SEO Werkt!

Apple on Friday evening began providing its developers with the first maintenance update to its Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion operating system released just weeks ago.

This guest post is by Amy Harrison of Harrisonamy.com.

This article is the final part of a three-part series on how your blog can feed different types of business models. In the previous two articles we looked at how blogging can attract customers who want to hire you to do your thing, or to be coached by you so they can do theirs.

The final piece of the puzzle is looking at one way a blog can be used to sell products to customers. These might be physical products, digital products such as ebooks, or events and training courses.

Writing my blog put my directly in touch with an audience of people who were interested in a subject that I could help them with: copywriting.

As I built readers I became more familiar with the struggles they had, and where they needed help. Their challenges influenced the creation of my first two products, which still sell today even thought I launched them almost 18 months ago.

There’s no way I would have been able to create products that responded well without having a blog to see which posts were popular, which ones received comments, which ones people shared, and which ones got the most traffic. Best of all, I didn’t have to wait till launch day to see if my product was something people wanted.

The blog didn’t just help me get a feel for what products to create; it helped sell the products without being pushy. Here’s how.

Using the blog to set the scene—preparing for a launch

Whenever I’ve launched or promoted a product, the blog has been an invaluable tool in the process.

Even though your products are geared up to help your audience, sometimes you need to raise awareness of the problems they solve, and your blog is a great platform to do this.

Planning your content back from the launch date, you can start brainstorming topics to attract the attention of your ideal customer. When I’m planning a product launch, I’m looking at the key issues and challenges that the product solves and then turning them into discussion topics for the blog. I might also release a couple of cheat sheets and two- or three-page templates or reports that will give my readers a sample of what the full product is like.

This does a couple of things. It raises awareness about the problems, but also the awareness of the “need” to fix those problems along with discussions as to why the problems haven’t been fixed before. That then allows you to introduce the benefits of a product that answers those challenges, questions and hesitations.

It’s like a long sales letter in pieces, except that you’re not pushing hard, you’re simply trying to attract the ideal customer for your particular product.

So, for example, if you were about to release an ebook or course on DIY car maintenance, what would be some of the key issues?

Perhaps the importance of having a properly maintained car, the safety aspects, or how much money you can save by a few home tweaks rather than having to rely on the garage all the time.

Then you could release a couple of checklists about the most important parts to keep maintained on a car.

You could also think about running a number of posts about why people don’t maintain cars properly: breaking myths like “car maintenance is complicated,” or “I’ll void my warranty if I start tinkering under the hood.”

While this is going on, you’re able to start attracting attention from people who are going to be your target market for this kind of product—simply by publishing strategic content on your blog.

Staying flexible

The beauty of your blog is it’s flexible, and you don’t need to decide from day one what your business model is going to be. If you’re still in work and want to launch your blog on the side, you can experiment, find your voice, and find your niche.

And once you do follow one path with your blog, you’re not committed—there’s nothing that can’t be changed. I use a combination of all three blogging models to generate income for my business, and I’m still tweaking and checking in with myself to assess where to place my focus. It’s not a “set and forget” process, but a constant state of evolution.

What I’ve learned the most in three years is that you can plan too much and have ideas about how you’re going to do something, but you learn so much more by just doing. So try things out, get going, and see where the blogging ride takes you in your business.

What about you? How do you promote your products through your blog? Do you use your blog to have seasonal launches or are your products evergreen? Let us know in the comments!

Amy Harrison is a copywriter and content marketer for Personality Entrepreneurs wanting to connect and sell authentically to their audience. You can now download her free report on how to write sales copy when personality is part of your business at Harrisonamy.com.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How to Blog to Build Your Product Sales Business

I often say that in order to be a successful blogger you must treat your blog as a business. However, I also like to think of my blogs as online property assets and you should too.

Most people would agree that real estate is one of the most solid assets in the world. Real property is a tangible asset that has the ability to make cash flow and increase in value. Your blog is also real property with the same attributes.

