Introduction About the Author: This guide was written by Jonathan Volk, an online marketer making millions of dollars each year online. Jonathan has generated over $1,000,000 dollars in revenue, almost 10,000,000+ visitors, and more all using the methods that he is going to teach in this guide! Jonathan also runs a blog about internet marketing where he provides updated tips and tricks for making money online! Visit his blog.
Introduction: Congrats and thanks for downloading my guide to making money using Facebook. Time and time again friends and family ask me how I make money online and if it’s possible for them to make money online as well. I always respond by telling them that it IS entirely possible to make money online. Usually they think it includes promoting unethical programs, spamming people, or having to be a programming / design guru. Followed by… them thinking they would need to have their own product, ecommerce store, website, or complicated and expensive systems. Let me put this all to rest before you read anything else. It does not include any of that! The methods I will teach in this guide are completely legitimate methods that I have used to make hundreds of thousands in revenue online… without promoting unethical programs, without spamming people, without being a design guru or even having a website! That’s right! In this guide I plan to go over the 5 main steps (in detail) you need to make profits with Facebook and how to then expand those profits to my level (hundreds of thousands…) Without further ado… let’s get started!
Why Facebook? Facebook is now the LARGEST traffic source in the US. Yup, even over Google! According to a major tracking website, hitwise.com, March 2010 was the first month that Google had become the second most trafficked website in the US.
All that to say, if you’re not looking at Facebook as a serious traffic source, then you are losing out on the majority share of the USA traffic! I am going to be explaining legitimate methods that you can use to advertise to millions of users on Facebook, instantly!
After having friends who have made MILLIONS PER MONTH on Facebook, I can tell you the amount of traffic you can find on Facebook is simply amazing. In addition to having the most amount of US traffic, Facebook is also more targeted than Google or most other traffic sources out there! That means… better customers, better traffic, better profits! But… I’m getting ahead of myself. (I’m just excited to share this with you!!!) First things first...
How Can You Make Money On Facebook? (Overview) Before we move on and get into specific details about how to make money on Facebook I want to discuss the broad overview of how it all works. Facebook, offers a ton of advertising options for your business, website, etc. Now, you’re probably thinking, “but you said, I don’t need a website!” The good news is you don’t!
What if you could promote someone else’s website on Facebook and get paid a commission of each sale and never have to deal with customer support, follow up, etc. again?! That’s what I will be showing you below. Think if you could advertise someone else’s website for just pennies per click and get paid $10, $20, or even $100 per sale of an item! It wouldn’t take much to earn a good profit would it? This is how I have earned hundreds of thousands in commissions in a few months time! Now, if you DO have a website, this information will be equally helpful! The main reason websites don’t make money is simply because they don’t get traffic! By reading this guide, you will learn how to get a FLOOD of traffic to your website. Not just any traffic… laser targeted traffic. Below, I am going to be explaining a five step process to make a profitable and successful Facebook campaign. 1. A Great Offer (Company to promote) 2. Demographic Research (Knowing who to target) 3. High CTR Ads (Creative and eye catching ads) 4. The Right Bidding Strategy 5. Maximizing Campaign Potential (How I scaled my campaigns to $xxx,xxx+ per month)
Section 1: Find A Company To Promote What Is Affiliate Marketing? When you market another person or company’s website in exchange for a commission, it is called affiliate marketing. This is exactly what I talked about in the previous section. Affiliate Marketing is marketing products or services for other companies in exchange for a commission. You are a virtual sales person of sorts. You don’t deal with inventory, customer service, follow up, or anything like that. You simply sell. When you successfully get a customer to the business and make a sale (or lead), you get paid a commission. Simple as that! As an example, let’s look at Zappos.com. Zappos is an online shoe retailer. Zappos wants as many sales as possible and in order to do so, will pay you a commission if you get someone to buy because of your advertisements. So they give you a special link (I’ll talk more about how to get these links later) and when you have people go
through your special link (called an affiliate link) and purchase something on the Zappos website, you automatically get paid a percentage of the sale. How awesome is that?! Now imagine having advertisements for Zappos.com running 24 hours a day on Facebook targeting people specifically interested in shoes. You could generate sale after sale without ever owning a website and without the fear of the almighty Google slap!
Real Facebook Example:
Let’s take a look at an example! Below is a Facebook ad I found when I logged in.
Now you’ll notice that this ad is for a California Culinary school! Awesome! When you click on this ad, it goes to a page that looks like this:
Guess what? The person who made this ad for this company is an affiliate. What’s even better is they probably get paid somewhere around $10 per person that fills out this form! They didn’t have to do anything except make ads in Facebook that link directly to this site in order to start earning! Now… Where and HOW can we get access to programs like this? That is where the affiliate network comes in.
What is an Affiliate Network? You could try to go and find each individual website you want to promote on Facebook, try to setup a deal with them and then become their affiliate but that would take a lot of time (weeks). This is where the affiliate networks come in. Affiliate networks are companies that facilitate the “network” or relationship between the companies and the affiliates (you). Affiliates (Industry term: Publishers) sign up for the affiliate network and instantly have access to thousands of companies (Industry term: Advertisers) that want you, the affiliates, to promote their business. You can pick through any number of these companies to promote. This instant access to hundreds or sometimes thousands of companies is the true power of being a part of an affiliate network. But… the benefits don’t stop there. You never deal with the individual companies directly. Instead, you always deal directly with the affiliate network. This way you really only have one point of contact. Finally, the other major benefit of the affiliate network is the payment terms. Affiliate networks usually pay their affiliates way faster than a direct company. Instead of waiting 60+ days to be paid (net 30 or even net 45), you can often get paid bi-weekly or weekly after a small earning threshold. For example, many networks will set you on weekly wires if you start generating $1000 per week or more in commissions.
