As an internet entrepreneur, you can use the marketing tools and advantages Facebook offers that will allow you to drive qualified traffic to your online business to generate leads and make sales. You can do this with both paid ads and free strategies that focus more on posting engaging content.

Why You Should Use Facebook Marketing

Using Facebook effectively could significantly add to your bottom line.And there are a few reasons for this.

First is reach. Facebook is huge, with 1.65 billion active users worldwide with 1.09 billion logging in daily. And a percentage of those users, a small percentage admittedly, is your perfect customer who is ready to sign up for your email list or buy your product. Of course, even 0.01% of 1.65 billion is still 1.65 million, which is a heck of a lot of people. No matter what your product or service, no matter what your market niche, no matter what language you and your prospect speak or where you come from…you can find them on Facebook.
And, by the way, don’t think it’s all young whippersnappers. While teens, twenty-somethings, and thirty-somethings are the largest user group on Facebook (87% of 18 - 29-year-olds use Facebook), those aged 55 and older are the fastest-growing group. And get this—56% of adults over 65 use Facebook.
Second is interaction. On social media sites like Facebook (or Instagram or Twitter), you can engage directly with your prospects and customers.

In fact, they expect that sort of back and forth and conversation from the biggest brands and companies in the world to the small mom-and-pop shops like yours.

You can tell them about new products being launched—whet their appetite with some teasing details. You could upload videos directly to Facebook or photos displaying the benefits of your product so they can see it in action.You could open it up to questions on your Facebook page.

For example, say you sell information products that show people how to get the most out of Disney World. You have a special report coming out about how to find the cheapest hotels closest to the parks. You could film yourself visiting one of these hotels, show off the pool, the quality of the room, and even show the ride to the front gates of Disney. Then you link to the special report on your website.
While you’re at it, on this Disney page you could also answer your fans’ questions about the parks or other aspects of traveling to and around this area that they post to your wall. For free, of course. This way you build a rapport with your audience. They get to know, like, and trust you as a valuable source of information. And that makes them much more likely to buy one of your paid products.
It’s the reality of marketing online these days. Social media is not only a viable marketing channel but a tremendously valuable one.
Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others are where your prospects and customers are spending a lot of their time - hours a day. And that means it’s time for you to do the same.

Taking Action With Facebook Marketing: Research and Set Up Phase

First order of business is to sign up for a Facebook account if you don’t have one already.Start off with a personal account. And play around. Post photos, write posts, connect with friends and family. Be active and get to the site and its capabilities.

If you already have a Facebook account start looking at your newsfeed from the perspective of an internet marketer. Look at the ads, both on the right side and within your feed itself. Go to pages for your favorite companies, brands, or products and follow them. Then scroll through. Pay attention to how they use Facebook to market. Do they have free offers or discounts? How do they interact with their customers?
Take a screenshot or cut and paste any posts that you think you might be able to model for your own Facebook marketing efforts. Build a swipe file, in other words.

Create a Business Page

It’s easy to set up a business page.
A few best practices: Include your logo, fill out the about page with your website URL and other contact information, include plenty of photos of products from the beginning, and before you let the world know about it, fill it up with some content so even the first visitors have something to explore.

Explore more tips on how to launch your own Facebook company page.

Generate Buzz About Your Page

Okay, so now you have a Facebook page for your business, and you’ve gotten familiar with how it works. But how do you get people there? You have several options.

1. Promote your business page on your personal Facebook page. Tell your friends, families, business contacts and invite them to like your page and share it with friends. You should also do so on any other social networks you are a part of.
2. Write about your Facebook business page on your blog and tell your email list about it too. Again, encourage these folks to share the news with their own social networks.
3. Look for Facebook groups in your business’s niche. Become an active participant in discussions and answer questions. Be sure to join under your business’s Facebook page so that when your posts pop up on the group page, it links back to your business page and not your personal one. A word of caution: don’t be “spammy.” Instead offer useful, valuable advice. People will naturally try to find out more about your business if you do so.

Taking Action: Start Driving Traffic With Facebook

Now that you’ve started to build a buzz with your site, it’s time to send your Facebook friends to your online business.

