Ad HustlerConfessions Of A Serial Internet Entrepreneur

It seems like people always like to jump on the bandwagon of hating someone.  Sometimes it’s gurus, sometimes it’s bloggers and sometimes it’s “social media experts.”  I seem to constantly see people bashing “social media experts” on Facebook.  I’ve seen blog posts how you should NEVER hire a “social media expert.”  I get it.  I understand why people in the internet marketing field hate “social media experts.”  After all, how hard is it to write a blog post, setup a wordpress blog, update a Facebook page or Tweet?  It’s not very hard for a seasoned internet marketing vet which makes it look like “social media experts” are just scraping the bottom of the barrel and taking advantage of people.

Step back for a second and look at social media from an outsiders perspective.  Imagine your the V/P of Marketing at a local bank, you keep hearing about how everyone is on Facebook & Twitter.  You want a piece of the action but don’t know where to start.  You don’t know how to effectively manage a Facebook page and quite frankly, you don’t have time for it.  You’re not going to assign the task to some random teller you have working at the bank and you don’t want to do it yourself so you’re stuck between a rock & a hard place.  You have 2 options.  You either risk having some menial employee screw up your bank’s reputation with something stupid they say on social media or you hire a “social media expert.”

Yea, most “social media experts” have never sold a damn thing in their lives.  Some can barely write an intelligent sentence.  Just because there are crappy players in the field doesn’t mean that all “social media experts” are bad.  Not everyone mows their own lawn, not everyone does their own book keeping, not everyone cleans their own office.  They use outside companies to do these tasks even though they aren’t particularly hard.  In business, time is money and sometimes it’s better to pay someone else to do your dirty work because it’s more efficient and requires less involvement.

I can’t say every company needs a “social media expert” or “social media agency,” but some do.  Some companies don’t even know where to start.  Some companies need guidance.  Some companies just don’t have the manpower.  Every situation is different so give the “social media experts” a break because there is a place for every type of service if it fills a need.

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I’ve been off on a lot of projects lately.  Many of these projects have to do with building sites that are designed for SEO traffic.  I’ve built about 50 sites in the last few months and some of the trends I see are interesting so I figured i’d share.  The first 25 or so sites that I built in this cluster, I almost immediately built links for because we all know that links are extremely important for search engine optimization.  About 1/3 of the sites in that cluster started getting traffic within a week or so.  About 2/3 of the sites never got any traffic at all (yet).  That discovery is really nothing revolutionary.  Obviously if you are pumping out a bunch of sites in different niches, some will get traffic and some won’t.

For the second cluster of sites (25 or so sites) I haven’t worked on getting any links as of yet.  I planned to let the sites age a little bit before doing link building.  One observation I find interesting though, is that out of these 25 sites, 5 of them have started to get traffic.  Again, THESE SITES HAVE NO LINKS GOING TO THEM!  This made me ask myself how could the search engines have firstly found these sites and secondly ranked them to any degree with NO LINKS?  I don’t actually know the answer to this question but here are a few hypothesis I made:

1. Google/Search engines are watching registrar databases to see domains being registered and preemptively crawling them.  Hense, no links needed.
2. These domains were exact match, so maybe that has something to do with it.
3. These domains are on an IP with other sites that are indexed, maybe Google/Search Engines find an IP and then look for other sites on that IP?

Whatever the cause is, it’s pretty cool that it happens.  Since i’m working on a bunch of sites, i’ll update you guys on any observations I make.

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I got a question via emai from a reader today and figured i’d answer it publicly

First off, you have an awesome blog and your Local Online Advertising related articles are really helpful. Your post are inspiring and by doing some testing I have run into a weird situation.  Perhaps you could provide me with a hint or two.

On Facebook, if I bid on a CPC basis, I get a CTR of 0.089 to 0.1. Now, for the same add, if I bid on a CPM basis get plenty of impressions but my CTR is suddenly at 0.010%  to 0.012%.

I have tested it with different add variations, and if I found a winning add combination, stopped it and created a new add based on a CPM model my CTR is suddenly down.

have you noticed similar patterns? Have you found a solution, or perhaps have any tip?

By the way, if you want to try or test anything on the German market, I can help with any translation.

It’s a very legitimate question for a new Facebook Ads advertiser to ask.  In the past, this wasn’t the case.  If you converted a CPC ad to a CPM ad the click through rate would be pretty similar.  In fact a lot of affiliates were doing this to get cheaper ads by bidding CPM.  Around a year ago, Facebook made a change to their advertising system which rewarded CPC advertisers with more clicks and CPM advertisers with more impressions.  I guess their logic was that CPC advertisers wanted only clicks and CPM advertisers wanted only impressions (which we all know isn’t true).  The way they seem to accomplish this is by running CPM advertisers in lower quality positions.  Here is the letter Facebook sent out around that time.

Upcoming system change:

As you know, we continuously work to make our ads system more accurate in order to further improve the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns. Among other ongoing improvements, we are refining our ads delivery system to better reflect the goals of our advertisers. This change will take place over the next few weeks and, assuming current bids remain unchanged, will mean that:

CPC advertisers (advertisers who have chosen to bid “cost-per-click”) may receive more clicks.
CPM advertisers (advertisers who have chosen to bid “cost per thousand impressions”) will continue to receive impressions but may receive less clicks.

Do I need to do anything?

As a CPM advertiser, you are indicating to our system that it’s more important that your ad is seen by your audience rather than clicked i.e. you have chosen to pay for impressions, not clicks. If your main objective is to increase awareness of your business with an ad impression, there is no need for action. However, if your most important objective is to drive clicks on your ads, you should change your bids from CPM to CPC.

I hope that answered your question.

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