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Recently I held a call about the biggest myths of marketing on Facebook. One myth I mentioned I see discouraging small business owners is that “Facebook alone will get you clients and customers.” This would be great if it was true of course.

Do people get clients and customers as a result of being on Facebook? Absolutely. But slapping up a profile and expecting the money to roll in is not going to happen. You might be surprised how many people end up discouraged because they’ve been on Facebook for a while and aren’t getting results. This is usually because they don’t understand how Facebook fits into their overall marketing picture.

It’s about consumers consuming what it is you are putting out there-which essentially, is content. You are gradually and steadily building momentum through relationships, word of mouth and the “know, like and trust” factor-which leads to traffic, to subscribers and eventually to sales.

Facebook is excellent for establishing expertise and credibility, for exposing your brand, boosting your visibility in front of your target market and even for market research-finding out what people need and want so that you can then go create and package those solutions for them.

Honestly, there is no faster way to create brand recognition and credibility and quickly connect to hundreds of thousands of people who are looking for what it is you offer.

So what should be one of your biggest goals? Traffic. Before you even get on Facebook, you must have a website or blog to drive people to first. You need to be able to continue to build those relationships outside of Facebook. And the best way to do that is to have a way to get people on your email list.

People don’t buy from you right off of Facebook. They also don’t buy from you the first time they visit your website, right? You have to build up that trust. But Facebook is amazing for strengthening that familiarity and credibility and for driving people to your site so they can get to know even more about what it is that you do.

The next time you get frustrated with Facebook or social media results in general, remember that there is no such thing as overnight success. But stick with it and the seeds you plant now will result in business rewards before you know it.

Web design is used as a general term to describe any of the various tasks involved in creating a web page. More specifically, it refers to jobs focused on building the front-end of a web page.

The web consists of myriad pages, presenting information using different technologies and linked together with hyperlinks. There are two basic aspects to any web page found on the Internet. The first is a presentation that the user interacts with, usually visually, while the second is a back-end that includes information for non-human browsers.

The basic markup language used to tell a browser how to present information is called the HyperText Markup Language (HTML). A stricter version of HTML is also widely used, known as eXtensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML). Using HTML or XHTML, a web designer is able to tell a browser how a web page should appear. In the last few years there has been a push towards separating the underlying structure of a web-page (using HTML) from the visual presentation of the site (using Cascading Style Sheets or CSS). This approach has a number of major benefits in both the short and long term, and is gathering popularity as time progresses.

From a technical standpoint, the act of web design can be quite difficult. Unlike more traditional print media, HTML has a number of variable factors. To begin with, not all browsers interpret HTML according to the standards created by the standard-setting body — the World Wide Web Consortium, also known as W3. This means that while one piece of web design will appear as the designer wishes it to in one browser, it may appear completely differently in another. There are numerous fixes and workarounds to try to circumvent browser-specific bugs, but it is a tenuous business at best.

Imagine telling an advertising agency that you will pay them only when you get leads from an ad. Or, perhaps you suggest paying them based on the sales that you make because of exposure of an ad. Besides having difficulty measuring these outcomes, chances are the agency will not take you seriously.

Approach a web site owner and he or she may actually consider your offer. The Internet enables you to pass this off through a marketing method called affiliate marketing – an effective way to increase your web site’s exposure, identify new customers and increase sales. According to Forrester Research, affiliate marketing is the most effective of all online marketing methods.

With an affiliate program you offer affiliates an incentive to perform a particular outcome. This outcome may be to generate customer leads for your business, increase ‘clicks’ to your site or improve sales – from a banner ad, text link, graphic or other means such as a newsletter. The incentive is usually a fee, provided as a flat rate or percentage depending on your affiliate program objectives.