Brent Sampson: CEO of Book Publishing & Marketing Firm OutskirtsPress.com

Continuing our topic from the past couple of weeks: Now you have your creative content designed for your Facebook welcome page, and you have your HTML code containing all the elements within a 520 pixel wide table.  The next step is adding a Facebook “app” to your page to enter the HTML.

There are several apps that do this. Some companies even create “easy” ways to do this and charge monthly subscription fees for them.  In those cases, you can usually skip the HTML portion that I discussed yesterday, because what those companies are charging for is the ease with which they allow you to do your welcome page.  Time and knowledge is worth money, so there’s nothing wrong with what they’re doing.  But this series of posts is designed to help you do it yourself for free.

The app we use for our Outskirts Press Facebook page is the “Static HTML : iframe tab.”  Installing it to your page is as easy as:

1. Be sure you are logged in to Facebook.
2. Find the Static HTML’s Facebook page by clicking here:
3. Click on the blue ”Add Static HTML to a page” button.
4. Voila, that app has been added to your page.
5. Return to your page on Facebook
6. Click on the “Welcome” link along the left-column menu.

You have to be logged-in as the administrator of your page. If you are, when you click on the “Welcome” link you’ll see two blank fields in which you can enter content. The top field is labeled “Enter your content here” and this is where you cut n paste your HTML code from yesterday — or your own HTML code if you prefer.  The bottom field is labeled [Optional] Fans-only content and this is where you add content that is only visible for people who have “liked” your page.   After you have entered your contet, preview it and save it.

Now, whenever a non-administrator clicks on that Welcome link, they’ll see your brand new Welcome page content.  How, then, do you get new visitors who have not yet “liked” your page to see your Welcome screen first instead of your wall when they come to your page?  That’s the topic of tomorrow’s post…

For the past several weeks I’ve been discussing the steps for creating a landing page, or “welcome page” on Facebook. I’ve broken it down into two parts – the creative component, which I covered last week and the week before, and the technical component, which I’m going to cover this week. The technical component consists of three parts:

1) The HTML formatting of the welcome page. I’ll discuss this today
2) The Facebook app. I’ll discuss that tomorrow
3) Setting Facebook settings so they utilize the app. I’ll discuss that on Friday.

See the previous posting for an idea of what our current Facebook Welcome page looks like for Outskirts Press, or click here to go to our Facebook page and you will see our Welcome page if you haven’t already liked us. That graphic is actually a composite of 6 graphics, put back together again with HTML. The previous postings have explained the reasoning for that. So, here’s the actual HTML:

<table width=”520″ cellpadding=”0″ cellspacing=”0″>   <tr>     <td colspan=”2″><img src=”TOP IMAGE HOTLINK” width=”520″ height=”125″></td>   </tr>   <tr>     <td width=”75″ rowspan=”4″ valign=”top”><img src=”SIDE IMAGE HOTLINK” width=”75″ height=”350″></td>     <td><img src=”YEAR IMAGE HOTLINK” width=”446″ height=”100″></td>   </tr>   <tr>     <td><img src=”JAN IMAGE HOTLINK” width=”446″ height=”100″></td>   </tr>   <tr>     <td><img src=”FEB IMAGE HOTLINK” width=”446″ height=”100″></td>   </tr>   <tr>     <td><img src=”BOTTOM IMAGE HOTLINK” width=”446″ height=”50″></td>   </tr> </table>

You’ll notice two things when looking at this HTML table coding. The first is that the width parameter is set for 520 pixels across. That is the optimal width for a Welcome page graphic for Facebook. Or even if you’re planning on incorporating both text and graphics, and even a form, the entire width of all your content should not exceed 520 pixels.  The Welcome app uses an “iframe” tag, and once the content starts to exceed 520 pixels across, your users may start to see vertical scrolling bars (not optimal or aesthetically pleasing).

The second thing you’ll notice is that the actual image hotlinks have been removed, although I bolded their location so you can easily replace them with your own graphics. The width and height parameters of each graphic remain.  Simply hotlink those images to their location on your company’s server, and Facebook will pull them into the Welcome page as it loads the HTML. Voila! Graphic Facebook Welcome page.

