Facebook Advertising – A Quick Intro

Many Internet Marketing folks have been looking for ways to monetize Facebook over the last few years. To be honest – it’s hard to monetize social media, because that’s the medium people are using to be sociable on! How would you feel if you were at a party and someone there, who you didn’t know, started trying to get you to buy stuff?

Advertising on Facebook can leave folks with that kind of feeling. However, if you do it right, you can get results.

And you can take advantage of the approximately 800 MILLION people on the mega network to get people over to your Facebook page, your website, or other online offer.

Before you start placing ads, you had better have a good understanding of what you are getting into so you don’t turn a potentially lucrative advertising campaign into a serious MONEY PIT.

Below is a simple list of the things you must know before getting started with Facebook ads so you don’t lose your shirt and make your campaign as cost effective as possible:

• Define your target market
  If you don’t clearly define your target market, you will likely display your ad to people who don’t have any interest in your offer. Make sure to clearly define who you are looking for by their location, gender, their likes and interests and their connections. You can then select this info when creating your ad so it is displayed ONLY on the profiles that meet this criteria.
• Define the GOAL of the ad
  Do you want people to LIKE your page? Visit your website? Simply know that your business exists? You must clearly define the action you want the person to take and include this in your ad text and link the ad to this action.
• CPC or CPM?
  Facebook allows you to pay either by CLICKING the ad (cost per click or CPC) or simply by the number of impressions (cost per thousand or CPM). If you want someone to click the ad and take an action, use CPC, if you are just looking for branding exposure, then CPM may be the better option.
• Make sure your ad is compelling
  In designing your ad, use a graphic and accompanying text that will engage the viewer and get them to notice the ad and take action. Special offers, coupons, and contests are great ways to do this.
• Pay attention to your stats
  Once your ad is live, make sure to view your ADS MANAGER regularly to see what kind of action your ad is getting. This is the best way to know if you need to tweak and change your ad for even better results.
• Split test for best results
  One of the best ways to optimize your ad campaign is to launch several ads at once, each with slightly different info and/or pictures to see which results in the most activity. Once you find out which one performs the best, maximize your ad spend on that one going forward.

The bottom line is, Facebook ads, like any advertising, requires a bit of trial and error in order to ensure the maximum result. Use the steps above and the helpful suggestions provided by Facebook to get the maximum exposure and activity for your Facebook ads campaign.

Good luck!

Tweet This Post

How Many of Your Site’s Pages Are Listed on The Top Search Engines?

Knowing how many pages you have listed is really important for general SEO but also when it comes time to doing 301 redirects so you don’t get any 404 error pages that can hurt your bottom line.

There are a lot of tools on the market that will help you find out how many of your site’s pages are listed with the top search engines, and how well they are performing compared to your competitors. The one I use all the time, and recommend a lot is Market Samurai. But if you don’t need all the other functionality of that SEO software then you can use the following to quickly learn which pages on your site are indexed on the top three search engines.

For Yahoo visit http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com and type in your domain name including the http://.

For Bing and Google type

site:yoursite.com

into their search box [changing yoursite.com to your domain name].
And if you like split screen results, visit Bingle and see both results at once.

Tweet This Post

Ten Tips To Make Your Web Page Text Stand Out

Studies have shown what you already know to be true – reading a web page’s text is very different to reading a printed page. Many people dislike reading web pages so much that they print them out to read in greater detail later, however, most visitors to your web site will simply skim through your content and make very quick judgment as to whether or not it is worth printing and reading later.

If you are one of the many small business owners turned newbie web authors, you need to know a few simple guidelines for publishing reader-friendly, effective web page text that will have your visitors staying around for more. (more…)

Tweet This Post

Internet Viral Marketing

Despite having a cool looking website with all the flashy bells and whistles, if people don’t know about it – it just doesn’t matter how great it is. Being online might just be a waste of your time, money and resources unless you can market your site effectively – and that’s where Internet Viral Marketing comes in.

While there are a plethora of methods and schemes used by so many websites today, especially e-commerce sites, there are still some tricks that can help you with an extra boost in the popularity ratings and one of the easiest to use is Internet Viral Marketing (IVM).

The word viral brings to mind the ‘virus’, a dreaded word known and experienced by almost all computer owners, those two words are not related at all in this respect. You do not actually use a computer virus to spread your business. (more…)

Tweet This Post

Traffic Building Resolutions for the New Year and Beyond

With a new year we become all encompassed in new year’s resolutions and finding new ways to do things that maybe didn’t work so well for us before. But let’s use this time to go over some proven traffic building techniques that don’t cost anything, are easy to implement, and will bring more traffic to your website soon. Just make the scheduling of these techniques a resolution and let me know how they worked for you.

Open your lines of communication with the following:

Forums and Social Networking Community Sites.
Take advantage of online forums and online social networks and communities. The great thing about forums and online communities is that you can target a certain group that fits the certain demographic that you are looking for. You can discuss lots of things about the niche that you represent or offer. Another great advantage is that you know what you are getting into and you will be prepared.

With online communities and forums you can build a reputation for your company. Show them what you are made of and wow them with your range of expertise about your field. With that you can build a reputation and build trust with the people in your field of expertise and knowledge. (more…)

Tweet This Post