Symptoms of Facebook Addiction Disorder

You may think that your need to check Facebook first thing in the morning is normal, but it’s possible that it’s a sign that you have Facebook Addiction Disorder.

Facebook Addiction Disorder, also known as FAD, is a real disease that affects many people. What starts as a small desire to keep in touch with friends and families becomes a major distraction that impacts every aspect of a person’s life.

If you possess any of the following symptoms, you may be suffering from Facebook Addiction Disorder.

1. Increased Usage

If you are spending more time on Facebook than ever before, it’s possible that you’re
suffering from FAD. Those with an addiction feel compelled to be on the social network as often as possible. If you’re logged in first thing in the morning and are still using the site after you are laying in bed for the night, you may want to seek help.

2. Fake Relationships

Those suffering from FAD have a need to constantly build their number of friends. This is usually the result of low self esteem, and they fill this void by making more virtual friends than real friends. If you don’t know who the majority of your Facebook friends are, it’s a sign you have FAD.

3. Withdrawal

If you ever feel symptoms of withdrawal when you cannot be on Facebook, it’s a major sign of FAD. If you feel anxious when you cannot be on the social network, you need to receive help.

4. Topic of Communication

If you are constantly talking about Facebook, it’s a sign that you have FAD. The majority of your conversations should not revolve around Facebook, what you saw on Facebook or what you did on Facebook.

5. Notification Excitement

If you receive email or mobile notifications every time activity happens on your wall, and you receive a euphoric feeling every time a notification appears, you need to seek help. While it is nice to be communicated with, it should not be the most exciting thing that happens throughout your day.

6. Oversharing

Those who are addicted to Facebook also tend to overshare. If you find that you are changing your status update or profile picture at least once every hour, it means that you are spending too much time on the site. Plus, oversharing can lead to harm. There is no need to tell all of your Facebook friends every single detail about your life, as some of them may use this information against them.

7. Lost Relationships

If you have lost real relationships—or worse, jobs—due to Facebook, you’ll want to seek treatment. The use of Facebook should never replace family, friends and careers. If you are not spending time with your family, if you no longer attend Girls Night Out because you’d rather sit on Facebook, and if you have been fired because of Facebook (or at least been reprimanded for your use during company time) you have FAD.

Facebook Addiction Disorder is a serious illness, and if you don’t seek treatment, it can spiral completely out of control. The best thing to do if you believe that you are suffering from FAD is to meet with a psychologist, as they’ll be able to address your situation and help you work through it.

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How To Build Free Links To Your Blog

Here is a few ways that you can get free links to your blog without resorting to black hat SEO. Some of them are a little underhand, but you have to remember that even if YOU are not using those methods–there are hundreds of people out there who are.

Link bait

If you do not know how to create link bait then you are going to need to Google it and learn. It is not going to get you hundreds of links, in fact you will be lucky to get one, but if you do it twice per week then you are bound to get a few free links every now and then.

Quality content

If your website is good and useful then you will get organic links. All you need to do is make sure that you content is of a high quality, or make sure that your blog is useful in some way.

Hack other people’s sites

You are no saint. Hack someone else’s site and add a link to yourself. The WordPress
users quite often fail to change their username from the default name. Find the blogger on Facebook, friend them, and look through their hobbies, interests and friends for their partners name, their kids, names, favorite pets names, even their favorite instrument.
Find twenty blogs, make twenty friends and I guarantee you that you will find someone like Benjamin Couldwell who has his blog password as bassoon. The same instrument it says he plays on his Facebook profile. This technique involves a bit of luck, but once you figure out a password or two you can add a few links to your site into their old posts every now and then, and they will never know.

Ask people nicely

If you are unwilling to accept the harsh realities of life, and believe that human kindness will get you further than hacking, you should try asking nicely. This works better if your find some sort of common ground first. However, if you are going to take the high road – be warned that if you ask too many people, you may be marked as a spammer. Your email account will probably be frozen as a result.