So what does the affiliate network get out of all of this? In exchange for all of this, the affiliate network takes a small percentage from the commissions you generate. Don’t worry… it is well worth it! Affiliate networks are the best places to start in your affiliate marketing career. Even to this day, I still use affiliate networks for a majority of my business because it allows me to leverage my time as best as possible.
Applying For An Affiliate Network So, by now, you hopefully understand that in order to make a lot of money using Facebook, you need to be a part of an affiliate network! I can’t say how important it is. It can be a bit difficult to get accepted into an affiliate network (especially for people outside the US) when first starting out. At first, it might seem like a tough process, but if you follow the steps below, you should have no problem. This tough process is due to affiliate networks taking on a ton of risk. In most cases they have to pay bigger affiliates weekly (sometimes even daily) but yet only get paid from the companies net 15 (15 days after the end of the month) or even net 30!
Risk Factor To affiliate networks it’s all about one thing. How much of a risk are you to them? Think of the network that has 1000 applications of affiliates waiting for approval. Because of the sheer number of scammers joining affiliate networks each day, the only way to stand out is to show them you’re not one of the scammers. If you're an affiliate from a major country, your risk factor is substantially lower but that still does not guarantee acceptance... You need to do more than JUST apply.
To Be Accepted... To be accepted into a network, you must apply and talk to them about how you plan to promote the different companies in their network… which for most of you reading this guide is going to be using Facebook social ads. When you’re on the phone, the affiliate network is probably going to ask you how you plan to promote the affiliate offers, if you have any websites, etc. After you read this guide, you will be able to confidently answer all of the questions they throw at you.
Application One common question you will see on the applications to apply for the affiliate network is what your website is. If you have no website, no worries either. Put something like Facebook.com in the website URL (since we plan to promote via Facebook) and explain in the comments section your plans to use Facebook as your main promotion medium.
Affiliate Networks to Join: Now before I tell you about networks to apply to, I want to you to know these are all affiliate networks I have worked with personally or have friends who have worked with them.
Also know that by applying to these networks, I will be paid a small referral fee (usually around 2% of your earnings). This ~2% commission is taken from the affiliate network profit margins and not from your actual earnings. This is one of the main reasons why I have sold this guide at a discounted price. By allowing you to succeed, I in turn succeed as well. I recommend you join around 4-5 affiliate networks to start. Some affiliate networks have so many pending affiliates that they might not be able to accept you at the current time so you should apply for multiple networks in order to make money as fast as possible! Quick note: Below I use some industry terms. A company in an affiliate network is called an offer. For example: Zappos is an offer in Commission Junction Affiliate network.
Clickbooth - Clickbooth is a huge affiliate network with a TON of exclusive offers (meaning you can only get the offer from them). In fact, they have over 4000 offers you can choose to promote as a Clickbooth affiliate. In addition to that, they are ranked the number 1 affiliate network in the world by Website Magazine. And... if that wasn't enough, they are ranked the 5th fastest growing company in the nation, number 1 in advertising and marketing (according to INC 500). I've had the privilege to work with some of the members of Clickbooth's staff for years and they have always gone the extra mile to ensure that I was able to run my affiliate marketing campaigns at maximum performance! I highly recommend you check out Clickbooth's affiliate network! Join Clickbooth Now: http://bit.ly/dDiYs7
AzoogleAds - AzoogleAds is my personal favorite affiliate network and the one I’ve
made a LOT of money on. I’ve been quite open about them being my favorite affiliate network for years and they remain my favorite. The company is on top for a reason: they treat their publishers very well. More than just gifts (like big screen TV’s, flights, parties, etc) they also are great at building relationship with their publishers and actually care about how you are doing as an affiliate. I’ve had the privilege of working with AzoogleAds since the start of my affiliate marketing career and they have been a large key to my success. I highly recommend you check them out no matter big or small affiliate. As of recently, they have a whole team designed specifically for the newbie affiliates called the AZN Advisor.
