But have you ever tried advertising on Facebook hoping to get a high ROI (Return On Investment) but you’ve always end up spending more money than what you earn? You’re not alone.

In fact, 99% of Facebook advertisers (including myself) have lost money on this and tons of it.

So, what’s the make it or break it thing? What makes a Facebook Ad a success or a failure?

It all comes down to 3 main key things that you have to do to get them right…

• RIGHT “Targeting” (expose your ad to the right group of potential buyers)
• RIGHT “Facebook Ad” (headline, image, ad copy)
• RIGHT “Landing Page” (offer, sense of urgency, etc.)

If any of the above lack, the only thing that pays is your pocket. With that said, let’s go ahead and show you some simple ways on how to make the most out of your Facebook campaigns so you can enjoy cheap clicks and maximum conversions.

Researching Tools to Find & Target Your EXACT Audience!

This is the hardest part of the whole Facebook Ads setup – most marketers don’t do enough research and they end up losing money. There’s something you can do to increase the chances for a successful ad campaign on Facebook and that’s to research your exact target audience before you set-up your campaign.

Your ad is more likely to perform better and continue running successfully if it is being displayed to the users who are most likely interested in what you have to offer.  Basically it goes like this:

Right Targeting = More Clicks and More Clicks = Cheaper Advertising

Translation: the better your targeting is,  the more clicks you get..and more clicks you get, the cheaper the clicks are!

So in the targeting option within the Facebook Ad Panel you’ll see many options. For example, you can target your audience by…

• Location (Countries where they live in)
• Age (their age group)
• Sex (their gender)
• Precise Interests (things and people they are interested in)
• Advanced Demographics (i.e. relationship status, education level, etc.)

Facebook Targeting Screenshot

Don’t be one of those people who just guesses and jumps right into setting up a campaign.  You’ll save yourself time and money by taking a few minutes to do it.

So how do you find more info about your market?

Well, there are several ways you can research your target audience.

Tip #1: Google Analytics

If you already own a website and are trying to promote it, this is a great place to start analyzing your existing website visitors. With Google Analytics, you can find valuable information about your audience such as countries, languages etc.

Tip #2: Google Ad Planner

Using Google Ad Planner you can find extremely valuable visitor demographics of ANY site! For instance, you enter your competitor’s website URL and you get to know their visitor demographics like age, gender, income, education — including audience interests — and use this data while targeting your Facebook Ad!  How cool is that?

Tip #3: YouTube Video Statistics

Have you ever noticed that small graph-looking icon in the right corner underneath a video you’re watching?  When you click on it, it gives you some great data about people who have watched the video — viewer age ranges, countries where people are watching the video, etc…

I usually find relevant videos depending on what I’m planning to promote on Facebook, and I analyze the target market by viewing its statistics. I also pay attention to how people communicate on these videos, what they need, what they like, what they don’t like and I use that while creating my ad copy to grab their attention.

Tip 4: Quantcast

Quantcast is a free online tool that provides details about a website’s audience.  My favorite bit of data is a breakdown and list of other sites people are likely to visit and this is GOLD when you’re using “Interest Targeting” on Facebook because you can learn more about the interests of people who go to that site.

That’s it for the researching and targeting part. In my next post I’ll show you some tips on how to create killer Facebook ad copy that will grab your audience’s attention by their eyeballs. Meanwhile please take a moment and let me know your feedback in the comments section below, I really like reading your comments.

Stay tuned!

So you have your website up but you don’t know how to get traffic.  Obviously a big part of traffic is getting it organically from searches done on search engines like Google.  And how do you get traffic from Google?  Well, you need to rank well for your searches.  So if you site is about digital cameras you might want to rank on page 1 on Google for “digital cameras” or “best digital cameras”.  Moving on…

At the risk of keeping things simple here I’m not going to go over all the different possible ways you can build links and get links and buy links etc etc.  This is my first post on this blog on SEO and I’m going to break down strategies and techniques into many different posts.  This post is going to discuss using simple “web 2.0″ type of sites, social bookmarks, and blog comments.

