Commercial Registrant – Internet Marketing & Domain Names

Archive for the ‘Traffic acquisition’ Category

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

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

There has been some talk in the internet marketing circles lately about how advertising on Gmail through Adword’s platform can bring amazing ROIs with dirt low CPCs.

It’s true.

Through Gmail you can get unbelievably targeted traffic for very low cost per click. Now that sounds like a paradox right? Adsense coming from email sites is fairly untargeted right? Well, the truth is that if you use the technique I’m going to describe below you will get laser-beam targeted traffic at fractions of the usual adwords click cost with very high conversion rates. You could promote your product of course, but since most people do not have a product you can promote affiliate offers. It works quite as well.

Imagine this situation: You login to gmail and send an email to a friend and somewhere in that email you say “I need to find a way to make money”. And once you hit send, an adsense ad appears on the right hand side saying “Need to Find a Way to Make Money?” – This phrase might not fit in the adwords title but it’s an example and I hope you get the point.

Or, you write an email to a friend and say “I hate working out ” and then an adsense ad appears saying “Do You Hate Working Out?”

Do you see where I’m getting at? I bet that you would like to be in the advertiser’s shoes at that moment because showing an ad which reflects the exact same thoughts and concerns of a potential customer at the exact moment he is having them is the dream of any advertiser. To be able to pitch his product at the exact time a customer needs it! That is what I call targeted traffic. Can you imagine the CTR and conversion rate if you could pull off something like that?

Here is the newsflash for today. You can! And most importantly, it’s easy!

Here is what you need to do. First, you need to create a campaign to show ads only in gmail. You do that by creating a campaign for content network only (do not check search and search partners) and set it to show ads only on placements you select. You then go on to select mail.google.com . Not gmail.com! mail.google.com is the official domain(subdomain) for gmail. I could get in depth in this but some guy from the adwords team made it easy by creating a video with instructions on how to setup a gmail campaign. See the video below and then read on on how to perform the “miracle” I mention above.

So now you have to set your keywords so that your ads appear whenever someone sends or reads an email containing them. But here is where it gets confusing(no worries, it’s still easy). In order to be able to laser-target your ads and pay minimal CPCs, you first need to stop thinking about keywords. If you are promoting a home exercise program and bid on keywords like home exercise, gym, abs, hard abs, workout from home etc, your ads will be somewhat targeted but you will also be bidding on the same keywords that thousands of other people are bidding on and you will end up paying more than you want to for not-so-targeted ads. Plus, you will not be able to show ads that reflect the exact same thought that the potential customer made just a while ago when he was writing his email.

So what do we do?

You stop thinking “keywords” and start thinking “phrases”. Bid on phrase match (see last post on Matching options when I go in depth about that) and bid on phrases that you think that potential customers of your home exercise program would use. Like for example the aforementioned “I hate working out”. Bid on that term. Create an ad group with just this term or a few closely related terms and write an ad for this adgroup that looks something along the lines of “Do You Hate Working Out?” – and then write your pitch in the description. Do you see where I’m getting at? Then think of other phrases your customers might use in their emails, create a new adgroup and write a new targeted ad. You will be bidding on terms that have virtually zero competition, so that has the added advantage that the clicks will cost you close to nothing. How does that sound? Targeted traffic at the lowest possible cost? Then it’s just rinse and repeat.

The traffic will of course be low, but gmail has hundreds of millions of daily users and usual phrases are being used all the time, so you will get some traffic and considering the high conversion rate it is definitely something worth the try. There are hundreds of affiliate products out there that you can promote and it’s a matter of leverage. How many of these campaigns can you create? The more you create the more traffic you get, more traffic=more sales, more sales= more money.

p.s I’ve been aware of this technique for a while now. However, I am also aware that Ryan Deiss is currently selling a course on this subject that covers A LOT more information than I have covered in this post. You can consider this post as an introduction to gmail advertising.

Visit EmailMindTricks.com if you want to learn more about similar techniques.

Hi guys, some of you might know me from the domain name industry, some of you might have never heard of me.

I’m starting this blog today to share some of my insights on domain names, affiliate marketing and traffic acquisition in general. I will be sharing good information, in some cases stuff others will not tell you about, information that some like to keep for themselves. It took me a long time to make the decision to start a blog, but I do feel that I have a lot to offer and I’ll give this thing a try. If I see that people are interested in what I have to say (and I’m sure most of you will) I will keep posting from time to time and I promise, I will make this worth your time.

And to those wondering what a “Commercial Registrant” is, it is a synonym to “Domain Owner” which (in my case) extends to “Domainer” or “Domain Name investor”- a person who owns, develops, monetizes and generally invests in domain names. I started off as a domainer in late 2003 and in my core, I will always be one.

Best,

Petros