With Google seemingly becoming increasingly affiliate unfriendly more and more people are switching to Facebook for their advertising campaigns as Facebook’s growth continues at a phenomenal rate.

Not only is Facebook usually cheaper than Adwords you have the ability to laser target your ads to those most likely to be receptive to what you are selling. In the very near future Facebook is set to overtake Google as the World’s most visited website, and did you know Facebook is thought to have only a 20th of the number of advertisers Google has?

Here’s a few Facebook advertising tips to set you off on the right track.

Demographic Targeting

With Facebook it’s extremely important to ensure that you are targeting the right people. For example, there’s little point advertising a product that helps “develop a six pack” to middle aged Moms burning up their Facebook time playing Farmvile all day long. Common sense would give you an idea about who to target such a product too but there is a little trick you can use that helps you confirm your intial thoughts on your target market or explore one you know little about:

1. Type into Google your basic search term – we’ll go with “how to get a six pack”. The first site that comes up for me is wikihow, now we want to ignore that site for our testing purposes and look for a high result that is a single domain, sixpacknow.com is a good one to try.
2. Next, go to quantcast.com and paste in the domain name to bring up the demographics of people who visit that site.

You’ll see that 57% of people who visit sixpacknow.com are male with 26% aged 13-17 and 38% aged 18-34. Incidently, for our ad campiagn we’d probably want to ignore the 13-17 age group, as although they may well want a six pack they probably dont have enough money to buy the product we’re promoting.

Now there’s nothing earth shattering there but it does confirm our intial thoughts. I’m sure you can see how you could explore a niche where the target market is less predictable. To finely tune your market you could target it towards people in this category who declare an interest in going to the gym, muscle building, fitness etc either via their profile or via groups they may have joined. Now we have our target market we move on to split testing.

Split Testing Your Facebook Ads

The benefit of split testing your facebook ads can not be over emphasised. There are many different variations to test, picture, ad copy, landing page. It could soon become confusing if you try to test all of these at once, not forgetting expensive and of course we’ll need a decent sample size in order to draw conclusions. The best way I find is to split test one factor at a time.

• Make two (or three or more) ads with different pictures but the same ad copy and let them run for a while in order to see which one attracts the highest click thru rate.
• Then, choose the best performing picture and make two, three or more ads using the same picture but different ad copy. Evaluate which ad copy gets the highest click thru rate.
• Finally, choose your best performing picture with your best performing ad copy and make several ads each sending the click to different landing pages.

Of course, the number of different ads, pictures and landing pages are pretty much infinite, so you’ll have to decide for yourself when you are comfortable with your campaign.

Final Killer Facebook Advertising Tip

Once you have your demographic and ad, then test out this. In your ad headline use the words of a city or region and then select that region or city as part of your demographic settings. For example “Want To Quit Smoking In Dallas?” targeted only to people in Dallas. Using the city name catches the eye of people who live there and can lead to increased click thru rates.

If you have any comments on the above facebook advertising tips or any of your own to contribute then please leave a comment.

Socialadr is a great system for social bookmarking your sites. Social bookmarking has always been one of those things that you really ought to do, but it takes time and it’s boring. There are several automated ways of adding your sites to social bookmarking sites, but they have their drawbacks too. They are expensive, difficult to set up and since they are automated the links they generate dont look natural. With socialadr none of these factors apply.

The beauty of socialadr is that it’s an exchange system, you submit other peoples sites to your bookmark account and by doing so you earn credits. You then spend those credits as other people add your sites to their own accounts. There are currently 19 bookmarking sites in the social adr system. First, you have to sign up with each one and add log in details to your account via the set up wizard. The way the wizard is laid out makes this a simple task, and you can even leave it half way through and finish up later if you desire. It does take a little time registering with and then verifying all the sign up emails, but it only has to be done once. If that’s too much like hard work then Socialadr will do this for you, for $7.

Now you go on and share other peoples bookmarks from the share queue. When you share a bookmark you dont actually visit the site yourself or see it open in a new window. Once you have done this and the bookmarks have been submitted you’ll receive credits. When you have accumulated  8 credits it’s time to add your own sites for other people to share. Like everything else about the socialdr system adding your own sites is as simple as it could be. You can also use spinnable text which is advised, particularly for your titles. When one of your bookmarks is shared by someone else then you’ll receive an email and you can easily verify your bookmark exists by clicking on the link provided in the mail. Each morning you’ll also receive an email suggesting new bookmarks for you to share, earning you more credits.

The beauty of socialadr is that your links are being shared on accounts owned by other people. Their accounts will have been manually created from many different ips, instead of by bots so they’re less likely to be flagged as spam. The bookmarks are added over a period of days or weeks as you earn more credits, again appearing more natural and avoiding the problem of having a ton of links dumped all at once.

