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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!

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!

Many times, when you think about making money online, the phrase Affiliate Marketing crosses your mind, may be because we associate the word marketing with money. Is not a secret that you can make hundreds, even thousands of dollars a month with affiliate marketing but that is not too easy as many people say on Internet.

Myth #1 – It’s easy to make money

So if I’m telling you that is not too easy, you may be wondered why. Many people lie to take advantage of, that’s a fact! Let’s be honest, when someone says that it is easy to make money with X affiliate network and it shows you checks of thousands of dollars, is because it wants you to register on that network under its name, this way it could get commissions for what you make.

Of course, it is easy to make money when you have an army of referrals behind you.

Myth #2 – Low capital required

Remember that everything has a cost, if you want to make thousands of dollars you will have to spend thousand of dollars. Is fairly impossible to make thousands by investing lower amounts, remember that affiliate marketing is mainly based on traffic, so if you want to drive many people to your website you need to invest on PPC campaigns such as Google Adwords.

In addition of that, if you are promoting a campaign with 3% of conversion rate it means that 3 of each 100 visitors will (or could) buy the product. Of course that a good web design helps but that’s basically what it means.

You need to make your plans to compensate the invested (and wasted) capital for driving the other 97 persons to your website.

Myth #3 – You will get money fast

This is the most false myth ever. Before you start making real money and not a few bucks, you will need to try many different things in order to optimize your promotion. You will need to be changing the theme of your landing page, changing its keywords, its title and redistributing the things on your website. After then, you will find what is converting for you! So how much you will need to wait until the first check? That’s up to you, it depends of your work.

Myth #4 – Work just 2 hours a day

Huh? another false myth. Affiliate marketing is mostly carried out by entrepreneurs, people who like to experiment and look for new ways to meet their goals. It is completely false to say that working 2 hours per day you could get thousands of dollars. Well, may be after many years when you have all your campaigns already optimized, you could stop working if you want, but that’s not true. Internet changes and people too, so you need to be constantly changing your promotion and keywords too!

Setting up a website with marketing purposes could take you many time, you will fall asleep after midnight trying to do your best, checking you traffic statistics and optimizing what you have done.

My Personal Recommendations

In order to make your affiliate’s life easier and avoid to be consumed by it, I suggest you to put in practice the following things:

• Make backup plans: Is something is not working for me, I try to put in practice another concept in order to improve the performance of my work. Always is good to have backup plans, when something is going wrong that kind of special plans could safe you! And I’m not telling you this just for affiliate marketing, you should apply this for everything in your life.
• Set goals: May be the most important thing. If you don’t know your goals you will be doing things without sense.
• Set a schedule: Take a calendar and fix your hours of work, this way you could take off the shackles and do another activities beside working on your promotions.
• Be patient: Remember that money won’t flow through your account immediately, and it will take days, weeks or may be months to see real money in your accounts.

In my eBook The Affiliate’s Start Guide I talk about all the basics things to create a website and make money with it, so I invite you to sign up for my newsletter and get your copy for free now!

Whenever we read or speak, we are thinking on keywords. Sometimes we forget an idea while we are speaking and then we remember it because of a word related with it. As you can imagine, keywords are everywhere, specially on Internet. Every blog, forum, social community or any other website has keywords which characterize it.

So what are keywords and how can I choose the correct ones?

Well my friend, keywords are basically that words with special significance, in particular any word used to reference something else. They link to other words or other information.

The term keyword in reference to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) usually refers to a word or keyword phrase (combination of words, such as ‘best paid advertising’) used to find relevant and useful web pages. Ok now you know what are the keywords, but how could you know which ones are the proper for your website?

Well first of all, you need to have in mind something. Internet is a big virtual world, and many people are competing at the same time for specific keywords, specially the short ones, i.e. diets, money, finance, music, etc…

I suggest you to have in mind the following 2 things when you are going to select your keywords:

1. The keywords should drive traffic: This means that they should be search on search engines in order to drive traffic. If you select keywords which nobody looks for you will be wasting your time.
2. The keywords should not be too targeted: This is a little obvious for someone who knows how this works, but it couldn’t be for a newbie. If you select highly-targeted keywords, it would be very difficult for you to rank for them.

