Campigns

How to Make Your Campaigns Profitable

When you run paid traffic campaigns, it is important to run them 
with a plan. Obviously running your campaigns at a higher daily budget will make it possible to pay for more clicks, but if you’re paying for clicks that aren’t amounting to anything, you’re not going to get anywhere. If you’re not getting a decent ROI, then the money you’re investing becomes a waste. To ensure your campaigns are profitable, you should be engaging in split testing to see which copy/design converts better, and you should be tracking your results. Only when you start seeing good results, should you consider increasing your budget to increase exposure.

Split Testing

Split testing, also known as A/B testing, is a method of testing 
what works better for your business. For websites, it splits the traffic in half, sending part of the traffic to one or more variants of the pages in the site, and sending the other half to a different variation. This helps you to see how people are behaving, and determine whether the copy/design elements/placement of certain things works better on one option vs. another.

You can do this with your ads, by slightly varying your ad copy 
for one set of keywords and using a different variation for another set of keywords. Then, you can set the landing pages for each ad to be slightly different version of each other, so you can see which set of keywords is doing better for which landing page. Then, you can switch them around to determine whether it is the ad copy, the keywords, or the landing page that is affecting conversion rates.

You can do split testing with one variation at a time to make it 
easier to see what is making the impact, or you can do multivariate testing to determine the best possible combination within a shorter amount of time. However, with multivariate testing, you need a considerable amount of website traffic to get accurate results.

For those starting out, run two landing pages across the same ads.
 Then, run the same two landing pages against a different set of ads. Look at website analytics to determine what did better. Run the landing page that did the best with the opposite ads. Did it still perform well? If not, it’s the ad. If so, then it’s the landing page.

SplitTesting.com offers free split testing. You can use it to split 
test anything, from the fonts you’re using, to pricing, copy, forms, colors, and images and layout. If you’re having trouble analyzing the results and figuring out what to change, the team at Split Testing can help, but you will be charged a fee for this service.

Facebook and Google+ Groups

Facebook and Google+ groups are much like forum marketing,

 except they use the social media networks as their platform, rather than stand alone forums. The best way to use these tools is to search the networks for groups where your target customers are already active.

Become actively involved in those groups, but never by spamming 
the groups with your product or service advertisements. You’ll be removed from the group, and you may compromise your social media accounts. Instead, look for ways you can become helpful. Answer questions, and offer to be available for questions whenever possible. Never participate in a group for the sole purpose of promoting your business. It will show, and people will start to ignore you.

When you start to see your own brand/community expand, you may
 want to start your own Facebook and/or Google+ group to allow your followers to come together and discuss your product/service. They can talk about how it’s helped them, how they want to use it, ask for advice from other users, etc. all while providing a real customer testimonial base for your perspective customers. It can also serve as an excellent customer service vehicle once your business is up and running.

Video Marketing

Video Marketing

Video marketing is another good way to generate traffic to your

 website. It takes a bit more time to develop videos, though, so you’ll need to create a balance in the time you spend using this method with other methods, until you see that it is working well enough for you to continue.

If you have a computer/Internet related niche, making videos is 
much easier for you, because you can use screen-casting software to record your screen while you talk. You can use it to share tutorials related to your product or service. This also an excellent option for people who are camera shy, and don’t want to physically appear on camera but still want to make use of video marketing.

If you regularly engage in conference calls, where your interested 
customers can come to learn more about your product or service, you can use screen-casting software to record the session, and then include this as a video, too.

Screen-casting software options include:

·        AVI Screen: Free

·        Cam Studio: Free

·        Adobe Captivate: Commercial

·        Screen Flow: Commercial, Mac software

·        Jing: Free, with limitations

Other niches will have to invest in a video camera, if you don’t 
already have one, and spend time editing videos to make them useful to your audience.

To do this, you’ll want to sign up for a YouTube account. Since 
Google owns YouTube, having a dedicated YouTube channel where you post videos can naturally help with your search engine optimization to improve your traffic numbers.

Invite people to become subscribers to your YouTube channel by 
including a link to it with your social media icons. Subscribers will be notified whenever you post a new video.

You can also include your videos in blog posts, giving you yet 
another cross-promotional tool. If people find your blog post, they can be drawn to your YouTube channel, and vice versa.

Twitter

Twitter

 Twitter is another excellent free traffic promotional tool. It may

 take a while to see results with this method, because you need to take the time to build an audience of followers who are targeted to be your potential customers. 

It’s important to get involved and interact with people on Twitter,
 and it’s equally important not to constantly “toot your own horn.” If all you do there is talk about yourself and your products or services, no one will listen, and you’ll quickly get lost in the abyss.

Much like you would do with forum marketing, you should take 
time to find things to share with your audience that are of use to them, regardless of whether or not they originate with you. A good rule of thumb is to share your own content 10% of the time, while sharing others 90% of the time. By creating relationships with people on Twitter, you may be able to find others who are willing to share your content with their following, in exchange for you sharing their content with yours.