Tomorrow we’ll talk about how to add the Facebook app to your profile or company page to make a Welcome page for your HTML…. stay tuned.

Here’s the last part of our first phase of discussing the Facebook Welcome page – the creative component.  Over the last six posts, I have focused on specific elements of our current Facebook Welcome page for our Outskirts Press Facebook page at http://facebook.com/outskirtspress.  The elements were “cut up” to make for faster loading and faster redesign.  Then, within HTML, you put all the elements back together again and when a new visitor comes to our Facebook page they see this:

So beginning next week we’ll talk about exactly what the HTML looks like that forms this graphic, and exactly HOW Facebook visitors come to this welcome page (rather than directly to our wall, for instance) when they enter our Facebook URL into their browser.

But in the meantime, here’s a little known fact.  Did you know it’s not necessary to actually like a company to see their wall content, even if they have a Welcome page like this that is almost implying “Liking” them is a requirement?   If you come across a welcome page like this, and don’t necessarily want to “like” the page, but DO want to see what’s on their wall, you can just navigate to their wall from the left-hand column navigation links. 

To combat that little-known fact,  I’ll also show you how you can specifically create content that ONLY your fans/friends can see.  Stay tuned…

There’s only one main graphic element remaining to be discussed as we talk about the current Outskirt Press Facebook welcome graphic and its creative elements. The creative component is “phase 1″ of a 3-4 week series about how to creatively design a “Facebook Welcome Page” and then how to technically create it within Facebook. We’re almost done with the creative part.  In fact, there’s only one more graphic left. (Well, there are actually two, but the last graphic is just a small element to complete the very bottom part of the vertical banner.). Tomorrow I’ll reveal the whole Facebook welcome graphic in its entirety,  Of course, you’re welcome to cheat by going straight to our Facebook Page and, if you’re not a fan/friend, yet, you’ll see our Welcome page.   

Our Welcome graphic is composed of rolling monthly opportunities, promotions, incentives, or perks. We discussed the general giveaway, concerning the Barnes & Noble NOOK last week, and we discussed January’s event (Fandemonium Volume 2) yesterday.   Our graphic will show two months at a time.  That means, on February 1, the January graphic will go away, February will move “up” and the March monthly event or announcement will drop neatly into place.  One general suggestion to keep in mind when it comes to incentivizing Facebook links is to KEEP giving your friends/fans valuable promotions or content above and beyond whatever prompted them to join in the first place.   Many of our current fans “liked” us on the chances they would win an Amazon Kindle last Christmas.  Only one could win.  So what do you do, as a business, an entrepreneur, a marketer, or an author, to keep those fans from “unliking” you once the giveaway is over?   You keep giving them value.  In our case, we kept the giveaway going, and even upped the stakes for a NOOK, but we also gave them a chance to publish for a free in a Facebook anthology.

And, in February, we’re giving them the chance to win a free Apple iPad2:

We don’t reveal too much more than that in our Facebook Welcome graphic — just enough to whet their appetites and hopefully get them to “like” us, if they haven’t already - or to get those who have already “liked” us to stick around for a couple weeks on Facebook.  By that time, hopefully, they’ll have come to see our value as a book publishing and marketing firm and we’ll have earned their business when they’re ready to publish.

And that, in short, is an example of how you can use Facebook to build relationships with your potential clients/customers, regardless of whether you are a start-up, a corporation, or a published author.

Over the course of last week I started covering the topic of creating an easily-modifiable Facebook Welcome graphic and dividing it into sections. I showed three elements of our current Facebook Welcome graphic. Element one (the top element) contained instructions for “liking” our page (since liking the page is the number one point of a Welcome page graphic).  Directly underneath this top element was a graphic element devoted to our ongoing incentive, this one for a free Barnes & Noble NOOK. And to the left of that element was the third element, a vertical banner holding the graphic “together” aesthetically. That left three remaining graphics, all of which we’ll cover this week.

Outskirts Press is devoted to making 2012 an exciting year for our Facebook friends, and to that end we’re planning on doing a special event, promotion, or announcement in each month of 2012.  So, in addition to incentivizing links and promoting larger giveaways, our Welcome Page is designed to allow us to mention each of those monthly “perks” as they come up.  So, naturally, the next graphic we needed for our Welcome graphic was for January.

