If you’ve approached your copywriting in a systematic way, you have probably done a lot of studying. You have probably read at least a few of the great books on copywriting by the likes of David Ogilvy or Claude Hopkins, and make no mistake, the same principles discussed in their books continue to apply for online advertisers. That said, there are some things that these folks who came from the age of print media won’t even think to warn you about that you really need to be aware of.

Shortcuts on Headlines

In the offline copywriting, direct-mail world, an enormous amount of effort goes into developing headlines. It would be perfectly normal to expect to write anywhere from 50 to 100 headlines for a sales letter before choosing the “winner.”

Online copywriters seldom follow this rule. They just don’t consider the headline as important enough to merit that kind of effort, or they think they’ll be able to tune the headline through split-testing so they don’t put in the up-front work. Frequently they’ll just write a few headlines, or even just one, and run with it.

Do NOT make this mistake. Your headline is the single most important part of your sales page — do what the great offline copywriters do, and write those 50-100 headlines. Honestly, you might get lucky and hit on the great one in the first dozen, but don’t count on it!

Getting Cheap on Copywriters

When it comes to great sales copy, you truly get what you pay for. Sure, you can skimp and try to do it on the cheap, but you’ll almost certainly be shooting yourself in the foot. The folks that you can get to write copy for you at the Warrior Forum for a couple hundred bucks are not going to produce copy you can build your business around.

There’s a reason why top copywriters can charge 10s of thousands of dollars for their services: because the copy they write can produce millions of dollars’ worth of sales. How can you possibly expect to build a multimillion dollar business around the sales copy produced by someone selling their services on Digital Point or, worse yet, Fiverr?

Bold Headlines, No Proof

If you don’t have the proof, lay off the big red headlines and crazy claims. All you’re doing is screaming at your readers, and the only thing that’s guaranteed to do is annoy them and turn them off.

Proof sells. It’s just that simple. One video testimonial, bank statement, or before and after photo set is worth an infinite number of red H1 headlines. While catching the reader’s attention is important, a “Make 10,000 Per Month” with no backup is just a waste of time.

Never make a promise you can’t back up with real proof. If you can’t do that, you need to work on your product.

Skip the SEO

You can do SEO on every page of your site but one: your sales page. NEVER, EVER try to do SEO on your sales page itself.

Just take a moment to think about it: every word of your sales page has to be carefully selected to have exactly the right emotional impact. How can you possibly do that when you’re trying to hit keyword density values or worrying about having a keyword phrase in your H1 and H2 tags? The very idea is beyond stupid: but people still try to do it.

Do yourself a favor: SEO the rest of your site, but leave the sales page alone.

If you’ve been in the Internet marketing business over the past few years, you’ve probably heard more than once that “banner ads are dead.” It’s such a common (and blatant) misconception that it almost seems deliberate. You hear it every time you turn around, but if you actually talk to big players in the business about where they get their traffic, the most common answer you’ll get is “media buys.” Folks, “media buys” means banner ads.

Banner ads are probably the single most scalable sources of traffic available online. Banner advertising is what you do when you want to get your offer in front of tens or even hundreds of millions of eyeballs per month. Nothing else even comes close. The smaller players do SEO or PPC or PPV; the big players do media buys, and they can bring in more traffic than all those AdWords or SEO or Facebook campaigns combined.

Starting Small in Banner Ads

Crazy as it may sound, one of the best places to get started with banner advertising is Google. Their contextual ad network is still the largest placement network existing today, but here’s the catch: there is no minimum buy! You don’t have to do a $10,000 minimum insertion order just to get rolling.

Almost every website out there that has opted in to the Google AdSense program is a potential target for image ads, and you can target sites either through keyword placement or by specifying the site itself. You can do basic split testing across 10-20 sites, drop $50 on each one, then scrap the ones that aren’t producing click-throughs or conversions and focus on those that are.

Other Small-Scale Banner Sources

There are quite a few other possibilities if you are looking for smaller scale ad buys; there are a lot of outfits that act as “middle-men”, linking up advertisers with websites that are making ad space available. Buy Sell Ads is one of the better known of these, along with Advertise Space, Puxee, and AdSella.

Keep in mind also that there is nothing stopping you from contacting websites directly to arrange banner ad buys. You’ll find that a surprising number of sites, even large-scale sites, that are open to offers to buy ad space from anyone who contacts them directly and acts in a professional manner. Do some Googling for keywords specific to your industry, identify some high-traffic sites, and contact the site owners directly to request ad space.