The only downside is there is a limit to how many times your bookmark will be shared before it is archived and cant be used again and a limit on the total number of bookmarks per month. 420 are included with the free option. If you really cant be bothered to click a couple of buttons a day then you can purchase a ‘lazy account’ which gives all the benefits previously described but without you having to do anything whatsoever. If you need more bookmarks then there are various other paid upgrade options available, with the highest one offering 300 shares of 80 different bookmarks each for a total of 6160 links per month. At $117 it’s more than I’d pay but as Socialadr state, that works out at 1.9 cents per link and you dont get much cheaper than that!

Some may say that social bookmarks are worthless links, but that’s a discussion for another day. I’d certainly recommend using the free version consistently and once you see how the system works then consider if you want to ramp things up with one of the paid options.

Click Here To Visit SocialAdr

It’s been 10 days since I joined SEO LinkVine and I think it’s fair to say the jury is still out.  I have only submitted 2 articles so far as I wanted to examine the effectiveness of SEO Link Vine before I devote a lot of time to it.

Click to Enlarge

My articles were both in very different niches – one was a quite obscure, very narrow interest article in the travel niche, the other was a fairly generic article in the Internet Marketing niche. I wanted to test if the results were markedly different. I submitted my articles on 1st and 2nd September. Both articles have been syndicated 11 times each.

By syndicated, I mean the content has been posted to 11 different blogs according to the SE Link Vine stats. In addition, the 2 articles are in the pending queue for review for syndication to 16 other SEO Link Vine, they have been that way for about 7 days though.

Sites Published On:

I have only been able to ascertain 3 websites (from linkback notifications) where my articles have been published, in all cases these were autoblogs with zero PR.

Traffic:

I have not been able to ascertain any traffic from the posts that have been published.

Inbound Links:

None of the inbound linking tools I use have picked up these links. This is really to be expected as they will take some time to show. In each case where I have discovered my content I have pinged the url to hopefully give the SE’s a little help in finding them.

Rankings:

One of my sites, the travel site, I went from no 6 to no 3 in the last 10 days. I could not put this down solely to SEO Linkvine though as I have been promoting this site quite heavily elsewhere too.

Conclusions Thus far:

• Although my content was accepted 100% in one case and 86% in the other by those who reviewed it, I expected more sites to be involved in the network and my content to be published more times than it has.
• The content has yet to be reviewed by a further 16 sites, and has been in that status for about a week. This suggests to me that quite a few of the SEO LinkVine members are inactive.
• All 3 of 22 sites I have discovered my content have been autoblogs and all with zero PR. This makes me question the authority of the sites, their likely traffic and consequently the value of any inbound links received.

A note about content available for syndication from others

I signed up one of my autoblogs (yeah I know, I’m as bad as the rest!) in the healthy eating niche to receive content from other SEO Linkvine members. I was presented with about 50 articles and was only able to use a small percentage of them. Many were spammy beyond the extreme, many hadn’t been spun to give a decent uniqueness to them and many were completely off topic. I dont want penis enlargement articles on my nutrition blog thanks very much!

So, as I said the jury is still out. In many respects it’s too early to tell the effectiveness of the system, but I think it’s fair to say I’m not holding out much promise. I have another few weeks before I get charged again, so let’s see what happens. Stay tuned for the next update!

For part 1 of my review please see SEO Link Vine Review Part 1.

For maximum reach every blog owner in whichever niche should ensure that their blog connects to their Twitter account. Once you’ve done this any blog post you make will be sent out as a tweet automatically, enabling your Twitter followers to see you’ve made a new post and entice them to visit your site to read the post in full.

There are a couple of ways of doing this, but the quickest and easiest I find is to download the twitter tools plugin, install it and activate it. Next you’ll have to configure the plug in. Up until recently you simply added your Twitter name and password and you were done. Recently though, Twitter decided to make things more complicated and change how it authenticates its users and you’ll need to obtain 4 different access codes. Follow the link included with the plug in and register your site as an application, copy and paste your consumer secret, consumer key, access token and access token secret into the relevant fields and your blog should then be connected to your Twitter account.

At this point you might want to configure the plug in to use bit.ly. Bit.ly is a url shortening service and will ensure that your limited character tweet is not comprised mainly of the long natural url of your post, you can also view the number of clicks on each link via the bit.ly interface if you desire.

You also should consider adding the tweet meme plug in, this is the utility that adds the tweet button you see at the top right of each post, it also provides a live count of how many times your post has been retweeted. Your blog visitors can then retweet your post to their own twitter accounts with a single click and help syndicate your content further.

This is the first of several entries which aims to monitor the performance of SEO Link Vine and evaluate it’s use as an Internet Marketing tool. Unlike, many others I actually buy the products I review and if it turns out to be a pile of crap I’ll certainly tell you it is.

Last night I attended a webinar where SEO Link Vine was being presented by Brad Callen. I was suitably impressed by the presentation and decided to buy the product. You are probably like me in that you may have bought lots of products only to be disappointed. Many I’ve found are complete rubbish; tired old methods and wild exaggerated claims that you’ll be making $25,000 a month in a few weeks time. Those type of products really annoy me and I have no hesitation in requesting a refund (and kick myself for falling for them in the first place) – after all the seller always uses the refund option as a sales point, so I’m more than happy to take advantage of it. Once in a while though, you come across a product that you really believe will be a powerful weapon in your affiliate marketing arsenal and SEO Link Vine is one such product.