First, You Must Regularly Post Content

A general rule is to post something every day; multiple times a day wouldn’t hurt. You have to keep the conversation going with the prospect, or they’ll forget about you.
Make the posts interesting and fun and engaging. You have to stand out from all the other content your prospects are scrolling through constantly in their news feed. Make it shiny! And shareable—encourage your readers to put your posts on their wall and send it to friends. That’s one of the most aspects of social media—you get your prospect to do some of your marketing work for you. If you go viral, you’re golden.

Include a Mix of Content and Calls to Action

Photos, videos, your thoughts on an industry trend, your announcement of sales or special discounts available for a limited time. And be sure to include a call to action at least 50% of the time—a link to your website or a separate landing page where they can buy, sign up, read a blog post, download an ebook or report, or whatever you want them to do. The other half can be just engaging content, whether it’s text-only updates, photos or videos, or even links to third parties, say to an industry article you think your readers will find interesting and useful. Learn how to make your marketing more engaging with visual content.

Be Consistent

Make sure that what you post on your Facebook is also consistent with your website and other marketing materials. The offer, your tone and style, and more should match otherwise the prospect could get confused.
It’s all about getting that click. The more clicks you get one day—the more engaging it is—the more visibility your next post will receive. One way to maximize your clicks to use Facebook Page Insights, which is a free service from Facebook that tells you when your target market is online, that way you can time your posts to catch their eyeballs. Otherwise, your posts could get lost in the bottom of their Facebook feed. Learn the best times to post on Facebook for maximum exposure.

Be Patient—It’s Worth It

Driving traffic with Facebook does take time. You won’t experience major results overnight. But with a consistent strategy, it could be a real game changer for your business in the long term. And the fact that it is free makes it a great platform for trying out ideas and offers.
Next, you should explore paid Facebook traffic driving strategies. Including your ads on the right side of Facebook and as Sponsored Posts in the Newsfeed can be an even more powerful way to drive traffic.

Keywords, ads, campaigns, ad groups, audiences, placements, site links, the list goes on. There are tons of elements that live within a PPC ad interface that all work together in ways that seem unidentifiable to the new PPC-er. And that doesn't even begin to cover the data itself. Before we get too far in the weeds, it's important for you to understand the basic structure that each PPC account takes and how those pieces work to cause your ad to show on a search engine results page (SERP).There are four main levels to be aware of: account, campaign, ad group, and the collective keywords and ads level. For this post, I'm going to liken each of these pieces to a different part of a filing cabinet. Let's start at the top. 

Account Level

The account is the highest level of organization. It's the equivalent of the entire filing cabinet itself as it's the shell that all of the following layers live within. All of the other elements of the account are housed within this single unit. It would be equivalent to the huge wall of files you see when going to a doctors office. For that business, there is that whole cabinet that encompasses all patient files. There are only a few settings that live at this level that is important to know about such as billing, auto-tagging, and account access, but we'll save that for a separate post. For now, let's keep the conversation high enough to know that an account itself is equivalent to the filing cabinet as a whole.

Campaign Level 

The second level within the cabinet are the drawers or campaigns. They're the second biggest block of organization available in a file cabinet and campaigns are the second biggest grouping in a PPC account. This level starts to give you as the advertiser control over where things go.It's up to you to organize your account well so you can find things when you need them later. 

As a best practice, I like to make my campaigns (drawers) broken down by one of the top 3 most important things to me in that given account. At the same hypothetical doctor's office I mentioned earlier, they sort these big chunks by first letter in the last name. When they look at the wall for a patient file, they can quickly narrow down the shelf or drawer it's in simply by knowing the first letter of the last name.
PPC accounts obviously function differently that doctor's offices. The most important thing in your account isn't the last name. It can be many things. Sometimes it's geography, sometimes it's product groupings, other times it is the profitability of the keywords in those campaigns. No matter what the piece is, it's one of the key things I pay attention to in the account, so it's imperative that I can see the breakdown in performance immediately upon opening that account. Simply make sure your campaigns have clear naming conventions and are easily identifiable later on and you'll be all set.

Ad Group Level

The third level down are what's call ad groups. These live within individual campaigns and operate in the same fashion as folders.Once you've identified the drawer the patient's last name corresponds with, you'll then begin to look alphabetically for their file based on the last name, then first. Ad groups serve to keep individual pieces of a campaign separate from the other, similar to patient files. Ad groups keep keyword and ad pairings separate from others in the same account. Similar to campaigns, it's important you follow a systematic naming convention for these ad groups. Without proper naming, you could easily get stuck shuffling through multiple ad groups before you find what you're looking for. 

