If you have ever read the very popular book “Who Moved The Cheese?” by Dr. Spencer Johnson you would know the word “cheese” is a metaphor for money. The characters in the book find a large pile of cheese and are happy for a time.

They are millions of people that believe the best source of income is a job. They believe that working a 9-5 job will give them a lifestyle they can live with.

But, if you are reading this blog, you are likely not one of those people. In fact you mostly believe that affiliate marketing is where the cheese is at. While there is a lot of cheese to be had in affiliate marketing, the most money in 2010 will be made in mobile marketing.

I just do not want you to miss out on a huge opportunity. Do not be like Hem in the book who refused to go back in the maze and find another resource of cheese. Be a Pioneer and gain huge returns.

How big is mobile marketing? In recent months Google (the largest Online Search Engine) purchased a mobile media company for $750 million. Google has also stated that they would not release a applications with out first considering mobile technology first.

Yes the opportunity in mobile marketing is going to be huge. Compare it to email marketing with it’s 20% open rate, mobile marketing’s text message open rate at 97% is amazing. Plus, 87% of  people open a text message within the first 15 minutes of receiving it.

Plus there are currently 4.6 billion Mobile phone users compared to 1.7 billion internet users.

That’s 5 times more mobile devices than computers.

With very few businesses using mobile media as marketing platforms there is very little competition. Mobile offers convert 5x better into sales and 7X better for digital coupons.

Mobile phone users take there phone with them everywhere. They consider their phone as part of them.

But, there is a very big difference in marketing on mobile devices and marketing on the internet.

A mobile phone is not the internet on a smaller screen.

Affiliate marketing will not work on mobile devices, at least not yet. People just are not comfortable at buying products with their mobile phone. People just have not gained that comfort level with the technology.

Recently, the Red Cross raised millions of dollars for Haiti with a mobile campaign. But, that was an exception and a lot of trust had to be put behind it.

What Mobile phones are good for right now is marketing for local businesses. Real brick & Mortar businesses. Businesses hire marketing professionals, like yourself, to develop marketing campaigns for them. Why not you?
Imagine creating a mobile coupon for a local pizza shop. You go to AdMob and send a broadcast message that saids “Text “pizza” to 756432 and get free medium pizza” People would be running into the shop with their cell phone in hand.

Mobile marketing works fast and it is easy to use. It is up to you to educate your local business owners on how to use mobile marketing in their business.

As more advertisers and marketers shift more of their attention and budget to Facebook Ads, Facebook’s performance advertising system, it’s crucial to understand the power of Facebook’s targeting capabilities. Here are details on the 10 ways to target Facebook Ads that every performance marketer should know:
1. Relationship Targeting

Relationship targeting lets advertisers target users based on whether they are single, in a relationship, engaged, or married. This is another stage-of-life targeting feature that is very powerful for marketers. For example, an HDTV retailer may want to target single males in their 20’s in one campaign, but married males in their 30’s in another. Dating companies spend a lot of money targeting single Facebook users, and companies in the wedding industry target engaged users. Advertisers can target ads based on the gender users choose in the “Interested In” field as well.

However, Facebook doesn’t allow advertisers to choose advertising copy that comes across as too negative. For example, ad copy that could be perceived to make users feel bad about being single (or any other relationship status) is likely to be rejected by Facebook’s ad reviews team.

2. Language Targeting

Language targeting is a powerful way for advertisers to reach all users who speak a certain language. This means advertisers wanting to reach all Facebook users who speak Spanish in the United States can now easily do so – an important tool for media companies and agencies working on behalf of language-specific brands.

3. Birthday Targeting

Birthdays are really special days on Facebook – users who have many friends can typically expect to receive dozens of “Happy Birthday” messages on their Wall, as well as a few Facebook virtual gifts. Now, advertisers can make special offers or promotions to Facebook users on their birthdays – with over 250 million active users, there are about 700,000 Facebook users with birthdays each and every day.
4. Location Targeting

Facebook gives advertisers the power to target ads down to the country, state, or city level. This is a powerful way for both national brands and local small businesses to make sure their ads are reaching customers in their target markets. Starting this month, advertisers can now choose multiple countries, states, or cities to target a single campaign against – eliminating the need to have multiple campaigns for multiple geographies. You can target each Facebook Ad to up to 25 countries.

