Make Money Online With Affiliate Marketing
Section 12 - Social Media Affiliate Marketing Guide
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is marketing ads on facebook, myspace, and other social media sites. On facebook, these are the small little ads you see on the right side. On myspace it is the ads you see scattered throughout the site.
The great thing about social media marketing is that these sites are among the easiest to get started in and can have great potential to make some good money. In fact, I personally make 6 figures in revenue per month using social media marketing. It’s one of my favorites for sure.
The main problem with social media is that the campaign longevity is generally not very long because as soon as a campaign becomes large, many people jump on the bandwagon and copy everyone else’s ads. The competition drives down the profit.
Social Media Advertising Sites:
Facebook Ads (http://www.facebook.com, login, click advertising) – This is my personal favorite of all the social media advertising platforms. As facebook grows to 400 million+ users, the advertising continues to get better and better.
Myspace Myads (http://advertise.myspace.com) - This is another system I have used and had some success on. Although myspace is declining in traffic, there is still a TON of traffic on their site and that means a lot of money to be made.
Other Social Media Sites You Can Advertise On:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites
Here is a great up to date list of social networking websites. While many of these social networking websites do not have their own self-serve advertising platform, I’d be willing to bet that nearly all of them offer advertising in some shape or form.
There is a ton of money to be made on these other websites because for the most part, they are fairly untapped when compared to the facebook and myspace advertising networks.
PlentyOfFish Ads (http://ads.pof.com) - This is another “social media” type website but is mainly a free dating website. Some of the campaigns that work on facebook and myspace will work on POF. The main campaigns that do NOT work most of the time (on POF) are the low commission items.
Things like $3 and below are very difficult to get to work. The great thing about POF is they have so many targeting options it can really make even more profit than other social media platforms.
How To – Facebook Ads
So let’s get into the how to of social marketing on the most popular platform, Facebook Ads.
Before you read the how to, please make sure you read the “Know Your Demographics” section.
Knowing your demographics is key before starting your social media campaigns. This is because people who are on sites (such as facebook) are not actively seeking anything except for entertainment of being on the site.
Therefore your ads need to be very targeted to your demographics in order for you to be able to make things work.
Also, before you start, I recommend you read the section from the chapter before that discusses how to setup a domain and hosting for redirection.
The reason for this is that with facebook ads, if you want to test a new offer (like two different auto insurance offers for example), you normally would have to make new ads and wait for them to be approved. With this setup, you will be able to test multiple offers simultaneously and see which is making you the most money instantly. While this is not required, it is HIGHLY recommended.
Ok – so now you’re all setup, have your offers picked out, and are ready to make ads, you need to sign up for facebook ads.
If you’re one of the 400 million people that have a facebook account, you’re already done and can start making facebook ads. To start click the Advertising link and then click “create an ad.”
Offers to Avoid in Facebook:
Before you start your facebook ads campaign, be sure to check out their advertising policy guidelines. http://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php
Doing so could help save you a bunch of time so you don’t go through all the trouble of making a campaign that simply is not allowed on facebook.
Tracking Facebook Ads Profitability:
Before you setup your campaign, I highly recommend you use a method of tracking. Tracking with facebook is super easy and does not require any sophisticated software.
What you can do is use the subids in the affiliate links to track each ad via a number ID. Then put that number id in the Ad name.
This way you can pull up a subid report in the affiliate network and see which ID numbers are converting. Compare those sub id reports with your ad titles and you instantly begin to optimize.
Ad Research:
The way most people seem to do research on ads is to look and see what else is running. If you can find an ad that is running a similar offer, you can get ideas of how to structure your ad.
Warning: Do not copy the ad. Doing so can lead to copyright lawsuits. Many times people own the copyright to the images they use and will sue you if you use their image without having the permission to use it. A good way to search for these images is to find sites that offer royalty free images such as photos.com. You don’t want to copy ads. Making your own ads can lead to longer term profits and a competitive advantage.
Getting Your Ads Approved:
1. Remember, facebook ads are approved by facebook employees. These employees can (and often do) make mistakes when marking your ad for disapproval. In fact, a large part of the approval process is subjective to the approver. If an ad is disapproved, read the reasons for disapproval. Try to fix it if possible and then try to resubmit it again. If it gets disapproved again, submit it again.