In fact, there are a handful of entrepreneurs who successfully make money by buying and flipping online properties like blogs and domain names.

Property investors usually fall into three categories; developers, renovators, or landlords. Bloggers can fall into similar categories, as some build websites from scratch and others buy seasoned domains or old blogs to renovate them. And some maintain blogs for their cash flow, like landlords.

The typical exit strategy for developers and renovators is to flip (sell) the finished product for profit. Landlords handle the maintenance of their property and are rewarded with cash flow and appreciation.

I’m a landlord who rents space on my blogs to direct advertisers and other forms of rent payers. Sometimes I must evict an ad because it isn’t paying and solicit new tenants. And I’m always in charge of maintenance because I know that all my improvements just add to the value of the asset.

What gives your blog value?

There are many technical factors that contribute to the value of a blog. The strength of the domain name, its age and Google PageRank, number of social media followers, overall traffic, the Site Authority score which is heavily based on backlinks, and appearance (curb appeal) are just some of the metrics used to determine what your blog is worth.

Other factors may include how competitive or targeted your blog subjects are, how much quality content is on the blog, how dependent the blog is on your personality, and how much content development is needed to maintain and grow the site.

But cash flow is by far the most important metric to determine the value of a blog. In a sense, cash flow is a reflection of all of those other factors. If your blog makes solid consistent cash flow, then there’s a good chance your technical stats are impressive.

What are blogs worth?

There are some online calculators that use different algorithms to determine the value of websites. They’re fun to play with but none of them are good enough to be called the industry standard. There are simply too many variables involved to reach an accurate value, but especially because there is no way for them to know correct earnings figures.

When a landlord decides to sell his property, the standard price of the asset is usually 10X annual earnings. In other words, if the property makes $50,000 a year, then a fair market value for the investment property is $500,000 give or take depending on other variables.

Websites and blogs aren’t usually worth that much because they’re a virtual asset as opposed to a tangible asset. However, a website that performs an important function or provides a virtual service of some kind to users may sell for many times more than earnings because of its potential. Blogs are a bit easier to figure out the value because they are mostly based on technical metrics.

When the immensely popular blog, The Huffington Post, was sold for $315 million to AOL, it was almost exactly 10X the $30 million in revenue Huff Post made in the previous year. Incidentally, their history and brand recognition is stellar and their stats are off the charts. So, it’s safe to say the high target for a blog’s worth is about 10X annual earnings.

Younger blogs will generally be worth less than seasoned blogs with good domain recognition. Yet, if the niche is clearly trending upward (think natural health), it may give newer blogs an additional edge in value. In general, however, the age of the blog will have a lot to do with its popularity and technical strength and, thus, its value.

Ultimately, though, your blog’s value is determined by what a buyer will pay for it and what you’re willing to sell it for.

How do you improve the value of your blog?

Isn’t it obvious? You need to make more money!
Since cash flow is basically a reflection of your technical statistics, you should work on building more traffic, more followers, and more backlinks. Start with a good blog strategy, or blueprint. Then create as much awesome content as possible and share it far and wide.

Set aside time each day to engage in your social media networks to help grow your loyal followers. Along the way, learn the finer details of monetization and SEO for blogs. Test different ads to see which ones are performing the best with your readers, and adjust your blog to be as SEO friendly as possible.

As a final tip, if your exit strategy is to sell your blog, do not make it too personal. A potential buyer may be turned off that the value rests more in your personality than the metrics. Whereas if your plan is to keep the blog forever, letting your audience get to know you will likely speed up the growth of your follower base.

What to sell your blog for?

As mentioned before, some people are flippers. They buy or build blogs for the purpose of reselling them. Typically, they’ll find a blog with a good Google PR and decent domain name that is undervalued, add some value to it, and then flip it for profit.

A blog flipper may only be seeking to double or triple his investment in the short term which may or may not coincide with site earnings figures. Flippers tend to view a blog as an investment and do not get attached to a website, where a blog founder may place emotional value on a website.

