The changes, which will take effect March 30, will affect nearly every transaction on eBay’s marketplace.

“Insertion fees” — the price users pay to put an item up for auction on eBay — will drop as low as zero, while the “final value fee” assessed on successfully sold goods will rise to a flat 9% for all transactions, with a new per-item cap of $50. Currently, final fees vary by selling price, maxing out at 8.75% for items that sell for less than $25 but without any cap on the back end.

EBay (EBAY, Fortune 500) is also adjusting fees for fixed-price item sales, a category that has grown rapidly in the past two years. Listing costs will plunge to as low as 3 cents per item for the most active, high-volume sellers, but rise slightly for merchants who sell sporadically. Fixed-price listings will also become more visible on the site, showing up in eBay’s main search instead of being divided out into a separate set of results, as they are now.

EBay fee changes often set off firestorms within its seller community. This time, reaction was relatively upbeat.

“A lot of merchants on a lot of different levels are already calculating their savings and are liking the changes,” said Joseph Cortese, founder of the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance, an industry trade group. “I would say eBay struck an overall positive note today.”

At AuctionBytes.com, a gathering spot for online merchants, hundreds of eBay sellers quickly weighed in on the changes.

“I can’t believe I am saying this, but at first glance, I like the store changes,” one respondent wrote.

But others were annoyed at how smaller sellers could see their costs rise. “Why doesn’t eBay just say that they are not interested in small business sellers and be done with it?” another seller griped.

“This is why I have left eBay,” one merchant posted. “The pricing structure keeps changing like lines in the sand because eBay can’t figure out what kind of venue they want to be.”

EBay’s new fee structure mimics one it has already adopted internationally. In a conference call last week to discuss the company’s quarterly financial results, CEO John Donahoe telegraphed the upcoming changes.

“In Europe, we have successfully transformed our seller value proposition and business model over the past 18 months,” Donahoe said. “By offering lower insertion fees to our sellers, we have almost doubled the number of live listings, a significant increase in selection. We plan to adopt similar best practices in the U.S. in early 2010.”

JPMorgan Chase analyst Imran Khan expects the changes to boost eBay’s sales volume, as it did overseas. “For large PowerSellers who list hundreds or thousands of items monthly, the new scheme could bring significant savings on upfront costs,” he wrote in a research note. “We think the new structure could put some pressure on the middle of the curve: sellers who sell regularly but not in enough volume for the discounts to kick in.”

For example, a $200 electronics sale with a 99-cent starting price would currently rack up fees of $8.47. Under the new model, fees would rise to $18. But if the item didn’t sell, eBay would collect nothing.

After years of frustration, Pat Jackson finally found affordable technology to let her mobile repair technicians bill customer’s credit cards.

For years, small business owner Pat Jackson struggled to find an affordable way to let customers pay for heating and air conditioning repairs with their credit cards at home.

The owner of Jackson Comfort Systems in Northfield, Ohio, once tried out a credit card processing service from Nextel, but her technicians hated the bulky phones it required. Then she looked into options from AirCharge and United Bank Card, but those services were pricey: up to $250 for portable credit card machines and $25 per month, per truck for wireless service.

Eventually, she asked her 27 technicians to simply write down customer credit card numbers. Payments would get processed in her office. But that led to errors and higher credit card fees. Plus, customers didn’t like it.

“It was frustrating,” says Jackson. “We pride ourselves on good customer service, and that meant we weren’t giving it.”

But in May, Jackson received a flyer telling her about a new service called GoPayment from Intuit (INTU). For $20 per month, Jackson’s technicians can use their existing cell phones and text messaging services to process payments. Instead of waiting weeks to get paid, Jackson Comfort Systems gets its money on the spot.

Paying with plastic has been the norm for years, but for many small businesses like Jackson’s that operate remotely, it has been an elusive benefit. Out on the road, options were limited: buy cumbersome machines for hundreds of dollars, call the office with credit card numbers, or simply miss a sale by refusing to take credit cards.

Now, photographers, contractors, limo drivers and dog trainers — any business that operates remotely — can find a wealth of new software to process credit cards on mobile phones.

