2015 Review and 2016 Goals – Facebook Ads Is Where It’s At!

January 11, 2016

It’s been a while since I wrote about what I’m up to in the affiliate marketing world. 2015 was more miss than hit for me. I bought several courses and none gave the results they promised. There always seems to be something left out.

Leaving Google For Facebook

The one big course I bought was the 100K Factory (about $3,000) which promised no one would be left behind and if you followed the plan, then success was guaranteed. For me anyway, it didn’t work out.

The basic idea is to use Facebook ads to drive traffic to a website where you can provide offers and/or Adsense to visitors. Essentially, it’s a Facebook ads / Adsense arbitrage model. The goal is to make more from Adsense than the Facebook ads cost.

At best, I was able to break even, so the 100K per year promised by the course looked a long way off. While a support desk was provided, no interaction between members was allowed. So there was no Facebook Group, Facebook Page or Forum provided. When I asked about this, I was told that it was a business decision.

The cynical part of me now thinks the reason that members weren’t allowed to talk to each other is because the level of success in this course was quite low. I have no evidence to say if that is actually the case or not. There were stories of success, but always recounted by the guys running the course, never directly from a member. And, since members couldn’t talk to each other, there was no way to get insight from that successful member.

I contacted the support desk on several occasions with queries and advice on how to proceed to turn advertising campaigns into successes. I got “just keep trying” or “try a bit harder” or “hmmm…I don’t know what that campaign’s not working” type responses. In other words, there was no definitive advice provided to get me to where I was actually making money. So this is where this course failed monumentally for me.

If I could go back in time and give myself some advice, not buying this course would be one thing.

However, the course has shown me that there is power in Facebook advertising. And because of the sheer number of people on Facebook, it’s a tool that must be used by any internet marketer. The trick is in finding out how to make more money than your ads cost.

The 100K Factory

While I was following the 100K Factory course, I built two new sites (Fallout 4 Buzz and Mad About Muscle Cars) and retooled an old site I had about Star Trek (The Federation Times). I also created Facebook Pages for each of these sites. It’s cheaper to buy ads to Facebook pages and posts than it is to buy ads that link directly to a website. These pages would direct visitors to my websites.

I initially ran Facebook “Like” ads for the pages. These are the results I got after running the ads for a couple of weeks:

The Star Trek site was by far the one that got the cheapest Likes – just €0.01 each. You’d think that at that cost, ad clicks on the associated website would generate enough revenue to cover those ad costs. Nope. Hardly any visitors clicked on ads and no one bought products through the affiliate offers, even though the site was getting 500+ visitors a day.

While the other two sites had more expensive Likes, it was the same story with ad revenue – break even at best, lost some money at worst.

And that’s where I floundered. The 100K Factory support desk was of no help in guiding me to success. So the course ran out of steam for me. It felt like, because I wasn’t successful with their course that the 100K guys weren’t interested in working with me. They only wanted to hear positive things from their members. I am left wondering how many if their members they left behind who were in the same position.

Changing Course

Next I took up Adam Short’s Niche Profit Full Control (NPFC) course [currently closed to new members]. Adam’s been around for years and has a proven track record with his courses. The focus of the first two modules of his course (there are eight in all) is about using Facebook to drive traffic to websites, only this time you drive traffic to an opt-in page to start building an email list.

To get members started, Adam provides the material for 8 complete sites in popular niches. This included articles for a website, an email series for each niche (including researched affiliate products – you just need to change your affiliate link) and the opt-in pages themselves. These are proven designs. So it’s all pretty much plug-and-play. Members also get access to his Niche Builder software which creates the sites for you if you’re not familiar with building websites. I opted to build my initial site with WordPress.

The first niche provided to members was on Body Building – a niche I know nothing about (being primarily a couch potato! 🙂 ). Still, I built the site, populated my autoresponder with the provided emails and added in my affiliate links. I also created a Facebook Page on the topic to drive traffic to the website. I then started a Facebook “Likes” campaign as directed in the course.

Results were nowhere near as good as I expected. Page Likes average cost was €0.09 each, quite expensive. I spent a total of €34.97 on the campaign and got 14 subscribers. That means each lead cost €2.50. Two of them unsubscribed soon after so the cost for current subscribers rose to €2.91 each.

Now, if 1% of subscribers (seems to be an industry-standard percentage) were to buy a product that gave a $25 commission, then I’d need 100 subscribers for just one of them to buy anything. So 100 x €2.91 = €291 would get me $25. Hardly a profitable proposition.

