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Almost 3 years ago I started looking at how to run a contest on Facebook. Back then Facebook was much more lenient. We could use likes as a voting mechanism and contact winners over Facebook. We were largely unrestricted and the ways we could bolster likes on Facebook pages were many.

Then, in came the Facebook lawyers, giving out a whole list of requirements for promotions run on Facebook, largely locking down many of the things we had been doing. Over the last 2 years the rules have largely remained the same but they still aren’t well known to many businesses, even large businesses still run contests against Facebook’s terms.

Based on the years of experience with contests I wanted help those new to the game by laying down the basic foundations of running a Facebook contest.

1. Why You Run A Contest

A contest can accomplish many things but its primary purpose is lead generation. It is for an email list, more followers, a larger audience to speak to. It can incidentally create sales as I have seen in the past but this isn’t always the case. You then need to communicate, provide value and engage with your new audience to increase sales.

Remember, a contest can give you a larger audience, it is then up to you to decide how to communicate with them.

2. You Need An App

Why? Because Facebook demands it and if you want to keep your Facebook page you have to abide by their rules.

3. Where Do I Get An App?

At Binkd, that is what we do. However if Binkd doesn’t suit your needs just Google “Facebook Contest App” to get many results and see what best suits your needs. I will mention that you are unlikely to find a free contest app and if you do, it will unlikely remain free for long.

4. Where Does The App Go?

Taking Binkd as an example, once you sign up for an account and create a contest, you need to install an app on your Facebook page. You are given a link and it will install on your Facebook page and provide you with a new tab.

5. People Must Enter Through The App

As one of the main requirements of Facebook’s terms, the only way people can enter a contest on Facebook is via entering their information on a page within the app. They can’t enter just by liking the page, commenting or doing any other Facebook action. In addition to this, you must get them to enter in information that allows you to contact them outside of Facebook. The reason for this will become apparent further on in the article.

However, you can require them to like your page before they enter the contest. This is called fan gating and Facebook does allow this.

6. Promote Your Contest

Now that you have your contest active you need to promote it. It doesn’t do it itself. Have a look at How To Promote A Contest for many ways you can promote your contest.

7. Pick The Winner, Award The Prize, Contact The Winner

Once the contest is over, the application will pick the winner(s). Normally this involves going into the app and looking at a page that shows the names and email addresses and which ones were picked. This is under Contests > Winners in the Binkd app.

Now you must contact the winner(s) over email or any other method except Facebook. This is a strict rule on Facebook. You can not message, post or comment the winners of the contest. The best you can do is contact the winners individually, then create a blog post announcing the winners and share a link to that article on your Facebook page.

Further Reading

It is always good to familiarize yourself with Facebook’s Page Guidelines. Pay particular attention to III part E.

Often many people think that a contest itself is a promotion that will get you many new followers but a contest will only go as well as you promote it. Promotion is critical in a contests success. Here are some of the best ways to promote your contest.

1. Your Existing Lists

Your existing channels are the easiest way to promote your contest initially. However you must continuously promote your contest through your existing channels while the contest is running. Mentioning your contest only once will get a response but mentioning many times, normally once a day or multiple times a day on services such as Twitter will gain a much larger response. Some channels for you to market to are:

a. Email / Newsletter List

b. Facebook

c. Twitter

d. Flyers In Your Store or packaged with your product

For mentioning your contest multiple times throughout the promotional period don’t be afraid to use services such as Buffer for scheduling posts and tweets, to ensure you reach people who might not be in your time zone when you are normally communicating.

2. Joint Venture

Working with someone allows you to amply your results greatly. Create a contest with another company and both promote it through your existing channels or run joint paid promotions. It cuts the costs and allows both your companies to gain larger exposure than if you did it alone.

3. Facebook Promoted Post

When you mention your contest on Facebook, use Facebook’s promoted post function. For more details on how this works have a read of Using Facebook Promoted Posts For Some Great Results.

4. Sponsored or Promoted Tweets

Promote your tweets on Twitter or get other accounts to sponsor them. For Twitter’s official promoted tweets have a look at Promoted Tweets. For sponsored tweets have a look at Sponsored Tweets.

5. Badges

If you are planning on running your contest for a month or more it would be beneficial to create badges for your contest that you can ask fans or other companies to place on their sites.

