So if you have a great affiliate product you want to push that you can target at a particular market, two years ago your PPC advertising campaign might have been focussed on Google and/or Yahoo. With Facebook’s penetration into the web community probably at its peak, the use of it’s collection of demographic data means that it is a marketer’s paradise.

I like to compare facebook advertising not to Google, but to the roadside billboard. With Facebook I find the best way to price your campaign is on an CPM impression basis. This is from where I draw the comparison with the roadside billboard. If you want to advertise a product on a roadside billboard, you will pay more for “high traffic” roads and it doesn’t matter if any of those drivers turn into leads, you still pay your fixed cost for your advertising, unlike Google of course where the status quo is to pay for clicks.

The advantages of Facebook over the roadside billboard is that you can decide to only target women over 30 in New York who are single, or Men at University in London who are in a relationship. Facebook will even tell you how many of its users match your requirements. You need to look at your product and decide not which types of people it will interest, but which types of people are most likely to convert. Effective facebook advertising on a CPM basis is about getting the click thru ratio up as high as possible. This will in turn reduce your cost per lead, which is what you want. You don’t want to go wasting your spend on impressions that won’t convert. So if your affiliate product is a high end product designed for men over 18, you may decide that men under 30 aren’t likely to have the disposable income to purchase your product, so don’t go wasting your CPM spend on them. Focus on your target market with the highest possible conversion rate.

Getting an advert on facebook is notoriously tricky, so you need to obey the rules they stipulate, which is no excessive capitalisation or exclamation, and the ads have to be tasteful, with no aggressive call to actions. Once you have your ad up running, duplicate it instantly and then tweak the words or pictures slightly. This is called split testing and what you’re going to do is observe which one produces the higher CTR. I always find that a CTR in the region of 0.02% to 0.05% is realistic, but as the CPM on facebook is fairly cheap the CPC still works out nice and cheap, for now. Keep tweaking your ad and recording which text and call to actions converts the most and you’ll soon see the CTR begin to rise.

If you have used Facebook to advertise I’d be interested to know how you got on and your thoughts.

I am pleased to say that my online endeavours have got to such a point where my workload warrants getting extra help. I don’t want to go through the paperwork of hiring someone to work part time for me in the UK. I am a one man business and I want it to stay that way. I don’t want to have the responsibility of keeping someone in a job, especially in these difficult economic times.

As I don’t have enough hours to feed to a UK based person, I am going to take the plunge into Mumbai. It is clear that you get what you pay for with a virtual assistant, especially a Mumbai VA, and I have heard mixed reviews. Many people have told me “Mumbai is cheap but they take hours to do a job, and don’t always do it right”. However, without being too disrespectful, Indians are good natured and hard working people, and yes I could continue to pay my existing web developer £35+/hour with zero risk, knowing exactly what I get, but enterprise is all about risks and in my eyes there is no better validation of current business processes than a good bit of split testing.

So I am going to look at outsourcing these specific tasks:-

• 50% Blog Posting for DailyEcoTips.com
• Chunky data entry SEO tasks
• Customer service emails for thejohnnyshop.co.uk
• Graphic Design

I am not sure how this will turn out for me, and I will keep you posted. I am hoping to get a dedicated assistant for 20 hours a month, and will not settle for a situation where I deal with a different assistant every day, as I want to build up a working relationship with my assistant. My research at present is leading me to getfriday.com or taskseveryday.com. Does anyone have any experience with either of these? If so, i’d be delighted to hear from you.

So it’s been a while since my last post. A few things have been going on online which I will blog about soon and offline I have been training for the Manchester 10k. As I said I will blog about the online stuff soon but until then I thought I would just humbly share with you a few schoolboy errors I have made recently!

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Recently, I decided to ad AdSense to my feedburner feeds for DailyEcoTips.com, and the results were very pleasantly surprising!

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The Pain of Discipline is less than the pain of regret

From chatting with friends of mine it seems that the above has been muttered by many CEO’s in the finance sector in the last few months as they look to restrict corporate travel, perks, pay rises and general corporate excess in light of the “credit crunch”. When mine said it in a company wide email I thought about it a little and what it meant.

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Well Hello. Not quite sure what to write here that isn’t on the site’s new about me page. My name is David and I have taken over PowerDosh.com from Dan. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Dan for all his work on this site during the time I was a reader of it.

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After a great deal of thinking, I’ve decided to have a big change in my portfolio. I’m selling off PowerDosh and DailyEcoTips (I’ve already made a deal). The reason is because my RSI is not getting any better, so I need to reduce my website commitments. The new owner will be continuing both websites in the same spirit in which I ran them. The new owner will introduce themselves soon!

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Think Visibility was the first SEO conference I’d ever been to, and it was held in Leeds last weekend. I met some top names in UK SEO, and learnt a great deal.

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I’ve been doing a lot of different things relating to web mastering, design, monetizing, link building, link selling, etc. So for this article, I thought that I’d tell you some of the things that I have learnt recently.

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Every so often, I come across a really useful articles on other blogs. The way I tag them is by clicking on the “Share” icon in Google Reader.

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