Still can’t make any money on Facebook? Stop crying I’m here to save the day, unfortunately it must be your own fault at this point. Here’s nine reasons why you probably aren’t making buku bucks with Facebook yet.

1. You don’t do any testing. Before you go and sink $100 in to your first campaign, take the time to do some real research. Get in the habit of fine tuning your demographics and research the groups you will be targeting. A simple $10 test can tell you whether or not an offer will sink or swim (or just float even) so why not make the extra effort? Being a lazy tool will not help you in this part.

2. You set it and forget it. Facebook is not a rotisserie oven people… Your ad performance will change throughout the day much more erratically than with most services such as AdWords and TLA. Slowing down your ads during the day and pushing them during the night for instance seems to make better money. Why pay they same amount for clicks during the day if they do not convert as well? Simply lowering your CPC earlier in the day can save you a lot of money in wasted clicks but still allows for some people to click through.

3. You think you know everything. If you do, comment on why you are reading this? I would say I can make a nice buck or two on Facebook and I am still finding new quirks and trends withing Facebook Ads on a daily basis. Read all of the information you can find on Facebook’s Ad Manager and benefit from it.

4. You don’t learn from your mistakes. Any entrepreneur can tell you they have made mistakes. The difference between someone who makes it in this industry and those who don’t are the ones who learn from their (few) mistakes. It’s very easy to go from making $3,000 a day on Facebook to waking up and being $1,000 in the hole for the day because you decided not to read that e-mail about various campaigns ending. Stay sharp and don’t be discouraged by failed attempts.

5. You have no originality. Sure you can sit back and copy everyone from the ad board and probably make some money at it too. However this tactic is not only dirty and time consuming, but if you put the effort into generating your own ideas you would probably make a hell of a lot more cake. My word of advice on this one, be the leader not the follower.

6. You have no fall back strategy. Someone has copied your current Facebook campaigns and you only made $500 for the day compared to your average $2,500. What’s your next move? If you cannot answer that question and have no fall back campaigns ready, expect the money to zoom right by you. Always be prepared for the worst and know how you’re going to respond in these situations by keeping fresh ideas waiting in the wing.

7. You are not aggressive / decisive enough. When it comes down to it, you have to get your hands dirty. I can give you page after page of awesome material to help you but you are the only one who can use it. Sitting back and running your 2 ads a day will not do much if anything for you on Facebook. Change shit up and make your decisions wisely. While acting on impulse can sometimes bring you lucky money, its educated decisions that will make you long term money.

8. You are to afraid to front. The thing with making money is that most of the time you have to spend money to make it. Until you can be comfortable with the fact that you might loose every penny you throw into a campaign, you should not fuck with Facebook. The traffic moves very fast and your daily budget can rocket during the day. Point one is a great example of how to prevent loss of your cash. Facebook is one of the more volatile markets and your money can do a 360 by sun up to sun down. If you don’t have your full confidence in what your doing, you may wan to question yourself why you are doing it.

9. You ain’t got them bommmb cuts. If you have not used NeverBlueAds on Facebook you are most likely loosing out on some good money. They offer a lot of offers that are like crack on Facebook and they always have good pay out. Don’t get me wrong, there are deffinantly other networks for use on Facebook but a lot of my money comes from NBA. Shop around for different affiliate networks to see what offers they have. Chances are you will find some good offers on a number of networks that you otherwise would never have known about.

Many people seem to believe that Social Media traffic is not worth it’s weight because it doesn’t pan out over long periods of time. While Social Media traffic does flow differently, the key is learning how to retain this traffic and turn people into come back customers. Planning out your social media campaign is an important step to insuring the best possible growth.

SERPs & Search Traffic – When it comes to this category, you are looking for long term organic growth. Search engine results are not going to appear over night for your site (in most cases) so its important to stay at it. Stay active on relevant sites and work on building links back to your content. Sooner or later it will gain traction and people will start linking you. This does however imply that you took the time to create content worth linking.

RSS Subscribers – One of the best strategies for retaining social media traffic is pushing them to your RSS feed. The easier you make it to find and sign up, the better. Offer multiple options such as feed and e-mail features, as well as direction. Notice a high volume of traffic coming from a certain social media site? Throw up a welcome message reminding them to subscribe to your site.

Remember To Brand Yourself – If you are marketing a blog you are essentially selling yourself to the masses. Continue to write how you normally would and include your thoughts and persona in your post. People are reading your blog because they like something that your doing… Changing your style can push avid readers from the site. For businesses, creating a strong sense of community is your goal. Make visitors feel at home instead of making them feel like they are reading information on a faceless corporation. Become the leader in your niche by creating content that sets you apart from the rest.

