"We love our website! Thank you, David." ~ Melinda Mitchell & Natalie Hudson.

Tours Key West is the island's most comprehensive source for tours, attractions, and things to do in Key West.

"My largest jewelry orders ever are coming from my website! It just looks fantastic and my customers love it. Thank you, David. Zimidi exceeded my expectations." ~ Sandy Guthrie

Island Bottle Factory is a showcase for Zimidi's advanced retail designs, featuring  over 120 related products.

Ah, Facebook: Great Mystery of the Universe. How does anyone make money with you? Why even try? Is there a point to all this digital marketing madness? These questions and more will be answered in this enlightening three-part series.

What Facebook Really Offers

Before we dismiss Facebook out-of-hand, it's worth nothing that it is one of the most lucrative and highly-valued businesses in the world. Clearly, the company is doing something right. How does Facebook make its money? From businesses just like yours and mine. So what are they doing that benefits us? How is Facebook worth billions when their site is free?

Facebook business pages can be integrated with your website in several different ways.

Facebook as a Social Platform

Social networking and social marketing are buzzwords for a new kind of relationship marketing. It's marketing to people who already agree that they are interested in your product. Basically, it's an advertiser's dream! No wonder Facebook is so successful: it gives businesses a way to speak directly to people who have already stated an interest in your product or service. It doesn't get any better than that. When you use Facebook properly as a social marketing platform, your message goes exclusively to people who choose to receive it. We'll look at exactly how this works in just a moment.

Facebook as an Advertising Platform

Facebook ads are more than targeted, they're hyper-targeted. When you use Facebook as an advertising medium, your ad is only shown to people with the exact demographics you select, whether its their physical location, age, or interests. Facebook makes it easy to only show ads to men 18-45 who live in Key West, for example. Or only to people who say they are vegetarians. Or dog lovers. Or into fishing. Facebook advertising is targeted at a level no advertising has been before. This is the real reason that it works and the reason Facebook is a multibillion dollar cash cow.

A highly-targeted ad for Key West restaurant owners. Clicking the ad takes potential clients directly to my page about restaurant websites.

Getting In

Ok, you're sold! How do you get started? To play the Facebook game, you must have a page for your business. Don't make the mistake of so many others and try to name your personal page with your business name. Don't think you can just take a personal page and put "Frank's" in the first name box and "Auto Service" in the last name box and you're done. Personal pages don't have any of the business-specific features that make Facebook useful for selling and promoting yourself. You need a business page, separate from your personal Facebook login.

Facebook keeps incredibly detailed statistics about interactions with your business page.

I Like You

You may be thinking, "I already have a Facebook page." But if you don't have a business page, you're missing out on the real power of Facebook marketing. First of all, personal pages require that someone friend you and then you agree to friend them back to create a relationship. Business pages don't need your consent to join. Anyone can like your business page without notifying you or asking permission. In this way, your business fan base can grow to thousands of people, far beyond the list of personal friends you know. In fact, it is these "Likes" that drive the entire Facebook targeting system. Someone who likes kayaking is a good target for an ad selling kayaks!

Unlike personal pages, Facebook business pages know how many people read each post.

Impressions Count

In most respects, your business Facebook page acts like your personal one. It has a wall where you write status updates, and it lets you post pictures and links. But it's different in three key ways. First off, a business page keeps statistics. It actually knows how many people read it each day, and which stories they look at. These numbers, called impressions, are tracked automatically by Facebook just hours after you post. This lets you see which posts are interesting to your customers and which ones failed to get their attention.

Many sites use a "social ribbon" to let users like them on Facebook from the website.

Business Tools

Facebook offers a number of cool widgets for your website, but these are only available to business pages. Once you have one, you can choose to share your wall in real time on your website, add a Like button any page on your site to bring website visitors over to Facebook, or even allow visitors to comment on your site content using Facebook (where their comments and your site link will be seen by all the commenter's friends). These powerful marketing tools are only available if you make a business page.

To logout of Facebook, click Account, then Logout.

Creating a Business Page

To make a Facebook page for your business, you must log out of Facebook. This counterintuitive step throws a lot of people off. Once you logout, you'll see a link at the bottom right of the Facebook home page that says "Create a page for a celebrity, band, or business." Click that link to get started. You'll go through a very simple process of telling Facebook what kind of business you have and filling-in some basic information, such as your website, hours, and location. Take a moment to look through all the options in business types and pick the one that most closely matches your actual business. Don't choose "national brand" for a local company, for example. Facebook search and advertising work best if you accurately describe your company's offerings. You'll be prompted to upload your company logo. About halfway through the process, you'll be asked to login with your regular Facebook login. This connects your personal account to your new business page and makes you the admin or responsible person for the new page.

Click this link on the Facebook home page to create a business page.

Get Some Likes!