Joining The Big Leagues

Unless you’ve got a lot of money to burn, you shouldn’t move up to these larger sites and ad networks until you’ve familiarized yourself with the process. You should have already identified the creatives you want to use, ones that you know from heavy split-testing will convert for you. You don’t want to be doing your creatives split-testing, or tweaking your sales funnel, at this point; the only variable should be traffic source.

Once you start using these big sites and ad networks, you are going to be spending significant money. Basically, expect to spend $5,000 minimum, often even 10,000. That’s the *minimum* it will cost you to get your foot in the door at sites like WebMD.com or the huge ad networks like Tribal Fusion.

Don’t be *too* scared off by those numbers, however; you can minimize your exposure by two standard techniques: a 48 hour shutdown clause and stipulating the traffic period. If you stipulate a one-month traffic period, then the traffic will be spread out over the entire period. This effectively turns a $5,000 contract into a $167/day order. Combine this with the 48-hour shutdown clause, and if you find that your campaign isn’t converting, you can shut it down after only two days and about $300 spent.

Conclusions

So, the general process you should use for your banner ad campaigns is really pretty simple: first, use the “no-minimum” networks to split-test your ads and tune your sales funnel. If you are successful at this level, you should also be able to build up enough cash to scale up to the big traffic sources with large insertion orders. Track things carefully for the first 48 hours, be ready to shutdown the campaign if your CTR or conversion ratios drop off. Once the campaign has proven itself, just start scaling and watch the money come in!

That said, enabling your site for mobile properly is not the simplest job you will ever have to do. There are a lot of issues to consider if you want to get it right.

Designing for Mobile: Problem #1

The biggest single problem with designing a site for portable devices is that there are a huge number of them. What do you design for? How do you approach the problem efficiently?

You’ve got the iPhone, which is clearly the front-runner right now. But then there’s the iPad, Android devices, BlackBerry, and even the Windows tablet. You simply can’t code a separate version of your site for each one, there are far too many to do that.

On the other hand, you can’t do a one-size-fits-all, as so many people used to do. There’s just far too much difference in capabilities between devices. A site that works for the iPhone or Android devices, with their smaller screens, will be horribly frustrating for an iPad or other tablet user.

Responsive Web Design: Query the Client

The best way to approach this problem is with what’s called “responsive web design”. What is this? Basically, it’s a method where you dynamically choose the best “version” of your site based on information that you can get from the device trying to access your site.

You use a combination of media and user agent queries to figure out how your user is browsing, with what sort of device, and what capabilities that device has. Then your site’s code can respond with the best possible results based on this information. And what’s the best way to do this? With your stylesheets!

Basically, you design and style your site with several screen resolution ranges in mind, for example:

• 200 pixels wide
• 200-400 pixels wide
• 400-600 pixels wide
• 600 pixels or more

Once you have done this, you can send the appropriate version and stylesheet to the client based on the information that you can gain from user agent and media queries.

Flexible Design and Mobile

The general concept of flexible design is to create your sites not with specific devices in mind, but with general device capabilities. You create a website *system* that allows you to put out a site that will work for any device. Done properly, this will produce a user experience that is acceptable, even for devices you’ve never heard of — or which haven’t yet been released.

Some general rules of thumb for different size devices: small devices work better if your text is broken up into smaller chunks, and your clickable buttons should be proportionally larger than for other devices.

Once you move up to more medium-sized devices, it’s usually reasonable to simply scale down a lot of the content you would use on your normal full-sized sites. Also, bandwidth is frequently still an issue for mobile devices, so it’s worthwhile to have scaled-down versions of your graphics to serve to these devices, rather than just scaling the same image using width/height values in CSS or IMG tags.

Finally, for bigger devices like the iPad, you’ll want to create something that is as close to fully functional as possible; it will be almost identical to the site you serve out to desktop or laptop computer clients.

The fallout from Google’s latest update, code named “Penguin,” continues. This has affected a lot of people in the Internet marketing industry, often more severely than even the previous “Panda” update. Penguin has targeted a lot of low quality link strategies specifically, earning it the nickname “The Webspam Update.”

Both of these updates were intended to increase the quality of Google search results, but in very different ways. Panda applied advanced artificial intelligence techniques and focused more on the content of the pages being ranked; for example, if too large a percentage of the page was taken up by advertisement space, it caused a penalty.

