This is part of the Mac Book Pro Challenge series, why don’t you join us and reach your goal.

Why start with a goal

Or better still what is your goal? if you said to earn money, then why are you looking to earn money?

For many the ultimate goal is to leave their jobs, live on a yacht, and go to fancy parties! This is probably described as a dream rather then a goal. I’m not saying you can’t achieve it after all humanity has an amazing ability to achieve and punch well above its evolutionary status so if we can all do it you can on a more personal level.

For now though lets concentrate on the first goal a milestone you can be proud of. Having a fixed goal allows you to be focused in your efforts it’s that little carrot to keep you on the path. It doesn’t matter if your writing a multimillion pound business plan or simply trying to diet after Christmas our life is driven by goals and milestones. You could argue that life itself is a sequence of milestones and goals, birth, marriage, (divorce), offspring, retirement, death sadly not always in that order.

Goals vs Dreams

So how do we determine a realistic goal vs a dream? are not all goals dreams until they are reached?

A goal without a plan is just a wish - Antoine de Saint-Exupery / Larry Elder

I would add a further extension to this famous quote goals with wishes are dreams.
A planned goal that relies on happen stance (winning the lottery) or without deadline or time scales relies on wishes you cannot plan to win the lottery, only how you would react when you win. Consequently such goals that contain wishes are dreams.

So for now I want you to put the dreams to one side and join me in the Goals.

Goal driven affiliate marketing

So bringing this back from the meta physical and back down to the affiliate marketing side of things why join an affiliate marketing scheme that doesn’t pay out per purchase/click?
The obvious answer is the sum is greater then the parts how many affiliate schemes pay $75 per signup? without you or the signer needing to spend a penny?
The answer is very few, of course the reason they can afford such high rewards is that very few people will reach them. Many people will give up at the 5 to 10 people mark. Out of those 2 will have not read the small print and were charged at least 1 month for a trial. Companies do not produce such schemes to lose money.

High reward low risk, I think for an affiliate marketer looking at the long game a high reward but with little or no risk is a sure thing. The problem is while the risk is low the result is time consuming. After all while $75 per signup is an amazing given what you have to do, sell one flat screen television for any major affiliate and you can be looking at 5 to 10 times that amount.

So we have to look at such things not in their value of a per signup but as a total, $1800 or indeed a Mac Book Pro! When I introduced the challenge I started by explaining how having a wireless laptop changed the way I live my life wow that’s a big thing, a piece of electronic changed my day to day life! But it really did I’m writing this down by the lake in my favourite spot, my wireless card is in and I’m on the internet. As its a beautiful day and I plan to be here a little while, I have brought along my solar panel to keep the laptop charged and my camera .

If you haven’t already experienced this sort of freedom might I suggest this as a great goal to start with? If not a laptop think of a singular item or service that will even in a small way change your life make it the goal.

A Goal without a plan…

Congratulations you hopefully now have a wish, it’s time to turn it into a goal with a plan, so let’s get started in the next part of the Mac Book Pro Challenge!

Mac Book Pro Challenge
For those following us on the Mac Book Pro Challenge is your wish/goal a Mac Book? if not what is your goal? If your not doing the Mac Book Pro Challenge why not? but hey even if your not defining a goal and having goals over monetary targets will inspire and encourage you.

Facebook opened up its advertising to make it easier for anyone to publish ads on their network, we all waited with baited breath and after a month or so the results are in.

Facebook Ads….
Sort of sucks

The general public jury
From comments here and around the web the overall consensus has been little or no visits from Facebook users, on the good side those reporting visits have high conversions. Chatting and gathering statistics the highly targeted ads, those looking at specific gender, age and location had the highest click through rate sitting at just under 0.5% while un-targetted traffic was sitting at the 0.42% mark these are not staggering statistics. Conversions were much more positive with the a conversion rate for affiliate offers at just under 6% which is staggering high one user was reporting a conversion rate of 86% though by his own admission he had under 100 visits. Blogs and social sites converted better then more traditional sites. Zip and email submits also did well but many people reporting that ads were being cancelled. This was the biggest complaint Facebook advertising standards policy is incredibly patchy with users being banned for little or no reason while others were getting away with murder (not literally) out of my 4 test campaigns I had 1 blocked as having sexual references! In case you are wondering here is the sexual reference in question,

Come on boys and join the party

Clearly a deeply offensive phrase! Overall few people were grumbling about the spiral costs of campaigns but I suspect this was more due to the lack of volume which meant that most people paying per click were not reaching their daily limit.

My own experience
My little test which I discussed here, had a series of 4 campaigns running on it, 1 was blocked as above 1 had a CTR of 1.2% and a conversion rate of 4.6% and while it ran I covered costs and made about 3% profit on the campaign. The second campaign had a much lower conversion rate and a much more tighter demographic, its CTR was 0.8% but was rewarded with a higher conversion rate of 4.9% however with the increased cost per click this campaign barely broke even. The final campaign failed miserably resulting in just 4 clicks and no converts.

Facebook needs to play fair?
So what went wrong why such low clicks? Well it goes back to why you were targeting Facebook users in the first place, they are a walled garden Facebook ads are not striking and do not appear within the users normal click area so many users simply don’t see the adverts. But the real issue is with Facebook ad policy I’m all for rules don’t get me wrong but you need to apply rules fairly which from my experience and the feedback given they seem not to be doing.

Sorry for the vanishing act, a period of being unwell and of course Nick in the Army now! means we were a little light on posts.

