February 17th, 2010 | 
Author: Have you ever tried Facebook Ads? If not, let me tell you that you are missing out on a very lucrative opportunity that can in some cases bring you 5x ROI which is way out of limit for other traditional PPC providers like Google Adwords. I even know of a fellow European marketer who makes 20x ROI in some facebook campaigns!
The key to Facebook Ads success, is to realize how to target your audience. Think about it for a moment…
In classic PPC advertising (Adwords, YSM, Adcenter etc) you need to get inside your prospect’s head and show him ads based on what you think he is thinking at exact moment he is doing a search. In Adwords your entire keyword and ad targeting strategy is based on how well you are able to get inside your prospect’s heads and show them the right ad at the right moment. That, together with the fact that in the major search engines the competition is enormous and bid prices for traffic keywords are climbing day after day, is enough to make you think twice before spending any money there. Those who are not advanced PPC experts on Adwords and PPC in general I can almost guarantee that they will lose money. Without months of training, trial and error and thousands of dollars spent testing campaigns you will not be able to make profit on google. It’s not impossible, in fact the high bid prices suggest that there are people who are able to pay $15 per visitor and still make profit, but those people have a very complex training and experience behind them, they are masters at PPC and most importantly, I can almost guarantee you that they are making money on the back end by upselling to their prospects. I find it hard to imagine someone paying $15/visitor and making money by selling just the front-end product. Anyway I’m getting carried away here. Upselling is the only viable way to go profitable with PPC nowadays and I have a lot to share on that complex subject, but it is something I will cover in a future post. For now, let’s focus back on the point of this post. Facebook Ads and why they can be better for your business than Adwords.
Back to the topic: Remember what I told you above about how you need to think and strategize your campaigns when you are advertising on Google Adwords? You need to base your strategy on “What my prospect is currently thinking”
On Facebook, things do not work this way. And this is the beauty of their unique platform. On facebook, you need to base your strategy on Demographics: “Who is my prospect” “Where does he live” and “What does my prospect like to do”. Can you imagine how good your conversions will be if you can target to such extremes? For those scratching their heads, stay with me. People who are on Facebook usually fill out their profiles with all kinds of personal information and will tell you Where they live, Where they work, Where they go to school, What school they graduated from, What Year, What movies they like, What kind of music they like, What are their hobbies, their relationship status …. you get the point.
The Facebook Ads platform allows you to leverage this information by targeting your ads to a very specific audience that matches your criteria. You can target by country, by city, sex, age, school, his hobbies and interests, you name it. You can even target specific graduation years!
Now, with Facebook you can target (more than never before) your ads to extreme levels and once you grasp this fact you can make very high ROIs for your own or affiliate services/products promotions. To illustrate the extreme targeting that you can do, you could – if you wanted- target your ad to appear only to female students between 18-23, living in Wisconsin, are single and like to play tennis. Can you imagine how much money you can save (and how much you can make) if you can target your ads to show only to the people who are the perfect fit for your offer? With Facebook Ads, you can do it! With Facebook, it’s like Adwords back in 2005. Too easy to make money if you know what you’re doing.
I am not going to get into this matter any deeper, the point of this post was only to illustrate how you can use facebook to increase your ROI and save advertising money.
If you want to get serious with Facebook Marketing, I can recommend one of the few online courses that are devoted to this subject. The course is found at “New Traffic Honey Hole” or otherwise known as “Facebook Ad Power” by Ryan Deiss, one of the smartest and most successful internet marketers alive. Watch his video and thank me later.
Let me repeat that for a moment. If you want to get serious with Facebook Marketing, do yourself a favor and invest a few $ on the “New Traffic Honey Hole” or otherwise known as “Facebook Ad Power” by Ryan Deiss before you spend any money on advertising. Not that it’s hard to make money on Facebook, it’s just so much easier when you have expert guidance from someone “who’s been there, and done that”.
Your comments, bookmarks or tweets will be very much appreciated
Petros
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According to a report(now confirmed) in TechCrunch, Google has acquired a social search service start-up, Aardvark, for around $50 Million. Google should make an official announcement today.
