPress Admin Interface and makes its more friendly to mobile devices, specifically iphones.

All the most common WordPress admin features are supported, such as:

• Dashboard sections: Incoming Links, Comments, Posts, Blog Stats
• Writing and editing posts (including auto-save)
• Tagging support in 2.3
• Comment Moderation
• Manage Posts page
• Manage Profile page
• Ability to toggle back and forth to the normal admin view.
• Support for plugins that include fields on the post page
• Compatibility with existing library of admin plugins

So if you have an iphone, or the readers of your blog are the type of people who would own an iphone [read: everyone] I would strongly advise you to invest the 8mins and install these two wordpress plugins, because the more ways you make it easier for someone to interact with you (and your blog) the more loyal followers they will become…

If you install the iWPhone WordPress Theme Plugin, please leave a comment below as i’d love to check out your blog….

Technorati Tags: wordpress, plugin, iphone, iwphone, admin, mobile, plugins, pete, williams

Facebook has just launched there very own Pay Per Click (PPC) platform called Social Ads and this is, hands down, the biggest thing to happen to online marketing since Google’s Adwords launched in October 2000.

Take directly from Facbooks Social Ads page:

Instead of creating an advertisement and hoping that it reaches the right customers, you can create a Facebook Social Ad and target it precisely to the audience you choose. The ads can also be shown to users whose friends have recently engaged with your Facebook Page or engaged with your website through Facebook Beacon. Social Ads are more likely to influence users when they appear next to a story about a friend’s interaction with your business.

So why is it so important?

Googles Adwords worked becuase you (the advertiser) only paid when someone clicked on your advert, which in direct marketing terms is a response - unlike traditional madision avenue style branding campaigns or print adverts where you are paying per impression (# of readers seeing your advert)

Secondly (and more importantly), you advert only appeared to targeted people who were obviosuly interested in what you were offering - this is becuase your adverts only appeared when people searched on Google for your specific offerings.

With Facebook being the ultimate palce for people to hang out theses days ( I remember when it newsgroups on TMNT were all the rage) their new SocialAds program is the only WEB 2.0 platform that mixes the magical PPC advertisng model with a 2.0 platform…

Now I am going to be testing it for my most public info-niche - Renegade Publicist and then seeing if it can drive traffic for Infiniti shortly after…

Watch this space for updates….

If you can’t wait and want to know more check out http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=6910

p.s. The (completed) new blog skin will be live in about a week…. or so the designers are telling me

Technorati Tags: facebook, ads, social ads, advertising, ppc

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