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.
Build A Blog And Make Money Part 2
Optimize Your Settings
Most default settings are perfect, but there are a few things you want to do to ensure that your site performs at its best. Go through the sidebar on your blog dashboard and check each area to make sure everything is filled out.
Under Settings and General, add the name of your site and a tagline. Set your timezone and make sure the other elements are how you prefer the.
Under Settings and Writing, scroll down to where it says Update Services and add a list of ping sites that you want notified whenever your site has fresh content. You can find recommended sites online, so just cut and paste that list in there.
Under Settings and Reading, make sure your blog is set to show the Latest content, not a static page. Remember, when people land, they may not be bloggers themselves, so they might quickly glance to see if you have fresh content and, not realizing that it’s a set static page, assume you haven’t blogged in a long time and leave.
Make the settings show a few posts, such as 5 and the syndication feed much more, like 55. In the feed, choose to show the full text. Double check to make sure the Search Engine Visibility is UNchecked. You don’t want to block search engines from visiting your site.
Under Settings and Discussion, check to allow people to comment on new articles, make them fill out their name and email, enable threaded comments, and choose to manually approve and get notifications whenever anyone posts a comment.
Under default Avatar, choose Gravatar. This is where most people have their avatar registered. Go to Gravatar.com and use the same email address as you use for the site. Upload a headshot so that your blog readers can build that trusted bond with you and put a face to the name.
Under Settings and Permalinks, it should be defaulted correctly, but you want to make sure it uses this format:
http://www.yourdomain.com/sample-post
You don’t want to use the official default where it uses ?p=123 instead of the sample-post style because you want the URL of your blog posts to include the keywords in your title. Just glancing at it, you can see which is helpful to both humans and search engines:
http://www.yourdomain.com/how-to-stop-panic-attacks
versus…
http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=1077
The first one is clear. The second could be any topic under the sun.
In part 3 we will look at plugins…
Build A Blog And Make Money Part 1
When you pick a niche and have a domain, you want to move to the next step and start creating your site. Many newbies want to know whether they need a website or a blog.
Static sites are great for narrow topics like a little minisite where you’re reviewing one particular coffeemaker and you want a page on brewing tips, a page on the specs of the machine, a page on comparisons with another coffeemaker, etc.
They’re also great for service providers like freelancer ghostwriters who want a page of samples, a page of testimonials, a page of rates, etc. But for most marketers, who are leading a niche, you want a blog.
Blogs provide freshness that Google (and humans) crave. As long as you stay committed to the topic and post on it continually, it will be an evolving online entity that grows in authority over time. Don’t worry about the thought of continual content – we’ll address that later.
For now, let’s just talk about the important elements you need to remember when you have a blog platform and want to profit from it. Before you get started, set your domain up with hosting and then log into your hosting account’s cpanel.
Click on QuickInstall and then WordPress and follow the prompts to install your blog. Ideally, your blog will be located at yourdomain.com – but some of you may have future plans to put a squeeze page on yourdomain.com, so you might want your blog installed at yourdomain.com/blog – either will work.
Once you have it installed, log into your WordPress dashboard. It will always be located at yourdomain.com/wp-admin. It’s time to set it up for maximum authority and monetization!
Install An Appropriate Theme
If you’re a newbie with deep pockets and want to start out with a premium paid theme, more power to you! But it’s completely not necessary. Free themes that are built into WordPress are great starts and you can always upgrade your theme and keep everything intact at any time in the future.
What you want to watch out for is downloading free themes off the Internet randomly. These often have things you don’t want in there, like hard to find links to seedy websites. Just keep in mind that nothing is totally free – they have a reason they put that out for the masses to use.
A better way to do it is to choose a free theme from those already installed. So in your dashboard click on Appearances and then Themes. You’ll see a variety of themes if you click on Add New.
You can sort by Featured, newest, Recently Updated – or check off theme specifics you want, like colors, columns, layout, features and subject. But there are some things you want to make sure you get.
Unless your blog is a photography-based blog, you want one where text is showcased more than images on the home page. It’s good to have some images, but not just images.
You also want a theme where the header doesn’t take up the entire “above the fold” area. The above the fold area is everything you see before have you to start scrolling down the page.
You want your above the fold area to show your header, navigation bar and the first snippet of the latest blog post as well as the sidebar that has your opt in form and freebie item in sight.
So you might notice the Twenty-Eleven theme has a huge header – takes up almost he whole screen. But the Twenty-Ten is much smaller. You can also upload your own theme if you want to.
There are some newbies who plan to launch an affiliate site for Amazon so they consider going with a specific review theme. That’s okay – as long as it’s not some automated system that simply pulls content in to your site.
In order to truly succeed, you want unique content with a personal style, not scraper sites that simply grab text from elsewhere. People don’t trust that. You might get the traffic, but when a consumer is looking for a review, they can tell the difference between a personalized post and scraped content.
