Not talking about affiliate ad network offers, but making money on facebook advertising serving the thousands of business that are in your neighborhood. Most of the dentists, lawyers, roofing contractors, cosmetic surgeons and other professional service firms are spending a few thousand a month on yellow page advertising. Most of that money is flushed down the toilet, handed over to internet scammers. If you want to scam, by the way, read my post about being a seo consultant. But I digress. Here’s how to do it on Facebook:
Sign up a couple local businesses, charging $500 a month for advertising on Facebook. That will buy you enough traffic to dominate, Facebook for your client’s geography– more on that in a minute. Avoid folks who sell products– they must be local. Also avoid real estate, insurance or financial offers, where there is a lot of competition. You can only make money as an affiliate doing what others don’t do.
Get the money up-front so you’re not having to front the cash– tell them you’re not a bank, if they complain. If you can take a credit card, even better– so you don’t have to chase them each month or play the “check is in the mail” game.
Set up one campaign with 5-6 ads targeted to your city on users that are 23+ years old. College kids don’t spend money on professional services. You can try out a few ads that have interest targets– but odds are that this will restrict the available traffic down to almost nothing– but try it. Bid 20 cents a click– Facebook will suggest a dollar or so, but ignore that. Spammers are not targeting this finely, so you can get the traffic much cheaper than them, as well as much cheaper than Google PPC. Set up subids in your tracking urls so you know which ad drove the click and conversion in your Google Analytics (which you’ve installed on the client’s site).
Set up a landing page just for the client– it can live on a subdomain of your site or the client’s site. If the client can’t get you access to their site or if it’s a pain, you just host the page yourself. Put the phone number HUGE on that landing page. If you don’t know how to do landing pages or are lazy, just send traffic to the client’s homepage– but it won’t convert as well or be as trackable.
You must have an offer or phone number so you can track conversion. You can have a special with a coupon code of “FACEBOOK” or require that they mention they saw the ad on Facebook. Thus, when prospects call or come into the office, they are telling your client that your facebook advertising campaigns are effective. If you want to really hit a home run, get a phone number that is unique to the web– BlitzLocal does this, as does Google Voice, which is GrandCentral rebranded.
Sit back and prepare to be amazed: There is so little competition on Facebook for legitimate ads that it’s easy to dominate for Denver liposuction or Boulder massage, even if you’re only targeting the city and age group. Your client will be calling you soon because his or her friends will be telling them that they see them all over Facebook– plus clients will be saying they saw them on Facebook!
If you want to learn more about local advertising on Facebook, see Dennis Yu,who is CEO of BlitzLocal.