Ask the spammers

You will kick yourself for not thinking of this, but you know all of those spam emails you get. Instead of emailing them viruses and changing their client list from innocent Americans to the email addresses of the staff at your local CIA headquarters (try it…the spam soon stops). Anyway, instead of doing that–you should ask the spammers to link to you.

So long as you are asking the other merchants, and not the scammers (you know, the “please check your account people”), you may actually get a link or two out of it. Even if you don’t, you still get the satisfaction of knowing you spammed a spammer.

Set up lots of social media profiles and link from them

Is this a black-hat method if you set up a profile for all the imaginary friends living in your house? If you do not do too many at once you should be okay. It works a little better if you add some stuff to each profile every now and again, to make them look a little more real.

Create an Amazon profile and link to yourself

If you already have an Amazon selling account then where is the harm in setting up a bio and linking it to your blog?

Add an article to an article site

The Google Panda update vowed to get rid of all the content farms–they haven’t! You can add your article to somewhere nice such as Ezine or Squidoo and link to yourself. You can actually make very strong links on Squidoo if you pass their high publication standard. They let you publish anything, but if it is really good then your page will rank highly.

Even if your page ranks number 217,000 it will be “search-indexed” and your one link (keep it to one) from your article will be a good one. They have lots (probably in the millions) of article on Squidoo. It is well worth trying to have two or three rank highly. Do not add an article to an untraceable content farm that is impossible to “whois”, because they are the worst kind of content farm (that Panda has done nothing to shift).

There are certain sexy internet warriors who are taking aggressive action to damage those sites, because they are sick of having their articles copied onto them!

Video Marketing : Your Business Going Viral

Expanding your personal business in a world that is growing smaller and smaller by the day thanks to technology can either be easy or hard, depending on how you look at it.

On one side, the multitude of free and relatively cheap tools and applications available online, and the many other platforms such as video streaming sites especially youtube, blogs, micro-blogging sites, and social media sites, help you easily expand your market base. On the other side though, this kind of diversity and creative freedom made available online has created a diluted market of online marketers also using the internet’s potential like you.

Developing a video for sharing on youtube is always one of the first things to consider when going online for your business. Buying youtube views for your marketing video / ad, has just gotten much tougher as more and more people flood the internet.

So what can you do to help boost your video and turn it viral?

Keep it short: Keeping your video short condenses your message and it’s a fact that a
viewer’s attention span shortens as a video runs longer. There’s a reason why commercials are only fifteen to thirty seconds long.

Find the simplest idea: It’s a common mistake that people want to say too much when trying to deliver a message. When your video happens to involve a lot of information, text, characters, and sound, this often results in a failure to deliver the message across. Minimalist commercials have always been effective throughout the years.

Create a compelling “hook”:  Creating a “hook”, or something interesting that captures the viewer’s attention, can be as simple as asking a question. Let the hook carry your viewers towards the message you are delivering. The hook also gives a lasting impression, and helps retain brand or product recall towards you.

Don’t Hard Sell:  One of the fastest ways you can turn away your viewers is by hard-selling your product. People generally hate the idea of being told what to do, much less what to buy. The idea behind your video, especially if you’re looking to go viral, is to capture your viewer and elicit a response from them that will get them to share what they have just watched.

Lastly, it is often a wise move to research. Take time to watch past videos and learn from them. Observe trends and concepts, and find out what makes these videos work. But most importantly, do not be afraid to go ahead with an idea you believe in. Nobody knows your business more than you do.


original: SociablWeb

5 Exclusive Facebook Marketing Resources

With over 1 billion people now on Facebook it stands to reason that Facebook advertising alone can target a wide range of people. However it wasn’t that long ago that many doubted Facebook’s strength in a marketing capacity. Yet fast forward a few years and many businesses feel social media is an integral part of their marketing strategy. In fact there has been a 75% increase in social media campaigns since a few years ago. There are still various companies out there that may find social media intimidating and haven’t embraced it yet. If you don’t know where to begin, check out these 5 marketing resources from Facebook to get you started from the very source itself.