6. Viral Features Of The Contest Platform

Once you have promoted the contest via other methods, this will help promote the contest further without much effort. Most contest platforms, including Binkd, have many features entice your users to share your contest with their friends.

a. Fan-gate - Fan-gating is enforcing the entrant to like your Facebook page before they enter the contest. This is allowed by Facebook’s promotion guidelines and in doing so, means that their like of your page will show in their feed to their friends.

b. Refer – You can also enable referrals in exchange for giving your contestant an additional chance of winning. For each person they successfully refer, they get another entry into the contest. This is a large enticement for your contestants to share with all their friends rather than hiding the contest to themselves.

c. Voting – If you are running a photo or video contest then voting can be a powerful motivator for others to share their entry and hence your contest with all their friends and family.

photo credit: theparadigmshifter cc

At Binkd we have hosted thousands of contests through our contest platform and through this we saw a large variance in contest performance, some received 10 entrants others 1,000′s. So I went digging to find out why that was and in particular, photo contests. At first I thought it would be due to the number of fans on Facebook. Have 1 million fans and you will see more entrants. While the correlation was there for most contests there were a few who didn’t fit in this model. They exceeded what was expected, sometimes over 10 fold.

Here is what I discovered.

A Valuable Prize (Get $1,000′s of dollars of prizes for $0)

This one seems obvious. A large prize value will attract a large audience, which it does without fail, however I noticed contests running large prize pools that didn’t pay big dollars for them. They did this in the following ways.

1. Retail value is higher than wholesale, hence if they were offering their own package or service, it costs them far less. But you always list the retail price of the prize.

2. Get sponsors. It sounds easier than it actually is. To rapidly increase your prize pool, all you need to do it speak to other business, even run the contest together. Most businesses are happy to provide a product for a contest to help increase their exposure. In fact I will let you in a massively valuable resource by Brendon Burchard in securing sponsorships. Watch the video.

What is the minimum total prize pool you should be offering?: At least $1,000. But if you follow the tips above you should be able to secure this for $0 with a bit of time invested.

Every exceptional contest always had a prize pool of over $1,000.

Don’t Rely On Existing Fans

Now if you took the above advice, you instantly have many other businesses all with marketing channels of their own. It is instantly a huge marketing opportunity at your disposable. They would be more than happy to distribute your contest to their list if you have one of their products as a prize. Just make sure you don’t have multiple sponsors that are competing with each other.

To further enhance this, start a marketing budget to perform things such as a Facebook Ad Campaign. Facebook Ads are great for giveaways and contests. However Google Ads generally are not.

You have a website, you have an email list, you have a Twitter account you may even have a retail presence or catalogue going out. Use every channel at your disposal, sometimes people won’t enter your contest until they have seen it mentioned numerous times.

Every exceptional contest is always marketed over multiple channels.

Give Everyone A Fair Chance

Voting contests normally have 1 major flaw. The person with the highest vote count wins. At the beginning this starts off with everyone on level ground and people contact family and friends to get votes. It soon becomes clear who has more family and friends and it turns into nothing more than a popularity contest. If you are lucky the top people will have a similar vote count hence they will continue to battle it out. However for everyone else, they just get angry, contact us with accusations of cheating and leave a large entrant base not participating because they believe they will have no chance in winning.

You have a few ways to solve this.

1. You can have a limited positive impact by offering multiple prizes. Hence people with lower vote counts still feel like they have a chance of winning one of the lower end prizes.

2. Use votes as an extra chance to win and not the highest vote count wins. Binkd’s Photo Contest App has a way to select winners in a fairer option, while still enticing people to continue sharing their entry to collect votes. Instead of the highest vote wins, each vote is counted as an entry into the contest. At the end, the winner is picked at random, however the more votes someone has the higher chance they have of winning. This gives everyone a fair chance to win, regardless of popularity and still gives a large motivation to share their contest with friends and family.

Every exceptional contest always had a prize pool or random drawing based on votes.

Lower The Barrier To Entry

Photo contests always attract less entrants than sweepstakes because it takes more effort to take a photo, then upload it. Sometimes contests remove large potential audiences just because of the way they set up their contest. If you own a sports gear store and setup a photo contest saying, upload your pic with you performing a move on your skateboard, lets see who you just removed.

1. The people who are thinking of starting skateboarding who don’t have any gear. They certainly want it and need to purchase a lot of things but they can’t enter your contest.

