I’m so excited about how our Facebook Advertising campaigns have been going! I really think Facebook Ads represents the greatest opportunity for generating targeted traffic to your site or Facebook Fan Page of anything that has come along since pay-per-click search advertising on Google and Yahoo. Facebook really represents the next wave of almost limitless ad inventory for national advertisers, affiliate marketers, and small businesses due to their staggering reach. Really anyone can promote anything at all through Facebook Ads and get their ads in front of a very targeted audience.

The main reason Facebook is such a great advertising platform is the targeting is so good. For example, if you are selling baby toys, you can target only women, between the ages of 25-40, that are fans of Toys R Us, Huggies, or another “interest” that would imply they have small children. Another example might be you are trying to acquire targeted fans for your Facebook fan page which is a bar or nightclub, so you can target men and women, between the ages of 21-35, that live in particular zip codes surrounding the location of the bar or club, which is great for local businesses because you know your ads will only be seen in a local area. Another really cool aspect is that you can see exactly how many possible people your ads will be exposed to when choosing your targeting options. With the ability to target “likes” and “interests” of people on Facebook there really is a limitless amount of ad inventory you can go after to see if it converts into sales or leads for you.

Facebook Ads gives you the opportunity to try various images, titles, and descriptions, which means you have to continuously “tweak” you ads to get the highest click-through (CTR) and conversion rate for your ad dollars. That’s the nice thing actually, you can try various ad elements to get your best possible combination of all three elements. You should definitely use some kind of tracking system of some sort to measure the return-on-investment (ROI) of your various campaigns and ads themselves.

Facebook Ad campaigns can be run on either a cost-per-click (CPC) or a cost-per-impression (CPM - per 1000 ad impressions). CPC is a flat cost-per-click for everyone that actually clicks on your ad or “likes” your fan page. Cost-per-impression will charge you a certain amount for every thousand ad impressions you receive, which can actually work out better than a CPC in some instances. What’s nice is they show you what your campaign is working out to on a CPC and CPM basis so you can see which you want to run on.

While targeted pay-per-click search traffic from Google and Yahoo is still the best way to send relevant paid traffic your site, Facebook Advertising is the next huge wave of online ad inventory that can be leveraged to drive in customers and fans. If you aren’t using this platform you absolutely should. If you are interested in have a good, competent outsourced social media company handle it for you email: evan at experienceadvertising.com. Thanks and happy advertising!

Social Media Marketing 2010 - Harnessing the Viral Powers of Social Networks - is being put on by my good friend Murray Newlands this year in London on the 17th of June.

The event comprises a one day conference filled with some of the finest social media experts including: Chris Brogan & Brian Solis (via video), Mat Morrison, Andrew Walker, Charlie Osmond, Richard Sedley, Murray Newlands, Luke Brynley-Jones, Sue Keogh and Nadeem Azam who will be answering your questions. You can follow the conference on twitter at #SMMUK10.

Murray Newlands event co organizer director, Influence People renowned blogger and social media consultant, said “…so you will have had your ears burned over the last few years with people talking about how great social media is, well this event is for people actually doing social media. We have asked all our speakers to provide in-depth case studies to ensure they have quantitative and qualitative stories to tell. It is important to ensure participants leave the day having learned much more about running successful social media marketing campaigns than they knew before, plus making some good connections.

Register now with the discount code Costpernews and get 10% off: www.socialmediamarketing.co.uk

If you cannot make it to the UK Murray will be one of the speakers in Miami at the Performance Marketing Expo.

I’m always trying to stay on the cutting-edge of the online marketing world. Here are 5 amazing companies that I think are a no-brainer to work with. Make sure to tell them Evan sent you!

500Friends - Allows retailers to integrate social sharing features into their checkout process, which facilitates and increases sharing and viral exposure.
Contact: Justin Yoshimura
www.500friends.com
(510) 817 4068 Office
justin@500friends.com

SocialFeet - This is a brilliant post-transactional social sharing function merchants can plug into their site to ratchet-up the social sharing and viral exposure.
Contact: Michael A Gunn
www.SocialFeet.com
mGunn@SocialFeet.com
Direct: 847-496-7810
Cell: 847-977-4928

BrandVerity - Protects your trademarks and urls from brand-poaching in the search engines. Invaluable resource to protect company’s ROI.
Contact: Van Chappell
BrandVerity
VP Sales
206.384.1746
van.chappell@brandverity.com

eReleases.com - This is the #1 Online Press Release service you can use. Excellent for SEO and PR. Blows away PRweb in my opinion. I personally have been using it for 6 months and it rocks!
Visit http://www.ereleases.com and use coupon code EXP-75 to save $75 off you press release.

