Many users just starting out advertising on Facebook are way to general with their targeting, myself included. I thought if I was going to promote, for instance a weight loss product, that targeting women, in the United States in the 20-50’s would be good enough. I mean, that’ss millions of users right there that could be seeing my ad! AWESOME!

Not so much. Being this general doesn’t give you a very good chance of converting a user and in fact, you are likely including too many people in your campaign. In order to get a higher conversion rate one thing you should look to do is combine interests and really invest yourself in the users environment. Getting the ad to blend several user interests (perhaps someone who “likes” the TV show The Biggest Loser and exercise, or yoga) would help you narrow your target audience and give you greater relevance to those the ad is served to.

From there you can split test different combinations of interests, mixing in Jillian Michaels, healthy eating, running or even try some un-healthy “likes” (fast food joints, bacon etc.) to see what specific groups you can hit on. If you tailor your ads to these different, more specific subsets of the larger demographic group you are looking to advertise to you will see an increase in your CTR and your conversions for sure.

By getting into the users world, blending their interests and making your ads very focused you can really make a killing on Facebook. It’s certainly going to be better than just blanket targeting huge, general groups of people (much like broad match on Google AdWords isn’t always a good idea) and seeing who stumbles into your offer. Be creative, think outside the box and get into your potential customers head. Chances are you’ll like what you find.

I say this because in this business, ideas that are working and become profitable are hard to keep a secret forever. Networks are pushing the same type of offers that convert well on tons of affiliates, millions of ads are served and in the increasingly Internet savvy world people quickly become blind to your ads. In order to keep seeing success you need to be able to innovate, both keeping your ads fresh and looking for underused or undervalued traffic sources.

One such traffic source that has been steadily improving is search traffic from Bing.com. While not as big a source of traffic as Google is, the conversion rate has been higher using Bing as of late and their traffic numbers are growing rapidly (likely on the back of their strong TV ad campaign). We have been seeing conversion rates as much as 10-12% higher on some campaigns as compared to Google traffic, and we have seen this type of jump in the past as well. So while you aren’t going to get the volume of traffic you might be used to, the quality has certainly been there and higher quality traffic = more money in your pocket.

Additionally, you are going to want to keep your ads fresh in order to fend off banner blindness from your target audience. I’m going to have a Facebook related post coming later this week about some targeting strategies to improve your results (blended targeting and deeper focus) but in essence you should always make sure to rotate your ads. Be that changing images, adjusting ad copy, changing offers or modifying your demographic you can’t afford to let your ads sit and run endlessly. Eventually they will lose effectiveness and erode your profits.

If you are seeing any of your campaigns stagnate or lose profitability entirely, try a new traffic source (like Bing) or try some adjustments in your actual ad. You might be surprised how some simple changes can pay big dividends for you.

Step One: Know Your Niche

The first thing to remember is that different niches are going to carry different costs to get the ad placements you are looking for. For example, if you wanted to run a dating campaign on Google, it’s going to cost you a lot more per click for popular keywords than if you were to run an IQ test on Google. Knowing how competitive, and thus, how expensive a given niche is is critical for both effectively pricing your ads and maximizing your budget. Researching a niche, and the associated cost to advertise in it BEFORE you start a campaign is a great plan and is a very common mistake made.

Step Two: Work Within Your Budget

Another critical step, especially for those of us working on a budget on part-time. You want to get the most out of your advertising dollars so make sure that you set a daily budget big enough to give you some valid testing results. If a click is costing you. 75 in the dating niche, a $10 a day budget won’t get you very good info as to how successful your campaign is going.

Step Three: Getting Valid Data

One of the biggest things we did at the start was abandon campaigns too quickly. If we hadn’t seen conversions in the first 100 or so clicks for the entire campaign (ones with LOTS of keywords, mind you) we would get discouraged and think that ad/offer/niche wasn’t working. I feel that you should try to get a solid bank of data per keyword before deciding if it is worthwhile or not – 50 or so clicks per keyword is usually a good sample. Other people like to spend 2 -3 times the offer payout before deciding if a keyword is worthwhile or not, it’s up to you.