If you’re a smaller / newbie affiliate, you get access to this AZN Advisor where you get newsletters, tips, tricks, and more! They are one of just a few affiliate networks to offer this to the smaller publishers and that is just another reason why they are on the top of my recommendation list. Highly recommended! Join AzoogleAds Now: http://bit.ly/a0bmcA
Eagle Web Assets - EWA is an amazing affiliate network run by SUPER Affiliates Ryan Eagle and Harrison Gevirtz. This affiliate network is great because a few reasons: 1. They help their affiliates with extremely informative information 2. They have really great payouts... Really good. 3. They tell you which offer is working the best. (For example, if they have three auto insurance offers, they let you know which to use) 4. WEEKLY payouts at any commission level. As you can see, there are a lot of upsides to EWA. The downside is that it's a private network, meaning not just anyone can get on. I would apply and try. If they don't accept you, work on building your portfolio up a bit and then go apply again! Great people, great network. Join EWA now: http://bit.ly/aGMWiv
Elite Clicks Media - ECM is a perfect network for Facebook offers. They even mark out which offers are perfect for Facebook (in their Social category). Besides having a lot of really great offers, the team behind Elite Clicks Media is a great team of guys that are set on helping their publishers go to the next level. For example, just recently, ECM held a free webinar on CPV/PPV Marketing. More importantly, they have even more webinars lined up to help their publishers learn! This, to me, shows how they are not just like any other old network. I highly recommend you check out ECM and when you join, be open and honest about your goals and intentions and this team will help you to meet those goals. Last but not least, Elite Clicks Media recently partnered up with Kevin Harrington, the guy who has sold more than $4 Billion dollars worth of merchandise via television infomercials. Now that speaks volumes! Join Elite Clicks Media Now: http://bit.ly/bt4ktk
CX Digital Media – CX Digital is another network that is highly regarded in the affiliate marketing industry by many super affiliates. CX is a large publicly traded company and an affiliate network with a ton of affiliate offers. Because of the size of this network, you can get just about any offer and get really good payouts at that. I’ve used CX Digital for some of my affiliate offers in the past and they have always treated me well and the offers have converted great. Another reason people love to use CX Digital is because of the awesome rewards program. Every $15,000 you earn with CX Digital (rolls over month to month) gets you a $100 prepaid Mastercard! Imagine earning cash for earning cash. : ) Join CX Digital Now: http://bit.ly/9IbrFC
Affiliate.com - Affiliate.com is one of the larger affiliate networks that was started by one of the largest email marketers in the business, Scott Richter. If you plan on doing any sort of email marketing, whether it be capturing emails via PPV, PPC, or any other method, I highly recommend you check out the offers at Affiliate.com. They have a great assortment of offers designed specifically for email. Beyond just email offers, they also have affiliate offers for just about every niche. And because this company is run by a super affiliate, they know the business very well. Affiliate.com puts it this way, “Our mission is simple. When you are successful– we are successful! We provide a wide variety of benefits you won’t find at other networks.” So, if there is one thing that sets affiliate.com apart from the rest is their focus on providing affiliate support and I love that about this company. I highly recommend you check out affiliate.com! Join Affiliate.com Now: http://bit.ly/cNjzi4
Neverblue - Neverblue was one of the first affiliate networks I joined when I was
first starting out in 2007 and was one of the first networks that I had success on. In fact within just a few weeks of running on Neverblue, I was able to get a campaign going that was making upwards of $400 revenue per day! Since then, Neverblue has continued to expand the amount of amazing offers they have, including many exclusives (meaning you can’t find the offers on any other network). Neverblue has a large amount of offers that do well on Facebook so joining their network will provide you with access to a large number of offers that do well on Facebook!
Join Neverblue Now: http://bit.ly/c0oVie
Join… Join… Join… Ok, so you’re probably tempted to join just one affiliate network and then continue reading. I can’t tell you how many people just like yourself have contacted me disappointed after they applied to one network and got disapproved and had to wait while they apply to another. Some networks are going through growing pains and can’t accept anymore affiliates. So… for a short period of time, don’t be offended if you don’t get into one or two of the networks listed above. This is why you will want to apply to multiple networks. So, go ahead… do that now! Also, you have the best chance of getting accepted into the affiliate networks if you know what you’re talking about. So if you went and joined the affiliate networks, I recommend you read through a lot of this guide so you will know what you’re doing. Ok… So let’s get started.
Finding the Offer (Company) You’re Going to Promote: First, you’re going to want to find an offer (also known as a company) you’re going to promote through Facebook! Inside the affiliate network, you will see hundreds of offers so it can get a bit overwhelming when you first start! Here are three methods you can use to find offers to promote via Facebook. We will want to run something that is already successful in Facebook and has a proven track record.
Method 1: Ask Your Affiliate Manager! A great way to find which offers to promote via Facebook is to get in touch with your affiliate network contact (often called your affiliate manager). Send them an email or call them and ask them something like:
“Hey, I wanted to see what offers are doing really well on Facebook ads for your network.
Thanks,” Usually, the network will respond back with a list of offers that are performing well on Facebook. Pick an offer you feel good about and is not the very top offer (leave that for the professionals). Method 2: Pick From This List! I’ve been marketing on Facebook for a while now. These are all long term campaigns that have proven to be profitable on Facebook for me. Education Lead Gen (Short, 1 page form offers work best) – These offers are great because they generally have a great payout ($8-$14) for someone to enter just a few pieces of information. No credit card or payment required means high conversion. Scholarship Offers (Degrees for moms, degrees for dads, etc) – Great follow up offers with your Education lead gen offers. Games (Huge International Opportunity) – There is HUGE money in the game industry. Most of these sites pay a buck or two for a free registration… equals big money. Dating (Lower profit, but solid, long term campaign) – Not a recommended starting point. Hard to get to work at a sustainable profit level. Worth checking out if you want a long term but lower profit campaign. Facebook App installs. (Mafia Wars, Zoosk, etc) – Because the user never leaves Facebook, you will have a high conversion rate. Mafia Wars ads have been running for months and months on Facebook.
Insurance / Debt – Insurance offers can pay as much as $3.50 for a single ZIP code submit. Yeah… imagine paying $0.50 cents per click on a page that makes you $3.50 after they submit their zip code. Doesn’t take much to earn a profit if you target it right.
Mobile Offers (Usually require Facebook-compliant versions) – Ads need to say “Subscription Required.” I don’t recommend you start with mobile offers, but they can be big converters.
