2011 | Finch Sells

The Art Of Successful Facebook Bidding Strategies

Jul 11 2011

Until Google+ introduces an ad platform that we aren’t automatically banned from, Facebook remains the go-to social network for self-serve advertising.

I seem to publish a new Facebook post every quarter, and with each time lapse comes the news that it just ain’t as easy as it used to be. I’ll save you the doomsday speech and get straight to the point. There’s still a lot of money to be made on Facebook, but the bidding process could easily convince you otherwise.

I’ve seen some suggested bid prices that resemble first class tickets to bankruptcy. Want to advertise to over 30s in Australia? That’ll be $1.50/click, says Facebook. You know you’ve been doing this shit for too long when you find yourself staring at a delicious Ginster sandwich in your local petrol station, and mentally equating it to the cost of two Australian housewives accidentally clicking your ad.

What make a successful Facebook bidding strategy in 2011? Christ, that’s not even contemporary enough, is it? What makes a good Facebook bidding strategy as of 6pm GMT on Monday the 11th July 2011?

I don’t have the inside scoop, but I can offer some perspective on what works for me.

Costs are going to continue to rise, artificially at least, so it’s important that we roll with the punches. If Facebook decides to raise their suggested bid prices, we have to follow suit if we want to lay claim to the same volume of clicks.

CTR is as important as it always was, and if you can score an excellent clickthrough rate, you will pay much less than your bid. This is the beating heart of what advertising on Facebook is all about. The confusion stems from where to start bidding, how to adjust as you go, and how to sustain the CTR.

I like to operate dual campaigns for whatever I’m promoting. This means I will create two campaigns for essentially the same offer, but changing the creatives for each. Fresh images and fresh headlines are my priorities, the actual ad text itself rarely makes a difference.

Assuming both campaigns have been tested and are pulling in good CTRs, I will run them alternately for a day each. This fights banner blindness and helps me to sustain each campaign a little longer. Facebook has been known to become a bigger bastard than usual if you attempt to resume a campaign that was already on the slide, grinding impressions to a halt. But personally, I’ve found this to be a non-issue as long as I keep pausing before the decline sets in.

I also like to create day-specific campaigns for my dating ads as another way of providing short term boosts to CTR that can also help to alleviate banner blindness. For example, “End Sunday With Her Phone Number” …followed by my buxom wench of choice, and a demand to register now before weekend registrations close.

As a general rule, I swear by lots of fresh high-CTR campaigns that I can alternate and switch out when necessary.

All this counts for nothing if you receive a grand total of 14 impressions, or spunk an entire budget on an hour’s worth of graveyard converting clicks. You’ve gotta know how to start the bidding, and in this regard, every affiliate has his own personal experience to draw conclusions from.

You can usually guarantee significant volume by bidding at the very bottom of the suggested bid range. So if Facebook is suggesting $1.11-$1.45, start your bidding at $1.11, and you should get plenty of clicks. For the overwhelming majority of CPA offers, Facebook’s initial suggested bids will prove utterly unsustainable. Over a dollar for a click to a dating offer paying out $5? On your bike, mon ami. You can tell the wife your summer vacation is cancelled at those rates.

However, and this is very important to consider, bidding at the bottom of the suggested margins gives you a window of opportunity to score a high CTR. If you can show Facebook that your ads are suitably click-friendly, the suggested bid margins will lower dramatically and your actual CPC will be a lot cheaper than what you tentatively opened the bidding with.

For affiliates promoting low-payout offers, the temptation is to scoop junk traffic by bidding way below the suggested price. It takes a certain quantity of steel in the balls to bid at 50% of your payout and still see profit on the horizon.

The problem with bidding significantly lower than the suggested price is that Facebook will only give you a very limited number of impressions, usually on lower quality pages, and if your CTR isn’t immediately impressive, that will be all she wrote. Unless your ad campaign puts the wowsers down your market’s trousers, it’s tough to sustain these types of campaigns.

There are some exceptions that I’ve noticed. Less saturated international markets and under 18 demographics are often easier to hit with low bids, presumably because the competition is lower.

I actually spoke to one affiliate who had the cunning plan of building an opt-in list of 17 year olds in the hope that he’d have a freshly plucked market of viable 18 year olds to send to dating offers in 12 months time. Scheming? Yes. Viable? No. Facebook does not appreciate the tactic, and I’m personally convinced that the dating advertisers would have harboured a few reservations about the quality of his leads too.

Full marks for creativity though.

Grooming for dating sites …the affiliate scumbag’s latest trick. Because no $5 registration is out of bounds!