I would have to:

Reduce the cost of Likes
Reduce the cost for each subscriber
Get better commissions from different products
Do a combination of all the above

…to turn a profit.

To reduce the cost of Likes, I’d need to write a better ad. If you’re naturally good at writing copy, that’s easy. I’m not good at it and I’m not sure if it’s something you can learn or something you’re born with. And without that skill, success is, at the very least, a lot more difficult. Crafting headlines and hooks for readers isn’t something taught in many courses. And yet it’s a critical skill. It’s hardly ever mentioned in courses either. I don’t know if it’s a skill the course developer has and they just assume anyone can write ads like they do or if they intentionally gloss over it.

Niche Profit Full Control does have a Facebook Group and a thriving community, so it’s possible to ask for help there, and advice will be given.

Facebook ads are more art than science, so there’s no template for guaranteed success. There are various ways you can tweak your ads to try to reduce their costs and that’s where you have to work alone. See what works and what doesn’t.

And the various courses I’ve taken all teach different ways to create Facebook ads.

So I’ve currently shelved the Niche Profit Full Control course while I figure out how to get the cost of FB Ads down. The course itself is solid and the key to making it work is low-cost ads.

While publishing content to a Facebook Page is less time consuming than creating a blog post like this, the more FB Pages you have, the more time you have to put into finding and publishing content on them.

Finding Viral Content For Facebook

I came across a product called Viral Autobots that makes it easy to find the most viral content on Facebook (Photos and Videos) and republish that on your own pages so you get the viral effect directly. [If you’re interested in buying it through my link, you’ll get Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter Marketing Video Tutoral Courses as a bonus].

Viral Autobots includes a course on Facebook Marketing too. The software saves a huge amount of time on finding viral content. Why use that instead of stuff you’d ordinarily add to your FB Page? Because you can monetize viral FB posts!

Viral Autobots in turn led me to Chris Record who I’d never heard of before. He kind of exploded on the internet marketing scene a year or so ago, making over $2 million in affiliate commissions. Since then, he’s set up hos own company and produced a number of courses. The guy is prolific to say the least.

I joined his 3ZeroClub and Dark Post Profits membership sites. If you buy the 3ZeroClub today, you’ll also get free access to Chris Record’s Inner Circle Club (normally $997 per year).

The former shows you how to get Facebook ad clicks for as little as $0.0001 (those 3 zeros after the decimal point give the 3ZeroClub it’s name). Here are the results of my first 5 ad campaigns in the last week:

The two ads for €0.002 are considered failures as they’re costing 10 times more than the other 3 ads!

The ads for €0.0001 and €0.0002 are starting to go viral. When they get a 100,000 Reach, then I’ll start monetizing them as taught in the 3ZeroClub course.

Viral Autobots, which Chris Record uses himself, ties in with the 3ZeroClub and how members are advised to add viral content to their Facebook pages.

I haven’t started the Dark Post Profits course yet – that teaches various strategies for creating different types of Facebook ads. The course also includes a directory of tens of thousands of “dark” Facebook ads (ads not on Pages or in Groups) that are proven successes so that you can see what works and back-engineer them for your own campaigns.

Goals for 2016

I also bought Chris Record’s SmartMember product, which is an all-in-one marketing toolkit. It builds SEO membership websites hosted on his servers, contains its own autoresponder system, support desk system, affiliate management system and much, much more. I’ll have more to say on it in a future post.

The first goal of 2016 is to master Facebook ads – getting low cost clicks that drive traffic from my Facebook pages to my opt-in pages, websites and SmartMember sites.

Monetization will be a secondary goal as it’s completely predicated on me achieving my first goal.

So Facebook ads are where its at for me in 2016. I’ve given up on relying on Google to drive traffic. Yes, organic traffic is free on Google, but you can also get organic traffic from Facebook. Google change the rules too frequently and don’t care if your online business gets wiped out in the process.

I’m also cutting out shiny object syndrome. It’s time to devote my attention to making one thing work and once that’s done, taking the next step from there.

I’ve always advised my readers and subscribers to pick one thing and focus on it, to ignore the noise and distractions and concentrate on the task at hand. It’s something I’ve been guilty of not adhering to myself. That changes this year!

I hope you’ll follow my progress during the year. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of ups and downs along the way! 🙂