Apple’s (AAPL, Fortune 500) iPhone has been a big driver, with a slew of new applications popping up in the last year. Users type a credit card number and expiration date into the phone, and have the customer “sign” on the phone’s screen.

“Now we have some small businesses that are running their whole businesses off the iPhone,” says Derek Del Conte, co-founder of Inner Fence, which developed the first iPhone application for processing credit cards.

Inner Fence’s app costs 99 cents to download and then $25 a month. Each transaction costs 25 cents, plus 2.09% to 3.79% for fees charged by the credit card companies. The app also lets business owners issue refunds, review prior sales and email PDF receipts of their transactions.

GoPayment, the service that Jackson uses, requires a $60 setup fee and a $20 monthly fee, plus a $0.23 per-transaction fee and 1.64% to 3.54% for credit card processing fees.

Jackson decided to spend an extra $1,000 extra to buy 10 pocket-sized Bluetooth credit card swipers that work in conjunction with the cell phones. She reserves them for when she rings up bigger sales. Using a swiper lowers the credit card fees — it’s an anti-fraud measure adopted by the processing companies.

Jackson estimates that the swipers save her $600 a month in fees. For her company, which has annual sales of $3.2 million, the entire investment in mobile credit card processing paid off within a couple of months.

“It saves us a bunch of money at a time when business costs are increasing,” she says. “The customers like it, and the technicians like it — and they never like any kind of changes.”

Making money online used to pretty much require you to have your own Web site, products to sell and some marketing savvy. But a new generation of dot-coms have arisen that will pay you for what you know and who you know without you having to be a web designer or a marketing genius.

But it’s hard to tell hype from the real deal. I did a search on “make money online” and “making money online”, and much of the information out there is just promoting various infoproducts, mostly about Internet marketing. I see why people sometimes ask, “Is anyone making money online besides Internet marketing experts?”

So I put together a list of business opportunities with legitimate companies that:

• Pay cash, not just points towards rewards or a chance to win money
• Don’t require you to have your own Web domain or your own products
• Don’t involve any hard-selling
• Aren’t just promoting more Internet marketing
• Give a good return on your time investment

In the interest of objectivity, none of the links below are affiliate links, and none of them have paid or provided any other consideration for their presence here. These are legitimate companies with business models that allow you to get paid for a wide range of activities.

Help friends find better jobs.

Sites like ReferEarns, Zyoin, Who Do You Know For Dough?, Bohire and WiseStepp connect employers with prospective employees, many of whom are already employed and not actively job-hunting, via networking – the people who know these qualified candidates. Rewards for referring a candidate who gets hired range from $50 on up to several thousand dollars – not chump change. If you know a lot of job-seekers (and who doesn’t these days?), this is a great way to break into the recruiting business with no overhead.

Connect suppliers with buyers.

Referral fees are a common practice in business, but they haven’t been used much in online networking sites because there was no way to track them. Sites like Salesconx, InnerSell and uRefer now provide that. Vendors set the referral fees they’re willing to pay (and for what), and when the transaction happens, you get paid. uRefer also allows merchants to set up referral programs for introductions and meetings, as well as transactions.

Write.

A growing number of sites will pay for your articles or blog posts. Associated Content and Helium will “pay for performance” based on page views for just about anything you want to write about. Articles on specific topics they’re looking for can earn direct payments up to about $200. The rates are probably low for established writers, but if you’re trying to break into the field and have time on your hands, they’re a great way to start. Also, a lot of companies are looking for part-time bloggers. They may pay per post or on a steady contract. Our Weblogs Guide posts blogging jobs weekly in the forum.

Start your own blog.

You don’t have to have your own Web site, or install blogging software, or even figure out how to set up the advertising. At Blogger you can set up a blog for free in less than five minutes without knowing a thing about web design, and Blogger even automates setting up Google AdSense so you can make money off your blog by displaying ads and getting paid when people click on the ads. To make even more money from it, set up an affiliate program (see below) for books, music, etc., and insert your affiliate links whenever you refer to those items. You’ll have to get a lot of traffic to become a six-figure blogger, but pick an interesting topic, write well, tell all your friends, and you’re off to a good start.

Related: Monetizing Your Blog

Create topical resource hubs.

