Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

I decided to splash back into the world of affiliate marketing by having a go with FaceBook. I was dreaming of thousands of targeted leads for next to no money, the reality, as with just about all my experiences with paid affiliate marketing turned out to be a little less than I was expecting!

My Offer

FaceBooks widest targeting parameter is the country, seeing as how I’d just got back from holiday and I’d been amazed at just how much credit information advertising there was on TV whilst I was there I thought I’d give that a go. The bulk of FaceBooks users are American so that gave me a huge audience, the financial crisis was hitting hard so the offer seemed appropriate as well. Something I hear time and time again from top affiliates is that you shouldn’t be afraid to step into a busy marketplace, if other people are making money from it then so can you. I went for this offer from NeverBlueAds which pays $15 per lead on a second page submission. Because it was a 2 pager I decided to drop leads directly onto their site rather than come up with a landing page. The offer shows great network earnings and an average of around $0.92 return per click (roughly 1 in 16 clicks convert). How hard could this possibly be? Hmmm, famous last words.

How Not To Target The Right Audience

This is where I began to struggle a bit. FaceBook allows you to target by interest, the trouble is how many people put “being in debt” and “credit reports” as their interests? Not bloody many, that’s how many! I was left to try and target other parameters instead. Mainly their age and marital status. I based this on my own experience, when I was young and single my credit score was the last thing on my mind. I was more interested in getting drunk and girls. I decided to target middle aged to slightly older people who were married. Whilst this did limit my audience quite a bit I was convinced that these would convert better. I was after a ROI after all.

The Advert

I’m not going to lie here, rather than spend ages experimenting to find what would work best I used that old affiliate marketers trick. I monitored what was working best on Adwords and stole (I mean borrowed) the top 5 ads. I priced up the difference between running the ads as pay-per-click or pay per thousand impressions and decided on the later. At a price of only $0.51 per thousand impressions I was sure I’d be able to do something with this.

My FaceBook Affiliate Marketing Results

The first day things started of well, my bid was high enough and I was getting large numbers of impressions. 6 hours in and the cost of more than a couple of conversions in the red already with only 2 clicks to my name it became apparent that this wasn’t going to be that easy. This trend continued for the first day, I ended up with several hundred thousand impressions, about 4 clicks and a nice bill to pay. Bugger. I think the problem was an obvious one, even with borrowing the top ads from Adwords there was nothing there that could convince enough FaceBook users to click. The next day I persisted with the same ads and the results weren’t as bad, but only because my competition were out bidding so I wasn’t getting as many impressions, hence a lower bill! Overall those 2 days were costing me over $13 a click for an offer that only converts $15.

At this point I figured PPM was not the way to go with this offer I so switched out to a traditional pay-per-click model instead. I could bid on my target audience (which I also decided to widen a bit) for around $1.05 a click. Looking at NeverBluAds stats for my offer this would still leave me with a deficit if it only converted at the “average” rate (remember the offer was earning around $0.93 per click). I didn’t care, it was a damn site better than paying $13 per click and this was after all a learning experience. The next 2 days my click rate increased significantly (costing me more money) but the end result was quite a few clicks but not one conversion. Not one. I carried on messing around for a few more days trying various ads and targeting different segments of FaceBooks user demographic but nothing I did seemed to increase any of my positive indicators any great amount. Besides this my cost-per-click was ever on the increase, even if it suddenly started converting at a good rate there was no way I was going to make any money from this offer on FaceBook. So I stopped.

What Did I Learn

As my previous experiments with FaceBook had already proved there is great potential, certainly in terms of the numbers. It’s very easy to rack up hundreds of thousands of impressions. The problem is of course getting them to not only click but also to convert. I’ll let you in on a little secret here, I think I may have found the key to doing this with FaceBook. I mentioned above that there were no interests I could associate with my offer? I think that was my main problem, my audience was way too broad to work for me. Google have this right, keyword marketing, it’s what they’ve built their entire business on.

