One question we are asked a lot by our clients is how do to earn fans on Facebook. Remarkably it’s not much different than getting traffic via search. There are two ways to get fans on Facebook.

• You get them organically by publishing a lot of blogs or putting a Facebook icon on your webpage
• You run ads on Facebook.

We were fortunate enough to just break 1,000 fans a couple of weeks ago and we used both methods to get there and here’s how we did it and how you can get lots of fans on Facebook as well.

Five Steps to Earn Facebook Fans

Step 1: When you launch your website, launch your Facebook fan page either a couple of weeks before or right after you launch your website. Follow the directions on the Facebook Page set up but pay particular emphasis to this one: TELL YOUR FRIENDS. The average person now has 634 connections via Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Unless you are running some kind of secretive business, people are already going to know you are starting a business and website, so tell them to like your page. We were extremely flattered by the support we got coming out of the gate, and you will be as well.

Step 2: Put the Facebook Like Icon on EVERY single webpage on your website. Don’t put it on just the first page, but EVERY page. When people go through websites, they always bounce around, don’t lose an opportunity to convert them. When you do put the Facebook icon on your page, make the icon easy to spot. Don’t make it small. The smaller the icon, the less likely people will see it and click it.

Steps 1 and 2 cover getting your Facebook launched, and with a little bit of luck, you should get a nice little audience on your Facebook fan page. Now what?

Step 3: Start updating your fans. You should at least update your page once a day, but probably no more than three times a day because after three times, your updates start to feel spammy. Updates can be about anything but should be in the voice of your brand. For example, ESPN will never ever talk about cooking unless it’s tailgating. What this means is simply to be yourself and use common sense. We typically will talk about a holiday or the weather or stuff we are working on. The reason for the updates is two-fold; first you keep your brand in someone’s newsfeed and second, you start conversing with your audience.

Step 4: Now that you have an audience and fan updates, it’s time to start driving them back to your website. At least once a week you should be writing a blog. Something informative and easy to digest. Post the blog on Facebook, Twitter and Linked In and let people start to come to your website where they can like your blog. By people liking your blog, your page will appear higher in search results so the indirect result is more website visits which will invariably lead to more Facebook fans.

Step 5: Run Facebook ads. One of the best ways you can turbocharge your Facebook page is to run Facebook ads. There are two flavors of Facebook ads: Sponsored Story and normal Facebook ads. Both are extremely effective at getting you traffic and new fans to your Facebook page and website. However, like Google AdWords, you need to find a sweet spot where you aren’t running an ad that’s overly broad or one that is overly niche. We would recommend doing the following out of the gate:

• Set up a Sponsored Story. When a fan likes your page, their friends will see that you like the page in the ad.
• Run different ad variations to see what works. Think about what your target audience is and where they live. If you sell coffee out of Princeton NJ, then you should target people who like coffee and live close to Princeton NJ.
• Think about who your competitors or partners are and go after their Facebook audience. If you are selling coffee, you might want to try and get someone who likes Starbucks
• Run an ongoing campaign for $5.00 a day. You don’t need to spend a lot of money to start seeing results. Start small with $5,00 a day as your campaign budget. If you only get two new fans a day then in the course of a month you will have sixty new fans. Twelve months later, assuming they don’t unlike you, you will have 720 fans. Not too shabby

The bottom line is that it’s not that hard to get Facebook fans. You have to put in a little bit every day, but with that little bit of effort and money, you can get over 1,000 fans pretty quickly.