QUICK NOTE: There recently has been an update to Facebook's policy and a lot of affiliates have thought of it as "the affiliate apocalypse" and what not. I think it's hilarious that people would say that. There are a TON of affiliate offers still running on Facebook. Pick from one of the offers above, ask your affiliate manager, or see what is running. If someone else is running the offer, you can run it as well. Simple as that. Method 3: Look at what is running! To find an offer, you can simply look and see what others are running. I talk more about this in the “competitive analysis” section towards the end of this guide.
Ok, great! Now we have the affiliate networks we are going to be a part of and a list of offers that will do well! Take some time and find an offer you’re going to try and stick with it.
Offers to Avoid in Facebook: Before you pick the offer you are going to be promoting, 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. Now what? How do we start?
Get Your Affiliate Link: Now that you have the list of offers that work well on Facebook, you will need to get the special affiliate link. When someone visits this link (via your ad for example) it shows the company you’re the one who sent that person and this is how you are compensated with commission! To get your affiliate link, you need to login to the affiliate network you have an account with. (Look in the section above if you are not yet part of an affiliate network) Once you are logged in, find the offer you want to promote. You can get the affiliate link here. Here is a screenshot of the link for Elite Clicks Media. (You click “Links and creatives” to find the link.)
This above example has the link: http://affiliate.adtrtracker.com/rd/r.php?sid=1148&pub=500229&c1=&c2=&c3= This is my PERSONAL affiliate link for the degree USA offer. If you click it, you are redirected to Degree USA’s website. Your affiliate link is what you will be using for the Facebook ad, so copy the link from your affiliate network down and save it for when you are ready to start your Facebook campaign!
Section 2: Who Will See Your Ads (Demographic Targeting) Know Your Demographics Now that you have picked your offer, you should always start by thinking about who will be interested in the product or service you want to market. While there are always going to be exceptions, there is usually going to be one main age group, sex, race, etc that buys (or is interested in) that product or service more
than the others. Targeting this group gives you the best chance of finding success and big profits. For example, if you’ve picked out a fashion offer, you should know that generally the demographic you will target is women. Sure, you can argue that there are some men that like fashion but a much larger percentage of women will be more likely to buy that fashion related… More specifically, women between the ages 18-49 are even more likely than women of other age ranges.
Targeting Options Before I get into methods that you can use to find what demographics you can target, I want to outline the different targeting options that we have available to us in Facebook’s ad system so you can know what to think about when trying to find your demographic information. 1. Location – Target via country, state, or city. 2. Age – Target ages from 13 or older. 3. Sex – Male or Female 4. Interested in – (Male or Female) Helps to determine sexual preference. 5. Relationship Status – In a relationship, single, engaged, married (or “it’s complicated”). 6. Language – Target English speaking for optimal results when targeting English speaking offers, etc. 7. Likes and Interests – Essentially helps you to keyword target interests of certain Facebook users. a. Check out the BONUS guides to see the top keywords and fan “like” pages to get an idea of the most prevalent interests of Facebook users. Target specific groups of people based upon some of the more popular things (find related products to sell) and make your ad about that, and you’ll have a really, really good click through rate. 8. Education – College grad, in college, or in high school. 9. Workplace Targeting – Target the employees of a certain business like Walmart, Google, etc. 10. Connections – Target users or their friends who are (or are not) connected to your fan “like” pages, events, groups, and applications.
How Can You Determine Demographics? Here are three methods you can (and should) use to determine your demographics. You should use a combination of these methods, if not all three.
Method 1: Quantcast.com First there is http://www.quantcast.com. This is my quick and easy method to find what demographic will be your best bet to make money. Go to Quantcast.com and enter the domain name of the offer. Let’s say you are going to promote jennycraig.com. Go to http://www.quantcast.com/jennycraig.com/demographics in your web browser.
Looking at Quantcast’s results for JennyCraig.com provides the following results:
As you can see the information that Quantcast provides is very helpful in starting your campaigns. You’ll see an index number next to each statistic. This index number is a comparison among the web average. Anything over 100 is above average for that demographic, under 100 is below average. So you’ll see for Jenny Craig, the best people to target are, women, ages 35-49. Perfect! You’ll need this information to make your Facebook campaign.
Another great tool to check out is the Google Ad Planner. Google Ad Planner has a lot more in depth information and research capabilities but is a bit more complicated to use. http://www.google.com/adplanner Method 2: Ask Your Affiliate Manager! I find that sometimes your affiliate manager will know a certain offer pretty well. Sometimes just asking your affiliate manager will provide demographic information that you would not have been able to get any other way. For example, I found specific age groups that work well for a gaming offer by asking my affiliate manager. These ages were very specific and resulted in me making huge profit levels. Method 3: “Profiling” Profiling is where you basically “guesstimate” what demographic would normally convert for an offer. Let’s take an example: Criminal justice (Become a cop) education offers. This is basically an offer that pays you per lead. Each person who requests education information from the college that offers criminal justice degrees means you get paid up to $14. Who are the people who are normally thinking about becoming a cop? Well, most definitely males. Usually late teens to early twenties. But let’s take it a step further… This is where profiling really becomes powerful. Would you say most men looking to be cops (or would convert on that type of offer) are heterosexual? Thus we can target “Interested in women” when we make this campaign. Think of how this type of information can be applied to campaigns when you are making them!
