About four weeks ago I decided to try running a diet offer on Facebook and it ended up working pretty dam good. I promoted the “Pure Acai Berry” offer from NeverBlueAds that converted at $30.00 a sale. Not to shabby.

For the first five or six days I was making upwards of $750 a day. When the second week rolled around it jumped up to around $900 a day and then started to decline very fast. By the end of the third week it dropped to about $200 a day. Average spending on Facebook was around $180 a day for this offer. I woke up Friday to find my ads deactivated and a stern warning from Facebook that these offers are not to be promoted again or risk my account being disabled. After doing some scouring on my other profiles, I noticed a large number of Acai related diet ads were gone… Are they nuking these offers regardless?

The thing is I was sending all the traffic (through my affiliate url cloak) directly to the landing page of the offer. I took an hour or two to get my own landing page and domain together and I now have ads running on Facebook again. They are converting about the same but holding better throughout the day. While I have not seen high spikes in conversions, it has also not gone below $300 since Friday.

I think Facebook is just very picky when it comes to the grey area that is being “deceptive.” Granted the default landing page was a little shady lookin’ but Facebook is just as picky if not more picky than your girlfriend. I recommend to anyone who has trouble getting ads through to invest some time in making your own landing pages.

Anyone else getting anything like this? I noticed there is still an amazingly large amount of diet ads going but I think Facebook might be cracking down after that Muffin Top b.s.

In my last post about making money with Facebook I gave you guys some info about cloaking your affiliate URLs and how important it is to keeping your ads live. If Facebook notices a direct affiliate link your chances of getting your ad approved are slim to none.

I just read a post by Shoemoney about Google drastically decreasing people’s AdWords quality score for direct linking their affiliate URLs. There are hundreds of places that you can cloak affiliate URLs with short, better looking, unsuspecting links. What this all comes down to is being smart with where you are sending your traffic (if you want your CPC to remain low…) This is kind of good timing because the next Facebook money maker will be all about landing pages and how they can increase your conversions. Aside from that I am also trying to get some feedback on what people need help with when it comes to making money with Facebook so feel free to comment and ill work it in to the next post.

I would also like to hear from people on whether or not they are having any success on Facebook as I have put some decent information into these posts and anyone who reads them could easily be making some cash money.

A lot of the time you may want to promote an offer such as a nice e-mail submit that requires some type of program fulfillment in order to receive a ‘free’ gift or whatever. Chances are Facebook will not let it through so how can you slip it by them? Well, why not create an ad that would work with two different offers and then switch the link? It turns out this is a very effective way of sticking it to Facebook.

So now I’m going to get into more of the possibly “Blackhat” techniques. Chances are you already have some type of method set up for masking / redirecting links to your affiliate URLs. The key for this technique to work is you must be able to change were the link is redirected to. So using a service that you cannot change the redirection location on will be of no help to you. Best bet is to use .htaccess or your own redirect scripts.

Once again I will give you an EXAMPLE THAT WORKED 100%. I was trying to promote a simple e-mail submit car insurance offer that Facebook would simply not allow through. So, after some thinking I wrote up an add for saving money on car insurace and set my masked link to redirect to Geico’s information page. As it turns out the ad I made coincidentally worked for an offer I had. First page e-mail submit for car insurance quotes. Facebook of course approved the straight up non affiliate link to Geico and then I quickly changed the redirect from Geico to my affiliate link for the other offer.

Simple enough huh? Once again the whole idea is quite simple. All you need to do is think outside the box people and the money will jump right into your pockets.

We hear it all the time, “Social media clicks are not worth dick…” and for the most part I would agree. When it comes to Facebook, you have to keep tight tabs on your CPC rates that you run across your ads. I have done much better slashing my CPC for less impressions, but better profits. Granted you will not see as many possible clicks because you loose impressions, but if your ads are converting well and your commission is not that high, why pay Facebook’s recommended $.60 > CPC? One of the biggest things you can experiment with is your CPC and finding the right cost per click seems to be a balancing act on Facebook.

I myself like to start high and work my way back down in price to a point were I am getting decent impressions, and a much lower CPC. Lets look at this example of some ads that I am testing. You can see that Ad One has a CPC of $.30 and got 24,048 impressions for a total cost of $4.32 for 18 clicks. Now by simply raising the CPC by six cents, I got 44,372 impressions (nearly double) and 59 clicks! Yeah the total cost is more ($17.56) but its irrelevant. For this particular offer I got a 10.00% conversion rate based off this small test. At $3.75 per lead, you do the math. This in my book was a successful test, the next step is to fine tune the CPC and expand my demographic (offer permitting.)