HasOffers.com - HasOffer is an amazing piece of software for running your own affiliate network with multiple Advertisers or just for your own site. You can use it for your internal online campaign tracking as well which is nice.
Sign for HasOffers Here.

Thanks for checking out these great companies…Be sure to tell them Evan sent you!

Have a great day!

Are you are looking to establish and build a winning presence in the social space for your company, but don’t have the time or know-how? You should check out Interactive Agency Experience Advertising. They take a very pro-active approach to building out each company’s social media presence with good content, as well as handle it in a very professional way. They offer proactive, effective social media management services for both large and small companies. Here is a break-down of the affiliate management services they offer:

- Complete set-up on 20+ major social networks including Twitter and Facebook Fan Page
- Completely takeover and manage existing social networking accounts
- Daily unique content updates to social networking accounts (including: tips, great articles, company news, promotions, surveys)
- Friendly interactions with Followers and Fans on behalf of the company
- Alerting company when there is a customer service question or issue to be handled
- Running creative, exciting contest and promotions to user-base
- Establishing Blog and Social bookmarking articles and content from company website
- Strategizing with company to better integrate and promote social networking to customers and visitors
- Implement revenue generating and customer retention strategies

If you are looking to ramp up and grow your social media strategy for your company be sure to check them out.

Having great social media management in place is absolute must for any company with an online presence in this day and age. Have a really comprehensive and proactive strategy for leveraging social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook is vital to keeping up with your competitors. There are many good reason to have excellent social media managers in place including:
- Posting frequent, valuable content to your followers and fans
- Increased interaction with customers and visitors
- Capturing more site visitors and facilitating interactions
- Providing better, faster customer service
- Generating more search traffic from your social media postings
- Conducting surveys and generating valuable feedback from your customers and followers

There are many other excellent benefits to have social media managers in place. Don’t settle for less than decent social media management. Your social managers should be extremely proactive, responsive, and engaging in order to do it truly effectively. Make sure to check out Experience Advertising for your best social media management solution.

I wanted to let you all know about Experience Advertising’s new affiliate management client: pingg.com.

Just in time for the holidays, this service allows you to send ad-free
custom designed / branded eCards to your customers, suppliers etc… it also includes a branded eCard web site where you can post interactive content like photos and videos, and integrate your twitter stream etc…it’s really freakin cool. You should check it out.

I know a few people traditionally find eCards cheesy, but this is done *right*! Save a few trees, time and money, and check it out here.

Their affiliate program is available through the CJ affiliate network: https://signup.cj.com/member/brandedPublisherSignUp.do?air_refmerchantid=2838046

Thank you,
Evan

These days, it seems like everyone’s either talking about how social media is the next big thing in affiliate marketing, or they’re talking about how social media just doesn’t work for traditional affiliate promotions. As a result, most of us have probably given it a try at some point. Maybe we throw together a couple of Squidoo lenses, maybe we dabble at Yahoo! Answers, or maybe we submit a few things to Digg and see if anything sticks. Regardless, most of us don’t have a clear plan and we’re not giving much thought to how social media might be different from normal ad-driven traffic.

First off, let me say this – you definitely can get affiliate sales by brute force on social media. If you blindly spam enough people and get them to your landing page, someone is bound to buy. To succeed without getting yourself banned on a daily basis, though, you’ll need a different strategy.

Frequently, you’ll hear guys like Gary Vaynerchuk and Chris Brogan talking about how the key to social media success is building relationships and fostering trust. That’s great for them, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that strategy.

The problem with relationship building is that it’s very time consuming. Those guys are heavily invested in a single area of expertise, so it makes a lot of sense for them to go all out with relationship building. What if you want to drive leads to a health insurance offer, though? Do you really want to spend months or years getting to know people and convincing them that you’re an expert? Do people even want to build relationships with an “insurance shopping expert”?

Luckily, there is another way to do things. Let’s take a moment to think about the typical mindset of someone visiting a social media site. Most of the time, they’re focused on either entertainment or getting some kind of specific information. Although people know that ads are a “necessary evil”, they generally don’t take kindly to blatantly commercial messages intruding on the areas of sites that are perceived as being ad-free (namely, in the user-generated portions of the content).

If someone is looking for tips on losing weight, they don’t want to see an shallow answer that refers them to a landing page for acai berry supplements. If they see a link labeled “The Best Way to Lower Your Auto Insurance”, they don’t want to be directed to a page for insurance quotes. If you take that approach, your accounts are going to get flagged, your content will get thumbed down or buried, and you’re probably going to spend more time trying to make sure your contributions stay up than doing anything else.