Last January, we solicited poems and short stories from our Facebook fans to compile into a Facebook anthology that we called Fandemonium (our fans voted on the title).  The royalties go to The American Red Cross. The anthology was such a big success that this year we decided to do it again, so the focus of our “January” portion of our Facebook Welcome graphic is devoted toward mentioning this opportunity:

So, after seeing how the HTML tables for the Welcome graphic look in the previous posting, you can see how and where this graphic element plays a part in the entire image.

All last week, after announcing the upcoming anthology in more detail on our blog, we started receiving submissions to our wall for Fandemonium Volume 2.  We opened up the submissions for one week, ending Sunday night.  Not surprisingly, since we have nearly 10 times as many friends on Facebook this year, we received way more submissions, too. Now that the submissions are closed, the manuscript is being compiled from among all the submissions and we’ll continue to keep our Facebook community up-to-date. The Anthology is a fun, fast, free way that writers who are new to Outskirts Press can experience the thrill of seeing their work in a professionally-produced publication for sale throughout the Internet and available for order just about anywhere that sells books.

We don’t “do” this anthology to make money (after all, even the royalties go to The American Red Cross, which is the charity our Facebook community voted for with Fandemonium Volume 1).  But, from a business perspective, it is an effective marketing exercise to build relationship with new authors.  So if you’re able to create some excitement for Facebook friends, give to a worthy charity, AND market your business in a way that has a positive ROI, what’s the downside? Not much.  And perhaps that’s why we’re doing a second one.   Thank you to everyone who contributed!

And tomorrow we’ll talk about what we have coming in February and how that fits in to our Facebook Welcome Graphic…

Over the past week I’ve displayed two graphic elements of our new Facebook Welcome page for 2012, which incentivizes “likes” for our Outskirts Press Facebook page.  We’ve talked about the advantages of “cutting” up the welcome graphic, not only for speed of loading, but also for the efficiency with which it allows you to update elements.  This was particularly important for us, since we plan on updating the Welcome graphic every month with new monthly opportunities, perks, and events.  In fact, the top-most element of our Welcome page (the one that actually asks for the “like”) outlines those benefits:

Now, the trick to making such a graphic not LOOK like a graphic that is horizontally cut up for efficient marketing purposes is to put a vertical element into the design.  You can see the start of that element in the graphic above, that curved gold… “thing.”   Here’s the rest of that element, which runs down the side of the whole Welcome graphic:

And now the pieces are starting to fall into place. Let’s see what we have so far when we put these three elements (including the first one I showed on Tuesday) together in HTML. I’ll talk about how to do that when we get into the next portion of this series, the technicalities of creating a Welcome Page, but for the sake of this post, I’ll show the HTML tables so you can start to see how the elements fit together into a cohesive whole:

In this fashion you can also see the three blank table cells that still require graphics. And we’ll discuss those next week, which really bring the plans for our Outskirts Press efforts on Facebook into sharper focus.

This week we’ve been discussing the creative design of making a Facebook welcome page. Yesterday I showed one of the “pieces” of our current Welcome page for our Outskirts Press page on Facebook.  Now let’s talk about the two most important elements of a successful Facebook Welcome page:

1) Understanding Facebook policies as it relates to incentivizing links
2) Graphically showing your visitors exactly what you want them to do when they see your Welcome page on Facebook.

Let’s discuss #1 first: Facebook allows you to incentivize links, provided all new and past friends are eligible to win the same prize/award.  So, for instance, you cannot reward only new “likes” with the offer.  Facebook has a specific posting in their FAQ about this exact topic, which is here: https://www.facebook.com/help/search/?q=free+for+liking+page and it says:

Is incentivizing Liking an app allowed?

Yes, you can provide special rewards to users who Like your app’s page. These rewards must be available to new and existing users. For example, users should not be immediately rewarded for clicking the Like button (i.e., “click here for 10 bonus points” is not permitted). Your messaging should clearly indicate that all users who Like your app/site are eligible to receive the offer or reward (e.g., “Free gifts are available to users who Like our Page” and “Users who Like our app/site are eligible for special offers.”).

