We so need to kick start the blog again, and how better then by helping you guys get a Mac Book Pro Each!

Why do you need a laptop?

When asked what is the single most important change in my life on the Internet I always answer my first laptop purchase with a wireless connection. Suddenly the world changes, now you can remain online in your own cocoon environment where ever you are in the world. I do not leave the house without a laptop, my laptop has gone with me to festivals, conferences, Hackdays, clients locations and even the shops!

If you don’t have a laptop then now is the chance to grab one, if you do have a laptop is it a Mac Book Pro? It is? ok well then you can just play for the cash!

The Challenge

So here is the challenge find 25 people and get them to join a site where they to can win a laptop each person to sign up needs to complete a single offer. When all 24 have completed 1 offer you receive a free Laptop or Cash!
Simple huh

Don’t panic it’s coming!

I bet most of you are chomping at the bit for the website address but I want you to hold on just 2 seconds more.
Before you sign up we want you to know we are here for you! over the next few weeks we are going to discuss not only the various offers, but ways to get people to sign up. In other words we are going to hold your hands through the whole thing!

One final thing before the address

One last thing before you sign up, it won’t cost you a penny! please, please make sure you read the small prints of offers but for everyone their is a free option so you do not have to part with money to take part* don’t be pressured into parting with cash on an offer unless you want to!

Let’s get started

Remember to successfully complete the challenge you will need to sign up 24 people, for Notebooks4free and have each person complete an offer.

Legal bits

We are not responsible for your earning potential, and while we will help as much as we can we can’t do the work for you. This is not a pyramid scheme it is a single tier affiliate program, we are using an affiliate link but any affiliates you recruit do not count towards our total. Please please please read the small print on the Notebook4free website. Only one entry per household etc. Finally not all countries can receive laptops in such cases the cash alternative is offered via Paypal.
Remember with free trials and offers always cancel them if you do not want them to continue!

*If in doubt sign up for Notebooks4free and stay tuned for ways to complete free offers even if you don’t have a credit card.

So who is ready to take on the challenge and join us on this simple but effective challenge? It doesn’t matter if your an affiliate marketing newbie or guru this is a great way to get a laptop or cash and what could be simpler then getting 24 friends together?

Taking the challenge to the next level!

• Goal driven challenges
• Creating your sales person

Before I start this post I would like to appologise to our readers for my long absence from payment blogger. I am in the army for the last 3 months (and I will be there for 9 more months) so time is very limited.

Anyway, enough with me, let’s talk about making money with forums. In this post I wont tell you how to monetize a forum web site, but how you can earn money by selling services and products on other forums. Personally I use these techniques frequently with webmaster forums to sell sites or ads. It doesn’t matter if you are looking to sell a site, an advertising package or some ebook you wrote there are a few things you should take care of.

Reputation

Everything in the business world is reputation. In forums this is even more important as reputation is “trackable”. Most forums have the reputation badge, while others (like DP) have a specific user rating for transactions with other members called itrader. So let’s say you start right now with a forum, you have registered an account with the forum and you are ready to sell your product/service. At that point I would suggest you to stop what are you doing and pay attention to your reputation. Without a strong reputation in the forum it doesn’t matter if you give gold for free because none is going to buy from you.

Building a “name” in the community

Ok that part is time consuming, but it is very important as long as you wish to earn some money in the forum you have just got in. Bellow are a few things that you have to do before posting any offer:

Post in the forums

A member with no posts is not a member. You need to make as much posts as you can. Don’t post stuff like “Thanks, I like this” but try to be informative and helpful to the other members. By showing them that you know about what you are talking will create trust from the community.

Give something for free

People is going crazy when you offer them something for free. It doesn’t matter if this is a 2 page ebook or a descriptive article on a technique you are using. If you give them something for free your reputation will increase so give it a try.

Buy stuff from the marketplace

If there is a marketplace with itrader, then you should buy a few things before try to sell something. This is because this way you will be able to have a positive feedback itrader that you make you look more trustful to your future buyers.

Time to make some money

Ok now you are a well known member in the community with reputation and itrader, so you can post an offer. At this part the most important factor is of course the product you are selling, but still there are a few things that you can do to maximize your chances:

• Try to be as descriptive as possible
• Rate your own thread (yeah people like to see 5 stars in the top of the thread)
• Make people bump your thread. How? Just leave a bit of information for pms so everyone will post “Please pm me details”

That’s it, I hope this article was helpful enough

Blackhat SEO: Simply means techniques that might get you penalised or banned from a major search engine. Blackhat is a very generic term and the Blackhat Forums do often include email marketing techniques that most would consider spam. This is not an endorsement of such techniques.

Quadzilla opened up his SEO Blackhat forums on Christmas day for a limited time as a Christmas present so I spent half an hour looking round, I was pretty disappointed and I left feeling sorry for those members who spent their hard earned cash on membership.

Let me put some background to this post, Quadzilla Blackhat forums cost $100 a month membership fee, not to steep but enough to make most people think twice. For the $100 you are promised a forum that has some top notch experts and to be fair there are some pretty impressive guys in there. The issue I have is they are not talking.
So what if you are a;

• Newbies – If you’re a newbie then you are after questions being answered, so it was disappointing to see lots of unanswered questions, sure most of them were very newbie’ish but still this is not the place to find answers.
• Intermediate – You probably will want to go straight to the parasite hosting and large database section and will be disappointed, Syndk8 and Wickedfire have discussions all at a similar level.
• Advanced – You will want to go to the labs, to see the sophisticated cutting edge stuff and yep you guessed it nothing sophisticated or cutting edge mostly old posts.

The overall feeling was one of depressing lingering and slow death, which is a shame because it could have been so much more. Of course with 30 minutes I did not read every post and I’m sure there are a few gems but if I’m going to spend $100 a month I expect a forum that is organised, is moderated, has question answered or at least be told my question wasn’t appropriate. I would want to see stickies with the cutting edge latest ideas. I would not want to shift through posts looking in vein for a thread which might answer my question though to be fair this would not take to longer, in that respect it does keep one of its promises, their are not 100s of threads to crawl through.

Quadzilla forums are not the only places to find Blackhat/Greyhat SEO information as already indicated Wickedfire and Syndk8 are both excellent places to find information on various techniques, Wickedfire also offers a paid for area, which is either invitation only or by paying $55 a month which is significantly less.

There is one good thing to come out of the Christmas day present, it reminded me to resubscribe to SEO Egghead a fantastic blog, so not all bad.

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.

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?