Which one is the devil?
Unless you have been living under a large stone for the last week you couldn’t have failed to notice to massive corporations signed a rather large deal. As of last week limited tests were being carried out to provide PDF writers the ability to embed adverts into their PDFs. The adverts are provide by Yahoo and are on a PPC basis, if you happen to live in the US you can run along and join the beta program for the rest of us we will have to be content with the information on the Adobe Labs site.

So how does it work?
PDF writers upload their finished works to adobe site, the PDF is then scanned and adverts inserted into the PDF. These ads will then display in the right hand side of Adobe Reader see a screenshot. A couple of obvious limitations jump out of you, the ads will only be displayed in Adobe Reader, and no doubt will make your PDf unusable in other readers, what happens when the Ebook is read offline? I know it might not have occurred to Yahoo but we don’t all live in a connected 24/7 world.

So will it work?
Well Ebooks have something of a bad image indeed Jon the admin at Wickedfire went so far as to create a thread providing backdoor access to some of in his opinion worst Ebooks out there. The idea was if people saw how bad these books were people wouldn’t waste their money do I condone his actions? Not really but I have even less sympathy for the Ebook writers many of whom are scam artists. On an interesting aside the stunt has sort of backfired with the thread becoming one of the most popular threads on the board with people requesting books not as Jon hoped to see how bad they are but to save buying them. Advertising in Ebooks is normally done through affiliate links, sponsored pages etc in much the same way as traditional magazines use advertising. The medium doesn’t allow much flexibility so this new revenue stream may tempt people to drop or remove prices from their Ebooks this for many books would be a good thing but ultimately you are placing your faith in a locked system which many people will not be part of, it is like having your advertising running through an ActiveX control.

PDFs in Search results
One indirect benefit of this hook up will be the technology used to scan documents to determine what ads to place this could have a direct effect on how Yahoo Crawls and ranks PDFs in search results, this could mean an increase in PDFs on the front page of SERPs. Many people ignore PDFs and other media in their search strategies but it maybe time to re-evaluate this.

Final thought
Currently Adobe and Yahoo currently only plan to show ads on PDFs that have passed through their filter system but the functionality will be (or is) built into every Adobe Reader how long before they press the button and include ads in all PDFs? If that is a scary thought have a look at Foxit PDF reader as an alternative for windows.

We would like to welcome our newest sponsor TNX.net one of the fastest growing text link brokers on the net at the moment.

Many of you will already be familiar with TNX from their Digital point thread offering free text link ads. But for those who are not their service they are a traditional text link broker offering advertisers a way to affordable get their links on multiple web sites indeed they go so far as to claim for as low as $11 a month you may get up to 10,000 static links to your website!

Like many link brokers TNX are concerned with Google recent and highly talked about Paid Link war, though they believe they have a series of tools that will help even the most paranoid person out there. Sadly for publishers they still use Google PageRank for their many metrics something that I suspect they will be changing very soon.

Finally for all those of you interested in cashing in a different way TNX have an affiliate program, this system is based around their TNX Points but can be cashed in, in a variety of ways and are worth checking out if you are looking to diversify particularly if you also want to use their advertising services.

Why don’t you think about becoming a community friend its a great way to reach out just like tnx.net have done. So everyone please welcome TNX Payment Blogger latest community friend.

We recently discussed a simple way to get highly targeted traffic through Stumbleupon based on stumble ads, well Stumbleupon is not the only Social Media site offering this level of targeting Facebook is also offering targeted advertising.

Walled Gardens

At first glance Facebook is offering just another PPC service for advertisers and while the rates are currently cheap they will no doubt rise quickly. So why is advertising on Facebook a good idea for affiliate marketers?

Facebook is a huge walled garden full of unsuspecting people easy pickings for a marketer at least it is at the moment, Facebook Ads launched yesterday and since then 100,000 ‘ad pages’ have been created an ad page is the free part of Facebook ads, its the second part we are interested in. However this says that we are not alone in seeing the pickings in the garden and to get maximum benefit you will need to work fast.

Getting your Mini Site ready

Lets take a simple example site (please note unlike the Stumbleupon post I’m still testing and have no accurate figures) same principle as before, aim it at British males in there late teens early 20s with the same style submit and site. For more information on the case study see the previous post.

If your lucky you already have several of these style sites ready to go and maybe you were testing Stumbleupon ads. If not get going I know I spent some money but even with $50 or less you can get up a half decent site.

Setting up a campaign

So lets get going, Like the Stumbleupon ads we want to geo-target as our Email submit is also geo-targeted. We also want to define a gender and age range, though we are less worried about picking subject matter this time as we will be writing an actual ad.
Getting an ad up is a 4 stage affair

1) Provide a URL of the site or page to send users to, notice you can also choose to target Facebook pages as.

2) Target users, selecting location, gender, etc notice you can also define right down to if they are in college and year shame its very Americanised so is not really helpful for us

3) Create an advert, if you have ever done any PPC you will know the deal, the important difference is Social actions, by clicking this you can create handles which have the potential to bring indirect traffic also notice you can attach an image, hmm I wonder what we will use?

4) Select if you want to run a PPC or impression campaign, again this should be familiar to anyone who has used any PPC before, bidding is currently very low but expect it to shoot up.

Start the campaign off, job done your bringing in highly targeted traffic I would at least while the prices low pay purely for PPC. Facebook has opened a huge door and no doubt the price will shoot up very quickly if you can be an early adopter then this is a huge opportunity.

What’s been your experience with Facebook ads, have you previously used Facebook flyers? which converts better for you?