www.affiliateconfession.com

Just yesterday I picked up on a tweet from lenstrom that MySpace Ads went live, at least in the beta version, so I though I’d head over there, sign up and throw $50 their way to see if I could get some action. As of this post unfortunately my ads haven’t been approved yet, even though they’ve been sitting in the que for about 22 hours. So, even though I don’t have any conversion or money making data yet, I can give you a walk through of the system and offer some opinions.

When I get my ads approved and get some data I’ll report back to let you know how it went.

It’s pretty easy to sign up with MySpace ads and you don’t even have to have a MySpace account to do so. Just put in all your personal data, a valid credit card and then you go and set up your ads. MySpace is different than Facebook Ads in that you have 2 choices of ad sizes, either a 300 x 250 block or a large 728 x 90 pixel banner of which you can either design right in the MySpace interface (you can add text and your own images), make your own or do what I did and just use creatives from whatever offer you are promoting.

If you’d like, you can target your ad before or after you actually create it. At this point the demographic data available to do your targeting is very limited. As you can see below they’ve left out at least one important choice in the game console category. They’ve included everything but the Wii (I forgot Wii was a Nintendo product. However, you can select it seperately on Facebook. Thanks to WordVixen for pointing out the mistake):

Also lacking in some demographic areas I was exploring were only 8 brand name video games to choose from, no Christian category under music, only 29 authors listed in the book category and the health & fitness category only has 2 options - working out and yoga, lame. Hopefully this is just what they’re offering during beta and the category choices will be expanded. Right now Facebook Ads offers much better targeting.

Also, you will definitely want to set your age demographic appropriately to avoid maybe trying to sell car parts to 13-year-old-girls or some such market that will waste your ad budget since MySpace is notorious for worthless ad traffic. How many 13-year-old have credit cards?

After you create your ad, target it and add your destination url, you then set your campaign budget and it looks like you can set a total amount to spend on a campaign (hopefully you can change that if your campaign is doing well) and choose your bid amount, as long as it’s 25 cents or above.

That’s another flub with MySpace Ads here is the 25 cent minimum bid. Come on guys, you can’t expect that to fly very long on an unproven ad platform with no conversion data yet. It remains to be seen if actual cost per click will be at 25 cents or lower, but that’s ridiculous, not being able to lower bids to 10 or 15 cents to get a better ROI is just crazy. This is basically a content platform and if I were paying 25 cents per click with some of my Adwords content campaigns, I’d be broke. Time to re-think that one.

Next you want to set the time frame or dates your campaign will run. Make sure you choose a campaign end date as people have left comments on other blogs doing MySpace Ads reviews that they’ve accepted the default setting which ends your campaign the day it starts. It might be a good thing if MySpace tweaks that to be out a least a couple of months.

The bottom line is that MySpace has more users than Facebook and could bring many more impressions to your ad. In picking some of the same type demographic as on Facebook Ads, MySpace is showing me millions of potential users vs Facebook’s hundreds of thousands.  However, it’s hard to tell how many clicks you’ll get or what the conversions will be like. The 25 cent minimum bid has to go and demographic targeting has to be expanded. MySpace has tons of data on its users and putting out an ad platform without including better targeting is extremely shortsighted. It’s almost as if they though maybe they’d see how much money advertisers are willing to spend before they roll out the whole package. Not good.

One other minor tweak I’d like to see MySpace make is to allow your session time to be a little longer. It must only be about 2 minutes or less because almost every time I refresh the browser, I get kicked back to the login screen.

Anyway, I though I’d at least give it a shot to see if it would produce a little income here. If you want, you can sign up for MySpace Ads here.

Affiliate marketing is somewhat like investing in that you have to decide what you are willing to risk to ultimately succeed. Be it time, money, a regular work schedule or the comforts of a nice car and other material things until you reach a livable level of income, all these things will factor into your risk tolerance.

Time is not always thought of as being risky to spend, but it is because we only have one time bank account and when it’s gone, it’s gone, no earning it back. That’s why it’s important to put your time into something that has the potential to earn you an income for a long time.

Working on spammy techniques or purposely going against search engine webmaster guidelines that put your business at risk may earn you some money up front, but they will seriously hamper your venture for the long run. There’s a difference in using a loophole in the system, that when it’s closed will only cause you a loss of traffic from one source versus risking your entire site or network of sites being deindexed from the major search engines. Loopholes are meant to be exploited, clear policy violations will eventually kill your business.