Keywords and Ads

The final level or this digital advertising filing cabinet are the ads and keywords themselves. These are equivalent to the actual papers in the files (ad groups) you're looking through. These need to be very closely themed to be most effective.

Just like at a doctor's office, all of the papers in a single file should be about the same patient. If you start including other patient's paperwork in that folder, things can get really messy, really quick. 

PPC account hierarchy really is simple once you get the hang of it. The good news is that once you've created an account and are ready to start your first campaign, the AdWords interface will walk you through creating your first set of ad groups and keywords so it won't feel so foreign and you can get the hang of it before launching head first into account management.

Whether you have a website already or have one in the works, your online business won’t achieve its full profit potential or perhaps not even survive these days without search engine optimization (SEO). So I’d like to share some SEO basics that anybody can implement and see real results, no major technical experience or expertise needed.
Yes, you can do SEO yourself — no need to hire an expensive expert that cannot guarantee results anyway.

Why Search Engine Optimization Is Vital for Your Online Business

The general idea is that the more SEO centered your site is, the more attention it gets from Google, and the higher it appears in the search engine rankings. This is important because when people search for keywords related to your business, they’ll see your website. And they’ll be more likely to click on the link that send them to your landing page, main website, and/or e-commerce drop shipping website.
That’s free traffic from people primed to buy your products or services. They’re actively searching for this information, which makes them more likely to take action, whether it’s to sign up for your email list or actually buy a product.
This traffic is much more powerful and valuable than paid advertising like pay-per-click or banner ads. Consider that, according to industry watch Conductor, 64 percent or more of the traffic to your website will come from SEO efforts, referred as “organic” traffic.

Jupiter Research says its 81 percent. Also important to note is that people who come to your site as organic traffic that comes in through SEO efforts tend to have a higher lifetime value (they spend more money) than those that came in through paid advertising.

And this is important. Consider that most people don’t go beyond the first page of the Google search.And less than 5 percent of searchers go on to the second page of results. According to a study from Advanced Web Ranking 67 percent of the clicks go to the first five results, with the #1 Spot taking in just over 30 percent of clicks.

How do get Google’s attention and get all these benefits? Luckily there are some easy to do tasks you can do yourself to make your website Google-friendly. Follow these simple SEO basics and you’ll see improvement in your Google page rank.
(Now before you say anything, yes, I know there are other search engines out there like Bing and Yahoo. But with Google commanding around 90 percent web searches, you really want to concentrate your efforts on making Google happy.)

SEO Basics — Making Google Happy — and Web Surfers Too

Something I want to clear up right here at the top. Google is very savvy.
You can’t just pack a bunch of keywords on your webpages. Remember back in the early days of the web, when folks would simply include a long list of words related to their niche at the bottom of their home page? Doesn’t work these days, not by a long shot.

First thing to realize is that you have to include your keywords naturally in your content. It can’t seem forced.You’ll include these keywords in the actual written material on your site. You should also have short, attention-grabbing headlines that include a keyword. Also, the keyword should be included at least once near the top of your webpage in the content and then sprinkled throughout the rest of the page, including variations.

Content marketing can be a great strategy for your SEO, but it has to be done right.
As far as SEO basics, this is called on-site optimization.
Google’s focus is now on useful content, added consistently, that is relevant to what people are searching for, like blog posts, articles, videos. Before they recommend your website to their users, they want to make sure you have something to offer as far as advice, important information, and more to people interested in your niche.

Important: don’t duplicate content, whether it’s from other pages on your website or from other websites you own.