The best way to describe this strategy is to do it visually.  So here it is my pretty picture:

This is known as tiered linking, link pushing, link pyramids, and probably a bunch of others I can’t think of right now.  The basic idea is that when you have backlinks to your backlinks, it makes your backlinks stronger.  Was that confusing???    Basically what you are doing in this method is increasing the strength of the backlinks in tier 1, which is the most important tier because it links directly to your website.

Money Page – Your website

Tier 1 – “Web 2.0″ type sites

Tier 2 – “Web 2.0″ type sites and social bookmarks

Tier 3 – Blog comments

First, the money site is a page on your site that you want to rank.  It can be your homepage or it can be an internal page.  Again, the money page refers to any page on your site that you want rank on the first page of Google.  I think that’s pretty clear.  This site should be your own site on your own domain.

Now let’s  get into tier 1 which is web 2.0 sites and explain this step a bit.  Web 2.0 type sites are sites like Weebly, Squidoo, WordPress.com, etc.  These are free “blogging” sites in which you can publish your content for free.  Of course, you are posting on their site so you need to stay within their terms of service in order for your pages to not get deleted.  Many of these sites get spammed alot, so some of them are pretty quick to pull the delete button on your page if they think it’s spammy.

Through various sources I’ve collected 77  free to register web 2.0 sites.  They are all do-follow, and the number you see after the domain is the PR of the homepage.  These are all working as of today.  Unfortunately alot of them go up and down and just stop working sometimes, so you will find alot of lists of these sites out there on the interwebz but most of them are crap.  They are lists of either sites that no longer work, or are no longer free, or are no-follow, etc.  This list I have for you is probably the best you’ll find.  If by the time you use it some of them are not working, let me know in the comments and I’ll try to update it.

Now, what kind of content should you put on them in order for them to be the most effective?  This is a highly debatable subject.  Some people will say you can put the same content on each one.  Some people will say it MUST be all 100% original.  And some say somewhere in between.  I am in the camp of somewhere in between with a strong lean towards as original as possible.  Why?  Well, there are 2 reasons why.  The first is that the more original your content is, the less likely it is to be deleted by the site moderators as spam.  Secondly, I think Google gives higher link power to links coming from content that is not duplicate.

My recommendation is to write one long very good article and spin it to at least 70% uniqueness.  You can use The Best Spinner to do this.  You can use this one article and it’s spun contents as as many of those web 2.0 sites as you can.  I find that it’s fairly easy to take 1 unique article and make 10 spun versions (at least 70% unique) and with those you can submit to 11 of the sites.  Then do another round and you have another 11, etc.

Here are the steps for this:

Step 1:  Write an original article on the topic of your choice that relates to the page you want to rank.  Let’s say for example you have a site about kitchen appliances and one page in particular reviews blenders.  And let’s say you want to rank for the keyword “best blenders”.  You will write an article about blenders, and link the phrase “best blenders” to the page on your site.

Step 2:  Spin that article using The Best Spinner.  Make 10 different versions, each one at least 70% unique.

Step 3:  Pick out 11 web 2.0 sites from the list provided above.  Go and register and create your page with the link to your website.

IMPORTANT:  When you create your page on these web 2.0 sites, don’t just add one link in the article to your site and that’s it.  Format the article with bold and italics, using different font sizes, and maybe add a video from Youtube if you can.  Add an image or two.  Also, make sure you link to at least one or two other domains besides yours!  If you just have one link to your domain only it will look spammy and more likely to be deleted.  Link to other high authority domains too!  So if your article is about the best blenders, link out to an article on MSN.com or About.com or Wikipedia, sites like that.  If you make your submissions as quality as possible, it is less likely to be deleted and will be more powerful link.

Check out this Squidoo page which is an example of  a great page.  Lots of good information on this one.  This is actually really well done, and while you don’t have to be as detailed and complete as this page, it certainly wouldn’t hurt.  As you can see he links out to lots of informative websites, has lots of good content, and then if you scroll down to the bottom you will see the author links to his domain londontoddler.com.  This page is so well done it actually has quite a few Facebook ‘likes’ and other sharing.  This is the type of backlink that the author will have for a long time.

You can also hire someone to do this step for you.  You can find someone from Fiverr, just do a search for ‘web 2.0′ and you’ll see some providers.  You can try Odesk or Elance.  Or you can use a service from WickedFire or other internet marketing forums.