Penguin focuses more on the types of links coming to the page. It targets “low quality” link strategies, discounting links from known link farms, and so on. Basically, if your SEO strategy is based mainly on having lots of low-PR backlinks to your site, you probably got nailed by Penguin.

Penguin Red Flags

Here are some specific examples of stuff that would have gotten your site’s rankings docked by Penguin:

• Spun content
• Article marketing, especially from low-PR directories
• Forum signature links
• XRumor Blasts
• Blog commenting and comment spam
• Web 2.0 profile links

If you’ve been getting the majority of your links by these methods, Penguin has probably already hit you hard. Time to regroup and start doing things differently. You need to switch to tactics that Google likes, such as: guest posts; high quality, high-PR links; distributing infographics, and even direct requests for high quality links.

Duplicate Content Is More Than Just The Same Words

There’s more than one way to get dinged for duplicate content, including deliberately setting up similar content that targets closely related keywords. For example, you may be putting together a site that uses recipes for SEO content. To try to maximize your keyword coverage, you set up multiple pages with slightly different title tags and keyword optimizations on very similar content:

• Chinese Noodle Soup Recipe
• Best Chinese Noodle Soup
• How to Cook Chinese Noodle Soup

Google can now catch this sort of “over-optimization” as you split up your content amongst multiple pages, and you can be penalized for it. If you’re going to do something like this, be sure that the content on these separate pages is completely unique!

Social Content Links are Key

Social signals are becoming more and more important to Google rankings all the time. Now more than ever, you need to cultivate a strong Twitter following, Facebook exposure and Google Plus presence. The good news is that there are solid methods for doing this; the bad news is that Google can now distinguish between true communities and a bunch of fake likes purchased on Fiverr or the like.

Google is taking into account authority of followers, tracking trending patterns and reading sentiment better than ever. If you’re going to put effort into the social realm, work on building a real community rather than trying to fake it.

Linkbuilding Diversification

You’ve probably seen training repeatedly that emphasizes the importance of “natural” link patterns and the need for diverse link sources. People who failed to heed this training have now, thanks to Penguin, paid the price. Don’t get dinged for this yourself; spread your links out naturally, don’t focus on only a few tactics.

The Penguin update should finally make it clear that you have to stop using “spammy” link building techniques and focus on quality backlinks and — even more important — on quality content.

So, you’re using WordPress for your blog or other marketing website. Great! WordPress is a fantastic piece of software, and in and of itself is extremely secure.

The problems start when you begin to extend the capabilities of WordPress with custom plugins and themes. Because of this extensible nature of WordPress, it is one of the most hacked platforms on the net.

The problem is that these add-ons often have not had nearly as much security vetting as they should, certainly not as much as the core code of WordPress itself. This leads to all sorts of potential security problems, and since the only security auditing done on most plugins is that done by the authors themselves, security holes can exist for months or even years.

How WordPress Sites Usually Get Hacked

Usually this happens when hackers discover a security vulnerability in a plugin and then develop an exploit for it. If you happen to be using that plugin, you’re now a target.

Generally, plugins will have identifiable “footprints” in the content that gets sent out to the web browser so that it will be fairly simple to identify whether that plugin is being used on a given site. So, would-be hackers can just pull main pages for a bunch of websites, look for the footprint, and build a list of sites to attack with their exploit.

As an example, there might be a plugin that adds social media “share” icons to your site (e.g. SexyBookmarks and such). The code that it produces and puts on the site may contain HTML comments that identify it as coming from that plugin. All the attacker has to do is look in the HTML for those comments. Properly crafted Google queries can search for sites that have the footprint; now Google is helping the hackers target their victims!

Backdoors And Other Fun

So, what usually happens when your site is hacked?

Usually, the hackers will install backdoors into your site. These are meant to provide access to the hackers on an ongoing basis, and worse, allow them to get back into your site if you try to fix it. These backdoors can be installed in many places: your htaccess file, your wordpress back-end database, and of course the PHP code files on the site.

Once the backdoors are in place, the most common things that will be done are traffic theft (by redirecting traffic from your site to theirs), using your site as a platform for attacking other sites, and simple malicious defacement of your site.

What Can You Do? Securing Your WordPress Site

Unless you’re a computer security expert, you’ll probably need some help with securing your site. Don’t despair; help is available!