In part 2 we will look at optimizing your settings…
5 Reasons Your Online Business Needs Social Media
Marketing online continues to evolve and grow and these days social media takes a front seat in most online marketing strategies as supports the growth of business. The reasons to use social platforms to engage and reach customers are plentiful; here are 5 of the main ones.
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Why do social media managers spend countless hours planning, posting, testing, and perfecting their social media presence online?
- There are 3 billion active Internet users and 2.1 billion of them have social media accounts.
- YouTube has more than 1 billion users, more than a 1/3 of all web users. Each and every day web visitors view hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube that generate billions of views.
- Facebook has nearly 1.4 billion users, that’s 47% of all Internet users. 4.5 billion Likes are generated daily and nearly 75% of Facebook’s revenue comes from mobile advertising. 936 million Facebook users login in at least once daily and 52% of marketers found a customer on Facebook in 2013.
- Twitter has 316 million monthly active users that 500 million tweets each day
- Google+ has 363 million users that hit the +1 button on 5 billion times per day
- Pinterest has 100 million users, 85% of which are women. 47% of Pinterest users purchase a product based on pins, with the average sale being $58.95. 67% of pinned content is from a business site and 82% of Pinterest users would rather follow a brand than a celebrity.
Impressed yet?
These stats are just one reason to use social media to market your business that really illustrate the reach that social media can have on your business, be it online and brick and mortar. Here are 4 more reasons to make social media a part of your marketing plan.
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Social media allows you to reach people at a more personal level. Many social media marketing experts explain that social media is about relationships building, that as a side effect brings about conversions for calls to action. When you connect with people and they connect with you, they are more likely to follow your brand and all it has to offer.
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Social media allows you to show off your best content, and highlight all your brand has to offer. Whether you use text, images, video, or all of the above, you can tailor your campaign to present and impress your target audience with the very best content, products, and services that your brand has to offer. Tailoring your campaign through social media allows you to meet many objectives, including, building brand reputation, customer engagement, a better customer experience through valuable information and any other goals that meet your marketing needs.
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Who isn’t sick of fighting for organic traffic when Google keeps wiping sites off their SERPS with one after another of their ongoing updates? Social media can bring a steady, long term, reliable and ongoing stream of traffic to your sites and blogs, without having to worry that some entity will come along and wipe you out.
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One of the greatest benefits of social media is that you have full control of what is presented about your company, brand, and website to your target audience. You can tailor your marketing plan to meet specific goals and not leave anything to chance. The multitude of tracking, and testing tools available, such as, Klout, SumAll, BuzzSumo, and TweetReach, just to name a few allow you to enhance and tweak your campaigns as needed to constantly improve your efforts to boost conversions.
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There is no better time than now to take advantage of all social media has to offer. If you have an online business and do not have a social media presence then you are behind the times, it’s really as simple as that.
There are many expert guides online to get you started, and educating yourself on the intricate process that is social media marketing is critical to your overall success.
There is also the option of hiring a social media marketing expert. Take care to choose a competent professional, it will not be cheap, but may well be worth it when they bring the results your business needs to succeed.
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What is the secret to being successful on social media?
The answer is simple: delivering value.
This might sound obvious to you, or perhaps it’s just obtuse and confusing. Either way, it’s undeniable and perhaps the best way to explain what I mean by this is to show you the opposite.
Which happens to be how most brands use social media…
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The way that a lot of businesses use social media is to set up their accounts and then occasionally post to them. They’re not posting regularly enough to be considered consistent but what’s worse is the nature of what they’re posting: posts talking about their products and services.
You’ve probably seen these kinds of social media pages in the past. They say things like:
“Our new POS is the best in the industry!”
“Check out our new range of clothing!”
“For service you can trust, give us a whirl”
The thing you have to ask yourself then is: why would anyone want to read that? What incentive are you giving for following your page?
This is something that a lot of businesses simply forget about: in order to get people to listen to them, they need to be offering something in return. The best litmus test you can always use is this: would you follow your own page?
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The solution is to turn your thinking on its head and to change the way you approach social media. Instead of thinking of this as a chance to promote yourself, think of it as a chance to provide an additional free service to your audience. This should be the same audience you’re trying to monetize but in this case you’re offering something completely free whether that is information, entertainment, news or inspiration. Either way, people need to look forward to your posts and they need to know what to expect.
Maybe you sell fitness products? In that case, you could provide a good service to your audience by posting new workout ideas or inspirational quotes every day. Maybe you sell clothes? In that case how about posting images of outfits to give people ideas?
Then, when you want to make a sale, you offer a genuinely exclusive discount. You have the ears and the trust of your audience and now you’re providing a limited time and exclusive opportunity. That’s how you influence through social media!