You can also spend time on building what you thought was a wonderful idea for a site only to have it fail and not really be able to figure out why. I put many hours into a work at home site a few years ago and even though the site has been up for about 4 years, it may get 30 visitors on a good day. The site used to get 200 or 300 people a day, but it eventually died a slow death as page after page lost rankings and traffic plummeted. Maybe it was too may affiliate links, maybe the site was too broad in scope, probably it was the domain name with 6 dashes in it (stupid!), I might never know. But I do know I put a lot of work into something that didn’t pay off. At least one thing I learned from building that site was to never get a domain name with dashes in it.

Money is a harder commodity to be risked because we can see the immediate results of losing it and racking up big debts through PPC or other advertising. But that’s what any advertising is really all about, getting your product or service in front of the right customer in the hopes you’ll make some sales, eventually making a profit. You do that by risking money up front and there are no guarantees.

That’s why it’s important to set a budget that you can afford to spend (risk) on advertising. My wife is the accountant in our home and we determined that any earnings my affiliate business generated over $2,500 per month could be spent on advertising and more specifically PPC. Through reading the adventures of PPC masters and thoughtful consideration of several offers, I am now earning some money with PPC.

I was also fortunate enough to get $250 in Facebook ads coupons and even thought I didn’t do so well with them and ended up spending more money after those coupons ran out, I’m now turning a pretty good profit with FB ads because I just felt there was a way to make them work. Despite losing money up front, despite the ridiculous hoops they make you jump through at FB to advertise, if I would have given up I wouldn’t be realizing almost $100 a day profit now. The risk in time and money has definitely been worth it.

And that’s the lesson to be learned. If you are reading what the experts in PPC have to say, learning from your mistakes, willing to risk time and money and are dilligent in your efforts, more than likely they will eventually pay off. The reason I was willing to risk more time and effort with FB is because for the people who are succeeding, they are succeeding wildly and I just though, ‘I don’t care if I have to spend $2,000 or $3,000, I’m going to make this work.’ Something just happens when you have an attitude adjustment like that. The trick now is to transfer my Facebook success over to PPC with Adwords. Maybe a bit more difficult task, but the truth is, it does work for some, why not for me or you?

Educate, calculate, risk, and earn the reward.

I’m taking a break today from the Harsh Reality series to report on some success with Facebook Ads, finally. Over the last 3 days I’ve found out that yes, you can actually make some money with Facebook. It does take quite a bit of trial and error to find an offer that works and to be able to write your ads in a way that will please the ad editors, but when you finally get everything right, Facebook converts like crazy.

Over the last 4 days starting with Saturday evening I’ve earned a little more than $300 by running several niche offers. The best ones are a niche within a larger niche and I have one in particular that’s earning about $3 for every $1 I put into it. I’ve never even come close to anything like that with Adwords so this one is doing exceptionally well.

I’ve found the trick with making a profit on Facebook is finding an offer that obviously appeals to the college and career minded individual, of which there are millions on FB, and it has to be easy and, even better, free to join, something that doesn’t require a credit card, at least initially and requires not more than about 8 fields to fill out.

One thing that has come as a surprise to me only in the last month or so, is that you can make money with cheap leads where you only earn $1.50 to $4 or so. In my previous experience with driving traffic via Adwords, it took lots of traffic to even get one conversion, but as the payoff per lead goes down, they will generally be easier and less costly to convert.

Spending stats for Facebook are above and here’s my earnings stats from AzoogleAds over the last 4 days or so:

The Facebook campaigns were started sometime on Saturday afternoon so they’re for a little less than 4 - 24 days. Total revenue for the 4 day period is $548.10 with spending at $233.57 resulting in a profit of $314.53. Not bad for a few hours worth of work over not quite 4 days.

To get profitable I started out the campaigns at around 35 cents a click and pared some down to 21 cents per click trying to keep my CTR consistent. Even if you can get your clicks down by 5 cents and it takes you 6 clicks to get a lead, as it did with my top earner, you can earn 30 cents more per lead which translates out to $30 extra profit per 100 leads.

