I have held off talking about about Entrecard until I had tried it for a couple of weeks but the results are in.

What is Entrecard

Put simply its a 125×125 banner exchange but you banner is displayed only once per day per site, you pay a certain number of credits to have your banner displayed on a specific site. Credits are gained based on people dropping cards on you and you dropping cards on other sites.

Stats according to Entrecard

Specific stats

Card Drops

Advert Clicks

Organic Clicks - Those coming from Entrecard

Is it worth it?

Well we have had some pretty targeted traffic from Entrecard but its also a lot of work chasing after credits, its very much a case of the big sites get bigger and the smaller sites have to work harder. But it doesn’t have the flaws of a scheme like BlogRush, and no money swaps hand, overall I think its not a bad system but I suspect at the end of the month we will remove the badge depending on how it goes. My Font site has had very little traffic so its currently very much geared towards money making blogs.

Want to try it without working hard?

We have a few credits to give away for those who want to try it, so for your chance to win simply tell us your thoughts either in a comment or trackback to this post or one of the follow up posts marked with win logo!

• First price - 150 credits
• 3 Runners Up - enough credits to advertise here

small print; what I say goes, credits given only for valid comments or trackback if your comment doesn’t get published you will not win, winners will be selected at random from valid entries and contacted via email for comments, or via the sites contact form if trackback. hey you get the idea! Good luck
Closing date oh shall we say a weeks time which would be Christmas day! 25/12/2007

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?

One of the biggest problems with harnessing social media for your sites is it tends to have a rather adverse effect on your monetising strategy this is mainly down to people still relying on Adsense for revenue. Today I would like to introduce a simple case study on how to effectively monetise traffic from StumbleUpon in a way traditional affiliate marketers can cope with.

Zip and Email Submits

I wrote a piece recently on zip and email submits so will not go into to much details except to say that they can be an effective tool but only when you have the traffic to leverage them, also this traffic must be geographically targeted as most email and zip submits are country specific.

Using StumbleUpon Advertising

A couple of days ago I wrote a piece on The Venture Skills Blog covering the basics on setting up and running a StumbleUpon sponsored stumbles campaign but briefly

StumbleUpon allows people to pay for traffic to their site it arrives in the same way stumbleupon normally sends traffic but with a guaranteed number of minimum visitors. The cost is very cheap for targeted traffic at $0.05 per visitor.

This equates to 200 people for $10 which means I will need a relatively low conversion rate below 10% to make a profit depending on the submit.

Pretty Girls make all the difference

Stumbleupon advertising not only allows us to select several categories from which it will send interesting stumblers it also allows us to specify a location, gender and age range. I therefore selected a suitable Email submit with a prize of a digital camera each submit was worth $1.90 the submit was only eligible to people in the UK.

Next I created a small mini site, buying a very cheap set of 3 photos from a stock photo site of a pretty young lady, nothing to smutty here but certainly attractive I also hired a copywriter to write 3 short pages on coping with university life, and finished it off with 3 flash bear drinking games. The central point of the site was the email submit which would be paying for the site.

So far the budget has been:

• $40 for the photos and a quick email to the photographer and the photos were removed from the stock photo site
• $20 Copywriter
• $5 for the flash games
• $6 for domain name

Probably another hours work tying it all together, and creating 3 variations of the “landing page”

Sample testing stumblers

The next stage was to spend $30 on sending 3 lots of 200 visitors to each of my landing pages to see which converted best, remember each submit was worth $1.90 The results page 1 2% , page 2 7% page 3 5%, Or put more simply Page 1 resulted in a loss $2.40 Page 2, a healthy profit of $16.60 and page 3 a more modest $9

This basic testing of small samples showed the second landing page performed well and therefore was used a daily limit was set up of 400 visitors and a sizable chunk from my paypal account was deposited.
I ran this for nearly 2 weeks, the site also received some small organic traffic and even a few inbound links.

The results

The final conversion rate was closer to 5 then 7% but still a healthy profit was made I spent just over $400 in total, so you see with a little bit of thinking it does pay to use StumbleUpon.

Cautionary tale

The above is of course a success story meant to inspire you so now I want to throw some water over you, the above happened as accounted but a word of warning when I stopped paying for stumbles I perhaps naively thought that I would still get hits from StumbleUpon just like blogs do I was wrong, the reason is obvious once the paid for stumbles were over all that nice targeted traffic vanished and while I initially did get some additional traffic it was not all male, and in the age range I had been aiming for, consequently a few negative thumbs down appeared. The result was I have never been able to start an organic stumble on that domain since even for decent content. So if you are using very targeted traffic on StumbleUpon make sure its on a domain which does not normally receive StumbleUpon traffic. Also make sure you check the terms and conditions of both StumbleUpon and your Affiliate company, finally remember that spam is spam ad heavy MFA sites will not work regardless of targeting it doesn’t cost much to make a half decent site and the returns are far greater.

Have you had success driving traffic with stumbleupon?

I got sent a question via email…

Hi Tim I love the blog and have learnt a lot from you and others but my site while popular doesn’t get very many sales through affiliate links what am I doing wrong can you help?

A quick look at both the site (which sadly will remain anonymous as the original emailer has asked it be kept that way ) and its stats indicated it was indeed a pretty popular site with nearly a 1500 visitors a day, which for a news portal is pretty good going. One of the features I really liked was at the bottom of each article was a have your say section which had a simple poll.