2. Who honestly has a load of pictures of themselves performing certain moves on their skateboard, a few, but most would have to go out, with someone else and get them to take the pic. That just removed a large number of potential entrants who will forget about your contest within a few minutes. They can’t take action there and then.

3. Those who are new to skateboarding might not feel comfortable entering a picture of themselves on a skateboard and sharing it with all of their friends to get votes.

To me that contest just wiped out a huge entrant list and all of people who are likely to become great customers. To open this contest, all that is needed to be done is:

Change the photo requirement to just any picture related to skateboarding, that doesn’t even require the entrant to be in the photo and one that is already likely to be on an entrant’s phone or computer.

Every exceptional contest always made the photo contest as easy as possible to enter.

Provide The Emotional Connection And Create The Viral Effect

I do think people greatly underestimate the need for enhancing emotional connections, even over a very non-emotional medium such as the internet. The real key to getting people to enter a contest and get them to share it is requiring a photo that they have an immense emotional connection to. Have you ever seen baby photo contests? Let’s run through why they always go so well.

1. In relation to the last point, which mother doesn’t have 1,000 photos, some professionally taken, sitting on their computer. Very easy to enter.

2. The mother’s pride is at stake with sharing a baby photo. Who doesn’t think that their baby is the cutest?

3. They will share it with everyone, as they always have. It is appropriate to send to family and friends and most will also be eager to see your baby win.

While baby photo’s are at the high-end of emotional connection, you can do this just as easily with photo’s of other things people have created. People are proud and emotionally attached to their creations and skills, let them show it to the world.

Every exceptional contest always requires the uploading of a photo with an emotional connection.

There are many other ways to ensure your contest performs well however these just mentioned are the lesser known and far more crucial factors.

Social media has enabled businesses to open up to their customers, start talking and using their social influence to gain more exposure. However it is always disheartening to see the amount of businesses who still don’t quite get it.
 
“Social Media Is Social”
People come on to social media to be social and engage with friends and people.

 
“They Don’t Come On To Buy”
This isn’t Google where they are searching for a specific product, they aren’t in a buying mood. It doesn’t mean people don’t buy from seeing something on social media, it just isn’t what they originally came on to do.
 
“People Talk About Social Activities”
People talk about what they did, what they are doing. Tweeting about what they are watching on T.V., taking endless photo’s of their food on Instagram and so forth.
 
“What Is Your Businesses Social Activity?”
If you sell kitchen appliances, don’t talk about the latest kitchen appliance. What do you do in the kitchen? Cook!

If you sell social analytics software, what are your clients doing? Most likely learning how to market their products and using analytics to measure results. Talking with other marketers, reading their articles trying to get ahead in their business.

If you sell clothing what are your potential customers doing? Talking about fashion on the latest celebrities no doubt.

Business to Business (B2B) or Business to Consumer (B2C), what are they doing socially related to your product or service?
 
“Talk About The Social Aspect Not Your Product Or Service”
What ever you are selling, talk about what people are doing socially in this area, not your product. You can mention your product or service occasionally but even when you do tie it in to the social aspect.

For example, I used my new state of the art (insert product name) blender to create this great smoothie (product details below the post), now here is the recipe and pictures of the finished smoothie.

Why do you think the big hardware stores make heaps of how-to videos?
 
“Go Forth And Be Social”
Who knows, your customers might actually start engaging with you!

After they initially launched in late May, I had hesitations on using this feature. For those that need a quick refresher course, Facebook Promoted Posts allow you to gain extra exposure of a post on your wall be getting more of your fans to see it in their feeds.

First, Lets Clear Up Some Confusion

One of the many reactions I initially saw is that people thought Facebook were hiding their posts from their fans and now they had to pay for the privellege. This is incorrect and posts on your Facebook page will be seen by the same amount of fans as previously.

Not every fan sees all of your Facebook posts, this has always been the case. What determines who of your fans see your posts is based on the EdgeRank algorithm. In short, this means the more interaction you have on your post the more people in your fan base will see it. Facebook users have so much content in their feeds that Facebook has to filter it to ensure only the best quality for their interests get surfaced.

This is actually a great feature meaning people who run Facebook pages must try their best to provide high quality, engaging content.

The Hesitation

Now businesses can bypass creating great content and just spam you with their content if they have the money to do so. But thankfully Facebook does punish under performing posts meaning the cost to promote a bad post is higher.

