Affiliate By Night

5 Reasons To Advertise on Social Networks

There are numerous ways to make money online, everyone knows this. The conventional wisdom for people looking to get into the business of making some money, or even a living, on the Internet is that they can start a blog, write some stuff about making money online, post some affiliate links and start raking in the cash. This is clearly not the case, as affiliate marketing takes a lot of hard work, perseverance and learning from your mistakes (trust us!).

One thing that we have discovered over the last month or two is that it isn’t all about Google. We were beginning to get discouraged with our disappointing forays into the world of PPC advertising on MSN and Yahoo! Even Google wasn’t giving us the great results that we had hoped for with a couple of our promising new campaigns, despite our use of the content network which was the home of our last big breakthrough campaign.

We decided to give social networking sites another try with our PPC dollars, since we knew that the campaigns we had were solid but we needed a more affordable testing ground than AdWords. We had limited success with them previously, but were hopeful we would find the right combination of demographics and ad copy on MySpace and Facebook that would start turning us a nice profit again. If Shoemoney and others were talking about how great of a market imbalance there was regarding these sites, there had to be something to it. Lo and behold, our instincts about our campaign were right and there certainly is something happening with the growing ad platforms on social networking sites. Here are 5 great reasons you should be advertising on both MySpace and Facebook:

1.    Cheaper Clicks

Generally speaking, the cost to advertise is lower on sites like MySpace and Facebook for many niches. We were going to have to spend upwards of $1/click on Google for our new campaigns compared to .35 – .40 / click or less on these social sites. Being on a budget as part-time affiliates, saving 60% per click is a great deal. It gives us more leeway to split test our ads, run them longer to gather more test data for optimization and gives us a greater profit margin per conversion.

2.    Demographic Targeting is Awesome!

The ability to laser-focus your campaigns on MySpace and Facebook is something that even Google can’t quite match. With all of the demographic and personal interest data that users submit to these sites it is really easy to tighten your advertising net and show your ads to people more likely to click on them AND convert to a sale. You can target much more narrow bands than “United States” or “New York.” You can have a campaign set to target 18-30 year old, single women, interested in fitness (dieting perhaps?) divorced fathers who are 55+ with children in the Northeast. The combinations and categories to use are massive and you can get some really good focused traffic

3.    Less Competition and Tons of Viewers

Most people starting out in PPC go right to Google, or MSN, or Yahoo! They don’t hit up social networking sites for a variety of reasons and this is one of the main reasons for the imbalance that exists right now in using these networks to advertise. Take advantage of this before the market corrects itself and everyone is spamming Facebook and MySpace with ads and copying your campaigns. Also because Google is so prevalent in search and search marketing today, many people assume that is the only way to get good traffic volume seeing your ad. While it is certainly a great way to get viewers, MySpace and Facebook have hundreds of millions of users who could potentially see you ads as well, not a group to be ignored by any stretch.

4.    The Ability to Go Visual

One of the great advantages to using social networking sites for advertising is the ability to use image ads and insert pictures into your ad copy. While these options exist in other methods of PPC, one of the reasons I feel it’s so advantageous on social networking sites is that these sites almost condition people to look at images. Tagged pictures of friends on Facebook, cool bumper stickers or imbedded links on wall posts, widgets and add-ons for MySpace pages – the list of visual stimuli on these sites is high and as a user you get used to looking at them. Pick the right image to go with your ad and you’ll attract a ton more visitors than whatever witty/catchy/insightful text you put on in your AdWords Text Ads.

5.    Avoiding Google for a Change

Google is the “king” of search and PPC advertising for most people, and it’s not an undeserved title. They provide great products and services, for free mostly and are a great benefit to casual web browsers, advertisers and everyone in between. However, affiliate marketers (ourselves included) are often complaining about Google’s quality score system being impossible to comprehend at times, the seemingly random nature to the ever dangerous “Google Slap” and various other annoyances that come from using their system. It’s nice to take a break from all of that sometimes and enjoy the freshness that forgetting about their metrics provides (granted, getting an ad approved on Facebook is harder than getting front row tickets to the Super Bowl, but that’s a different post all together…).

Each of these reasons is compelling enough for some to make the move and branch out onto Facebook and MySpace advertising. Taken as a whole, it seems foolish that you wouldn’t at least consider diversifying your interests and give them each a try. Until then, we’ll be over there making all the money for ourselves.

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