Internet Events, Facebook Advertising, Internet Marketing and SEO

There are now about 2 billion people on the internet. There is no shortage of traffic. You can put up almost any kind of site, and if it has honest real content, thousands of people will end up there. I have a page that is a very high ranking page on choosing a mattress, that I never get around to even giving an offer to convert to. Does not even have adsense on it.

A year ago I first crossed paths with Tim Ash, the guy who is behind the Conversion Conference, Site Tuners, and Attention Wizard. Tim wrote a book called Landing Page Optimization. It is absolutely the best book ever written on conversion.

Tim actually, factually has more experience on what pages convert and what don’t.  The reason Tim knows more about it than you do is that Tim has a piece of software that can literally make over a million landing page options in a week.

If you have a site that has a few million visitors per month, then Tim can figure out the best landing page in a few weeks that creates the conversion you are aiming for.

For sites in the thousands of visitors like I have Tim does it based on experience. I gave Tim a shot with a facebook landing page that I had been spending about $5,000 per month on. The problem with a website that has a few thousand visitors per month, is that it takes a long time before your results have any statistical significance.

We have now been running Tim’s version of my landing page for about a month. So far it looks like there is about a 40% improvement in conversion. The problem is that the sample size is still too small to know for sure. Ask me again in a few months and we should have the full info.

Tim’s numbers speak for themselves, and when you hear him talk, you will know you are hearing the real deal.

Some of the things are so obvious that you will know them to be true as soon as you hear them, but were not previously obvious to me.

One example is that people don’t want to scroll down. If you put everything you want them to see above the fold, (on the screen), then they are more likely to see it. Also that people’s eyes move from the upper left to the lower right. He also confirmed Shoemoney’s research about a big fricken bright button on what you want them to do. Many of the other things are more subtle, but when put together create a page that you can look at and just know is right.

The express review that I did with him is under $1,000. His conference is priced averagely.

The truth is, that if you click around the internet, you will immediately see that most landing pages are not thought out, and definitely not set up for conversion. Just ask yourself how much more profit you would have if you paid the same for the traffic you have, but simply converted 10% or 20% more.

Many of the affiliate landing pages I look at, I won’t send traffic to because I can tell by looking that it is unlikely to convert. By the same token, I find more and more I prefer to send traffic to my own pages, because I can control the landing page.

If you want to go to the Conversion Conference, use my promo code (discount code) to save $250 off of the 2-day conference pass, plus I get an affiliate commission  promo code CCW603.

If you want to get your page reviewed and corrected by Tim personally then e-mail me (dk =at= purposeinc =dot= com) and I will hook you up. If you have a site that has a million visitors per month and are making money off it, then e-mail me about Tim’s software that can maximize the landing page conversion. If you have a site with a million visitors per month and are not making any money off of it, then I’ll buy it from you and get it profitable! LOL. Just contact me as well, and we can figure out what needs to be done.

(there is a little intentional changing of small facts below to protect details of various businesses mentioned to protect those companies including my own)

Over the past two weeks facebook has made some changes to the way it is handling affiliate marketers. This is another wave in a series of changes over the past year where facebook has altered what ads are acceptable to be run on facebook.

I have been getting a steady stream of e-mails and phone calls from some of the biggest players in the industry asking me what is going on.

None of what I am saying is coming from inside of facebook, but instead what I have seen happening to my own campaigns, and from the campaigns of other big shot affiliate marketers.

The phone call or e-mail usually goes like this.

Super Affiliate: “Hey, How’s it going?”

Me: “Good! How are you?”

Super Affiliate: “So,….ah…have you noticed anything different about facebook ads lately?”

Me: “Yeh, I had some of my campaigns turned off”

Super Affiliate: (Now relieved that they were not the only one, now speaking in a stronger voice),

“Yeh! We were spending $xxxxx dollars a day on (dating/games/or education offers) and our ads just got turned off and retroactively disapproved.”

This has not been an uncommon conversation over the past few weeks.

facebook has been improving the quality of its ads over the past year. Many affiliate marketers I know, will run anything they can make money off of that doesn’t put them in jail.  (an exaggeration, but not by much). facebook on the other hand is trying to protect its users from illegal and unethical behavior of it’s advertisers.