First, you should install a good WordPress security plugin. There are several excellent such plugins out there: “Better WP Security,” “BulletProof Security,” and “Ultimate Security Checker” all come to mind. If you’re unfamiliar with this, the “Better WP Security” plugin is probably a good place to start.

Simply install the plugin and activate it. Right out of the box, it does a bunch of stuff to help secure your site: it locks down and protects your PHP files, hardens your htaccess files, and does automated backups of your database and of your site files. The backups are particularly important, as they will allow you to restore a clean backup if your site does get hacked.

There are other security aspects to consider that can’t really be addressed by the plugin, such as the configuration of your webserver itself, the file permissions on your PHP code files, how PHP is configured to behave, and system-level security, just to name a few. Most of these things will be outside your control unless you do your own hosting. However, if you are getting your hosting through a reputable, professional provider like Bluehost or HostGator, you can be reasonably sure that those issues are being handled.

Crap! I Got Hacked Anyway! Now What?

At this point, it’s probably best to call on an expert for assistance. The good news is that you can find help like this on eLance for a fairly reasonable fee. You should expect to pay roughly $100 to $200, depending upon how complex your site setup is and the extent of the damage, to fix things.

A qualified expert should be able to help you clean up all the backdoors and patch whatever holes the hacker used to get in, and as long as you’ve got backups, you should be OK.

Unless a particularly malicious hacker has completely deleted your site, you should be able to get recovered and back in business in fairly short order. Be sure to install the latest versions of WordPress and any plugins you have to use; get the latest version of one of those security plugins installed and configured, and you’ll have done everything you can to prevent it from happening again.

One of the most important skills you should be developing as a marketer is your copywriting. If, like a lot of people, you haven’t done any writing more in-depth than a grocery list since high school (or college), this can seem like a daunting task. But you have some fantastic tools at your disposal to help you with this that you may not even recognize.

If you are doing affiliate marketing for major product launches, something you can be guaranteed will be provided is affiliates’ resources. And something you’ll find on any high-quality affiliates’ resources page is swipe files. Don’t just think of these as marketing tools — think of them as learning opportunities!

Copying By Hand

Strange as it may seem, this is one of the best ways to learn copy. It’s time consuming, even tedious sometimes, but very effective; so effective in fact that it is included in the standard training program of the American Writers and Artists, Inc. (AWAI) as a core practice.

The practice is simple: get some copy from a top-notch copywriter, and simply write out the copy word for word. Writing the copy forces you to pay much closer attention than you would when simply reading it. It allows you to pick up on nuances in the copy, and better absorb the style of the writer.

As you do this with copy written by different people, you will get a much better feel for their style, how they write, what words they choose, how their writing evokes different reactions. Some writers are very up-front, blatant, while others are more subtle. Analyze copy from writers like Gary Bencivenga, versus someone like John Carlton or Peter Stone or Gary Halbert, and you will see what we’re talking about.

You can find a lot of good examples of swipe copy from these people online; try the Warrior Forum or just do a few Google searches, and you should find more than enough to get started. Just copy it by hand, possibly more than once; see how you begin to get into their heads and absorb the thought processes. Your copywriting will improve, we guarantee it!

Print It Out!

Don’t work from an electronic copy of the swipe on your computer screen! Print it out, have a hard copy you can hold in your hand while you’re copying.

Print out copies of multiple different swipes, so you can *see* them, hold them side by side and compare their look and flow. When you’re in hard-core learning mode, your office should look like a tornado swept through a stationery store.

The objective is to get as much of your brain and senses engaged as possible when you’re in this learning process. Don’t underestimate the power of that tactile feedback you get from holding paper in your hand, even the smell of the ink and paper straight out of the printer. It all helps to imprint the ideas and knowledge in your brain!

Build Your Collection Via Email

One of the best things about collecting swipe copy is that it doesn’t have to cost you a dime. Some of the best advertising copy in the world can be had free of charge, because, hey: it’s advertising copy. The whole point of its existence is to be distributed to as many people as possible!

Set up a Gmail account to be dedicated to collecting email swipe copy. Then, go shopping: find every major marketer’s blog you can and register using this email address. If you’re working in specific markets, find major websites for those industries, and sign up there as well.

You shouldn’t stop until you’re on at least 20 email lists. But frankly, the sky’s the limit. Get on 50 lists, or even 100. Just try to stick with major, well known marketers and blogs. Then, just wait for the material to flow in.

