Articles
What Is A Brand?
Your Entrepreneurial Spirit
Have you ever just sat down and thought about what you really want from your life? What are your dreams for yourself and for your family?
What if you hit the jackpot tomorrow? Have you ever made a list of everything you actually want in life; what do you dream of? Have you thought of what legacy you would like to leave behind for your future generations?
If you have answered “Yes” to most of these questions, then congratulations, you are the type of person who isn’t interested in “ordinary” or “average” but someone who wants to achieve big and you probably have a belief that anything is possible. You have the entrepreneurial spirit, now go and use it…
Making An Impact
If you want to make the maximum impact on the web, then it’s simply not enough to have a social media account(s) and a blog. You really need to ensure that there is a brand behind that social media account and behind that blog – something instantly recognisable that ties all of your posts and comments together under a single banner and something that people will feel is more than the sum of its parts and is a guarantee of quality.
But a brand isn’t just a logo. In order to have a real brand that has raving fans, you need to know what it is that makes something like this work and how to go about building yourself an image and then (more importantly) how to gain exposure for that image
Affiliate Marketing on Facebook
If you are an affiliate marketer, you have probably heard that social networking sites are great for boosting affiliate earnings. But do you really understand how to use them to their benefit? Sometimes, if an affiliate marketer is too pushy they may appear to be spammy – you know the type that ends up posting their links on other peoples’ fan pages or worse – spamming their own friends and family.
There are several ways you can pursue your affiliate marketing on Facebook and it can be quite lucrative, especially considering that Facebook traffic is continually on the rise! You just need to work out how to best cater to your target audience and their needs on Facebook.
Here are just 3 ways to market on FB:
Fan pages
These are one popular way to pursue affiliate marketing on FB. Anyone can create a fan page, and yours can be for a specific brand or niche topic, like parenting. You’ll want to grow a list of followers on your fan page by providing lots of interaction, tips and yes, links to products they might like.
FB Groups
While your FB pages are usually meant for fans to follow a leader in a niche (YOU), a group is for like-minded people to be able to interact.
So you could have a parenting Facebook group for Moms of autistic children, for example. You could provide tips for working with autistic kids, and sometimes provide a link to toys that are good for autistic children or a link to an info product about nutrition and autism.
Your group(s) can be either public or private. Private groups require you to invite and approve members. You may wish to consider this option if you’re collecting names on an email autoresponder list and want to give them access as a perk. You cna even make your group secret meaning that it cannot be found by any search on FB so the ONLY way to know of its existence is to be invited.
FB Ads
Advertising on Facebook is very popular among affiliate marketers but you do need to know how to use it before you plunk down a substantial amount of money – or even invest a little and lose it all because you didn’t know what you were doing.
The thing that many advertisers like about FB ads is that you can really target your audience well and drill down into a niche, and the ads themselves are pretty inexpensive. Because of the highly focused targeting, your conversion rate can be very high.
With a Facebook ad, you’ll want to use a mix of images and text to produce a click-through although you need to bear in mind that any text has to follow strict FB guidelines and not cover more than 20% of the ad (FB does provide a tool for advertisers to check whether their ad is compliant to the 20% rule and is well worth checking to ensure your ad is approved quickly. Your mixutre of iamage and text is something you can easily split test and you can see what works best for your particular audience.
The demographic targeting options you have are very extensive; you can choose the country, age group, interests and even relationship status – so if you wanted to target single men and promote a course on how to pick up women, you could! Or if you wanted to promote your gardening site to people who garden, your ad could just go out to those individuals.
So if you are an affiliate marketer, you really should add FB to your arsenal and by using these 3 options you can really make the most of FB to drive highly targeted traffic to your affiliate offers.
A Note To Us Marketers
One of the jobs of us as marketers is to attract those you want to sell to and work with, BUT equally importantly, you need to repel those who don’t resonate with you or your message.
A big mistake that many new marketers make is to try to appeal to everyone but, trust me, that will make you miserable as you will be dealing with people that just don’t “get it.”
Draw a line in the sand and stake your claim. Be YOU and don’t apologise for being yourself to people who just don’t resonate with you. Just say goodbye, move on and focus on those people who DO appreciate what you have to offer them.