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Nowadays everything is becoming social. Everybody use social media networks to communicate, share stuffs, make friends and even to make money!

You should know that marketers always look for one thing: Masses. They analyze a market and study its potential depending how many people they can target and how many people could be willing to buy.

In the matter of marketing, there are many, but many factors you need to study before stepping forward. In this post I just want to talk about how you can use the traffic from social networks, specifically on Facebook to make money online.

Facebook’s Traffic is Huge

Do you know how many people visit facebook a day? According to Compete.com, Facebook receive over 100 millions of visits a month, which makes it an incredible place to run ads.

So now, I’m gonna step you ahead Facebook Ads, giving you my personal tips and thoughts about the system:

Creating and Ad

social media advertising

I don’t remember if you need to register or something like, but you can create an ad by going to the next link -> facebook.com/ads. Once there, you could see case studies and a step by step guide for creating an ad.

[tip 1] Selecting a Title is key for your ad. You have only 25 characters to write something to attract people’s attention, so do it well. This is something like Google Adwords, if you have created advertising before you know that you need to call to action within the title. Using verbs such as “buy, learn, get, celebrate… etc” (a.k.a. active verbs) is key to succeed.

About the content, this is the ad itself. You have only 135 characters so you need to think well how to write an interesting ad. Describing and complementing what you wrote on the title is the purpose of this field.

The other factor you need to consider is the photo. This is a 110×80 pixels image that will be shown in your ad. [tip 2] I highly recommend you to put a image with these dimensions; avoiding putting images such 80×80 or whatever. This is because facebook don’t center the image, so if you don’t use 110×80, your image will be aligned to the left, which leaves a white space at the right – which sucks!

Targeting

This is the most important step and the reason why many people fail with advertising. It is very important to target the right crowd for certain product or event. People tend to target large audiences, but that not always works.

Study demographics and psychographics of your market (i.e. real state, gaming, acai berry etc) so you will be able to configure the different  filters such as: location, age, sex, relationship status among others.

[tip 3] The more accurate your targeting is, the better. Don’t try to be flexible with the filters in order the display your ad to more people. That “extra” people you get by doing it, will not convert!

Campaign and Pricing

The next section deals with choosing a campaign to attach your ad to, and also, for setting your budget. You can choose between running your ad since it is approved or running it in certain dates, perfect for holidays such as Halloween or Christmas!

[tip 4] Choose Pay for Clicks in your ad (paying for impressions sucks, I’ll talk about it later). Facebook is gonna suggest you an interval for max bid. Do not care about it!! My experience says that setting a max bid lower than the minimum according to facebook works well. I’m used to set my max bid 20 cents lower than the min suggested by facebook.

Extra Considerations

Despite the great traffic of facebook, the clicks through ratio (CTR) sucks, so your goal is to improve it as much as you can!  That’s why I recommended you before to choose PPC as method of payment.

Also, they probably will reject your ad many times. The first time I used facebook advertising I got rejected like 5 times or even more, no kidding! But why? I have no idea, I was following their policies and rules so I think they didn’t like my ad.

[tip 5] I suggest you to create a couple of variations of your ads. In fact, once you get approved, continue creating variations of them. Then, see which one provides the greatest CTR, discard the others and keep the testing by doing other variations of the selected one. Then, the cycle repeats over and over until you get “the best” ad. Variations also include different pictures for the same texts!

I recommend reviewing: Suggested Best Practices and Common Reasons for Rejection, both sources of help provided by facebook.

Did I miss something? If so, leave a comment to let me know!

Image via CrunchBase

If you are in the business of  websites development, one of the easiest ways to make money by doing what you know is to flip them. In fact, you don’t necessarily need to know about the coding. If you are able to pick a theme and create a couple of good articles you could be flipping blogs without problem.

What’s a blog flipping?

Have you created a blog just to sell it? Well, that’s a flip. The price of a blog vary depending the quality of its theme and also, if the blog is established – with a couple of months, with loyal readers -  or not.

