How can I earn money with Facebook? What are the best ideas and proven strategies? My new Facebook friend Jim Chao and fellow associate with MLM Lead System Pro recently exposed many of his “patented” techniques using Facebook, while providing some simple steps to achieve this goal.

The bottom line is that you can exploit these Facebook ideas as an awesome free networking tool. What does this mean? First, Facebook has very good tools to automate many of the tasks needed to be accomplished by any sales professional, network marketer or manager. The first is making yourself personable. This is crucial to eventually making money online.

Facebook is great for establishing rapport so that people can more easily communicate with you. Your profile should have a real picture, plus some details about your interests, hobbies, etc. Your photo albums should “tell your story” and make you real and approachable to people. Your “about me” section should be filled out briefly with no sales pitch or company website.

Many will find this doesn’t make sense, but remember that your task is to not introduce your product before first understanding the needs and desires of your customers. Note that many inexperienced “marketers” want to quickly post links to their company websites on everyone’s wall. Jim’s advice is simply to delete these “friends” from your list.

Second, make new friends. To do this, just become aware of and join groups which you find similar interests with. For example, if you search for “The Secret,” you’ll find many groups on this subject, several of which could keep you busy forever in finding friends. Then choose people in the group to invite as your friends. Include a short message (optional) stating your mutual interest in the group topic and your interest in connecting.

If you’re doing other Internet marketing, use Facebook to connect with these people by adding them as friends, so they can get to know you. This is particularly true if you generate cold leads online, e.g., pay-per-click (PPC). If these people are in your sales funnel, you can bet they’re in other sales funnels and by contacting them personally you’ll place yourself above your competition. Jim, who does a significant PPC marketing volume finds about 50% of his prospects do have Facebook accounts already.

By doing these steps and implementing these ideas, you’ll also set yourself apart from 97% of all Internet marketers. Network marketing, as with any sales profession is about relating with people. That is why Facebook, augments your otherwise restricted capability to get to know your prospects.

Make full use of videos. You can tag your new friends in a standard greeting video. Then don’t expect to introduce people immediately to your opportunity. Relationship building takes time. As with any marketing strategy, you want to focus on learning about people first, and then once you have a relationship built on trust, help them with what they want. For most it will be to get their home network marketing business finally profitable.

Another great idea is to send friends a video on their birthday. There are virtually no marketers presently doing this, even after listening to the training. If you use videos this way, you’ll be ahead of 99.9% of internet marketers.

Facebook groups and events are also excellent tools for list generation, which is necessary to make money. Once you’ve established friends online, you can invite them to a group you’ve created with the purpose of education and training in building their business, if that is what they want.

Another idea is adding other social networks can save you time, e.g. link to Twitter. Be careful, because Facebook users may not appreciate it if you tweet them more than a couple times daily. But for most people this is a viable idea and can save time, since most people only occasionally post to their Twitter account.