To get the party started, you'll need to invite some friends to like your new business page. Facebook has a built-in tool for sending these invitations. At the top-right of your business page is a link labeled "Invite Friends." Click it and you can choose current Facebook friends who should receive an invitation to join your business page by "liking" it. You should post a link to your new business page on your personal wall, too, inviting friends to like your new page. When you have 25 people who like your page, you're ready for a vanity name, a personal Facebook address like facebook.com/zimidi that's easy to type or tell people.

Use the Suggest to Friends link on your business page to get more Likes for your new page.

Your Homework

Your homework for next week is to get a Facebook page and 25 likes. In my next blog post, you'll get a vanity name and learn to create effective Facebook posts that integrate with your website and generate new business.

> Continue Reading Part II

About David Bethune
David Bethune is an internet pioneer and the founder of Zimidi, Inc. As a radio host for Southernmost Radio Network, he taught classes in Facebook and digital marketing. He considers himself very lucky to have two dogs.

Keys Discount Insurance is the new name for Hazard Insurance Services, a leading Homestead insurance broker. Zimidi rebranded the company, designed the new logo, and created the "Keys Discount Man" concept for their new site.

Look for the new Rick's and Durty Harry's Key West website coming soon!

Rick's is the premier entertainment complex in Key West, combining 8 bars and entertainment venues, each with its own unique appeal.

What does the metaverse hold for you? No one can say with certainty. Few people are even aware of OSGrid, OpenSim, or the coming 3D version of the internet. But you are. That's why you're reading this page.

Zimidi, founded by internet pioneer David Bethune, has been innovating on the internet since 1995 and in the metaverse since 2004 as David Czukor in Second Life. Today we're opening new territory in OpenSim region development, scripting, and user interfaces.

If your company is interested in finding out what's in the metaverse for you, it's time to contact Zimidi.

"David from Zimidi was able to capture the essence of yoga on my website. Created with simplicity and beauty, it exceeded my expectations. He's efficient and quick. Thank you, Zimidi."  ~ Sofia Artola

Shakti Yoga is Key West's favorite yoga studio.

"My website is beautiful. Gorgeous! Thank you, David." ~ Georgia Favelli

Casa 325 is a unique Key West hotel hidden in an enclave off Duval St.

With apologizes to the Bard, but clients do often throw fits over the topic of email -- and there's really nothing to it. Today, I'll break down the main types of email addresses and why it matters to your business which kind you have.

"Why spend your time and money advertising for Google? They’re doing fine, thank you. It’s time to make your email address work for your brand."

Three Kinds of Email

In the beginning, everyone had an email address from their internet provider, as this was the only game in town. It created a profusion of addresses ending in @aol.com and legions of subscribers who were afraid to ever change them. AOL still rakes in advertising dollars from folks who have an AOL-era address and are too afraid to change it. The second type of email address ends with the name of a big mail provider like @gmail.com or @hotmail.com. The old favorite, butterflygirl24@yahoo.com is one of these. But the king of the hill is the vanity email which contains only your own name and your company name: david@zimidi.com.

Internet Provider Emails

Email addresses that come from the same place you get your internet access are free and already setup for you. This seems like an advantage until you realize that they don't belong to you. If you establish an email address @comcast.net and then move out of town, Comcast will not keep your mailbox open for you. They don't even offer forwarding. Your mail and contacts will simply disappear the moment your cable is shutoff. Not good. The same is true with accounts from your employer or business partner (webmaster@johnspizza.com) or an educational institution (linda_smith@harvard.edu).

Webmail

Realizing the tremendous advertising income AOL was generating from letting people read their email in a web browser, all three of the other big internet players started offering free email boxes with lots of storage, including Microsoft's Hotmail, Google's Gmail, and Yahoo! Mail. Just signup on their site and get a new email in minutes. What could be simpler, right? If you answered, "It still doesn't belong to you," you're right! Those who answered, "And you can't pick the name you want," go straight to the head of the class. These are the two main problems with webmail accounts. But those aren't the only problems.

Webmail Is Still Webmail

One of the worst things about webmail is also the best thing: You read it in your browser. That's wonderful if you're on someone else's computer, if you're in an airport on a notebook, or if you're using a public computer in a hotel. But those emergencies aside, a website is no place for email. First of all, it's a crowded, dirty spot. Much of the screen real estate is given over to advertising, the bread-and-butter of the big email purveyors. You must deal with endless clicks across multiple pages as determined by these giant corporations (and changed whenever they like) in order to navigate what you thought were your messages. Keep a webmail account just for non-work uses when it's best not to give out your work address.

The Dark Side of Webmail

Webmail accounts come with serious privacy concerns. All of the major internet providers routinely offer access to their customers' data for advertising and law enforcement purposes. All of your email content: logins, locations, emails, and attachments are stored, even after you delete them. The ominously-named Microsoft Global Criminal Compliance Handbook goes so far as to give sample wording for bench warrants. Microsoft, Google, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and others all offer up your private data for advertisers and governments.