Sustaining Traffic – After a while you will notice that traffic builds up and at some point becomes steady. This is a key point in time where you must make the most effort. You may be running low on ideas but making it through this hump and continuing to create content will allow continuous growth and organic link development. Constantly striving to push the bar will insure that you will always have traffic.

This should help you with some ideas if you feel stuck. Overall the biggest task is putting yourself out there for people to find. Social media can be much more than a short-term traffic boost, it comes down to knowing how you can retain the traffic.

That’s right I said it, your a tool Twitter… When Twitter came out I didn’t really see the appeal. It may seem a little pointless especially with the advanced text messaging you can do with cell phones. But of course I ended up creating an account (smmguru) and I can already tell how useful it would be to some people.

Now keep in mind that in order for Twitter to be of any use your account will have to have some level of followers… If no one is reading your tweets then you cant expect much. I only have around 30 + followers so the traffic is nothing special (about 40 hits a day.) However if you take in to account what a base of 3K followers does to your visibility, you can easily push decent traffic that also tends to convert well in terms of subscribers. The trends I’m seeing is that many see large increases in RSS subscribers when they receive visibility on Twitter.

To start off, find some people on Twitter that fit into the overall topic of your blog. In the next step you can take two very different paths:

1) You can continue to follow people relevant in your niche and keep your follow list shortened to people you actually want to see tweets from. Pick this option if you plan on using the service for something more than getting as much visibility as you can from it. This will give you visibility but your followers will be much more organic and build up slower.

2) You follow every person you can find relevant, and continue to follow everyone that they are following so on and so forth. This will totally work but it will take some time to kick in. As long as you post quality tweets the visibility of being on all of those people’s pages will draw new followers. The more people that can find you, the better your chances.

Once you have all of your followers it’s time to start pushing links. There are a number of different plugins for auto-updating your Twitter page with new posts from WordPress. There are also various Twitter clients for the iPhone, BlackBerry, Mac, and Windows desktop applications. Give it a try, chances are if you put some work in you shouldn’t have any problems.

If you have a new blog you may be facing a common problem. You got all amped up with your original idea and before you know it you are all out of ideas for posts. Chances are your blog is going to have others like it… Why not use your competition for inspiration?

AideRSS is a tool that analyzes a given RSS feed and then determines a ‘PostRank’ on the given posts in the feed. Each post will also get some other info drawn such as how many comments it had, number of Diggs, number of Tweets, and more. What this will do is give you the top performing content on the site. Go and read some of their top posts and while reading be looking for ideas that you can expand on or build on… Keep in mind your not copying them, rather looking for ideas that have not be touched upon. Staying up to date and current within your niche is also very important. Be on top of new delvelopments that may be taking place in your industry, read the news, and keep tabs on various related blogs.

Using these ideas you should be able to keep the ideas going. Another method that works is guest posting. As long as your site is of some sort worth being featured on, finding people to write a relevant post with a plug to them in it should not be too hard. Just make sure you are posting as well, after all your readers are there for your content and that’s why they come back. Your persona and view combined with the information you give is why your readers essentially do (or don’t) return.

Okay people, I managed to put together yet another post for Facebook Ads. Now you will learn about testing campaigns and how to tell whether or not you should increase your budget and let your ads loose. The most important factor in this lesson will be how much you are paid for each lead / sale for the item or w/e it is you are promoting.

The first step is to go ahead find your offers, get some ads together, and set a budget to test with. I would say $10 or $15 should be enough for you to get your feet wet… This again will be determined by the offer you are promoting and here is why: Lets say you have an offer that converts at $2.50 a lead for migraine pills and another offer that converts at $22.00 a lead for baby diapers. You get your ads set up and within an hour your test budget has been used for both campaigns and you have some data to work with. If your CPC was an average $.28 cents per click we walk away with around 35 clicks. Lets say that in each campaign, only 2 clicks converted. Offer 1 only made us $5.00 so we ended up loosing $5 on that offer. On our second offer however, those two clicks converted into $44.00, a $34 profit from a $10 test. Not bad!

If you have not figured it out yet, Facebook traffic is very finicky. You can get 100+ clicks a day and only see 1 conversion for a $3.00 lead that cost you $25+ to generate. The big tip here is TEST, TEST, TEST! I have had much more success with offers that take more to complete than simple zip-submit offers. If anyone has questions or ideas for another “MMWF” post let me know!

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.

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.