Experiment Number 2

Anyone can blab on about having theories, I decided that I’d try and prove mine so I started again. This time with a promotion I’ve been doing via organic traffic for a long time. Not only that but it had a number of interests associated with it that could work for me. I’ve been operating in the property niche for a long time now so have direct deals with a few companies, I was going to try getting sales/rental leads for a property development. The cool thing was they’d accept leads world wide so I could target multiple countries, the down side was that by narrowing down to interests my potential audience on FaceBook wasn’t that big. Determined to get PPM to work I started with that again, this is how I did:-

Not too bad at all! I found a great market in Hong Kong, and can probably kill the offer in the other countries (not surprisingly the US performed far and away the worst). The end result is an offer that I’ve been able to profit from for a week or so. Not a huge amount and it wont last long but it’s SOOOO much better than I did first time around. Not quite Uber Affiliate status yet but at my second go I managed a profitable campaign.

So there you have it, for me at least the key to getting affiliate marketing with FaceBook to work was finding an offer that I could target to people via their interests. Age and status targeting just wasn’t working for me. Seeing as how I’ve got my $250 in free advertising to spend I can now use this information to go away and try and find a campaign that I can scale and make some real money from, yeah like it’s that easy! Despite losing some money first time around this has been overall a positive experience, besides if you think I did pretty bad here wait until you here about my experiment with AdBrite!

(ps – As I’ve said millions of times, I’m by no means any sort of an expert in PPC/PPM affiliate marketing, I lose money so you don’t have to! If you’ve got any tips/advice/feedback please feel free to leave a comment, I really do appreciate it)

I was just messing around with my new domaining tool (which is brilliant by the way) when I came across this website. I really like the animated gif next to the “Email us”. Genius.

Google, loved by many hated by few. I wonder if that’s about to change, big time?

I’ve been avoiding writing about Knol, Google’s wiki killer. Google have stolen the wiki idea and ran with it giving publishers a fancy new blog style interface that allows real HTML, the main kicker though is that they will revenue share with any advertising on your Knol articles. So what? That’s exactly what I said, I can publish my content on my own sites and get a revenue share from Google as well as using any other advertising I choose to use as well as building a long term “property” that I can be proud of for years to come. Or I can publish on Knol and get the same revenue share from Google. Why would I ever choose to publish my content on Knol?

Well I wouldn’t would I, but then again if you don’t have a website or a blog then I suppose it could be of use. Then again if you’re such an authority on a subject to write about it on Knol maybe you should have a website anyway? This was my initial stand point but that may have to change.

I figured there was no way that Google would bias in favour of its own Knol content in the natural search rankings, I was very wrong. SEO guru Aaron Wall has written an excellent article on his blog covering a very early experiment he ran with Knol. If at this very early stage, within days of going live, duplicate content posted onto Google Knol is ranking above the original authoritive source then anyone who publishers content via their own websites has a lot to worry about. There is nothing to stop somebody stealing your content, posting it to Knol and not only having your original out ranked but also the possibility of having it removed as duplicate content. That’s shit, wrong and really annoying for anybody who spends the time to write their own content.

I hope for all our sakes that this is just an early blip but somehow I doubt it. It’s very well known that Google did and do give YouTube pages a helping hand in their search results so I guess we’d all be a bit naive to think that they wouldn’t do the same with Knol. Isn’t it ironic that the same Google that actively ignores the rights of video producers via YouTube (to much support from the web community as a whole) is now about to ride rough shot over the rights of that same group of people.

ps From what I’ve seen so far, other than the medical articles every post contains a huge number of back links to an “original” source website. This whole Knol thing stinks of nothing but ripped off content + link spam to me

Just for anybody who lives and dies by the little green bar, Google’s Matt Cutts announced yesterday that the next Page Rank toolbar export will be happening over the next few days. If it’s anything like normal expect your green figure to start moving around over the weekend.

I’m not all that fussed, I don’t do anything that relies on that page rank figure, I now make 100% of my money other ways so it can pretty much do what it wants as long as my search rankings stay! One thing that “could” be interesting though is that Matt has stated that a lot of the old penalties are expiring with this export, so if you’d been slapped for selling links in the past and changed your ways you might want to keep an eye out for this one.

Other than that it’s been a very long week and I’m very tired. Time to go home, cook a nice meal and put my feet up. Hope everybody has a good weekend.

Somebody please tell me this is some sort of a joke? Please!

Crazy Design Skillz

(Of course they do SEO as well)

In-Text advertising is a great way of generating extra income from both your existing and any new content you create. Some of the advantages over traditional ad units are that the ads don’t take up space on your page and that they tend to be well targeted to your page content. Implementation is usually as simple as pasting a few lines of code into either your individual web pages or your template footer.