Personally, because I’m a landlord who covets cash flow, I would never sell a blog for less than 8X. Of course, I’m a developer who only blogs about my passions, so maybe I overvalue my creations.

But imagine you have a blog making $24,000/year ($2000/mth) with only a few hours of maintenance required per week. Even if you think you’ve maxed out the potential of the blog, what would be the point in selling that blog for $120,000 (5X annual earnings)?

You’re making 20% of that price every year from this blog. And with minimal effort (1-2 quality articles per week), that blog is likely to continue steadily growing. Purely speaking in terms of investment, it would nearly be impossible to invest the lump sum profits from the sale to make a 20% annual return.

A price of 8X earnings ($192K using the example above) drops the return to 12.5%, which is still a solid investment for a passive buyer and a price worth selling a cash flow asset, particularly if you have other online assets to tend to.

Certainly a blog flipper could use the proceeds from the sale to buy and flip many more websites and make a much higher return. So every single situation will be different and personal preferences will always carry some weight in the valuation process as well.

In conclusion, thinking of your blog as an asset allows you to envision a long-term plan for your blog. It will help you stay focused and motivated while doing the tedious tasks necessary for improving your blog. And know that each little improvement you make and each task that you do contributes to the overall value of your asset. And before you know it, you’ll have a nice property to rent out or sell.

J.P. Hicks is an info-activist and pro blogger, editor of BlogTips.com and author of The Bloggers Secret.

Do you have social media plan?

Are you looking for an easy to follow guide to formulate a plan for your business?

Keep reading for seven tips to help your business develop a social plan…

Why Businesses Fail With Social Media

Businesses often fail in their social media efforts for the same reason New Year’s resolutions fail: It’s a good idea, but there’s no structure or commitment.

Then, when there are no immediate results, or the goal ends up being more difficult to attain than previously thought, it goes by the wayside.

Has this happened to your business’s social media presence? You aren’t alone. Very few people can simply choose to be active in social media and stick with it.

For the rest of us, we need something to keep us honest. That’s why I advocate you create a social media plan—a checklist, if you will—complete with daily maintenance, recurring tasks and milestone projects.

These seven tips will help you design a social media plan that will keep you on track, active and moving forward.

#1: Make a Commitment

Before you even start creating your plan, you have to make a promise. Establishing a healthy social media presence can be a very slow process. You can’t expect your list of fans, followers or subscribers to grow overnight.

You don’t want to start your business’s presence out by posting and updating consistently, only to get bored, lose interest and forget to log in when there’s no immediate gratification.

To prevent that kind of slide, make a commitment. Even if it’s just to yourself—even if you have to frame it and hang it above your computer.

No matter how silly an exercise it may seem, acknowledging and agreeing with yourself that building this presence could take upwards of a year (and then some), and then promising to invest time, energy and resources into it no matter what, will keep you committed and prepare you to be active and engaged even when you feel like your presence is stagnating.

#2: Find Your Best Fit

If you’re just getting your business’s social media efforts up and running, part of creating your plan revolves around seeing if you already have a fanbase out there.

Search for your business on sites like Yelp. Thank customers for their good reviews, and apologize to customers who gave bad reviews. You could turn that bad experience into a loyal customer and a better review.

So do some searching. Are there lots of people posting videos to YouTube of themselves using your product? Does your company have a bunch of mentions on Twitter? Do you have reviews on Yelp?

Although it’s important to establish a presence on a giant like Facebook, make sure you also set up shop where you’re already visible.

#3: Schedule Engagement

Now that you’ve identified the social media platforms you’re going to focus on, it’s time to turn your attention to the ways and frequency with which you’ll engage with your users.

Infrequent interaction is one of the main reasons businesses experience social media failure.

Those who are most successful in social media know that you have to engage steadily.

Funny, engaging and prolific, Taco Bell's Twitter feed provides fans with frequent news, entertainment and engagement—a model for other companies.

