One blogger in particular, J’s Everyday Fashion, we’ve been able to grow a personal and business relationship with her and her brand.  Truly authentic, yet serious about her passion and love for women’s everyday fashion, J has taken the fashion world by storm with her latest announcement: ShopJCloset.com.  My wife and I both had the pleasure of helping J create, craft and develop ShopJCloset.com’s website and overall business model.  So it is with great anticipation and excitement to see that J has launched the website today!

ShopJCloset.com is a budget-friendly, interactive website for J’s Everyday Fashion fans to shop together.  On this shopping website you will find the following:

• Items in J’s closet
• Items that are very similar to items in J’s closet
• Items J would like to own
• Opportunity to socially share and leave questions and comments on items

Moving forward, ShopJCloset.com is a concept and business model Brownstone Strategies’ hopes to bring to both new and existing ecommerce clients in a similar or different format.

Give me a shout, I would love to hear from you should you have questions or comments in regards to ShopJCloset.com, or having a similar or different project created for your company.

But my point is that the ever so growing Facebook community is an entertainer’s biggest stage and marketers biggest advertising candy store with all shapes, colors, styles, sizes and more in terms of target market audiences!!!  Being in the business of helping my clients to harness the power of integrating both marketing and technology, I can’t help but to share the latest Facebook Pay-Per-Click (PPC) secret with each of you: Competitors Referring You Qualified Customers!

Yes, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is nothing new.  Most of us at some point of owning our small businesses have had a run into, whether good, bad, or ugly, with executing a PPC strategy to drive more traffic to our websites and more profit to our bottom lines.  Whether with the now defunct Yahoo PPC, or Bing, or Google, there are many claiming to know ALL of the secrets to driving the $0.05 per click qualified lead that will buy your $**.99 product or service.  The truth is that they never tell you how much they spent to get to the $0.05 level, do they?  Think about it… would you be willing to spend into the tens and hundreds of thousands for a 25% or less chance of converting a customer?  Hmmm… that’s what I thought.  So my question to each small business owner, is why spend such an exuberant amount of time, energy and money when your competitors have done the homework for you on Facebook and are willing to send you qualified competitors?
That’s right!  My little Facebook secret is that your competitors are waiting to send you QUALIFIED business and ideal clients.  How, you ask?  Well, let’s take a look.  Write down your top 3 or 5 competitors, look at their website for their Facebook profile page or go to Facebook and search for your competitor by name (fyi, latter is more difficult).  If you want or need to add more competitors feel free to do so.  Look at each competitor’s fan count… here’s your golden opportunity.  Your competitors have identified qualified customers who are in need or have experienced a service ‘like’ (I use ‘like’ loosely) yours or in the same industry.  Once you’ve identified your competitors, then make sure you setup a Facebook profile page for your own company if you don’t already have one.

Okay, now the real work begins.   Once you setup your fan page to your liking, now it’s time to setup an ad to promote your fan page using Facebook’s Social Media Advertising Engine — which puts your in front of 500+ and growing user base.  Here’s where things get real interesting, because you can choose to promote your page like a traditional PPC strategy and continue to lose money with lackluster performance, or you can try my little secret.  Again, why are you reading this?  If you’re going to do the traditional method, you might as well pull out a lighter and money you’re willing to spend and POOF… that’s right, burn it because that’s what you’ll be doing by do the traditional PPC method.

So are you ready for the secret?  Okay, go to Facebook Advertising and click “Create Ad” and follow the instructions in regards to setting up your ad.  Follow each step until you get to “Connections – Target Users Who Are Connected To”.  Here’s where the magic happens.  In the input box below “Target Users Who Are Connected To” label, start typing each one of your competitor’s Facebook profile names until it autocompletes.  Submit your ad for Facebook to review, and sit back and watch the fans and conversions start rolling through.  How does this happen?  Well, your ad is placed on the right hand side when users that meet your ad criteria are logged in and using Facebook.

Now what? Wash, rinse and repeat.  Do this until no end and you’ll be set and ready to start having target customers like your profile page and hopefully visit your website and convert into profitable, repeat business! Yes, it’s just that easy.  Oh, and how much per converted lead are you looking to spend?  On average, $5-10 per person.  So for every $10 you invest, you at least get 2 fans to convert into customers.  Not bad, aye?  Well, no need to stick around here when you could be adding more to your bottom line using my Facebook secret.  Create many types of ads, testing and trying each to see which ones do the best via the Click-Through-Rate (CTR).  Oh yeah, don’t forget to turn off your PPC ads elsewhere and move that in your newly found Facebook Budget.