I compared two of the most common in-text solutions a little while back, namely Kontera and AdBrite. In that comparison Kontera for my money had the better system, depending of course on your visitor statistics (numbers, geo location, traffic sources etc). On the back of that comparison I was contacted by a company called InfoLinks and asked to give them a go. What with being on holiday and being snowed under with other stuff (not to mention my natural suspicious mind) I put it to one side and ignored it. Well that was until the end of last week. Seeing as how I needed a break from refreshing my shockingly bad PPC/Affiliate stats I thought I’d give InfoLinks a go on a couple of websites. One low traffic site (this one) and one medium traffic. The results were amazing.

The next day I looked at the InfoLinks stats (all very simple CTR/ eCPM etc figures) and I could see that even with a blog that performs very badly in terms of earning money via pay-per-click ads included, I was doing better than I had been with the other 2 in-text solutions. So earlier this week I cranked it up a bit and started using InfoLinks across more sites, it has been a hugely impressive experiment. I’m not going to step on anybody’s TOS here and go into in depth stats, Kontera and AdBrite have both performed for me so I’ve got no reason to but even with leaving a couple of my websites out I’m seeing a consistent 3X increase in revenue by using the InfoLinks system. That’s HUGE! If I could triple all my advertising income tomorrow I’d be a very happy boy!

Looking at the sites I have InfoLinks on I think it pays so well for a couple of reasons. The script loads fast, it only highlights the most relevant phrases (A problem with AdBrite) and there is the small matter of a higher earning share for any new users who sign up before the end of July. Saying that, even at an industry standard 50/50 revenue share I’d still be earnings a lot more with InfoLinks.

I’m going to be honest now, I was going to hold on to this post whilst I enquired about any InfoLinks affiliate program that there might be. In this game when you big somebody up it’s always nice to get a kick back for it. The truth is though I couldn’t wait to share this, there are no InfoLinks affiliate links of mine in this post, I’ve not been paid for it or anything else. I tried InfoLinks and they simply worked much better than any similar solution I’d tried. If you’re not already signed up then I’d recommend you get over there now and sign up to InfoLinks.

**UPDATE** If you’re currently not happy with your revenue from Kontera, let them know. If you don’t ask you don’t get and you should be able to get a better deal out of them

I received an e-mail not long ago asking me to create my account for Shoemoney’s much talked about and hyped Shoemoney Internet Marketing Tools. Instead of the $250 a month price tag that has been banded about here and there the actual price is $99 a month, well for me anyway. I figured it was worth that just to check it out and see just how useful the Shoemoney Tools would be.

I’m still at the very earliest stages yet so I’m not going to say too much. My very first impressions are that a couple of the tools need a bit of work on the presentation side (but it is beta so what the hell) and some of them seem very similar to what I get from WebCEO. The real value here will definitely be in the PPC tools and the domain marketplace. As I’m already proving to myself yet again I’m fairly rubbish at PPC affiliate marketing (no, I’m MUCH WORSE than that) so it will be interesting to see how much this helps me. The domain marketplace looks really interesting but I’ve already got a bit of feedback to leave so that’s all for now….

For at least the last 6 months now over 95% of blogging competitions from the make money online niche have included a Flip Camera amongst the prizes (No, I haven’t done a serious study of the comps, I’m just guessing!) Every time somebody puts one of these up for grabs the number of entries seems to go through the roof. I’d like to know what the big deal is about the Flip? Sure it looks very nice and EVERYBODY knows that video blogging is the new big thing but why do people get so excited about the prospect of winning a Flip camera?

From a personal point of view the only reason I ever enter these competitions is because I still haven’t found anybody who will deliver one to the UK, and they’re not available here yet. As soon as they are I’ll just go out and buy one, even at inflated UK prices it’s hardly going to break the bank is it? I can’t get my head around all you North American money makers who scramble with nasty odds of winning one when you can go and order a Flip from Amazon.com for less than $200 (Actually less than $180). What gives? They are by all accounts a great little tool, you want one that bad, you just buy one surely? As I’ve probably mentioned in the past I do all right out of this online money making thing, no I’m not rich but come on, spending a couple of hundred dollars wouldn’t even register with me. I see a number of people entering competition after competition to win one of these who are claiming to be earning much more than me online.

Or have I got it all wrong, are the only people entering these competitions people like me who don’t have the option of buying one? If so then there’s obviously a big international market for these things, some clever technology blogger out there might want to consider buying a shed load and exporting them!