Being involved in the Internet Marketing industry gives you a slightly different perspective in everyday life sometimes. When see ads on tv, it makes you wonder things like, “How much are they spending on that ad spot? What’s their ROI like?” It helps you spot obvious scams much more easily than the average Joe. It also opens your eyes to the creative efforts of other internet marketers and their strategies.
Last week Nickycakes visited his folks to surprise his dad for his birthday. While driving around town Cakes spotted a sign that read something like “Single? [LocalCity]Dating.org.” It was a small sign, white cardboard, maybe 2 feet wide, with 2 small metal posts, stuck into the ground near a sign at an intersection. Later on, he noticed more and more of them, all around the city.
That’s nearly free advertising. Thousands of impressions per day. It couldn’t have cost more than $100 for all the signs. Nickycakes made a mental note to check the site later on.
That evening, checking the site out was a little surprising. The guy/girl had set up their own service where you had to fill out a lengthy 4 step signup form and then wait to be contacted by some “dating expert.” Too much work. It would have been much easier to make a little landing page saying something like “there are 234234 singles signed up in [LocalCity]. Sign up here to search for free.” And just direct em to singlesnet or true.com at your favorite affiliate network. Seems like you could put up the signs and forget about it until you start getting your checks.
Cakes out.
Published by nickycakes //
Last November, Myspace announced that it would be releasing a self-serve ad platform in early 2008. The ad platform would resemble Facebook’s current self serve social ad system. Early news indicated that the platform would only allow for promotion of a user’s myspace page, however, things can change quite a bit.
Next week Myspace will be launching their long awaited (yawn…zzzzz) Developer Platform, which Nickycakes can only assume is supposed to be their version of Facebook Applications. As everyone knows, facebook applications pretty much ruined facebook’s clean functionality, but it’s hard to imagine a crappy site like myspace getting any worse, so maybe it will bring on some sort of improvement.
The dev platform was announced in October, and the self serve ad platform was announced in early November. So one can only hope that the ad platform will be right on the heels of next week’s release.
Get your curl scripts ready boys. It may be party time once again.
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on January 29th, 2008 in General, Promotion
So the old theme looked uglier than Courtney Love, so Nickycakes hacked up a new one. Hope you like it.
The traffic on this site has been growing pretty steadily since it was launched, and since the Cakes noticed his alexa rank above 100k today, he figured it was time to put a few ad spots up and try to pay for some textbooks and stuff. This blog gets quite a bit of traffic, so you won’t be disappointed if you grab one. Starting out at $30, Nickycakes would probably get more money just putting affiliate offers on them. And if you like this site then it’s a great way to show your appreciation and get some good traffic in the meantime. Anyway, enough with that plug, you know how to get ahold of the Cakes if you want to scoop one up.
Drop a comment if you like/hate/are indifferent about the new theme and/or have suggestions for improvement.
Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
Almost exactly one year ago, Eli from BluehatSEO made a post on MadLib sites. The basic idea behind a MadLib site is this: You make a script that will randomly (or not so randomly) generate pages from a database of information by inserting different pieces of information into each post to make them unique. For example: Today I saw *girlsname* go into *storename* and buy *productname*. You can generate thousands and thousands of unique pages this way with very little effort and get indexed by google without duplicate content penalty if you do a decent job.
Well, the problem is, not everyone has the ability to code their own madlib system, and not everyone owns large databases to use for the process. That’s where Datapresser comes in.
About 6 months ago, Rob at Seocracy started working on Datapresser. It’s a comprehensive madlib blog generating package. All you have to do is enter your madlib text and title using their formatting system using their huge databases of information, and it will generate thousands of unique content pages, in wordpress format, for you to slap on your wordpress blog and let ‘er go.
Saturday morning, Rob launched Datapresser.com with a fee of a modest $45 a month and 60 available signups. The 60 signups were gone in under 30 minutes. $2700 in 30 minutes ain’t bad, to be honest. If you weren’t able to get an account on Saturday, don’t worry. Rob is working on getting more server’s up to be able to handle more users, so there will still be opportunity to get your spot.