If you’re wondering where CPM fits in to all of this, my opinion is that it doesn’t. Once upon a time, CPM was the most logical method of advertising on Facebook. Then Facebook decided that CPC campaigns should get first dibs on the best pages for ads – unofficially, but very noticeably – and the benefits in bidding CPM disappeared.

Some might argue that CPM still has a time and a place. Yeah, sure. For heavyweight brands who want their message on the page and don’t actually care about attracting clicks. There are similar exceptions for international traffic with CPM bidding, but even those are typically less profitable than the same campaign with a CPC bidding strategy.

As always, you’re welcome to take a giant dump on this advice by outing your own yacht funding CPM campaigns. I’d be happy to hear about them!

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!
My network emails tell me that YeahCPA is running a competition between now and August 5th, where practically any affiliate should be able to bagsy some nice rewards. Just $1000 commission required for a free Kindle, and $5000 for a free iPad. In cashback terms, that’s good cricket. Join YeahCPA to get involved.
If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. You’re also welcome to add my profile on Google+, just as long as you assign me to a private circle titled BILF. That’s Bloggers I’d…nevermind.

How To Build A Diversified Online Business

Jul 05 2011

Diversify, diversify, diversify.

The three coolest words in an Internet Entrepreneur’s vocabulary. But what does it mean in practical terms?

Most entrepreneurs appreciate that with competitive markets and rapidly changing technologies, placing all your profitable eggs in one basket is a risky tactic.

If you don’t want your online business to end in a flood of tears and bitter resentment, then you better learn to diversify and create several avenues of profit. MySpace has shown, quite spectacularly, that it’s possible to fall from grace in 18 months. And you would do well to assume that so can pretty much any profit spinning website in your portfolio.

What Makes a Strong Portfolio of Online Assets?

In no particular order, here are some of my favourite business cornerstones.

Profitable affiliate marketing campaigns

Who would have guessed it? An affiliate marketer recommending affiliate marketing! Stable it is not, but an important staple of my business it will remain.

CPA campaigns provide enormous earning potential, and although short term in nature, can be used to fund investments in to more long term business models. I advertise affiliate offers using various PPV traffic sources, Plentyoffish and Facebook.

Effective affiliate campaigns require only part-time management, making them key contributers to your bottom line, without swallowing up all of your time.

The information resources for Tomorrow’s Next Trend…

Forget about the monetization, and ask yourself, “What is going to be really talked about in 2012?”, then build a website that provides top quality content on that topic. Does anybody remember the crazy market for backgrounds and add-ons when MySpace peaked? These exploded in popularity, and those who were ready to meet the demand, profited immensely.

Predict what is about to become hot, rather than attempting to monetize yesterday’s news, then build a website that delivers outstanding content on the topic. If you do this well, the monetization will take care of itself. Being first matters.

How about a home bizopp site for Greeks? Smell the demand, jump on it.

Having an online store

Drop-shipping and digital download stores are two areas I’ve been exploring closely over the last few months. I have a turnkey download store that produces a steady flow of revenue, and it’s inspired me to look further afield.

One of the great benefits of selling your own products is a conspicuous lack of anal manhandling by Google if you later decide to use their Adwords platform. Yes, owning your own product takes away the title of Internet Middleman, which Google unfortunately associates with Aids and Rabies.

For those with aspirations of something more legitimate than a digital product store, feel free to get utterly lost in the possibilities of drop-shipping. Sites like Alibaba make it possible to purchase, via wholesale, just about any product imaginable, and then sell it on for [sometimes] healthy profits. This is a step away from simple sideways diversification, but worth a look.

The branded blog

You may have noticed my soft spot for blogging. And you may have noticed my particular style of blog branding. I believe that it’s possible to become an authority in your industry, making good money as a blogger, without selling out in the eyes of your readers.

But the formula is murky.

Some bloggers use their platforms too eagerly to push any affiliate product with a commission attached. Others, I feel, are guilty of under-monetizing their blogs. I prefer to ignore writing about products, and instead focus my efforts on establishing relationships of similarity with my readers.

For my Internet Marketing blogs, I like to use humour, sarcasm and an occasionally self-deprecating tone. These are excellent weapons for building bridges of trust with a notoriously cynical market, but they’re not always as effective elsewhere. If you’re going to diversify in to becoming a blogger, step one is to understand your market.

And no, that’s not just some useless Quantcast demographics. But understanding what makes them laugh, what makes them smile, what content are they known to devour, and most importantly, what do they aspire to be? It sounds straightforward, but is often forgotten. The secret to running a popular blog is to know exactly what the “end goal” is for your average reader…and then to position yourself as the lifestyle rainmaker who can deliver that golden egg.

I have developed a collection of popular blogs that rake in $5-10K per month through direct banner buys alone. Many affiliates would laugh at those numbers, but hey – it’s diversified income. Most of my money traditionally comes from affiliate marketing, but if it were to disappear overnight, I make more than enough through publishing crap like this to live comfortably within my means.

