I’m going to walk you through the five simple steps to create a professional Facebook business page that helps you stand out from the competition, and make more sales. And then at the very end of this article, I’m going to give you a critical step that you NEED to take in order to keep both your business and your Facebook page safe and prevent the rug from being pulled out from under you.

Step One: Page Creation

Step number one is actually the initial page setup, so we’re gonna dive into Facebook and walk you through this. So after you log into Facebook you’re on your Home tab. On the upper right corner you’ll see a button that says Create.

Go ahead and select that and head down to Page. And it’ll take you to this:

Now on this page, for most of you, it’s appropriate to choose Business or Brand. That’s why you’re here, that’s why you’re setting it up. If you’re a public figure or a community, you know who you are and you can do that, but everybody else, let’s start on this left-hand side and simply click Get Started.

After you click Get Started, Facebook will walk you through this setup process very simply.

I want to focus on what you should name your page, because a lot of people get this wrong.

Here’s a very common mistake we see.

If you’re in affiliate marketing, where you’re promoting someone else’s products and not just your own, DO NOT DO THIS… Many affiliates make the mistake of naming their page according to that company that you’re promoting their products for.

So say you’re an affiliate of ClickFunnels, you’d say something like “ClickFunnels King” as your business page name, and that is completely inappropriate. ClickFunnels is a brand in and of itself. You are not ClickFunnels. You are you and you need to build up your own specific brand.

Now for most of you, your page name will most likely be your name, however, some of you may have a brick and mortar store that you’re working with that has a name already, or you may be building a digital brand that is not related to your name like Digital Trailblazer. So whatever it is, put that here.

Once you have the name plugged in, put in a category that makes sense for whatever you’re doing. For Todd and me, this is internet marketing, it’s a simple one.

Step Two: Pictures

After that, you’ll want to follow through Facebook’s tutorial focusing on everything we will be laying out below.

Step number two is your cover photo and your profile picture. This is something that a lot of people get wrong as well.

Your cover photo and your profile picture are your first impressions you make with your potential customers. It is wise to spend some time thinking about these.

Some questions you can think about when determining your best public image and channel art could include:

• Who is your target audience?
• Who are your potential customers?
• How can you include visually to show a prospect how you can serve them?

You want to speak directly to your prospects, specifically with that cover photo.

When they see that cover photo, they need to know:

• Who you are
• What you’re about
• What goal are you gonna help them accomplish
• What problem you will help them solve

Remember to keep the focus on the results you will help them get.

For example, say you’re a Realtor®… Instead of saying your name and showing your title as a Realtor®, instead, tell them how you’re going to help them. So “Helping you find your first-time home,” or “Helping you find the perfect place that your family can call home.” Prospects that come to your page will feel as if your page is speaking to them directly, and that language is very specific to the type of client you want to work with.

Now exactly what you say there will vary based on who your perfect customer or your target audience really is.

If you wanna work with investors, you may talk about distressed properties. Or retirees who are looking to downsize. Or first-time homebuyers looking for that good deal.

If you’re branding specifically to your name, it is important that note that on both your cover photo and profile picture should have a smiling picture of your face.

If you are not branding your with your name, and if you have a specific logo that you’ve created for your business, then you can use a logo for that profile picture.

But in general, it’s a better rule of thumb to have a smiling photo because it makes you a real person.

People are more likely to connect with you if they see a smiling face instead of just a flat logo, which softens them up to working with you.

Pro Tip:

I highly suggest that you get a true graphic designer to create your cover photo for you.

However, if you are on a budget and that’s not something you can hire out right now, you could head over to Canva.com and create one yourself. Canva is a great graphic editing tool that we use all the time and is free to use.

Step Three: Fill In Your Details

Now, step number three is to fill out the following sections. Yes, you are going to follow Facebook’s setup wizard, but make sure you hit these sections in particular because they’re very important to the growth of your business.

You need to fill out the Description. You need to briefly tell people what they’re gonna get from following your page. So this is very similar to what you would have in your cover photo, however, you do have more characters to work with, so it can be a bit more descriptive.

You also wanna choose the correct Category for your type of business. You wanna link your website.

You wanna put in all the contact information that you wanna use for people to get in touch with you. Now if you have a physical location to your business, you wanna have the address and the hours of operations as well.