Are you an expert on a particular niche topic? Can you put together an overview of the topic and assemble some of the best resources on the topic from around the web? Then you can create topical hubs and get paid through sites like Squidoo, HugPages and Google Knol. Payments are based on a combination of ad revenue and affiliate fees. You’ll get higher rates doing it on your own, but these sites have a built-in supply of traffic and tools to make content creation easier.

Advertise other people’s products.

If you already have a Web site or a blog, look for vendors that offer related but non-competing products and see if they have an affiliate program. Stick to familiar products and brands – they’re easier to sell. To promote those products:

• Place simple text or graphical ads in appropriate places on your site
• Include links to purchase products you review or recommend in a blog, discussion forum or mailing list you control
• Create a dedicated sales page or Web site to promote a particular product

They all work – it just depends on how much time you have to spend on it and your level of expertise with Web design and marketing.

Related: How to Really Make Money on the Internet With an Amazon.com Affiliate Site

Microstock photography.

You don’t have to be a professional photographer to sell your photos for money. People are constantly in need of stock photography for websites, presentations, brochures and so on, and are willing to pay for the right image. People generally search for images on stock photography sites by keywords, not by photographer, so you have the same chance as anyone else of having your image picked. Just be careful that you don’t have images of trademarked brands, copyrighted art or people’s faces that are readily identifiable (unless you have a model release), but just about anything else is fair game, and I promise – you’d be amazed what people need pictures of, so don’t make any assumptions. If it’s a decent photo, upload it. Some sites to get you started include Fotolia, ShutterStock, Dreamstime and iStockphoto. The great thing about this is that it’s truly “set it and forget it”.

The above list is by no means comprehensive, but it highlights some of the new and interesting ways to make money online without investing any money, without having a product of your own, and without having expert sales and marketing skills. Most of all, unlike taking surveys or getting paid to read e-mail, the potential return on your time investment is substantial.

Did you know that heating water can consume as much as 25% of your home’s overall energy consumption level? It doesn’t have to!

Boiling It All Down  – Some easy,  common sense things you can do to reduce your hot water costs !

* Insulate your hot water pipes and the tank of your water heater.

* Lower the temperature on your water heater.

* Install such energy saving devices as a drain-water heat recovery system and heat traps for your water heater.

* Use less hot water – duh!

You may also want to see if there exists perhaps a more efficient model of water heater out there which will increase efficiency enough to warrant the cost and time it will take to recoup and become a cost-saving device.

Solar Water Heaters (or washing on the sun!)

When my wife and I visited Greece (insert your childish snickers here…), we kept noticing these large panels on the roofs which appeared very similar to solar panels. On our last day’s stay at our hotel, I couldn’t resist any longer, so I actually climbed up to take a closer look, trying not to bust my ass since there had been recent rainfall and everything was wet and slick, and discovered these panels had piping running through them and were actually the method they used to heat water! I was absolutely amazed that these roof panels were able to provide enough hot water for an entire hotel and because they really weren’t anything too fancy, just some tubes running back and forth through panels with a reflective backing and a plexiglas covering, I can’t imagine them being very expensive at all.

It’s A Tankless Job But…

I have also done a bit of research on tankless water heaters which heat water instantly on demand and do not require an open flame or constant electricity to keep a resource of water heated. Some systems can be expensive and complicated while others are more simplified. The systems range according to the needs of the household so weigh the installation costs and energy savings carefully against the the time it will
take to recoup your investment.

There are also methods of using your home’s space heating system to assist in heating water in order to take some of the load off the water heater.

If you are planning to sell your home within the next few years, you will want to consider how much resale value a specialized system might add to your home’s worth in addition to how long the recouping of your investment might take.

These preceding two scenarios (tankless and space heat assistance) are ones which should be discussed with a home energy conservation expert. Seek someone neutral for advice without an agenda. People selling water heaters or environmental activists probably would not have your financial savings at the forefront of their concerns, but may still have some good information to enter into the equation. It is tough to find advice based solely on finance for such a politically-charged issue as energy saving has become, so seek a range of opinions and use your own best judgment.

All of the above are great options worth exploring further and the method best for you will depend upon your particular needs, the types of fuel available and local laws and building codes which may limit what you can do on the outside of your home aesthetically and what types of equipment are available legally.

