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You are here: Home / Archives for Marketing

Can I Do Affiliate Marketing on Facebook?

Does Affiliate Marketing on Facebook Really Work?

You can do affiliate Marketing on Facebook but it needs to be done the right way, Facebook has rules against spam. Also I wouldn’t recommend promoting your affiliate business using your personal account. You’re friends are unlikely to be your target audience – you just risk getting blocked by them. People generally don’t like being advertised to.

Free Facebook Marketing

Affiliate marketing done the free way often isn’t easy and usually involves joining multiple groups relevant to your niche and sharing posts on a regular bases. Again it’s best not to use your personal account, just in case you end up being accused of spamming and end up getting your account deactivated.

Also if you decide on the free method I don’t advise marketing directly and often – for example sending posts with affiliates links. You could perhaps offer something free, such as an eBook, and add the affiliate links within the eBook itself.

From my own experience Facebook does allow you to use affiliate links within your images, and post these in Facebook groups. However you will find that many groups are closed, not very active or require approval from the group’s administer before you can join. Some will allow you to post on their timeline, others require approval before your post is published and then there are groups that totally forbid any advertising or promotions. You may also find that many of the groups aren’t very active.

Create your own Facebook Group

You’re better off creating your own Facebook page which is targeted toward your niche audience. Unless someone is interested in your offers, this will prevent unwanted advertising and links landing directly in peoples feeds.

To get others to join your group you should provide value and foster that niche, treating it like a community, offering advice, useful information or tools. I’ve found sharing Free stuff to be a very effective way of marketing as people love freebies and they can be used as an incentive to pay for complete offers.

You should then occasionally provide affiliate products or services in a post, making sure the product or service you’re offering is of high value and very relevant to your audience.

One way I earn money online is using AdGate Media. You could provide a free offer such as a free eBook, digital product or offer and then use AdGate media to force visitors to complete a survey before they can access your free content. Only after they’ve completed the survey do they get access to the offer and you get paid around $1 for each survey completed. AdGate media creates a targeted campaign and has the highest pay-outs in the market! Check out the following video:


Paid Facebook Advertising

If you don’t have the patience or time to create value, you can always target a specific audience with paid Facebook advertising. This will enable you to target a particular location, age, gender, interest etc
Facebook Group

Tips for Creating Ads on Facebook

Here are some tips to increase the conversion rate of your ad. They can make all the difference between making a profit and losing money.
1. I’ve found that images work better than purely text ads and images that include people tend to work best.

2. Know your target audience. Are they young or old, male or female, professional or non-professional. Make sure the ad is laser focused towards that group.

3. Once you know your target audience ask yourself what is the biggest problem your customer is going to solve by using the product? Provide the emotional benefits in the title. For example “Stop Losing Money… “, “Stop Wasting Time…. , “Give up your Day Job”, or “Never Fear …. Ever again”

4. The biggest hurdle against people purchasing your product is the fear of losing money. Consider providing a guarantee – for example “If you’re not Satisfied I’ll give you your Money Back”, or “Free 30 Day trial”. Or include a Free Bonus that comes with the product, which is itself of value.

5. If possible provide social proof. For example a testimonial, number of current users etc .

6. Creating a sense of urgency can encourage people to buy now. For example a discount that expires soon, or an offer that’s only temporary.

7. Use a call to action. People need to be told what to do. This is a trigger phrase such as Download our eBook Now, Claim your Spot, Try it for Free

8. Make sure you stay consistent. When the visitor clicks the Ad it should take them to a landing page that reinforces the ad with similar images, features, Bonuses, targeted toward the same audience.

Test different Ads

Some ads will be more effective than others and the only way to find out is to test, test test. Test both the ads themselves and also different audiences to see which audience is most responsive.

You should monitor your campaign closely to see if it’s effective. You may decide that your ad isn’t converting very well and requires a different approach, for example a different image or text which converts better, a special offer or it may just be the case that the niche just isn’t worth pursuing.

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: AdGate Media, facebook, facebook ads, facebook marketing

How to Hide Affiliate Links and Boost Conversions

How can I Cloak a Link?

Affiliate links look ugly and search engines don’t like pages that contain a lot of outgoing affiliate links. Hiding affiliate links means you don’t make it obvious you’re promoting an affiliate product or service to any potential buyer.