Step Four: Making Adjustments

Once you’ve researched a niche, set a useful budget and gotten some test keyword data you can now go in a lot of different directions to make your campaign more profitable. You have data now, and this is the key to making smart, profitable decisions. If certain keywords aren’t converting well, replace them with some new ones. If you have keywords that are converting well, adjust the bid on them (either up or down) and see how that effects conversions through another 50-100 clicks. Since you you always be split testing your ads anyway, if one is performing a lot better than the other, replace the weak one with a new ad copy and see what happens. Data is your friend as it lets you know what keywords, what times of day, what people are converting well for your offer. If you track well, you will profit.

Step 5: Scale the Campaign and Repeat

After getting your test data and making adjustments, you’ll know if your campaign is paying off for you or not. If it is, increase your daily spend to get more exposure, maybe up some really hot keywords bid and always keep tweaking looking for improvements. Then, it’s back to step one with a new offer, maybe a new niche and seeking those profits again.

If you are looking for good tracking software, tracking202 is a great free resource for tracking your PPC campaigns if you aren’t already.

For a great refresher, or introduction to, what the simple math behind all of those terms above you should read Daniel Scocco of Daily Blogging Tips newest post – Basic Mathematics for Internet Advertising. It provides a detailed breakdown of CPM, CPC & Conversion Rate with some great examples. Puts all those potentially irksome numbers in perspective for sure.

The basic calculus that I like to employ when looking at the big picture of making money online is pretty simple:
Does Time Invested = Monetary Return + Enjoyment? When taking a look at the basics of working online, if the time I am putting in isn’t getting me a satisfactory amount of money and enjoyment, then I probably shouldn’t spend my precious time doing it.

Your values for those variables in my equation can be whatever works for your situation. Some people may be happy spending 10 hours to make $1,000 and hate every second of it ($100 for every miserable hour). Others would need to make more for that to be worth it, or would want to enjoy it more and perhaps make less for it to be worthwhile.

Take a second to think about what your Affiliate Marketing Calculus equation looks like and see if you need to make some adjustments.

Everyone is looking for the newest technology or emerging traffic source and often times I feel that people will overlook simple, yet effective methods of getting cheap, targeted traffic. Enter EzineArticles.

I’ve been using this as a way to promote sites that I am working on and get traffic to them for free. It’s free to sign up for the service, and costs you nothing to post articles. Not only can you get traffic & conversions for nothing, the backlinks never hurt either. The best part is the traffic we’ve been seeing converts really well if you publish quality articles. For example, I wrote an article with tips and suggestions for people looking to buy a wireless router. Within 3 days time, I had 328 views and more importantly, 158 clicks over to our site’s URL – that’s a 48.2% conversion rate!

If you are employing any pre-pop tactics on that page you send them to, you are going to increase the conversions even more. It less than an hour I had signed up for EzineArticles, written and published an article and that resulted in almost a 50% conversion rate on the traffic – FOR FREE. Imagine if I had used social media to promote that article…

Now, you should be excited about this, but I imagine there are some skeptics out there so let me go over a few tips for creating a good EzineArticle submission.

1. Focused Articles lead to Paying Customers

The more focused your article is, the more relevant it will be to those who find it. Continuing the above example, I made my article about how to choose a wireless router and went over the 4 major components that people should be looking for when purchasing one. That’s it. I didn’t review a bunch of routers, or explain how to set up a wireless network or talk about the benefits or wireless computing. Just what to look for in a wireless router. All those other things are separate topics and could be articles of their own. With focused content, people find what they are looking for and what you want them to find (your site).

2. Tagging is critical

Tags are one of the main ways people will find your article, and so if you write a focused piece, the tags should be easy to come up with and similarly focused. Using huge tags like “Computer Technology” on that routers post wouldn’t get me the type of targeted traffic that converts as well. People looking for all different kinds of computer technology, not just routers, would find your page and that’s not what you or the user want.