The coupon haven

Consumers love coupons. It’s an addiction that has been passed down through generations and is now more exploitable than ever thanks to the reach of the web.

When people ask me what kind of website would make a good first addition to their portfolio, I tell them to go find some niche coupons for products with affiliate programs, then build a website around them. If you’re smart, you’ll do this in such a way that the website doesn’t die with each coupon period that expires.

Your own personal page

Even if you don’t want to become a blogger, I don’t think it’s ever a bad idea to have a personal presence on the web. Some of the most exciting opportunities I’ve had would never have found my inbox if I hadn’t made the decision to promote myself, and what I do, through a personal site.

Obviously, a portfolio is not going to attract money in the diversification sense. But you shouldn’t underestimate the opportunities that can fall your way if you tell the world what you’re good at.

A collection of mailing lists

They say the money is in the list, and although that statement is being challenged by the arrival of fan pages and enormous Twatter followings, I believe it still rings true. Mailing lists are fantastic assets to have. The ability to land effortlessly in the inbox of 50000 potential customers at the snap of your fingers should not be discounted.

I like to use Facebook and PPV sources to build highly targeted mailing lists that can be sold various products. For a brilliant illustration of how this works, get your IMGrind on and read this.

Understand there are Internet Gazillionaires who make money through no other means than by mailing the hell out of some very large lists. Contrary to popular belief, those lists do not last forever, especially if you’re the kind of prick who buys them from the unsolicited scrapheap. However, put to the right use, mailing lists can deliver lots of return customers and cross-selling opportunities.

The acquisition of good products

As perfectionists, we sometimes doubt what others are capable of achieving. One of the best ways to diversify an online business is to invest in somebody else’s good work. You can’t give 110% of your attention to every brainfart that occupies the mind… but somebody else can.

Stable businesses make a habit of innovating and investing in equal measures. While I enjoy the creative thrill of building websites from scratch, it makes just as much business sense to buy websites and digital products straight off the shelf if the standard is high. You might want to avoid marketplaces like Flippa which are about as buyer-friendly as a fist in the balls for your money back.

I recommend buying re-sellable digital products, or privately seeking out under-monetized blogs for the best chance of adding a nice juicy investment to your portfolio. If you can monetize better than 95% of other webmasters, you can have an absolute field day profiting from their hard work.

What Are The Areas I Don’t Like Diversifying In To?

Are there any projects to avoid? This is likely to provoke an angry response from those who dedicate their careers to the work I’m about to mention, and with good reason. Entrepreneurs are driven by different motives with different objectives. But for me personally, the areas I don’t like diversifying in to include…

Anything driven solely by SEO. I can’t control it, therefore I don’t pretend to understand it. SEO is an afterthought for all of my projects. If you build it, they will come. Only a complete bumberclart wastes his time trying to compensate for Google’s next move.

Web design and programming. I have the skills from my background as a programmer, but it’s far too time consuming to “diversify” in to client work. And it’s not so much a diversification, but rather a complete veering from the racetrack. In short, client based programming work can suck a donkey chode. I always get the shivers when friends or family contact me asking for a “quick website built”. And that’s without the duty of actually being paid for it.

Web hosting services. They will consume your entire working day, unless they’re entirely modularised and outsourced. I’ve seen many examples on Flippa of small web hosting services boasting respectable profits, but when you factor in that time is money, those profits suddenly start to look very small. Committing to be somebody else’s 99.9% uptime bitch would push me to insanity.

Customer subscription services. You will find that once again, unless you outsource everything, another service will usually beat you to the market by dedicating 100% of it’s time and doing a better job. A good example of such a subscription service is the pay-to-access forum. Many of these forums are emerging (PPV Playbook, IMGrind…), and it’s tough to knock the earning potential when you look at the numbers. 500 members paying $60/month is a healthy $30000/month in revenue.

However, forums are also notorious time-vacuums. Unless you can dedicate significant time to them everyday, they will never blossom in to healthy communities. Even once they’re established, you still need to engage and interact on a daily basis. This is perfect if the forum is your primary business. But as a diversification strategy? Be prepared to double your current workload, or get eaten by the competition.

Niches I know nothing about. If I can’t understand what I’m selling, I have no hope of guessing my customer’s next move. I’ve made the mistake far too often of developing websites on niche topics that I don’t “get”, and although I can motivate myself for the build phase, they often sit derelict after the site is launched.

Whatever You Do, Do It Well

It goes without saying that diversifying a business is irrelevant if you do a half-arsed job of it. We can go back to the MySpace example as a prime example of this. The examples above are merely my own professional choices, based on my own skillset and the talents of those I work with. You may have a very different vision.

