To find out if they are worth YOUR money please either follow me on Twitter or via the RSS feed above to make sure you don't miss out on the review. If you've got a webmaster product you'd like me to review please get in touch using the contact form.
Inspired into taking some more risks with promoting affiliate offers through the paid advertising networks I’ve now got a few offers running. Ever since creating my NeverBlueAds account I’ve not really done much with it but I’ve found a couple of offers that I think I can profit from so I’m going for it.
One of the Ad networks I’m giving a go is FaceBook. I never had much joy with them the last time I tried this but I’m game for a laugh. Came across something that could really help a few people out during my research, I’ve found a way of getting $250 in free FaceBook advertising! That’s a decent chunk to do some serious experimentation. When you read the affiliate gurus they always go on about experimentation, and I know from experience as much as anybody that it can be a very scary thing to do when you only seem to be wasting your own cash. The free $250 you can get for FaceBook really free’s you up to experiment at leasure.
Your Free FaceBook Advertiser Codes
These 3 will each get you a $50 credit:-
In order to get the final code all you need to do is add the Visa Business Network application (do a search for it from within your FaceBook account). Once completed they’ll e-mail you a voucher code for a $100 advertising credit.
All codes can be applied from the Billing/Funding Sources area of the FaceBook advertisers control panel. Even cooler is that these codes aren’t just for new advertisers, even if you’ve been using FaceBook to advertise on for a while these codes will still work.
Hope everybody enjoys them and let me know how you get on with your ad campaigns? If you do find them useful would you please consider stumbling this post so that others might find it? Good karma and all that.
ps Forgot to mention, I’ve been looking for a promo code for Microsoft Ad Center but haven’t been able to find any active codes. If anybody knows of any voucher codes that still work can you let me know? Cheers.
As part of my big experiment on PPC/Affiliate marketing I also setup an advertising account with FaceBook. I purposely didn’t write about it in my review because as an advertising network it was so different to the others I’d tried.
Forget Keywords, Think Demographics
The big difference between FaceBook and Adwords, YSM etc is that instead of targeting keywords and phrases you’re targeting a demographic. Select a location, sex, age range, education status, political views and even there relationship status and your ad will only be shown in front of the group of people you select. I’m sure you don’t need my help to point out what sort of potential this has for dating adverts and things like that, it’s also no coincidence that so many of the adverts on FaceBook are dating or education related.
Why Google Have It Right And FaceBook Have It Wrong
I started of only bidding $0.10 for my FaceBook ad, this is where it is cool though, even with such a small amount (I ignored the $0.30-$0.40 recommendation) I was getting 5,000 impressions plus a day. Not bad considering I was targeting a quite small amount of people as well. The problem was though that my CTR was almost non existent. This is where Google have things right and FaceBook don’t. When somebody enters a search into Google thy have an intent, they are actively looking for something. When you sign into your FaceBook page, you’re not actively doing anything. You can have all the ads in the world but if the person isn’t looking for that product then your CTR is going to be very low. This is a large part of the reason why search related traffic always converts so well compared to direct type in or referrals. FaceBook ended up costing me very little (it’s pay-per-click after all) but also returned very little as well.
Where Would I Use FaceBook Advertising
Where I think this has huge potential is for gaining exposure, not so much selling but for getting a name out there. FaceBook receives huge amounts of traffic (that tend not to like clicking on ads). By creating a carefully crafted advert it’s possible to get almost free advertising for a website or product of your choice. You might not directly get the clicks but it’s putting a name or website in front of a lot of people.
…is turning into a massive mistake. It’s been a bad day all around so no real time to post about how bad things are in detail, will do a propper update tomorrow. In the meantime here’s a stupid monkey with more balls than brains (a little similar to how I decided to tackle paid click affiliate marketing)
If it’s not already then in the near future Facebook is going to become THE social networking website of choice. Compared to MySpace it’s easier to use, looks much better and is not full of ear bleeding, eye wrenching rubbish! I’ve only been using it a little while but have already found it a great tool for getting back in touch with people, many of whom I haven’t spoke to since I left school.
But How Does This help Your Blog?
I only discovered this morning that one of the many applications on Facebook is something called Notes. It’s like a notepad that just allows you to type ….well …notes. Of much more use to Bloggers is the ability of the Notes application to create notes from a RSS feed. Your Blogs RSS feed maybe? By building a large group of friends on Facebook you can get your content to more people and even in my case gain some extra RSS subscribers! Thanks to the clean interface of Facebook it’s easy for people not interested to hide your notes so you’re not in any danger of turning your page into a garish billboard like MySpace.
This has to be one of the easiest ways of promoting a Blog (or any RSS feed for that matter) and it’s something I’d strongly recommend you do. If you’re not already a Facebook member then get signed up now, it’s free and easy and might just put you back in touch with people long forgotten.