Recently, I tried submitting a weightloss ad that was 100% compliant with facebook’s guidelines. It got denied over and over. I talked to my rep at facebook rep, and was told the ad was compliant.
So what was the issue? There was none. The subjectivity of the approval process lead to getting the ad disapproved. Some niches are harder to get approved than others. It can simply just take hard work to get approvals.
2. The facebook ads approval times range from minutes up to hours. It really depends on how many ads need to be approved in the entire system. Ad approval times seem to slow down on holidays and weekends but still are fairly quick. There is nothing you can really do to speed this process up.
3. Read the ad guidelines (www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php). Read and follow these guidelines and your ad will be approved eventually. If you have trouble still getting your ad approved, email affiliates@facebook.com and they might be able to give more detail on why your ad is being disapproved. If you believe your ad is compliant with the guidelines the issue is probably your image. Images are subjective and some reviewers might pass an image through that others would not allow through. (Hence the possibility of needing to submit an ad multiple times)
4. The facebook approval teams can sometimes be international (meaning outside of the USA). Therefore if you have a campaign that redirects international traffic (some affiliate networks automatically do this), you will need to link directly to the affiliate offer (via your PHP redirect) during the approval period. After the ad is approved, you can change the direct link back to your affiliate link in your PHP file.
If you need help setting up a PHP redirect, I explain how to do this in the previous chapter.
Impressions/Clicks/CTR/CPC:
1. The first few hours of a new ad will pretty much determine the performance of your ad going forward. If you have a low click through rate, your ads will start to see less and less impressions until they stop receiving impressions all together. If your ad has less than 0.01% click through rate, you really need to work on creating a better ad.
2. Your click through rate is one of the most important factors for the entire campaign. The higher your CTR, the cheaper your cost per click will be. The image and title have the biggest impact on your CTR so as you begin to test, focus MOSTLY only those two items.
3. So you don’t blow a ton of money, start your facebook ads with a low daily budget and using the CPC (cost per click) price model. Only after you have a successful ad campaign do you switch to CPM bidding… at least when you’re first starting out.
4. Split up your ads into groups based on who you want to target (age ranges, male/female etc.). This means smaller volume but the ability to target better. By having more specific targets, you will be able to find specific demographics that make more profit (and you can bid more on) and certain demographics that make less money.
5. Once you find an ad that works well, make sure to try to find another variation. (Read more about the WHY you need multiple ads in the section called Banner Blindness below)
Bidding:
Facebook allows you to do both CPC (cost per click) and CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) advertising. The major difference here is obviously the CPM model does not guarantee that your ad gets any clicks and yet you still have to pay. The upside to the CPM model is that you can get clicks for cheaper if you have an ad with a good click through rate.
A good way to get a starting place for your bids (specially if you are direct linking) is to ask your affiliate manager or affiliate contact what the EPC of an offer is. This EPC (earnings per click) is the estimated revenue you make for each visitor to the page. If an offer has an EPC of 45 cents, you might start your cost per click bids at 20 cents or so.
Important: Facebook really doesn’t like you to lower your ad bids. In fact most of the time that you lower bids you end up getting 0 impressions on that ad. Therefore you should always start your ad bids low and move up.
Scaling Your Facebook Ad Campaigns To The 6 Figure Per Month Mark:
Here are some really helpful tips on scaling your Facebook campaigns up to the six figure per month mark like I have:
- More Ads – Making more ads with little changes can have a big impact. With Facebook, you can run literally hundreds of very similar ads at the same time, going to the same offer. This can really help to get more traffic to successful campaigns.
- Targeting – Targeting on Facebook is where you need to be creative. In fact, if you’ve found a small profiting campaign, chances are, your targeting is actually pretty broad.
In my experience, most newbies target very little. So, target more specific things.
Remember, people in one place in life might convert differently than another. People at one workplace might convert differently than another. Test them all… ages, geographical location, sexual preference, etc. People at x might convert different than Y.
Most people group them all into one large lump of demographic targeting. If the ad is not profitable, you kill entire sub-sections, which might have been profitable.
This might take time, but it’s worth the effort. You can put a small budget on each test to maximize your testing efforts. (See the tool below for making these ads more efficiently)
- Images – Images are well known as the main factor in producing a maximum click through rate. The higher your click through rate, (usually) the more frequent your ads get shown.
It’s simple enough to know that you should be testing multiple images. If you find a new image that has a much higher click through rate, you’ve instantly scaled your campaign.