Now for a little rant. You can make a profit with Facebook ads if you don’t give up and just keep looking for an offer that converts, but it can be difficult because of the utter incompetence of the Facebook Ads department. It is a complete joke what’s going on there. Sometimes it takes 5 or 6 tries to get your ads approved and I even had one ad that took me 4 times to come into compliance with one rule only to be disapproved for a completely different rule on try number 5. All the while my best performing ad is apparently in violation of both rules, yet they’re letting it run.

I’ve had ads approved and run for 1 hour and then turned off because they’re violating some insane policy. The Excel downloadable reports are absolutely worthless because they aren’t divided by campaign or date, just a single row of info (why even bother making an .xls file?). There isn’t any way to get a monthly report by campaign or day, you must go into each individual campaign and get reports by the week which will make for complicated accounting at the end of the month and there’s even more.

The incredible shortsightedness on the part of the developers of the ad system at Facebook is mind-boggling and then to top it off by staffing it with people that must have zero experience in advertising or making money online is truly astonishing. Facebook could probably be making billions with their ads, but because they are so user unfriendly and must employ people like the soup Nazi on Seinfeld to approve ads, they’re probably bleeding advertisers, and more importantly revenue, by the dump truck loads. End rant.

The best way to get your ads approved seems to be to get them in early in the morning before 10 am Eastern time. I’m guessing there are thousands of ads to approve from the night before and they are probably spending less time looking at your ads and are less alert because their Starbucks buzz hasn’t kicked in yet. I’ve had the exact same ad, only targeted differently, approved in the morning and not approved in the afternoon or evening multiple times, so they may be spending more time looking at things after the workload dwindles throughout the day.

If you’re going to make money with Facebook ads just decide right now to suck it up, bring a pick axe and keep chipping away at the rock because there are little gems to be had in there somewhere. Just keep looking.

Over the last 3 weeks or so I’ve had the joy of trying to make money with Facebook Ads and trying to figure out what the minds in the ad department will allow to be shown on their site. Luckily I was able to secure $250 in free Facebook advertising coupons (some have expired as of this post) via NeilsWeb.com so this little advertising experiment didn’t cost me anything.

Probably the biggest drawback to advertising on Facebook is just trying to figure out what the ad editors want. In a previous post I lamented that the ad editors were so arbitrary in their decision making that they were causing blood to shoot from my eyes. After posting some 28 ads and getting 8 disapproved, I think I finally have somewhat of a handle on what is acceptable. They won’t accept anything that even remotely resembles spammy advertising, whether it be in the way you write your ads or the product you’re advertising.

Their old advertising guidelines don’t give you much direction on how your ads should be worded and while their new guidelines (not yet published, but found at Nickycakes.com) are much better at explaining what they’re looking for, their philosophy on advertising in general is bizarre to say the least. The text in your ad can’t imply that there is anything wrong with a person who might click on your ad. For instance, ads for weight loss products can’t say something like, “Want To Lose That Weight?” because that would be implying that those who want to lose weight are overweight. Well ya! Your ads must be worded in a neutral way such as, “Lose Weight With Product X” or Product X Weight Loss”. Completely lame.

It seems like the ad department at Facebook needs a little schooling in long established marketing principles because they seem to be hell bent on rewriting the rules of advertising. For Facebook to not even allow you to creatively pique a potential customer’s interest by asking a question, to establish a need, is just plain foolish. The powers that be at FB might have to rethink that one when their ad revenue starts drying up.

So what exactly happened with the $250 in free advertising credits? Well, my results didn’t turn out all that well. After spending $247 of the $250 I managed to only earn back $87.15, not a good return. Here’s how it all breaks down:

28 total ads created

8 disapproved

4 ads generated revenue

AzoogleAds Campaign = 9.50
Azoogle Campaign 2 = 23.35
Azoogle Campaign 3 = 2.50
Market Leverage Campaign = 51.80

Total = 87.15

3 Paused due to bleeding revenue to the tune of $97 in about 2 days time.

Probably the biggest hindrance to earning back the $250 was the high bid prices that are suggested you start your campaign with. Many of them are in the 50 to 70 cents per click range and I started 3 campaigns that ate up $97 rather quickly and produced zero results. I didn’t really figure out how some people such as Neil from NeilsWeb.com are able to get their bids low and still get a decent CTR. Most of my campaigns ran at a ridiculously low CTR of 0.03% and while I ran one campaign after I’d spent the $250 in free credits that got a 0.27% CTR, it ended up producing zero revenue after spending around $30.

