Introduction

Getting started

What to promote

Creating Your Ad

Testing & Tracking

Tips & Trics

My Campaign
Getting Started
Because we are going to be dealing with leads you'll need to apply to some of the major affiliate
networks if you have not already done so. Apply for an account with the following affiliate programs:

Commission Junction
Azoogle Ads
Rocket Profit
Never blue Ads

You need to have a website set up in order to be approved with these programs. If you don’t have a
website, sign up for a free blog at Blogger or Word press, write up a few posts about anything (you can
also use articles from ezinearticles.com just make sure you credit the source).

Your application can sometimes take a few days to process, so be patient. If you have an account with
any other affiliate network you should review their offers for any lead affiliate campaigns.

If you do not have a domain and hosting you can get a free one at http://www.freehostia.com
What To Promote
In case you’re not familiar with leads, it is basically a company that will pay you when you refer a visitor that performs a
specific action. It could be anything from filling out a short survey, to entering their zip code, or requesting more
information on a loan. There are hundreds of leads to choose from and that is why I suggested you sign up for the affiliate
programs above.

Let's browse through Commission Junction and find a good lead offer.

Click on Napster to find out exactly what the action criteria is. From the description: "User signs up for a free trial of
Napster or Napster To Go". How easier could this be? You're essentially offering a free 7 day access to millions of
songs and unlimited downloads.

The characteristics for a good lead offer are:

1) It has to be free.
2) It has to offer something of value to the user. In this case we're offering 'free music', it has value because everyone loves
music. If we were to offer a 'free coupon for $2 off a box of Tide detergent" it doesn't offer the same value and it doesn't
appeal to everyone.
3) The form has to be short and simple. Put yourself in the user's shoes and fill out the form, is it painfully long, does it ask
questions that you need to think about? The simpler and shorter the form, the greater your conversions will be.
4) The payout should be minimum $2.00. Anything below this and you're dealing with a very small profit margin that
doesn't give you much room for testing.

"Free iPod" type website leads:

You will also come across a lot of "free ipod" websites that offer you $1.00-$1.50 per e-mail submit. My advice is to stay
away from these offers. The profit margin on these is too low to promote using CPC and you'll end up losing money. If
you choose to advertise these types of leads be careful when writing your ad description not to write anything about the
user having to enter an e-mail address as your ad will be disapproved immediately.

Credit cards and other financial leads:

A lot of people are tempted to advertise credit card offers because of the huge payout which can often be as much as $100
for an application. The problem with these types of leads is that

1) There's a lot of competition which means the starting CPC to get your ad displayed can be very expensive.

2) The conversion rate is significantly low. Most of the clicks are "tire kickers" that just want to have a look at what you're
offering but will not fill out the application.

If you focus your campaigns narrowly and do a lot of testing it's possible to make a decent ROI. In the next section I'll
show you what I mean by this.

What you can NOT promote

Unfortunately there are a lot of restrictions with Facebook advertising. While the application manager will tell you if you
are not allowed to have a certain word in your title or description they have not posted a specific list of products and
services that can not be advertised on Facebook. The only way to find out is to wait until one of your ads gets flagged.
Here's a recent collection of what's not approved by Facebook:

1) Ringtones - Facebook also blocks any derivative such as "ringer", "cellphone music", e.t.c.

2) Gambling - This includes everything from poker to bingo.

3) Tobacco, Alcohol, Firearms

4) Drugs, pharmaceutical products (even herbal products)

5) Adult content

There are several other regulations that are just common sense such as "Hate speech" or "Illegal activity", but I'll trust that
you can use your own logic to know what's acceptable.
Creating Your Ad
Now that you have a few lead campaigns selected it's time to create your ad.

Step 1 - Getting Started

The URL address. As of writing this Facebook does not disapprove direct linking. So you can enter your
affiliate link in the address bar. The URL does not appear below an ad when it is shown in the social
pages on Facebook so do not worry about having a long ugly URL.

You can also use Tinyurl.com to shorten the link and avoid commission theft. Better yet if you have a
website and domain (check the first page of this guide for information on how to get a free
domain+hosting) you can use a simple PHP redirect. Open notepad and type in the following

<?php
header("Location: youraffiliatelink.com/");

?>

Save the file as index.php and upload it to your hosting account. Visitors will automatically be redirected
to the merchant's site with your affiliate ID attached.

Step 2 - Choose Audience

Location: Based on the offer that you are promoting select the country accordingly. Be sure to have read
the description of the offer, you do not want to waste $20 in UK clicks when the offer is only open to US
visitors.

If you are promoting a general offer such as Napster's music trial leave the Location to Everywhere.

Male/Female: Depending on the offer.