One last thing, be sure to thank your competitors for doing the homework and laying a great foundation for you to capitalize on.  NOT!

For more information in regards to driving more fans to your fan page, go here.

It was my pleasure to assist in helping 11^th Street Station bring a branded online presence to 11thStreetStation.com.  The final product has yet to be created although the complete site will be released in the coming weeks!

In short, the overall site design is basic.  Included in their package is simple SEO optimization and information architecture.  We’ll also submit the entire site to the top 25 search engines once completed.  In addition, 11thStreetStation.com has taken advantage of listing it’s business location via various free listing services throughout Austin (i.e. Google Listing, Yahoo Listing, MSN Listing, UrbanSpoon.com, Groupon.com, TheLunchDeal.com and more).  Each of these services are very powerful in driving word-of-mouth advertising and business to the bottom-line.

Also, a value-ad strategy for 11thStreetStation.com is keeping their site up to date using dynamic content and driving customers to the site to view the latest events coming to the venue.  The true nuts and bolts of the strategy and entire website will rely on using automated marketing.  The customized automated marketing package will allow for 11thStreetStation.com to message to it’s customers who sign up on the website to receive email ‘meal deal’ alerts as well as customers that complete a survey when dining in.

The messaging timing of 14, 30, and 60 day messages will include contests, giveaways, East 11^th Street Fun Facts, as well as an opportunity to join the 11^th Street Station’s Social Media (Twitter and Facebook) online presence.  The power behind this strategy is that it’s all automated – that’s right, no hiring of a full-time agency to manage it.  It’s all database driven and dynamic content.

Well, it’s about time for lunch and I’ll let you guess where I’m headed… see you there: 11thStreetStation.com!

The Unique Closet really came about over the course of the last 9-10 months of travel.  Everywhere city we visited someone would question Mallary about certain boutique outfits.  Most wanted to know where they could purchase or possibly even peruse such a unique collection of boutique clothing and accessories.  The more and more people questioned, the more the two of us put two and two together to strike out down the path of partnering to operate an online women’s boutique clothing business.  We figured we’ve already committed ourselves to friendship and marriage, so why not a business too!

So over the course of May and June, we married, honeymooned, built a full-scale online boutique e-commerce website, and birthed a dream into a reality:  TheUniqueCloset.com.  The site in it’s entirety is an osCommerce shopping cart with an osCommerce Template from TemplateMonster.com.  We’ve tweaked the out-of-the-box osCommerce install quite a bit, adding the following major features just a name a few:

• Purchase Without A Registered Account
• From 4 to 1 page checkout capabilities
• PayPal Payment Method
• eCloset (Wishlist) Capabilities
• Recently Viewed Products
• Points and Rewards Program
• Discounts / Gift Certificates
• Automated Product Review and B-Day Mailers
• Livezilla Chat Software
• Facebook Like

And July 1, 2010 arrived and we were met with ladies chomping at bit to get their hands on trendy dresses & rompers, tops, bottoms, and accessories.  The experience has definitely been a learning one, seeing this is Mal’s first rodeo and I’ve not been in retail in nearly 10 years.  But with the help of family and friends, and second to God, our little baby is growing up quite fast before our very own eyes.  We thank everyone for their prayers and support — it takes a lot to strike out as an individual to start a business but definitely as a couple.

Oh well, sorry to cut this post short, but our new baby is calling and time for new shipment post of merchandise.

OH, and before I forget… If you’re ever online and in our neck of the woods shopping for women’s boutique clothing and accessories, stop on by TheUniqueCloset.com.  If you find something you like, be sure to use the following promo card to save 10% off your purchase: almal10.

But in terms of managing and operating and great lead generation system with Facebook, the static FMBL language can allow for a company to turn a simple form into a simple lead generation tool.  What does this mean?  In simple terms, this means that Facebook has provided developers with a programming language that is equivalent to  HTML, hence the ‘FBML‘.  So, how can your business use FBML to drive lead generation or to increase traffic to your website?