In my opinion, and only in my opinion, I think that affiliate marketers have as a group simply pushed the edge too far, and facebook is being a bit “cautious” or maybe “suspicious”, or “protective” against any affiliate offers that are being run.

Some people I know, who I believe have been spending way over the cost of a new Porsche EACH DAY on facebook ads, have had ads removed that appear to be both legal and ethical in my opinion.

This is a strong move by facebook, as this is real cash in a very significant volume that facebook is saying no to.

Here is a personal example of an ad I tried to run in another country to test what is going on.

I actually tried to run a few different versions of the ad to be as compliant with the policies as possible.

The original ad was not in English, but below is the Google Translation into English.

The Title of the Ad was:

Online Dating

The image in the Ad was:

The body of the ad said:

Online dating site (Dating Name Brand). Please complete form
online to participate.

If you click on the ad, it takes you to a dating site called “SITENAME”, which is a very generic site, similar to Match.com or Eharmony, but in another country. The site is free, and I am guessing makes it’s money off of advertising, or plans on making its money that way.

The ad was submitted to be shown to Males, who were single, between the ages of 21 and 60 in that country. It is interesting to note that in the new dating guidelines for facebook it states that you should also select in the demographics of the user, whether they are interested in men or women. At the same time, for some countries there is no option to choose whether the user is interested in men or women.

The ad was rejected with the following explanation:

Ad Disapproval Reason(s):

* The content of this ad does not adequately reflect the product/service offered. Ads may not be false, misleading, fraudulent or deceptive.  Per section 4, ads must not make unsubstantiated claims, including but not limited to prices, discounts or product availability; use of current events in the ad text or image that create false association to be used for irrelevant commercial agenda; use of false qualifications to create a sense of relevancy; as well as the implication of dynamic ad content.  Any statement made within an ad must be accurate and relevant to all users.

Additionally, ads must disclose what action or set of actions is required to qualify or receive the product/service.  Offers requiring the submission of Personally Identifiable Information must disclose on the landing page how such information will be used and distributed.  This disclosure must be clearly and prominently displayed.

When I read the reason above, it does not seem to match up with ad I ran. I can’t quite figure it out.

Now on the other hand, the ads I have running for brick and mortar businesses are running just fine with no hangups.

My feel I am getting from this is simply that facebook is being extremely careful of affiliate offers, extremely careful.

My final analysis is that an affiliate offer is no worse or better than any other offer. A brick and mortar advertiser, or a large fortune 500 company, can also be deceptive, or criminal in their advertising. At the moment the affiliate marketers have simply pushed a little too far, and are getting pushed back. This creates a tremendous opportunity for brick and mortar businesses to be advertising on facebook because they are not competing with the overly profitable illegal affiliate offers. Since facebook is a bid based system, the price is simply going to be a bit less now than it would have otherwise.

Many affiliate marketers have been scrambling to find other sources of traffic, and I am sure that is big talk at Ad Tech this week.

Jason Akatif, founder of Ads 4 Dough stated that he keeps a spreadsheet with hundreds of traffic sources. It sounds like affiliate marketers will need to do the same, at least for a while. I am starting up a spreadsheet to do the same.

Take a minute to read Andy’s blog about his March Madness program help with micro student loans for those in need abroad. Andy is always on the cutting edge of finding ways that small amounts of our money, can make a big difference.

Andy Rocks.

Andy Liu controls some of the most visited sites on the internet.

Tonight I am sick and I am also pissed off. For any of you who know me well, neither of those things happen to me very often, like I don’t think I have had a cold in around two years which is typical for me.

Here is why. There are X number of miners who are now either dead, or in grave danger, and it sounds like around 3 more who died trying to rescue them.

What was this great jewel for which these guys are risking their life or dying? Is it some universal truth?, Saving a child? Creating an eternal utility that will benefit mankind for centuries to come? All of these are things I would risk my life for. Nope, they were going underground to get coal.

Why are they going after coal? This coal will be for the greatest degree be used to be burn, which will heat water, which will boil. When the water boils it can turn wheels. When these wheels turn, they have magnets attached, which push electrons through wires. Those electrons moving through wires, is electricity. These guys are risking their lives, and/or dying so we can watch T.V., and run our I-Pods.