A link such as http://www.bargainsonsale.com/ looks better than http://www.bargainsonsale.com/affID=923945 and many companies will remove the query string at the end (affID=923945) once a user visits the site.

How you cloak links will depend on how many affiliate links you have and whether you wish to rely on a plugin or extension or add the code yourself. This article will show you both methods.

Do it yourself Method

When cloaking links I prefer to have all cloaked redirects in one file. That way they’re easy to modify and all in one place.

Things you should consider

You need to own your own web host. I recommend SiteGround Web hosting, just because of it’s speed, reliability and great customer service.

The .htaccess file must be uploaded to the root of your webserver. If you own multiple domains you should upload the .htaccess file to the appropriate folder representing the desired domain.

If you already have a .htaccess file you should first download it and then make a copy just in case you mess things up. You need to add the code at the end of the .htaccess file and be careful not to change anything else.
htaccess file

If there’s no .htaccess in the root of your domain, simply create a blank text file and open it.

Copy the affiliate link you want to cloak and enter the following code each on a separate line

Redirect /mydirectoryone http://1.hop.clickbank.com

In the above example mydirectoryone is a directory or folder and http://1.hop.clickbank.com is your affiliate link. mydirectoryone does not have to exist as a directory on your web server. It will merely be the text used to cloak the link.

You can add multiple directories and affiliate links

Redirect /mydirectorytwo http://http://2.hop.clickbank.com
Redirect /mydirectorythree http://http://3.hop.clickbank.com
Redirect /mydirectoryfour http://http://4.hop.clickbank.com
Redirect /mydirectoryfive http://http://5.hop.clickbank.com

Save the file as .htaccess and upload to your web server. Make sure to include the period at the beginning of .htaccess

Plugins and Extensions

Here is a list of popular options for cloaking affiliate links. Some of these are for self hosted sites and others are for WordPress based sites.

Web based

LinkTrackr
LinkTrackr is a web based link cloaking and tracking program. It can track conversions, leads, sales, and advertisements and provide individual reporting for different ad campaigns. Prices range from $9 per month to $69 per month. For $39 per month and up it can even provide A/B split testing.

AdTrackzGold
AdTrackzGold is a web based affiliate cloaking, link tracking software that also provides split testing. Adtrackz Gold let’s you see where all your traffic is coming from, and then automatically analyzes the return of investment of those sources so you can focus your time on campaigns that make money, and drop those that don’t.

WordPress Based

Pretty Link Lite
Pretty Link Lite has been around for awhile and is one of the most widely used WordPress plugins to manage affiliate links. It lets you shorten and track links with basic statistics. It also allows you to put links into groups and set them to “nofollow” and allows you to use either 307 temporary redirected links or 301 permanently redirected links.

This plugin comes in free as well as pro versions and the premium version brings in number of quality features like masking your links automatically to save a lot of time.

ThirstyAffiliates
ThirstyAffiliates empowers website owners with the tools they need to monetize their WordPress website with affiliate marketing.

It lets you administer your affiliate links, assists you with inserting them into your posts, pages and comments and gives you a central location in WordPress to manage all of your affiliate links.

ThirstyAffiliates will create pretty links from ugly affiliate links (aka link redirection or link cloaking) all the while giving you the double benefit of protecting your commissions from theft.

WooCommerce Cloak Affiliate Links
The WooCommerce Cloak Affiliate Links plugin allows you to mask all external links in your WooCommerce store.

For example, change this…

merchant.com/index.php?aff_id=123&product_id=456
… into this:

yoursite.com/go/123
Configure the status code for the redirect to either 301, 302 or 307.

The plugin also adds a “Disallow” to your robots.txt file to prevent bots from following those external links.

Affiliate Links Lite
Affiliate Links is a WordPress plugin for creating and shortening any internal or external links. This plugin will be useful for masking partner links to affiliate websites. You can also use it for shortening long URLs to simple pretty links such as ‘mysite.com/go/link’.

Key features
Hit count stats
301/302/307 HTTP redirect codes setup
Nofollow and noindex for redirects
Link categories setup
HTML and shortcode generator for link embedding
Category slug in the link URL if needed

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: affiliate cloaking, affiliate link, affiliate links, hide links, link cloaking, links

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