Free Traffic Tips

Hey, You're New Here! We love new people.

Please do us the honor of returning. You can subscribe by RSS feed, or get updates by email. We also welcome your feedback on the posted information. When filling out the form, don't forget to leave your link and your first name.

My back is in horrible shape today so this has gotta be short. I haven’t got good at adding links using Dragon yet. I’ll write a full series of articles later, hopefully early Friday before my hands gets swollen, with links, and apps, and all that.

Facebook, at its most basic level, is what it sounds like. In the olden days before the Internet, when I was just a wee girl, a facebook was a book with photographs in it, meant to help people on campus get to know each other, from alumni and staff to students and teaching faculty. If you know someone on Facebook, that’s reason enough to join.

Yes, like AOL was, it is a “walled garden”, meaning it’s a closed network where the general public can’t see what you’re up to - you have to be a member to get beyond faces, or to interact with the faces you see.

Sometimes, privacy is a good thing, yes?

People present a different side to themselves when the doors are closed, when they can control who is observing what they do.

And this is what is wonderful about Facebook. You get to know people on a more personal level than you would with email. You can learn what their interest are, and see how they interact. I’ll get into more details about the tools in Facebook that actually make this possible later on.

Right now, here’s a quick list of what makes Facebook the place to be right now.

1. You can be yourself more, and still be professional.

   There are ways to say things on Facebook that aren’t exactly risqué, but that you wouldn’t put on your blog, either, due to audience conflicts or content compatibility issues.

2. It’s easier and faster to get to know people you admire.

   There are many people whose content I enjoy, that I’d like to get to know better, in a deeper way than commenting on their blog would allow, but is not as intrusive as random emailing or calling them on the phone out of the blue.

   Facebook allows me to find and talk to those people, and soak up a whole different batch of their wisdom than the public at large gets to see.

   So if you find out that someone you admire is on Facebook and they aren’t yet overwhelmed with noise, get on and Friend them before their list goes over 100 - that seems to be the point at which the noise has the potential to overwhelm the signal.

3. It helps you establish common ground to facilitate deeper bonds when networking.

   You have a lot more leverage to introduce yourself to someone if you participated in several of the same discussions and are interested in the same things. With a blog you have a fleeting connect until someone comments repeatedly.

   I mean, honestly, how many blogs do you visit every single day, of the ones that are in your reader?

   Facebook has a system that reminds me to care for and feed my relationships with people in a way that a blog doesn’t. When you bump into someone enough within this remnder system, you’ll want a way to connect to each other more often.

4. It’s intimate.

   This point can’t be overstated. Facebook feels like a bunch of small gatherings, even when there’s a conversation in a big group taking place among hundreds of people.

   This makes people feel comfortable, when they’re comfortable they relax, when they relax, they’re more open. Meeting colleagues, potential clients and your favorite gurus is a completely different experience than when you meet them in a more public part of the Net - for better or for worse, you’ll often get the most accurate version of a person you can online.

5. Facebook friends are more likely to help spread your content.

   In the past week that I’ve been more active than usual on Facebook, I’ve been included in Scoble’s linkblog, which led to getting on the first page of Sphinn.

   I didn’t even know he read my content, we’re really only Facebook and Twitter friends, it’s not like I know the guy, though Facebook makes it feel like I do.

   I also have had more of my other content either replied to or submitted to social news sites by people not on my team than in just about any othe community I’ve ever particpated in.

6. You can display your expertise instead of just talking about it.

   It’s one thing to get compliments by peers, or to be published in a prestigous online publication because of somethng you wrote - in fact, it’s a great thing. A wonderful enhancement to that is when a potential client sees you edified by one of your peers. It’s extremely powerful, because it happens in real time.

7. Many of the activities you flit around the Web doing can be accessed from within Facebook, which can help organize and simplify your day.

   I can Twitter, Jaiku, share blog posts I like, and do a LOT of other social media related things that are imperative to my business from within Facebook. Of course, I don’t need to have Facebook to do this. It just makes it easier and more fun.

   So what happens to me when Facebook is down? The same thing that happens to me when Google is down. I don’t rely on Google for ALL my traffic, and in the same way I don’t rely on Facebook for access to my friends, social networking, etc. The part of the online world that gets pulled into Facebook is still retained on the outside of the garden - ie, I can still Twitter from the Twitter page if I like.

8. Facebook brings you 30 million potential people for you to market to - Without Necessarily Actively Marketing to Them.

   Facebook is not a place to spam your link and people who do are mostly ignored, and occasionally chastized. Yet, even though I have not done one single thing to market myself on Facebook, I’ve got a whole new audience stream from it.

   No, really, besides doing the best three things that can get people from my Facebook profile to my web page, I have done zero marketing on Facebook - and yes, there are ways to market on Facebook besides networking, I just haven’t used any of them.

   And yet I get constant traffic.

9. It feels like a fun waste of time but it can actually double as highly productive time spent on your online business.

   I know I don’t have to explain to you why feeling like you’re goofing off, when you’re growing your business, is a good thing.

10. The additional stream of traffic I get to my blog from Facebook is more interactive.

    With only 52 friends and one network able to see my full profile - the people who come here from there are more likely to reply to posts, and they leave deep conversationsl responses. Makes sense when you think about it - traffic from a more interactive community is more likely to… um… interact.

11. You’ll find all kinds of long lost friends.

    There are people I haven’t heard from, literally since college, that I found again through Facebook. It made my eyes mist up to see some of them around again, and doing well. That’s the best present I could ever get from being online and it was totally free.

Thanks, Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook team!