I am all for energy consumption. AS we speak my wife and I both have our Mac’s open, and the T.V. news is rolling in the background.

I am not one to bitch and moan without giving solutions. So here is the solution. Yes I can say this because I have been saying this for 20 years.

To preface this I love military. I love the idea of high tech equipment rolling across the tundra kicking ass on evil people. Lots of my peeps got gassed in world war 2, and my wife would have been speaking German and eating strudel, instead of Norwegian if we had not spent a grip on going into Europe to whoop Hitler.

I am all about righteous causes, and sacrificing oneself for the betterment of mankind. I have lived this my whole life, from being a lifeguard, to teaching, to being a chiropractor.

The fact that we have spent something like a Trillion dollars the last few years on wars to protect us from unknowable enemies that we can’t really put our fingers on, and that haven’t turned out to be exactly what we thought they were is another story. Not saying it wasn’t a good way to spend money. I have a lot of warrior friends who got their chance to test their training, shooting mortars, missiles, flying, and even get to drop out of a helicopter into a building and play street fighter except for real.

I am not a fan in any way of the death that took place on either side as a result of this.

All you need to make electricity is something that moves relatively frequently in quantity that you can latch onto. A common way is burning something like coal, or oil, or making heat from a nuclear reaction that heats water. Once you have steam from the hot water you can turn a wheel, which moves the magnets against the wires, which moves the electrons and makes electricity.

I had the pleasure of meeting a guy a few years ago who is one of the greatest windmill designers in the world. He was working on a bearing for the center of the entire windmill where all of the friction from the spinning is, that would hold the tons up from magnetism. This is the force you feel when you put the wrong sides of two magnets up against each other. Amazingly, it creates almost no friction but can hold a ton of weight.

What if we had given that Trillion dollars plus of war debt to help him build the best windmill he could and then crank them out by the thousands to power up the entire country?

What if we had given that money to my buddy Paul Cross the inventor who came up with a tidy idea on how to use the tide moving in and out to push a simple paddle, which spins a wheel, which makes electricity.

A few years back I met a guy who worked with his wife for a guy named Openheimer. For those of you who don’t know the name, this group spent a few months in New Mexico and created the first atomic bomb. Americans rock at getting together in small groups of brilliant people to peak stuff that moves technology in huge giant steps forward, ie: car, airplane, A-Bomb, computer, internet.

So I am pissed. I am pissed that we just blew a trillion bucks on a war with very little measurable benefit of outcome, that we just passed a health care deal that puts more money toward surgery and drugs that are not really solutions to the cause of health problems, (exercise, chiropractic, nutrition, mental health). Along with this we spent billions of dollars on companies that suck and could not make a profit. I have made a profit every week during this recession. Give me the money, or Shoemoney, or someone else in our crew, and we will make a bunch more out of it creating jobs and improving our country along the way.

All of this happened the week after I just spent 40 hours over 2 weeks making sure my taxes were as perfect, honest and tight as I could possibly make them, just so I can give away over 50 percent of my income to a government that will spend it on programs that give money to people who don’t work 80 hours  a week like I do.

So how do we solve this?

Over time I will go into more details but it is this simple.

1.    Don’t invest money in killing people. There are very, very few times where killing people makes things better. Hold a gun to one of my friends heads and if I have a way you will be gone in 3 seconds. Other than that, there are very, very few times it makes sense. Stopping other mass murders or genocides is usually a good time to use war.

2.    Don’t invest money in treating symptoms. Unless the medical treatment cures the cause of the disease, or at least makes a massive, measurable improvement of function such as insulin with diabetics, don’t spend money on it. Treating symptoms is no more intelligent than smoking dope, or taking coke. You feel better, but get sicker over time. If people want drugs or medical treatments to help how they feel, let them work to make that money. And no, you don’t deserve any health care. God did not make us, or we were not created, with a plaque that says we will always deserve the most expensive healthcare on the planet. There just is and will never be enough money for that, just do the math.

SPEND ANY GOVERNMENT HEALTH CARE DOLLARS ON THINGS THAT HAVE PROVEN TO PREVENT ILLNESS NOT TREAT IT

3.    Abolish the IRS, and create a consumption tax of a fixed percentage. Everyone would save instead of spend, and you wouldn’t have to do taxes. Even if it wasted a crap load of money, which it won’t think how much time it would save, and the increase in your productivity as a result.Wow, was that so tough?