Facebook Marketing Page

Facebook’s official marketing page currently has over 2 million likes and is designed to help marketers and businesses use Facebook’s marketing platform more effectively. The marketing page posts valuable information about webinars that they are holding for marketers as well as providing statistics about Facebook’s advertising platform. This can come in useful when you’re trying to pitch for Facebook advertising to a marketing team or a client. Facebook representatives will also answer any questions that are posted on their wall.

Facebook Advertising Page

This page describes the online advertising process – how things work and examples of
successful campaigns. If you want to have a go at Facebook ad’s, this page has a ton of resources. They also answer frequently asked questions and tips to get your campaign under way.

Facebook Studio

This is a gallery style page showing a range of successful creative Facebook campaigns. This page shows a sample of different experiences people have had with Facebook campaigns from all over the world for marketers to learn from.

Facebook Studio Edge

This is an online course that gives important information about resources, research and useful tools to enable you to carry out successful online advertising campaigns.

Facebook Business Page

This page teaches you how to succeed on Facebook, build your page and create ad’s on Facebook. This page teaches you how to get the most out of Facebook for your business. The page goes through the process of building a page and then gives you advice on how to engage your audience.

4 Marketing Tips for Targeting Women via Social Networks

Social networks have become so popular these days, which the online marketing techniques had to redesign the whole concept around these aspects. There are many tips and tricks to use the social networks when it comes to reaching a targeted audience, when talking about a company, the only thing that a person needs to do is to pay attention to the details.

So, who is on Facebook? The most common answer is that everyone is there, from children to adults, from college students to professionals in any fields. This means that any company, of any profile, is interested in being in the social networks because of the fact that everyone is there (or at least a great part from their targeted audience).

Let’s take the example of a perfume company for women. How would they target this section on Facebook? There are some tips that can be applied here.

#1 Groups

This is a very subtle way of communication. There are millions of groups that are formed
on social networks that are based on various points of interests: fashion, books, lifestyle and so on. The idea here is that the perfume company needs to be present in the groups that have a lot of females in them: for example Fashion Today or anything that comes to mind. You need to think of various attributes of your targeted audience and connect those attributes to your company or brand. That is what a group does.

#2 Sharing

This is a key concept of the social networks, a concept that you need to explore and develop as much as possible. You need to link your brand or company to something that the targeted audience cares about. Your presence in the social network needs to talk about your company, but it needs to take things to the next level. Continuing with the idea of the perfume company, you need to always link with the fact that a great perfume goes superb with a great outfit and talk about fashion. This is just an example, but there are many that link their business with various interests that their targeted audience has.

#3 Interaction

This is another aspect that should be of great interest here. The idea is to interact with your targeted audience, engage in conversations, like their photos, comment on their events, be part of their lives. The idea here is simple: if they feel that the brand is pretty close, they will fall in love with it and build up a relationship with it. The social networks helps you interact with people from all around the world and any relationship can be productive even in the long term.

#4 Be consistent

The problem that various brands face these days is the fact that they create a profile on various networks, they make a huge buzz and then after a while, everything is plain. What type of message do you send to your users if you behave that way? Always be present, always be there so that your audience knows that they can count on you as a brand in their lives.

Imagine that the social networks are the links to the entire world. It’s up to you how you use this power and it really depends on you how well it goes.

3 Online Branding Mistakes You Need to Avoid

Branding properly can build your business at an alarming pace. You can gain your target market’s trust, improve your visibility and increase sales quite quickly if you brand yourself effectively. Unfortunately, many people take all the wrong steps during the branding process.

Many rush mindlessly ahead, desperate to generate sales, so they plaster their business link all over Facebook Groups, twitter and Google Plus. These practices are repelling, meaning that you scare away people who might otherwise be interested in your opportunity.