Anyway, Nickycakes is extremely grateful to have been given an account to check out Datapresser and see what it’s all about. At first blush, it’s great. The interface is clean, which the Cakes loves. The help file is…..well…helpful. And it works damn quick. There are 3 output formats for the data, including 2 for wordpress, and one is text output for use with pretty much anything.
If you don’t understand the scope of a tool like this, think about it a little harder. With Datapresser, or any madlib script, you can automatically generate thousands of unique articles for ANY niche you can think of. Go to your favorite affiliate network, open up the offers, and pick one. Want to make a site with thousands of keyword content rich pages related to that offer? Want to do it in under an hour? No prob!
So anyway, if you’re interested, keep checking seocracy and datapresser for updates on when the next batch of signups will be available.
And thanks again Rob. Great tool.
Published by nickycakes //
First, and foremost, if you’ve never read Nickycakes’ tutorial posts on getting into Facebook Ads, please take a moment to read them. Part 1, Part 2. The info in those posts can, and will make you good money with Facebook Advertising if you follow the information presented. Nickycakes gets asked about once a week if it’s still possible to make money with Facebook Ads, and the answer every time is YES. It’s still an awesome system, easy for new people to get into it, and extremely profitable. The potential is there to make hundreds of dollars a day, without a doubt. It’s been quite a while since this site has had a facebook ad post, and it’s long past due, so here goes.
- Spy on Other People’s Ads
Many people’s biggest problem is finding something good to promote on facebook. Seriously, every few days in the nickycakes irc channel, someone is scratching their head in bewilderment because they’re running an ad for car loans and nobody on facebook is clicking on it. If it’s too tough to figure out what to promote to college kids on your own, the idiots at facebook have created an adboard which lets you view everyone else’s ads. The Cakes has absolutely no clue why someone would do something so stupid, but they did. Just refresh your normal facebook profile page until you see a facebook ad come up, and click the “More Ads” button. There you go, a page full of ideas that are probably making other people money.
Keep in mind, however, that you will only be shown ads targeted to your demographic, so you may want to create a few fake facebook accounts for different demographics to see what’s being promoted to females/males/old people/young people/single people/married people, etc.
- Make Multiple Ads
Many times, you will make a facebook ad that is getting decent traffic, but you’re not coming close to filling your daily budget because you’re not getting enough impressions. There are two good options for getting over this hurdle. First, you could do the obvious thing and raise your bid, which will in turn make facebook give you more impressions per day and end up filling your daily budget. Second, and probably smarter, is keep your bid the same, and make a few more nearly identical ads. Assuming your CTR is nearly the same on all the ads, you should be able to fill up your budget with 5 almost identical ads if your original ad was using 1/5th of your budget to begin with.
- Use a Good Picture
The picture you use for your ad will literally make or break you. You NEED to find a good one for your ad to preform well. When making the picture for your ad, always save it in 110×80px with as high resolution possible (Nickycakes uses 24bit .png). Pick something eye-catching. Something that definately does not blend in with the facebook site. Using mostly black works well. Anything with hot girls is good as long as it’s related to your ad, and targeted to guys. Stacks of money, optical illusions, and expensive cars have all preformed well. Again, refer to tip #1 if you’re struggling and check what other people are using to get ideas.
- Run Your Ads At Night
This one is pretty simple. Ads just do better at night. No idea why, but they do. If you can afford to not get any clicks for the first half of the day, set your bid at 1 cent and wait until around 5pm EST or so and put your bid back to normal and watch the clicks fly.
- Out of the Box Targeting
A big mistake that many people make when starting with facebook ads is targeting everyone in the US market. Facebook may not have as many targeting options as Nickycakes would like, but they have quite a few, and they’re pretty accurate. The US market has a ton of people advertising on it, so try targeting Canada. Most people don’t target by keyword, but doing so can convert to sales like crazy. If you’re promoting some sort of health supplement, try thinking of keywords for people who work out and target them, or maybe vegetarians or vegans. These targeting options, while they may give you a more narrow audience, and less traffic, will give you a great CTR which will make your clicks cost almost nothing, and will no doubt convert to sales much better.
The most important thing to remember when advertising on facebook is this: It costs $0 to create an ad. Make as many as you can until you find one that’s making you money.
Published by nickycakes //