4.    Stop paying instructors to talk to students. Instructors need to be there until the students learn how to read and study on their own, and then they serve no purpose. They only personnel needed  for school are to keep the kids in line, and help them on how to learn. While we are on it, don’t force kids to go to school. Education is a gift, but if you don’t want it, don’t force it on them. Let them work when they are young. I did manual labor starting at around age 10, and have worked a job or a business since I was 15. It did me a ton of good. Put all of the education online, well written, and let students guide their own curriculum.

5.    Keep the military, train them, buy them the best stuff, and make them bad ass and strong, but give them domestic work to keep them busy, productive and worth the money we spend on them.

6.    Stop giving money to people who fail. O.K. if you are born with no arms or some unlucky tragic thing take care of them, and give them a break. Everyone else, get up and work. I promise you when I am old, my hip doesn’t work, and I can barely breathe, I will be doing everything I can to improve my life, the life of my family, my community, and my country. I totally dig this one elderly Asian man (I think Philipino), must be 70, who I see at the beach every summer digging through the garbage for Aluminum cans. Wow he inspires me! So life has been rough? Tough! Talk to my buddies like my friend the graphic artist in Manilla, Jonathan Antonio, who was working for me, literally while his neighborhood was flooding, and water was pouring in through his roof.

7.    By the way, read up on drinking 2 oz. of pomegranate juice a day. All of the research shows it clears out your arteries like a drain cleaner. Don’t trust me on this, research it for yourself, but it sounds like a miracle drug to me. (Ask your doctor )

8.    Take all the money we save, and use it to develop long term renewable energy sources for the benefit of all mankind.

That is enough to get started. Let’s get those things in place over the next few months, and we should be in good shape.

If you guys decide you want me to head this up, feel free to elect me and I will be more than happy to get these things in place, but you all better be ready to work ☺

Then once we have all of these things in place, the country should be humming along. Then we can show it all on some reality T.V. shows, and the rest of the world can copy us.

Was just doing taxes. (This is our San Diego earthquake story)

My wife walked down to the lower level, and I felt the house give a little roll.

I yelled to her, “hey, we are having an earthquake”.

I immediately thought of one of my silly things, which is to watch water slosh during earthquakes.

So before it even stopped shaking, I grabbed the pool key and yelled, let’s go see the pool!

As I got out the door, I noticed a little wind, and as we were running said,

“oops, the wind will cover up any ripple waves.”

When we got to the pool it was a different story, the whole pool, about half an olympic size one, was sloshing back and forth,

like a drunk, stumbling, carrying an overfilled beer across the bar, that sloshes out the side.

We stood and watched for about 3 minutes, and it slowly subsided, but never stopped.

Our neighbors just moved to California, and I met them for the first time.

She asked “Does this happen all the time?”

We said, nope, you were just lucky.

Last week I spoke at the Ads4Dough conference in San Diego. When I got invited by Khoa, it sounded like I was being invited to speak at a little party get together of 10 or 20 of his buddies who were also internet marketers.

When I saw Nicky Cakes,  the facebook expert, was speaking I realized the game had stepped up. That was when I saw the title of my talk for the first time, facebook Ads Crash Course to Profitability. After doing a little research I realized there would be at least a few heavy hitters coming, and I only had a few days to prepare.

I decided to see if I really was what I was speaking on, so I put together an affiliate campaign in a few days, and tried to make some money. It backed out, made a fistfull of dollars, and I presented it along with some other secret sauce. Turned out in fact to be one of the most concentrated group of successful guys I have ever been with in the internet business world.

Walking that night to go see the fight with Dr. Ngo, Nicky and a bunch of other guys, I was called out on the fact that the results of my case study, were largely irrelevant due to the small sample size. I looked at him and said, “yes”. It is what it is, right?

So when doing stuff for real, and not just trying to fluff something up for a good stage show, here is how I do it.

Feel free to chime in if you see any defect to my logic, but what I do is way simple and as I understand it quite valid.

I’ve gone all the way through calculus in college, but try to keep math to very, very practical, fast and simple applications.