Section 3: High CTR Ads Making ads that grab attention is essential for a successful campaign. The more attention-grabbing your advertisement, the more clicks (traffic) you get and the cheaper your traffic becomes. This results in higher profit levels and allows you to scale up a campaign to the huge 6 figures revenue per month level that I have talked about.
Structure of an Ad Let’s talk about the structure of the Ad. There is the title or headline, the image (110x80 pixels max), and the body text.
Here are three sample ads.
These are all good ads. They are structured very well. Let’s break them down to understand how to make our own ads that will do well.
Image: The image of the ad is the MOST important part of the ad. This is because the image is what grabs the user’s attention away from the normal browsing experience while on Facebook. Ads without images tend to underperform compared to those ads with images. But what image will work best? It’s impossible to tell exactly what type of image will bring the most clicks. You really need to split test multiple images. Here are some guidelines to find the best types of images based upon what has worked REALLY well for me: Use Amateur Looking Photos – Those professional stock photography looking photos tend to look too much like an advertisement while the amateur looking photos tend to look like “user generated” content that
people are used to seeing on Facebook. In the sample ads above, you can see that the photo of the dad with his baby does not look professional. Use Shocking Images – Shocking images catch the attention of users very well. This can be a car crash or a face full of acne for example. Shocking images grab the attention because we are all interested in the things that shock us. Use Celebrity Images – Celebrity images are hard to get through Facebook’s approval process at times but if you can get them through. The images generally grab the user’s attention very well. Use Localized Images – When you’re targeting a specific region, using an image that only that region would know about or that relates to that region can be very powerful in grabbing the user’s attention. One such example is showing a California drivers license as the ad image when targeting California drivers for an auto insurance offer. Remember: Don’t use plain and boring images.
Test Multiple Images Just like I mentioned a little above, you never know what will do well for your particular campaign. You really need to start by testing 3-4 images and keep the winner.
Using Similar Images Once you find an image that works well, make sure to not just run that one image. This can lead to a thing called “banner blindness” which I will touch on later in this guide. Instead, once you find a good image, try to find a similar image! Here is a great example of two images for the same ad that would do equally well:
Notice how they are essentially the same type of image? They are amateur looking photos with dads holding their new babies.
Ad Copy The ad copy is also very important for a good, attention-grabbing ad. While the image pulls in the users eyes, the title and body text are what cause the user to click onto the ad and ultimately convert into our next paycheck. ;) Here are some types of headlines that have worked well: Ask a question –For example: “Lonely?” or “Who Searched You?” – The usage of the question mark brings a good click through rate. Testimonial Style – For example: “How I Lost Weight!” Include Special Characters – For example: “ I use eHarmony™ ” – Including that TM (trademark) symbol is a character people do not see very commonly so it grabs attention and causes user interest. Appeal to User’s Intelligence and Self-Esteem – People like to think they can be one of a few people to do something. Appealing to this ego mentality means we can grab a bunch of people who are willing to do what it takes to know if they are better. This generally means… money in our pocket. Call Out User Attributes – For Example: “San Francisco Deals” – The main thing about calling out user attributes is that while it will increase your click through rate a ton, Facebook only allows it if the attribute is related to the offer. This is because users started to abuse the use of targeting user attributes for completely irrelevant offers. o For example: “Age 22: Car Insurance.” While this ad title worked really well, the offer had nothing to do with the user being 22 years old. Thus, Facebook has since only allowed ads to call out user attributes that directly reflect the offer. o Try to only include the user attribute in the Body text. Including the user attribute in the headline can lead to people feeling like their privacy is being violated. Use Action Words – For example: “Download Now!” – “Check it out!” – etc.
Section 4: Bidding Strategy The right bidding strategy using Facebook is another crucial part of having success with Facebook.
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 because you can get a ton of clicks and still pay the same set price. To find the bid you should start with, you first need to understand a term called EPC. This EPC stands for earnings per click and is the estimated revenue you make for each visitor to the page. If an offer has an EPC of 45 cents, you can assume that you will make an average of $0.45 for each visitor you send to the page. The EPC is calculated by dividing the total commissions divided by the number of people who go to the company’s website via your affiliate link. Let’s say you make $50 on 149 visitors to the page. The EPC is approximately $0.34. ($50/149 = ~$0.3356) A good way to get a starting place for your bids (especially if you are direct linking) is to ask your affiliate manager or affiliate contact what the average network wide EPC of an offer is. By knowing the average EPC, you can start your bids at a CPC that is below the EPC. Start your bids at the low end of the EPC and move them up a few cents at a time until you start to get more and more traffic. Important: Facebook really doesn’t like you to lower your ad bids. In fact most of the time that you lower bids your ad stops showing all together. You should always start your ad bids low and move up.
CPC Bidding I recommend you always start with CPC bidding when you start a campaign. CPC ads give you a guaranteed maximum price that you’re willing to pay. By knowing your target demographic and what the average EPC is, creating profitable ads is not very challenging. Simply bid below the EPC and you’re practically guaranteed a profit. In order for your ads to show using CPC bidding, you really need to bid 30 cents or more. Depending on the demographic, it might be as much as 50 cents or more. The main issue here is that many of the lower commission offers have an EPC that is below 30 cents. For those type of offers (usually $3-4 dollar commissions or lower) you will need to start with CPM bidding. You also will want to use CPM bidding instead of CPC bidding if you have a great click through rate. If your CTR is good enough, you can reduce click costs significantly! I’ve had clicks as cheap as 1 cent per click for US visitors!