The Bottom Line
As you can see something as small as $.06 can make a big difference on your traffic and visibility. Don’t be afraid to jump in and shake things up. The whole point of having all of the statistics is so you can fine tune your ad performance. I also want to add that the recommended CPC for those ads was up in the $0.61 range. Facebook wants your money, be smart and test before going big, before you know it you will be rocking the $1,000 limit as well.

So now that you know what you want to promote, its time to generate some ads! It seems like Facebook is getting even more strict with their ad guidelines so you may be finding it difficult to get your ads through approval. The guidelines that they operate under basically give them loopholes to block pretty much anything you send their way. Here are some quick tips to make sure your ads get through the manual approval process and save yourself some time.

1. Stay Away From Free Titles
I have found that 99% of the time if you have free in the title of your ads, they will reject it. This can however be swayed by the offer. For instance if you had a buy one get one free ad or something it would probably be okay, but pushing freebies that require program sign-ups etc. most likely wont work. Your best bet on freebies is to be direct with what they are getting, and what they need to do. Try to be more creative with your titles.

2. Don’t Use Symbols as Substitutes
This is a tip that will hopefully save some people time… It sucks waiting for a bunch of ads to be approved and then you find out they did not make it because of a little technicality. One mistake people make is they try to use symbols to cut down on their character count. For instance using “Save $ On…..” will not make it through the approval system under guideline 7 of Facebook’s policy you would need to use “Save Money On….”

“All symbols, numbers and letters must adhere to their true meaning. Symbols may not be used to substitute for words or letters for emphasis or to reduce character count.“

3. Catching on to Cloaking?
I have a feeling Facebook has a strong idea of whats going on with dev cloaking. If you are cloaking your ads for Facebook manual reviews watch your traffic closely as they are getting smart.

4. Don’t Bother With Downloads
Don’t even try putting download related ads up… I have yet to get one of the xxx’s of variations through approval. They do not allow it and even though those Zwinky toolbar offers convert so well, I don’t think we’ll be seeing them on Facebook any longer.

5. Keep Pushing Your Ads
Even if you ad did not get approved, you may still have a chance. If you ad complies with all of Facebook’s ad guidelines then keep submitting it. Once and a while I can get zip submits etc. through by resubmitting a few times. It also seems like your CPC could influence it under manual review circumstances. There has been a few times were I have done nothing but raise my CPC to $0.99 and the same exact ad that got rejected now gets approved, then I just lower it down to my normal CPC. It could be totally unrelated to the approval but I found it odd.

For the first post of ‘Make Money With Facebook’ I think it would be best to start with finding offers to promote. For this you will need to be a member of an affiliate network. As far as Facebook goes, I and many others have found that NeverBlueAds have many programs for making serious cash.

Getting Signed Up
Head over to NeverBlueAds and get your account set up, this can take a few days depending on your experience level and credentials you supply them with. Alternativly you can use other networks but for the sole purpose of not getting too confusing I will use NeverBlueAds for my examples.

Finding Promotions
Now the question I see the most of is “what are teh best programs to promote on Facebook???” The answer is simple. The targeting features on Facebook allow you to really target certain age groups well so take advantage of it. Ads that seem to convert the best are Email Submit, Zip Submit, etc, but can also be hard to get through the approval system. To be generous I will even give you a money making example: Knowing that the highest percentage of coffee drinkers are between the ages 25 and 39, you could target that age group and display ads for the Gevalia gourmet coffee club. Touting its free blender, two boxes of coffee, and stainless steel travel mugs I was making a decent profit off this just last week… It was not converting as well as I wanted it to though.

Also keep in mind that Facebook has some pretty tight guidelines and anything that involves downloads or could be considered “misleading” will have a tough time making it through approval.

I really don’t understand why Facebook has this feature… Let me paint you a picture real quick.

So last night I am going through NeverBlueAds looking for some possible promos that would work well on Facebook. NeverBlueAds has some awesome offers so it did not take long. Within 20 minuets I had my campaign set up on Facebook with 10 ads running. About three hours later the ads are approved and running. I already had 56 clicks and after checking NBA I noticed that 21 of them had converted at $3.50. Not bad!

About an hour later I was up $200 bucks and then I started to noticed my clicks die down. A quick check of the ad board brought up countless ads for the exact same promo. Within 2 1/2 hours of being approved I got swiped.

I think if Facebook wants to keep people happy (and spending their money there) they need to get rid of this retarded ad board… Whats the use of spending $500 a day in clicks with 1,000,000 ads for the same thing running against you?

When used correctly, Stumbleupon can be a great weapon in your arsenal for Social Media Marketing. Not only can it bring substansial amounts of traffic over a period of time, it converts great as well. To really maximize your Stumbling success, you have to optimize what your users are seeing once they hit that Stumble button. Keep in mind that users will click Stumble and decide in just 2-3 seconds weather or not they will stay or Stumble on to another site. Using four simple methods of optimization, you can turn your site into a Stumble machine.