Keywords: This is the power of Facebook and why it's a marketer's wet dream. Basically by entering a
keyword such as "music" you can target everyone who has "music" listed in their their list of interests.
Better yet you can also dig deeper and find people that are interested in a particular artist, say Metallica.
The only downside is that Facebook doesn't cross-reference these keywords, instead it shows your ads to
anyone who matches one of those keywords.

So if you're promoting Napster, and your ad has Green Day in the title do not choose the keywords
"music" and "Green Day" just choose "Green Day".

Education: This is a fantastic feature and a great way to get clicks. Let me explain by using an example:

Say we're promoting a Citibank credit card offer that pays a lead for every new application. A great way
to get clicks would be to target to university students who the vast majority are struggling with tuition
fees and book fees.
Create ads targeted directly at specific schools or universities.

NYU students credit card offer

Now when our NYU student logs on to her facebook account you can be sure this ad will catch her
attention a lot more than a generic "get a 0% interest credit card" type ad.

It doesn't matter if the program you are promoting has any offers specifically for that particular school,
it's just a way to increase your CTR and your conversion rate.

Workplace: Similar to Education you can target specific workplaces (Browse the networks and find the
largest workplace networks to advertise to)

Relationship status: This is mostly useful if you're going to be promoting affiliate dating leads.
Needless to say, choose "singles" to advertise to.

Step 3 - Create Ad

If you have any experience with Google Adwords or any other PPC program you will find this very
similar.

Title can only contain 20 characters and unlike Adwords you can not capitalize the first letter of every
word. Your title should be catchy, but do not place too much stress on it as it's your photo that's going to
do most of the talking. If you are promoting a free offer be sure to include the word "Free" as the first
word of your title.

Body again you can only capitalize the first letter of a sentence. Keep it short and only list the benefits.

Photo your photo will be resized to 110px x 80px. Depending on your original photo you may want to
edit it otherwise it might come out squished if it wasn't in a 4:3 aspect ratio. Your photo is the first thing
that a visitor will look at, make sure to use something flashy to attract attention.

Step 4 - Set Budget

Daily Budget: To start set your daily budget to a minimum, along the lines of $10-$20. It'll give you
enough wiggle room to see if your offer converts at a profit. If your conversion rate is positive (you are
making more than you are spending) consider upping your daily budget and see how well the offer
performs.

Pay Per Clicks vs. Pay Per Views: ALWAYS set it to PPC. Because of the inordinate amount of traffic
on Facebook you'll easily gather up hundreds of thousands of impressions in a very short time but have a
CTR of under 1%.

Confirm

The next step asks you to confirm the details. Make sure that everything is in order because once you
submit your ads you can not make any modifications (except for the bid amount).
Testing & Tracking
Unfortunately Facebook's advertising platform is nowhere near where as sophisticated and functional as
Google Adwords or Yahoo. This can make testing and tracking a little more complicated.

With so many different demographics on Facebook you could spend an eternity testing out different
combinations to see what converts best and this is where tracking would come in handy. So we'll have to
rely on our judgment to see what converts.

The kind of testing you should do from the start:

Geographical location If the offer you are promoting is applicable to different countries, create a
different ad for at least two of those countries. Don't automatically assume that US impressions will
convert better, I've had several campaigns where Canadian impressions converted almost 30% more than
US impressions.

Sex & Age: Depending on the offer, males or females of a certain age may be more prone to convert.
Again create a different campaign for males and females of certain age groups.

Of course none of these tests mean anything if you have no way of tracking. For this you'll have to read
your affiliate program's help section to figure out how to add a tracking code to your affiliate URL.

These are the basic tests that you should perform when you have found a successful campaign. The test
should be done over a period of a day or two to get some basic information. Once you've successfully
identified which demographics are converting and which are just costing you money, it's time to test even
more.

After you have enough information, you can test even further by testing if there's a difference in
conversions between college freshmans and high school seniors.

Hopefully someday Facebook will implement a system that can display stats on who's clicking your ads,
but until then it's all manual.
Tips & Tricks
Reducing your CPC

I've mentioned several time throughout this guide that the basis for determining your starting CPC is
absolutely ridiculous. If I was promoting "shrunken midget heads" I would need to start off my ads at
$0.35 the same as I would for "DUI lawyer". Ridiculous no? Well if you try starting it off at $0.05 you
just won't get any impressions.

So how do you get your CPC to go down? You have to improve your CTR. That's the same basic logic as
with any other CPC program. The only problem is that your ad is still being displayed to hundreds of
thousands of people who are not actively looking for what you're advertising, they just have it listed as an
interest.

The key is to target very small niches. I mentioned in the "testing and tracking" section that you should
experiment with different demographics to see what brings the best conversion, well let me emphasize
the point again because it will also be crucial to improving your CTR and in turn lowering your CPC.

