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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!

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!

Lastly I noted that many people who started following me on twitter is an affiliate, many of them has a customized background with the product they promote and when I started following them back they sent me a message (automatically with TweetLater for example) inviting me to check out their website.

After checking a couple of them, I noted that some of them were using static pages whilst others were using dynamic pages to promote a product, what do you thing is best?

Static Pages

Static pages are those that ends with .html, .htm (and similar) and they need to be designed from scratch (at least you want to buy a template). This kind of pages tends to load pretty fast due to their simplicity in the design.

This kind of pages work very well because you can practically create one of them very fast, much more than if you want to set a page with wordpress for example. The bad thing is when you want to update the content because you don’t have an admin panel or something similar than a CMS can provide.

Dynamic Pages

Being the opposite of static pages, this ones end on .php or similar and they use to be generated by content management systems like WordPress or Joomla. They could be as pretty, complex and interactive as you want but they need dedication to be done.

The Analysis

No matter what kind of pages are you using to promote a product, the only thing you want to do is to sell. The thing is that Google prefers static over dynamic pages, so if you want to get a high rank on search engines you better build static pages.

Nevertheless many of these affiliates use PPC campaigns to get their potential buyers, so what’s the matter with using static or dynamic pages? If you are one of those who are using PPC campaigns go for whatever you want, but remember if you use dynamic pages it doesn’t mean that you won’t get a good rank, it is all about SEO.

To conclude, I would like to know if you have a kind of preference on this. Personally I have done either static or dynamic pages to sell products and honestly, it’s not so different.

There are many business strategies you can use to promote your affiliate products, and a very interesting way to do it is with Article Marketing.

Article Marketing is nothing more than a type of advertising in which businesses write short articles related to their respective industry. These articles are made available for distribution and publication in the marketplace. Each article contains a bio box and byline that include references and contact information for the author’s business. Well-written content articles released for free distribution have the potential of increasing the authoring business’ credibility within its market as well as attracting new clients.

Source: Wikipedia

So what’s the strategy? How can I boost my sales by writing articles?

The strategy is not so hard to do, but actually it is if you have difficulties to be consistent, but we are going to see how to deal with that.

What do you do when you want to buy something? I bet you search on google everything you can: videos, reviews, scam alerts, comparison articles etc etc. That’s why you need to write articles of the products you sale!

People used to investigate before taking actions and you need to take advantage of this situation by promoting your marketing products with articles. Articles of every type, but specially you need to write articles that review the product, articles that talk about the pro/cons of the product and things like that.

By writing many articles and using the proper keywords you could rank high in most search engines, or at least Google. Is not so hard, you just need to find keywords that sell.

The basic strategy is to redirect the people who read your articles to your landing page or another website where they can buy the product. This way you will get a commission per sale.

NOTE: You cannot use hyperlinks in affiliate marketing, so how do you redirect them? Using the little bio box at the end of the article, where you can place hyperlinks.

How to write articles that sell

Write from experience: When you write from experience your articles will be much convincing, and that’s what you want. This relates the thing I was talking the other day about choosing products that you are interested in. If you are not interested in a product how could you write “from experience”? It’s kinda impossible… Also, many times you won’t need to pay just for getting the product and then write a review about it. In most cases you can contact the advertiser and explain it the situation, asking for a free copy of the product in order to test it and promote it.

It’s kinda usual to get free copies of what you want to promote.

Be precise: Don’t write things neither too long or too short, just be precise. Hit the nail and that’s it, don’t waste lines talking and talking about nothing. Give the information you want to bring to your potential customers and that’s it!

Write what they want to read: This may sound unfair or non-ethic but this is how marketing works. Study the people you are targeting, their likes, their ages etc etc… So then, when you really know the people you will target, write the articles based on that statistics and give them what they expect to read when they search for a product on Google. Of course you will need to write several articles in order to cover a wider espectrum of possibilities. FYI, you can try QuanCast to know demographic stats of people specificing a page.

