
If you use any social media right now, you’re probably used to seeing ads all over it, usually targeted somewhat at you. A lot of people get anxious about knowing how to use social media “properly” to promote their business. The truth of the matter? Social media algorithms change, and the tricks you learn or figure out or pay for become less effective or obsolete over time. And even though you get instant feedback in terms of likes, comments, views and shares, none of that necessarily contributes to making an actual sale. What people see on social media is momentary, and then they’re on to the next thing. And if the formulas change, they might not even get to see your content. There is still absolutely nothing that compares to a really good email list. Whatever you do on social media, you want it all to point back towards your site, where people can engage more thoroughly with you and sign up for your freebie in exchange for their email. So take the anxiety out of social media marketing and try to remember the one rule that stands while the others change: just post engaging content that can link back to your site. That way, you can choose to use whichever platforms are most intuitive for you.
Facebook and Twitter are two of the most well-known social media platforms. You may already have a preference for one or the other, but let’s start with Facebook first.
Facebook is a great way for people just starting out to notify a whole bunch of people at once about their new business, or product, or service. Why? Because everyone has friends and family! And even if you don’t have that many friends, you likely have a lot of people you went to school with over the years, or worked with, or belonged to groups, or churches with.
Facebook is a very fast and easy way to access all of these friends, acquaintances and colleagues in one swoop. And because everyone likes to show that they have lots of “friends” on Facebook, everyone is likely to accept your “friend request”.
You can create a free account (personal profile) on Facebook and invite all your friends to become “friends” with you. You can also search for the school or college you attended and invite your classmates to be friends. Make sure you select your school info and hometown locale when you sign up as this alone can bring a flood of “friend requests” from others. Here’s what my Facebook personal profile page looks like:

You can see from the top right side post from Gigi Chan, that even though this is my personal page, people are still asking me business questions here and they feel like they can easily connect directly to me.
On your personal profile page you can either just post a little excerpt from your blog post, along with the link to your post, or you can post photos (with a blog link), or information (that links to your site) directly on your personal timeline (used to be called your Wall), OR you can also create a free Facebook PAGE or Fan Page.
A Facebook Page (Fan Page) is also free, but can be focused entirely on your business and you can promote freely on it without alienating any of your real friends!
You can also buy ads (very reasonably priced) from Facebook that send people to your Facebook Page for more info. Once on your Facebook Page, you then send them to your site. Facebook has all the instructions for setting up Pages and it is very easy. Just make sure you link to your website right in the header of your Page, so people can click to your site easily. Here’s what my Facebook Page (called Listen To Your Gut) looks like:

See how I have linked directly to my Shoppe and my Videos and other social media right at the top of the page? And my site URL is at the top left hand side.
The other advantage to having a Facebook Page, is that it’s fairly common for other people to ‘stumble’ across your page from:
- Having seen it on a friend’s Like section
- Having seen a post or photo you posted that got shared around
- Having one of their friend’s post that they love you or your work
If you have a great photo or logo associated with your page, that will often intrigue people enough to click through and check you out.
Remember that your Facebook page never takes the place of your site, and it’s primary purpose is to drive people to your site. But it is definitely useful as a place to get you added or unexpected exposure.

Free Marketing!
I strongly recommend you set up at least a Facebook personal profile. When you’re just starting out, your family and friends are the largest network you have – and with Facebook, whatever you share with them can also be ‘shared’ with all their family and friends, if they like your post – kind of like pyramid marketing.
So yes, you definitely want to share your new business and new website with all your family and friends on Facebook – do a search for your schoolmates going back to your elementary school days and that will automatically garner you a few hundred ‘friends’. Could marketing (sharing yourself and your ideas) be any easier?
Also, if you have kids in school, you can ‘friend’ all of the other parents you chat with in the schoolyard. Or people like your massage therapist, hairdresser, chiropractor, etc.
The other benefit of Facebook is it makes people feel you are more accessible and more likely to answer them personally. When you’re first starting a business this is gold as it gets you lots of interaction, questions and feedback from your audience. After your business has grown bigger, you can always get your personal assistant to answer all your Facebook queries.
The other type of page people like to use on Facebook is a GROUP. People can become members of your group and then they can post questions to you, you can announce events, or post content, etc.
However, a PAGE allows you to do more things than a Group, so for that reason, I closed my group down and am getting everyone there to transfer over to my Page (by “Liking” it). Here’s what my Group looks like and you can see just from this screenshot that both the Page and the Personal Profile offer more options to promote your business:

Personally, I feel the main use for Group would be if you want to run a support group, or a private (secret) group for members of a program. But as I said, in the beginning, you only need a Personal Profile. And if you can add a Page, then great!
In the meantime, Jo Barnes has provided us with a free eBook to get you started on the nuts and bolts of how to use Facebook to promote your site and your stuff. She outlines all the details for you on how to set up and get going. Click here to get the download link for this free guide (Jo’s gift to you!). Here’s a snapshot of what she’s going to teach you, that gives you a nice visual of what I’ve already explained:

If you really like Facebook and want to work it, there are two great tools I can personally recommend. The first is a course offered by Jo Barnes – a totally down-to-earth, funny Brit who knows Facebook like the back of her hand. The second is GroSocial, which would be most useful if you have already been using Facebook for a while (it’s more advanced) and want to run really targeted contests and promotions.
Remember, I don’t recommend anything that I haven’t tried myself, and use for my own business. That doesn’t mean that another program is not just as good, or perhaps better – by all means go ahead and do your own research. It just means that you can have the confidence that I walk my talk; whatever I refer you to is something I have used or am using myself.
Facebook Ads
If you’ve been on Facebook, then you have already seen the advertising options available – the ads are in the sidebar and in “sponsored posts” that appear right on your timeline.
Facebook ads are effective not only in terms of generating “Likes” but, even more importantly, generating the “likes” that you want – from your target audience, no matter how narrow and specific it is.
Facebook allows you to target your ads to your audience in three ways:
- According to demographics (location, age, sex)
- By very specific interests (health, natural remedies, healthy food, recipes, for example)
- By Likes – for example you can target your ads at Facebook users that “like” your competition’s fan pages by typing in their fan pages’ names.
What’s great about Facebook ads is that you can switch off your ads whenever you want to (if, for example, they are not effective at all) or you can change the copy and images within the currently displayed campaign, with no additional costs.
Advertising on Facebook is also really affordable! $30 – $50 is a reasonable budget to test an ad campaign on Facebook – that is enough money invested to tell you if your ads are working and whether you should continue, or hire someone to help you with it, or if it’s a good venue to advertise your business.
When we tried Facebook ads for our health business, we discovered they were a good way to increase page ‘Likes’ but not a good way to drive sales. We got much better results for our health stuff from using Google AdWords.
Automate Other Social Media to Post to Facebook
The great thing is that once you have your Facebook component set up, you can automate all your blog posts to appear as soon as you publish them. Simply install a free plugin on your blog, like NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster. And you can have this plugin automatically post to Facebook and other social media as soon as you publish each new post.
You can also link your YouTube account so your videos are posted automatically to Facebook. And you can “like” or “share” anything on the web that relates to or helps promote your business.
For example, let’s say you “share” a great photo with an inspirational quote on your Facebook page and wall, and a bunch of your friends think it’s great, so they all share it, and so on, until it goes viral. That photo could end up being seen by 2 million people and some of those people are bound to be curious about who posted that photo and they will see your website URL (address) on the photo, or click on your name and voila! – new traffic to your brand or your site.
Another trick: If you had the time, instead of just ‘sharing’ someone else’s photo, you could download that photo, or take a screenshot of it. Then do a blog post about the photo and inspirational quote (remember, a few lines is sufficient) along with the photo credit (copyright) and a link to the original photo – to cover yourself legally. Then re-post the photo with your blog link on Facebook. That way, if it goes viral, people will have a direct link to your blog and you will likely add many names to your email list via your site opt-in. Exciting stuff!
Like Facebook, Twitter is free and you can easily “share” your blog posts and videos with Twitter, so they are automatically tweeted out to all your followers. Personally, I don’t feel it’s a great tool for promotion, because I’ve found it doesn’t drive much traffic compared to other methods, but it’s so easy, you might as well add it to your repertoire. It’s also super easy to have your blog post directly to Twitter automatically for you.
Tim Grahl from Out:think echoes my experience in a story about his client, NY Times Bestselling author Dan Pink. Dan has almost 200,000 Twitter followers, however, when he Tweets something only 650 click on the link. So whilst the 200K number looks very high, the actual effect, or engagement is very low (less than 1 percent).
My experience with Twitter confirms this, which is why I don’t recommend you spend too much time with Twitter. But if it’s easy and you enjoy Tweeting, then why not?
Write down now whether you want to use Facebook or Twitter. And do you want to have just a personal profile, a business page, or a group?
Do you have the budget yet to hire someone to post to Facebook of Twitter for you, or do you need to start by doing it yourself? Or do you want to install a plugin on your blog that will automatically post your blog content to Facebook, Twitter, etc)?
Photo-Sharing Sites – Pinterest & Instagram
Photo-sharing services allow you to pin, or post photos that (as in the Facebook example I gave above) can easily go viral. The key to this method of social marketing is to make sure you add text to your photos that shares something about yourself or your topic that speaks to viewers. Remember, you don’t just want people to look at a great photo, you want them to click back to you and check out your site. So be creative. As our lovely Jo Barnes says:
“Put simply, Pinterest is a ruddy great online collaborative photo album where each user can share interesting images about a wide variety of topics with other users. Its power is in the fact that firstly – everyone loves to share photos right? Remember hours of pouring over old photo albums with your folks & friends. We LOVE it. Hence why photo sharing has become the No 1 activity online and why Pinterest has grown so rapidly!
But it doesn’t end there. Add to that, utilizing the right keywords in pin descriptions, linking to fantastic, high converting landing pages, sales pages or amazing content, your pins and boards can not only have a HUGE affect on your referral traffic, but they could even make it to the top of search results on Google or Bing.”
For example, you could create a photo (Pinterest calls these “Pins”) that has a Top 5 list. So let’s say your business (website) is about Natural Horsemanship. You get a photo of a gorgeous horse and superimposed over the picture you put the text: “The 5 Best Ways To Connect With Your Horse”. You then “pin” this photo to your Pinterest account. When someone clicks on the photo, it takes them to your blog post about that topic.
Note: You can use this exact same process to post the same photo to your Facebook page. And you can also post it as a blog post – either as is, or with a paragraph or two of text. Always multi-purpose your content whenever you can as this increases your marketing reach (tells more people about you) with zero extra work!
Here’s an example of what a Pinterest ‘pin’ looks like:

