Today I want to show you how you can convert your Facebook profile page to a fan page AND the pros and cons of doing so, based on a little experiment I did with my husband’s Facebook pages.

When Facebook opened up to the public and caught on with business owners we all began with a Facebook profile page. We all have one. Unfortunately for most of us, we were forced to mix personal use of Facebook along with business use and it made for a kind of “muddy” social media business model. No one really liked it like that. I didn’t want personal stuff from my friends pushed on my wall, and I’m sure some of my family members were like “What the heck is Lisa writing about today? We just want to hear about the kids!”

So in comes Fan Pages. Cool. We can use these for business. So now we have a profile page which if you used for business a lot, you still have a lot of those types of people sending you friend requests AND we have a fan page which up until a while ago we had a pretty good system for encouraging the “like”. With Facebook’s new timeline format for both profile and fan pages, that has changed a bit. But you either have just a profile page OR you have a profile and a fan page.

For example, if you do a search for “Lisa Angelettie Facebook”, you will see results for both my Fan Page and my profile page.

One day I accidentally ran into an article on Facebook on how to convert a profile page to a fan page and instantly became interested in what the benefits of that would be. Hey, I didn’t even know you could do that. So of course I didn’t want to experiment on myself! (LOL!) So I used my husband as a guinea pig and these are the steps that we took…

1 – Download all of your Facebook data on your profile page.

Go into the general settings of your page and you will find the link to download your personal data which will include your photos, timeline info, (see below). because once you convert to a fan page you will lose all of that data. The only data that is moved to your fan page are your friends which are now your FANS and your username. Uh, my husband was stubborn and refused to do this first step which he later regretted. So do this step!

What Personal Information is Downloaded During the Back-Up Process?

1. Personal profile information (groups, information, interests, contacts etc.)
2. Photos & videos
3. Wall posts
4. Status updates
5. Content that your friends have uploaded
6. Friend lists
7. Notes
8. Messages sent and received
9. Events that you have RSVPd for
10. Comments you have received and made on walls, photos etc.

2 – Start The Conversion (Migration) Process

When you are logged into your account, go to the migration page. You’ll come to a page that looks like this:

What information will be transferred from my profile page to my new business page?

1. Your profile photo

2. Your Friends which will now be your FANS

3. Your url/username

It’s important to understand that once you’ve completed the migration process that you will end up with a pretty blank looking timeline page. So it’s pretty important to know what you’re going to do from this point on to continue engagement and get things moving again on your page a.k.a. What’s your Facebook Marketing Strategy?

You also need to understand that if you run your profile page like a fan page already, that Facebook requires you to move to a fan page according to their terms of use. They really want to make it clear what pages are for personal use and what pages are for businesses.

Finally the migration process is permanent. You can’t click a link and go back or edit something, etc. Remember I said that:)

Okay so having said all of that, here are the pros and cons.

Benefits of Moving Your Profile Page To A Fan Page

#1 – The biggest BENEFIT I found of moving my husband’s page to a fan page is that all of his 5000 friends now automatically became FANS on his new page which is nothing to sneeze at!

#2 –  Your brand is no longer muddy or diluted. Now you can focus on promoting and doing all of your FB engagement with your fan page. Just one page.

#3 – It’s just one less thing to worry about. Switching from one profile to another, etc. You do everything under the one login now.

#4 – You’re not limited to only engaging 5000 friends like on your profile page. Now you are open to talking to a lot more people and get thousands of more likes.

Headaches of Moving Your Profile Page To A Fan Page

What Facebook doesn’t tell you is that your page is now run under a business account which limits how you can maneuver on Facebook, or rather maneuver in the way that you’re use to with a profile page.

#1 – You are definitely starting with a fresh spankin’ new fan page. No content in your timeline. Nothing! So you have to be pretty diligent about engaging other users, having conversations, and getting more content up on your timeline. You feel like you are completely starting all over again – because honestly you are.

#2 – You cannot merge your profile page into an existing fan page. At least not yet. What would have been cool for many entrepreneurs (like my hubby) who have a profile page with 5000 friends is to have migrated that page and those friends into an existing fan page. That could have easily almost doubled his fans and again he would only have had 1 page to manage.

#3 – To piggyback off of the last issue, the people who really want to migrate a profile page into a fan page are people who probably already have a fan page and are sick of having to maneuver between the two. Use both. Engage users from both. It’s a lot of work. This conversion process does not really work for people like us because all you would end up with are two fan pages. Again – more than one page to manage.