None of that means that it’s impossible to submit advertisements to social media and get the support of the community, though. What you need to do is find a way to make your message valuable to the user while still maintaining the commercial thrust. A couple of examples that you can run with or build on today:

Auto Insurance - Instead of sending users to an auto insurance landing page, make a list of auto insurance companies you work with and then do a little research about each one. Which states do they work with? What kinds of discounts do they offer? Who offers online bill-pay? Write it up as a one-page guide and then insert your affiliate link beside each company.

If you use promote insurance quote services, do the same kind of thing. Call them up and find out who they offer quotes for, what kind of privacy protection is in place, how long they’ve been in business, etc. You’re delivering real value and you’re going to be much more likely to gain the trust of your users this way.

Weight Loss Supplements – Yes, there are honest ways to promote them. Skip the flogs and instead try piecing together a brief 3 or 4 week action plan that your visitors could use. Make sure it combines exercise and healthy meals along with the supplement you hope to promote, and be sure to make it clear that you’re just a fitness enthusiast – not a doctor, trainer, or nutritionist. Sure, not many people are likely to follow through with your plan – but that doesn’t mean they won’t like the idea of taking the supplement to boost their usual regimen of Diet Coke, Doritos, and couch-warming.

Dating – Pick your niche and then thoroughly investigate the alternatives. Instead of pretending to be a real girl or just pushing users to the landing page, try creating a page that talks seriously about the benefits. I’m not saying you should make a review page – in fact, it’s best not to pass judgment unless it’s to say which ones are best for different types of people. Talk about privacy options, the number of people in different age groups, and the overall feel of the site. Is one better for older daters while another caters to the college and early 20-something crowd?

You could also take the approach of making a quiz that determines which dating site is best for you based on your personality. That way, it’s not only fun but it has some viral potential when people post the results to their profiles, too.

Basically, the idea here is to create the kind of page you’d want to browse. You don’t have to fill a site with 80 articles to add value when it comes to social media – a single page that fills someone’s need will do the trick.

The Murray Newlands Fan Page is a resource for affiliate marketing and social media innovation, as well as a great place to find other people who are doing just what you are- growing an online presence. Beginning this week is the End of Summer, Murray Newlands Facebook Fan Page Competition.
By becoming a Fan at the Murray Newlands Fan Page you will have access to great affiliate and social media information- The MurrayNewlands.com blog, the @MurrayNewlands twitter feed, conference recaps and photos and other resources.

But what about the competition? It’s a way to have fun and grow the community! The two best things about Facebook in the first place. (And you can win $100!)
With that, here is how you enter the End of Summer Murray Newlands Facebook Fan Page Competition.
What: End of Summer, Murray Newlands Facebook Fan Page Competition
Who: You
Where: MurrayNewlands Facebook Fan Page
Why: For that one last bit of creativity at the end of summer! (and to win $100)
How: To with the $100 prize, show how creative you can be at recruiting people to the Murray Newlands Fan Page!

Here is how you enter the Facebook Competition :
1. Become a Fan of the MurrayNewlands Facebook Fan Page and invite ALL your Facebook friends to join.
2. Tweet this message: “I signed up for the @MurrayNewlands Facebook Comp – $100 prize! Sign up @ http://tr.im/wGym Plz RT”
3. Post it to your Facebook Wall.
So how do you win the Facebook Competition?
The Facebook competition winner will be chosen at random on the 30 August 2009 by Murray Newlands. No purchase necessary. Murray Newlands’ decision is final and the rules are by his discretion. You must be able to take payment by paypal.

Anyone that knows me knows that I am a voracious networker and have been so since getting into the Internet marketing industry in late 2001. You don’t get 3000 Plaxo and 1500 LinkedIn connections by sitting on your fanny doing nothing! So, I decided to put together a list of some of the things I like to do to build my social networks and actual generate business and friendships from them.

1. Be Friendly, Out-going, Respond, and Retweet - Social media has forced people to network with each other, but I still don’t see much actual interaction. I mainly see people promoting themselves, which is fine, but doesn’t really build lasting bonds or generate business. Make sure to reply to your connection’s “status updates” and retweet stuff you find interesting. Reach out to your connections and try to find common ground for working together. Try to actually help your connections in some way by possibly connecting them with someone you know or a valuable resource…it goes a long way.

2. Use Ping.fm - I absolutely love Ping.fm for broadcasting my messages out on all my social networks at once. It makes it easy to update your “Status” everywhere in one motion. What I have noticed is an increase in the responses from my connections to the messages I’m broadcasting since using this wonderful tool.

3. TweetDeck – This is a great desktop based application that allows you to really keep on top of your Twitter account and what’s going on. This will allow you to interact and respond more actively, and overall manage your Twitter account better.

4. Invite – you can’t build your network unless you invite anyone and everyone you know to connect with you. Most social networks have an invite from address book feature….use it!

5. Start Your own Social Network – Use Ning.com to set-up your own social network, so you can start conquering the Internet and building your own social network. It’s really cool and easy.