One thing to keep in mind is that while you are working on making your website Google-friendly, you can’t forget that real people will be reading your content too. And if they can’t understand what you’re saying — they won’t be back, which impacts your business and search ranking too. So make sure your content is people-friendly and Google-friendly too.
All these strategies should help you build authority in your niche market and compel other sites to link to you — the more links to you — the better your SEO.
Aside from quality content, your SEO efforts should also include work done in your “back office.” Internal linking, for example, is important. Basically your site should have plenty of useful content on related topics… and you should link among these different pages. This will keep visitors on your site longer, which shows Google your site is useful. And, crucially, this also allows Google to crawl all through your website.
Your keyword should also be in your title tag, which is the very short — just one line — bit of text that appears as the highlighted blue clickable link on the Google results page.
You should also take care to fill out the meta description for your webpages. This is a very short description of what’s on the page — it appears under the link in the search results and could help convince the reader to click to find out more. It should also have your keyword at least once. It’s not a big SEO influence but could increase clicks.
If you have photos or images on your site (and you definitely should), don’t forget to include “alt text” that describes the content of that image. Google can’t “see” photos but it does read the alt text. And that increases the changes your images will appear in Google’s image search results.
All of these things can help to positively affect your SEO rankings, but again, the most important factor will be you publishing good quality, original content, on a regular basis.

SEO Basics — Figuring Out the Right Keywords

We’ve talked about keywords being important. But you can’t just come up with them out of the blue. If you optimize for the wrong keywords, even if they are related to your niche, all your efforts will be for nothing. You need to figure out how exactly people are searching for information and tailor your keywords for your website to that… this should also influence the topics of blog posts and other content.
It’s important to use a keyword planner tool to do some serious research of the right keywords to optimize for. Of all the SEO basics, this is where you should start. As having the right keywords will guide all your other optimization efforts.
Google itself has an effective tool here: https://adwords.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/
Let’s look at an example.
Say your niche is yoga. The keyword “yoga beginners” results in just 1,000 to 10,000 searches per month in the U.S, but “yoga for beginners” has 10,000 to 100,000. Can you see what keyword you should be optimizing for?
Another example. If you’re providing a treatment for back pain, the search term “lower back pain relief” has 10,000 to 100,000 searches per month, but “back pain treatment” only has 1,000 to 10,000.
These two examples show how people search for information and products in each niche. And the keywords you pick for your SEO efforts should reflect that. Remember that this research should also guide the content your provide.

The Only SEO Constant Is Change

Another thing to keep in mind is that making your website Google-friendly is not a one-time task. You must create and post useful content consistently. Google is always crawling through the web updating its results pages. Need some blogging ideas? See this article on 40 Great Blogging Ideas for Your Blog.
But if you stick to these SEO basics shared in this article, you’ll have a solid foundation for an optimized site that makes Google happy — and your prospects and customers too. And with a website that comes in higher in the Google results page, you’ll have more of those website visitors too… which is good for business.
And, by the way, you may have heard that Google is always tweaking the algorithm that determines page rank. “Tricks” to get high page rank now may not work a few months from now. That’s definitely true and for more intense SEO tasks you’ll have to stay on top of changes. But that’s nothing to worry about right now. Stick to the basics for now and you'll be utilizing SEO best practices that will pay off for years to come.

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Radio buttons have only recently been open for deep customizations with CSS. The on/off switch design was lifted from Apple’s original iOS and moved onto the web using radios and checkboxes for toggle switches.

1. Accessible Toggles

Accessibility is a huge concern on the web and it’s something you have to consider when restyling an HTML element. These accessible toggles by Chris Hart show just how much you can change with a little CSS.

Each switch has its own unique style including custom animation effects. You can click either side of the switch to toggle the result which is perfect for usability on smaller screens.

Overall these switches are some of the best you can use and they’re really easy to customize. However they do rely on checkboxes so form submissions work a bit differently compared to radio buttons.

2. On/Off CSS Switches

If you like a minimalist approach to design then check out these radios created by Nick Bottomley. They’re as simple as can be and they work flawlessly.

The secondary styles even add custom animation effects to the switch where it expands out like a blob before animating. You can add optional labels that light up when switched on/off and you have plenty of room for adding colors and changing styles.

I’d say these switches make the sturdiest base for customizing on/off buttons without building them from scratch.

3. iOS7 Switches

When Apple released iOS 7 it came with many updates including a flatter design and new on/off switches. These iOS7 switches were recreated using checkboxes and CSS3 by skilled developer Bandar Raffah.

The backgrounds have an interesting animation effect where they slide in & out of view along with the switch button. It’s a really unique approach to the design and the fact that it’s all powered by CSS is even more impressive.

