A year ago I decided to go hardcore into facebook advertising. Thought here was a new growing field in the Internet Entrepreneurial world. Sounded easy. I have extra money I can throw around while on the learning curve. I have 20 years plus experience marketing, as well as a nice series of home runs in internet marketing, and tons of sales and marketing experience offline.

In my helping Shoemoney I got well connected with some of the Facebook executives. Figured I was ready to roll.

I figured there still was and still is a huge tidal wave of advertising money rolling toward facebook both from the offline world, and from other online sources. This turned out to be true, and I am sure it is going to increase 10 fold quickly, and then another 10 fold after that.

Around the same time I went to an event I had never heard of called Online Marketing Summit here in San Diego, honestly not expecting much, only to be blown away by a talk by Tim Ash on landing page optimization, also the name of his book. I then pawned a copy off of him, and went to work learning the science. The timing on this was amazing. Tim by the way is a genius, and if you have $20k plus to spend on optimizing a landing page, he is THE guy for the job. If you have an extra 100 hours, no exaggeration, then pick up a copy of his book and study it inside and out. I question how many people have actually mastered the entire book, I haven’t yet, but even knowing well half of it I feel head and shoulders above most people at that game.

This proved excellent timing because just as I was playing with facebook advertising I was having the experience of having trouble getting it to work. My website, bodyabcs.com which both Matt Cutts, and Shoemoney have tried to get me to change since it continues with it’s 1998 Enom template design, but honestly it converts so nicely from google traffic that I doubt I will ever change it. The problem was when I sent facebook traffic to the site it did not convert at all, zero, zilch.

So I got Shoemoney and his dentist to agree to let me copy the site they had built and tested. They created a site that converted like crazy to a point that they apparently had to turn off the marketing to it because he could not handle the patients. So I have learned a bit of html, and can even do a wordpress install from scratch, set up the database, do 301 redirects, and all the basics. When it came time to actually copy a site, I realized how much I still did not know about html and css.

I literally ended up spending over $1,000 and even more importantly over a month of time getting a site set up that was an exact copy of his. Obviously with my chiropractic office I had to modify the pictures, and the text to make sense, but still kept it the same as Shoemoneys dentist just as close as I could. Finally it was done, I started running campaigns and sat back to see all the success.

Still nothing.

I changed up the campaigns, demographics, images, changed, changed, changed, and still zilch. Not a single patient (customer).

Back to the drawing board. Now the search began for a programmer who could crank out little mini sites to test what worked. I figured this would be easy. Every one I worked with made way too big a deal out of each site, and was unable to crank out a quick one or two page site overnight which is what I needed. One guy in our industry I met with was right in the middle of creating a program that would modularly build a site for you, but as far as I know it is still not live yet.

Along with the fact that every time you run an ad variation on facebook, it took quite a while to enter it all and wait for pages to refresh, the whole thing ended up being very, very time consuming to test.

Along this time, I had the good fortune and truly what I considered an honor to get to help facebook with their SEO and marketing. The guys and gals at facebook have been great, have let me see the inside of what they are working on, and have me absolutely convinced that they really deeply care about the user experience more than they do about the company being profitable. I am extremely proud of my relationship with each of them, and the work they do.

Right in the middle of all this Shoemoney pointed out a guy who he said had just mastered all of this. Shoemoney told me this guy had worked out a software that interfaced with facebooks advertising page, and could crank out ad variations without having to sit in front of your computer. Then I met the guy, and he confirmed what Shoemoney had said. I was blown away, and figured I had years to catch up with his work. The guys name was Dennis Yu.

Just for the record, since I have been away from my blog the past month, the entire record of my relationship with Dennis is as follows. Had dinner along with 10 other guys and Dennis at Elite Retreat two years ago. Talked to him for 15 minutes at Adtech last year when Shoemoney was talking him up when they were working together. Dennis drove to San Diego and bought me breakfast  some time last summer, and gave me around $100 worth of California Pizza Kitchen certificates just as a gift. Dennis came to thinktank, paid for two people but came alone. Then later I refunded back the extra person he paid for since he did not use it. Then Dennis and I had a snack, and talked a half an hour, at the W hotel the weekend of the Azoogle party. Dennis and I also exchanged a fair number of e-mails, mostly talking about how helping small businesses with facebook could make a very positive difference. I also called one of his clients to see if I could help him, and after talking to their client I recommended that Dennis’s in house guys and the client himself could help the guy more affordably than I could.

Then I started to hear and read the battle unfold online between Jeremy and Dennis.

So back to the facebook story!

Along the way I finally found a programmer that could make these micro sites to test conversion quickly and at a rate that I could actually afford.

Since then we have been testing, testing, testing.

I have run ads now and gotten sales, clients, or leads for a ton of different industries.

I have done facebook ads now for

- National Building Contractors

- Roofers

- a Church

- a Coffee Shop

- my Chiropractic Office

- a National Travel Site

- Affiliate Offers of many types (Got a tear in my eye when I sold my first Slap Chop, thanks George and Jaime!)

- etc. etc.

It has now gotten to a point where I e-mail Mihai my programmer, or leave him a voice mail message, and when I wake up the next morning I have 20 or 30 new sites he built during the night for testing different landing pages.

The reason I tell this story is to point out that this stuff is still not that easy.

We worked out the marketing for the chiropractic office using facebook, but it took a year. That was a year after all of the connections and knowledge I had before that. I would give the average chiropractic office 4 years, or maybe never, to catch up to where we are regarding the subject right now.

SEO took me a year to learn, and then another year to really master how to get the right type of quality links. The subject of link baiting is one that I am certain now, that most people will never learn.

A month ago my server told me to stop loading thousands of images, and dozens of videos at a time. I spent some time researching options and went with a small company called JC host. A friend of mine, who is a systems admin for one of the busiest sites in the world offered to help in the migration, I also ended up getting two good PHP guys to help, and then finally needed paid support from Gallery2. It wasn’t easy to get the site over here, but I think we are good now with a big dedicated server with lots of images and video to come!

The online world kicks ass. It is tons of fun. The riches and rewards are there to be discovered. But it still aint easy. I know the group that reads this blog does know how to do it which puts you, us, in a great position.

If you want to see the type of work I have been doing, come to my Facebook presentation at Affiliate Summit. I twisted Shoemoney’s arm and begged him to join me now that Dennis Yu is not going to be there. I will let Jeremy make the official announcement. Jeremy really is an amazing expert on Facebook advertising, and the session would have been much less without him.

We are still in the wild west, and I don’t see that changing soon.

For those of us brave enough to persevere through the explosions, and broken bones, the view from the top is amazing.

There is still a stiff barrier to entry.

This gives those of us here, and in the game a huge advantage.

So I have mastered the first big step of facebook advertising.

Let’s see what mountains I can find to conquer this year!