Once you learned that you may have many questions, for example, how do you know when a keyword is highly-targeted? Everything will be asnwered in this post my friend, so be quiet and keep reading. Now, let’s review the procedure of selecting good keywords.

Selecting The Keywords

To start, make a list with the most basics things you have in your mind. What? Are you telling me that you don’t have anything in mind? Don’t worry, I’m going to help you with that. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What is my site about?
• What will I offer there?
• What kind of people will visit my blog?
• What are the keywords of my competitors?

Once you thought in those questions, you will have many keywords in mind. Write them in a paper or in a blank document because now we are going to explode and optimize them with some web tools.

Wordtracker GTrends

GTrends is a free tool which you can generate 100 keywords by entering just one, and get the estimate of search volume as well as the competition on Google. Let’s see how it looks:

Then you need to enter a keyword very related with your website and click on Hit Me.

I searched for “affiliate marketing” and I got 100 potential related keywords, the most searched on Google. At the left you will see the searches, and if you click in the icon of the right, you will see the competition of the selected keyword in Google.

It is recommendable to take keywords with a competition less than 50K. If you take one with more than 50,000 it will be hard for you to rank for it. Also if you get a keyword with less than 20K, you will probably rank in the first places of Google.

Also, there are other web services which you can use to fetch keywords, and they are the following ones:

• Traffic Travis: This is a good tool which you can take your market research, search engine optimization and PPC campaigns to a whole new level with this suite of tools. This software is available for windows, and it has 2 versions, a free -which let you fetch just 200 keywords- and a paid one, which let you fetch more than that.
• Digital Point Keyword Suggestion: This is a web based application of the DigitalPoint’s team.
• Google Keyword SandBox: You can also find this tool in your Adsense account under Tools > Keyword Tool. ith this you can generate a big list of keywords by giving a couple of them. It explores and gives you synonyms of the entered keywords.
• Google Sets: Another great tool of Google. You need to type some words and you will get a list of related keywords.
• Good Keywords: This is a simple and good Windows software to find the right keywords for your web pages.

Using Google Keyword Tool

By entering some keywords you will get hundreds of them by using synonyms. You can fetch keywords by Descriptive words/phrases or by Website content (this last one works to “steal” other people’s keywords).

Then you will get a list of 100 keywords or more, with detailed information such as competition, search volume and others. In the last screenshot you can see how these result looks like, the green bars are the competitions which as you can see, there are keywords more targeted than others…

What next? Export all the keywords to a .txt file and then go to the tool called Traffic Estimator. Then, open the .txt and copy-paste all the keywords into the box. It is very important to set the maximum CPC for ever keyword, which is $100. By doing this you will get the highest priority for the keywords that you are looking for.

Then you need to process that and export them the results as .cvs. Then, I invite you to check this video made by John Cow to learn how to use a program called KeywordCorral, which is free and will help you to choose the right keywords for your website. The video of Cow is oriented to Blog Titles, but it is perfectly applicable to website keywords.

Recommendations

Short keywords are really hard to rank for, and you should look for another alternatives. I suggest you to use Long Tail keywords, which are those ones formed by two or more words, i.e. lose weight fast, bes affiliate networks, climbing everest mountain, etc… Nowadays, these kind of keywords are much better for everything, because they are more specific and they have less competition.

Note: Remember to get keywords with less than 50k competitors.

Week 0? What’s that! Well, I made a mistake in the last spreading love post and I wrote Week 4 instead Week 3. So, I will call this september week 0 to be good according the calendar.

This day, I want to share with you 8 posts I found interesting this week. Some of them complement some posts of my blog:

• The Power of Understanding and Solving Problems – Written by Maki of DoshDosh
• Six Lessons I Could Only Learn by Letting My Blog Go – Written by Skellie of SkellieWag
• 5 ways to kill good copy with bad design – Written by Dean of Direct Creative Blog
• How To Use The Google AdWords Keyword Tool – Written by Garry of GarryConn
• Social Media Marketing: Getting Long-Term Results – Written by Steven of Traffickd
• Why You Should Consider Writing Guest Posts – Written by Mattaw of Money Bites
• Why You Should Use BloggingZoom – Written by Gary of ImpNerd
• Avoid Wasted PageRank Juice – Why Would You Do These Blogging Tips? – Written by Louis of HomeBiz

Enjoy those awesome posts!  Have a nice weekend