CPM Bidding CPM bidding is really the way to scale to huge volume. Think about it… if Facebook gets a guaranteed amount per 1000 impressions, they would prefer it over CPC ads, which only guarantee that Facebook is paid once there is a click on the ad.
Daily Budgets: Your account will start with a small daily limit (around $50). If you are constantly spending the full maximum spend of around $50 per day then Facebook will automatically raise your allowed spend up to $1000 per day 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. I’ve heard of limits as high as $75,000 per day.
Competitive Analysis Because We’re Not Marketing Experts Ok… So now we have our affiliate network, offer (company) that we will promote, and a place to promote the offer. And… now we know how to write effective ads. However, I’m all about shortcuts to help speed up the profit process. That’s why we need to do a bit of competitive analysis before we start making our advertisements. Why not use the research others have done for us by seeing what is running on Facebook ads? If you see an ad on Facebook, chances are, it’s making money for the person running the ad (unless it’s a huge brand like Coke, etc). Therefore, we’re going to start looking for ads that we can potentially imitate for the offer you have decided to promote. To do this, click the “More Ads.” link under the ads on the right hand side.
By clicking the more ads button, you will see a whole page full of Facebook ads targeted directly to your demographic. (Your age group, sex, sexual preference, location, etc) By refreshing this page, you will be able to view a bunch of high performing ads. Your goal here should be to find an advertisement that is as similar to the offer that you’re going to promote as possible! Once you find one that you think might be similar to the offer you’re wanting to promote, copy it down so you have a baseline idea of where to start with your ad.
Not Seeing the Ad You’re Looking For? If you’re not seeing the ad for that offer, the problem can be that the offer is not targeted to your age group, location, etc. So, if you’re really looking to find an ad that is similar but can’t find one, then you need to register a few more profiles. You’ll want to make at least 5 male profiles and 5 female profiles. For the male and female profiles, use the ages 13, 18, 25, 35, and 50. These are the primary age groups that people target. You will need to use a different email for each profile, so you can use a free email service like hotmail. Quick tip: I did emails like male1@, male2@, etc to easily know which is which. Also note that some offers only show to single people (such as dating offers). You can however change the relationship status of each Facebook profile and after a little bit of time (as long as an hour) you will begin to see the change in advertisements. If you don’t want to go through all this trouble, select another offer where you see the ads already.
Found Your Ad? Ok… So now that you have found the advertisement that is similar to your offer, you’ll want to save the ad. Right click on the ad image and click “Save Image As…” Then, open up notepad or Microsoft Word and copy and paste the headline and text from the ad so you can reference it later again. Great!
Modify the Ad So you have your sample ad, your offer link, your affiliate network, and you’re ready to go! Now it’s time to make a few variations of the sample ad you found.
Make sure not to just flat out copy the ad because you can run into copyright issues and run into lawsuits. The main way you can make modifications to the ad copy is by changing the headline and finding an image. I recommend that you make at least two to three variations of the ad copy by modifying the headline and finding at least one other image. You can find images using Bing image search or Google image search.
Section 5: Making Your First Campaign Ok, so in order to start your first campaign you need the following: 1. Your offer (affiliate) link. This link is the unique link that we will send traffic through in order to have it marked as coming from our advertisements. 2. Your Ad Copy. Check out the section above if you do not have this yet. 3. A Facebook Account. Any Facebook account will do… You don’t need a special account in order to be able to advertise. 4. Your Demographic Information! 5. Desire to make money online! You can do it! If you have all the above, you’re ready to start making your first campaign!
Get Your Facebook Advertising Account: Ok, now you’re going to want to get your Facebook advertising account. Here is the good news… If you have a Facebook account, you’re already done. It’s that simple! Simply login to your Facebook account (or register a free account at Facebook.com) and click the “advertising” link at the bottom of the page.
After you have clicked advertising you can click the green button “create an ad.” This will enable you to begin advertising on Facebook.
Create Your Ad: Basically now, it’s all just plugging in data.
Getting Your Ads Approved: All ads must first go through an approval process. Here are some pointers to make sure you ads are 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 weight loss ad that was 100% compliant with Facebook’s guidelines. It got denied over and over. I talked to my rep at Facebook 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 ad approval time ranges 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)
Section 6: Maximizing Your Campaign Potential So now you should have done the following: 1. Applied to all the affiliate networks and been approved to at least one. 2. Found the affiliate offer (company) you’ll be promoting 3. Found the demographics for that offer 4. Made your advertisement(s) 5. Discovered the EPC of the offer and set your bids accordingly 6. Had your ads approved Now that your ads are approved, you’ll need to probably make some modifications to the advertisements. At first, you most likely will not get a ton of traffic to the ads if you used the correct bidding strategy. We put in low bids so we need to slowly increase the bids until we start to see impressions and clicks on the ads. Every 10 minutes or so, increase the bids about 1-2 cents until you start getting clicks. The higher you can bid, the higher your click volume.
The Importance of Click Through Rate If you have a low click through rate (CTR), your ads will start to see less and less impressions until they stop receiving impressions altogether. If your ad has less than 0.01% click through rate, you really need to work on creating a better ad. Depending on the ad, you should really try to shoot for around 0.1% or better, although that’s not always possible. 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.
