Archives for October 2011

Facebook Ads can be a great way to reach your niche audience, as they provide a variety of categories to target.

You can choose your audience by location, age and interests, and test both image and text-based ads to figure out what works.

There is the option to promote a Facebook Page or your own site – you'll want to send the traffic to your site. Why? Because this section is all about techniques to drive traffic to your site, that's why!

Also, Facebook Ads enable you to set the daily budget for your ads, and you can adjust your daily budget anytime. And you can choose to pay either when people click (CPC) or see your ad (CPM).

I've used Facebook Ads for affiliate sites, but easily my most import campaign to date was one where I was trying to accelerate the same of my house in August 2010. I ran a number of different ads to test elements of the ads, as well as the target audiences.

This one here, which used the real estate short-hand language from my house listing, was the best performer and ended up reaching the buyer.

I combined targeting an area my real estate agent said was the source of most of her sales in my town, as well as testing a theory that the best prospects would be folks married in their 30's, since they would be family-minded and looking for more space.

The overall Facebook campaign cost about $1,000 and the offer came in a week after we listed. I did some research at the time and houses in our range were selling in about six weeks or so.

I run a number of small campaigns currently for affiliate sites with a budget around $5/day.

An important thing to point out – be sure you use a unique link for the traffic to your site and monitor it, so you can track the effectiveness.

More details on Facebook ads at http://www.facebook.com/advertising/.

Podcasting is a great way to reach a niche audience, and to drive traffic to your site. But wait… podcasts are audio, so how can they drive traffic?

Well, one of the ways people listen to podcasts is by streaming them from a blog or other website.

And the posts for podcast episodes typically include podcast notes, which recap the show and include links to items mentioned on the podcast.

I use a WordPress plugin called PowerPress to incorporate podcasts into blog posts, and the plugin includes stats of where people are listening to the podcasts.

When I take a look at a sampling of podcasts on GeekCast.fm, a network of business podcasts I started years ago with Missy Ward, 75% of people are listening to the shows on the site, and the balance are using their iPods or other devices to hear the shows offline.

So anyway, is the amount of traffic from podcasts worthwhile?

Well, I've been podcasting weekly since 2006 – sometimes more than one show a week. If I wasn't seeing a benefit in doing it, I would have stopped long ago.

Check out 7 Minutes in Affiliate Heaven, which I record solo every week.

And have a look at GeekCast.fm to see a variety of podcasts and how they work out their podcast notes.