Seoroll.com - SEO, SEM, Affiliate Marketing, Arbitrage Experience. » Facebook

Social Media is powerful. But I’ll be sticking to Search.

admin — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 19:34:39 +0000

Right now, Social Media is what some people may call a “hot product”, in the sense that a lot of people are making new marketing products to teach people how to do marketing with Social media, but in fact, it is no better than search. Except for some practices. Growth of YouTube, Facebook caused this big explosion in internet’s social media attention, but in fact, there is something more to it that just 4-5 major social media sites. EBay, Craigslist, Twitter and all the forums of the Internet are social media . The reason to worry about is that all businesses and marketers are going crazy over social media right now simply because it’s hot. This is not always a good idea – go after a new channel because there’s value, a path to revenue and a solid set of tactics that fit with your overall strategy, not just because it’s under exposure all the time.

Social media is great for:

Connecting with your customers/your prospects
Building another channel for communication, branding & messaging
Appealing to early adopters

Search market gives you a lot more in comparison:

Answer a direct need precisely when it’s requested in a scalable fashion
Gain visibility from virtually all Internet users with an interest in your brand/product/sector/content at once

And if you’re ignoring other important fundamentals of online marketing, like:

Building a website with a unique value proposition
Creating great useful content that people want, content is king
Road to effective email marketing
Finding ways to scalably acquire new users & retain existing ones
Leveraging conversion funnels & conversion testing
PPC

You should probably consider those marketing points before ones that are obtainable thru social media. Don’t get me wrong, I really love social media, there is a great way to build email lists (FaceBook Groups) and share experience with people (forums) and getting the experience in return!

Enough reading, starting with Affiliate Marketing!

admin — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:57:48 +0000

So I am ready to start with Affiliate Marketing. Odds are you are as newbie as me in this industry, so I will clear that up. Here is the image of how it works, and a quick quote from wiki:

Affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.

Most famous and most comprehensive way of doing it is promoting the products using PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns on Google Search and Content Network (AdWords), Yahoo! (Yahoo Search Marketing), Live.com search, and so on. Actually any using any methods to get visitors to your product (they should be interested in it, otherwise it’s just waste of time and money).

Some blogs I read (you can find them to the right > ), suggest to take first steps using Facebook Ads. The point is that if you will find a product that interests users, and make a good ad campaign, with targeting, people will click the ad, facebook will lower the cost of the clicks (if the CTR is high). And most important you can get some sales/leads, earn some money and stay in profit. Okay, there is a belief that this business is not for everyone. So Me and You want to figure out whether we are suitable for it. What’s good is that Facebook, like all other companies has coupons. And I will give you one right now, it’s $100 coupon by Visa. You just have to complete this offer, and attach your business profile on your facebook profile page, and you will get $100 voucher and instructions on how to activate it in email. Here’s the link: http://apps.facebook.com/visabusiness

P.S. There are more vouchers available every time, just use google search to find some. Most won’t work! Here is the link, I found 2 x $50 coupons there that work http://www.retailmenot.com/view/facebook.com

P.P.S. ALL Coupon credits have expiry date, be sure to use them or you will lose that free credit, and read 5 Killer Tips for Facebook Ad Ownage by nickycakes.