How to Make Money with Facebook Social Ads

by: Sam Henry

In a previous article, I gave a basic introduction to Affiliate Marketing and briefly discussed a marketing method known as Pay Per Click (PPC). Facebook, the wildly popular social networking site which has taken nearly every college campus by storm, has recently introduced a marketing program called Facebook Social Ads. Much like Google's Adwords program, users can post advertisements targeted to specific audiences by location, gender, keywords, etc. However, Facebook takes targeting to a whole different level because it has more information about its users. Through Facebook Social Ads, you can target your audience by their schools, hobbies, favorite movies, favorite music artists, affiliations, political views, people in high school, college, college grads, people who are single, married, etc. This ability gives you greater control over who sees and clicks on your ads which ultimately means there is a greater chance that your clicks will convert to sales or leads.

For example, an affiliate marketer and Facebook user who has signed up through LinkShare for MagazineLine's affiliate program might chose to promote a student discount for BusinessWeek Magazine. Given an affiliate link and an image provided by Linkshare, they could very easily use Facebook Social Ads to create something similar to the following ad. A suitable audience for this ad will be people between 18 and 22 years old in the United States who are interested in Business, the Stock Market, or Investing.

Ad Targeting

*Notice, in this example my choices limit me to approximately 20,000 people. Simply removing the upper age limit more than doubles the reach of this ad and going even further by adding "Magazines" to my keywords triples the estimate.

Expanded Target Range

The idea is to reach the widest possible range of the audience that is most likely to be interested in what you are promoting, and with nearly 100 million registered users there are an unlimited amount of specific (niche) audiences to reach.

Get creative with the text of your ad but be sure to adhere to Facebook's Ad Guidelines. They will reject ads for irrelevance, excessive capitalization, punctuation, etc. Always upload a photo! Pictures just add that extra "eye-catchiness" to your ad.

Creating your ad

Keep in mind that the cost of the clicks will eventually add up and the trick is to make sure you're earning more than you're spending. Facebook Social Ads allows you to set a daily budget with the minimum being $5. Your Bid should be set to whatever you are comfortable paying considering the commission you will earn when you generate a sale/lead however, it's best to follow the suggested bid. If your bid falls too far below the suggested bid you wont get many impressions (the number of times your ad is displayed).

Facebook offers many advantages as a marketing tool, but making money with it, like anything else takes practice. If you're into affiliate marketing, don't be afraid to experiment with different types of products, and services from different affiliate programs until you find something that works with Facebook. If you have your own business, website, or product that you're promoting, experiment with your wording, and imagery to find out what combination is best at getting your message across while converting clicks to sales or leads.

Facebook is a registered trademark of Facebook, Inc.

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