Be Your Own Gmail

The answer is clear: For business, you must be your own email provider and control both sides of the equation: the email boxes that come before the @ sign, and the domain that comes after. You need to be able to make up your own email boxes whenever you please, and to forward copies to other people if you choose. You may even need to deal with multiple domain names, for your business and your charity, for example. And sometimes you'll still want to use webmail in a pinch. The good news is that all of this is remarkably easy to implement. In fact, it's far harder to explain than it is to setup!

Add Email Service to Your Domain

While it's possible to run your own mailserver (and believe me, I've tried), I don't recommend it. The reason is spam. You could easily be overrun with spammers and find yourself with an unusable machine that's been blacklisted from every provider, leaving you unable to send mail to anyone. Instead, let someone take on that burden for you -- but with professional level controls that you can access. My favorite provider for this kind of stuff is 1&1. They're the world's largest hosting company (that you never heard of) and, like all their products, they make adding email service to your domain a piece of cake. It's cheap, too. For less than $2/month you get 5 custom email boxes with built-in spam and virus protection. Every domain name provider offers email, so you don't have to use 1&1, but they keep their site ad-free and make things very simple to navigate.

What's in a Name?

Once you've got email service on your domain, it's time to start creating boxes. This is where you  make your vanity name. Bill Gates's famous email address was bill@microsoft.com during his tenure there, and I recommend this same format for you. If your business has three owners, they should be bob@yourcompany.com, ted@yourcompany.com, and alice@yourcompany.com. These addresses have two tremendous advantages. First, they are remarkably simple and unambiguous. What could be easier to understand than your first name? Second, they brand your company with every email you send and every mention you make of your email address. Why spend your time and money advertising for Google? They're doing fine, thank you. It's time to make your email address work for your brand.

Other Boxes You Might Want

People often ask me if there are other boxes they should have, and sometimes the answer is yes. When your company needs a generic face that can be covered by several people, an address such as appointment@mycompany.com or support@yourcompany.com will do, but in general these names are dry and impersonal and best avoided. If you must have one, it should forward to all of the vanity names of the real people inside your company who will deal with the messages.

To Forward Or Not To Forward?

When you create your new email boxes, the first choice you're given is to use forwarding or not. Forwarding seems like the easy choice. Just have your new mail come to your old mailbox! But it's a form of cheating because replies you make to those messages will come from your old webmail address. In other words, if you setup jerry@ourbusiness.com to forward to jerry-penguinfarmer43@yahoo.com, the people who receive email from you will be told that your email box is @yahoo.com. It must be this way, since you are using Yahoo to receive and reply to the message. Instead, let's jump through the wormhole and out of webmail...

Meet Your Web Client

In the halls of computer science, a client is a program that communicates with a remote server for a specific purpose. The program you'll need to get your email from your new server is called a mail client and there are a few popular options. For years, businesses relied on Outlook because it's the most full-featured mail client for Windows. But in the last few years Microsoft has made 95% of the functionality of Outlook available in a free product called Windows Live Mail. It looks and works just like Outlook so folks who've used that setup at work will have no trouble. On the Mac, the built-in Mail program can communicate with your domain-based email server.

Get It Setup

Google is the new tech support, and it can come to your rescue here when setting up your mail client. Let's say you want to setup Windows Live Mail to work with your 1&1 account. Just Google "1&1 email Outlook setup" and you'll find an article that steps through the process. You'll be pleased to know your old webmail provider will also let you access that account with your email client, and you can Google for those instructions, too. The term you want is "POP3" for incoming email and "SMTP" for outgoing email. So to setup your Mac Mail client for 1&1 SMTP, search Google for "Mac mail 1&1 SMTP."

Embrace the Change

When faced with a tenth of this information, many clients recoil in horror at the thought of changing their email address. They envision lost emails and customers who will never reach them. This isn't going to happen for two reasons: First, you're not going to delete your webmail account, you're just going to stop promoting it. When people ask you for your email address, you're going to tell them you're sally@yourbusiness.com. End of story.

Making the Migration

People who continue to write you on your old address can still reach you. Just add your webmail box into your new mail client as one of the accounts it checks. Et voilá, all of your mail in one place. Outlook and Windows Mail can even help the migration by automatically replying to people who write you on your old address, informing them that your message was received and to please make a note of your new address. You can even setup your replies and forwards to automatically come from your new address, regardless of what address you received them on. How's that for sophisticated customer service? Once you're satisfied that no useful mail has come into the old account for some time (a year is a good start), you can safely turn off your old box. If a real person is trying to reach you after that, they can find you in Google and get your new email from your business webpage. And just think of all the spam you'll miss!

David Bethune is an internet pioneer and the founder of Zimidi, Inc. His two doggie children do not have vanity emails.

"Working with David Bethune has been a pleasure. His insight into the internet as a whole is second to none and, combined with his excellent teaching abilities, made everything a very easy learning experience. David's marketing with the internet is an invaluable asset for anyone looking to use their website to grow their business." ~ Chris Rehm

Key West Chris is an established local musician who just released a new album in the Trop Rock genre.