Eli the Computer Guy

Archive for the ‘Small Business Advice’ Category

When I first started using Facebook Ads I was highly impressed.  My cost Cost per Click was between .60-.70, and the visitors that EverymanIT.com brought in from Facebook were high quality.  I couldn’t have been happier.

But then the CPC cost slowly started to rise.  My CPM cost is down to .19, but the once cheap CPC of .60-.70 now averages around $1.50 and some days tops $2.50.  Not only that but my steady stream of new registrations to my site has become a mere trickle.

I have changed my Ads and changed my keyword targeting.  This always creates a boost for a day, or two but then the results start to wane again.

I am left to wonder if Facebook Ads is a good advertising venue for the long haul.  Maybe it is only effective for short burst marketing and then the targeted audience losses interest..?

I still think Facebook Ads can be very effective, but I will have to rethink the strategy that I use with them.

Over at EverymanIT.com we ask that visitors become members to the site in order to watch our video classes.  Everything is free, but we just want to be able to tell how many of our visitors are really interested in our site, and how many are just passing through.

To this affect our opening line on the Home page said “Try our Classes for FREE!!!”  in big, bold H1 font.  At the end of the page we had the standard line of “FREE Membership Available”.  It’s a little cheesy, but I figured the two sentences made the point. Apparently I was wrong…

I received a comment from a visitor that was very interested in our site, but was worried that she would somehow have to pay something and she doesn’t have the money for it.  As an older person she read the “Try our Classes for FREE” to mean that it was some type of trial and that she would have to hand over some money at some point. Knowing all of the scams out there on the Web I can see where she is coming from. 

I sent her off an email and modified the line to “Watch our Classes for FREE!!!”.  The question I wonder though is how many visitors were turned off of the site due to that simple wording issue.

This just goes to show that you should try to get a wide range of people to view your site and tell you what they think you are saying.  Although you may know the average 20-40 year old would understand what you are saying the 50+ crowd may not. This may become a real factor if like us you find out that your demographics are skewing to a much older group of people then you originally expected.

There’s a whole lot of hoopla when it comes to what Web advertisers see about the people that respond to their ads.  Just to dispel a myth the fact is most Web advertisers don’t care much about you as a person.  They care very much about you as a demographic.  There’s no profit in knowing what one person will do, but there are millions on the line to understand what masses of people will do.

Below is a snippet of what I receive from Facebook about the people that respond to my ads.  Please note that this is very useful information, but it’s not exactly something that says much about any one person.

I recently created a Fan Page on Facebook for my new company Everyman IT.  One of the things I find very interesting about Fan pages is the “Insight” reporting feature.

You just click on the “View Insights” on the Page Admin page, and you are presented with some interesting information.

You can see what percentage of your Fans are male or female, what age your Fans skew towards, and where your Fans are located.   It can even show you “media” consumption.  This tells you what pictures or videos posted on your Fans page your Fans are looking at.

Although you need to keep in mind that the demographics of your Fan page, and your business’s demographics may be substantially different this may be a great tool to determine where you target your advertising dollars.

You may notice my biggest demographic for Everyman IT (A Computer Training Site) is Females between the ages of 25-34 (Females on the whole account for 13% more interest then Males).  This may be a fluke with how Facebook social networking works, or it could be a tremendous market insight. (No offense, but in a male dominated field you would not expect women to take the most interest in the subject.)

As anyone knows who’s followed my blog, or spoken with, I don’t think much of Affiliate or Pay per Click marketing.   There are ways to make it profitable, but the numbers involved are a bit ridiculous.  This has led me to try to create a pay for membership site in hopes of becoming profitable through subscriptions.

I have been debating ways to do marketing for the past couple of months and think I have hit up-on an intriguing idea.  Numerous “autoblogs” have popped up lately.  These blogs use a script to automatically gather posts from other blogs and publish them.  They do this to try to gather Google traffic.  They post as many banner and Adwords ads as possible in the hope that they will earn a decent amount of money through ad revenue.  I find this to be boring, tedious and of doubtful profitability, BUT… I was thinking…

What if I created numerous autoblog sites, but the ads on the sites ONLY pointed back to my membership site? It would end up costing around a dollar per site to setup, and probably take about an hour to do the setup and configurations for each site.  For very little money and time I could then create a number of legitimate back links which would help out in Page Rank, and bring in traffic to the main membership site.

If you then played around with redirecting 404 errors, or just plain redirecting traffic you might get some decent results. (This may be in within the darker shade of grey hat, but I would argue against it being black)