Heating a Swimming Pool
(For those so rich, they don’t really need to save the money, but I’ll include it here anyway because it makes my article appear longer and more “in-depth”)

Probably the best ways to control heating costs for a swimming pool are to use a solar pool heater, use a pool cover after use and just plain ol’ not heating the pool at all!

What’s the matter? You a wuss? Dive in ya big chicken! Bok! Bok! Bok! Bok!

Some of the tips I have written about in this article have come from the U.S. Department of Energy’s “Energy, Efficiency and Renewable Energy” website which can be found at http://www.eere.energy.gov and most items can be delved into in much greater detail there.

Please read my main blog at http://www.letsgetahead.com for more great articles like this one!

You see them all the time – Biz Ops for vending machine routes. They all say easy money and quote big profit margins and low overhead and startup costs. If there’s one thing that can’t be stressed enough, it’s that THERE IS ALMOST NEVER A FORMULA FOR EASY MONEY! If making money were that easy, inflation would skyrocket out of control thus making the money you have worth far less, so it is somewhat self-regulating in that sense.

The vending machine business is one that is filled with the promise of profit and the horror stories of scams and hidden operating costs. The scams can include broken down machines and broken agreements for machine placement services leaving you stuck with machines and no place to vend! Don’t fall prey to the routes that cost thousands of dollars in an upfront investment. Start slow and minimize your risk by doing the initial legwork yourself. You can always crank up the pace later once you know what you are doing!

The profits come from getting your machines into the right places, servicing your business properly and choosing the right things to vend that minimize your commitment and maximize your profits.

Bolster Your Income With Bulk Candy!

Bulk candy is probably the best way to dip your toes into the waters of vending for the first time. Startup costs are relatively small and the return on investment (ROI) is pretty good, plus you get to sing that Sammy Davis Jr. song all day long!

What About Soda Machines and Other Types of Vending Machines?

I’m just laying out in this article the easiest way to gently wade into the waters of the vending business. Have you seen the live lobster vending machine game in Japan? You put around a dollar in this machine and work the claw to try and grab a live lobster out of the tank. I’m sure the animal rights groups are in a tizzy over this one!

Soda machines do make good money, but also need a lot of maintenance and restocking and thus require more attention all-around. If you have something making money for you at around a 200% ROI, why not just duplicate that over and over into a larger scale? If it gets so large that you don’t wish to deal with it, just hire someone to service your routes and take your profit off the top. At that point you are just kicking back and having money delivered to you! What could be better!?

How Much Money Can You Make?

With bulk candy and any other business, it is LOCATION! LOCATION! LOCATION! There are some locations with bulk candy you may only make about $5 a month and others that will pay upwards of $150 per month per machine. On the low end, this really doesn’t sound worth it except that if a location is that slow, you can just go by less often to restock and pick up your money.

The profit margins on candy are generally around 70% whereas gumballs will generally cost about 2 cents each and you sell them at a quarter, so do the math! (note: Many locations do not want gumballs out of a fear of having to scrape gum off their business constantly, so be sure to offer more than just gum!)

A triple vend machine (one that offers 3 different products) can be purchased as Sam’s Club or online for around $150 or even less if you buy used or in bulk. Thus, they pay for themselves rather quickly.

Restocking and Maintenance

Machines can generally go for about 2 months before restocking. You of course have to buy candy, drive to the machines, count coins and do your accounting.

You want to be as unnoticed as possible when maintaining your machines. The location should ideally not even know you are there, yet always have a stocked machine. NEVER LET THE MACHINE RUN OUT! This makes the machine a nuisance and gives the location owner a reason to have it removed. If you have a little candy left over, don’t be stingy about giving a little to the employees. They will gobble it up in a day and be back to buying from the machine very quickly and it’s great PR to have the staff on your side!

You probably would be best to transport your candy in a cooler with a few ice packs so nothing bad happens to it in a hot car.

It would also be handy to have a few of the following items for cleaning, maintenance and other requirements of your route:

* Clear Tape – you never know
* Zippered Money Bags
* Business Cards – always promote!
* Keys to the Machines – duh!
* Paper Towels
* Cleaner
* Screwdriver
* Rubber Gloves
* A Route Log – to track how much you are making from each location

Locations! Locations! Locations!

