Facebook Advertising Tips & Strategies

 

I just completed my two weeks experiment with facebook advertising. As I did not manage to get a Facebook ad coupon, I prepared myself to spend money from my pocket but at the end of it I was not too excited about the outcome.
What I tried to do with the facebook ad was to kind of promote my affiliate links without making it sound like one. In the process, I also figured out that Facebook advertising is not meant for direct sales or affiliate marketing but more a mechanism to build your brand. The following are my findings based on which you can derive your advertising strategy as well.

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Facebook Advertising Basics

Advertisement on Facebook essentially refers to the the campaign that targets facebook profiles (users). These ad blocks – a picture, a heading and short description text underneath – appear on the right side panel of the targeted facebook pages.
One can easily kick start with a Facebook advertisement by just uploading an image (standard image size for Facebook ad is 110 x 80 pixels), and adding a heading and description of your ad. You have to provide a Credit Card number up front and there is no support for paying via PayPal etc.
However, it takes 10-12 hours (sometimes even a day) before your facebook ad is approved! This is something that they need to really improve. Basically, the image approval process is what takes time. They will make sure that the image that you uploaded is very relevant to your advertised product, do not contain rated stuff and also not violating any copyrighted, trademark protected product or service. In addition, they are very strict on the rated stuff itself – perhaps even stricter than PG13 norms. For example, the % of skin that can be shown on the image is highly restricted – even if it’s a (normally) publicly exposed part of the body like face or hand. The approval process is really the biggest disappointment and it is nowhere near to the satisfaction levels of Google AdWords campaign for example.
There is a possibility for you to pay for impressions (CPM) or clicks (CPC).

Good and Bad about Facebook advertising

I targeted my Facebook ad for the US region alone and for the grown up audience. After a couple of rejections, finally my ad got approved and as of today it has created 1617 impressions in the US and absolutely no clicks. Fortunately, I opted for the Pay-Per-Click model and hence no money spent on it so far.
So what’s good and bad about facebook ads?

Advantages

• Facebook allows your ads to be targeted at very specific audience (As their punchline goes ‘Reach your exact audience and connect real customers to your business’). For example, it is possible for you to target all male audiences with a particular hobby, in a particular age group from a particular state in the US or any other country with your facebook ad
• Simple and easy to use ad design screen
• Allows CPC and CPM models
• Extremely good for brand building at a very low cost
• May be suitable for building on your fan pages etc for low cost
• Facebook has overtaken Google in terms of traffic and hence you can create millions of impressions in a matter of seconds

Disadvantages

In fact, I found that the Facebook advertising solution has a lot more shortcomings than plus points and here are some of them:

• Only one type of ad blocks – There are no different sizes and shapes of ads. Also they appear only on the side panel and not in content
• Limited keywords: Though ad serving is done based on the profiles there’s an additional possibility of keyword based filtering. In Facebook ads, this is done as tag filtering but there’re only very limited number of tags
• Low CTR – Click-through-rate is very bad mainly due to poor ad visibility
• Very slow approval process
• Ad tracking & reporting modules are not up to the mark
• CPC costing and pricing functionality is not there – basically we do not get a feel of how much should we pay for a click

Tips for Facebook advertising

Overall, I got a feeling that the Facebook Advertising is still an immature product that they still continue to experiment. However, it is still a reasonably good ad medium for certain type of advertising. The following are my general guidance to those who want to experiment with facebook ads.

• Use it more for indirect marketing (like building patronage or fan base). You may keep running it permanently on a lower CPC basis and that works out really cheap
• Never opt for CPM (Paid per impressions) model initially
• Use it a mechanism to highlight your brand via the image
• You might want to keep experimenting with tags based on targeted audience’ hobbies and tastes
• Start with a restricted audience (e.g. age group, sex, location, marital status etc) and then slowly broaden the scope

And the best thing really is to build your brand and patronage with a nicely built Facebook fan page (Read facebook fan page create).

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SEO – Link Building Series: Backlink Building Methods

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   A couple of posts ago, we saw how internal linking and optimization can be done within your blog or website in order to improve reach and thereby help Search Engine (SE) bots to crawl and link relevant pages. Now, it’s time to learn about various link building techniques in order to obtain a lot of backlinks to your blog (This topic could be boring to those who have read it 100 times elsewhere). As we understood sometime back, no ‘nofollow’ backlinks with relevant keywords in the anchor text will boost the search engine rankings of your pages.

Ways to build your Backlinks

#1 Blogroll & Link exchanges: This is the most common way of building links whereby on mutual consent the links are exchanged using the blog roll space. This is also less spammy in nature and sometimes will do the role of advertising for your blog.










#2 Link love: This is not exactly my way of link building but there are a lot of people who give and take love with no nofollow references to each others’ posts. If you link to and from relevant posts, it is actually beneficial to both the parties. There are people who regularly publish link love posts.
#3 Directory submission: You can submit your blog URL to directory services some of which provide dofollow listing. In most cases, relevant front page listings come at a cost.
#4 Blog commenting: Blog commenting on dofollow blogs is a great way to improve your inbound links. In addition, if the blog supports a top commentator, commentluv, keywordluv plugins, it can improve your chances of getting dofollow links from more relevant sources.
#5 Forum posting: Many forums these days provide dofollow links via post signatures of signed up users. Though the link strength of forum backlinks are relatively weak, a number of them will always be of help. Please read my article titled High PR forums to help popularize your blog for more information on this method of building backlinks.
#6 Guest posting: Guest posting on popular blogs will not only build one or two relevant links to your blog but also attract some traffic, get some subscriptions and conversions.
#7 Via services such as blog themes, widgets and badges: If you build and market your own free themes and widgets, you will have a chance to put backlinks on those free products (e.g. Free WordPress themes, blog rank widgets etc)
#8 Link baiting: Link baiting refers to the process of publishing some content/post so exciting, unique and compelling that people willingly would link to such content. The baits could be something like plugins, free online services, free tool downloads etc.
#9 Paid links: Paid links or buying links are another way to improve your backlinks but these come at the risk of being detected and blacklisted by search engines such as Google. Google believes that such unethical ways of link building inorder to boost page ranks are methods to sabotage their logic of identifying the relevant links.
#10 Article submission and spinning: Another way of building links is article marketing and/or spinning. This method is explained in detail in one of my posts on article submission sites

Other tips for effective link building

• Whenever you bump into a blog in your niche with similar ranks and statistics, make it a point to contact its author via contact forms for potential link exchange queries and/or blogroll entries
• Three-way linking (a => b, b=> c, c => a) is supposed to be better than reciprocal linking (a => b, b => a)
• Keep track of the URLs or blogs with which you have exchanged links (especially in three way linking). You may loose track otherwise
• Make sure that your link partners use dofollow links if they promised to do so
• It is always beneficial to exchange links with pages that have a low number of outbound links. This minimizes page rank dilution
• Use the NoDoFollow Firefox add-on to check the rel properties of links
• You can use free tools like comment kahuna commenting software to search and comment on blogs of your niche and/or have specific keywords in them
• Read the comment policy of blogs where you are commenting to save you from the risk of getting marked as spam. Also gently ask the bloggers whether keywords in URL are okay (some of them don’t allow this)
• Gradual and slow link building is always better than high speed link-building (such as article spinning or purchasing links in bulk)
• Stay away from bad neighbourhood (rated sites, copyright violations, pirated content etc) while exchanging links as blanket bans by Google can put your online life int jeopardy

I hope that I have covered almost all known methods of link building in this post. One of our online buddies has recently started a bigger post on the same topic. You might want to check out his comprehensive guide on building backlinks as well.

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