Things you need to consider

• Theme: you can either create your own theme, which will take you more effort, or you can pick a free/premium one. The second option will take you almost zero effort, but it has a difference: by taking a premium theme you could sell your site more expensive.
• Content: like the first point, you have two tracks here. If you are selling an established blog, I guess your content is original and unique. But if you are selling a non-established site – which means it is brand new, without loyal readers -  you could use re-purposed content that has been or may be reused on other sites. The kind of content also determines the price of the blog.
• Revenue: depending how much the blog you are selling makes a month, the price can be higher or lower.
• Traffic: this is kind of obvious but there’s people who ask how a blog can be sold for $60k. The higher the traffic a blog has, the higher the price. If your blog is not an established one, you cannot expect to receive thousands for it.

Try selecting a niche that converts when you are going to sell a blog. If you do not know how to recognize a good niche, so I invite you to check out this post and also, to stop by flippa’s marketplace so you can see what’s selling and what’s not.

If you think flipping sites is much trouble to you, so hire someone who makes the hard part. For example, you could hire an affordable copywriter to create 5 original articles at good forums such as DigitalPoint or Warrior. Also, you could hire someone to get an original logo.

Remember, the more is developed/customized a blog, the more you can ask for it. So you could hire someone to customize a theme so you could sell it for more. In fact, you could hire someone to make the whole work and then sell it for a higher amount so you can get a profit practically for free.

So, have you flipped websites? I’ve done it through Flippa and SiteDeal!

Naturally, everything follows a pattern. If you read about fractals, you will find that they appear on tree leaves, broccoli and so on.

As you can imagine, people’s behavior DOES follow a pattern too, and you can see this fact by analyzing a group of people… If you are a leader, you should know that usually the people you speak to tend to follow a kind of line, or at least most of them…

The thing become interesting when you find persons who stand out from the crowd! So then, by analyzing this kind of people – aka freaks – you can actually know more about what is happening in the environment and so then, improve it.

Have you seen bloggers changing their theme from time to time? may be the sidebar or the position of the links? Well, this is because they probably would be using heatmaps in order to study the behavior of the people who visit their blogs.

How a heatmap looks like?

A heatmap shows you where the visitors have been clicking on your website. With this awesome tool you can test the position of your ads, may be icon alternatives for subscribing to your blog etc etc… Use your imagination! This can be used when you need an input from your visitors, without letting them know.

One of the purposes I use heatmaps for is to analyze which landing page  “looks” – aka sells – better. Remember that your audience will probably think different than you, so don’t make any suppositions because you don’t know how they will react to certain graphic.

So as you can see, this is perfect for split tests among landing pages, which I will be talking about in future posts.

The Tool

To run heatmaps, I use the services of Crazy Egg. There should be lots of web services out there, but I like this one. So try it by yourself and tell me what do you think about it! It’s pretty easy to use, you just need to upload a script to your website and walah! – you will be catching every single click made on your website.

Input request - Are you using heatmaps? What for? Share what you know about this topic!

Probably you have heard about an unofficial apps store for Twitter called oneforty. If you haven’t, you better check this out.

oneforty is a great way to find, rate, collect and share Twitter apps or services which improve its functionality. Over there you can find tons of resources: from desktop to smartphone clients, there are plenty of apps which you should check out. Currently they are tracking 1611 apps that make Twitter even better!

How To Join

Do you remember ping.fm? Well, oneforty works the same way ping.fm did once. Being beta at the present time, you need an invitation and a twitter account in order to surf/use this website. If you don’t have an special  invitation, you can sign up to make your request. After a day or two, you will receive a special link directly in your inbox which you can use to create your account and start finding apps to improve twitter!

What I Think

Twitter is a great service which many people use everyday. In fact, I’ve been waiting something like this since a long time ago , and I’m sure either you.

Yesterday I was looking for a new client for my smartphone and I found exactly what I wanted. I get surprised when I saw how many apps they have listed there, I mean they have a lot! So if you don’t use Twitter so much because you think is boring or something, I definitively recommend you to request an invitation for this site to check out what they’ve listed for you. Surely, you will find something that fits your necessities.

Are you an oneforty user? If so, what do you think about it?