Note how she has made sure to include her website URL for when this image gets shared, posted and blogged around? This image then also becomes her photo at the top of her blog post about this topic.
Optional for the Tech-Lovers: If you can, add a “Pin It” button beneath the photo and write a smart, searchable tag for the caption. You may think you don’t need to add a “Pin It” button to your blog posts — that people who use Pinterest will naturally just pin the posts they like. But this is not true. People aren’t always thinking about Pinterest and so you need to tell them to pin the post. The pin button is an easy way to say, “Hey, go ahead and pin this.” It also shows that you are giving the person permission to pin the content. Remember, when you put the “Pin It” button on your post, you can customize the copy. Take advantage of that and be sure to include key words and hash tags to make your content searchable.
If this sounds too complicated, then never mind, when we had your blog installed, you had SHARE buttons added and these include a Pinterest Pin button – so people who are looking for great photos to pin can still grab yours.
Tip: You can easily add text to any photo by using free tools like Preview on iMac, or Gimp on PC. Or, you can use a free online tool to add text to your photos like AddText.com
Here’s a video where I show you step-by-step how to add words to your photo on Mac:
Using Preview with Mac
And Here’s a video showing you how to add words to your artwork or photo on a PC:
Here’s another example of text added to a photo (see how she’s included her website for when it gets emailed or passed around places other than Pinterest):

Here’s another great photo/quote that started out on Pinterest and then got passed around Facebook – it has now been “Liked” 2,700 times and shared 1,442 times – note how the creator made their website clearly visible, so they can benefit from all this free promotion:

If you find you really love Pinterest and want to make it a major part of your marketing efforts, Jo Barnes has an excellent course on Pinterest that is very reasonably priced. Jo is a fantastic, no-nonsense instructor who practices everything she teaches and is fun to learn from. She has also provided us with some excellent Pinterest training in a free eBook – click for the download link!
Or, you can hire someone on Elance to run your Pinterest account (and/or Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.) for as cheap as $5/hour. Just be sure to go look at the examples applicants give to make sure their English is good enough for you.
This is how I run my Pinterest account. I found Bbrave Marketing through Elance.com and they handle not just my Pinterest and Instagram, but my entire social media portfolio (Facebook, Twitter, Google+) as well – for only $50/week. They are fantastic and we’ve seen a noticeable increase in new site traffic since they took over.
But again, before you pay for anything, Jo Barnes has given us a really great eBook on getting started with Pinterest, for free! Jo will walk you step-by-step through setting up your account to maximize your efforts (i.e. least effort for most result!) and the best way to use Pinterest to tell people about your stuff and drive them to your site.
*Add instagram updated info?*
Instagram is also a rapidly-growing photo sharing app that started out just being used by cell phones, but they are now developing their website too. Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion at the end of 2010, so I’m sure we’ll be seeing many new and interesting ways to use Instagram and also integrate it with Facebook in the years to come.
Instagram is a more personal posting platform than Pinterest. It is more about posting spontaneous pictures of yourself and your interests. For example, preparing a new recipe, in your office working on a new blog post, pictures of you attending workshops and seminars, interviewing people, etc.
And like all social media, these photos link back to your site. You can also optimize them for search engines by adding hashtags (#) with the keyword when you post the photo on instagram. E.g.: #homecooking, #pioneer, #slowfood. More about exactly how and when to use hashtags over here.

Lastly, in the Keywords field, here’s where you choose a maximum of five keywords or keyword phrases and separate each word or phrase with a comma. So if you have a keyword phrase do not insert the comma until the end of the phrase. Do not use more than 5 keywords or it looks spammy and will decrease your ranking.









The main reason you want to promote your site is not just to market yourself and your stuff to potential customers, but to get people to opt-in (sign-up) to your email list.


Offer free seminars on specific topics – this will be particular to your niche. For example, if your business is health-related, then many health stores have monthly or weekly seminars you can sign up to present at. Check with local business groups if you have a biz-related service or product, etc. Check with hardware stores if you have DIY or special carpentry expertise, and so on. Of course, be sure to bring your cards along!
It’s important to keep in mind that your customer’s experience of you and the positioning of your product is not complete when they’ve purchased your product.
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