3. Titles = Traffic

Having compelling titles in your articles (and blog posts etc.) make it easier for people to get an idea of what your content is about. It could be the best article ever written on the subject, but if the title is boring – think “Some random thoughts about reading good books” or something similarly uninteresting – no one will bother to read it. People are inherently lazy and that’s why everything you can do to catch their attention and do the work for them will only benefit you in traffic, conversions etc.

4. Follow the rules

The Terms of Service are pretty straightforward at EzineArticles, so make sure to follow them. Don’t put your links above the fold, don’t link to prohibited sites and the most important, don’t over-use a keyword. The last one is the hardest, as my first reaction was to use terms like “wireless router” as often as possible, but that is prohibited. Use the keywords you want to target often, but naturally; usually no more than one or so every 100 words. If you do that, your articles will be approved quickly with no editing required.

That’s exactly what I did to quickly drive some free and targeted traffic to one of our websites. Anyone can do it, so give it a shot and let us know how it went in the comments section. If you aren’t getting as much traffic or conversions as you want, let us help!

It is very easy to use as well. You simply enter in the website you want to extract keywords from, put in some keywords you are looking to target and the search based keyword tool will give you a list of actual Google searches related to you site, and the keywords you entered. Best of all, it’s linked to your AdWords account so you can easily add new keywords to your already existing campaigns! Pretty easy way to add a bunch of targets to an existing campaign and who knows, maybe it can help you bring back an old campaign you thought was dead.

Obviously not every keyword or phrase that someone enters into Google is going to be relevant to your campaign, (for example: if you are advertising a dating offer and looking to target “singles” as a keyword, someone could have searched for #1 singles, which is looking for music and not dating) but we find it’s a great way to find additional phrases or keyword we might have missed and get some longer tail targets too.

As if this wasn’t handy enough already, when it displays your results it shows you the average monthly searches, amount of competition for a particular keyword and gives you a suggested bid so you have an idea of how much it will cost to get a top position for a given keyword.

If you haven’t given the search based keyword tool a try yet, you ought to, because otherwise you are leaving profits out there for someone else.

All throughout the year there are innumerable events like the Super Bowl that cause highly focused spikes in traffic for certain niches and you can make a killing if you are prepared for the traffic surge. Building a PPC campaign to target one particular team, or just general terms like “Super Bowl” or “Super Bowl Ads”, or you could focus on those people looking for gambling information on the game – the possibilities are endless.

Once you figure out what type of traffic you want to target for the big weekend, it’s easy to find a relevant offer to put in front of them. ZIP/Email submits offers are often popular for this type of blitz advertising, as the user can quickly enter the info you need and move on. Attention spans are often short during the game especially. You could also choose other offers that you think will cater to the crowd doing the searching (generally young to middle aged men for the Super Bowl) – something like Omaha Steaks perhaps. Depending on what affiliate networks you are a part of, there should be plenty of offers to choose from that will cater to your audience.

Get your ads ready and running while there is still time before the game to get them optimized and then as the weekend hits, you should see a really strong boost in your income. The only downside to these types of campaigns is that they are by design short-lived. However, keep them saved and come back to them next time the Super Bowl runs and you can be earning tons of money while you sit on the couch eating wings and drinking beer with your friends. Pretty awesome deal, if you ask me.

We have been advertising in various niches on Facebook for quite some time and have seen some excellent campaigns that converted much better there then through PPC marketing. While it would be cool to go on about what type of money we made with these campaigns that did well, I think it is much more valuable to tell you about some of the things we did wrong and let you learn from our missteps. Hopefully this will save you valuable time and money and allow you to see increased sucess with your advertising efforts.

First and foremost – Pictures matter! Early on we had a few ads running without ads, or with really generic photos that were only loosely related to our product. Needless to say, the ads we had without good images did not convert well. The first thing you should split test with a new Facebook campaign are several images to find out which ones convert best with the same ad text. This is your chance to really think outside the box a little bit and grab the attention of users and get them to notice your ad, and then click on it. Don’t just use the first image of some dude working out for an acai offer, be creative. Use before and after shots, try using pictures that focus on different parts of the offer/ad text and see what works best. Once you have a good picture, you can move on to the next step.