One of the best way to gain locations is to have a special charity to tout that you donate 10% of your profits to. This is a great selling point, a reason for people to want your machines in their location, a relatively small payout on your part and a wonderful thing to do in general (Don’t lie about the charity or a bolt of lightning will come down from the sky and fry the hell out of you and your machines!) It is probably best to choose a charity that is well-known, not riddled with scandals and is non-controversial. I suggest forming a relationship with a local charity, getting their blessing and making small promotional cards to insert into your machines touting this charity. The charity may even provide you with these cards if you ask.

Walk into a place of business with a pictures of your candy machines and speak with the decision maker and ask if they have an extra few square feet to spare for this candy service that will be free of charge to them and that 10% will go to such and such charity. You will do all the restocking and servicing and the machine will just be there as an added value to their staff and patrons and will require absolutely nothing on their part. Some will say no, but some will say yes. Nothing in life comes without the need for a bit of salesmanship and this is a great and low-cost way to gain these skills with little to lose.

You also want to have a few different types of candy for your locations to choose from. People are often more likely to purchase when presented with choices. Runts, Peanuts, M&M’s, Peanut M&M’s, Skittles, Reese’s Pieces and gumballs usually keep the longest. Hot tamales should only be offered if the place is well air-conditioned but they do go bad after a few months. It is usually best to have at least one sugary candy and one chocolatey candy offered in a machine. Be sure to set the machine properly in order to dispense enough not to have your customers feeling ripped off and not so much that you lose all your profits.

Candy is obviously something that appeals to a younger crowd, so seek out places that employ younger people so that you can place your machines into their break rooms which is an easier sell. If you can get front of house placement, that is even better as you will then be selling to both employees and customers, but this one can be the much tougher sell.

I never said it would be completely effortless, but vending is a very viable business and one that’s easy to break into and grow with a profit margin that is nothing to sneeze at.

Please visit my website at http://www.letsgetahead.com for more great articles like this one!

There are many words to describe how so many people end up in financial trouble, but one stands out.

Pretenders.

Sure, sometimes bad things happen, and it’s not your fault. But many of you — and you know who you are — are experiencing economic problems because you were pretending to be rich.

Thomas J. Stanley has been examining the truly rich for years. A former university professor, he’s the co-author of one of my all-time favorite personal finance books, “The Millionaire Next Door.” It should have a permanent spot in your home library.

Just before year’s end, Stanley released “Stop Acting Rich . . . and Start Living Like a Real Millionaire” (Wiley, $26.95). I’m recommending this book as the February selection for the Color of Money Book Club.

The credit crisis and recession, Stanley says, have presented us with the opportunity to treat and cure the pretenders.

“But for the treatment to work, you must take a cold hard look at your balance sheet and at your life, and determine if you would be wealthier if you would stop acting rich,” he writes.

In Stanley’s new book, a millionaire is defined as someone with net-value investments of $1 million or more. The investments include cash, stocks, bonds, mutual funds and equity shares in a private business. The author said he eschewed the traditional way people calculate wealth, particularly as it relates to the value of a home. If your net worth was $1.5 million with 85 percent of that from your home, and the value of your home depreciated by 50 percent — which it has for too many people — then your wealth wasn’t real.

Stanley’s research does a great job of proving there’s a big difference between income and net worth. Many pretenders have become very good at generating income and enjoying a high standard of living. But take this Stanley gem to the bank: “Those who are among the least productive in transforming their incomes into wealth are in the higher-status occupations.”

What do we often tell a child who expresses an interest in teaching? “You won’t get rich as a teacher.”

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No worries, as our job is to help you get on your feet and moving in the right direction with online advertising… and hopefully keep you from taking too many wrong (expensive) turns.

Now back to the question: “Where should I advertise online?” The answer depends on the following:

1. What’s your monthly online ad budget? It’ll be based on results… that’s right. But it may take a few months to determine what works. So how much do you plan to spend in the meantime?

2. Who’s the target audience you want to reach? This is really important since the more you understand about your prospective customer the better.

3. Are your customers local or everywhere? On the Internet it’s easy to waste dollars finding prospects who can’t buy from you. So even online you need to think geographically.

