2010 | Finch Sells

The Facebook Ads Apocalypse, It Ain’t Over Yet

Apr 10 2010

Game, set, match.

A little birdie told me affiliate marketing just died a sudden and cold death with the unveiling of a new policy change on Facebook Ads. As far as I’m concerned, the only way to kill affiliate marketing on Facebook would be to shut down the advertising platform altogether. I’m not going to rehash the same guidelines. Most of you, I’m sure, will have scoured through them by now.

The overwhelming feeling, as far as I can tell, is one of defeatist resentment. How dare they mess with my traffic source! Or you used to be so good to me baby, why you gotta go changing like that? While most affiliates have been busy launching their toys out of the pram, I’d like to point out that Facebook marketing isn’t dead. Your last great idea is dead.

The goal posts have been shifted, the interns have been fed new cram sheets, and life just got a little tougher for all of us. Maybe Facebook just shut down your one profitable campaign. I can hear you wondering out loud how it’ll ever be the same again. The answer is it won’t. You can continue moping, scamper away with the masses, and abandon one of the most lucrative traffic sources in the world. Or you can bide your time, let everybody else bitch and moan, while making the effort to adjust your marketing approach.

As far as I’m concerned, advertising on Facebook just became slightly more appealing. I’ve made no secret of my distaste for the way that the guidelines are so freely interpreted from intern to intern. The latest policy changes have tightened the noose. Or have they? Maybe they’ve tightened the noose around the most uncreative minds.

I honestly believe that Facebook users have become savvy to the techniques that we as affiliate marketers have rushed to employ. Banner blindness isn’t just a problem that confronts the dude with a campaign pushing in to it’s second month. It’s an issue that arises from the simple reality that every affiliate marketer and his god damn dog has had an investment in the marketplace.

As an affiliate who generally sticks to the more “white hat” Facebook campaigns, I favour any policy change that deflates the balls of 75% of my competition. Especially if it’s enough to make them piss off to brighter pastures unknown. I hate to be the one to break it to the world, but not all CPA has to end with a sour taste in the user’s mouth. There are genuine reputable offers.

I’ll be the first to admit, when I look over these new policy changes…it looks like some Facebook monster did off in to the night with the Affiliate Marketer’s A-Z Handbook of Tricks That Get Clicks. Yes, he came back and banned them all. So what are you going to do about it? Let your business die with yesterday’s old news? Or maybe you should shrug, accept that there’s a new system in town, and start working on those next tricks.

If there’s one thing I’ve had to preach over and over again, it’s that the key to your long term success is your ability to innovate and stay one step ahead. A lot of the time that involves seeing opportunity where other marketers see only a bunch of pixels. And their own broke reflection in the monitor.

We can only assume that many affiliate marketers will be driven out of town by these latest rounds of changes. Because all they’re willing to deal with is the knowledge they already have. The campaigns that worked from Day One, the concepts they’ve read about, the vague and uninspiring “How To” guides jacked from a thousand Internet Marketing blogs. God forbid anybody took the initiative to develop their own mailing list, their own product, their own hook…any kind of disguise to continue operations as an affiliate marketer in a market that just became infinitely less polluted by other affiliates.

I will agree with every blogger or journalist out there who has a bone to pick with Facebook persistently dicking on their affiliates. Considering the money we invest in to the platform, you would expect perhaps a little more courtesy and understanding of how such changes could completely alter the face of so many small businesses. But ultimately, do you really blame Facebook for implementing these changes? I find it hard to knock the intentions of a company that’s setting out to prevent users from being exposed to badly coded toolbars, notoriously misleading subscription plans and a bunch of other zip submits that have about as much truth in them as myself after seven pints.

If you still want to promote those offers, maybe you need to change your game plan. As I said in the last post:

“If thereâ€™s one success story you should be listening to, itâ€™s not that some dude is banking five figures a day on dating ads in April 2010. Itâ€™s that the guy who did it FIRSTâ€¦had the easiest ride.”

Well, now’s your big chance.

Facebook has moved the goalposts and everybody is in the same position. Be the one to find a concept that makes money and satisfies the new guidelines, and be the one that thousands of other affiliates are still ripping two years from now.

Recommended This Week:

Lots of Ads is the latest service to offer spying capabilities over Facebook’s most profitable ads. The great appeal for me is the ability to spy on International markets including France, Spain, Argentina, Brazil and many more. Save time on translations and tap in to the most lucrative markets on Facebook. Definitely a worthy addition to your toolkit. First 20 customers only who use code FINCH11 will receive 10% off their lifetime subscription. Enjoy!

How To Stop Thinking Like 95% Of Other Marketers

Apr 02 2010

One of the benefits of being a “blogging personality” in the affiliate world, and hopefully a trusted one, is that a lot of people come to me with their best kept ideas and ask for my input. My inbox seems to attract some incredibly creative minds and it can be enlightening to hear some of the strategies that other marketers have devised. But for every innovative affiliate, there must be a thousand hopeless sheep.