Once you’ve got a good picture that is converting more than others you tried, then you move to split testing the ad text and trying to create several different calls to action to get users to click through and submit their email, buy your product or whatever it is you are looking for from them. Make sure to let them know what to do – users need direction. We often had trouble getting really good calls to action, and so we we get a lot of clicks but people weren’t often taking action once there. Adding in strong calls to action prime your audiences mind with what they should do next and that will help your conversion rates.

If you’ve followed these two steps you should have improved your ad’s click through and conversion rates a good amount and probably taking a campaign that wasn’t profitable or breaking even into the black. Once you have gotten this far, make sure to re-visit your demographic targetting and make adjustments based on the data you’ve gotten from your split testing clicks. Using the data from your split testing and adjusting based on that is the only way to sustain profitability with these campaigns. Often tons of affiliates are promoting similar products and once you’ve got a solid picture and ad text, you want to put it in front of the users who are most likely to take action. If you aren’t making these adjustments, you’ll be leaving money on the table.

A final word of advice, these tips will hopefully help improve the Facebook ad campaigns you are running, but there may come a point where even an optimized campaign will start to see diminishing returns. Potentially, this is because tons of people have already seen your ad, and are becoming blind to it. To combat this, you can do a few simple things like changing pictures or altering the title or add a bright colored border around the ad to draw a little extra attention to your ad.

Good luck out there on Facebook!

I’m here to tell you that what we’ve found to be very successful is what I am going to call “winning small”. What I mean by this is we have adopted an approach where we start very small, laser targeted campaigns that seek to capitalize on very niche markets and a large group of interested parties. For example, running a campaign around the time of the Super Bowl, targeting 21-55 year old men and focusing on the beer commercials is the general idea of what we are doing. For the baseball fans out there, we are basically playing small ball and trying to manufacture as many runs as we can through sacrifice bunts, stolen bases and hit & runs. Essentially, we’re the LA Angels.

Basically what we do is hope to capitalize on some natural traffic, have a great ad with a couple strong keywords and ride that for a short period of time. If we play our cards right, we’ve gotten a lot of cheap clicks that lead to a solid number of conversions and a hefty profit. Think along the lines of spending $25-$50 to make back $200-$300. We certainly aren’t hitting it out of that park and making 5 or 6 figures a day, but for what we’re after (which is efficiently using our money to make as big a return as possible) it’s working out great.

As with most everything though, there is a downside to this method. Unlike a more traditional approach to a PPC campaign, where you may pick an offer and try to scale that campaign up over the course of months or longer, these types of campaigns often have a very short shelf life. You will find yourself constantly making new campaigns and having a very high turnover rate. Also, if you don’t have the a solid ad copy or great keywords to go with it, the campaign will not be as successful, which hurts your bottom line.

That being said, it’s a good way to make a great ROI (often 3-6 times your investment) and build up some solid cash. At AffililateByNight we’re all about making realistic money online in your spare time, and this has been a great way for us to achieve that goal. If you find yourself in a rut or looking for a change of pace, give this method a shot and let us know how it worked out in the comments section.

According to TheDomains.com,

Efficient Frontier Inc, which calls itself the world’s largest search engine marketer says that the number of clicks on ads served by Microsoft Bing.com search engine jumped 13% in the two weeks since it was switched from Live.com.

“Those gains are significant in terms of revenue,” said Justin Merickel, marketing vice president at Efficient Frontier, which places about $750 million in text ads on top search engines worldwide.

With the U.S. search ad market valued at $12 billion this year, each additional point in paid-click share Microsoft gains would be worth $120 million in annual revenue.

So, that being said, are you testing your campaigns on Bing.com? If not, don’t you think it’s time to give it a shot? Sounds to me like Bing could be liquid gold!