Test as many images as you can afford. Some images are so odd but work amazingly well. Some images you think would work great, yet perform poorly. I find images that look like a “facebook friend” would have taken perform well. Professional photos generally perform not as well.
- CPM bidding –Think about it... Facebook is trying to maximize revenue. If they can get an advertiser to promise to pay a set amount regardless of clicks for 1000 impressions, they have just reduced a lot of risk on their part.
Therefore, if you have a good ad, switching to CPM based models really can help you increase your traffic flow. Facebook favors the lower risk ads.
Daily Budgets:
Your account will start with a small daily limit (around $50). If you are constantly hitting your daily budget, facebook will raise your allowed spend up to $1000 per day automatically in increments of $250 or so.
This is only a maximum spend limit, so don’t worry that you’ll have to spend $1000 per day every day to keep a good limit.
If you need more than $1000 per day in spend, this can be raised after a little history and an email to affiliates@facebook.com. Building history to your facebook account is important so you might not be able to get a big raise in daily budget until you have a bit of history with the company.
With a good account history, you can have an extremely high limit per day. My limit, for example, is $50,000 per day.
My Secret Weapon To Facebook Ads: Facebook Ads Manager Tool
I'm always looking for ways to make the most of my time. Whenever a process can be sped up or automated, I'm all for it.
Facebook's ad system can be very tedious, and to resolve that problem, I have been using a tool called Facebook Ads Manger extension for Firefox. You can view my review of this tool here.
I've used this tool over the past year or so and it has literally redefined how I look at facebook as an advertising platform and has helped me to make hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Facebook Ads Manager allows you to automate much of the tedious ad submission process saving you an innumerable amount of time. You can setup the toolbar to make 1000’s of ads and leave it running all night. Come back in the morning and you’re set!
To find out more about this ads manager tool please go to my blog post about the tool. Or you can check it out on the Facebook Ads Manager website.
What is Banner Blindness?
Banner blindness is when an ad is ignored or rendered ineffective due to the fact that it has been seen many times by the same demographic.
Ads that once worked really well can lose their effectiveness all together. Click through rate drops, CPC prices increase, etc.
Banner blindness can set in rather fast on Facebook. I’ve seen ads move from profitable to unprofitable in a single day by not implementing the correct protocols (featured below). This happens especially fast when targeting smaller numbers of people.
Overcoming Banner Blindness
Overcoming this banner blindness is a huge struggle as a facebook advertiser.
To overcome banner blindness, my team has tried numerous techniques. Here are a couple techniques that can help you to overcome this banner blindness and increase your facebook ads profitability.
- Put a border around the image ad - In Photoshop you can easily add a red border around your currently high converting image to create a bit more attention to an ad losing it’s effectiveness.
- Try changing the headline to something 100% different. Often, changing the headline to something completely different can have a good effect on your ad conversions.
- Always run more than one ad variation. If you run more variations of ads, your ads lose effectiveness slower. Even if one ad is less profitable, it’s worth running to keep your higher profiting ad running for longer. This is one of the best techniques – highly recommended.
- Of course, switch out the image. Easiest and simplest trick in the book, but it works.
By using some of these techniques, you should be able to overcome banner blindness to some extent.
Facebook Representative
After you start spending more money in Facebook, you will eventually be assigned an ad representative that will be able to help you with ad approvals, etc.
The great thing about Facebook is that no matter how much you spend, you can always email affiliates@Facebook.com and get relatively similar responses.
Facebook Ads Conclusion
So now you have a huge head start with using Facebook ads and should be able to make a successful campaign if you follow these guidelines and keep pressing through the failures!
Facebook is a big traffic source that can be difficult at first but once you have it down, you can make huge money. So get going already! ;)
Blog Posts on Facebook:
I’ve done quite a few posts on Facebook at my blog and on other blogs. These posts are worth checking out to do some more research:
http://www.jonathanvolk.com/facebook-ads
MySpace Ads – How To
Really, if you read the above, many of the techniques, research, etc applies to myspace. The thing that I have experienced with myspace is that the quality of traffic is usually lower.
The good thing about that however is that the traffic is generally a bit cheaper making up for the lower quality.
All that being said, I highly recommend trying out myspace myads. They are a bit more lenient than Facebook for some things and this can result in good profits.