The Benefits

Simply put, the main benefits are

1. Lets you re-engage people who haven’t seen your posts for a while, meaning it will organically start appearing in their feeds once again.
2. You can get new likes.
3. The estimated reach spans beyond the total number of fans you have, which can only mean that people who don’t like your page also see the post. How this works I am not sure, but I could assume it may be through seeing that a friend (who is a fan) has liked or commented on a post, hence showing it to all of their friends.
4. Ensures that you can get important messages out to your fans when needed.

Lets Take It For A Spin

I chose 2 posts to see the results. The first post is an article written on Binkd and was getting limited engagement, even though it was a great post. The second was a photo that also prompted people to leave a comment and was getting some great engagement initially.

Post 1: Link to article, limited engagement

Post 2: Photo, existing engagement

I spent $5 on each one. At this point in time Binkd had 1,500 fans and normally saw a 300-400 people saw this metric on everything we posted. We also managed to get 2-5 likes per post with maybe 1-2 comments per post, a few would slip by with no comments.

Note: You can’t start a promoted post if you have a fan base of under 400 fans. (when we checked on the 2012-07-29)

What Happens When You Start A Promoted Post?

1. Like any ad, it first needs to be reviewed by Facebook before being accepted. Depending on when you try to start it, it can start within 30 minutes or a few hours.
2. It starts being promoted and accrues costs as per a normal ad. This means that the $5 is a budget for the ad spend, not that you just spent $5.
3. You will see the reach, statistics and total cost of the ad spend thus far.
4. It will run for up to 3 days or until the ad budget is spent.
5. The amount you spend for the reach is based on performance of your post. The more engagement the more people you will reach for a lower cost.

Results

When a promoted post has completed it’s ad spend or time limit, it changes to Promotion Complete and you can see the results. You can see the results during the promotion as well.

Post 1: Link to article, limited engagement

Comments: 4; Likes: 11; Seen By:1,837

Post 2: Photo, existing engagement

Comments: 78; Likes: 17; Shares: 83; Seen By:3,814

What We Learned?

As you can see from both promoted posts, the boost in views, clicks, likes and comments all increased. The great thing about the statistics is they are purely what happened because of the promoted post. Each link click, comment or view gained in those statistics was due to the ad spend.

The link to the article gained an additional 81 clicks. Directly, I paid 6 cents per view of my article and high quality traffic too. Now that is some good value traffic. StumbleUpon charge 5 to 25 cents per view and that is low quality traffic from my experiences. This doesn’t include the additional shares and engagement I may have gotten from Twitter or other social networks as a result.

Tip #1: Make sure your post is getting good engagement before promoting it. This way you can have greater assurance it will perform.

Tip #2: Photo’s work great with engagement but don’t bring in any views to your site. Use Photo’s if your main aim is to increase engagement and likes.

Tip #3: Great source of quality traffic. Use promoted posts instead of StumbleUpon. The results are FAR better.

Tip #4: Make sure it is done when you get the most engagement on your posts, which may be the weekend or a particular day of the week. Engagement drives greater views.

Is It Worth It?

Yes.

1. I saw my fan count increase however I can not definitively confirm the numbers of this caused by the promoted post.
2. I managed to engage with fans who hadn’t previously engaged.
3. I saw really cheap traffic and high quality traffic to an article I wrote.
4. I will now appear in more news feeds organically, however I can not confirm any direct statistic on this.

As always, test and measure. Give promoted posts a go, I will certainly be delving deeper into them. Are you willing to give it a try?

Bonus Stats

Want to know more about your promoted post? Go into your Ad Manager and look for your promoted post campaign. It will contain some more great insights.

Guest Post: Sookie Shuen is the community manager at Tomorrow People, a leading UK inbound marketing consultancy who provides free advice and updates through a five step inbound marketing methodology. You can also find her on Google+ and Twitter.

LinkedIn

1. Complete your personal profile

Setup and complete a personal profile. Be very thorough and provide a lot of information in your LinkedIn profile. The more complete your profile, the easier it will be for people to find you through search engines. Make sure your summary is complete and include a professional photo of yourself to increase your credibility. Add skills to your profile to highlight your expertise.

2. Promote your LinkedIn profile

Add a hyperlink to your LinkedIn profile in your email signature, and post it on your business cards.

3. Grow and monitor your network

Import your existing contact lists from your e-mail client to find out which of your contacts are already on LinkedIn. You should regularly scour through your existing contacts for people you might want to connect with.

