Facebook is a simple and effective way to drive traffic to your website. With daily billing to your credit card and daily spending limits, it’s an ideal way for small businesses with limited cash flow to effectively manage a web marketing budget.

In order to advertise on Facebook, you must create a user account. This can be your personal account, or one you create specifically for your business. Creating a page for your business will increase your presence on Facebook, and allow you to drive traffic there, or to your outside website.

Facebook advertising benefits from some highly specific targeting. You can find your ideal audience by limiting your ad plays by age, sex, location (country, state or city), marital status, education level, language, and other specific keywords of your choosing. For instance, you may only want to reach Spanish-speaking females between the ages of 14 and 18, currently in a relationship, who love “Twilight” and live in New York City. It’s a cinch with Facebook’s simple targeting system. They’ll even suggest additional keywords for you based upon your choices, allowing you to efficiently find your niche.

A bold image is a great way to draw the eye. Your image will be resized to fit into a 110 by 80 pixel box. It’s best to submit your image in this exact size, to avoid any cropping or distortion.

You can choose to pay for your ads by CPM (cost per one thousand impressions) or CPC (cost per click). Depending on your goal, CPC is the most direct way to track your ad’s performance, as you only pay when someone clicks on your ad and is directed to your website. Facebook will suggest a maximum CPC, and then allow you to choose your own maximum cost, and your daily spending limit. If your maximum CPC is well below their suggested rate, your ad will not display very often. If it is within or higher than their suggested rate, you’ll get more exposure, and therefore, more clicks.

Facebook provides fairly comprehensive statistics on how your ad is performing. They will let you know your average CPC and CPM, as well as how many total clicks and impressions you have received, and your total spend on each individual advertisement and campaign. This will allow you to focus on your most effective ads and keywords, and discontinue ads that are not performing as well.

Links are no doubt one of the most important things to have to improve your rankings in Google and the other major search engines.   So how do you go about getting them?

1. Paying For Them:  I do not recommend buying links.  Many in this industry consider paying for links cheating.  If you build a good site links will come.
2. Link Exchange:  If you are a local business and other firends or business in the local community have websites it is always a good idea to trade links.  Trading links is a great first step to a online relationship.  After trading links I also recommend looking for other ways to cross promote on and offline.
3. Link Letters:  Many website owners who cater to a simlar audiences as your site will be willing to put a link to your site if they only knew about it.  I find sending an email to these webmasters informing them of your site and why you think there visitors will find your site useful is a great way to get links.  Make sure you send your emails on Sunday night. I find emails open on Mondays get a much higher responce rate.
4. Submit to Web Directories: Do continuous directory submissions for your site.  Rotate the anchor text you use.
5. Article Submissions: Submit content to other sites.  Embed links within the content.
6. Social Networking: Build pages with content and link on soical networks.  Look for ones that don’t use the nofollow tag.
7. Link from .org and .edu sites: Offer free services to schools and non-profits.  Most will give you a link in exchange for your help.
8. Social Book marking: Make a profile and add your links to at least 10 of the soical bookmarking services.