Think of creating and responding to comments, tweets, posts, etc., as simple daily maintenance. It must be done. You need to start the conversation with your users, and anytime they reach out to you, you need to be prepared to respond.

Remember that the timetable for creating and responding to content is platform-specific. Twitter moves so fast that tweets can become irrelevant within the hour, whereas Facebook status updates and posts have a few hours of staying power, and videos are great because of their longevity.

#4: Create Expert Content

Your fans and followers don’t want commercials, they want conversation. They don’t want to hear how great your company is, they already like or follow you. They don’t want sales numbers, they want industry news and thought leadership.

A good rule of thumb is to talk about your customers and your industry 80% to 90% of the time, and then discuss your own business. That means you need to start a blog, write white papers, explore trends, release case studies and create infographics.

Post frequently and do it consistently. Your ideal goal should be some kind of content every couple of days or so. Avoid going longer than a week without posting.

Thorough, in-depth articles and papers will position your business as an industry expert and thought leader, and keep your fans and followers (and even competitors) looking to you.

MailChimp's more than 30 Guides cover a range of topics—from email marketing best practices to papers on how to use MailChimp most effectively—positioning them as a leader in email marketing.

#5: Run Contests and Promotions

Contests and promotions keep fans and followers excited, interested and coming back. Most importantly, they’re a covert way to get your business or brand in front of more people. That doesn’t mean you need to run one all the time.

If you’ve always got some kind of giveaway going, they’ll soon become more social background noise. This is especially true if you’re giving away not-so-great prizes.

Run a contest or promotion every couple of months, and make sure the prize is something to get excited about.

Falken Tire's Porsche Giveaway is gated to fans only. And when the prize is as great as a Porsche, their fanbase is sure to be active and their fan count is sure to go up.

#6: Broaden Your Horizons

Every social media plan needs to start out the same way, with a commitment to the long haul and a focus on the basics like interaction and content. But once your presence is established and your users are engaged, you’re free to open things up to experimentation.

If you’ve built a solid fan following on Facebook, create and install some custom apps on your page, start posting videos on YouTube or interact more frequently by hopping on Twitter. Try things out for a few months, and then go back and see how they’ve performed for you.

Not every platform will be a fit, so if your business isn’t performing well on one for an extended period of time, don’t be afraid to pull the plug and explore different options.

Rosetta Stone's numerous custom apps help them better engage their fanbase of over 1.1 million.

#7: Delegate Tasks

If you’re at the point where you’re looking at expanding to new platforms, congratulations! You’ve likely got a healthy presence. But don’t let all of this growth overwhelm you. The larger you grow, the more in danger you are of failing to engage (point #3), because—let’s face it—social media is a lot of work.

So look into adding some more team members. Graphic artists for your infographics, writers for your blogs and white papers and even some interns to manage the day-to-day social media conversations and information-gathering. A talented team can give you a richer, more robust presence than you could ever achieve on your own.

More admins frees you up to expand your social media pursuits and makes day-to-day engagement easier to cover, especially for pages with large fan bases.

What do you think? What’s your business’s story? Do you already have a social media plan? How’s it working out? Or are you about to implement one? Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

Enterprise software titan Oracle has agreed to buy facilities management app maker Skire, the company announced Thursday.

Skire’s software helps manage the planning, construction, and maintenance of many kinds of buildings around the world. Oracle intends to combine Skire with its Privavera products, which are designed to help people and organizations manage large-scale projects better.

“The capital construction and facilities industry has for decades sought a tighter relationship and greater synchronization between owners and service providers, and the Oracle-Skire combination makes that vision a reality,” Skire CEO and founder Massy Mehdipour said in a statement. “This announcement is the result of years of tremendous dedication by our employees, and with the support of our customers we are thrilled to be joining Oracle to provide the choice of both cloud-based and on-premise governance spanning the entire lifecycle of EPPM.”