For example, let’s say your business depends heavily on individuals visiting your website and registering as a user to download various whitepapers, presentations, or even buy products/services.  If people don’t visit your site to make purchases, 9 times out of 10 your business will not grow.  Enters FBML.  We’ll take FBML and your user registration on your website and now place it on your Facebook Fan or Profile Page as a tab (See example via the boxes tab: 2010 Hurricane Season).  Simply put, FBML allows for businesses to brand their Facebook page with custom tabs.  These custom tabs can include custom images, forms, text… the works!  So yes, you can run a contest from the custom tab, email newsletter sign up, watch a quick video, or promote user registration.  Think of the leads you’re missing because you’re Facebook Page is unable to capture those persons or businesses that may not visit your site but will visit your Facebook page.  Are you ready to get started?

To learn more about how to use FBML to drive lead generation, or to share your experience, please leave a comment below.

If you live in the Texas Triangle of Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio, then you know about the Texas Relays, 6th street, slabs, bikini nights, Greek & Step shows, and the works…  There is nothing like it!

Well, for 2010, I had the opportunity to setup a ‘Stay In The Know’ events site for the Texas Relays: TexasRelaysWeekend.com.  In  simple terms, this was a site to educate between 20-40K people about various Texas Relays events and parties.  The site featured the Urban Music Fest, Clyde Littlefield Texas Relays, and an assortment of Texas Relays Style Parties & Events.

So what is so special about the site!  For one, it because the most viewed and visited site as ranked by Alexa.com in a period of 7 days!  Most companies promise you a #1 Search Engine Position and can’t do it, so you know I was quite impressed to see the organic growth to position #3 on such a short timeline.

Beyond SEO, the competition could not touch the website nor the Social Media presence via Twitter and Facebook.  I was able to automate the listing of each party a dynamic RSS php feed via Twitter and Facebook, so that as we added parties to the database, people could via the parties via the smartphones, PC’s/laptops, text/sms, and emails.  Not only that, but users could also search the database for parties via our proprietary site search engine.  Search by event type, name, date.. you name it, you can do it at TexasRelaysWeekend.com.

And the greatest benefit of the site… it is user generated content!  Yes, you the users have access to add parties — your parties for FREE!  Not only that, the site offered a self-service advertising portal for business owners to promoter their businesses/products/services or events at a reasonable daily cost.

The 2010 Texas Relays may be gone, but that doesn’t mean you can’t catch the 2011 Texas Relays: TexasRelaysWeekend.  Visit TexasRelaysWeekend.com and sign up to receive updates about the 2011 Texas Relays events and parties.

Objective
To build an interactive community via BumpStopper.com of High Time Products whereby users obtain and attain greater product awareness, profitable customer base growth, and increased online/offline profitable revenues.

Solution
After a thorough discussion of the objectives and possible metrics used to determine the success of both the campaign and overall strategy,  it was apparent that both… Twitter and Facebook would be viable options.  Now the catch is that in reality, both solutions will speak to unique audiences and will have different messaging paths.  Twitter is used more for dialog, and Facebook is more of a extended website or brand of Bumpstopper.com.  Both allow for transparency, but in different ways.

For instance, with Facebook High Time Products will be able to add custom FBML tabs, add and manage events and contests, promote PPC ads, and suggest the BumpStopper.com Fan Page to a greater network of individuals.  In comparison to Twitter, Twitter is more about personal engagement and conversing about the company brand and just personal topics.  Now with both, we’re able to sprinkle in posts in regards to promotions, discounts… etc.  But the main focus is to drive engaging conversation and interaction behind the High Time Products with the by product being that new and existing customers convert and buy products on the BumpStopper.com website.

Strategy
You’ll have to stay tuned in regards to finding out our strategy… Yes, you’ll have to come back in a few months to read whether or not our strategy worked, or you could keep up by becoming a fan and follower of BumpStopper.com.  Visit the website and you’ll see the icons to join and follow.

Metrics
Read Strategy Section  :)

Well, until the next post… to Social Media Infinity And Beyond!

Armadillo Auto Glass came to mind.  I did a quick search and didn’t find a website, but I did find a number.  I love doing business local here in Austin, so I knew that Armadillo was probably the go-to company for my auto glass needs.  I did check with others, but the owner, Greg, said he would come out and fix my glass within a day.  And that he did and a stellar job too!