In the work I have been doing with Tim Ash lately of Site Tuners, who by the way hands down is THE expert on landing page design and statistical analysis, (Check out his Conversion Conference and use promo code CCW503 to save some money and make me some! I get a commission.). This is one conference that can make you a lot of money.

Bottom line, is that until you have about 1000 of some action taking place, your statistics could very well just be random chance. By the way, just for the record, I honestly do believe that if I decide something is going to take place strongly enough it will. The stats just record it.

Here is how to verify that the numbers you are getting are real, and not just chance.

We are only going to need a few numbers here.

The first one is sample size. How many of the first thing are you looking at? With facebook advertising, it could be how many clicks did you get on your ad, which translates into how many people hit your landing page?

Then next number is the observed result. Say 100 people clicked on your ad and went to your landing page (sample size), then how many of those people bought your product, which is the observed result. 100 people to the landing page, and 10 of them bought. Or it could be another conversion, such as 5433 people landed on your landing page, and 234 of them clicked on the link to your online store. You can figure out if that conversion makes money or not, but was it just luck? or if you roll this out big will the results continue to be the same? How much could it vary?

For any large sample size, such as all the women in the U.S., there is a percentage that will buy when they hit your landing page. Since you are not going to be able to afford to show your ad to all of them just to test, then you will just show a small sample of them your landing page, measure how many convert, and then figure out how reliable the results are.

There will be some variance between what your sample test result shows, and what the entire U.S. will be. I am about to show you what that variance will be, and I will make it easy.

This is a site I found years ago, that makes it really simple for doing this variance analysis.

To keep your interest, I have added 6th grade style drawings to the screen shot to describe this, as well as photoshoping in one of my winning dating ad pictures I have used in Europe in the lower right side of the picture.

Keep one eye on the following picture, and continue reading below.

Where the alligator fish is biting the percentage, you enter in 90%, which means you want the results to be 90% accurate. If you can afford to make a mistake, leave it at 90%. If failing at this will bankrupt you, then switch it to 95% or 99%.

Enter the sample size in step #2. This is by the fish’s lower lip. Fish do have lips you know. The sample size is how many of the first thing you have. So if 45000 people clicked on your facebook ad, and you are going to see how many of them download your game, then the sample size is 45000. If 300 people go to their shopping cart, and 34 of them check out, then 300 people is your sample size.

Next go to step 3 where the arrow is pointing. Here is where you enter the observed result. This how many of the desired action took place. Of the 300 people who hit the shopping cart, how many of them checked out? How many of the girls that you asked out, actually said yes? Of the opportunities you had for the good thing to take place, how many times did it actually take place?

To the right of the frequency that you just entered, the percentage will automatically pop up to its right. This is cause since your math aint so great, and firing up excel would have taken too much time, it is done for you. This is the percentage of the opportunities you had, that the good thing took place.

Then look down at the subliminally out of focused picture of the girl to make her look more approachable, and a realistic option that she might date you, and you will find the calculate button.

Push It. But not on my photoshopped photo, but on the real site!

It will then give you a range.

You will find that range has at its center, the percent that you just looked at.

What this is saying now, (in my example which is real by the way), that of the 209 clicks I got on facebook today, 5 of them did the thing I wanted them to, which was 2.39% of them. In reality, this sample was too small to be of much use, since the bottom line is saying, that if I keep running this ad and have 100,000 people click on it, that the final result will be between .65% (less than a percent) and 4.13% (which would be rad!). That number at the top? Well I am 90% sure this is true which is good enough for this since I can afford to fail at it.

So this lets me know that my results are mostly meaningless, that it is very unlikely my result will be over 4% of the clicks converting (which in this case is o.k.), and that I need to get a lot more clicks before I know if this ad is working.

Here is the stats tool.

The upside of this, is that I should put my energy toward spending more money on clicks, before I even bother wasting my time, trying to test new ads or landing pages.

So tomorrow I am going to crank this up, and if you are an Eastern European interested in dancing and horses, you will be likely to see my ad! Then tomorrow night, with more data, I will run the numbers again.

If this was at all confusing, just leave in the comments below where you got lost and I will try to help.

If you are a math weanie, and saw something I was inaccurate on, please let me know, so other math weanies can not their heads a the accuracy of this post afterwards.