Part of the guide: Affiliate Marketing
In my last post I talked about 5 Facebook advertising tricks for getting higher CTRs. In this post I’m going to reveal 5 more Facebook advertising “hacks” for boosting your ROI and making ridiculous amounts of money with Facebook ads.
In this guide
1. $20 Mini Campaigns
What’s the secret to launching hugely successful marketing campaigns?
Being a genius? Knowing all kinds of secrets that don’t exist? Hallucinogenic drugs?
None of the above (LOL).
The reality is the way to launch hugely successful marketing campaigns, websites and ideas in general is to simply TEST tons of ideas.
Testing, that’s all there is to it. Most people think they know what people want, so they create a product that they think will sell, and they spend a bunch of money marketing said product.
With FB advertising, you can never lose a ton of money. You can TEST your ideas for as little as $20. It’s what I like to call a $20 MINI CAMPAIGN.
Simply come up with a badass marketing idea (that you believe will sell). Now create a coming soon/early bird list landing page for the idea.
Maybe it’s a new info product or service you want to launch , create a landing page to capture the emails of people who are interested. Now create a profile of your target audience for the idea.
Now create an ad directed at that audience linking to the landing page. Whatever suggested big Facebook give you, bid HALF of it. Launch the campaign.
Now come back in an hour, see if you’ve gotten any impressions. Simply increase the bid 5 or 10 cents every hour until clicks start rolling in. This allows you to easily test your new ideas for next to nothing. Always do this before launching a huge FB ad campaign.
2. Start Higher, Drop Your Bid
Ok, so this is the complete polar opposite or what I just talked about. If you want to get traffic FAST, and you don’t care about overspending to begin with.
You need to start your bidding high, and slowly drop your bid. Here’s how it works:
Start by bidding just 3 cents over the bottom suggested bid Facebook gives you for your ad campaign. Just 3 cents above will ensure you start getting plenty of ad exposure.
When you start getting traffic, you get data on your ads. You can see which ads are working and which aren’t. I always start with at least 20 different ads, and run a good $100 at them before checking out the data.
If you’re paying $1/click, you need to spend at least $200+ to get some data back when targeting a small audience. The bigger the audience the more you need to spend to get this initial data.
After running some initial traffic at the ad, you can come back delete the low converting ads, and keep the high converting ads.
This time Facebook will have dropped your suggested bid for the high converting ad. In which case just lower your bid 3 cents above the next suggested bid Facebook gives you. Keep doing this again and again until you hit a plateau, then start creating more ads and testing new audiences.
3. Start Small, 50k Audience Works
Most newbie FB advertisers start targeting a gigantic audience. What’s up with that?
The larger the audience, the less targeted your ads will be, the lower your CTRs and the higher your ad spend.
You really don’t need to target a very big audience. You can easily generate 100+ clicks a day off of an audience of 50,000, that’s a good starting point.
50,000 reach.
Test with small audiences, get your ads right, split test them. Then branch out to bigger audiences and bigger ad campaigns as your budget allows thanks to your insanely high ROI,.
You have been paid late before
You have watched the number on the dashboard not match the number in your account. What is different now is simple: it settles on a public contract you can check yourself, not a dashboard I control.
Read the contract →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
4. Fake Video Ads
Fake video ads get crazy click-through rates. They are little ad images that look like a video with a play button.
Of course, they’re not actually a video, they’re an image that looks like a video and they’ll take the visitor to wherever your ad goes on your page.
For some reason Facebook decided to ban the use of ‘fake video ads’ for external URL promotions.
However, it’s still possible and extremely effective when you promote Sponsored posts on your Facebook fan page.
Really easy to do.
Simply post a fan page update with a fake video image in the update. Place a link to your target site first thing in the update/post along with a sentence which will be your ad copy right below.
When you go to create a new Facebook ad, select your fan page, click ‘sponsored post’ and select the post with the fake video image.
Facebook approves these ads and the click-through rates are sky high. When it’s approved a fake video image and your URL/ad copy will show in the sidebar.