4. Engage with your connections through LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn allows members to join 50 groups. Join groups with a high membership. Joining groups that are related to your industry or other small business matters is also a great way to make new connections.

5. Get recommendations

One way to build trust is to build a list of LinkedIn recommendations. Recommendations are the most looked for feature when viewing a new profile. Ensure you request LinkedIn recommendations from happy customers willing to provide testimonials.

6. Integrate your blog feeds into LinkedIn

To sync your LinkedIn and blog RSS feed, by adding the BlogLink application on LinkedIn and add it into your profile. It will automatically take your profile’s website links and display it under the application section.

Facebook

1. Ask questions

This is one of the easiest ways of engaging with people on Facebook: ask questions. People love to talk about themselves and offer their thoughts – and the more comments and “Likes” you get, the better your post will do.

Keywords such as “where”, “when”, “would and “should” see the highest number of engagement on Facebook. “Would”, in particular, drives spikes in “Likes” due to fans using “Like” as a way of voting “yes” on a question.

2. Interact and engage

When people write comments on your posts or wall, you should contribute to the discussion to maintain user engagement. The longer a thread is, the higher it will rank in your fans’ Facebook news feeds.

3. Incorporate wall sapplets

Instead of just posting items with text, vary the material and incorporate interactive components (known as sapplets).

This could include polls or coupons, which will prompt your fans to engage with your status updates directly in the news feed, beyond standard “Likes” and comments.

4. Incorporate relevant photos

Rather than just telling your fans about your products and services, why not show them?

Relevant photos will attract people to your posts – people aren’t generally interested in reading through long text updates, but they love immediate content such as photos. Facebook has assigned a higher weight value to photos than to other types of content, so photos will keep you in people’s news feeds.

Why not post images to introduce fans to your company’s employees, or show them how things work behind the scenes?

5. Relate to current events

You can post questions or state your stance on pertinent issues (but again, be careful!), as this could encourage fans to engage with you and get a discussion going. Ask people what they think about breaking news, celebrity gossip, sports or other topics – this could lead to more traffic.

6. Incorporate videos

Everyone loves interactive content – and video is one of the best strategies a brand can use to draw attention. Videos can be played within the news feed, so users aren’t redirected away when they start playing a clip.

Be sure to keep your videos short (to keep people’s attention) and set expectations within the text to tell your fans what the clip is all about.

For example, you could use videos to show people how to best use your products/services – why not offer them a tutorial?

7. Include links within posts

As a tool for sharing and spreading information, Facebook is an obvious place for you to post links.

Encourage people to interact with your brand by posting links that users will find valuable or interesting. This will encourage people to share the link with their friends, spreading your brand and driving engagement.

8. Be explicit in your posts

Not explicit as in XXX content or swearing, explicit by telling people exactly what you want them to do. In many cases, publishing content that you think might generate traffic isn’t always enough to get the results you want. Instead, be explicit and explain to your users exactly what action you want them to take.

For example: “Click here and use our special tool to post to your wall”.

Twitter

1. Hashtags

You should familiarise yourself with this symbol (i.e., #) and make it your friend. Put this hash tag in front of a keyword or your company website and Twitter will convert these hash tagged words into searchable keywords. What does this mean for you? Anyone searching for something can find all tweets containing your hash tagged word in a single location, thus making it easier for them to find your tweets even if they’re not one of your followers. Search the database for hash tagged questions pertaining to your business or topics of your expertise and connect with these followers.

2. Engage with your followers

Simply sending out tweets and not responding to your followers will get you nowhere. It’s important to respond to those that tweet at you and answer any questions they might have. Each time you interact with your followers, make sure it’s a personalised message. No one wants to feel like their receiving a mass tweet. If they feel your message is sincere and they like what you have to offer, the chances of them retweeting your information is even greater, thus ultimately exposing your business to more followers.

3. Combine your platforms

Use applications like Twitterfeed.com or Hootsuite to syndicate your blog with your Twitter account. This then helps you save time rather than having to tweet something about your new blog post.

4. Update your profile

Although most of your followers are only reading your tweets and not your bio, it’s important to have a profile in place that’s up-to-date and professional. Think of it as an extension of your brand. Potential new followers and customers will be checking out your profile to see what you’re about before hitting the golden “Follow” button.

5. The power of a list

A Twitter list is basically a compilation of followers, grouped together. You can use these lists to your advantage by promoting and rewarding customers. How? Try creating a list comprised of all your valued customers and reward those on the list.