This will be Oracle’s fifth acquisition this year, and just last week Oracle agreed to buy Involver. The company also agreed to buy Taleo, Vitrue, and Collective Intellect.

Oracle said will acquire “substantially all” of Skire’s assets. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Larry Ellison photo: Oracle/Flickr

Filed under: deals, VentureBeat

Mark Zuckerberg giveth and he taketh away. Facebook users are reporting today that they no longer can see the real-time “Ticker” that describes the activities of friends on the right side of the Facebook home page.

TechCrunch reported that the disappearance of the ticker is widespread but it should return online soon. And you can see from the blank space at right, the ticker is gone from my Home Page as well. Sobs.

It isn’t clear why the ticker disappeared today but we’ve got a query into Facebook. Hopefully it’s something like maintenance or a bug fix. One user said a friend at Facebook told him that it would be back online soon.

The ticker is very important to Facebook’s developers because it shows what people are doing. That helps apps spread, since people are likely to click on a lot of the live links on the ticker because they see their friends doing something. As such, the ticker is prime real estate and it helps apps go viral.

If  it were gone, then the app makers would have to spend a lot more money advertising their apps in order to get people to notice them. TechCrunch said that reports started appearing on Twitter at about 9 pm on Saturday June 30 about the missing tickers.

Filed under: social

CPU fans have a certain steampunkian quality to them. They’re loud, annoying, and collect all sorts of debris as they run, whirring endlessly and eventually failing. This new heatsink – more like an impeller coupled with a brushless motor – is the latest in heatsink technology and promises quiet and efficient heatsinkery in the future.

Built by Sandia, this cooling system could cool CPUs or even lighting. Because it consists of only three pieces – the fins, the base, and a motor – the headsink could offer maintenance free cooling for years. It actually blows dust out of its own crevices as it spins and with the right calculations you could make this bigger or smaller for various implementations.

The model shown here is 30 times more efficient than current coolers and 10% smaller.

To see the heatsink in action, fast forward to about 2:30 and watch how this puppy whirrs. You can read more about the impeller at Sandia.gov.

via Extremetech

Windows: CCleaner, our favorite Windows maintenance tool, just updated to a new version with the added ability to clean up Windows’ cluttered right-click menu. More »

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Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. He is Managing Director of Formula Capital and has written ten books. His latest books are I Was Blind But Now I See and 40 Alternatives to College. You can follow him on Twitter @jaltucher.

I wanted to have 100,000 Facebook fans for my blog. I don’t have a product to sell. I’m not trying to get advertisers on my blog. I’m not even trying to get more speaking gigs because of my blog. But I believe in the message of my blog and I enjoy having an audience for it. So I wanted to expand that audience.

We have entered the “Choose Yourself” era. No longer do you have to wait for the big media companies to reach down from the heavens and bless you with a column, a book advance, a TV show, a job, a career, money, or even customers. In 2008 the tide came in, the financial system collapsed, and we saw that the myth of corporate safety was just another example of the brainwashing that we had undergone since we were kids.

[See also: "Self-publishing your own book is the new business card"]

Now, if you want to spread the truths of your brand, of your ideas, of your products, of your message, you have to create your own platform, you have to spread it across all media, and then you have to manage each medium differently. I can’t just link my blog posts on Facebook. Or tweet links to my posts on Twitter. Your message has to be spread across the entire digital landscape and treat each medium as it’s own channel, with your message, formatted, designed, and massaged to have the greatest impact in that particular channel.

For each medium, you have to ask: why this medium? For Facebook the answer is obvious but is so different from prior media that most people don’t think about it. In general, if you want a fan (or a customer) to “Like” you even if he has never heard of you, you are going to have to pay to reach him.

BUT, on Facebook, as opposed to any other medium (other  than twitter) you pay ONCE and then forever after you can market to that Fan for free. You can’t do that with TV, for instance. Budweiser has to reach the same fans each year with another $4mm commercial. But on Facebook, once they are a fan, then anything you post goes on their newsfeed for at least three hours. More on that in a second.