5. Use FB Ads To Destroy Affiliate Competitions
Another little-known hack is to use FB ads to destroy affiliate competitions. With FB ads you know exactly how much money you’re spending per click.
This means if you know your target URL is making you more per click than the cost of the FB ad click, you can scale that sucker up and make a small fortune.
In the past I used this to crush affiliate competitions. Whenever there is a big product launch in the Internet Marketing community (or any other community for that matter), become an affiliate.
Now put together a bonus package for people who buy the product through your link. Set up a landing page with a video offering the bonus package and place a link to the sales page below.
Now target the market that would be looking at the product in a few FB ads. As long as your FB ad CPCs are lower than your EPCs of the product; you can quickly climb up the affiliate leaderboards out of nowhere!
The trick is to target the right audience, easy to do with a few custom audiences and extracting Facebook member IDs from groups.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments and questions below. Also opt-in to the email list on the right for more Facebook marketing tips, tricks, and secrets.
Comments (carried over from the previous site)
Matt DiMaio, August 29 2013, 14:30
Thanks for this David. Learned some good stuff here. (spam link removed)
Tyronne Ratcliff, August 29 2013, 15:45
Solid content Dave. The other tricks are also good as well. What I like about advertising on Facebook is the fact that you can get started for as little as $5 a day. They also have free advertising credits as well. (spam link removed)
Three posts a day. One email a day.
Everything I publish, in one short daily email. Real numbers, no hype, unsubscribe in one click.
Get paid 100%, on-chain, the second the sale clears
Most affiliates earn little, and that is disclosed up front. The difference here is not a promise about what you will make. It is that you can verify every payout yourself, on a public contract, in about twelve seconds.
See how the payout works →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
The strongest defence of the fake-video-ad trick, even though the whole point of it is to look like something it isn’t: the click only costs the advertiser money if the visitor feels genuinely misled once they land, and if the landing page actually delivers what the thumbnail implied, you could argue no one has really been deceived in any way that matters, just briefly surprised by a still image instead of a moving one for half a second before the page loads. I don’t fully buy that argument myself — a fake play button is a fake play button, and the whole reason it works is that it borrows credibility a real video would have earned. But that’s the version of the defence that would actually need answering before dismissing the whole tactic as simply dishonest, rather than just calling it a trick and moving on.
The $20 mini-campaign tip assumes you’re comfortable putting a landing page and an ad in front of strangers before you’re sure the idea works at all. I’ve built my entire audience by writing things people already asked for, never testing cold ideas on cold traffic first, and I’d rather know an idea is wanted before I spend anything advertising it.
Marla, I think what’s being missed here is that a lot of this ecosystem ran on member-scraping and lookalike building for years before Facebook tightened the rules around exactly that practice — the tactic being described as current advice is really a record of a loophole that existed and has mostly since been closed, which is worth knowing rather than dismissing outright.
‘Spend at least $200 to get data back’ — at what baseline CTR, what sample size? Without that it’s a rule of thumb wearing a formula’s clothes.
Raj’s math assumes an audience big enough to spend $200 into before you’re basically retargeting the same eleven people twice. A 50,000-person audience like the post recommends doesn’t really exist for a business built around one small town, so the whole testing budget calculation just doesn’t translate down here.
Lonnie, the part of this that automates well regardless of town size is the bid-stepping in tactic two — wrote a script that nudges the bid five cents an hour until impressions start, no reason to babysit that part by hand whatever your audience size is.
‘100+ clicks a day off a 50k audience’ — over what CPC, sustained how many days before it saturates? I’d want the decay curve, not the day-one number.
Yuki asking for the decay curve instead of just the headline number is exactly the kind of question that actually helps someone budgeting a real campaign. That’s worth more than the tip itself.
Look, ‘extracting Facebook member IDs from groups’ to build custom audiences is doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence. That’s scraping people who joined a group for one reason and turning them into an ad audience for something else entirely without them knowing. Calling it a ‘hack’ doesn’t change what it actually is.