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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!

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?

Micro-Blogging has been a technique adapted by many bloggers and advertisers to promote their stuff. Due to this activity is easier and quicker than blogging, it has become a perfect way to send little notifications, share links with your friends and this way, spread your word.

The simplicity of micro-blogging has caused an impact on many internet users, increasing the use of websites which provide this service. Let’s check the main services and how they have increased in the latest months:

There is a graph of Unique Visitors of five of the main micro-blogging services: Twitter, Plurk, Identi.ca, Pownce and Tumblr. As you can see, Twitter has devoured the other competitors with its service, reaching almost 2.500.000 unique visitors monthly, and that number continues increasing.

Besides twitter, Tumblr is the other commonly used service, reaching almost 1.000.000 unique visitors monthly. About the other services: plurk, identica and pownce, they are in the same point, with few ups and downs but at the end, they could be represented by the same line, reaching  an average of 185K unique visitors monthly.

This graph made me think about what is happening here, specially with Twitter. I’m a twitter user, and daily I receive hundreds, may be thousands of messages of people notifying their latest blog posts, the latest news, sharing their photos etc etc… And daily that’s becoming a viral thing, and even more now because of the apps for blackberries, iphones and now because of TweetSMS, a service which you can send and receive twitter statuses through sms.

But how important is to use this kind of services?

Analyzing the graph provided by Compete, you can noticed it could be a good strategy to use twitter to promote your products or services due to the number of people using it, but it’s a must or not? Well, it depends of your business model. If you use them to promote your stuff; twitter, tumblr and others are perfect for that kind of businesses which are constantly changing, e.g. blogs or pinging services… Those models of business are the most common you can find on twitter, besides the random stuff, links, pictures or anything else without any relation with a business.

Now, let’s analyze the case of a landing page, for example. Let’s say you have a landing page and you want to drive traffic to it besides advertising, should you use twitter to promote it? or even better asked, what impact do you think it could cause on the users? I think it would be a waste of time trying to promote that kind of things through twitter because basically, a landing page is something static and it won’t ever change. The users could visited once, may be twice and then they won’t visit your landing page again because they will not find anything new there.

So when you deal with services for micro-blogging, you should think well about what you would like to share on them. Not every business model is designed to be promoted by this methods, and also there are other business perfect to be promoted through them but for some reasons, it doesn’t work for us. You need to study if micro-blogging is for you, make your tests and stick to that things which work for you.

We are almost done with this series! Until now, I have covered some points which you will able to plan your business, selecting your brand, keywords, logo, strategies and other interesting things. So then, congratulations! You have successfully created your blog, but now you need to write content on it.

Once you have posted some good articles on your blog, you need to start promoting your content with people who use social networks like Digg, StumbleUpon, Sphinn, Mixx, Propeller, Reddit etc etc…

4. Socialize

Besides all those communities I mentioned in the preview line, there are many other communities which you can use to interact with people, but I highly recommend you to check those ones.

There are people who use social media networks basically to spam, they submit and send to all their friends every single article they write, but you cannot adapt that strategy or you could get banned. Now, let’s talk about some techniques you could use to promote your products and content without spamming those networks:

• Adding People: I have seen several people adding me at BlogCatalog, but after adding them back, I check their profile looking for something like the following picture in its recent activities:

   

  

That’s completely crazy! How can you add so many people so fast? Obviously, this user was adding every single user it was seeing in other profiles. Tip number one, you should never do this, that’s spammy, and that’s not the worst part. If you visit those recently added users, you will see in their shout boxes the same welcome message! If you add someone and you want to give a good impression, at least you should personalize the message. So the important thing of this point is that you should add people who share the same interests than yours.

• Voting and Commenting: If you vote just to get karma points or to boost your profile’s statistics, you are wasting your time. It’s better to vote with property, vote up an entry only if its content is related to the category where it was published. Also, by leaving legitimate comments you will gain popularity and you will impose your authority on the other users.
• Submitting Content: If a user submit its own content consecutively, it will be suspicious. That could be considered as spam, so the other users could report you and you could get banned by admins. So, to avoid this kind of issues, I recommend you to submit your very best content, in addition to submit other’s people content too. This way, when you share your own content with other users it will be seen natural.

So then, being a good user of a network is more than submitting content, reporting spammers, giving your feedbacks and inviting people to join is a good way to contribute with any community.