Use outside sources to validate your article: This is a fact, people like to read “as seen on CNN” and things like that. When possible, use outside sources that help you to validate the things you are talking about in the article. Try to find a special article from a magazine, news channel or something where users can read and makes them believe in you.

Hopefully if you follow these guidelines, you will boost your sales promotions in a targeted market.

Where to write these Articles?

Great question, I was talking about article marketing and I didn’t tell you where you can publish them. The following is a list of websites where you can do it, most of them could be well known by you:

• EzineArticles
• BestEzines
• AssociatedContent
• WebSource
• Freesticky
• Amazines
• IdeaMarketers

Those are the main websites, but you can find more by looking into the tag called Articles of my Delicious account.

Your Ideas About Article Marketing

Well in other posts I will talk more about other promotional marketing methods beside this one. For now I’m done, but I would love to read your thoughts or experiences in this matter in order to learn more from you, I don’t know everything!

Many Internet Marketing gurus say it’s easy to succeed at this business, or at least they make us think it. I think everything is easy when you already learned how to do it, for example to walk. We learned to walk when we were childs, but for a just born baby it could be an impossible thing aka nightmare.

The other day I talk about The Secrets Behing Finding Niche Markets where I gave you details about finding niche markets. Today I’m going to give you some tips to help to take part in this business. Many people when join to affiliate networks think they could start promoting the first thing they see, or may be the hottest thing. Well, that’s not so easy because if it were, everybody should be sucessful and rich.

Recommendations for Choosing an Affiliate Product

Be familiar with the product: The reason why I’m giving you this advice at first instance is because this is the key to suceed. You should look for a product you are familiar with, a product which you know and will enjoy promoting it. This way, you won’t need to research before promoting it because you have the knowledge to talk about it.

Also, it’s not good to promote something you don’t believe in. This is like blogging, if you blog just because of the money you can earn, you will end failing. So to resume this first advice, pick a product you know and you think it worth.

Be interested in the product: You can be familiar with the product because everyday you hear about it, but if you are not interested in it you will lose your time. At the beginning you can do it fine, but then when you need to work hardly writing many articles about the product and submit it in article directories, it will be a pain in the ass!.

Almost every week I see people promoting Herbalife products in my community, but for any reason I would promote them.

Check its landing page: When you think you got a good product, check its landing page, email creative or whatever is supposed to convince people for buying the product. The landing page needs to be easy to navigate, and it should call to action.

When you see the html email or visit the landing page, think as you were a costumer near from buying the product. If YOU are persuaded, it means your costumers will too. In the other hand, if you don’t feel motivated or persuaded, probably you should look for another product with a better catching interface.

Check if it converts: Talk with your affiliate manager and ask him about the conversion rates of the product you want. In other words, the conversion rate tell you if the product makes sells or not, 3 or more sales per day is ok. Conversion rate is the ratio of visitors who convert casual content views or website visits into desired actions based on subtle or direct requests from marketers, advertisers, and content creators.

I talked with my manager of NeverblueAds and he told me some good conversion rates related with different offers:

• Email submit = about 25 – 35%
• Free trial offer = about 2% – 3%
• Dating offer (short for submit) = about 10%
• True sale offer = about 2 – 5%

Those numbers are relative, so talk with your manager to assure.

Stay with the winners: What I want to mean with this, is to promote those things that are working. Promote popular/hot products, promote that things you know other people are making money with. Why, won’t be harder because of the competition? If you try to promote those products that are not converting well, you will lose money and time promoting it.

What you need to do is to effort promoting it, that’s it. I will talk more about promoting your affiliate products in other article, as well as how to find keywords and how to find these products that are making the people richer, using Affiliate Espionage.

Money back guarantee: This is not always available but if so, it would be better for you. Money back guarantee programs inspire peace and trust, your consumers will feel safe of blackhat tricks or scammy programs.

As I said, this is a plus. The good thing is most of the U.S. and Canadian offers have this policy, but if you find a great product without it don’t worry!.

Which are your tactics?

The other day I read something that recommends the opposite of me about the popular products. I read it is better to get an unsaturated market, this way you could sell “better” than if you take a saturated one, such as making money online for example…

What do you think about it? What about the wasted money until you discover the trick of the product?