A couple of years ago, it may have been possible to drag some bum off the street, teach him a trick, show him FTP, and hey presto – you’ve got an affiliate marketer. The barrier to entry was so low, and the competition so light, that anybody with half a mind for selling the bullshit dream could run wild with profit. Unfortunately, that’s no longer the case.

You can’t just plug in, profit and piss off anymore. There has to be method to your madness, because other marketers have upped their games to combat the rising costs of saturated traffic sources.

The key to success is no longer to apply some basic newbie guide, but rather to innovate and strike the market before your peers. The biggest money in affiliate marketing goes to the guys and girls who jump on an idea before everybody else. The problem is, there can only be so many ideas to go around. Having to innovate to survive is a scary thought because as we all know, moments of inspiration do not run on tap. They can be days, weeks or in the case of my good friends over at the Warrior Forum – cosmic light years apart.

But what too many marketers don’t realize is just how far one good idea can go.

Imagine being the guy who had that moment of inspiration and decided to submit a Facebook flyer with the simple title “Want A Girlfriend?” all those months ago. If I had to take an educated guess, I’d imagine that he probably targeted his ad to the usual 25-39 crowd in the United States. But because nobody else was cashing in on the same concept, it was easy money.

These days, entering the same market with the same simple concept is a challenge where most will fail emphatically. Those who succeed will have split tested until blue in the face, rinsed through a hundred different creatives, and probably still have trouble sleeping given the delicate margins between profit and loss.

Entering a saturated market means you have to be good at what you do. Damn good. So what’s the most logical business direction you can take?

Judging by some reactions, it would probably be to bitch, moan, and sob that Facebook doesn’t work. All the while glaring enviously at those who still seem to be profiting with the same god damn ads every single day. Isn’t it just a slap in the face?

No, the solution is to stop thinking like 95% of other marketers. If your to-do list reads like a bunch of tips from an affiliate marketing blog, then you’re not thinking far enough outside the box. You’re just one of the many sheep with the same list of ideas and the same half-hearted execution that will ultimately result in failure and more bitching and whining.

When I’m brainstorming new ideas, I like to ask myself – “How can I get rid of a few more competitors? How can I avoid as many other affiliate marketers as possible and still reach my intended audience?”

If I’m taking a dating offer, maybe my targeting doesn’t read like this:

Male
25-34
United States

Because isn’t that what EVERY affiliate marketer will be thinking? You’re instantly competing with not only the established affiliates, but a thousand other newbies who’ve simply thrown up a “test ad” in the most obvious market. Thinking obvious gets you nowhere.

Let me just tell you that the single quickest shortcut you can take in the dating market is to switch that targeting from men to women. I guarantee that you’ll filter out 90% of the newbie slash retarded competition. You’ll still need to do a lot of work to find a winning concept. But it’s a step away from the obvious, a step towards your first untapped market.

Once you start taking those steps, it won’t be long before you’re marketing internationally, in foreign languages, to specific keyword subsets…carving your own niches out of the inventory. Whatever. Just know that if you’re doing your best and your best isn’t profitable, your best is not good enough. So move on and find a market which hasn’t already been raped up the arse by a thousand other affiliates.

If there’s one success story you should be listening to, it’s not that some dude is banking five figures a day on dating ads in April 2010. It’s that the guy who did it FIRST…had the easiest ride.

Do you want to spend the rest of your week scratching the margins, desperate to sustain a minimum CTR, because you know just how banner blind your target audience has become? Well, instead of split testing new titles, perving for 110x80s on Bing…why don’t you take matters in to your own hands? Find a market that every other affiliate and his dog hasn’t stuck his wang in yet.

Brainstorm your ideas, look at them carefully, and do the opposite. If you can stop thinking like 95% of other affiliate marketers, you’ll find yourself reaching markets that are still willing to listen to your bullshit.

Got a question for an affiliate marketer?

Seeing how I don’t like using AIM and emails get all too easily lost in the shuffle, I’ve opened a Formspring account where you can ask questions related to affiliate marketing, or whatever else tickles your fancy. No smart arses, please. I don’t like people trying to be wittier than me.

Click here to ask Finch a question

Back To Basics With Facebook Ads

Mar 26 2010

I haven’t posted about Facebook Ads for a good few months now. You probably figure my masterplan of finding, falling in love with, and marrying a sweet Facebook intern was a raging success. Actually, it wasn’t. I still suffer, like most of the affiliate world, from mindboggling approval guidelines and acts of rejection logic that put my world in a spin. I’d complain if I thought it’d make a difference.

