Gary Leland Show Episode 5

On this episode I talk about my personal marketing strategy for Facebook. Social Media is the only way I advertise my business, and my business is growing every year. I talk about the steps I follow in my social media marketing process. – Produced By Gary Leland

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Let’s talk about Facebook. I’m going to pretend we are starting from scratch with your one personal account. It’s your personal page where you have close friends and family. First thing you need to do is make a second account. I have 2 accounts. You need a second account for a lot of reasons. After you build this great marketing network of hundreds of thousands of people who are loyal followers of you and your brand, and Facebook decides to kick you off of Facebook for something you did wrong. Everything that you had is gone, because you are no longer on Facebook and you were the sole owner. So make a secondary Facebook page. Mine has a clever name and I don’t work that page very much, but it is a member of most things I belong to, own, or built, so it’s kind of a back door. It’s a safety valve. Just in case something happens to my other page, I have a way to access everything that I have built. I put tons of time and money into it. Next, build a brand page. This is not a personal page; it is a company page. The reason why you want to make a company page instead of a personal page is because personal pages limit you 5000 friends. For instance, for Fastpitch TV (facebook.com/fastpitchtv), I have close to 75,000 likes. If you start as a personal page and you get to 5,000, you have to try to migrate all of those people over to the new page, and that never happens completely. Start doing your company marketing on a company page. Make yourself an administrator and the other account an administrator, which makes them both you.

Start with a company page and post from that page daily. Start inviting people to your page who you think will be interested in your page. You might even do that on your personal page, is like people with whom you are familiar, not necessarily good friends. Then you can recommend to your friends to join your page. I post my Fastpitch TV blog every day, to get more people coming to the site, to get them enjoying the page, to get them reposting, liking, and sharing information that I give. When I do make a post, I make it quite a few times. Every morning, I make a post on my blog at 9 or 10am. I go to Facebook, put the image I have created for that post because I know that images get more views on Facebook than just regular text. I think Facebook even shows it more because they like images more than text. Let’s say at 9:30, I made the post to my website, Fastpitch.TV; by 9:35 I have made it on Facebook and I have sent a link to read the post to read to the specific blog page. Then in the bottom left hand corner, you see a little icon. If you click it a calendar will come up; that’s your scheduling tool. I will schedule that post to come up every month for the next 6 months because that is as far ahead as they will let you schedule. What I choose are different days of the week and different times of the day, so there is more of a chance that everyone in my audience will see it at least once. It makes it look like I have 6 times the amount of content than I actually do. Doing this has helped me grow my fan base to 75,000 people. It should be up to 100,000 people in no time at all.

I am always experimenting with new things and I just opened a Woo Commerce store on my site at Fastpitch.TV. If you are not familiar with Woo Commerce, it is a plug in you can buy for your site to make it a store. You put products for sale on your Word Press page, specifically on that page. I built a working Woo Commerce store on Fastpitch.TV, which is a Word Press site, and I filmed 5 short videos of products I sold. Each video was 2-3 minutes, explained the product, and told them where they could find it. I put these on once a day on my Facebook page. Now, one of my six posts a day is a product review and tells them they can come to my site and buy the product. Virtually every day I sold out of the product I reviewed. I wasn’t stocking thousands of these items, but I sold in one day what normally takes a month to sell, some items maybe more. I had to say very quickly that I was out of the product, but people still ordered it because I had a back order date listed. I can actually now start marketing products on Facebook for people to come to my site and buy stuff. That is the basic plan behind my marketing, is building an audience and selling them stuff.

I am working on a new approach now, which are the Facebook groups. I like Facebook groups; you can have pages and groups. When groups first came out, I started a few of them. One of them is Fastpitch Softball, which has been around for about a year, and it has over 6,000 likes. I think that when you have a group and it gets big enough, Facebook sees the kind of people that may be interested and put it over to the right hand side of your page saying that you may be interested in joining this group. It does help acquire more people because it did take off all of the sudden. Then I made another group. It’s something I am very excited about. I built a network of groups, there are actually 401 groups in this network and it will be a giant marketing tool for me when it’s all said and done. This network is Fastpitch Search Network, and you can find it at Softball. Directory or Fastpitch. Directory, which are the websites. I have made one main page that the URL directs you to, which is the Fastpitch Search Directory. You can’t post anything on that page; it just has the links to 50 other groups so it functions as a landing page. The 50 groups are the 50 states in alphabetical order. Within each state, it has 7 age groups from 6U to 18U because softball, like many sports, is played in age groups. This search network is for fastpitch players to find fastpitch teams and for fastpitch teams to find fastpitch players. They are all pages you have to join; you can’t just post, which helps with spam. The only thing you can post on this page is to find players or find teams, not for practices, not for tournaments. This way, people don’t have to scroll through a bunch of posts to find what they really want and that is all that is there. I even put it on the rules that if you post about other things I can kick you off and ban you from the group. I did the test run in Texas in the 7 age groups and I am getting close to 1000 members on each one of those groups. This allows me to target those members and market the products I am trying to sell. It will act as a new marketing arm.

Now we have built our personal page, our back up page, our company page, we are posting on it every day, and we have created a network of groups where your members can interact with one another. I have a lot of my stuff automatically post to each of these as well by using If This Then That, IFTTT.com. When I make a post it will automatically post on my group pages. A lot of them at 2000-3000, some have over 6,000, so I post one time with IFTTT, it will post everywhere. Not everyone is a group of all of your groups, which is why it should be posted in all of the groups. If someone sees it more than once, great; it’s just one more opportunity for them to click through and buy product. As the group owner/administrator, yes you have the right to advertise on that page. You take a chance; if advertise too much, people will leave, but I think the average person sees it as a great resource instead. I have been on pages like this and seeing nothing but spam. I think my pages are the perfect example that they will live with it, and even support what you are doing and selling. Don’t put too much stuff to sell right off of the bat. Wait for the page to start to work the way it’s supposed to before you put anything on there to sell. My Fastpitch Player Search pages probably won’t get any spam on them for a year, just so the page can build up with it’s intended purpose.

How do I find time to build 401 pages with my busy schedule? I posted on my Facebook page that I would pay $8.50 per hour to build groups and I had a ton of people volunteer. There are a lot of people who don’t have jobs, are stay home moms or dads, and they can work a couple of hours a day on a subject they like with something they understand. The girl who did it for me did a great job; she built all 401 groups with a lot of information and custom images.

I hope I gave you some information that was of interest and helpful!

If you have a question send it to me at GaryLeland@gmail.com

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