Showing posts with label Marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marketing. Show all posts

Friday, October 30, 2009

Custom Facebook Fan Page Part 1

Ok so I'm gonna go thru the preliminary steps... I'm gonna break this up into 3 parts this first installment will teach you how to add a clickable image to your profile side bar on the Left this is the first step in working with the Static FBML Application on facebook.

  1. Prerequisites for this Excercise is of course a Facebook fanpage
  2. Some basic knowledge of HTML... (Copy Paste is what I call basic for this excercise)
  3. Some familiarity with Photoshop and creating images for when we get to the custom landing page part. (I will be adding instructions that will be as basic as possible but I do this for a living so I may take for granted or gloss over some things.
  4. I will try to provide screen shots of what I'm doing for a visual reference

First things first go to your fan page. Depending on where you land:
If you are on the ads manager page click on pages this will bring you to the page manager...
for the majority of what we will be doing this will be where you will add widgets and applications.
I will refer to this from now on as page manager.
If you are on your actual fanpage click edit page to bring you to the page manager.
Scroll all the way down to the bottom and you will see the More Applications Box. Click the pencil in the right corner select Browse More.
(click images to make larger and not blurry!)





Next on the application screen you will see a list of applications
We want to find the Static FBML APP
Type that into the search field.

When you reach the Static FBML Page
Directly beneath the icon on the left you will see the option to add to page


Click to add to page and this box will pop up:



Your page should be listed here (as I've already added the app to my page mine isn't there) but click add to page directly across from your page. Then hit close.

Now we will return to the main page manager window. Follow the steps above to get back to the page manager.

Now here is a simple simple example of just adding a linkable image to your sidebar. From which you can build upon to add custumization to your page.

Open up a new tab: Go to etsy.com and then go to the community tab and then resources
Find the big orange circle that says find me on etsy. Click on it. A code window should open up.
Copy the code.
Now return to your facebook fan page Page Manager.
Scroll down until you see this:


click the pencil Directly across from the FBML 1 application.




Select Edit.

That will bring you to a screen that says Edit FBML...
Take the code that you copied from etsy and paste it in the LARGE BOX.
The small box at the top will be what this box will be labeled I kept it simple and put Find me on Etsy there as the tittle of my box. You can always come back and change this later.
Now the Etsy code will link out directly to ETSY. We want this to shoot out to YOUR shop.
So we will need to replace the www.etsy.com with your shop url.







Click Save at the bottom.
Then click on your page name in the upper left hand corner of your page.
Click the Boxes Tab on the tab bar on your fan page.
Your Etsy button should be there.
To move this to your profile sidebar you need to click on the pencil to the right of the button and select move to wall tab.
And TADA you have created a button that links out to your page and successfully moved it to your sidebar where it will be EASY Peasy to find.
You can do this with ANY image.
A blog badge a twitter badge anything. (check out my item of the week Badge Using this same code and just changing the img src, and the link info as we did earlier.)
You can pull in images from your blog... from your shop and link them out using the steps we just used. OR... you can create an image and upload it to your website (If you don't have one you need to get one for STEP 2 (photo sharing sites DON'T like you using their sites to upload for websites so it's best to use your own web service. Get the url for your images and replace the img src"http://team.etsy.com/images/downloads/buttons/findme.jpg" with your images url and then replace the link part with whatever you choose to link it to. This Adds so much customization to your page in just a simple step.
This same principal can be used for creating the custom Landing page for the fanpage. For that we will be using photoshop to create some simple boxes and slicing them up in photoshop and inserting all of the links there and then inserting the html code generated when you save for web and devices and dropping that in the FBML box.
If you have no idea what I just said Stay tuned Tonight or Tomorrow I will be putting up the Steps for the next half of the Lesson!
But now you know how to add custom badges and buttons to your page!!! And how to work with the FBML application.
In case you want to go crazy with this and add more go to the Page Manager and click edit on your FBML box (remember you renamed it so it won't be FBML 1 any more) scroll down to the bottom and you will see add another FBML Box click edit to add to that box. Take the steps we did earlier to add more stuff.
Cheers and have fun and I would love to see what you come up with!!!

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Crafty Marketing: or My Weekend of Marketing Madness

Ok so most Etsy Sellers have heard that the secrets to success are off Etsy marketing. Well this is a daunting task... I know for me I would personally rather stick a knife in my eye than spend a whole lot of time marketing my Shop, when I could be spending that time creating.
So I have taken a few steps into the Marketing Wilderness. I will chronicle some of that journey for you now!

Step one... I'm one of those troublesome etsy shops now where the username doesn't match the shop name DOH! I've kinda started to establish my shop. I kinda like where it's going and the awesome feedback. So I want to keep it at least temporarily. So I worked out a way to standardize all of my marketing materials. I developed my SSC logo last year and use it extensively for my Graphic businness... A strong imagery is important to branding. So I wanted to use the cool logo (see below as to how I created that), and use it as the distinguishing and recognizable brand piece. I love the idea of textures and I didn't want to just throw the logo on a background, so I put it in a frame threw up a very nice textured linen background and used a classy but modern font called advent (found for free on the internets) and Voila. Branding Material. Next I figured lets carry this imagery onto a business card. Opened up photoshop designed a custom business card using all of the afore mentioned elements, went on over to Vista Print and ordered up some cards.
Next I needed to address the website. I wanted a site that was fun, decorative and me, and yet with a simple interface. So I WIPED my old SSC site that was graphic related all flashy and illustratored out and started redesigning the site. I still need to add my graphic business to the site which will come in a few weeks when I have some down time. BUT the site presents all of the information on the Craft business and how it works and is handled. I hope to be adding more content and more detailed information on the individual products as well, BUT for now it serves it's purpose well. I highly recommend Office Live... It has GREAT features once you get familiar with how the system works... I've tried both ways and I HIGHLY recommend not using the third party design tools... I know right??? A graphic designer says to use the crappy templates... Ha Ha I took a basic element and with a bit of java and html turned it into something sweet in the SSC style! It worked out well... You just need to figure out how to trick out the Office Live templates and pretty much anything is possible... feel free to email me and I will tell you how I did everything including hooking the site up to analytics!!!
Next step was hey lets do some marketing... So I had this facebook fan page just kinda hanging out... my first step was to locate a facebook ad promo code (yes they have them and you should search for them right now) I found a code for 50 dollars in free advertising... Awesome I got my page some fans and a nice base to start with.
Next I figured generating some hits on my webpage might be kinda awesome as well, so remember earlier when I told you that I ordered business cards from Vista Print??? They have a promotion when you order you can chose to recieve a promo code for Google Ad words... which was for 50 dollars as well. I signed up all my info and ran an ad... The Ad words credit got eaten up in about 5 hours you must watch this one to make sure it doesn't go over. But I got some traffic to the site AND the Etsy Shop... Because the shop tab on my website redirects directly to my Etsy shop. Eventually I plan on having a shopping cart on my site, but for now I'm redirecting anyone interested in seeing products directly to the shop from my website. Now I can market the crap out of the website which is a url I own and I can manage traffic, tweak things as I see fit and I can control my SEO. In the Etsy forum someone once said I have my own URL that I market with a redirect to my site and I don't have to worry about what Etsy is doing cause I don't market my shop I market my website. This sounded like good advice and it makes sense! So, so far so good. Feel free to take any of these tips and run like a crazy person with them!
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