If you’re looking for an Apple-inspired design on your site then these checkbox switches take the cake.

4. Pure CSS Circles

For a slightly more customized solution take a look at these iOS switches by Jesse Couch. The labels are built primarily for Chrome and Firefox so they may not work in all browsers like Opera or Safari.

But they do support the “label” element for radios that can automatically switch between values when clicked. This way the user doesn’t even need to hit the radio, but just the label to get the on/off switch working.

5. Win10 Switches

Windows 10 users will know all about their latest changes for better or worse. The new Win10 settings include many custom on/off switches duplicated in this pen.

You can edit the size, color, and padding all through SCSS variables right in CodePen. These switches all use the HTML checkbox element which makes them superior for mobile users. They don’t have much animation but they look great and work well, two factors that always sell quality interface elements.

6. Clean On/Off Toggle

For accessibility you have to consider how checkboxes handle in older browsers and how attributes like aria-hidden operate. That’s the basis of this pen created by Felipe Fialho.

He takes this on/off switch to the highest level of support with an HTML label and custom styles that degrade gracefully. It’s also a nice looking switch and given the simple setup it works well on any website.

7. Switchboxes

These cleverly designed switchbox inputs were created by Victor Knust as a universally-supported solution. Every switch works in all major browsers including IE7 and above.

Because of this wide browser support you will have to work with JavaScript. It’s not much JavaScript, but it is a factor when deciding if these switches could work on your site.

But they look great and offer universal support which is more than most CSS-based switches.

8. Custom Square Toggles

If you’re really going for custom then check out these square toggles by Andrew Gehman. They completely restyle the checkbox design with square corners, a square switch, and custom text.

I can’t imagine this would blend nicely into many websites. However it shows how far you can go with pure CSS3 and this may be a nice codebase to start with if you wanna customize your own checkboxes.

9. Glowing Switch

An original design by Nick Vasile turned into a fully-functioning glowing CSS switch thanks to developer Valentin Galmand.

This interface almost exactly matches the original Dribbble shot which makes the switch even more impressive. It relies solely on CSS3 to recreate the shadow effects and icons in the center. It’s a shining example of how much you can do with pure CSS.

10. Sliding Radio Buttons

This example may be my favorite because it has such a delectable gradient attached to each button. These sliding radios created by Oguzhan Cansever use CSS3 gradients and custom labels attached to each side of the switch.

However these are pure radio buttons so you can only select one at a time. This means if you click the active side it will not switch over.

But if you like that style then this is more than applicable to any website. You can even customize the gradient colors and increase spacing in the switches all through CSS.

Wrapping Up

You can find dozens of amazing radios in CodePen with free code snippets to copy & edit.

If you like these examples be sure to save your favorites and feel free to browse the “switch” tag for more examples.

You should take a look at these code snippets for creating beautiful CSS buttons next or this collection of copy and paste responsive navigation snippets.

You have your website up, you are open for business, and you need to use social media to help you get the word out. Where should you turn? Facebook!

Facebook is still the number one social media site, and it’s a great place to start with your social media strategy. Obviously, you need to do your own research on where you need to participate online that makes sense for your business, but with more than 1 Billion monthly active users, Facebook is a happening place.

So how do you get started? Take these 5 steps…

#1 Optimize Your Page

The first thing you are going to do is either set up your Facebook Page (if you haven’t already) or optimize the Page you’ve already set up. Watch these 5 main areas to optimize:


• About section. Spend some time writing a good about section really getting into what your business offers and how you are different. You can add links in this section to areas on your website, add testimonials from happy customers, and add information about the history of your business. Take a look at these 4 examples of inspiring Facebook About sections to give you some good ideas. Also make sure you have some good text in the Short Description that appears on your Timeline since that is the most prominent part of your About section.
• Cover photo. Of course you need an interesting cover photo because that will also appear whenever anyone hovers over your Page and it will be more prominently featured in the new News Feed that is being rolled out. And now all the rules are out the window surrounding cover photos. You can have a call to action, you can have as much text as you want (but don’t get too crazy – simpler is better), and you can do some very creative things with your cover photo. Take a look at these examples: How Your Business Can Use the New Cover Photos (but keep in mind that the 20% text rule is now gone!)
• Add a storefront or e-mail capture tab. This may feel a little more advanced but there are a lot of easy ways you can accomplish this task. You can use the ShortStack app to get a very nice e-mail optin like Jon Loomer. Or you can use a tool like Tabsite to show a slideshow of some of your products (see the Product show widget). Or you can use something like Static HTML: iFrame Tabs to bring a website into your Page (can be used for an e-mail optin or storefront)

You will also want to make sure the rest of your page is optimized and you can refer to this handy 10 point checklist.

