Ad HustlerConfessions Of A Serial Internet Entrepreneur

I was reading a Wickedfire thread which referenced an AllFacebook post which alerted me to something that Facebook is up to.  Apparently Facebook is testing ads targeted at status updates.  Facebook has a lot of data on their users so power to them for using it to help their ad system.  See the AllFacebook post for a screenshot of a possible implementation of this new targeting system.

Honestly, if that is how they are going to implement an ad targeting system based on status updates I don’t understand what they are trying to do.  The whole system makes no sense to me in this context.  This got me thinking…..Rather then just criticizing someone elses implementation, how would I implement a status update ad targeting system that would be effective for advertisers?

If I Were The Boss At Facebook Ads……

I’ve come up with 2 possible solutions that could essentially revolutionize online advertising. (Hey Facebook: Show me some love if you take my ideas)

My thought process: The reason why search engine marketing is so darn effective is because there is intent behind a search, and advertisers can cater their ads to that intent. The ads on search engines fulfill a need.  They are the answer to a question.

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Status Update Targeted Ad Implementation I

Let’s say a Facebook user made the following status update:

“User Name I feel like crap today and i’ve felt like crap for a month. I wish I had health insurance so I could finally see a doctor.”

Then if Facebook would allow you to target on the following criteria:

Status Keyword: health insurance
Status Time: today (other options being “yesterday,this week,this month,ever”
Location: Within 15 miles of Asbury Park, NJ

You could craft an ad with text like:

Need A Doctor?
No insurance required. Our office only charges $49 for a non insured patient checkup.

This would make Facebook almost as effective as search engine marketing because you could target intent rather then just interests.

This implementation isn’t always going to be perfect.  For instance if someone wrote as a status update “Thank goodness for health insurance” the ad would make no sense in that context.  However, this does move Facebook Ads closer towards having the ability to target based on intent.

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Status Update Targeted Ad Implementation II

My second idea would be wayyyyyy more effective but risk annoying Facebook users.  It goes like this:

An advertiser decides they want to run a Status Targeted Ad.  They select their demos:

Status Keyword: health insurance
Status Time: today (other options being “yesterday,this week,this month,ever”
Location: Within 15 miles of Asbury Park, NJ

The advertiser is presented with a list of status updates that match their criteria but Facebook removes any identifying information about the user.  For instance:

1) I feel like crap today and i’ve felt like crap for a month. I wish I had health insurance so I could finally see a doctor.
2) Thank goodness for health insurance
3) Does anyone know what a red rash with a purple triangle in the center if it on your ass signifies?  I lost my health insurance when I lost my job so I can’t get it checked out.

In this example #1 & #3 would be extremely relevant to a doctor that could offer a $49 office visit without the need for insurance.

My proposal here is to allow the advertiser to JOIN THE CONVERSATION and have the “ad” be a reply to that users Facebook status.

Example:

Facebook User: I feel like crap today and i’ve felt like crap for a month. I wish I had health insurance so I could finally see a doctor.
Advertiser Reply: My name is Dr. Smith and we examine uninsured patients for only $49.  Give my office a call at 555-5465 for more info.  Feel Better!

And for this type of advertising Facebook could invent a whole new pricing model.  Not per click, or per thousand impressions: PER REPLY!

This would increase Facebook’s bottom line because they could implement this alongside their current CPC & CPM ads.  They could charge a flat rate across the board per reply ($1-10 for instance) or could even build in some type of bidding system.

They would also obviously have to cap each user to receiving one “sponsored reply” per day to limit the annoyance of this ad system.

If the ads were targeted and legitimate the responses could actually HELP the facebook user into making a decision or finding the answer to a problem.

Personally I think this idea is genius.

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That was my contribution to the world of online advertising.

What do you think of my ideas?  Do you have a better one?  If so please share in the comments!

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I get the unfortunate opportunity of speaking with a lot of medium sized businesses that have search engine marketing companies handling their paid search campaigns.  Within the last month or so the lies i’ve heard being told to these businesses have been getting more and more outrageous.  I figured i’d share some memorable ones (oh and by the way these lies come from huge companies not just some kid out of his basement selling search engine marketing):

• Everyone showing up on the page pays the same amount per click
• Ads in position 5 get 60% of the clicks
• We are best to manage your campaign because the search engines charge us less per click because we do volume
• We can sell you position 1 for “keyword” for $250/month
• We can host your landing page on our “trusted” domain and that will get you much cheaper clicks
• Most people searching for your keyword will use a geotagged keyword along with what they are looking for ie. “exterminator in San Diego, CA” (Totally not true)
• The more paid search you do the better your website will rank organically
• By having logos on your website like “featured in such and such news source” you will get more & cheaper clicks
• Your cost per click will always be the same
• We manage all of your competitors campaigns so we are obviously the best company to go with

Just a few i’ve heard lately.  Do you have any you’ve heard and would like to share?

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If you missed part 1 & part 2 of the Building an Audience With Datafeed Sites, make sure you go back and catch up.

After I built the site & got some links I just let it sit around for a while and get indexed.  It got indexed pretty fast.  Initially a couple thousand pages were indexed.  After a bit that fell down to 271 pages.  I suspect there was some sort of duplicate content penalty that caused me to lose those indexed pages.  Regardless, the total number of indexed pages has remained around 270-300.  The site has been online since approximately January 2010.  Over that course of time the traffic has grown steadily month over month.  Below you will find traffic stats since January.

