Douglas Newby is one of my long-time students who had zero (0) fans for his FaceBook fan page last September (2009).  As of the date of this post he has well over 48,000 fans, each of which contributes to his search engine rankings.  Here’s how he did it and how you can explode your fan base without spending a dime.  NOTE: if you already have a fan page and want to learn the secret of explosively growing your fan base for no cost without having to read this whole article, just go to www.FaceBook.com/OnlineDominance and click the “Cool Tools!” tab.

Personal Profile vs. Fan Page

There are two primary ways you can represent yourself on FaceBook:

1. Personal Profile – everyone who has a FaceBook account has a profile page.  This is your “home base” for all your friends and family to connect with you in a personal way on personal (i.e. not business) matters.  While how you grow and manage your “friend base” is a topic for another post, suffice it to say it doesn’t even come close to helping your business as the next way.
2. Fan Page – sometimes also referred to as your business page. This is where you try to attract and interact with people who are part of your target market or at least connected to it in some way.  Now this next part is very important:  The more targeted fans you have, the more Google will see you as being relevant and important in your field of real estate expertise.  And this translates to significant gains for your search engine rankings.  For example, Douglas Newby is essentially a one-man shop in Dallas, yet his site consistently out-ranks those of companies in his area with 1,000 or more agents.

To create a Fan page in FaceBook simply go to www.facebook.com/pages/create.php and follow the simple steps.  Now there are some things you might want to do jazz it up so it looks attractive and engaging.  There are plenty of articles written about this that go into more depth (just Google “How do you create a fan page on FaceBook”).

Once created, Facebook will give your fan page an innocuous looking URL that no one would ever remember.  However, once you have at least 25 fans, you can get your own URL that is tied to your brand.  This is crucial that you do this ASAP!!  Get your friends and family to become fans so you hit your 25 fan threshold as quickly as possible.  Then go to NameChk.com to see if your intended name (i.e. brand name) is still available on nearly every social media portal on the Net.  If so, grab it immediately on FaceBook, Twitter and YouTube at the very least.

Growing Your Fan Base

Douglas Newby did something rather clever to build his fan base from 25 to about 2,000 in a short period of time.  He simply created a FaceBook ad targeted to people on FaceBook who are interested in modern architecture.  His ads were set up as Pay-Per-Click (PPC) which means if they clicked on his ad, they automatically became a fan.  Keep in mind however, this method is not free and each fan you bring in this way costs you money.  Once he hit the 2,000 mark, his fan page went wildly viral and started growing exponentially by word of mouth from his initial base.  The reason his fan base grew so quickly after that is a) his content is extremely interesting to his target market, and b) there are millions of people all over the world that are interested in fine modern architecture.

Here are several ways you can grow your fan base without spending money:

• Send emails to your clients and prospects suggesting that they become a fan;
• Place a “Become a Fan!” widget on your Websites and blogs.

While these methods may add marginally to your fan base, don’t expect rapid growth this way.  The key to explosively growing your fan base consists of two parts: 1) make sure you have something of extreme value in the eyes of your target market, and 2) well, it will have more impact if I demonstrate it for you —just go to www.FaceBook.com/OnlineDominance and click the “Cool Tools!” tab and you will instantly see how this second part works :0)

You will find that taking the time to aggressively grow your targeted fan base will have a dramatically positive impact on your online bottom line.  There is simply nothing more powerful in marketing than having a bunch of raving fans…