Now, when you need copy to work with, you’re stuck for a selling point, a headline, whatever, you’ll know just where to go. Your inbox for this account will be a gold mine of examples, and you’ll be able to use the power of Google’s search engine to sift through all that content. Think of all the great material you’ll be able to steal — err, borrow.

Conclusion

Use the power of the Internet to build your collection of advertising swipe copy, then wring every bit of value out of it you can. Study it, emulate it, and practice to build your own copywriting skills. Knowing how to create good sales copy is a valuable skill in itself, and it will multiply the effectiveness of your other marketing efforts immensely. It’s worth any and all efforts you put in to it!

Don’t worry about this: you can do a lot of great work without having to spend a lot of money. You can produce perfectly good audio content recording with your iPhone or the built-in mic on your netbook. Add a copy of a free tool like audacity and a short learning curve, and you can produce perfectly good podcasts for free.

The price of webcams has come down so fast it’s almost mind-boggling. You can get a perfectly good, full high-def webcam for about $1-200 these days. With plenty of free non-linear video editing tools (like Kdenlive or AviSynth or Cinelerra or LiVES) available, you can get into high-end video editing for an absolute song.

If you’ve got a reasonable budget, commercial tools like Sony Vegas or Adobe Premiere can be had for well under $1000. You can do pretty much anything you will need to do as an Internet marketer with these tools.

Priorities: Audio First, Then Video

Video, of course, is the new hotness. It’s cool, and it’s sexy. But it’s not as important to have quality video as it is to have quality audio. Video makes great eye candy, but it’s the spoken message that people really need to hear. If your video is a bit off, it’s not the end of the world; if they can’t understand what you’re saying, forget about getting your message across.

What this means is that if you’ve got a limited budget and you have to make a choice, you should spend your money on quality audio equipment, *every single time*. Remember this. Write it down. Repeat it to yourself. Learn it, know it, live it!

You can get a solid, high quality wireless microphone set for few hundred dollars. You want a good lapel mic with a high quality receiver. Shop around, read reviews, pay attention to ratings. Did we mention that getting this high-quality audio equipment is important?

High Quality, Crisp Video

While having a good quality camera is important, the truth is that creating really high-quality videos is usually more about shots, angles and proper lighting than it is about having an expensive camera.

Does this mean you shouldn’t buy a high quality camera? Absolutely not. But you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to do the job! These days you can get a high-def camera that will be perfectly good for all your marketing video needs for under $1,000 — possibly even under $500.

That said, if you’re going to be doing DVD or Blu-Ray content, yes, you should probably invest in a higher end camera. But mostly you will be generating web videos, either for marketing or information products, and you don’t need the same resolution or quality for that.

Another thing to keep in mind is that sometimes it is worth the money to bring in a professional. This is particularly important if you are going to be doing a lot of interviews or instructional videos in a specific setting. Hire a professional to do the lighting setup, but take the time to learn what they are doing.

You can shell out $50-70 per hour for a professional to do this work, and then invest in your own lighting set. If you’ve been paying attention, you can then do your own setup with your own lighting set any time you need to. This is more than worth the initial $3-500 investment; the knowledge will pay dividends for years.

Bells and Whistles — What To Do Yourself, and What Not

You can learn the basics of video editing with a good non-linear video editing (NLVE) package in just a few evenings. When you’re starting out and have little or no budget, it will be worth it to do your own editing. But it’s more important to look at this as a learning experience, getting a feel for the concepts of editing and presentation.

You should try to outsource as much of this work as you can as you go forward. You need to be the creative vision behind your videos; you should not be spending all of your time and energy doing the grunt work of production. In a perfect world, the only time you should be putting into your videos personally is the time scripting and actually being recorded.

Outsource the 3D logo, the cool music, and the snazzy introduction videos to someone on eLance or even Fiver. If you can’t spend a lot of money, try to find a video/film student who’s looking to get started or make some money instead of a high-end, seasoned professional. As long as you find someone whose taste matches your own, you should be fine.

You should be willing to invest some money in getting set up with good equipment, but the real place you should be looking to spend your budget is getting information and knowledge from proven professionals in the field. This sort of input is almost priceless, especially when you’re getting started.

Put your effort into finding good resources, people who know what they’re doing and whose tastes match your own. If they have a proven track record, be willing to accept their (constructive) criticism of your own plans and ideas. Sometimes other people’s taste is superior to your own; don’t be too proud to change your mind if someone with experience can suggest something better.