#4 – The biggest headache with this entire move was the fact that once you migrate your profile page is that you lose all functionality of many of the social media tools and apps that connect with Facebook. So for example, the Facebook iPhone app. This app along with many other social media tools connect to Facebook PROFILE accounts or personal accounts as the primary account and only to pages as secondaries. Some apps don’t work with fan pages at all. So with no primary account, the apps could not connect. This was a disaster, because my hubby makes a lot of his posts via his phone application — not online.

#5 – While you can receive messages from your fans and/or they can post on your timeline, you cannot initiate messaging because they are not your “friends”. This didn’t work for my husband because he does a lot of connecting and communicating with potential clients on Facebook while my goals on Facebook are a little different.

I want to engage with people either over the phone or via my main website email – not Facebook. The goal of my content on Facebook is to drive the friend or fan back to my site. I actually hate the messaging functionality on Facebook. With no real filters in place, it can become a nightmare, which my FB inbox is.

#6 –  If your profile page has any traction at all in the search engines then this can be a nightmare because as soon as you convert your page over, the link to your profile page in the search engines goes to a Facebook error page. I was surprised at how quickly this took effect. These were some of the “little details” that we didn’t think through before we migrated the page because my husband’s profile page currently outranks his fan pages in search (mine as you saw above is the reverse).

“So Can I Reverse This If Went Ahead And Converted My Page Without Reading All The Cons?”

The answer is yes. If you converted your profile page by “mistake” or you jumped the gun on it, you can submit an appeal to Facebook to revert your page. Just a tip, make sure that you let Facebook know that this was an accident and that you want to revert to your personal account FOR personal use only. Not business use. The reversal process took about 5 days in our case and there is limited contact from FB. You just have to keep checking your page and if and when they approve the reversal – then your profile page will simply pop back up online and in the search engines. This is what I did for my husband as ultimately the cons were too great for his business.

Need help? If you would like to schedule a complimentary 15 minute call to discuss your social media/content strategy, please schedule a call with me here. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your feedback or any Facebook conversion stories you’d like to share below.

Learn How To Easily Monetize Your Pinterest Page With Your Products, Books or Services In Under 60 Seconds…

Pinterest has been steadily climbing in popularity on the web and is now the 3rd largest social media site on the web (right behind Twitter and Facebook). That’s pretty impressive for a new kid on the block.

Now there’s another cool thing you can do on Pinterest, and that’s add your books, products, etc. with a cute little price banner across your image. Here’s how you do it in 60 seconds…

1. Identify The Items That You Want To Promote On Pinterest.

Remember that you should select items that you have good images for because that’s what Pinterest is all about –the visual appeal. You should also probably pick items that are your entry level priced products. For this example, I’m going to show you how I added a mini guide that I sell about How To Write Content That Google Loves on Amazon.

2. Add The Image Of Your Product

Add or Pin your image to Pinterest. When you add your images to Pinterest with this strategy, you are adding them to the “Gifts” category. This category is auto-filled with products by users who specify a certain price for their products in the description area.

3. Include The $ or £ Symbol In Your Description

In order to make sure that your product ends up in Pinterest’s Gifts section and that the price banner shows up across your image (like the one on mine above), you just need to make sure that you include a $ or £ symbol in your description. For example, I put $2.99 in the description area for my guide.

Make sure to add your payment links in the description and/or link area, so that buyers know how to purchase your product. Select the board category for your product and save.

And in 60 seconds you have a product up on Pinterest in front of all that daily traffic!

New to Pinterest? Read my tutorial on how entrepreneurs can get started with Pinterest

This article was written based on an article topic idea submitted by one of my weekly ezine readers. I try my best to include any and all input from my readers into my editorial calendar. So if there’s a topic you’d like to learn more about, please feel free to drop me a note over on Facebook (the fastest way I’ll see it).

How To Add More Optin Email Subscribers To Your List Using This One Super Simple Strategy…

It’s amazing how we entrepreneurs can fret over a million things when it comes to building our businesses. Did we pick the right name? Will people like what we write? What will we say during our next speaking engagement? How do we find a good virtual assistant. The list is endless. But the major issue that comes up over and over when I talk to entrepreneurs is the one we all know and love — “How can I get more people on my list?”.