Step Four: Add A Button

This step is really important because it is how you will get people to take the next step with your business. Step number four is actually setting up the button that appears right under your cover photo on your page. How you do that is very simple. Just click on this button that says Add a Button.

And then you get to choose what action you want a prospect to do. So, if you want them to book an appointment with you. If you want them to go to a landing page, to a website, send you a message, or whatever you want them to do. You simply set it up here.

If you don’t have anything set up, like a website, or a landing page, or anything else, it’s really simple just to say “Message me,” and you can start having conversations through Messenger on your business page. And those conversations can very easily lead to sales.

So to do that, I would just click this Contact You > Send Message.

Choose what’s best for you and your prospects with all of the different options that you have here. Then scroll down, hit the Next button.

There are not a lot of options when it comes to “Send Message” because it’s pretty straightforward. They’re gonna send you a message through Facebook Messenger. So just select this on step two and then hit Finish. And now you see, Send Message.

Pro tip:

To see what someone will see when they visit your Facebook Business page, click on the three dots to see additional page options, and you can see “View as Page Visitor.”

And this is what people are gonna see when they go to your page:

They’re gonna be able to message you with the handy button you’ve just set up. They will see all of your posts and all of your contact information.

To go back to your regular view, simply click on this link at the very top of your page:

And you’re back to your regular administrative view.

Congrats, now your page is set up, and it’s super important that you do step number five.

Step Five: Promotion

Step number 5 is actually inviting people to like your page and starting to promote it out on the internet.

So how do you do this?

There’s a really simple button that says To Invite Friends.

Now, here’s the important part. You don’t just invite your entire friend network on Facebook because guess what? They’re not necessarily your target audience.

But you can easily scroll through your friends list and send invites to people who do fit your perfect customer, your target audience, that you want to reach, so definitely invite them.

Now if you’re thinking, “Well, I just want the likes, “I don’t care if they’re my perfect customer,” that’s the wrong way to think because here’s the deal…If people have liked your page, but they don’t actually engage with your page, that’s gonna be seen as negative towards you in Facebook’s eyes.

Plus, when you are ready to run ads and do some different targeting based on who’s liked your page, it’s going to mess up your ability to target your ads effectively. Because when you’re ready to run these ads, Facebook is going to look at who has liked your page and it’s going to find other people on Facebook that are like them, so this is gonna hurt your ability to have an effective ad campaign, because Facebook will try to put your message, your ad, in front of people who aren’t actually interested in what you have to offer.

So just “getting likes” is going to be an ineffective strategy that will effectively increase the cost of your advertising and not get you a meaningful or profitable ROI (return on investment).

Now, if you’re active in any communities online, Facebook groups or wherever, that serve your target audience, where you have people in your target audience there, promote your page to them if it’s allowed in the group. So know the rules. But if allowed, let the community know why they should follow you and your page and invite them to do so.

You can tell the folks in these targeted communities what value they will receive from your page, and you can also possibly run a contest for a free coaching session, a free call, a mug with a logo, whatever you can do to appeal to provide even more value and an incentive to the people who are liking your page.

If you did that, you would basically announce that out of the next 500 people that like your page, you’re gonna be doing a drawing and giving away something that they would want.

And now, for the crucial piece that you must do to create a stable business…

Here’s the thing to keep top-of-mind, Facebook actually owns your business page. You don’t own it.

And if you tick Facebook off in any way, which you probably won’t know what you did, you could wake up and all of the work that you’ve put into a Facebook page could be gone.

Facebook is notorious for shutting down people’s pages, doing bans, putting limits on people’s pages. This is a risk that we all have to accept and live with, BUT you can still safeguard your business by moving people from your business page onto an email list, so you take traffic that you don’t own, and you move it to traffic that you do own, your email list.

This will ensure that if at some point down the line your business page goes away, you still have a way to contact and connect with that audience through email. So, just safeguard yourself and make sure that you’re moving your audience from Facebook onto your email list.

Pro Tip:

It is always a good idea to stay aware of Facebook’s policies, and yes, they change all the time. But try to stay up on policy changes, especially when you start running ads.

Now that you’ve got a beautiful Facebook Business page all set up and ready to go, it is time to start posting. Do you know what to post? Well, I have exactly what you need to watch to know what to post on your page in this video here. Watch that one next to learn nine super easy hacks to create very profitable posts for your business. I’ll see you there.