The Lazy Stoner

Hey whats up everybody I just thought I’d swing through quick with some quick tips for affiliate marketing on Facebook and other social networks. If you don’t know what CPA offers are or what affiliate marketing is, I’ll have some resources up on that shortly.

So now lets get started. First of all, lets talk about Facebook. Facebook is currently the 5th most visited site on the Internet, and receives nearly as many daily page views as Google. Of course this is important as we will be advertising different things. You won’t make any money if there’s nobody there to see your ads! Aside from being an insanely huge website, Facebook is also a social network. If you’ve never used a social network before, they are essentially sites that allow users to connect with their friends, make new ones, create groups and events, and upload photos, among many other activities. The importance of these sites is that each of them have unique viral channels which can be leveraged for marketing purposes. A great example of this would be Facebook’s ‘Share Link’ option, which probably 99.9% of Facebook members legitimately use to send stupid/entertaining/whatever websites they stumble across to their friends. The .1% or so of Facebook users who are Internet Marketers know these viral features can be used to generate massive amounts of traffic when you promote your own websites to large networks of Friends. There are of course many more viral channels on these sites, and Facebook is only one of them. The point is, is that social networks can be an Internet Marketers paradise, if they are properly utilized.

Then it got better! Facebook started their own advertising network, allowing users to create their own targeted CPC ad campaigns on the site. The only problem was that it was damn near impossible to get an ad people would click approved, nobody clicks the ads, and most offers didn’t stand a chance at converting.

There was of course some success there, but by and large many people tried the network out didn’t see any profits right off the bat, and jumped ship. Lot’s of people these days will say stuff like ‘Facebook traffic doesn’t convert’ or ‘Myspace is done, the glory days are gone’ and give up. WHY?!?  It’s not like theres a shortage of traffic on these sites. Facebook is the 5th most active website in the world! The problem is that these people haven’t figured out how to harness it yet, either that or things are different from when they had success with these sites before, and they don’t want to re-learn.

Anyway, this is where it gets good, so listen up. Around the time Facebook started running it’s ad network they also launched the Application platform, where developers could create games and interactive widgets within Facebook and let members use them too. Now here is the key point right here. Hopefully this can give you some kind of indication as to how huge Facebook is.

To incentivize developers to make applications for their platform, Facebook allowed them to monetize their creations. Because the platform is used by over 100 million people actively, this of course presented a huge opportunity to developers to make a lot of money advertising to Facebook’s users. In turn, this spawned the creation of FB/social network-specific advertising agencies. This move also forced the other competing social networks (Myspace, Bebo, Friendster, etc) to open up their APIs to developers as well, which caused the advertising companies to migrate there as well as Facebook.

The result is TRULY an affiliate marketer’s DREAM COME TRUE! What we are left with after this all played out, is a plethora of social network-specific ad networks to run your CPC campaigns on, and many of them really are worth your time and money. 

You have the ability to go to a network’s site, choose which of the 5-7 sites most networks support to show your ads on, target by location, gender, and age. Now you can take it even a step farther if you know a bit about the demographics of each social network. For example, say you have a Crush offer that’s good in the UK. Now obviously Crush offers perform better on females than males, and you’ll probably want to target the 13-18 age group, but because you can target locations on any of the social networks you can choose to run your ad on, how do you really know which sites to choose? Well if you knew about Bebo at all, you would know that it is insanely popular in the UK. Bebo is also a site that is targeted at a ‘younger’ audience who are more interested/dumb enough to complete these offers versus a site with older users.

I suppose I should also say a bit more about Crush/IQ offers too, since they’re in the title and I really haven’t said much about them at all yet. I guess there really isn’t much to say anyways… The bottom line is, these offers are converting like crazy right now and the opportunity to advertise them on applications via the social network-specific networks is just a beautiful thing. If you like making money, give this a shot, you can send me a Thank You note on a $100 bill when you’re done

Check out this great video on how to quickly and easily build your Friend networks on Facebook. Facebook is a very powerful source of traffic… if you know how to use it. Check out the upcoming series FB Guru will be releasing, I’ll be sure to do a review when it’s out.

OK, so if you have any experience selling virtual goods or ‘electronic items’ as Paypal employees refer to them, then this article is for you. I’ve been ripped off by people abusing Paypal’s policies on various occasions, and it sucks.

Well here’s one way you can protect yourself. Since Paypal offers no protection for sellers on digital goods, simply include something tangible with your purchases. Now, this isn’t something you’d want to do with with a cheaper product, it’s gotta be worth your while. Especially since I’m sure most of you don’t have a Fedex truck on call for everytime you sell a product. At least, that’s how I do it. In my last few larger product releases, I’ve included a small bound book with each purchase. The books were never really anything more than 15-25 or so pages of mumbo jumbo I’d type up quick a day or so before launch and bound with plastic binders, but they served a purpose. You see, many of the products I release cost between several hundred and several thousand dollars, so when I sell somebody something and they get my extremely high quality products that I’ve worked hard on for the past 2-57 weeks, I want to make sure I can hold on to that money.  Unfortunately, it’s quite easy for a buyer to get their money refunded back into their account after purchasing a digital item through Paypal. I won’t go into details because I don’t want to help someone scam anybody, but it basically just depends on how you approach the situation. Disputes can usually be won pretty easily, but Paypal people are fuckin wacky, so you never know what to expect from them. If it’s a bank or credit card chargeback though, forget it, your money is gone.

Anyway, the point is, is that if you include physical merchandise with your digital goods, like a book or some stuff, and can provide proof that you mailed it to Paypal, than in most situations you have nothing to worry about. I’m talking, even like some 3-page stapled together shit with newspaper letters glued together to spell out a message or something, mail it!

Now as I was saying, this doesn’t apply to all products. If you’re selling something for $12 or $27 then you certainly don’t want to be spending $1-$15 to mail the product, depending on where they live. I would only do this on products costing above $500 or so I think, maybe a bit less.