Aardvark is an interesting new service founded by two ex-Google employees that taps into the social network collective knowledge by allowing a user to post a question and get answers from their friends or their friend’s friends. Aardvark has received around $6Million in VC funding so far (to be specific, $750k in Angel funding in 2007 and $5.25m in VC funding in 2008)
Keyword Match Types are a very confusing aspect of PPC advertising and it might be one of the most important factors that could “make or break” your business, if your business depends on Adwords (or Yahoo Search Marketing, Bing AdCenter etc) traffic.
The most confusing part of all – and the part most advertisers often fail to realize-, is that even though some PPC platforms feature equivalent keyword match types, there are cases that the functionality of a certain match type might vary quite a bit from platform to platform.
I’ve covered the differences from match type to match type in all large search engines in a previous post (see Keyword Match Types), but for the sake of illustrating my point I’ll mention a brief example below:
Take for example Google’s Adwords “Broad Match” VS Bing’s AdCenter “Broad Match” VS Yahoo Search Marketing “Advanced Match”(which is the equivalent to the Broad Match):
- Google Adwords will match any query that includes all the keywords including singular, plural, spelling alternatives and synonyms. Google will also match what their algorithm considers to be related queries. This combined with their “Automatic Match”(see Keyword Match Types) is enough to nominate Google’s Broad Match for the title of “The Broadest Of All Broad Match Types” on the web. You bid on Baby gifts and your ad might show up for Child Gifts. Bid on Ferrari Cars and your ad will trigger on Luxury Cars. What a money-sucking black hole!
-Yahoo Search Marketing is the same as the above basically, however they are not as “broad”. Unlike Google, related queries usually do not trigger your ad to show.
-MSN (Bing) will match a query that includes all the words but they will not always combine singular and plural, but there is(in certain cases) some light synonym matching.
So as you see, even though all search engines offer a broad match equivalent, you will find many differences from one provider to another.
Make sure you know what each keyword match type stands for on the platform you are bidding on so that you can adjust your efforts and budget accordingly, otherwise you are wasting money. Save that money and invest it in a smarter way, or you know, just take your wife for a lobster dinner.
So what can you do to save yourself some money and increase your profit along the way?
First you need to realize that you are possibly wasting a big part of your budget on broad match – unless you really know what you’re doing. If you are running 100% broad match, chances are that the majority of your traffic is irrelevant and you are throwing money down the drain. Even if you are making profit, your CTR will be a lot lower than what it could be with more targeted bidding which would drive your quality score down and your CPC up and again, you would be paying more than you should for each ad position.
Converting your bidding from broad match to exact or phrase match will definitely yield better converting traffic and in the long run, it will lower your cost per click as your CTR rises. Here are a few simple basic steps you can take in order to optimize your campaigns for better ROI:
1. Create very focused ad groups
Try to create ad groups with closely related keywords. The fewer keywords in each ad group, the more targeted your ad group is (with just one keyword per ad group being the best option optimization-wise), that closely match your text ad and landing page. This will drive up the quality score and minimize your costs.
2. Create different ad groups for Broad, Phrase and Exact match
This is crucial and you should have a way of tracking your conversions. If you are not tracking, you better pause your campaigns and figure out a way to track conversions otherwise your entire effort is going down the drain. It’s impossible to know which keywords and which match type converts best if you have no tracking installed. But this is something I’m going to cover some other time. For now, it’s enough to say that Google, Bing and Yahoo offer conversion tracking as part of their advertising platforms and it’s a piece of cake to install them. If you are running campaigns as an affiliate, ask your merchant or your affiliate network if they can install your tracking pixel on the thank you page, in 99% of the cases they will be happy to do it.
So track, and create different ad groups for each match type. This way you will know which match type converts best and has the best ROI.
3. Use negative keyword matching!!!
Try to figure out which keyword match types you do not want to trigger your ad and include them in your campaigns. Google’s external keyword tool will suggest a few for you but you will also need to carefully go through the list because it is an automatically generated list and understandably there will be a lot of keywords you will not want to add as negatives.
Furthermore, once you get your campaign going and you start getting clicks, you can generate a “search query performace” report from your adwords account which will show you which queries triggered your ad to show. Go through it and identify which of those queries are irrelevant and should be negatives.
Negative match types are very underestimated and sometimes will be the factor that can turn a campaign profitable in a matter of hours from implementation.
Note that negative matches should be used for broad match and phrase match bids. Exact matches do not need negative keywords because the ad is only triggered if the query is identical to keyword you are bidding on.
There is so much info that I want to share with you and I could expand on any of the above subjects and keep going for hours. I will do my best to post good quality content over the next months so keep an eye on this blog.
In case you haven’t seen the previous post on the various match types and how they vary from platform to platform, you should definitely read it! If you’ve spent the time to read this post up to this point then it would be a shame not to check it out because it’s so closely related and it’s information I haven’t covered here, plus it’s info you won’t easily find anywhere else without spending considerable time googling:) Here it is.
So what is Copywriting and why is it so important?
It’s the art of “Writing Good Copy” – putting words together in a way that increases the effectiveness of whatever message you are trying to send to your reader. “Good copy” basically is a well thought out and carefully planned piece of text, that was created to persuade the reader to take some form of action. It can be a physical action like to buy a product, to subscribe to a newsletter, to click on a text ad or banner, visit your store, complete a form etc, or it can be a mental action, like increase awareness of whatever you are trying to get out there or change his opinion on something.
If you are into Internet Marketing (and if you are reading this blog you probably are), then sooner or later you will need to learn the basics of Copywriting. If you are spending money on Google Adwords, or buying banner space, advertising in newspapers, sending newsletters, selling infoproducts or physical products or if persuading people to take any kind of action is an important part of your life and…. you haven’t studied copywriting yet…. you are leaving money on the table, wasting a lot of your precious time and possibly sabotaging your efforts to get the desired result.
There are many copywriting tutorials out there both free and for a fee, and a lot of famous copywriters who are worth studying. Dan Kennedy, John Carlton, Gary Halbert to name a few. These people are the fathers of copywriting and are charging $1,000 to $15,000 or even more for a course or a seminar. They will charge you $x,xxx/hour for consultation (Gary Halbert not anymore, sadly he has passed away a couple of years ago). There are hundreds of professional copywriters who charge $10,000+ to write a sales letter for your product.
But you know, you really don’t have to pay that kind of money unless your income heavily depends on it. You can learn good copywriting by purchasing one of the less expensive courses out there and even start reading the free information that flood the internet today.
I happen to be selling a $97 copywriting video course on clickbank. I am not the author of this course, the author is one of the most famous internet marketers and he has sold me private label and resale rights for a hefty sum of money. Why am I selling this course for just $97? That’s the limit with Clickbank! I would sell it for $500 if I could, but if I want to use ClickBank’s affiliate and selling platform, I simply can’t. Anyway…. if you are serious about doing business online then this course is the right choice for you and I suggest that you purchase it.
Alternatively…. You can have this course for FREE. For a limited time, I am offering the Copywriting Project Video Course completely free in exchange for your subscription to my newsletter. If you want to read the description of the course, visit the current sales page: Copywriting Course (CopywritingProject.com).
If you feel that you will benefit from the FREE $97 Video Course I am just handing out to you, go ahead and click the product image below. All you have to do is enter your name and email, and you will receive instant access to the members area.
Enjoy!
Click Here For Your Free Copywriting Video Course
Jeff Johnson, one of world’s top Internet Marketers(for those who don’t know who he is) released recently a new version of his famous WP plugin, the “Free Traffic Getting SEO Plugin“.
I took the time to install it on two of my Wordpress blogs yesterday and I must say I’m impressed. I will basically tweak your settings, change your permalinks and download a few plugins it considers important, all helping you automatically optimize your blog to rank higher in search engines. It took me around 5 minutes of work to set it up and optimize my blogs. It does everything for you with a click of a button, it’s a good tool to have.
Here is what Jeff Johnson writes on his blog about it:
“I just released the my brand new Traffic-Getting SEO Plugin Version 2.0 for Wordpress!
And it’s still 100% Free
Version 2.0 includes new “total control” features that allow you to pick and choose which features of the wp plugins you’d like to keep, and which ones you don’t.
It’s also much more “existing blog” friendly… we added a new feature that helps preserve your incoming links by rewriting your permalinks and issuing a search engine friendly 301 redirect… if you don’t know what that means then I guess it really doesn’t matter to you but trust me… it’s really, really good 
It’s easy to use, and it installs in just minutes… and it’s 100% free.”
If you want to check it out, he is giving it away for free right now. Visit the site here