Okay, what did I learn from this? While it’s still somewhat of mystery as to how some people are rockin Facebook Ads and cleaning up in revenue, I learned these basic things:

• Don’t advertise spammy offers.
• Find the fine line between neutral and creating too much of a sensation and you will get your ads approved.
• Watch your ads closely and reduce bid prices accordingly if you are spending too much.
• Look for offers or products that pay high, cost the consumer little and have appeal to the young Facebook audience.
• Don’t listen to me, I essentially lost money! For crying out loud, read NeilsWeb.com and NickyCakes.com and learn from people who actually make money with Facebook Ads.

I’m not taking this as defeat though. There is a way to make money with Facebook Ads because other people are doing it, I’m just going to be a lot more careful with the next $250 spent, because this time it’s my money on the table.

I though Google Adwords had cornered the market on vague and restrictive rules for advertising. Not so. Facebook advertising has turned into a complete joke. Their guidelines mean absolutely nothing, they turn off ads already approved and apparently ad editors arbitrarily disapprove ads for the same reason my cat vomits, that would be for any reason or no reason at all.

Let’s have a look at what a joke Facebook Ads are. Here are 3 ads of mine below that they approved:

Now have a look at 2 ads that they didn’t approve:

Does this make any sense? The first set of ads is a complete goof and the second set is advertising a legitimate product and a legitimate business opp offer without making any ridiculous promises or unrealistic income claims.

But it gets even more unbelievable. The worst part of this whole sideshow is that they must draw numbers out of a hat to decide which Facebook Ad Guidelines they’re going to tell you that you’ve violated as their reason for not letting them run. The ad above about saving 90 cents a gallon on gas is going to this landing page that’s about what else, saving money on gas by using a fuel additive. Yet check out guidelines number 8 and 9 I’ve supposedly run a foul of:

8. Facebook references

Ads are not permitted to mention or refer to Facebook, its site or its brand in any manner, including in the title, body, image, or destination URLs.

Ads must not use Facebook logos, trademarks, or site terminology (including Facebook, The Facebook, FacebookHigh, FBook, FB, Poke, The Wall, and other company graphics, logos, designs, or icons).

Facebook site features may not be emulated.

9. No incentives

No ad may offer incentives to viewers for clicking on the ad, for submitting personal information (cell phone numbers, social security numbers, physical addresses, or email addresses), or for performing any other tasks.

WHAT? (this is when blood squirted out my eyes and across the room) Are there two different sets of guidelines, because what you’re showing me here has no relevance whatsoever to the disapproved ad? Where does my ad say anything about Facebook? Who exactly is running the show at Facebook Ads, and is anyone being trained on how to interpret their advertising guidelines.

Yes, believe it or not, it gets even worse. I’ve been trying to get some understanding on how the Facebook advertising game works by reading NeilsWeb.com and Nickycakes.com and these guys seem to be having some adventures with the gang at Facebook as well, but on a much bigger scale than myself.

Neil logged into his account one day this past week only to see that the ad Nazi’s at Facebook turned off thousands of dollars of previously approved advertising without warning and Nickycakes recently tweeted about a good performing ad he had spent over $100,000 on that was suddenly turned off. Mind you, this is all without warning. One day you’re making the big bucks, and the next day you’re done. No warning, no renegotiating, no fixing the problem and no way to contact the little elves at Facebook Ads, that’s it, we don’t want your money any longer.

Okay, if I’m a VC with money invested in Facebook, I am freaking losing my mind at this point. You did what? You turned off the adverting of a $100K spender without even so much as an email or a phone call? When I worked at BellSouth Advertising we sent advertisers like that to Daytona and gave them box seats, we sent them to Orlando Magic games and they sat in the sky-boxes and got free food, we didn’t rip their $60,000 per month worth of advertising out of the phone book because we changed a policy overnight.

Guys, get a grip on reality, I have patches over my eyes to keep them from hemorrhaging any more.

Update: As I was getting ready to publish, I read this post over at Nickycakes.com on the new guidelines for Facebook Ads and they look even worse that before, but that’s a post for tomorrow or later.