Do you think Mclaren should have been fined over £50 million pounds for spying?
Yes|No

Each poll was a question and a yes no answer along with the results, most of the polls no one had entered however to help get this site out of the red they would make an excellent place to peddle our affiliate links.

Zip and Email submits

Many Affiliate companies have zip or email submit campaigns running these campaigns offer the chance for people to win free items like phones computers etc, in exchange for giving up some personal details. The person is then entered into the draw, the affiliate gets paid per lead, so every time some one enters the affiliate makes some money between $0.80 - $5 you are not going to get rich of these schemes but they can easily compete with adsense earnings if properly managed. Zip submits tend to pay out more then email submits and both tend to be very geographically targeted a quick look at the site revealed nearly 70% of the site came from the US while a further 21% was from the UK so we hunted down two suitable campaigns. In the end we found two geotargetted campaigns both through the Affiliate group Copeac one was a Win IPhone and $500 visa zip submit for the US the other a Win a Digital Camera for the UK. Both have appalling small print but hey they worked well for our needs, however before we could get started we needed to organise a few things.

Incentivised or Encouraged

With most Zip and email submits you will come across the phrase ‘This offer Can NOT be incentivized’ what this means is you cannot offer something to go with it. So for example you couldn’t click here to receive a free pen and a chance to win an IPhone for example. The line between encouraging and incentivised is simple you can not give away a physical or electronic product to lure a person into providing their information. While we did check that offering the chance to take part in the poll was not an incentive we also took some extra steps and included small print offering a link to the free iphone/camera offer as well.
Finally we added both an entry in the privacy statement about linking to a third party who may require information to conclude offers, a statement in the terms of service indicating that we are not responsible for offers on third party websites.
To give you an idea of what the poll looks like here is one of the early mocks

Geo-targetting

We knocked together 3 versions of the poll settings, USA, UK and international each with their own offer for the USA and UK they went to our affiliate site once voted via a timed redirect with a means to escape if they just wanted to vote. For international users we asked if they would be interested in doing an online survey to win $100 through yet another affiliate company. You can easily do the same thanks to posts by both Nick and Patrick from Blog Storm on the subject which we linked to just last week. Once this was done, we had checked out that all the links worked, via proxies we sent it live.

The results

The number of people taking the poll rose by 900% this initially sounds a staggering figure but remember we only had around 10 people a day taking the poll so in reality this means we increased the number of poll takers to around 90 a day.
Out of those 90, 50% were from the US, 41% UK and the other 9% international.
In terms of conversions

• 45% - From US resulted in lead payment well above average for this sort of submit
• 5% - From UK pretty much average
• 0% - Well technically not 0 1 person did take the survey but I think it might have been me via a proxy!

The result is that in the last 3 weeks the site has been earning about $24/day from its polls but these are already dying with the last week seeing a disappointing number of results, this is down to several reasons the very high US conversion rate is coming down, Lots of regulars have either stopped voting or more likey are not visiting the same offer. My job was done and I have left my new friend to find some more offers for his polls I have suggested that either run several offers and rotate between them or at least offer a new offer every couple of weeks seems to be a good balance.

Have you had success with Zip and Email submits? Do you think that using them this way is a good idea, perhaps you think its slightly manipulative let us know!

Its been a great few weeks since we last did a Link around so I thought we would cram a few more then normal in.

Geo-targetting Visitors

Kicking things of is Patrick from Blog storm with his post on Geo-targeting users also check out his 9 Link baiting tips for eccomerce.

Geotargetting is simply the art of showing different content to your visitors depending on which country they are from. For example if I have an affiliate offer that is only available to customers from the UK I know that it will be useless to US visitors.
http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/blog/geotargeting-with-php/

Patrick uses the pay for version of the Maxmind database but those on a budget and who don’t mind mislabelling all AOL users as Americans can use the free version and Nick ran up a quick script this morning on Webdigity for using the Free geo-targetting DB.

Using no-follow on your own pages?

SEO Fast Start has a great article on how and when to use no follow attribute on your own sites it follows on from a series of discussions by SEO on the merits of no follow.

The key question is whether you can improve your position with search engines by changing the internal linking structure of your web site. http://www.seofaststart.com/blog/internal-nofollow-help

You might also like to look at SEO Fast Starts SEO guide (say that 3 times quickly) which can be downloaded for free!

Staying the course

Melanie has made her 100 post on SEO Cog (technically 101 by the time you read this) in which she lists her top 10 posts from the previous 100, I strongly recommend you go and read them all but if I had to single one out then I would go with ‘Small touches with big results‘.

There is nothing more satisfying than a little something with a big yield. I love these things! Its like polishing the chrome on and old car….Instant gratification.
http://seocog.blogspot.com/2007/08/seo-small-touches-with-big-results.html

Congrats Melanie, I hope you celebrated with style and we look forward to the next 100 posts.

Other notable links

Some of the hundreds of posts that caught our eye these last few weeks.

• Developing a mailing list - Web Development blog
• Proof you can gain Links with Google News - 97 Floor
• 17 Wordpress Plugins for Adsense - Mashable

Both myself and Nick would also like to take the opportunity’s to thank Olaf from finalwebsites.com for his Guest post yesterday and like to remind you that we are always looking for guest bloggers.