Some time ago Yahoo! announced the launching of Yahoo! Buzz, a service which you can share stories, images or videos with million people. Now, Yahoo! Buzz is opened to the public and you can enjoy of its services, being perfect to drive traffic to a website.

If you manage a website, there are some buttons that you can add to your site to buzz your content. The people can vote up/down any article, so as you can imagine the most voted stories will be show in the home page of this service, getting exposition in front of million users.

Will Yahoo! Buzz Beat Digg?

As you see, Yahoo! Buzz is a social service like Digg, Mixx, Reddit and that kind of networks… Yahoo! has the power that any social network actually have, being this a big company with years of experience, do you think that Buzz will Kill Digg? I personally think thatt Yahoo! Buzz could be a good competitor of Digg, the categories are basically the same but there are some differences between them.

In the social aspect, at Yahoo! Buzz you cannot add comments to a story, something that reduce its points in front of Digg. You can send the stories by email to your friends or coworkers, like every network allow it.

However, I think that Yahoo! is not comming with a competition’s attitude because you can share the stories submitted on Buzz in the most popular communities: Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Propeller, Reddit and StumbleUpon. So I think they are comming with a friendly attitude, aimed to improve the web.

I think if they integrate a profile system to Buzz which you could comment, flag users and that kind of things, it would be better to them. I mean, it would be nice to have the MyBlogLog’s profile merged to this service, what do you think?

Yahoo! Buzz Plugin for WordPress

You can manually add the Buzz buttons to your site or blog. But it don’t took much time to be a plugin for wordpress, letting you to integrate the buttons to each post. Travis Johnson has created this plugin, thank you for that!

The following ones are the steps you need to follow to integrate Yahoo! Buzz to your blog:

1. Download the Yahoo! Buzz WordPress plugin.
2. Unzip the file in your computer.
3. Upload the file wpbuzz.php to the plugins directory.
4. Activate the plugin from your wordpress blog’s admin section.
5. Now go to Settings -> Buzz on Yahoo!
6. Select the look and feel of button you would like. Here the button details are given in text without graphics, so this Yahoo buttons page would be of your help.
7. That’s it, you would see the Yahoo buzz button appearing at bottom of each of your posts.

Something I think it can be improved in this plugin is to have options like the Sphinn button plugin, which you can place the button at the top, botton left/right of your posts.

What do you think about this new Yahoo! service? I would like to read your opinions!

Do you ever thought to have your favorite search engines in the same platform? Well, yesterday I was invited to use Scour, a system which merge Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines, bringing you all of their power together into the same website. When you use Scour search engine, those three engines are searched all at once, and the results will be shown on the same page.

How It Works

The Scour member is able to vote each listing up or down, based on the relevance of the keywords used by you. Also, you are able to write comments reviewing the listed sites. By blending users’ feedback, the Scour Team improve the search algorithms, improving the search and giving relevant results for your keywords.

With the Scour voting and comment system, their goal is to introduce the human element of searching allowing you and all other Scour members to speak up and help shape the results with every search. So if you see a result that doesn’t match with your search, vote it down! And in the other case, if you see a site that is exactly what you wanted, vote it up and leave a comment expressing why you liked it. After enough votes, the listings will move down in rank, placing the relevant ones where they should be, at the top! When using Scour you can read user reviews about websites based on your keyword taking a lot of the guesswork out of searching and getting to you destination quicker.

The Motivation

Did you know that search engines make billions of dollars a year in advertising revenue? Would be great if the users could get a piece of that… Well, with Scour you can earn Points which you can change for Visa Gift Cards!

Every member is awarded one point for every search, two points for a vote and three points for a comment with a maximum of 4 points a search. Also, they offer referral points for the friends you introduce to Scour where you can earn 25% of the points they make.

What about the point conversions?

• With 6,500 Points you get a $25 Visa gift card.
• With 12,500 Points you get a $50 Visa gift card.
• With 25,000 Points you get a $100 Visa gift card.

It’s more than everybody currently make from searching, and if you invited 25 friends that used scour regularly in addition to yourself, that’s an easy $125 in your pocket for a year of what you already do! Also they have a calculator which you can check out how much you could earn.

It seems like merging social media with search engines it’s the new sensation on Internet, but will this work? If you can earn something for each search you make, why not? I mean, we have nothing to lose.

What are you waiting for? Join to Scour now and start earning points!