The basic premise of SEO Link Vine is that you submit content and it is distributed among a network of blogs with links intact. If you didn’t already know inbound links are the foundation of a sucessful site, not only in terms of traffic they bring, but more importantly to increase your search engine positions and bring you highly targeted traffic. The system also allows you to receive free content to your own blogs. I didn’t really subscribe for that but it’s a ‘nice to have’ and will try it out and report back.

SEO Link Vine Members Area

So, I logged in to the interface today and it’s clear and easy to use. I watched the instructional videos which were brief, well presented and easy to understand. In fact the whole system is so easy the proverbial kid could use it. I chose an article I had already previously submitted to article directories and copy and pasted it in to the editor. The editor looks very much like the one you see with wordpress, so is very familiar.

It is essential that you use the spin function so that you end up with a large number of articles that each have different text. Make sure you also spin both the title and the anchor text for your links. Spinning is basically word replacement – so instead of saying “I bought 4 large apples today” you might instead say “I purchased 4 big apples this morning” the meaning is the same but the words used are very different. With clever use of the SEO Link Vine spinner you can produce an almost infinte number of articles, each one of which would qualify as unique content.

Why is unique content important you may ask, there are a couple of reasons:

1. While I understand that the Google duplicate content penalty is a myth there is no doubt that 20 articles with unique text on 20 different websites will produce much better results than the same single article on 20 different websites.
2. The members of SEO Link Vine want unique content for their sites, you will see far more people publish your content (and give you backlinks) if you take the time to ensure each is unique.

I span my article to achieve a 60% uniqueness which is pretty high. I have to admit it took me about an hour, but this included getting used to the system and reviewing the videos, but now I have a virtually never ending supply of variations for that particular piece of content which I can use in many different ways. I submitted the article which can take 48 hours to be distributed. I also added a blog of my own to receive content, I’ll update you on progress on both of these in due course.

A few extra tips:

• Now that I have an almost infinite number of articles I can simply press the spin button and use the spun article straight off as fresh unique content for a satellite site such as those at hubpages, squidoo, weebly etc. which of course will link back to the site I aim to promote.
• I embedded a youtube video within the post. Not only does this increase the attractiveness of the post to publishers and make them more likely to publish it, it gets my url some extra publicity since the video is watermarked with my site. It will also increases the views of my youtube video, help it rise in youtube’s own search rankings and enable it to reach the threshold for revenue sharing more quickly, giving me extra income.

So to recap, any piece of content you write can be submitted to SEO Linkvine, spun and submitted to multiple blogs giving you valuable links back. You can then use that spun content on third party sites to give you even more links back to your site. In these early stages I’m confident that the system will prove useful, time will tell.

If you’re promoting a product or service then you’ll most likely want a domain name that accurately reflects the nature of your site. Not only is this useful for potential visitors it’s also extremely valuable in helping get your site ranked well. The very best domains are those that contain the exact words that people are searching for, known as exact keyword domains. Here’s a quick and easy way of grabbing a few ideas on how to start in looking for an exact keyword domain.

Let’s say you want to make a site that sells umbrellas, it’s a bit of a silly one but it’s just to demonstrate the principle. First head on over to the adwords keyword tool or any other keyword tool of your choosing and type in your search term “umbrellas”. The tool will throw back 100 of the most popular umbrellas related search terms, which you can then order by the greatest number of searches to the fewest. In this example I see patio umbrellas, beach umbrellas, market umbrellas, garden umbrellas etc etc.

Now either export the list or copy and paste it into a text editor, then you want to strip out all the numbers so your just left with the search terms on their own. This is a little laborious but once you get going it doesn’t take long. If you want to download the file I made on umbrellas just to test this out then here it is.

Ok now you have your list of keywords head on over to Godaddy’s bulk registration tool paste in your list. Choose the extensions you may be interested in and click search (I only consider .com, .net and .org in that order I steer well clear of .info’s and .biz etc.) You’ll see a ton of unavailable domains in red, scroll past these and you’ll notice those that are available. In this particular run there were a few that might be worth a look:
LADIESUMBRELLA.NET
WEDDINGUMBRELLA.ORG
SMALLUMBRELLA.NET
LARGEUMBRELLAS.ORG
LADIESUMBRELLAS.NET
BUYUMBRELLA.ORG

Here’s the full list of what was available at the time of searching.

All of these might be useful for affiliate marketing microniche sites, but their usefulness and potential for income will depend on three other factors.

• How many people are actually searching for those terms?
• What is the competition for those search terms?
• Can I, as an affiliate, make money from it?

In future posts I’ll be looking at each of those criteria in more depth, using the umbrella domains we’ve already determined are available to register.