 

So anyone who has “liked” your page (before or after the incentive) needs to have the same eligibility for the reward. You cannot just reward the new “likes.”  Easy enough.

 

The second most important part of the welcome screen is showing visitors HOW to “like” you, which is best done with a graphic that is pointing to the actual “Like” button on Facebook. In our case, this is the very top element of our Welcome Graphic:

 

 

Again, just like the graphic I showed you yesterday, this graphic element looks a little odd all by itself, and that’s because the full graphic has been “cut-up” to accommodate both faster loading and more efficient manipulation when we want to update elements of the welcome page.  Then we put it all back together in HTML. Don’t worry, all this will come more into focus as we continue putting the pieces into place… and we will continue that next time…

How did Outskirts Press increase its Facebook friends by 40% in one month? By “incentivizing links” and using a “Facebook Welcome page” to promote that incentive. In our case, we encouraged visitors to our Facebook page to “like” us for an opportunity to win either a free Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble NOOK, or Apple iPad 2. The more “likes” we received by Christmas, the better the prize.   We unlocked the first tier (Kindle), but not the second.  So with the start of 2012 we knew we wanted to continue the opportunity for our Facebook friends to still win that free Barnes & Noble NOOK.  Therefore, that opportunity became an element of our new welcome page that we unveiled on Facebook on January 1st.

On it’s own, this graphic doesn’t look very impressive.  But don’t worry, I’ll show you the whole thing soon; or you can cheat and look at our Facebook Welcome page now to see how this element plays its role in the Facebook Welcome page as a whole.

By designing this welcome page graphic in “pieces” we are easily able to swap out elements without having to redesign the entire graphic each time. This is particularly efficient (and cost effective) when using rolling monthly promotions and events like we plan to do in 2012.  When January ends and February begins, we won’t have to create a whole new graphic. Instead, we will only have to create a new month.  All this will become clear as we continue this series next time, and more of the pieces fall into place… stay tuned.

Last month, Outskirts Press added approximately 1,500 new Facebook friends to our company Facebook page. Sure, when compared against Facebook pages boasting millions of “likes” this isn’t very impressive, but when one considers that we had approximately 2,500 “likes” at the beginning of December, adding over 1500 new friends in 31 days is pretty good.  At least, I thought so…

How did we do it? 

Over the next several weeks, I’m going to show you, by taking what we did in December, modifying it for our current Facebook efforts in 2012, and detailing the exact steps you can take on your own Facebook page.  Granted, many of these steps may be more applicable for a branded company page than for a personal profile; but if you’re an author, you ARE a brand (or should be), so these are steps to pay attention to, also. And even if you already have a Facebook Welcome page, this will be a series worth reading since I’ll reveal some helpful tips to systemize it, along with a technical trick very few people know to keep your welcome page from always showing up, even for those people who have already “liked” you.

There will be two parts to this series of posts about Facebook Welcome Pages. The first part, which we will begin tomorrow, begins with the discussion of the “creative” element to Welcome pages. Then, after we cover that portion, we’ll continue on to the technical side.  Both portions are equally important. After all, it doesn’t matter if you know how to “do” something if you don’t have anything worth “doing.”   And right there, that’s kind of similar to book publishing, isn’t it?  It doesn’t matter how easy self publishing has become if you don’t have a good book to publish.  (Of course, that’s what ghostwriting services are for…)

See you next time for the “creative” of a Facebook welcome page…

For three weeks I have been examining the top ten funniest self-publishing contractual clauses from competitors and dissecting what the legalese means and why each clause is “funny.”  What is perhaps funniest of all is that all ten of these clauses have been from the same single competitor.

#1 Funniest Clause from the Competitor’s Contract – You acknowledge that you have no input or control over the price at which your Titles are sold.

What it means: It seems pretty clear what it means.

Why it’s funny: What’s “funny” (i.e., worrisome) is that some authors are willingly relinquishing control over their own books to such a degree.

Wouldn’t you rather publish a book with Outskirts Press, where the sixth clause in our author-friendly contract is: “AUTHORS SET THEIR OWN RETAIL PRICE to any price ending in .95 cents, provided the Retail Price exceeds the Wholesaler’s Price.”   (And between you and  me, if you don’t want your book ending in .95, it doesn’t have to).