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This post is part of the Mac Book Pro Challenge, but don’t worry it’s not to late to start, so why not join us?

Getting a face

Think of the Mac book Challenge as a marketing campaign the goal (ahem wish sorry) is to convince people to join in your version of the challenge by presenting them with the information, the incentive and the reason. Now for a little game who do you want to target?

Seriously its that simple forget careful keyword research or demographic studies go with your gut who do you think you can convince to join up and encourage their friends. The reality is just about any demographic over the age of 18 is going to be interested in a free laptop be they a student, a Gran or a Working Mum so which group do you think you can appeal to which group can you get your head in.

Once you got your target we are going to create a sales person an online persona who will front your campaign just like any good advertising campaign. Now before we even think about web sites etc I want you to think personal the key to a good campaign is when the person on the receiving end (believes) they are on a two way conversation.

So lets look at some social groups and try and decide the best person to front a campaign for each of them.

18-25 Male Students
You got to hand it to them by far my favourite source for this kind of affiliate marketing, they are generally poor, most want to get rich, nearly all want beer and they all like pretty young girls. Ok so a few sweeping generalisations there but on the whole pitching to sterotypes works even if its not politically correct.
Perfect Persona: Pretty Girl Next Door

House Bound Mum
Wants to earn a bit on the side, is more cautious about giving to much personal information away. Often looking for things to fill short gaps, ideas have to be pitched as not time consuming and not evasive.
Perfect Persona: House Bound Mum alternate: Dashing Gent

Silver Surfer
The internet is not just home to young, more and more elderly persons are getting online, highly cautious and much more careful with their details. The silver surfers are a great long term revenue source and have fantastic networking capability.
Perfect Persona: Silver Surfer

Affiliate Marketers
Strong willed and expecting a con, they have been there and done that however as they know the business they make great partners and can easily expand any affiliate network. In many ways they are the best and worst people to pitch to.
Perfect Persona: Me

These are all stereotypes and pretty generic in most cases like encourages like but such as the case of our 18-25 Male its not always the case. Once we have an image in our mind of our persona it’s time to go out and make them a reality.

Bring a persona to life

Your sales persona needs to be fleshed out; create a name, and find a suitable picture if you can’t use yourself try getting friend, family, local model to pose for you. If all else fails then look for a suitable photos online try to avoid the free stock photo sites like sxc.hu and instead look at sites such as stockxpert.com. The reason is simple buying an image or set of images that have been rarely downloaded means that the chances your model has been seen before is limited. Try where possible to get a few images which can be used throughout your campaign. Given that in our examples we are aiming to get people laptops it makes sense to promote with images of your model with a laptop.

Above all try to keep it real certain people are just not going to promote certain things, Jessica Simpson is not the next model for a free laptop. When using an image make sure the model has signed a model release form and that the image is licensed for commercial use.

The more details the more customers

The more people can be brought into the site the more likely they are to bite, this may sound a bit manipulative but that is what you are doing it’s what the local shops are doing. For the ultimate effect try using video, if you have access to your model, get them to record a personal greeting/ sales pitch. Developing a character with personality quirks does not take much, try to create a short bio, include 5 things your new persona likes and dislikes what star sign are they and age. The more the better even if you don’t use these details on the site it helps build a stronger character a more believable character.

What’s next?

Next post we are going to start building a suitable site as our main sales site, we will look at the various elements needed on the site and discuss how sites look can influence a person. Through out these next few posts I will be building a sample site for you to play with complete with persona (no you can’t use it) but it will help you to understand some of the ideas and psychology behind such sites.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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