So now you have tier 1.  Tier 1 can be 5 sites, it can be 20, it can be 50.  However much you want to do, it’s up to you.

OK so now onto tier 2.  Now, tier 2 can be more web 2.0′s or they can be social bookmark submissions.  If you don’t know what social bookmarks are, you can read more about them here.  Social bookmarking should be done on a large-scale to be effective for building link juice and is very tedious if you do it manually.  Actually, I take that back.  It can’t be done manually really.  It’s too tedious and wouldn’t be worth your time as it would take forever.

To automate large-scale bookmarking submissions you can either purchase software or a service.  For software, you can use Bookmarking Demon or Sick Submitter.  Or if you don’t want to mess with software then you can use services from Wickedfire.  I’ve used the software and I’ve also hired people from Wicked.

Now, when you create social bookmarks or web 2.0′s as you tier 2 links,  you will link to your tier 1 sites.  You can either use web 2.0′s for tier 2, or social bookmarks, or a mix of both.  I think a mix of both is best.

IMPORTANT:  Your web 2.0 sites for tier 2 do not have to be as awesome as your tier 1 web 2.0′s.  I wouldn’t recommend you waste alot of time writing original articles and spinning them very well.  For this tier I would find related content and spin it to at least 50% uniqueness.  Do what you can to make them OK, but don’t spend as much time on these as you do for your tier 1 web 2.0′s.

Two small notes regarding social bookmarks and these tier 2 links.  When I want to bookmark the content on my own websites, I use Onlywire which automates submission to a handful of the largest and best social bookmarking sites out there.  These bookmarks are done for mainly direct traffic though, as I’m hoping others find my content useful and share it as well.  This is actually the true purpose of social bookmarks.  Right now Onlywire is free to use for up to 300 submissions per month.  Again, I use Onlywire to bookmark my own sites and NOT web 2.0′s.

Also – you can also use the large-scale bookmarking submission to point to your money site as well, but for the purposes of simplicity I didn’t set up my diagram that way.

Finally, we have tier 3.  These are comments you can make on blogs and these backlinks can be pointed to both tier 1 and tier 2.  These are the lowest kind of links for the most part, which is why they are the furthest from your website.  This is not to say all links from blog comments are shitty.  If you find a blog in which the actual PAGE you are commenting on (not the homepage) has a high PR and doesn’t have alot of comments, then these kind of links can go to your website.  But for the most part, blog comments are all on low PR pages and they have really been devalued by Google for their link strength. 

Again for these you can do them yourself, and to teach you how to do this would require a whole blog post or two dedicated to it.  You can use Scrapebox to help you find blogs to comment on manually and you can also use it to spam out thousands of blog comments automatically.  You can also hire people on Fiverr and again from Wickedfire as well.

So there is your beginner’s guide to some link building.  Like I said alot of this can be done for free, but you can buy software and services if you want to do it faster.  More blog posts to come later on more link building and SEO stuff.

And then sometimes I hate Google.  I don’t understand why Google is trying to hurt me and it makes me want to hurt Google back.  And I yell “I hate you Google you bastard!” when no one is around.  Then I feel better about Google not sending me the beautiful traffic that I should be getting.

A few months ago I posted this article about one of my sites dropping like a brick from the 1st page of the SERPs (search engine results pages). I had this site on page 1 for a variety of terms, and suddenly one day all terms dropped back and adsense earnings for this site went from nice to terrible.

In that article I had speculated about the reason as to what it was, and you can see the list of possibilities I had thought had caused the drop in that previous post.

Well, I had done what I said I was going to do.  I was adding content and backlinks but the site was just not moving.  For any keywords at all!  It was driving me crazy.  So what I did was read and read and reached out to some friends.

Turns out, I’m now 99% sure this was a manual penalty.  When I say manual penalty, I mean someone from Google took a look at my site and decided it’s not worthy of being on the first page of the SERPs and slapped it with a -50 penalty.  A -50 penalty is a penalty given to sites in which all keywords drop in the SERPs by 50 spots, and while in the penalty it is impossible to get past position 50 no matter what you do.

How did I figure this out?