Little did I know then, we both would connect and my company would return the favor, being awarded the business to do an all inclusive website for Armadillo Auto Glass.  Here’s the kicker… 80-90% of Armadillo’s business came/comes from Google Maps and local searches.  Yes, believe it or not, they were pulling in business without a website.  So that leaves one to only imagine at what could happen when designing an easy-to-use informative site that is SEO-optimized and makes the best use of customer testimonials.  Well, we did it… take a look at Austin’s most trusted auto glass repair and replacement experts: Armadillo Auto Glass.

So what does the site consist of???  Glad you aksed…  Simply put, we focused our efforts on the following to help drive SEO optimization, site traffic, and content generation:

• Facebook — one of the easiest ways for Greg to extend his Google Adwords was getting him onto and into Facebook PPC advertising, whereby he can focus his efforts on local business and not have his eggs in one basket.  With Austin being a tech town, Armadillo Auto Glass stands to gain a lot of PPC exposure and business.  So we created Armadillo Auto Glass a Facebook fan page to begin gaining friends as well as offer an incentive for joining…
• Simple, Yet Intriguing Design — One of the first things out of the blocks was to create a simple, easy-to-use site whereby people can make the best educated judgment about the business and services provided and the main goal is to get customers to call for an appointment.  Cha-Ching! Nothing fancy about this site in general, but we do take advantage of MySQL database and homepage call-to-actions to organically grow and manage a customer email sign up for Dillo Deals, Dillo Referrals and testimonials.  In addition, we use some code to generate dynamic pictures and differentiators throughout the site.  We also provide users with a slick shadowbox image effect in the Photo Gallery area.  As a management feature, Armadillo will use Google Analytics for website traffic monitoring as well as integration to their AdWords.
• Search Engine Optimization — As usual, we optimized this site from head-to-toe with all the basics of SEO as well as some additional honest white-hat tricks of the trade to give the site a boost in it’s infancy.  Armadillo has a great foundation for SEO due to having visibility on Yelp, City Search, Merchantile, and other local Austin venues that provide free advertising and product/service reviews.  One of the biggest SEO components is the testimonial area whereby people leave auto glass testimonials of the great service rendered by Armadillo Auto Glass.

We still have a ways to go to in regards to SEO Link-Building strategies, and getting traffic to the site.  However, for now, we will focus our efforts on Facebook and getting/staying on Googlemaps, and making sure we add auto glass content on the regular to boost the overall PageRank throughout the site.  Stay tuned as we’ll keep you updated on this project and how things are turning out.  Next on the list… landing pages for Armadillo Auto Glass!  See you around…

After our initial meeting, it was evident that Lafes website was greatly in need of search engine optimization and marketing.  The site has a great look and feel, yet from a form, fit, and function, it has struggled to gain traction for user communities in search of natural and organic products.

Our solution for lafes.com…

• Alt/Title tags for all images
• Contact info and Text link navigation (header/footer) in addition to the image links found on pages
• Unique/Indepth Page Titles, Descriptions and Keyword tags
• Installation of Google Analytics for tracking/reporting usage for the main site as well as the xcart shopping cart; measure conversion rates of those who shop the site.
• Submission to the Top 40 Search Engines
• Created a trackable keyword function on all pages for searching the xcart shopping cart/store; in addition, these words are reviewed for possible submission into keyword tags
• Installed ShareThis: adds the capability of users sharing any Lafes webpage with their various social media communities.
• RSS Feed icon/link for Lafe’s external blog
• The addition of integrating both Facebook and Twitter accounts

In addition, we’ll be starting a link building campaign build greater SEO visibility, and user community participation and relationships in regards to natural and organic products.  The main goals of this project are to:

• Drive more consistent and qualified traffic to site
• Develop relationships with bloggers and various online communities to build Lafes Ambassadors to promote services/products
• Develop a baseline for the average shopping cart size in money spent and products purchased.
• Develop a baseline for click-path conversions
• Most importantly, sell more products to a qualified target market

Go take a visit and look around… Lafes Natural and Organic Products

Read the remainder of Low Cost Secrets for Ensuring Profitable Growth Using Technology.