4. How will you know your advertising was successful? Orders, leads, website visitors? Figure this out in advance so you can measure your advertising performance.

With these questions in mind, here are some guidelines to help you figure out where to advertise online:

If your monthly online ad budget is less than $1,000, then consider:

• Paid Search: Google is the most popular but you should also test Yahoo! and Microsoft.

• Directories: This includes online yellow pages such as Superpages.com and Yellowpages.com. Many of these providers will also create your very own web page if you don’t need a fancy website.

• City Guides: Yahoo! Local, Yelp, and Citysearch offer advertising options that can be really effective if most of your customers live nearby.

If your monthly online ad budget is $1,000 to $10,000, then consider:

• Paid Search, Directories, and City Guides (as described above).

• Small Blogs and Websites: This is where knowing all about your target audience comes in handy since you want to advertise on sites that your customers frequent. And expect to spend between $250 and $1,500 per month on each site.

If your monthly online ad budget is $10,000 or more (lucky you!), then consider:

• Paid Search, Directories, and City Guides (as described above).

• Blogs and Websites: Focus on sites that reach visitors that match your target audience. The better the match the better your results! Keep in mind that many popular consumer-oriented websites require a minimum order size of at least $5,000.

• Advertising Networks: There are hundreds of ad networks to choose from. Select those that best reach your target audience. For example, vertical ad networks specifically target many consumer categories such as autos, travel, health, women, and even the environment… so definitely check them out. And like popular websites, most ad networks want you to spend at least $5,000.

Remember, these are just guidelines. So yes there are ad networks you can try on even a small budget; and sure there are popular sites which sell affordable text ads. But when in doubt, stick to the guidelines until you feel comfortable with your online advertising efforts… or you risk taking one of those wrong turns we talked about.

And don’t spend your whole ad budget on one option (i.e., Google). Test different alternatives to see what works best for you… based on how you measure success.

Thanks and let us know how it goes!

And come visit us at www.leadtail.com.

Too busy to pursue an MBA, Steve McKee turned to business books to educate himself on branding, marketing, and advertising. Here are his top picks

I began my career in advertising as a field marketing manager on the Pizza Hut (YUM) account, which basically meant I got to travel from restaurant to restaurant, work with the managers on their local marketing efforts, and eat all the free pizza and breadsticks I could (not a bad gig when you’re 22, newly married, and broke).

I operated out of my home, and when I wasn’t traveling I had a fair amount of downtime that needed to be filled. Unable to pursue an MBA at the time (those were pre-Internet days), I decided to do the next best thing: read all I could about my chosen field.

That began a career-long love affair with business books. King Solomon himself said, “The words of wise men are like goads, and masters of these collections are like well-driven nails.” I wanted to be a “well-driven nail”—sure, steady, and able to piece things together no matter what marketing challenges I would come to face.

Since that time I’ve occasionally been asked to recommend the branding, marketing, and advertising books that have had the biggest impact on me. It’s impossible to choose just one, so below I’ve listed a handful of my favorites. I’ve structured the list based on how they’ve contributed to my own marketing education: prerequisites, concentration, and application. This isn’t necessarily the order in which I recommend you read them, and depending on your goals, you certainly don’t need to read them all. But you can’t go wrong with any of them.

Prerequisites

Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy, by Thomas Sowell

The front flap of Basic Economics says it brings its topic to light in a way that is “easy to absorb and hard to forget.” That’s certainly true. Sowell presents practical concepts about how incentives, trade-offs, and other dimensions of the economy really work. More interesting (and more relevant) than the economics course you may have suffered through in college, this book is for people who get paid for results rather than for effort, pontification, or simply showing up. (For extra credit, read Sowell’s follow up, Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One.)

The Marketing Imagination, by Theodore Levitt

Levitt, who died in 2006, was a professor at the Harvard Business School and former editor of the Harvard Business Review. The Marketing Imagination was one of the first books I read that made the concepts of marketing and “why people buy” come alive for me. Since the book was first published in 1983, some of the examples in it are dated, but reading them with the benefit of hindsight offers a unique Monday-morning-quarterback dimension that imparts another layer of education.