More recently I’ve been doing some consultancy work and helping other individuals, mainly those involved with small business, to gain some mainstream exposure with a little help from my intern friends. Advertising on Facebook is valuable and often profitable, which is why so many of us choose to gut it out and submit endless rounds of ads until something sticks.

What really strikes me, as an affiliate, is the scope for expanding my own business by working with small local start-ups. Particularly those without a marketing team. If you’re a successful Facebook affiliate, whether you know it or not, you are a hot commodity. There are businesses out there who will pay good money for your expertise, and with good reason.

Anyway, I’m going to break down the key components behind any successful Facebook campaign. This is quite basic for some of you, so I’ll try to throw in some extra tips.

Before you even think about creating your ad, you need to make a decision. Are you going to bid CPM or CPC? Why is it such a key decision, you might wonder. The answer is because the model you choose will have a critical impact on the wording and message you will need to be sending with your ad text.

I wrote an entire post dedicated to the CPC vs. CPM question. I’d suggest you check it out if you want a comprehensive look at the matter. But the basic gist of the story is this. By bidding CPM, you can afford yourself the luxury of sending a much vaguer message with your ad text. Just as long as your landing page does a good job of twisting that message in to a sales pitch that actually works. You can be as cryptic or dare I say it – misleading – as you want.

If you’re producing a high volume of clicks and a good CTR, you can manipulate your campaign in to something that backs out on the right side of the red. I’ll take a dating ad as an example.

As usual, whenever I give away examples like this, people will go ahead and rip it image for image, word for word. Good luck. Why do you think I’m using it as an example?

Anyway, which ad do you think is more suitable for CPC? The creative which is designed to generate as many curious clicks as possible, or the creative that outlines the steps the user needs to take?

This is going to save you a lot of money. If you’re thinking of bidding CPC on Facebook, you better take that user’s hand and practically drag them through the necessary steps to fire your conversion. It’s no good being cryptic like I have with the first “secret admirer” creative.

By bidding CPC, you need to get the maximum bang for your buck. You want everybody who clicks that ad to be fully prepared for the steps that await them. I can imagine if I set the first example to CPC, I’d probably wipe out in spectacular style and be left with cornflakes for dinner. There’s only one thing worse than a CPC ad that doesn’t convert. And that’s a CPC ad with a ballbreakingly high clickthrough rate that still doesn’t convert.

In contrast, if I were to bid CPM with the cryptic dating ad, I’m now faced with two issues.

How can I get the clickthrough rate high enough to minimize the cost of my clicks?

The answer?

Test the living crap out of it until I find some numbers that fit in with my EPCs. Change the headlines, split test different age demographics and work out which time in the day is most productive for drawing the clicks. Ahem, after 6pm, use your fucking brain. You ever fancied shagging strangers over breakfast? Well there you go then.

The second and most important aspect to a successful CPM campaign is twisting that original cryptic message in to something that delivers high quality leads to the offer. You probably don’t give a monkey’s arse about the quality of your leads, but you should. When an advertiser knocks you off an offer, it’s a spanner in the works to the groundwork you’ve put in before.

Many affiliates will simply direct link with the high CTR ad and hope that by the law of numbers, all will be profitable in the end.

I don’t like doing things this way. In fact, I rarely ever direct link my offers.

My goal with the cryptic ad would be to develop a small landing page, possibly flogging it up with some dude explaining how he never knew he had so many admirers – until he added Zoosk – and now he can’t stop getting bombarded with messages from girls who want to know more about him. Have I tried that method before? No, because I want to keep my Facebook account. But you should be getting the idea that it’s important to deliver SOMETHING on your initial message. Otherwise you’re going to drive a lot of clicks and still be eating a lot of cornflakes for dinner. Comprende?

I’ve used dating and Facebook as examples here, but the methods are exportable to all traffic sources. You need to plug in your brain and start asking yourself not just “how can I get the most clicks to my offer?”, but “how can I get people clicking through with the right intentions?”. A conversion rate is significantly more important than a clickthrough rate. It highlights the importance of tracking and not interpreting your stats at face value.

I’ve seen affiliates turn off ads with the lowest CTR without even stopping to check which ads had been delivering the conversions. I mean, really, that is the act of somebody who wants to believe he’s tracking his campaigns but is probably just shooting himself in the balls over and over again. As long as you feel like you’re being productive, that’s all that matters – right?

There’s a few more Facebook themed posts lined up for the coming weeks so check back soon if this is your thing.

Recommended This Week:

Lots of Ads is the latest service to offer spying capabilities over Facebook’s most profitable ads. The great appeal for me is the ability to spy on International markets including France, Spain, Argentina, Brazil and many more. Save time on translations and tap in to the most lucrative markets on Facebook. Definitely a worthy addition to your toolkit. First 20 customers only who use code FINCH11 will receive 10% off their lifetime subscription. Enjoy!