Everyone knows facebook now a days. Even your 80 year old auntie is probably working the night away playing farmville! There are many mixed opinions about facebook, but one things is certain – the audience is huge. It’s also very diverse! Using some targeted ads, and the right product you can use your affiliate marketing skills to cash in on an already huge pool of potential clients.

Facebook is not just for young people anymore. Parents, and even grandparents are getting more technologically inclined. That means you can target a multitude of users all in one place. I’ve been doing a little experimenting with Facebook ads to see their effect with affiliate marketing.

The good thing about these types of ads is that you don’t need a landing page. If you choose not to pay for hosting, and upkeeping a site you can link directly to your hop link! You are of course free to use this to advertise your own site though.

Facebook utilizes a bidding stratagey just like Google does, but with the added benefit of networking. You see, facebook is beautiful in that people love to share! People can like your ad, and share it with their friends. Which if it’s something they enjoy they are very likely to do so believe it or not.

You can bid for space by paying per 1,000 impressions or per click. If you run a campaign with a good click through rate many people have been happy paying per impression. If you have more impressions, and less clicks this may be less desirable.

My last campaign ran for only a few minutes before my small test budget of ($15) was maxed out! I acquired over 62,000 impressions, but just 27 clicks. So far, no sales. However, I was using Clickbank; which has a ‘cookies’ feature. So if they go back it might translate into some.

Depending on what you pick the clicks can be costly, but nobody says you have to pay the premium. You will of course not get displayed as much, but you are free to be picky with what you will pay. I did that for my second run, and I still got displayed. Just in a smaller volume when my bids won of course.

The mistake I believe I made from this experiment was lack of targeting. You can target users via age, interest, gender, ect. However, for fear of excluding people I didn’t do this. Just because somebody doesn’t list something in their “interest” section does not mean they would not purchase your product so I decided against it. Reflecting, I think that move was ill advised.

While I may have missed out on some people; I think the benefit of being guaranteed to hit a probably interested party outweighs that. Since I did not have a specified area my CTR was most likely out of whack. I’m trying again with targeting. (I also may or may not get a better bid)

Some people say it’s hard to convert facebookers, because of steep competition. That and a lot of them want something for free, but not to pay. An advertisement for an info product or site that offers a free trial may be beneficial. As stated earlier; if you have an affiliate program that honors “cookies sales” you could snag some profit. Or if you are marketing your own product it could generate leads if you have a ‘freebie’ to give them.

There were many facebook ad coupons around giving you freebie credits! All the ones I came upon were expired sadly, but if I find any I’ll post them up so others can try their hand at Facebook advertising risk free! Visa was giving away $100 in credits even for signing up for their network!

Originally posted 2010-06-08 04:44:11. Republished by Blog Post Promoter