In the end it all comes down to testing, whether it's targeting a smaller market or creating a more eye
catching graphic.

After a few days, you should lower your bid amount by $0.05 and gauge how it affects your impressions.
If you see that your impressions drop dramatically then bring them back up $0.01-$0.02. Do this
gradually over the next week and within two weeks depending on what niche you're catering to you can
easily have your bids as low as $0.05.

Getting your ad approved

There's a lot of debate regarding whether or not Facebook actually reviews every single ad manually. It's
more likely that they have filters in place which makes it much easier to get away with some slight
deviation from the guidelines. There is one factor that will trigger a manual review and that's if you're
advertising to people under 18. If your ad is borderline do not advertise to people less than 18 years old.
This will result in a flag on your account, and if it happens again your account may be suspended.

Landing page or direct linking

I've played with the two a lot, and from my experience landing pages are not effective with lead
campaigns. Your purpose is to get your visitor to enter their personal information to get something free.
There's no need to pre-sell them, they clicked on your ad because they want that "free trial" or they're
interested in "applying for a credit card". Take advantage of Facebook's loose policy on affiliate links
because it may not be long that they're going to enforce it.
Type of campaigns

While I'm not going to reveal the details of every lead campaign I'm running on Facebook I'll give you an
idea of what I found converts extremely well:

● Contests. It doesn't even matter what the prize is, if you tell people they can enter a contest to win
something just by entering their e-mails they won't hesitate for a second. The payouts are
generally small, around $1.00-$1.50 per lead but if you're getting a 100 leads per day at
$0.05/click you're looking at a $95 profit.
● Free games. You'll see these often especially on Neverblue Ads. They payout can be as much as
$2.50 just for the user downloading a game.
● Columbia House. As of writing this they were no longer associated with any of the affiliate
networks, but I'm positive they'll come back soon. Their offer was $25 per subscription. With
their new policy that the user only needs to buy 3 dvd within a 2 year period, it was an easy sell.
My live campaign
By now you must surely have guessed which campaign I'm going to talk about. Yes it's the Napster free trial
promotion. To reiterate in case you forgot from the previous sections or you decided to skip directly to this section,

Napster is an advertiser with Commission Junction. The offer is a $10 commission for every new user that
downloads a 7 day trial of Napster or Napster To Go. Basically during those 7 days the user has access to all of
Napster's millions of songs and can cancel at any time during those 7 days. There is one thing that I need to
mention about this offer; the user needs to have a credit card or a paypal account. The reason for that is because
they are required to create a recurring payment plan which they can cancel before the 7 days is over. As a result
you'll need to target users who are 18+.

I've been running this campaign for two days now and so far I've made $400 with $75.97 spent on advertising
which gives me a profit of $324.03. Not bad for 5 mins work if you ask me.

* Another note about Napster's affiliate program: I don't know who's in charge of submitting leads received but
they can take a really long time to appear in your CJ account. It's kind of a pain in the a** because it can make
tracking your conversions very difficult.

Below is a screenshot of my Facebook advertising account displaying stats for my campaign.

Now here's the reason why I'm not too afraid of sharing every detail with you; in addition to targeting a general
audience who likes "music", I also target users who are fans of a particular group. For example:

Free Metallica Songs

My target market here is people who's interests include "Metallica". I'm targeting a much smaller market but now
my campaign is much more focused and my CTR improves drastically because I'm giving these people what they
want.

Depending on the artist I choose I also target men or women. For example if I'm promoting Avril Lavigne I'm
going to target girls between 18-25 whereas if I'm promoting Iron Maiden would target men in 18-35. I'm sure
there's a lot of guy Avril Lavigne fans just as there are plenty of girl Metallica fans but that's the great thing about
Facebook it tells you exactly how people you're targeting with "men+metallica" vs. "women+metallica".

There are thousands of artists you can promote, so get creative. If you want to know what's hot right now go check
out MTV's top charts, or Billboard's top 100 singles chart.

Final Thoughts

The Napster offer is one of the best affiliate offers I've seen in a long time, and I'm already thinking of new ways to
promote this. Here's my next strategy:

Create a video for a popular song using images. I'm sure you've seen these on Youtube, it's just a slideshow with
images of the artist and the song playing in the background. It'll take you about 10 minutes to create this with
Windows Movie Maker.

Create an image with the words

Insert the image at the beginning and end of your video and set it to run for 3 seconds. Upload the video to
Youtube/MySpace e.t.c. and promote the video using social bookmarking.

It might seem like a lot of work, but this once you get started you'll see it takes just a few minutes to assemble these
videos. Create a few of them for different artists and let the money roll in.

I hope you enjoyed this guide and I wish you success with your Facebook campaigns.