In my last post, Is Your Facebook Fan Page A Virtual Ghost Town?, I discussed techniques that you can do to engage your audience, encourage participation and overall give some life to your page even if you are the only one driving the conversation.

One of the areas I briefly touched up on was creating a landing page for your first time visitors.

Well, due to popular demand (I always wanted to say that ), I’ve taken on the arduous task of creating a tutorial on how to create a customized landing page.

And guess what?

It’s pretty darn easy to do…I kid you not.  It’s one of those things that once you see how it’s done, you’ll think to yourself, “self, I could of done this earlier!”.

In the video, I add a profile picture, and show you a very simple design, but you can  get really super creative here by adding customized images.

Adobe Photoshop is great for this.  If you don’t have Photoshop and don’t want to spend the insane amount of money to get it, check out a free image editor such as Paint.net.

OK, so without further ado, the topics to be covered in the video are:

• What can be added to your Facebook Fan Page
• Using WordPress to create your customized landing page
• Adding staticFBML to your page
• Adding the HTML code to your FBML application
• Adding videos to your page using YouTube & some code (see transcription for the code)

This video is a bit under 10 minutes, so grab a cup of coffee, put your feet up and enjoy the show – yes, I know, a bit dramatic.

Video Transcription:

[spoiler]

Hello this is Michele Welch from NewBizBlogger and this is the second part to the last video I made on Facebook engagement techniques.

In this video I would like to go more into depth with how to create a landing page which is going to be your default page.  This is the page people visiting your Facebook fan page for the first time will see first.  On this customized page you can basically put whatever you want, whether it’s information about you or your business or you can add videos.  As you can see here, I’ve added some bullet points and what I do for a living and that sort of stuff.

Ok, so let create a page and you’ll get to see how easy it is.  Now I’m going to show you using WordPress, but you can also do this with a text editor, basically any software that’s going to generate html code for you.

Another neat trick is to actually sign up for a free blog at wordpress.com and use that text editor to create your Facebook landing page.

>OK, so lets’ sign into our WordPress Dashboard.  I’ve already signed in. If you are new to WordPress just sign in and under your ‘Post’ click on ‘add new’ and you’ll get into a new page.  I’m just going to go ahead and go back since I already have one for this presentation.

And it doesn’t matter what title you put because you are actually going to save it as a draft post.  You are not going to publish this post.

And you are going to type whatever you want here…and I’m going to show you in a little bit how to add a video to your fan page as well.

So let’s go ahead and add a picture, a profile picture > click on the ‘add image’ icon. [Click on ‘select files’ and browse through your computer to select your image].

You can choose where you want it aligned…I’m going to leave it as ‘none’ – default size is fine with me- then I’m going to click on ‘insert to post’.

Let’s go ahead and look at it and click on ‘preview’…  So you can see it needs a little fixing so I would just go back [and fix it up a bit] and then preview the page… you can always go back and fix it…

Now let’s head over to Facebook and we are going to do a search on ‘static FBML’ and click on ‘add to my page’ – now I already have this application so it’s not going to show up, but you are going to see  your page show up here, just click on it and then click on ‘add to page’.

Now go back to your Facebook page and click on ‘edit page’ and you will see something here that reads FBML. Just click on ‘edit’ …

I already have something here so I’m going to leave the title, but you can put whatever title you want in here.  You can put ‘Welcome’ or ‘Join my Newsletter’ or whatever you want to put and then what we are going to do is go back to our text editor, in my case I’m using WordPress> click on HTML> copy all the HTML code in here> right click and copy.

Go back to our Facebook page and you are going to paste all that [HTML code] right in here and click on ‘save changes’.

Now let’s go back to NewBizBlogger and we are going to search for that page that you just created and you see here, that it’s been created.  Now you can just go back and clean this up a bit, just go back to your text editor and fix all these features.  I’m not going to do that now for this presentation, but you can go ahead and work on that.

Now adding video is just a bit more technical but still relatively easy to do even for the novice.

Now I need to give props where props is due…I actually learned this neat trick from HyperArts.com.

OK, so what you are going to do is upload your video to YouTube and I’ve already uploaded a video.  And what you are going to do is, in the URL, the information you are going to need is this code [code after where it says v=] , let’s go ahead and copy it and plug into a notepad.  And you are going to take all this code right here:

And copy it and let’s go ahead back to our Facebook page and click on ‘edit page’ and go back into the page we just created and in the bottom, you are going to paste that code.

Now where you see xxxxxx , this is where you are going to paste this little ID code from the URL that you’ve just grabbed. So let’s copy that and paste that ID where the x’s are and click on ‘save changes’.

Now let’s go ahead and check out our site.  Let’s go back to the page you created and you see here that the video has been added.

Just one more note on that; let go back to the page:

I’ve actually added the center tags so the video is centered on the page, [otherwise it sits to the far left of the page] but if you don’t want it, you can just take it out.

And there you have it….your own custom landing page. Like I said before, it’s really simple, you can get as creative as you want with pictures and video and text and all that.  It’s just going to take a little bit to work out the kinks.  But overall a very easy process.

This is Michele Welch with NewBizBlogger , good luck and good bye.

Oops forgot one last step-

And that’s how to make your landing page your default page.

Go to ‘edit page’ , scroll down to wall settings, click on ‘edit’ and where it says ‘Default Landing For Everyone Else’ you are going to select the name of the customized landing page that you’ve just created.

That’s it…thanks again for watching.

[/spoiler]

If you would like to join me on Facebook, click here.

Don't forget to check out Part 2 of "Creating a Facebook Landing Page That Rocks" and learn how to create a landing page with an image file!

So what did you think? Easy or Not? If you feel others can get some value from this video, please feel free to share it- tweet it, flip it, like it, diggit, you get it!