Hello people, it has been a long time since I wrote my last post, the college was consuming me… So how are you guys? While I was offline, I kept reading your comments and reading other people’s blogs, so  I hope you didn’t feel abandoned . Also I was exploring other kind of businesses which I will be talking about soon.

My incomes dropped… but not so much

So let’s talk about my incomes! I noted that many people take a look at my reports. So this months of recession people started cutting their expenses – as you know – and that included banners and text links from my blog, which means that my incomes became lower.

I kept earning money from banner subscriptions, but my ppc campaigns dropped like %50! So I needed to find other ways to make money to avoid all those cuts.

Someone asked me about my earnings of Text Links Ads, and I’m glad you asked because I think I’m gonna quit. I was earning like $25 with TLA, but Google was (and still doing) digging my grave… In the latest months my blog dropped from PR2 (which was low enough) to 1, and then to a big zero. So I think I’m gonna quit that and focus more on sales of banners…

What I have been doing

Aside my private sales, I also play with affiliate marketing and web design. Recently I sold a blog (www.bigghealth.com if you are interested on my work) and that gave me a boost on my incomes, fortunately. Also I have been dealing with pay per lead campaigns, also known as CPA campaigns (cost per action).

I want to make a couple of articles related with alternatives besides Google Adwords for advertising, i.e. facebook ads,  MSN & Yahoo advertising and others…

I want to ask you a favor

Yes, you heard it. If you have any experience with advertising and PPC, I would like to know it. So you can drop me a comment here or send me an email.

PS: Especially I’m looking for information about Facebook Ads

If you have never done a Pay Per Click Campaign before, it can be very daunting.  Sometimes the risk factor turns you off before you even think about creating your first Adwords campaign.

Even if you have been burnt before, here I’m going to present you a list of 8 simple and systematic steps that should put you on the right track to creating successful pay per click campaign after successful pay per click campaign.

1. Choose a Market: Go to popular affiliate program sites like Motive Interactive or Ads4Dough and find out what the most popular offers and affiliate products are.  You need to choose a market that is proven and has lots of competition, as then you know that there is money being made in that niche.
2. Choose the Keywords to use for your campaign:  Once you have chosen a market, think about four or five search terms that you would enter into a search engine if you wanted to find out more about this market, just like if you were a customer looking for something that fits your necessities.  Make a note of these keywords.
3. Compile these keywords into a list:  Take the keywords researched in the previous step and enter them into the free Wordtracker or Google Keyword tools.  Copy and cut the lists of keywords that this tools generate into a Notepad and process them through another free tool like  Good Keywords to get rid of any duplicates.  Now you have a list that you will use in step 6, so save it and put it to one side.
4. Choose what affiliate products you would like to promote: Using the first five original keywords you thought of in step 2, type them into Spyfu.com and study the sponsored ads it brings up for those keywords.  You want to see which affiliate products are being promoted and which are most popular, so you can make a decision as to what affiliate program to promote based on your findings.
5. Choose what kind Pay Per click campaign you are going to run:  After you have determined what the most popular affiliate is, have a look how the pay per click advertisers are promoting their link – is the link directed to a landing page like a blog, or review page, or is it a direct link to the affiliate product?  You will want to try and differentiate yourself from the other advertisers in your selected market.
6. Break down your keyword list into groups of related keywords:  Take your list of keywords from step 3 and break it into groups of 5 to 15 related keywords, ready to enter into your Google Adwords account.
7. Create your Google Adwords account and start testing:  Open your Google Adwords account and enter your keyword groups, which personally I do with the Adwords Editor to make the process faster. Take the plunge and set up an amount per day that you are comfortable with spending.
8. After a week or so run a Google Adwords Search Query Report: The search query report will show you exactly what people have typed into Google for your ad to appear to them.  This will help you refine your keywords and chose the best ones to continue on with your campaign.

This is a good strategy for creating your first Adwords campaign and once you have completed the steps, it is a formula you can refer back to and create many more successful pay per click campaigns.

To make this process even simpler, I do all of this with the help of Affiliate Espionage. It is a simple but powerful plugin for Firefox which exposes profitable PPC campaigns with ease. Check out what you can do with it, 100% recommended!