6. Keep track

It’s important to track your followers and identify whose really paying attention to your tweets. You can do so by tracking retweets, clicks, messages and hashtag mentions. This will give you the opportunity to engage with your loyal followers and maintain these relationships.

7. Ask questions

Get feedback from your followers by asking the right questions. Find out what you’re doing right, what you need to work on and what they want more of. This shows not only that you’re listening, but can provide you with valuable insights about your followers and consumers.

8. Tweet about others

You don’t always need to talk about yourself and your company. It’s important to integrate other’s ideas and links into your tweets. Retweet what your followers have tweeted, share their links and let your followers know what you find interesting about a particular tweet. This lets your followers know that you’re human and are interested in what they have to say as well. Not to mention it’s a great way to build and expand your community.

9. Customer Service

Create an account in which users can tweet questions about products or services to you directly. This allows you to interact with your consumers and provide them with something of value

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“As a small business owner, I know the disappointment when the results from a promotion come back and are not what you expected. You did what others had done, you honed your marketing techniques, spent lots of money, put in a vast amount of effort and still ended up with a promotion that lacked great results.”

Here Is What Happens

If every fan is worth $2 to you (as an example), then the marketing agency created $20,000 of value and the small business made $40 of value. Yes, I realize the small business got 20%, I feel sympathetic toward the small business, but in the end the small business still lost and the marketing agency won.

The Obvious But Wrong Conclusion

I imagine you are thinking, well hey, they had 10,000 fans and a $10,000 prize of course they were going to do well. There is some truth to that but it’s not what you think.

The marketing agency beat you on knowledge, prize selection and economies of scale. They know what their fans want, they had more options to pick a better prize and 10% of a bigger number gives them more room to run lower performing strategies and still come out ahead.

If you don’t have a $10,000 and 10,000 fans how do you get to profit from a promotion?

1. Compete On Non-Scalable Actions

Large audiences cause a large stir online, make things go viral and boost your marketing efforts without you being involved. But you don’t have that scale yet and as such you should stop following what the big brands are doing. You can compete on non-scalable actions that they can’t do, but are so much more valuable to your audience than what the big brands can deliver.

Let’s examine that. One simple example that I used to do in the early days of Binkd is say, “everyone post your website address and I will review it for SEO or Conversion Rate Optimization”, as this is an area I have had much success in, currently and in the past. As such I managed to boost my page from 100 fans to over 500 within a few days. It took me almost 12 hours to get through everyone’s site. It was hard work but didn’t cost me a dime.

As a positive side effect I also got to know my fans, started the relationship building and invested my time into helping others succeed. A win all around and something a fan page with 1 million fans could not hope to accomplish without significant cost.

2. Prize With An Emotional Response

Contests are fun! How about an iPad! That sounds great, I can imagine sitting on my couch browsing the web, chatting on Facebook. [1] How about a mini cooper? How awesome would that be driving around town in a fun sporty little car. How about some SEO services from a company you don’t know… How exciting would that be? Yeh, not much.

Sometimes your products aren’t too exciting. Large companies spend millions on making their products exciting. Use their brand recognition and trust to get people over the line in entering your contest by using their products. If your contest prize isn’t exciting, your response rate won’t be either. If your product isn’t exciting, choose something that is.

3. Build Your Fan Base First, In Other Ways

Now this seems strange. Don’t you run promotions to get fans? Yes you do but sometimes certain types of promotions are just not meant for you.

On smaller fan bases, the first thing I recommend is the non-scalable actions I mentioned. Purely the best way to go to start out.

Next, joint ventures and cross promotion is an absolute must. I have been browsing YouTube recently, finding some amazing talent such as Lindsey Stirling. Lindsey then collaborates on songs with others. From a collaboration I then found Megan Nicole, then Salt Lake Productions and so on. Collaboration on content, e.g. setting up a weekly post arrangement with another blog. You will drastically build both of your fan bases. Then start spreading out to other blogs. Work together, no one ever gets successful working alone.

Communicate in LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups or industry forums. Where does your target market hang out? If you aren’t there, why not? Be open and learn as much from them as you will share in knowledge with them.

Now go out and build your fan base and good luck! Feel free to ask me any questions below.

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[1] For anyone who actually knows me, they will know that Apple is not welcome in my home. My wife want’s an iPad and I said if one ever came into our house the first thing it would do is print divorce papers. (this is all said jokingly of course)

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