Check your energy. Do you feel confident, about yourself and your opportunity? If you don’t, take a step back. Either build up confidence in yourself and your business or select another opportunity, because you can’t build a successful, thriving brand while lacking confidence in yourself and the business you attempt to grow.

Lack of Clarity

Branding newbies usually have zero clarity around their campaign. The brand message
changes hour after hour, day after day, confusing their audience. You can’t change your message and expect people to digest, understand and respond to your message with regularity.

Stick to a core intent. Build your brand around one dominant idea. Maybe you intend to help individuals find profitable niches. Good. Write blog posts and send out social updates focused on helping individuals find profitable niches.

Zero Creativity

Dull brands are ignored. You will never make a firm impress on individuals within your target market by developing a boring, listless brand, because people are repelled by entrepreneurs who lack creativity.

Be creative. Inject your personality into your work. The most successful brands become memorable by thinking on a different plane of thought compared to most individuals. This takes in-depth planning on your part. Turn off your lap top. Think through your marketing campaign. Proceed to test out your strategies, fine-tuning your techniques to ensure that you find the proper recipe to building your brand.

Creativity develops by practicing, by using your mental tools, by perfecting your craft. Spice up your ad copy. Study marketing wizards. Learn from the best how to make an indelible impact on your niche.

Underestimating Your Impact

Many branding failures believe they can never make an impact with their brand. This sends out a loud and clear message to “stay away”, as people sense this lack of confidence on a deeper level. No, you might not develop a more powerful, global brand than big-ticket companies, but then again, you might. You can make a phenomenal impact with your brand because each of the most powerful, well-known brands on earth started where you started.

You can make a resounding impact. Yes you, a single person. The first step is to believe in yourself and your offering, and to know that you can make a real difference in people’s lives. With this realization you can proceed to establish clarity around your brand message, positioning yourself to become a well-known authority in your niche.

Avoid these mistakes and you can build a powerhouse brand over time.

How Should Niche Businesses Use Social Media to Best Effect?

This article gives suggestions and best practice tips to niche businesses around capitalizing on the potential of social media.

Time to Socialise

The big mistake that many smaller niche businesses make is to forsake social media platforms completely. There is a prevailing attitude that, because only a few people will probably be seeking out a social media presence, that there isn’t any point in doing it.

Instead, these businesses should view social media in much the same way that they view search engine optimisation. Accept that yes, fewer people will be seeking you out, however take that opportunity to focus on the specific market that has an interest in you and make your social media content as relevant as possible.

How to Stand Out

If you are a niche business then it is not easy to stand out in a world where the biggest
businesses use social marketing experts and have large budgets in order to make themselves successful in this manner.

Where several of these bigger businesses fall down, however, is that their content is just boring. Yes, it may be relevant and original, but it doesn’t inspire, and generally leads back to their site and the same old boring landing page.

Visual social media is a particularly powerful tool, especially if you are selling a product that someone would want to see in action before buying it. This may be something as simple as a fireworks display, or as expensive as a luxury car. Of course, the traditional text based platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Digg are still worth exploring, however if your business can make the most of visual media you will gain much more attention.

Case Study

Just by looking at the ways in which a fireworks vendor could potentially market themselves using social media, the possibilities are endless.

The most obvious means is to use YouTube to utilise demonstration videos of said firework in action. Saying what it does is all well and good, but if a picture can paint a thousand words then how powerful is a video?

There is also endless potential in the uses of sites such as Pinterest or Instagram. Any business with a visual slant can encourage their followers to share inspirational photographs, or even create ones of their own products and what they would like to see your brand produce. Simple competitions such as “come up with a name for this new product” or “what would you like to see?” are excellent ways to pique interest online and build a social media following.

Smaller niche businesses using social media can often quickly build themselves a kind of “cult” following, which is then an excellent platform on which to expand their reach and business.

original: SociablWeb