So here’s what I did. It was a three step process. Here’s my facebook fan growth in the month that I pursued this.

It basically took about 30 days to get 100,000 fans. Just to experiment, I then tried a slightly smaller approach on my wife’s very popular yoga blog and she went from 0 to 37,000 fans during those few weeks. While there will always be some churn in Fans, it is much smaller than you would think. Its relatively rare for people to Like and then un-Like.

1)      Many people around the world have no idea who I am (this is hard for me to accept but it’s reality). Even though I get a lot of readers to my blog, these were not the people I necessarily wanted to reach. I wanted to reach new people who didn’t know me.

So I used FanNewsCast.com to set up these tabs on my facebook fan page. (see below)

This made my fan page not only a source about my own blog (which most of the seven billion people on the planet could care less about) but a source for the top trending stories at any given moment for Innovation, Inspiration, Healthy Lifestyle, and Entrepreneurship. Then, even if someone was not interested in me, they could still Like my page and always know they can come back to see these top trending stories in their favorite topics for any moment in time. FanNewsCast could then make ads targeting people interested in these topics. So then I would know that there was a high likelihood these same people would also like posts coming from jamesaltucher.com.

Then, FanNewsCast came up with ads that targeted the friends of people who were already connected to my blog but specifically not the people connected to my blog. I made FanNewsCast an admin on my ads and they developed the ads. Essentially, it reached all the friends of friends of my blog, which means they targeted millions of people. The ads would point to the tab pages that included the top trending stories about inspiration, entrepreneurship, etc because they knew people would be interested in these stories.  They also worked with the agency I hired (see #3) to help them update my page three times a day with the best material I have.

Each of those friends of friends would see “XYZ Likes James Altucher’s Blog” in the ad, where XYZ was someone already connected to my blog. This is sort of like dating. If the woman’s friend already approves of you before you even meet the woman, you’ve already overcome a major hurdle. Exact same principle.  These ads were mostly CPC ads.

Using this approach got me to the first 50,000 Fans.   Overall, I ended up paying about 7 cents per click (because friends of friends of friends would start seeing their friends like my fan page and so they would then Like it so I was getting, in some cases, greater than 100% returns).

2)      I next used a company called Optim.al. They did several  things for me.

- They set up a mobile ad campaign which got me mobile users. The clickthru rates on ads were as high as 90% on some of their ads. It is much more effective to advertise to a mobile user. They also found demographic data differentiating the iphone users (who clicked through at a much higher rate) and the Android users and were then able to optimize the ads to target them more efficiently (“efficiently” means “cheaper and faster”).

- I wanted to bring down my cost per click even lower. And I was hungry for speed. Optim.al determines what words in an ad, in general, causes people to click and causes people to “Like”. So they started putting together ad campaigns that used those words. Then they would do a lot of testing: putting the words in the front of the ad, in the back of the ad, linking to specific posts on the page, linking to the whole page, experimenting with different pictures in the ad, etc.  They also changed my ads from CPC to CPM to bring cost down since they were specifically optimizing and targeting the type of people who would click on a CPM ad.

Each ad campaign probably had four or five separate factors they were testing  and they would start new campaigns each day. Within hours they would drop the ads with slower and more expensive click-thrus and up the budgets on the ads that were working. In the last few days before I hit 100,000 I was adding 10,000 fans per day probably at a cost of 3 or 4 cents per Like.

- Right now they are doing more geo-targeting so I pick up Fans from specific cities. Like New York City. They have optimized which approaches work best for each city. Targeting a specific city is more expensive but now with my first goal achieved I’m taking my time and experimenting more with what works.

I am fine, in general, with all English speakers. This is in part because I am not selling a product but I believe in my specific message and ideas and I like to get those ideas across to anyone who will listen. Altogether, I’ve probably had less than 1/10 of 1% unlike my page during this process (I wrote at first, “unlike me”. Freudian slip or perhaps too close an identification with my social media persona as opposed to who the real me is).