As long as the vision is clear, and the planning is sound, diversification can only ever be a good thing.

Recommended This Week:

If you’re not already registered on PPV Playbook, you are missing a beat sunshine. Easily the BEST place to learn from marketers who are actually making money. It has some awesome case studies. The catch is that you will need to pay some of your hard earned pesos to access it. I swear from the bottom of my black heart, joining is worth every penny
Help! Subscribe to my new FinchSells RSS feed. And if you don’t already follow me, add FinchSells to your Twitter.

Google Panda About To Eat SEO Professionals?

Jun 26 2011

Google has rolled out Panda update 2.2, and webmasters around the world are staring in awe as their sites dance around the rankings like uncontrollable drunks. The sense of confusion is growing, and incredibly mixed results are being reported.

I’ve had affiliates telling me their sites have surged to the top of Google for ultra competitive terms. Others seem to be drowning their sorrows at the prospect of a long-term stay in the dreaded Sandbox.

It’s rare that I post about SEO. There are two reasons for this:

SEO requires more management than my paid traffic campaigns (which earn a lot more money)
I believe SEO to be rapidly heading towards extinction.

For those who, like me, rarely stick their heads out of the rabbit hole to see what’s new with the world of SEO, let’s take a look at the disputed intentions of the Panda update.

Google wants to reward websites that offer engaging content and a rewarding user experience.
Google wants to punish websites that scrape content and leverage thousands of weak backlinks.
Google wants to place the responsibility in the user’s hands to determine whether a website deserves to rank well.

Google has always publicly encouraged engaging content, but the algorithm has struggled to match the stated objectives. Panda seems to be changing the game, or at the very least, taking a sincere hack at it.

Naturally this is going to rip a new one for many affiliates, especially those who use SEO as their primary means of driving traffic.

SEOMoz has an excellent article explaining the likely repercussions of Panda. The overwhelming message is that SEO…isn’t really SEO anymore. The easiest way to game the system is to actually play along with the system.

If ranking well becomes a question of designing engaging websites where the user is left with a positive feeling, a sense that he hasn’t been shafted by Johnny Rogue Affiliate on a commission crusade, then surely the SEO professionals of the future will be forced to prioritise their work around the shit that truly matters – satisfaction in the eye of the end user, rather than an algorithm and it’s thousand loopholes.

I have long seen SEO as an inefficient middleman between excellent content and the interested readers who would want to find it. My own sites have generally responded well to the Panda updates, which is encouraging given that I spend about 2.4% of my working day giving a damn about SEO.

If the most important factors for high rankings finally shift towards user-engagement measurements, then isn’t it time SEOs changed their job titles? Wouldn’t it be ironic if after optimising for local SEO terms, they had to rebuild from scratch as UEOs? I can see a growing demand for User Engagement Optimisers…get the domains ordered, guys!

Likewise, if Google wants to reward brand-driven websites where little thought is given to keyword phrase density and second tier backlinks, then I’d happily invite the Panda in to my home for tea and biscuits. Fuck it, I’d even scrub up nice for the occasion.

I am as clueless on the next move as everybody else, but I would guess that Google will be using engagement metrics such as bounce rate, time on site, return visits and a whole host of social sharing monitors to weigh up relevance. It wouldn’t surprise me in the future if Google took one look at your Analytics, smelt the bullshit, and didn’t even bother to count the backlinks.

Ultimately, nobody can say for sure what the true scale of the Panda changes are. It’s too early to measure the ranking fluctuations with any conviction. But what matters is the intention. Google is clearly taking a stand against the webmasters who blast thousands of blog comments and 500 word articles in their attempt to fake relevance.

It would be very rich of an anti-SEO blogger such as myself to hand out SEO advice to those who have based their professional careers around the craft, but I’m going to do it anyway.

DIVERSIFY YOUR BUSINESS!

Assume that Google had a blackout and no longer existed, how would you get customers to your site? If the answer is “By shifting my focus towards Bing and Yahoo”, you’re doing it wrong!

Recommended This Week

If you’re not already registered on PPV Playbook, you are missing a beat sunshine. Easily the BEST place to learn from marketers who are actually making money. It has some awesome case studies. The catch is that you will need to pay some of your hard earned pesos to access it. I swear from the bottom of my black heart, joining is worth every penny
If you’re working in the dating market, check out Adsimilis. Definitely one of the better networks with a wide range of dating offers, all on high payouts, including lots of stuff in Europe and South America. I think you’ll like them.
If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Feel free to add Finch to your Facebook. Yes, this is the right link. My real name is not actually Finch. Also follow me on Twitter Love you long time. Thanks for reading.