Making Your Ads Profitable: So by this time, you have your ads running. You are either making profit or you are unable to get your ads to run at a profitable cost per click level.
If your first ads are unable to run at a profitable level but you’re getting clicks, here are some things that you can do to increase the chances of profit. 1. Find a new image. – Chances are your click through rate is too low and that is why you are having a hard time. 2. Switch bidding model. If you’re bidding CPC and you’re unable to get traffic, you should try (cautiously) bidding CPM at a low level. Move bids up slowly. 3. Use some of the tactics in the “Upper hand” section below.
The Upper Hand – Techniques to Blow Past the Competition This is my personal favorite section. These are all techniques to expand profits, expand click volume, and more. If you’re having issues with profitability, first try and use the techniques featured above. After you test those methods, use the methods below. If you are profitable already using these methods will (hopefully) help you to achieve the six figure per month levels like me.
Tracking Profit of Each Ad Before we get into specific tactics, we need to look at how to track the profitability of each ad. The way to do this is quite simple. All your affiliate networks will have a way for you to add a “subID” of some sort. This subID can be any value that we can use to track our ad. What I do is assign each advertisement a unique number ID. Usually I start at 1 and move up from there. In the destination URL of the ad I just change the subID to simply include that unique number ID. Then, you can name your ad (during the last step of ad creation) I simply name this ad after the subID number. Now, whenever I want to see what ads are bringing in profit, I pull a subID report from the networks’ reporting area and compare it with the ad ID numbers. The easiest way for you to do this is to sort your ad data by “Today” or “Yesterday” and pull a subID report for those days. Then you can see at a glance which ads are performing and which are not. DO NOT DELETE: As your campaign continues to progress over the weeks, you will notice that when you sort by “today” for your campaign stats, some ads that did really well at one time, are doing terrible for that given day.
Don't be too quick to delete ads. Every once in a while, sort these ads by lifetime stats and re-activate historically good ads (high CTR or low CPC) that you paused because they had too high of a CPC at the time.
Upper Hand Technique 1: Split Ads Into Smaller Segments I have had major success by splitting ads into smaller targeted groups. For example, instead of making one ad targeting people ages 50-60, I would make an ad for EACH age. This can be applied to more than just age. You can split into age groups, into geographical location, etc. You’re probably thinking… Wouldn’t that take forever? Well, no and I’ll explain how to automate making ads like this later in this guide. The reasoning behind this is that certain demographics are more expensive than others, some convert better than others, and some just are not as good. By breaking them into specific segments, you’re able to track which segments perform better and which don’t. Of course for this method to be effective you need to implement the method of tracking profit listed in the section above. One example of this working extremely well was when I had a campaign that was targeting individuals from the ages of 25 and older. What I found was that the people between the ages of 50 and 60 converted way better (and thus gave more profit) but in order for me to get significant traffic at those ages, I needed to increase bids higher than all the other demographics. The result? A high volume, high profit campaign.
GEO Splitting Just like age, I have also split by geographical location. I’ve tried splitting ads by state and also by city. For city targeting I did not want to take the time to target every single city in America. Instead, I compiled a list of the top 200 cities (by population) I would use to target. Then I would target places within 25 miles of that city to cover a majority of the US. The result? I found that some geographical locations convert much better than others. Some less. By breaking this into segments you can discover what locations are working and what locations are not. Remember, not everything is equal.
Upper Hand Technique 2: Increasing Volume One technique I’ve used to increase volume of clicks to my ads is simply by creating multiple ads. They can be the same ad or have small changes. Although creating a duplicate ad does not double your volume, it does increase volume. If you have a profitable ad, try duplicating it 5-10 times. It can often lead to some of them getting more volume.
Upper Hand Technique 3: Recreating Ads Sometimes, for whatever reason, profitable ads can turn from profitable to breaking even or unprofitable. By recreating the same ad (either identical or small changes) you can often revive a campaign. Click through rate can pick back up when you create new ads which then can lead to more profit. I’ve had campaigns where I recreated ads hundreds of times and was able to run the campaign for 6+ months because of it. There would be days where the profit would begin to lower and we would pause old advertisements and recreate them and watch as our profit levels increased back up to a normal level.
Upper Hand Technique 4: Ask! There is an email at Facebook setup specifically for advertisers like us. This email is affiliates@facebook.com You can email this email and sometimes you WILL get a canned response. However if you email them back with your specific questions, more often than not, you’re going to get a detailed response! Remember, the loudest one in the room gets the attention so if you continue to email them asking the question, you will eventually get the help you need!
Upper Hand Technique 5: Overcome Banner Blindness 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. 1. Put a border around the image ad - In any photo editing program you can easily add a red border around your currently high converting image in order to create a bit more attention to an ad that is losing its effectiveness. 2. 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. 3. 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. 4. 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.
Upper Hand Technique 6: Sex Sells I know it’s crazy… but photos of attractive men and women grab attention unlike anything else. It doesn’t need to be super provocative or revealing either. Simply the fact that it’s an attractive person is enough. TIP: When using photos of women, I always try to include photos that have their chest inside the photo. It does not need to be revealing or pornographic. Just the fact that it’s there is enough to increase the CTR of that ad to a level that is above others.
Upper Hand Technique 7: Monitoring EPC and CPC for Maximum Profits Though
this next technique can basically go without saying, it’s an important basic tip to keep an eye out for when you’re first starting. As I’ve recommend, you should try to ask the network for the average EPC (earnings per click) of an offer in order to get an idea of what to bid. But once you start getting clicks on your ad, you really need to keep a close eye on the CPC (cost per click) of each ad and the EPC you’re actually getting for the offer at the network.