I hear you loud and clear! And guess what, I have a super ninja strategy to help you do just that that will change your optin email subscriber statistics overnight. But right now I want to quickly tell you about a few facts that you need to understand when it comes to building your list…

1. You must drive traffic to your site in order to capture names for your list. The more traffic you attract, the higher your optin email subscriber rate will be. This is a numbers game. That’s why companies with lots of traffic have bigger subscriber lists.

2. In order to create this stream of traffic, let’s get real. You have to create content that is interesting, informative, engaging or entertaining that the reader wants. Content that’s worth them “following the trail” back to your site. Do you have ninja tips to share with your readers? Share some!

3. Once you start getting all this traffic, there must be a working optin form somewhere to capture the names of the readers. I like using Aweber to make this all happen, but whatever company you use it’s more important that you have an optin in place and that you’ve tested it to make sure it’s working.

Yet This Is Where A Lot Of Entrepreneurs Drop The Ball!

I bet many of you have an optin box in your site’s sidebar right? Maybe you even have one at the end of your posts. Perhaps you’ve created a cute little landing, squeeze, or entry page like the one I have over at LisaAngelettie.com, but statistically I bet that your landing page is not even your highest trafficked page. Have you checked your stats lately? Do you even know?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to have your optin email subscriber form on your #1 traffic page?

And if statistically that’s your home page, then what about your #2 page? Or #3? I bet it’s not that landing page you’ve been relying on. It’s another single page on your website, and for many people it’s their ABOUT page.

But I Don’t Want To Jump To Any Conclusions, So We’re Going To Check Your Stats And Make Sure…

1. I use Google Analytics and WordPress Stats to track all of my sites, but regardless of what tool you use to measure your site’s statistics, let’s open them up.

If you have never purposely tracked your statistics, don’t worry, your webhost probably does it for you. So for example, if I go the cpanel section of my account with Hostgator and scroll down, I can see an icon called awstats, which I can click on to see the latest stats for my site.

2. Take a look at the top 5 pages on your site and the clicks they are getting.

3. More than likely your home page is getting the most clicks. That is pretty typical.

4. Take another look to see what pages deeper in your site are “hot”.

5. Is it a single post that gets a lot of attention? Or is it your About or Start Here page?

It’s Ninja Time!

Now that you know what the top 3-5 pages are getting the most traffic on your site, it’s time to strategically place an optin form on those pages. This is what is know as getting “in front” of traffic instead of having to chase it down.

Notice how my About page has several optin email subscriber forms. That’s because based on my stats, I know that it is one of my more frequented pages. There are a few others that I identified as high traffic pages as well, and so I’m going to place an optin email subscriber form on those as well because it is a prime opportunity for me to connect with more people who are interested in what I do and be able to build a relationship with them by adding them to my list.

My Ninja Tip Super Simplified

Okay, so here is everything I just said summarized really simply:

1. Don’t just rely on the optin box on your home page. You can do better!

2. Identify your highest traffic pages using any basic statistic tool available to you.

3. Add optin email subscriber forms to those pages. Don’t be afraid to initiate the relationship:)

I guarantee you, that you will begin to see a rise in your optin email subscriber rate!

Do you have any other ninja tips on adding more subscribers to your list? Please share them with us in the comment section below or on Facebook.

Content Marketing Question Of The Week: Time Management

Question
I am relatively new to content marketing and wanted to know how much time I should dedicate to this strategy considering I have so many other things to do in my business.

Answer
I often say this when I work with clients but it is very important that you understand that content marketing at this point on the web is not only crucial but it’s mandatory. Without a foundation of content in your business, you are bound to fail. The web is fueled by content. Fresh content. So it’s important that you treat content marketing with the respect it deserves!

Carving out time to create content that your ideal prospects will want to read and share should be one of your top priorities. So carve out time for that priority as you would any other major aspect of your business. A lot!

Remember that the time spent in on content creation has a fantastic ROI.

For one hour’s worth of work and one killer article or video, you could possibly get over (and let’s be very conservative!) 200 new readers. A portion of them will convert and become subscribers to your list. Let’s say 75. Out of those 75, twelve of them really liked your next newsletter where you offered them a complimentary strategy session. They liked it so much that 7 of them booked the sessions.

Out of those 7 sessions, 3 people signed up for one of your offers. Perhaps it was two VIP Days and one 90 day client. Maybe all three joined your entry level membership program or ordered your book.