Above all, work on getting yourself into a more managerial, mastermind role when it comes to your multimedia production. If you’re doing things right, your time will be too valuable to spend on all the details of creating the videos. You shouldn’t be a one-man band!

Even so, the majority of online marketers haven’t come close to realizing the leverage Facebook Advertising can have on their business. The fact is that people are still trying to run their Facebook Ad campaigns like they do their other PPC ad campaigns and Facebook Ads just don’t work like that.

The bottom line is that although Facebook Ads are charged based on the Pay-Per-Click model, they are in fact a completely different animal. To best understand how Facebook PPC really does work, you do not want to begin by taking it from the ‘how it’s different from Adwords’ point of view.  Rather it’s better to learn it from its fundamentals and then on up through all its demographic and other targeting intricacies.

So really the mindset is just completely different and so are the various techniques you’ll need to generate winning campaigns.

Interrupt Versus Permission Based Marketing

One of the key fundamental differences to Facebook PPC versus Adwords PPC is that Facebook PPC is based on an ‘interrupt’ method of advertising whereas Adwords PPC works on more of a ‘permission’ based method.

Think of it like this:
When people go to Google and search for something like ‘Best Dentist in Reno’ and you’re advertising a dental office in Reno, you’re providing them with exactly what they’re looking for, a direct answer to their search. By doing so, you’re in a ‘they ask – you answer’ scenario. With that your ‘click-thru-rate’  will be higher because you’re essentially advertising with their permission.

In contrast, your Facebook Ad depends on its ads ability to ‘interrupt’ your target audience as they’re doing what people come to Facebook to do, which is to interact with their friends.  So your ad must be able to draw their focus away from reading their friends posts, and posting their own updates, videos and pictures. Then once you’ve interrupted their attention and they’re now focused on your ad, it must be compelling enough for them to click-thru.

Targeted Marketing Using Facebook’s Demographics

People demographics and keywords are the two main ways Facebook provides for targeting your Ads. It’s all about demographics and so you better know your target audience. If you don’t, then you could end up blowing through a lot of ‘Ad Spend’ just to get terrible results.

It’s very important for you to have established other advertising venues so you’re not using Facebook for preliminary testing of your ad campaigns; because it’s usually far more expensive to test on Facebook than elsewhere.

One of the first things you want to do before starting a new ad campaign is to determine what an acceptable ‘Return On Investment’ (ROI) is for that campaign. I say ‘that’ campaign because ROI levels can, and often are, much different from one campaign to another. With an established ROI level in mind, you’re ready to target your ‘key demographics’ (KD) and this is where Facebook excels.

Here at the IMC, we’ve found that the best way to narrow down your KD is to begin with a narrow range and then expand the range to an optimal level based on your ROI and the potential range of your KD overall. What this means is that there’s a balance between the size of market you can target and the amount you’re willing to allow your ROI to decrease.

The basic rule is; the larger the market you try to capture, the smaller your ROI will be. Another way of saying it is; the more narrow your KD range is, and thus target market, the greater your ROI will be.

For example:

From this vary narrowed down size of your target market as a result of applying a set of tightly targeting ‘Key Demographic’ filters you should see a higher level of ROI than you’ll see as you broaden your target market reach. So now you’ll begin to widen the size of your target market by carefully reducing the number of KD filters being applied, and/or by loosening the allowable values that are input into your KD filters; for example: you could have had a KD filter for age range that’s set to 25-40 initially, and then you could loosen that up to a 20-50 age range, which would widen your target market reach.

So obviously there’s a tremendous amount of tweaking you can do with Facebook’s demographic filters; and when you throw in everything you can do with keyword filtering, it becomes an infinite amount of possibilities. You certainly want to have a good idea of where you’re likely to achieve the tightening or broadening of your reach relative to the KD that you deploy in your campaign. So again, good upfront demographic research on your niche will save you a ton of time when it comes to tweaking your KD filters in order to achieve your optimal ROI.

Create an Ad That Interrupts & Grabs Attention

Earlier I pointed out how important it is to understand your demographics when it comes to executing a profitable ad campaign on Facebook. When it comes to the ad itself and what’s the most important elements in the ad, the image you use in your ad is to the ad what good demographics research is to a profitable campaign.