Well, like I said – nothing I did got this site to move.  So upon my reading and research and discussions with my SEO friends, you can find out if you got a manual penalty in 2 different ways:

1) You get a message in Google Webmaster Tools.  I actually did not have GWT set-up for this site, so I quickly set it up.  I got no messages, though.  But a bunch of people I talked to HAD gotten messages about getting the -50 penalty.  And when they did, the message would just say that they violated Google’s quality guidelines and they need to fix the site in order for the penalty to be lifted.  Or they would receive a message saying they have a page or pages considered “doorway pages” and they needed to be removed or fixed.

A “doorway page”  is a page Google considers to be NOT in the best interest of the visitor.  Basically they are intended just to gather information from the visitor or send the visitor somewhere else, as in through affiliate links.

2) Since I did not get any messages, you can also do a search for your domain and keyword and see where in the SERPs you show up.  For example, let’s say you have a site bestcomputermonitors.com.  Obviously one of your keywords is “monitors”.

Go to Google and do a search for this phrase:  bestcomputermonitors.com “monitors”

Your site should show up as the first result.  At least it should.  If anything it should be top 3.  Go ahead and try it now for any of your sites and you will see what I mean.

Now, if you do that search for domain.com “keyword” for any keyword for your site and your site doesn’t show until page 5 of the SERPs, then you done got yourself Googalized.  Yup you’re in a penalty, your site sucks, and you suck.

I did this search for my domain and keywords, and sure enough it’s on page 5.  I’m in a penalty, my site sucks, and I suck.

What can you do?

1)  Well, either way you can submit for reconsideration through GWT, in which they will reconsider their decision to penalize you and lift it.  First you have to know what you did wrong though obviously and fix it.  Some of the guys I talked to got messages in GWT stating specifically that they got penalized for doorway pages.  So, fix the doorway pages and then submit for reconsideration through GWT.  That’s what you can do when this happens.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

2)  You can wait out the penalty.  Again a bunch of people I talked to had said that they fixed what they thought was wrong and put the site aside after not getting a response from Google for their reconsideration request.  Sometimes it took 3 months, sometimes 6 months, sometimes more.

3)  You can setup a 301 redirect from the penalized domain to a new domain purchased and/or aged domain.  This is a method that is on the dark side of SEO, but I’ve been told this can work.  I have not tried it though so I cannot personally verify this….yet.

OK so after all of this, why do I think I got penalized?

Somehow I overlooked this in my original post about this, and I don’t know why.  Just a brain-fart I guess.  This domain had a squeeze page as the homepage.  Yes, a squeeze page as the home page!  Terrible, terrible, terrible!  As soon as the Panda updates started rolling out and it became known they were all for onpage factors, I should have realized this and fixed it.  But I didn’t and I done got Googalized.  A squeeze page as the domain homepage is the exact opposite of what Google would consider a “good user experience” and is exactly what they would consider as a doorway page.  And I had it as my homepage.  Pretty stupid.

As for how I got the manual review, there is quite a bit of speculation as to how this happens.  Many people believe that once your adsense earnings reach a certain point you are put in a pool for random checks.  Kind of like an audit from the IRS.  Others believe if you have adsense and google analytics on your site and your traffic increases quickly and dramatically, as did with my site in question, again it is put into a pool for manual review.

And still others believe that if you are on page 1 of Google for any particular term, at any time you are subject to a random manual review just for being on page 1.  Jennifer from Pot Pie Girl mentions some of that here in this post, amongst a bunch of other interesting information regarding how Google works if you want to check it out.

What did I do to fix the problem?

So, I fixed that problem.  I removed the squeeze page and I put about 1500 words of content on the homepage, interlinking to a bunch of pages on the site and linking out to authority sites as well.  I also put a video on the homepage, just a video from Youtube that has very related content.

It’s been about a month since I did that.  I am going to wait another few weeks.  The site was penalized on August 1st and my 3 month anniversary for the penalization is coming up.  If it doesn’t bounce out soon, I will submit for reconsideration.  And if it still doesn’t work, I will try something else.  (cough 301 cough to another cough domain cough)

If you’ve had any sites penalized manually I’d like to hear about your experience.  Or maybe you have a question about any of this?  Hit me up in the comments yo.