I hope to see this traffic grow continually month over month going forward.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that this site has not converted well AT ALL.  Here are some stats since January 2010:

Clicks Through a Product Affiliate Link: 659
Click Through Rate: 7.58%
Sales: 6
Conversion Rate: 0.91%
Gross Sales: $197.40
Commissions: $29.61
Total Cost: ~$27-$30

As you can see this has NOT been a super profitable venture to date.  I’ve made back around what I spent to create the site.  The positive side is that since this is organic SEO & the traffic keeps growing, i’m sure that more sales will trickle in over time.  The site certainly won’t lose money.  The question becomes can you create more of these sites and scale them?  I think that you can.  Although i’m basing that on theory alone, I believe that if you make a lot of these types of sites you are eventually going to hit a profitable one.

This site is getting traffic so i’m going to work on getting a better conversion rate and figuring out other ways to monetize the traffic and report back to you with what I find.

Please post your thoughts in the comments.

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In Part 1 of this case study I discussed what I did to setup this datafeed site.  Part 2 is what I did to promote it.

I’m going to be honest with you.  I don’t have crazy blackhat methods.  I just have some simple, straight forward things I do to try to get a site to rank in the search engines.

The first thing I concentrated on was simple on-page SEO.  I made sure that every post had appropriate title tags & meta data as well as H1 tags (using a plugin).  I also made sure that no affiliate links were visible, everything was cloaked.

Next I needed to get some links.  I like social bookmarks as i’ve had a lot of success with them.  I almost always use Amit aka Red_Virus for social bookmarks.  You can order his services HERE.  Tell him Ad Hustler sent you and I guarantee you’ll get awesome service (no, i’m not making a commission).  I sent all of the social bookmarks to the main domain.  Ideally, I would have liked to get a few social bookmarks to each interior page but I haven’t been able to come up with a good & easy way to do that yet.

I decided that I want to diversify the links a bit so I went over to Fiverr.com and ordered an edu link package.

That’s it.  I didn’t do anything else to promote this site.  After completing these steps I still wasn’t indexed and had not received any traffic yet.  I decided to just leave the site alone for a little while and see what would happen.

Excluding the datafeed script because i’m using that on multiple sites, my total investment in this site so far would be around $32

Part 3 will discuss whether or not I got any traffic or sales.

Any questions so far?

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I like to keep things diversified so i’m willing to try anything that can run on autopilot once it’s setup.  I started thinking about playing with datafeed sites when Nick Mattern put out Review Plugin For WordPress.  I consider him a friend of mine so I bought his software and started playing around.  (Please keep in mind that even though this is the software I used for this case study, Nick no longer owns the product and I’m not sure about the quality of the newest versions).  Here are the steps I used to build a datafeed site:

Step 1 – Pick A Niche

The first thing I chose was the niche I was going to use to build out this site.  I considered different affiliate programs at CJ, Linkshare & Shareasale. Part of my consideration was how many items they had in their datafeed as well as how much information the datafeed contained.    I eventually settled on 1 affiliate program that had about 3,000 products in their datafeed and the niche was based around fashion with a decent commission rate (20%).

Step 2 – Buy Domain

I bought a domain with the main keywords related to the niche located within the domain name.

Step 3 – Setup WordPress & Datafeed Plugin

Setting up wordpress is pretty self explanatory.  I used the “Review Plugin For WordPress” as my datafeed importer.  Quite honestly I only wanted the software for this feature.

After I cleaned up the database file that I downloaded from the affiliate network I started the import process.  The process of importing a datafeed to wordpress is pretty simple.  You need to setup a template which grabs all of the information out of the database and places it in the correct place on the page.  Here in the post template I used:

Title of Post: [PRODUCT NAME]

Body of Post:

[PRODUCT NAME] – [$PRICE]

[PRODUCT IMAGE LINKED WITH AFF LINK]

Product Description: [PRODUCT DESCRIPTION]

[PRODUCT NAME] is currently in stock at [MERCHANT NAME]

For more information about this item please click here. <—AFF LINK

If you have already purchased [PRODUCT NAME] please leave a review below.

This post template would allow all 3,000 products in the database to have the same look when they get published to WordPress.  Rather then publishing everything at once I opted for a drip feed.  I let the posts feed into the wordpress site over a period of 6 months rather then all at once so that it would look more natural to search engines.

Tip:  Since i’m hosting this particular site on a crappy shared hosting plan, I found that the import process would continually freeze up.  I guess the process takes a lot of resources on the server.  The fix I found was to break the datafeed file into smaller files and import that way.  I just wanted to mention that in case you hit a glitch like I did.

After this step my datafeed site had posts and new ones appeared throughout each day.

Step 4 – Find a Decent WordPress Theme

I used SkinPress – Simple & Free

Step 5 – WordPress Plugins

Here you will find a linst of the plugins I used & why:

Review Plugin For WordPress – Used for importing the datafeeds

Akismet – To keep the Spam under control

All in One SEO Pack – To auto-create appropriate SEO tags.

Link Cloaking Plugin – This allowed the tons of affiliate links all over the site to look like internal links ie domain.com/goto/1 – I thought it would be better for SEO then rogue affiliate links all over the place.

Scheduled M.I.A.s – I was having an issue with the scheduled posts actually going live when they were supposed to.  I kept getting the error “Missed Schedule” so this plugin fixed that issue.

WordPress Suicide – To get my post template correct I needed to try it a few times.  To retry I needed to remove everything that got imported into the database.  This plugin can clear your posts database.

WP Super Cache – Speeds up WordPress when you have tons of posts.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Allowed each product listing to show several links to similar products.  Kind of like an Amazon cross sell.

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That’s everything I did to get the site online.  Next was promotion which will be Part 2 of this case study.

Any Questions?

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