Unlike Adwords where the headline is the most important element to an ad, with Facebook the image is the most important element to an ad, and the headline is a distant second. So when you’re creating your Facebook ad, take care to make sure your image is eye catching in one way or the other.

Take the time to find an image that can relate to your ad in some way, but more importantly, find an image that is stimulating, controversial, surprising, or just flat-out unusual in some way. Some of the usual suspects always work as well like beautiful girls; or better yet, beautiful and seductive girls; or even better yet, a suggestive image of a beautiful and seductive girl.

I always try to put myself in the shoes of my target audience and imagine what would catch my attention to the degree that it would ‘interrupt’ whatever it is I’m doing on Facebook. If my target audience is men for example, I’ll often try and work a beautiful girl into the image some how.

One of my favorite and most successful Facebook ad campaigns was for driving traffic to a web site I have for promoting model trains. That ad was very simple as it consisted of a very cool looking model train setup along with a gorgeous girl standing next to it wearing a very seductive conductors outfit. Suffice it to say, that campaign did very well and we ended up driving what was for us, a record amount of traffic to that site. If I recall correctly, we drove as much traffic in the week of that promotion as we did in the prior year of strictly SEO traffic.

The point is fairly simple here, your ad’s image must attract attention by being visually stimulating enough to interrupt your audience.  Your ad’s image can even be text so long as its eye catching by using a bold or visually interesting font style along with a color that pops off the page.

The other elements in your ad simply need to support the work that the image is doing. The headline should work with the image to make the statement you’re trying to make with the ad. The body text just needs to provide a minimal amount of information about what will be gained by them clicking thru.

So the bottom line is that your Facebook Ad Campaign can be very successful when you can strike pay-dirt between optimum demographic targeting and a great eye catching ad that can grab your target market’s attention by successfully interrupting whatever they’re already doing and getting them to click-thru. Proper split testing is also extremely important, not only with your Facebook ad campaign, but also with your sales page and/or landing page.

Be patient, be thorough, and be consistent; then you’re almost assured of hitting a profitable campaign more often than not. Since this is often a numbers game, then you just need to find a groove that works for you and then stick with it until it doesn’t work any longer. Then when that happens, you simply find another groove!

Also, since a lot of traffic tactics involve “bidding” scenarios where marketers “compete” for a traffic resource, if a tactic becomes too popular it can become too expensive because competition drives the price out of reach for the majority of marketers.

However, the fact remains that those tactics still work, and they can remain profitable at some price. And after a particular method of advertising gets too expensive for a while, sometimes its price starts to come back down because people abandon it for cheaper methods.

Let’s look at a three methods of generating traffic that aren’t generally considered “hot” any longer, but we think are still worth looking at — because they still work.

Solo Mailings

Think of solo mailings as a “paid cousin” to the ad swap. You can approach an existing list owner and, instead of offering to email your list with their offer in exchange for them doing the same, you simply offer a negotiated, fixed fee to them to mail their list for you.

You’re probably familiar with some of the “ad swap directories” out there that help you connect with other list owners to arrange ad swaps. There used to be a lot of directories similar to this for solo mailings, but most of them have shut down as the method went out of favor. This means that you’re probably going to have to do some research on your own to identify list owners and contact them directly to make offers.

If you’re willing to do that work, you can still identify owners who are willing to mail their lists for you for a fee, and this can be some of the best exposure you can get. Be aware that people are more protective of their lists than ever, and you had better have a good offer with real value ready to go before you start down this path.

Co-Registration Leads

If you’re unfamiliar with this type of lead generation, you’re not alone. It’s not highly favored these days, because a very popular system called “Pipeline Profits” came out in 2007 that blew out the market. The sudden influx of competition drove the prices out of sight. Now, not very many people do it any more.

You’ve probably purchased something or joined a site in the past, and at some point in the purchase process you were presented with a checkbox that asked something like: “I would like to receive special offers or information for ‘subject X’”. If you left the checkbox checked, you went on a co-registration list. Lists like these can be huge, numbering hundreds of thousands or even millions.

These email lists were then made available for marketers to “bid” to send their email offers. The leads could literally be bought for pennies, or at least they could before the great PIPS marketer flood in the late 2000s.

The good news is that after a few years of being out of favor, those prices have come back down and co-registration leads are alive and well. The bad news is that making co-reg work for you can be difficult. You’d better have a first-rate email provider and be prepared to split test like a madman. Plus, you will almost certainly burn through more than one list before you get it right. Be prepared for a few failures (think of them as “learning experiences” and split test some more) before you strike gold.