What does that income look like?

How much was one hour of your time worth to you?

Imagine if you wrote 3, 10, 100 more articles or videos? Consistently? And the same numbers applied.

What does your business look like now?

See wasn’t the time put in worth it?

Final notes – dedicate as much time to content marketing as you would any major marketing strategy in your business. I always encourage my clients to write for themselves in order to really capture the true essence and uniqueness of what makes you, well you. BUT you can always outsource things like article submissions, video editing, etc. for better time management.

Do what feels right for you and measure the results.

How much time are you spending writing content right now? Do you think it’s enough? Do you think  you spend too much time developing content? Share your thoughts with us!

How To Use SEMRush To Conduct Keyword Research

At the foundation of every piece of carefully written content on the web is research. To be more precise, keyword research. If you are a member of my training program Articology or if you’ve followed me for a while via my newsletter, you know that I talk about keyword research quite a bit and actually offer it as a premium service in my business. It’s just that important. I do it everyday.

In previous trainings, I have talked about how to conduct keyword research using free tools as well as Wordtracker and Market Samurai, but today I want to talk about a new tool that I am using called SEMRush which is a web based keyword research and analytic tool. I am LOVING this tool for a few reasons.

FIRST – I really do prefer a web based tool because I can use it anywhere and it’s not a drain on any of my computer’s resources. This is a really robust one.

SECOND – It’s really easy to use because in one click you get a variety of search results that are pretty simple to interpret because of the explanations that SEMRush provides along the way (I’ll explain more about that later).

THIRD – There is a paid and free option enabling users at any stage in their business to use the tool and reap the rewards of major keyword research.

As a little background, I became familiar with SEMRush because this tool was founded by the creators of the plugin for Firefox and Safari that so many people use called SEOQuake — so I knew that they were quite familiar with keyword analytics and looked forward to seeing what their tool had to offer. As with any new tool that I test, I am doing so for myself of course but even more importantly for my community.

BEGIN THE SEARCH

SEMRush offers both free and paid research options. For our purposes, you can do everything you need to do with a free account but as with any service will benefit from more options and more query options with the paid (pro) option.

First you can start your search and get basic keyword information by typing your keyword in the top bar choosing to get either Google or Bing results. Go with the Google results as they dominate the search results.

SEARCH OVERVIEW

You will get basic Google trend information, search volume, and the cost per click for the keyword using Adwords. If you don’t know what a specific term means, you can hover over the ? image and get a brief description. This is a great feature for the new user.

PHRASE MATCHES

The second part of your results will show something called a phrase match report. In this particular search, I researched the term “keywords” and this report includes the keyword phrases that Google found relevant to my original search term. This information opens up my options for what terms I may want to also try and rank for.

The two most important areas you need to pay attention to are the Volume numbers and the Results numbers. Volume means how many monthly searches are conducted for this keyword and Results means the number of search results (pages) that Google returned for this search term.

*So one of your goals when making a decision about what keyword is a good one is finding one that has HIGH search volume and LOW results.

If you like one of the phrase matches, feel free to click on that particular keyword to drill down your search results even further.

RELATED KEYWORDS

The next sections of your research will show related keywords. This again is to option up options for me and shows me a variety of “synonyms” or other terms that Google believes are related to my original search term. Again you are looking for terms that make sense to your research, have high volume, and low page results.

Like with keyword phrase matches above, you can click on a particular keyword to drill down your search results even further in the related keywords section.

ORGANIC RESULTS

This section of your report shows the top 20 results that appeared in a Google search for that term. So basically, who your competition is for that search term, which is very important to know. For example, look at my results below. Some of the websites that I’d have to compete with for the search term “keywords” are heavy hitters such as Google, Wikipedia, and Wordtracker. So chances are, I’m not going to rank well for that term. So that let me knows right off the bat, that I should look at other options.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, as someone who conducts keyword research on a daily basis, SEMRush is a tool that I will not only use myself but one that I feel very comfortable recommending to my community regardless of what stage you’re at in your business and keyword research experience.

Feel free to give it a whirl at: SEMRush Free Trial

Then make sure to come back to this page as I plan on digging in a little deeper on how to conduct keyword research step by step. I will post those new tutorials as I create them. Until then, feel free to ask me any questions about SEMRush or keyword research in general over on Facebook.