If you are promoting a product I would love to know how did you choose it, teach me!

Internet Marketing is a very deep topic which you can spend your entire life talking about. The basics of this kind of marketing are known by almost all the people who deal with online businesses:

From Wikipedia – Internet Marketing, also referred to as web marketing, online marketing, or eMarketing, is the marketing of products or services over the Internet. Basically, internet marketers affiliate with networks in order to promote their products and earn money.

That sounds quite simple, but for mysterious reasons you may feel that you don’t know anything about it, no matter how much you read about the topic. Which is the secret formula used by gurus? First of all, I need to clarify that I’m not a guru in this topic but however I have learned many tricks with the passing of time, committing mistakes, testing and testing again!.

I know what internet marketing is but I don’t know how to get involved – Help me!

That’s not a crime so don’t worry! In this topic I’m going to teach you a couple of tricks in order to help you getting started. Great! So let’s take it easy and think about the very first thing you need in order to start digging into this goldmine… Skipping either a domain or an affiliate network, the very first thing you need to have is a Niche Market.

From Wikipedia – A niche market is a focused targetable portion of a market. A distinct niche market usually evolves when a potential demand for a product or service is not met by any supply, or when a new demand arises due to changes in society, technology, or the general environment.

Once you understood what a niche market is, how do you get one? There are many websites which provide this kind of information, so what I’m going to do now is to review and study a couple of them:

Google Zeigeist

“Zeitgeist” means “the spirit of the times”, and Google reveals this spirit through the aggregation of millions of search queries they receive every day. Zeigeist is not a Google tool at all, it is more a place where you can find the Google tools that make the dirty job, and among them we have four, but just mainly 2: Google Trends and Insights for Search.

By combining both tools you can get very accurate data about what people is looking for. Personally I really love Google Insights because you can see the evolution of a term with the passing of time since the service was launched – 2004 I think.

Yahoo! Buzz

Yahoo! Buzz is a great service launched the last year which you can see the most active topics on Internet. In addition, top searches are broken down into actors, movies, sports, etc., with constantly updated short articles to the right of the top search chart. This is a great place to get information about the most popular searches in relatively real-time.

AOL Hot Searches

AOL Hot Searches is something similar to Buzz when we talk about diversification, because there you will find the top 10 searches by categories. I read it updates every 12 seconds, so I guess it should be very accurate. By checking the sidebar you could see the Year’s Top Searches – 2008 in this case. With this another section you can see what was hot throughout the last year!.

Amazon BestSellers

Being Amazon a big place where everybody buys, its Bestsellers section is perfect to know what the people is interested on, and what they are buying. You can take advantage by knowing what kind of products are making great sales.

Lycos 50

Lycos is one of the most classic websites since the internet started. At Lycos 50, you can find the most 50 active searches during a week. Perfect to get new and fresh ideas.

Ask Top Searches

As you may know, Ask.com’s innovative search technologies deliver fast and relevant information for millions of people every day. Ask makes cuts of the searches, displaying the top searches for the week ending a date.

Bloglines

Bloglines is a feed reader, but besides that it offers a section with the most popular blog feeds. This is a great resource to know what bloggers/networkers are talking about!.

Technorati

Technorati is a blog search engine and may be the most comprehensive source of information on the blogosphere, indexing more than 1.5 million new blog posts in real time and introduce millions of readers to blog and social media content. By looking at the popular searches you can know the hottest things about what bloggers are talking about.

DogPile

Dog what? Dogpile is on a mission to help rescue pets. They call it our Search & Rescue program. When you search the Web on Dogpile, a portion of revenue generated will be donated to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA®). However, it shows in real-time what the world is searching for.

Ok I know where to find niches, then what?

Once you find a niche market, then you need to search affiliates in order to have something to promote. Finding a niche was only the first step and then after finding affiliates, you need to find good keywords, establish the affiliate campagin model among other many aspects, which I will dealing with in the next days.

What about you? Where do you find niche markets?