3)      All of this required a lot of maintenance. I like to focus mostly on writing my blog and I needed help with maintenance on several levels. So I hired TheSocialPag.es to do my daily maintenance and here is what they did:

- Managing the content of the page day to day. For this I need to have someone find the best quotes from all my blogs, put those quotes in an image, and put them out at the ideal times that both FanNewsCast and optim.al had concluded were the best times for my page to post to maximize on “Likes” for the image. For example: the below image on the right got a lot of PTAT (‘people talking about this” in facebook lingo):

[See also "How Kissing Ruined My Life", the post that image is from]

Why an image as opposed to a link to my blog? One reasons is I want the page itself to be its own channel for me and not just an extension of my blog. The other reasons was that I wanted to improve my “edgerank” score. Facebook tends to favor images, text, links in that order when deciding what to put on a user’s fan page. Links are last because they would prefer people not leave the site. So I wanted to be seen by as many fans as possible so more people would be “talking about” (commenting, liking, or sharing) my “story”. This, in turn, increases my edgerank further. It becomes a virtuous cycle.

A lot of theSocialPag.es work also involved A/B testing. Was it better to post an image or text? Was it better to have an image with text or a more artistic image? What time of day, etc. They worked closely with FanNewsCast and optim.al to figure all of this out. They also then set up an email subscription service for me using Mailchimp. Again, I’m trying to use the Fan page as it’s own channel but to also interlink with all of my other channels. The outcome of posting a signup image on my Facebook fan page for the email service was that I got a quick few thousand signups, mostly from the US. So regardless of where most of my “Fans” were coming from, it was quality users responding to an offer.

(the above image linked to this and proved very successful)

They then would pin all images to my Pinterest boards. They also took the results from my twtter Q&A posts and would update Quora questions with them. Again, they took every channel and updated it for me. I also use them for technical maintenance on the blog along with the guys from Stocktwits, who host my blog.

Everyone who is saying “Facebook will eventually die just like Myspace” simply doesn’t understand Facebook and how it has already gone so far beyond a tipping point there is no turning back. Facebook is a scrubbed-clean mini-Internet that will soak up large ad budgets that were intended for mainstream traditional media.

With one billion users and growing people say “the growth has matured. It will slow down now.”

(See also (the post from the left image above): “25 Ways to Make a Trillion Dollars“)

But examples like mine shows that it won’t.

-          Every company will do a strategy similar to the above to get Fans for their brand

-          Many bloggers will apply the strategies outlined above. Why not? You can do it at your own pace and at your own budget. In fact, if you want to be a part of this “Choose Yourself” era you will have to do it. Similar to the reasons why one should self-publish a book on Amazon, or participate on G+ and twitter and even China’s Weibo (where I have an intern helping me maintain my “presence” and engagement there). Nobody is going to choose you until YOU choose you.

-          Facebook continues to roll out new ways to advertise. Not only for mobile, which is fairly new but now I can promote more individual posts. When you post on your fan page it will hit, on average, 16% of your audience. This has always been the case. But now, with a small budget of $10-$50 you can make sure your post will hit up to 75% of your audience or even more. I had one post exposed to over a million people because of the Shares. Both of the posts in the above image, I separately promoted. This applies for any page with less than 100,000 Fans. Once you hit 100,000 fans there are other techniques but similar budgets.

And I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of what I could do with my page. I feel like it’s TV in 1955. The entire world is open to me. What other medium can I potentially target a potential 700 million people (as one of my ads targeted) in an ad with a budget as low as $200. Altogether, my entire ad budget over the last month was about $6000. Then maybe $2000 more for the maintenance and upkeep. The ad budget includes also promoting individual posts, which I didn’t need to do to get more fans but I used to get more engagement. I feel like I’m just now beginning to fly with this fan page.

And, of course, the final outcome: