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

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)

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.

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

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

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.

Step 1:

Use zfbot.com to find a list of domains that start with your LLL combination. Get the list of the com/net/org domains that start with that letter combination.

Step 2:

Scan them using Domain Research Tool for Alexa Rank and check the sites of the domains that have at least some traffic (if a site has at least some traffic, it will have at least some Alexa rank). Besides the sites that get traffic, browse through the list and copy the domains that seem like they could belong to a company.

Step 3:

Find even more end users. Search for the LLL combination in all major search engines and copy the sites that you think could be interested in purchasing your domain name.

Check wikipedia and other abbreviation sites to see if your LLL combination stands for something, and then search for those keywords in all major search engines. In some cases, you can find many more end users who would be interested in your domain.

Search in all search engines for people advertising on your LLL combination or other keywords that the LLL combo might stand for. The advertisers who pay search engines to show ads to people who search for these keywords are very likely to be interested in purchasing your domain. Imporant note: If you are outside US and you want to sell an LLL.com domain, you would want to use a US proxy to access and search through google or any other SE. A good free proxy service is worldproxy202.com. Same stands if you are trying to sell an LLL.ccTLD. Try to search for keywords through a proxy of the country your ccTLD represents. This way you will get more prospects who are advertising on that terms.

Search for the LLL combo or the keywords that it might stand for using the inlink function in google. For example use this query to find websites that contain the combination XYZ in their URL:

inlink:XYZ – this will show you all sites that contain XYZ somewhere in their URL. e.g: http://www.comapnysite.com/products/XYZ

Using this method you might find a couple or end users more to add to your contact list.

Step 4:

Write an email with a sales pitch, price your domains right and personalize each email before you send it. Make sure that you send it to a decision maker, not to some support email. The support staff will most likely delete if without forwarding it to his manager. Find the decision maker by browsing around the site, very often companies have contact info on the managers in their about section. If you cannot find a contact on the site, get the email from the domain’s whois info. It is better to email there instead of support, chances are that the person administrating the domain names will be either a decision maker.

Step 5:

Rinse, repeat

I hope at least some of you found this post helpful. Your comments are always welcome.

Petros

Stompernet published this information in their 2nd issue of their montly Net Effect magazine to which I subscribe to. FYI, you can get a 30 day trial (= the first issue) and a DVD of the famous Stomping The Search Engines Course to your mail for just $1. It always contains top notch insider info on SEO and SEM.

Anyway, here is a table below that will hopefully help you put things in order with all the match types out there.

Edit: And don’t forget to read my latest post on how to use these match types right in your campaigns and save some cash in the process:) Click on the link to learn how to use the verious keyword match types to save some serious money and increase your ROI.

What I’m about to discuss below is not a very discussed tactic and there is not a lot of information out there about it. Posting this information is against my best interests and I’m doing this to prove to you that time spent on this blog, is time well spent.

Enough of that, let’s cut to the chase.

There is a small search engine, Clickriver.com, which provides the contextual ad feed for Amazon.com(the contextual ads that appear below the items list when you search for something). Clickriver belongs to Amazon.com.

People who visit Amazon.com are very engaged online shoppers and they only visit Amazon with either the intention to research a product that they wish to buy, or better yet, with the intention to buy it right away. There is no better place to target this audience than a site like Amazon.com.

There is one great thing about this service, and that is, the visitors that you will get through ClickRiver convert like crazy. They will convert at a 5-15% rate or even higher.

The negative side if this is the relatively low traffic that you will get from these ads (eventhough you might get a lot of impressions, the ad CTR will be low because the ads are placed on the bottom of the page), and the fact that you can only advertise Services using ClickRiver. Until a year ago, you would be able to advertise physical products as well, so you could easily find a great CPA or CPS offer and send traffic there. Since they changed it to just Services, you can now only forward users to CPA offers that advertise a service in one of the given categories you will see in your Clickriver account.

Automotive, Business, Tax, Electronics and Computer services, Education etc etc

I found it hard to find CPA offers that fitted these categories in the usual CPA networks (Hydra, neverblue, affiliate.com) because the majority of CPA offers are physical products, but if you join CJ.com or LinkShare.com, you will find a large variety of service related offers to choose from .

The other problem you might come across, is that they know which domain names(websites) host CPA offers and they restrict you by not allowing you to direct link to such sites (or display their domain name on the ad). However I got around this problem by using another domain(usually freshly regged) in the ad and then using Framed Redirect to forward the traffic to the CPA offer page. Their automated system is not sophisticated enough to figure out that the content shown is not hosted on the domain you enter.

And last, a small tip to increase your CTR on your ads:

Use domains that look like this www-domain.com

For example, if I am advertising Auto Repair services, obviously the best domain to increase CTR would be www.AutoRepair.com. If you register www-AutoRepair.com , it will appear as www.AutoRepair.com with those small ad letters (at least to those not observant enough). This trick will help boost your CTR at least a little bit.

I know a lot of guys wondering around here are domainers, but I thought that this info might interest at least some of the visitors

Petros

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