The EPC can fluctuate and if you want to be as profitable as possible, you need to make sure you’re pausing all ads with a CPC that is above, at, and 1-3 cents (depending on the offer and its payout) below the EPC. Most networks have an EPC calculated for you in their stats section, but it’s just the revenue divided by the number of clicks. On the Facebook side of things, they make it extremely easy to sort the data. Within a campaign, you can sort data by lifetime stats, today, yesterday, last week, or whatever custom date range you would like. You can then just click on “Avg. CPC” in the gray bar to sort the ads by their CPC for that date range (highest to lowest, or lowest to highest). Just make sure you are checking the network EPC for the same date range.
Upper Hand Technique 8: Facebook Ads Manager Sidebar One of the tools I rely on was designed for creating Facebook ads automatically. Please note that at the time I released this guide, the latest Facebook Advertising Guidelines (April 8, 2010 revision) clearly state that “Advertisers cannot programmatically automate the creation of accounts or ads unless given permission by Facebook to do so.” Please seek permission from Facebook before downloading and using the phenomenal tool I talk about below, or else use it at your own risk. Failure to do so could result in your account being locked down and displaying this message:
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 Firefox sidebar tool called Facebook Ads Manager. Side note: Firefox is one of the best web browsers around. (Internet Explorer and Safari are other examples of web browsers you may be more familiar with) Not only does it have great security measures built in, but it has awesome capabilities for extensions and add-ons. If you’re not using it, you really should be. You can
download it at getfirefox.com. Firefox is required to use the Facebook Ads Manager sidebar. I literally wouldn’t have had anywhere near as much success using Facebook’s ad platform and probably wouldn’t have ever made this guide if this sidebar hadn’t been released. I might have even stopped using Facebook for advertising months and months ago. For me, this extension is an absolute necessity. I can’t recommend it enough. If you’re truly serious about Facebook advertising, you need this. 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 by allowing me to segment my ads into very specific groups. 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 1000s of ads and leave it running all night. Come back in the morning and you’re set! The Facebook Ads Manager sidebar has all the possible targeting options provided by Facebook’s ad creation process. There are several “extra” targeting options that may very well be irrelevant to your offer or that you don’t need to test as you start out, but utilizing these options can make a real difference for the right offers. Once you purchase it, it’s largely self-explanatory to use, but I still wanted to break it down step by step in this guide. Once you get it setup, you simply click the play button, and can walk away while it makes as many ads as you want, automatically. BONUS: Since you purchased this Facebook guide, when you purchase this Facebook ads manager tool through the link above, you will get a $50 rebate! To qualify for this $50 off rebate: Step 1:Purchase the Facebook ads manager tool through this link: http://bit.ly/cOmk9J Step 2: Forward a copy of your email receipt to newsletter@jonathanvolk.com. Step 3: After your purchase is verified, you will get a PayPal payment for $50.
Facebook Ads Manager Sidebar Walkthrough: After you have it installed, login to your Facebook account and open it in Firefox by going to View>Sidebar>FB Ad Manager
Upon doing so, the sidebar will open on the left, next to the website you have open
Enter the campaign name and budget
Put in the URL (It automatically adds subIDs! Just choose what number you want to start from)
You can split test numerous ad texts and images! 2 texts and 2 images = 4 total ads per location/gender/age/language groups that you target! Want to test more? No problem. The possibilities are limitless, but it will take more and more time to complete a campaign the more you try to split test. But the reality is, it does all this automatically! So once you set it up, as long as you leave it running all you have to do is wait. There is absolutely no better or faster way to create a ton of ads so easily. By split testing so many different images, texts, and targets you’re going to quickly and easily find the best ads for your campaign.
Set the location you want to target
Set the gender targets
Set the age or age group targets
Set whether you want to target people who are having their birthday (primarily used for birthday related offers or ad copies that mention the user’s birthday)
Set what keywords to target
Set education levels to target
Set workplaces to target
Set relationship statuses to target
Set sexual orientation to target
Set languages to target
Set whether to bid CPC or CPM and input your bid
Set the ad naming format – This is really cool. I typically set things up like this: img{img} txt{txt} {age} {gender} sub{sub}
When the ads are created, anything that is in the { } will be automatically replaced with the number or data that reflects what that particular ad is targeting. If I made some ads for females with the age groups 25-30, 31-35, 36-40 using that ad naming structure, the first ad would automatically be named: img0 txt0 25-30 F sub1 This way it is extremely easy to get an idea of what ads are working simply by
looking at the list of ad titles and by always including the subID in the name it is really easy to find an ad when I see a certain subID is doing exceptionally well at the network. Another great feature is that whenever you have all the ad settings setup, you can save them as a file. Much like you save documents in a word processor that can be opened up and edited later, you can do the same with this tool. This really is another great positive that makes this tool indispensable as a time saver.
To find out more about this ads manager tool please go to my blog post about the tool (which will have current updates): http://www.jonathanvolk.com/facebookads/facebook-ads-manager-tool-review.html Or you can check it out on the website: http://bit.ly/cOmk9J
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! Not every campaign I make is profitable but one thing that is for sure: the profitable campaigns I have found cover the losses from the failures many, many times over. 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! ;)