These are but a few ideas for making you more productive with Social Networking. Let me know if you have any questions and I will help you out.

Famous People on Twitter are changing the way Marketing on Twitter works. Twitter is one of the newest social media networks around, so there are few established rules or standards as far as marketing in general, and some social media purists argue that marketing has not place on Twitter at all. From the looks of it, marketing on Twitter isn’t going anywhere- and neither are famous people on Twitter.

Famous people on Twitter seem to have the same magical influence over their Follower base that they have over every other kind of media- public fascination. Ashton Kutcher’s @aplusk profile is the ideal example of this. After his much publicized race with CNN to 1 million Followers he then skyrocketed to over 2 million just 6 weeks later. 6 weeks! Celebrities use Twitter however they want to- just the other day @aplusk tweeted (to his 2 million + Followers) that his friend was writing a book and could really use some feedback on the first chapter. I don’t know the numbers, but if even ½ of 1% of those Followers clicked through to the book, that’s 1000 people looking at a book they probably wouldn’t have otherwise heard of.

Social media does beg a different marketing approach, and the presence of famous people on Twitter has both profound and under-the-radar effects on Twitter marketing. The presence of famous people on Twitter and how they use the micro-blogging service exerts an influence over the etiquette, the approach and the metrics of Twitter Marketing.

Here’s how Famous People on Twitter Influece Twitter Marketing:

1. Tone- Famous People on Twitter utilize the personal tone that is the calling card of Twitter. On any other media platform, their relationship with the general public is carefully scripted. Twitter’s essence is real-time, personal connection, and that changes how famous people on Twitter interact with their Followers, leading to an expected tone with marketers. Marketing messages on any media are traditionally scripted as well, refined to get attention and evoke a call to action These kinds of messages on Twitter are not as effective. Top-down entertainment doesn’t work, and neither does top-down marketing. If famous Twitterers can teach us anything about tone it’s that there is power in the personal.

2. Personality and Trust- Famous People on Twitter have large numbers of “Followers” just because they are already famous. That’s just how it is- they are celebrities. As I have said, Twitter is based on personal interaction- old marketing techniques and a lot of newer online marketing is premised on delivering a message TO people. While there have always been spokespeople or brand representatives, never before has there been such an emphasis on personal reputation and trust- what Chris Brogan called “Trust Agents.” Marketers on Twitter represent themselves and a group of products rather than the product in a group of people. Personal branding people and bloggers utilize strong personal branding abilities to grow their own Follower base- they themselves become famous people on Twitter by using Twitter effectively.

3. Conversation- People on Twitter expect conversations and respond to them positively- even @aplusk or @THE_REAL_SHAQ are talking to people they probably haven’t met in person. Most messages in traditional marketing have been one-way and top-down. Again, just as famous people on Twitter interacting with people who aren’t famous and breaks the content delivery mode of traditional entertainment, so is the normalizing of conversation on Twitter challenging marketers to change the traditional content delivery mode of marketing.

My own blog competition has seen a lot of traffic from even semi famous people on twitter tweeting about it to try and get votes. And as Twitter continues to grow, the influence of what one trusted person has to say will only grow.
The personal nature of Twitter is changing how we view our relationships with famous people on Twitter, and that changes the way people expect marketers to act and interact on Twitter.

Guest post: Murray Newlands works in affiliate marketing and affiliate management. You can find out more about him at www.MurrayNewlands.com.

Can you write decently? Do you want to earn some extra cash this month? We are running a LinkedIn affiliate group contest this month for the best articles on the affiliate marketing industry! Here are the rules:
- Article must be 100% original and not currently on the Internet
- Article must be about the affiliate industry and not about your company
- Article must be 350-500 words
- Permission granted to publish the article on CostPerNews.com. All submissions will be published on the site.

Prize Money:
- $500 for the best article (judged by me)
- $200 for Second place
- $100 for 3rd, 4th, and 5th place

If you are interested in possibly earning some extra money this month start writing your article and send it to me. Get cracking!

Let me know your thoughts!

Email me at: evan “at” costpernews “dot” com

Everyone knows social media is on fire right now, but how leverage it for affiliate marketing seems to be up in the air. There are so many social networks out there it’s hard to know where to start. Using an effective social media strategy for promoting your own sites is a great way to increase traffic and build followers and friends. By building up your friends and followers on social media networks you will have more people to broadcast your messages to and more people to interact with. Once you starting building up your friends and followers you are well on your way to promoting via social media. Another thing you can do is add “follow me on Twitter” logos and icons to your websites/blogs, so people will do so. You can also add it to your email signature to futher build your friends and followers. If you would like to read a more in-depth social media guide for affiliate marketing click here.