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Facebook is a social network, not a shopping network, so why should any business spend resources establishing and maintaining a Fan Page on Facebook? (A Fan Page, by the way, is a profile for a business or organization rather than for an individual.) Because even if members have no intention of buying anything on Facebook, the relationships you establish and community you build there can benefit your business in countless ways. Here, I reveal the top 10 ways a Facebook Fan Page can help your business.

1. Establishes another outpost for your business on the web
   Creating a Fan Page provides your business and brands with another branding outpost on the Web where prospects, customers, future employees, vendors, and even the media can find information about your company and the products and services you offer. Unlike Facebook’s personal Profiles, which are member-only accessible, Facebook Fan Pages are public-facing by default; that is, people need not be logged into Facebook to view a business’s or brand’s Fan Page, so even more people have access to the information you post.

   Tip: To save time updating your Fan Page, create an RSS feed on the Page’s Notes tab to pull entries from your existing business blog. As long as your blog posts aren’t overtly “salesy,” the additional content should be well received.

2. Drives Traffic to Your Website
   Fan Pages have no restrictions on driving Facebook traffic to websites. In fact, Facebook encourages you to link to your website from your business’s Fan Page. Redirecting even a small portion of Facebook’s huge amount of daily traffic to your website could significantly improve the amount of qualified traffic on your site.

   Tip: Turn Facebook members into Fans, Fans into customers, and customers into Fans by cross-promoting your Fan Page and website. Link your Fan Page to your website and insert a Facebook widget on your site to link back to your Fan Page.

3. Improves your SEO
   Google, through its new Social Search feature, and other search and decision engines are now indexing content created on sites like Facebook, so your Fan Page content has the potential to generate favorable search engine results for your business and brand. By linking your Fan Page to your website, you can leverage Social Search to drive even more Facebook traffic back to your site.
4. Allows you to engage with your community easily and for free
   A Facebook Fan Page provides an inexpensive (free) alternative to implementing customer engagement on your own site. In minutes, you can have a branded Fan Page where customers and other brand advocates can post to your Facebook Wall, share photos and video, ask and answer questions, and interact with you and one another. Creating and managing a Fan Page, complete with a Discussions tab, is easier than launching and monitoring discussion forums or message boards on your own domain.
5. Connects you and your staff directly to your customers and fans
   A Facebook Fan Page gives you a direct pipeline to your Fans. You can send messages to Fans all at once or target individuals or groups by country, state, city, gender, and even age range. Using the Events App, you can even schedule special events or promotions and then send invitations to only those Fans who live in or near the town where the event is scheduled to take place. All of this and more is available free of charge to any business or brand using Facebook.
6. Strengthens customer relations
   You can significantly deepen your relationships with customers by connecting with them in a social rather than a business setting and not selling. Facebook members may not shop on Facebook, but 90 percent of them expect the businesses and organizations they deal with to have a Facebook Fan Page.
7. Provides a breeding ground and platform for brand evangelists
   Only 25 percent of Facebook members want to be sold to, but a much higher percentage are apt to sing the praises of a quality company, brand or product to their Facebook Friends. Establish strong relationships with a number of influential members who have plenty of connections, and you gain valuable brand evangelists who authentically market and sell on your behalf.

   Tip: As you post updates to your Page’s Wall, or as Fans interact with your Page, these interactions appear in the Fan’s News Feed, reaching even more potential Fans (i.e., your Fan’s Facebook Friends), making Facebook the ultimate opt-in, permission-based marketing tool available online today.

8. Listening and observing has the potential to improve your business
   In a social setting like Facebook, customers and prospects are likely to let down their guard and share information with you and others about products and services they like, good and bad experiences they have had with your business or your competitors, and their unfulfilled needs. Each time a Fan interacts with your Page, you are presented with a wealth of information.

   Tip: By default, Facebook Fan Pages include the Discussion tab. Encourage discussions to mine valuable market data and ideas on how to improve your business.

9. ROI-related metrics are readily available
   Facebook’s Page Insights tools and dashboard facilitate the analysis of marketing and communication by revealing data related to interactions (Comments, Wall posts, and “Likes”); discussed posts, reviews, and mentions; Fan demographics (gender, ages, geographic location/distribution); and so on. These tools improve your ability to identify and target specific demographics and gauge ROI.

