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?

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?

Advertising a product or service is always tricky particularly in a niche so when it comes to monetising your site you need to first sit down and work out what products and services you wish to promote, who they are being aimed at and how you will target them.

Niche products don’t sell in their own niches

There is always exceptions to a rule but generally a product such as an SEO book will not do well being promoted on SEO sites. Tad recently posted that Aaron Wall SEO Book does not sell well on his site. Now you may have glanced to the right and spotted we are also promoting it so does it sell here? yes but we will explain why in a minute.

First lets take a look at Tad site, its aimed at Search engine optimisers who have some knowledge and can understand Tads’ musings this means the majority of his readership will read a wide range of SEO orientated blogs I wonder what product is promoted on those blogs?

Aarons book has completely saturated the market almost every SEO blog that runs advertising will have at some point dabbled with his book, their is not an intermediate level SEO that has not heard of it, many will have bought it, plenty have blogged about how great it is for people at all levels its the perfect book for some one who wants to cover all bases.

Why does it sell occasionally here, well its a really good book for starters but the focus of this blog is not search engine optimisation but monetising sites we occasionally mention SEO techniques and ideas and recommend our readers dabble. The SEO Book therefore is a niche product but in a niche different to our own we are introducing the product to a new readership not the over saturated readership in the SEO community.

Say hello to your neighbour niches

Now that we have worked out that selling niche products in their own niche does not work how do we choose what products to promote after all promoting cooking products on an SEO blog doesn’t seem to be any better then promoting an SEO book. Look at your blog or site does it fit into a niche so to continue our theme Tads’ blog is clearly an SEO blog, its got a very narrow focus now we need to think of niches around SEO, I’m not going to list them all but basically SEO niche neighbours a wide range of web services and development including but not limited to:

• Web development
• Web Hosting
• Directories
• Online advertising
• Graphic Design
• Programming

Their are loads of others but you are getting the idea all these separate niches have their own niche products what’s more finding them is easy enough look for the products that are saturating the market. This tactic doesn’t always work to go back to Tad blog he mentions that he promotes Dreamhost a hosting company (use promo code TIMSEO (monthly plan)) but once more he has not received a single sale this is an interesting one the company has a mixed reaction with the community but does offer one of the best deals in term of goodies they also have very good support but still have at times come in for criticism that said I have an account with them so they can’t be that bad.
So why does Dreamhosts not work for Tad? Well I think its simply that most SEO’s have hosting and its a long term thing its a lot of hassle to move hosts and Dreamhosts lack of dedicated servers does not make them the choice for those looking to expand. Would Tad be better promoting a different web hosting company? Possibly but Tad has a level of integrity which will ultimately drive through the promotions, when he promotes a product he is promoting something he knows works be it tool or service. While he would have more success promoting a service offering dedicated servers or resellers he has no experience of either (as far as I know).

Getting the products to the users

So how can we help Tad? Well lets first look at his current products he is promoting:

• Search marketing Standard - a publication for SEO and SEM
• SEO Book - Aarons book
• Web CEO - SEO software
• Dreamhost - Web hosting

I have used Tads’ affiliate links on the above and I encourage you to take a look in particular Search marketing standard and web CEO may be new to many of you. Remember they come with the Tad seal of approval!

I would be tempted to drop several of the programs here in particular the Dreamhost, SEOBook and possibly WebCEO. Not because they are not great programs or services just they are already saturating the market. So what would I replace them with?

• Directories have become quite a big bone of contention recently but their are still several good affiliate schemes out there BOTW has been getting a lot of press recently and we will be covering their scheme soon as an interesting case study.
• Web hosting, this is a odd one I find promoting web hosting takes a long time people as I said earlier do not change hosts often and when they do its normally to go up the chain so it makes sense to promote schemes with dedicated or semi-dedicated servers and reseller accounts.
• Domain names this is not the way to make a fortune but I find that many SEO’s are slowly becoming domainers hoarding domains so promoting a registrar might be the way to go I tend to promote 123reg a UK registrar but its a good idea to look at a more generic registrar, you could even have a go at being a domain reseller yourself with a company like Enom.

Of course affiliate programs are not the only way to go, do you know a Graphic designer, landing page designer, web developer why not offer them space to promote their products? these are the sort of people who often don’t have an affiliate scheme, they are also the perfect people to advertise on your site as few people will have come across them.

Aaron book does sell in the right audience

Through out this post I have repeated the mantra niche products fail in their own niche but this is not always the case. Even within a niche their is a diverse audience within a readership, a product that sells to the enthusiastic amateur may not do well for the pro and vice versa. Sometimes its a case of know thy audience for example a great place to sell Aarons book is on a website devoted to rookie and new SEOs apart from the fact they are impressionable folk they also haven’t been conditioned by the mass of adverts.
There are plenty of examples of niche products selling in their own niches but if your struggling with product sales have a look at what your selling and ask yourself how many times have you seen that product before?

Well I got a little laugh when I ran a few of my sites through Talklinkcentre Paid Link detector thanks to fantomaster for pointing it out. Scarily the detector managed to completely miss any paid links and instead decided that links to Feedburner and Google were clearly paid for.
To make things worse they use scary statements such as

Paid Or Not
These Links Are Useless To SEO

Which is complete tosh, from what I can tell they simply decide any link with anchor text and is not a nofollow is a “paid link and or useless” but they did get me thinking how would I create a paid link detector?

Elements of a paid link

Lets start cooking to identify a paid link we need some tell tell signs such as;

• A dofollow full juice link
• Off Topic
• Associated keywords - sponsor, advertisment
• Neighbourhood checking
• Link viability

Walk with me,
So the first check is to see if a link is a full link i.e no use of the nofollow and that the link is external, this would be followed by some sort of relevancy check, and magic keyword check, this would leave us with 2 piles of links one lot we know or suspect are evil, the other we just suspect, so we then check each link against a list of known offenders looking for a match.

Getting into the logic

This is all pretty simple now isn’t it?

The two sticky areas are Link relevancy and the Evil keyword matching list, you see what is a relevant link? if I am writing a computing blog is an Apple an irrelevant term? We could perform some amazing Latent semantic Analysis (or swallow a really big thesaurus) to determine relevancy but could we get it anywhere near close enough? Without some sort of relevancy engine how would we know which links are paid for or not. Google and the other search engines must have this cracked (note that was a sarcastic comment) so let us ignore this small problem and go to the second one our Evil keywords. This is far more straight forward we simply look at anchor text, heading or div container that has terms such as Advertiser, sponsor,click here etc. Once we have amassed our list we pass our links and the surrounding code through them, just to be sure we better also have a flag system for terms such as Page Ranks as people who discuss such things must be selling links.

Ultimately when it comes to developing our paid link detector script we have hit a large problem without some sort of relevancy checker, and a huge database of known offenders we will be unable to catch those evil paid linkers damn. We could harness list where we do know their are offenders such as the Pay per post market place or Text Link Ads but certainly with the Pay per post we could get ourselves into a bit of hot water did the buyer pay for a link or a blog post or we could ignore this small problem.

How would you go about creating a paid link checker, the above is one idea its up there with writing “all those who have paid links please step forward” line but perhaps you could do better? maybe you think the guys at talklinkcenter got it right and if its an external link it should be nofollowed just in case?

Please note their was a certain level of sarcasm in this post, you may also note using the above diagram to try to create a paid links detector will not work nor will it help you take over the world.