Hey everbody,

I was wondering if I could get some advice on how to get off to a fast and effective start with my facebook marketing. I’ll give you a quick outline of my situation and my current goals so you can better understand where I’m coming from.

I have a self-help book on building personal leadership skills and I have a website from which I would like to sell this book. So my primary goal for my facebook marketing is to drive traffic to my website where they can purchase the book.

I currently have a basic facebook profile page and zero friends! Naturally I need friends in order to have an audience that will “see” my updates when I post them. My initial action was to search the facebook network and cherry-pick individual people with similar interests to become friends with, but I quickly found out that this process was very tedious and not a great way to leverage my time.

Then I read about facebook groups and decided to join a group and form some relationships but when I tried to search the database for groups in the “Self-Help” and “Personal Development” categories it kept returning zero results! I know there have got to be groups in those fields. Facebook is too large to not have any. What am I doing wrong? How can I properly do a search for the groups I want to join? And how can I effectively use those groups to quickly accumulate friends and have an audience to market to?

Thanks everyone for your time. If there’s anything I can do to be of service to anyone here please let me know how I can help. Also, I’m including a link to my website incase anyone wants to look it over and give me some advice. http://www.professad.com

Thanks everyone and take care, “Professa D“

With the changes Facebook has made to pages you may be better off trying to develop sales through your profile page. How many friends do you have? You could post self help tips on your fan page and share on your profile page with a comment tagging your page.

@russellallert Your idea of a contest strikes a chord with me. Others have suggested it. I wonder what would be the best way to begin to initiate such a thing. Does anyone have any suggestions. I am an artist/designer and content creater. I would be willing to network with anyone who has some ideas. @darrendouglas I like the idea of a book on building leadership. I suppose the one thing that we need is a way to present to the facebookers and tweeters without seeming to hard sell desperate.

@darrendouglas How about contacting your real live friends and asking them to be your FB friend? That is the purpose of a personal profile. Also, about search, FB search is really irritating – it does NOT return all results, it returns some that it thinks are close to your geography or linked to your friends list.

@fredericgonzalo Thanks, Frederic.

@sgsrecording Thanks!

I am glad my advice is having some good results for you.

Russ