All that said, co-registration does work, and there is an amazing amount of traffic in it if you do it right!

Media/Banner Ad Purchases

Whoever started the idea that “banner ads are dead” should be shot. It’s a myth, and what’s more, it’s a myth that’s hurting a lot of newer marketers who don’t know better and have bought into the idea.

PPM is still a perfectly viable option for getting enormous amounts of traffic to your website. If you want huge exposure and large amounts of traffic (we’re talking millions of visitors), there is almost no better way to do it than banner ads. You can scale this traffic method like almost nothing else out there, and that includes PPC. Unless you’ve got huge (we’re talking 6- or 7-figures) budgets to work with, you could never hope to get as much traffic with PPC as you potentially can with banner ad buys.

There are two crucial issues, however, that you have to have covered before you can make banner ads work for you. First, you have to be ready to do serious split-testing on a small scale, working closely with a really good graphics creator. Second, you have to be able to target demographics very precisely.

Don’t go in to a banner ad campaign thinking you can just target a keyword like “weight loss” and spray your ads out there. You have to be able to tailor your offer to a very specific group, including selectors like education level, marital status, sex, children/no children, age range and income range. So, for example, target your ads at “college-educated women with no children, between 25 and 35 years of age, making $50,000 or more per year.”

Also, while big banner ad campaigns can be significantly less expensive than PPC campaigns, you still should expect to spend $5k to $10k to really get started with these media buys.

Conclusion

While these are all paid techniques, only the media buys require a significant amount of money to get started. You can still get started with solo mailings and co-registration leads for well under $1,000. It takes time, care and experience to use these techniques effectively, but the methods can work wonders for you if you put in the effort to learn — and the vast majority of marketers completely overlook them.

Within the past few months, social search has been getting integrated into the top search engines. More and more news and information is being disseminated via the social media networks, particularly Twitter and Facebook. Several major news stories have broken via Twitter even before appearing on the established news sites.

When something big happens, people are tweeting it or sharing it via status updates on Facebook like never before. The search engines are adapting to this fact as quickly as they can, recognizing the fast-paced relevance of the information flowing through the social networks.

You can take advantage of this trend as well, if you take the proper steps to optimize your brand for social search, allowing you to get ahead of your competition and bring in customers quicker than ever. Here are some tips to help you with this.

Integrate Social Media with Your Content

You need to start thinking of those “Share” and “Like” buttons as a crucial tool. If your users are sharing your content through the social networks, you are going to get indexed that much quicker; the links you gain from people’s pages on Facebook or Twitter can be like gold! Make it as easy as possible for your users to do this and reap the benefits.

Promote Via Social Media Activities

Above and beyond the obvious steps of adding “Share” and “Tweet” buttons to your content, you should be sharing links to that content on your own social media profiles. Never miss an opportunity to provide links or references to your content when commenting in forums or on message boards and blog posts. These outlets have their own integration with the social networks — sometimes they’re called “other readers.”

Work on Relationships with Contacts

Be real with your social media profiles. You are building brand when you do this; and the more you genuinely engage with customers/fans through those social media platforms, the better your relationships will be. Those relationships can snowball as people you’ve engaged refer still more contacts to you. The more people enjoy their engagements with you, the more likely they will pay attention to the things you share.

Those top-quality relationships will translate into far greater reach for your information; this in turn will make your social search optimization far simpler, because others will be working to share your information for you. People love to feel like they’ve got “insider information” and will be eager to share it with others — this sense of community can be a crucial element in building your brand.

Guard Your Online Reputation

Social search can hurt you as much as it helps you if you aren’t careful; any damage to your online reputation can be multiplied if you have large reach in the social media realm. Potential customers can hear about your screwups as quickly as they do about the good stuff — probably more so. Information moves at lightning speed in social media, so keep it in mind and be careful with every tweet, status update, or share you do.

Develop Interaction Strategies

Take advantage of every opportunity to encourage your customers to share your content. Offer rewards like giveaways of products and/or services to encourage them to engage with you and share or like or tweet. Since you can track information about “likes” and “follows”, they can be used as “entries” in contests to run on your site. Use your imagination and there’s almost no end to the possibilities; your contests can multiply your followers and fans, and that winner will be talking about you for a long time to come.

Remember that there is no form of advertising more powerful than word-of-mouth!