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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!

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Using Facebook to Make Money Online

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!

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Your First Pay Per Click Campaign In 8 Simple Steps

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.

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Static or Dynamic Pages For Managing Affiliate Programs?