To make this easier for you, Prismatic offers a collection of 

material for every niche/subject you can think of. You can automatically get share links, and then, to save even more time, use HootSuite Pro or similar software to schedule your tweets and other social media updates. This should not, however, take place of actual interaction with your followers. Use it to save time, but never to fully automate the process. People need to know there is a real person behind your Twitter profile.

Facebook ads

Facebook Advertising

Facebook advertising is a great way to make use of social media 
to help drive traffic, especially if your fan page is just getting started and you want to increase activity there, too.

Facebook advertising programs work similarly to Google 

Ad-words and Bing Ads, in the sense that you can control your budget on a daily basis, as well as see reports to determine how well the ads are doing. However, there are some significant differences in the way these campaigns work, because you have a few different options.

Increase Page “Likes

With the “increase page ‘likes’” option, you can choose the page 

you want to promote, create your ad, and choose where you want the click to send the person to (timeline, photos, or any other page “tab” you may have). You can also include “Sponsored Stories” in people’s newsfeeds, for example: “Jane Doe likes “Your Page Name Here” for no additional cost.

Promote Page “Posts

With the “promote page ‘posts’” option, you can choose a certain 
post to promote on your page. You also have the option to leave it at a certain post, or to continuously keep your ad up-to-date with the most recent post.

 See Advanced Options

With the “see advanced options”, you can set your Facebook ads 
to run on a cost per click (CPC), or cost per thousand impressions (CPM). This means you can either pay every time the ad is clicked, or for every time the ad is displayed on a page, rather than clicked. 

Typically, you’ll pay less for each time the ad is served when 
you’re opting to pay for CPM, but you’re not as likely to see those convert than you are to see them convert when you pay for the click. However, you are required to pay for the click, regardless of whether or not it converts to a page “like.” This is no different than paying for a click on a Google or Bing ad, regardless of whether that click converts to a paying customer.

The main difference between Google and Bing Ads and Facebook 
ads is that instead of selecting keywords to display the ads on, you’ll be choosing the audience you want to expose your ad to.

You choose the:

·        Location: Country, State, City, Zip code

·        Age

·        Gender

·        Precise interests

·        Broad interests

·        Connection to your page: You can show this only to people who are already connected to your page in some way, such as only people who already connected your page, only people who are not already connected to your page, or people who are targeted to certain topics, events, and friends of current connections.

You can also choose people to advertise to based on who they are 
interested in, their relationship status, their language, their education status, and their workplace, if you opt to use advanced targeting techniques.

You can choose to constantly run your campaign starting on the 
day you create it (once it’s approved by Facebook, which generally takes about 24 hours) or you can set a finite date range to run the campaign.

I advise you to get as specific as possible for your niche. Though 
with each segment you specify, the total number of people decreases, you’re getting more targeted, which means you have a greater chance of converting the people who do see your advertisement.

Warrior ads

Warrior Special Offers: WSOs

Warrior Special Offers, also known as WSOs are useful if you’re
 already actively using the Warrior Forum, a popular forum for Internet marketers. There’s a specific forum thread on Warrior Forum for this purpose. All you have to do is pay $40 to run your ad, and you will start to see traffic to your website, sometimes within minutes of the ad going live on the Warrior Forum website.

In order for this form of advertising to be effective, your product or service must be useful to other Internet marketers. For example, Internet marketers are always looking for ways to reduce their content costs without comprising quality. Anything that helps other marketers bring in traffic, make their website design/maintenance easier, etc. is usually a safe bet. If you’re offering an affiliate program, or something you think other marketers may be interested in promoting with you, it may be a good idea to post it here.

The key here is a well-written ad. You’ll need a catchy title to 
entice people to click on your thread. There are plenty of ads posted on Warrior Forum every day, and yours will not stay at the top for long, though after it reaches a certain point, you can pay and have your ad bumped to the top again.

Once people click on your forum thread, you’ll need to write good
 sales copy to really sell your product or service, making sure to offer them an exclusive, Warrior-only deal, to sweeten the pot.

Free Traffic

Free Traffic Methods

If you’re running on a tight budget, there are several free traffic 
methods you can use to start driving traffic to your website. Remember that when you opt for free over paid marketing tactics, you will have to invest more time, and the results are typically slower.

Forum Marketing

Forum marketing is a good way to generate traffic to your website,
 but it will only work if you’re providing something of value to the forum members. In other words, you can’t just join the forum and start posting anywhere and everywhere, just for the sake of posting. The best thing to do is to set up your forum profile with your website URL, and include your website URL in your signature, so it’s automatically included in every post you make on the site.

The key is to make sure you find forums where your target 
audience is frequently found. You can do this by searching Google for “forum + your niche.” Once you’ve found a forum or two related to your niche, then it’s time to start looking for places where you can be useful.

Look around the threads, and if you see someone asking a question,
 take the time to answer it. Don’t sell your product or service, unless it provides a legitimate answer for their problem. Instead, offer your expertise and extend a hand to help, if you’re able to do so.

The more actively involved you become in the forums, the more you’ll establish yourself as a expert in the field, so people will learn to trust you and what you have to say. When you’re a credible expert, you’ll start to see traffic come from the effort you’ve put into forum marketing.