   Tip: Use Facebook’s powerful metrics, along with information you gather from your Fan Page, to develop custom messages and talking points that speak directly to your Fans’ needs, are suited for your community’s style of engagement, and support your business’s word-of-mouth goals and objectives.

10. Allows you to keep pace with the competition free of charge
    Still not convinced a Fan Page is worth setting up? Then consider the competition. Even if only one of your competitors launches a successful Fan Page, that competitor can corner the market on Facebook and build a following long before you do. Stake your free claim early to establish your business as the industry leader before the competition has a chance.

When pay-per-click advertising is good, it’s very, very good. Nothing gets highly targeted traffic to your website faster, or gives you a nimbler platform for testing. But when it’s bad, Vegas is the only place you can lose money faster.

Unfortunately, most pay-per-click beginners don’t get past the bad before they just give up on what could be their greatest marketing weapon. We hear the same question all the time from newbies: “Why am I getting click-throughs but no conversions? It’s costing me a fortune.”

In all likelihood it’s because of one or more of these factors:

Click fraud: In our experience, some of the smaller PPC search engines deliver clicks but no conversions. Check the clicks-to-conversion stats for every search engine you use, then stop using any where the results are seriously out of whack compared to your PPC performance on the other search engines.

That said, don’t think Google is the only search engine you should try. It’s the biggest, and therefore most competitive. You might get more conversions for less money using other PPC programs. And the nice thing is that if they don’t work out, you can just stop using them.

Content network: If you’re using Google AdWords, your ads can be seen either in the search results (search network) or on relevant web pages (content network), or both. Opt out of the content network when you’re starting out. It’s a different animal entirely and requires separate ad campaigns.

Lack of keyword research: Do you know what keywords your potential customers are using to find products like yours? If you’re just guessing, you’re costing yourself money.

A good keyword phrase generally has three or more words in it and clearly shows the intention behind the search. So when you think you’ve found a keyword, ask yourself, “What problem is this searcher trying to solve?” If you can’t answer that definitively, then that keyword phrase is too general–and you’re probably going to lose money on it.

The Google AdWords Keyword Tool is free, and it will show you an amazing range of information that will help you zero in on affordable, targeted keywords that will pull in people with a problem that your product can solve.

Here’s an example: A quick search on “scrapbook supplies” showed an estimated cost of $2.73 per click to get into one of the top three positions for that keyword. Yet for 8 cents you could get in the top three positions for “digital scrapbooking supplies” or “scrapbooking supplies paper.” The estimated traffic for those words is lower, but the words themselves are more targeted–and more likely to convert.

So for the same money you can get 34 clicks on a more targeted keyword, or one click on a less targeted keyword. No contest!

Scattergun ads: Each ad should be built on one keyword phrase that relates to one very specific problem. If your ad is too general, chances are that someone who clicks on it could be looking for something else entirely.

Your product may be able to do all sorts of things, but you want one ad, or even one ad group, for each problem it solves.

When you’re writing your ads–and this is something you really need to spend time on–first, think like someone who searches using the keyword in your ad. Is it clear that if they click on your ad, they’ll find the exact solution they’re looking for? If not, back to the keyboard for some rewriting.

Use your keyword in the header and try to work it into the body of the ad as well. And don’t forget to talk about how your product benefits the reader instead of just mentioning its features.

Irrelevant landing page: Link your ads to the most relevant page on your site, so people know they’ve found what they’re looking for. If they click on an ad for a yellow raincoat and land on a page with all sorts of other products, or they have to figure out how to navigate to the yellow raincoat page, you’ve lost a sale. Your ads need to take them where they want to go. The best thing is to create a landing page for each group of related ads.

Sticking with the same old ad: Finally, if an ad isn’t working, test other ads against it by changing one single element and running them against each other. Consider your original ad the control ad, then change the headline and see if the new ads get better results. If so, that becomes your control ad, and you run it against a new one with the wording of the ad changed. Keep going until you have an ad that’s getting the best conversions. PPC advertising is the easiest way in the world to test your effectiveness.

With pay-per-click advertising, always keep one thing in mind: Click-throughs cost money, and conversions make money. So check to make sure that none of these obstacles are getting between your PPC click-throughs and your conversions.