#2 Get your first 100 Fans

Now you need some social proof –- you need someone to Like you!

I suggest starting with your warm market if possible. These are people who already know, like and trust you -– it doesn’t matter if they will never buy from you, they may refer business your way. So go ahead and invite your friends and family to Like your Page.

Your friends will get a notification that you have invited them to Like your Page. Here are some other suggestions for getting your first 100 Fans:

• Send out an e-mail to your friends inviting them to like your Facebook Page (and visit your new online business!). Tell them what types of things you will be posting. Make sure you include a link to your Page so they can easily Like it.
• Run a Facebook ad campaign. Depending on your target keywords, you may be able to get your first 100 Fans with a Facebook ad for as little as $50. Spending a little money for some social proof is a good idea when you are starting out. Of course, if you read this blog regularly, you know exactly how effective Facebook ad campaigns can be!
• Interact with like-minded pages as your Page (more on this in a bit).
• Put a Likebox on your website. Maybe you don’t have a ton of traffic to your new site but you hopefully have some as you launch!

You may also want to look at 10 Ways to Grow Your Facebook Followingfor some interesting ideas.

#3 Network with like-minded businesses

This tactic is sometimes under-used but can be a great way to build visibility. It just takes a bit of time. You can comment on other Pages as your Page (thoughtfully, not spamming your information on their posts) and build relationships.

You can find the most appropriate businesses to connect with on Facebook in a couple different ways. First, you can start with Pages that may be complementary businesses. Say you provide Search Engine Optimization Services and another business provides Social Media strategy. You probably have an overlapping audience of businesses who want to get the word out about their own business online. Or your business is to sell the cutest hairbows ever to little girls. You would want to connect with businesses that sell the cutest necklaces ever to little girls.

You can start by using Facebook Graph Search to find some of these pages. You are typically only going to find Pages with the words in the title of the Page.

Now you can Like the Page as your Page and start commenting on that Page’s posts as your Page. Their audience will see your comments and hopefully connect with your Page. Or that page may also share some of your posts occasionally if you are sharing their content occasionally.

You can also find some like-minded pages by looking at the Likes of the Page you are connecting with (still with me?? It gets a little circular).

Go to the Timeline of a Page, and on the right column you will see a list of the Pages that the Page Likes. Click the “See All” link to get a popup of all the Pages that Page likes and you can find some interesting Pages that you may not find through Graph Search.

Also make sure you check out more Facebook Graph Search techniques in point #2 of this post: How to Build a Facebook Audience from Scratch.

#4 Direct people to your website the right way

Now that you have some of your Facebook connections, make sure you are driving them to your website. The easiest way to do that is to blog and use your great content as your bait. But sometimes you don’t have time for that. So you may want to feature your products a little more. Make sure you make it fun and ask questions to start a conversation.

It also helps to have beautiful pictures of your products. If your products are not photo-genic or are more virtual products, consider investing in some good stock photography or graphics that will convey the idea of your product.

#5 Connect e-mail marketing and Facebook marketing

If your business is online, I recommend getting people’s e-mail addresses in addition to connecting with them on Facebook.

E-mail is still your best chance of being seen online. I was recently at a major retailer and they were offering $10 off coupons for every e-mail they received from people checking out. They know the value of e-mail!

Use things like free reports, whitepapers, a free teleclass, free webinars, or contests to get people on your e-mail list. Use photos to enhance your post about your freebies and include your link to the freebie in the text.

You can also use tabs as mentioned in Step 1 to connect your e-mail optin to your Facebook Page. Make sure you are sharing that optin occasionally with your Fans so that they know about it. Many people, once they Like your Page, may never return to the Page itself and just interact with you in the News Feed.

Your Turn

So that should give you a good start on getting your Facebook presence up and running and assisting you in the launch of your online business.