Is Your Site Aesthetically Pleasing?
Our first step boils down to design. The first thing your users are going to see is the sites design and layout. The web is becoming ever more “pretty” and users are known to skip right past anything that is not appealing to them. Keep in mind accessibility, readability, and visual pleasure. Balance these three pillars and you can’t go wrong.

Tales Of Title Woes.
Your headlines and titles are also going to be one of the first things that pop out to a user (or at least they should be.) Your headline does not always have to be linkbait. Think it over and make sure it really represents your content before publishing.

Above The Fold.
It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that if a user does not see any content, they are not going to stick around. They’re pointer is right on that Stumble! button to continue on. Keep the content in view above the fold, don’t make people look to find it. They are going to quickly decide weather or not they want to invest time on your site. If you can clearly decipher content without having to scroll down your in good shape

Fish With Dynamite!
If you want a sure fire thumbs up, give the user something stimulating before the body content. Ask something thought provoking or make a statement that is sure to spark something in their minds. Master making this opening content and I can guarantee you that you will increase Stumbleupon traffic 10 fold.

It’s always been said that “Content is king,” if your page sucks and the articles are garbage you cant expect people to give it a good reaction. Take your time and make something people will want to invest their time in and you will see things change for the better.

I decided it would be a good idea to take all of the best posts and information I have read online lately and put them in one list. Keep in mind that while a lot of this information will give you great insight on making money and leveraging social media, SMM and affiliate marketing is not for everyone. Those who are creative, driven, and LIVE outside the box are those who make the buku bucks.

And now for the list:

Facebook Social Ads Command Center
Laundering your Facebook Traffic
Messing with Facebook Social Ads
Messing Facebook Social Ads - Take 2
Gaming Facebook Ads - Part 1
Gaming Facebook Ads - Part 2
5 Killer Tips for Facebook Ad Ownage | NickyCakes.com
A Killer Facebook Strategy Revealed
A Successful Campaign Revealed!
Facebook and Landing Pages?

In my experiances I have found that Facebook can be highly profitable if you are willing to put the time in. It will not take long before 100 other people are running ads that are for the same thing (even exact copies of your ads lol) so have ideas waiting in the wing.

If you can stay ahead of the game, you can make some big bucks off Facebook.

If you answered Yes, you came to the right place. One of the most underused techniques when it comes to generating traffic from Digg is comments.

Lets say you have a website you want to promote that you cant necessarily submit a bunch of posts from to hit the Digg front page. No problem! Now keep in mind that comments will send you traffic but nowhere near as much as a front page submission would generate.

Now for an example Lets say your promoting…. Netgear routers for whatever reason and your site / splog has all kinds of Netgear router information. Your first step is to pull up Google and construct a simple little query as follows: “[keyword] site:digg.com”. For us this looks like:

netgear routers site:digg.com

Okay, now as you can see from Google’s 238 results there are plenty of places to drop some comments. The next step is going to be finding pages that dont have too many comments on them. I would say a good rule of thumb is stay away from any pages that have the ‘click to see more comments’ bar as most people wont be finding your link. I have dropped links on pages with 30+ comments and still get 300+ hits a day from those pages. Its all about finding pages as close to the top of googles results as possible.

What this will insure is that not only will people browsing Digg see your links, but unsuspecting people who happen to find the Digg page from a search will also be greated with your link. The next step is to write out your comment. Simply dropping a link will not work. Try to intice people or provide them a little info on the site. In our Netgear Routers example you could use something as follows:

“Hey, this router has some major security issues. You can read about them at http://www.yournetgearblog.com and find more secure routers too!”

As you can see this idea is very simple but just requires a bit of enginuity and creativity to work well. I can tell you that if you hit terms that people are doing searches for (more than browsing Digg for) you can actualy get some very nice conversion rates. Another little hint I will let you in on is that to find these search pages keep in mind that you dont have to use pages that made the front page of Digg…

Now that you can exploit Digg comments, get out there and make some cash.

Well, after my battle of finding a good host I landed at Media Temple and have to say they are by far the best I have dealt with yet.

On a latter note, I lost everything to my blog at my other host… All 80+ posts and my 3,000 comments that I built up in the beginning of winter 07′ are gone and I am now starting from scratch.

I decided to take this as something positive and look at it as a fresh start. I created a new theme for the site and I am refreshed and ready. Focus was lost on smmguru and I think this will give me a chance to really shift the focus from the random posts I was doing with SMM thrown in, to a full SMM posting schedule.

I am also going to try and bring back some of the posts I had before that people liked… The Digg comment posts etc…