In addition to pure location filters, Facebook also offers Radius Targeting – the ability to target users located within a certain distance from any given city. Radius Targeting makes it easier for local advertisers to reach people living in the greater vicinity of target markets. For example, an advertiser wanting to reach people over 18 in San Francisco could target Facebook users only in San Francisco proper – about 300,000 people. With Radius Targeting, that same advertiser could target people within 10, 25, or 50 miles of San Francisco, expanding the possible reach of the campaign 500% to nearly 1.8 million people.

facebook-ads-local-targeting

Facebook determines users’ locations based on IP address lookups. However, Facebook also says that “if a user has listed a current address on their profile, they may see ads targeted to that location, regardless of where they are currently located.” Ads are not targeted to a user’s geographic networks, which are being deprecated from the site.

5. Keyword Targeting

Keyword targeting is perhaps one of the most powerful ways to reach your target audience on Facebook. Say you wanted to promote a new sci-fi movie on Facebook – you could easily target your ad against all users who had placed “Star Wars” or “Star Trek” as interests in their profile.

Facebook targets keywords based on interests, activities, and favorite books, TV shows, movies, or job titles that users list in their Facebook profiles. Facebook also targets keywords based on the names of Pages users are fans of or Groups users belong to. Facebook also suggests keywords sometimes as well. “Our system looks for the keywords that are most common among the users your targeting already encompasses,” Facebook says.

Thus, keyword targeting offers the best opportunities for competitive advertisers to aggressively bid on users with related or rival interests to their own company or brand.

6. Connection Targeting

Connection targeting is perhaps the most robust of Facebook’s recently released targeting features. With connection targeting, advertisers can now target their ad to only reach users who are:

1. Fans of any of your Pages
2. Users of any of your Applications
3. Members of any of your Groups
4. Attendees of any of your Events

Basically, Facebook wants to make it easy for business and brands to increase engagement with any users they’re connected to on Facebook through Facebook Ads, using it as a paid notification or cross-promotion channel. You can also target users who are connected to one of your Pages/Groups/Apps/Events but not to another in order to do more specific cross-promotions.

facebook-ads-connection-targeting

However, currently, advertisers are not able to use the new features to target members of any generic Page, App, Group, or Event. That would be very powerful, but would also encourage targeting behavior that Facebook may not want to enable. Nevertheless, as it currently stands Connection Targeting could be a very powerful tool for marketers and developers to re-engage certain segments of their Page’s fan base or application’s user base.

7. Age Targeting

Facebook gives advertisers the power to reach users within any age range, from 13 to 64. This is an important way for advertisers to make sure they’re reaching their target audience. Although you might think the vast majority of Facebook users are under 25, most are actually over 25 – and the number of older users on Facebook has been growing dramatically this year. This means new opportunities exist for advertisers wanting to reach older users, who on average have larger disposable incomes.

9. Education Targeting

Education targeting offers advertisers the opportunity to reach users based on whether they say they have graduated college, are in college, or are in high school. Obviously, this could be a powerful way to filter users based on stage of life.

facebook-education-targeting

Power tip: Once you choose to target users “In College” or who are “College Grads,” Facebook gives advertisers the option to target by major and graduation year as well. This could be great for career-related services like jobs or moving.

8. Sex Targeting

Facebook has allowed advertisers to target users based on their sex since Facebook Ads launched. Keep in mind that Facebook’s population is about 55% female, and women over 55 are the fastest growing sub-segment of Facebook users.

While sex targeting may seem simple, it’s important to think about how men and women behave differently in social settings when crafting your ad creative!

10. Workplace Targeting

Workplace targeting lets advertisers only show their ads to Facebook users who are members of specific company networks. This is absolutely one of the most powerful ways for B2B marketers to reach their target audience on Facebook. For example, ad agencies may want to target ads at companies in their target verticals, or recruiters may want to target people who work at certain companies. Workplace targeting is fantastic for reaching an industry audience and headhunting.

Conclusion

Facebook Ads offers a powerful array of targeting features, with more still to come – for example, Facebook recently told us that full dayparting would be launching for advertisers in the next few months.

With 250 million active users and growing every day, the Facebook Ads platform is becoming an increasingly important way for performance advertisers to reach their target audience online.

Use the F.A.B. formula (Feature, Advantage, and Benefit)

Let’s start with the features, every product or service we promote has features. A feature is a fact about the product.

For example if we were promoting a Flip HD video camera, a feature would be “HD Video”.

You may have heard that features do not sell products, but benefits do. And that is correct.

To find the benefits of a feature, you simply say “so what?”

Feature         VS        Benefits
“HD Video”  “so what?”   “Capture clearer images of your friends and love ones”

You can find any benefits in this fashion, but what about the advantages.

The advantages of a feature is when you compare it to something else. Or I like to call the advantage the “Real Reason to believe”. What makes the Flip HD Video Cameras different them other HD Video cameras? It’s fits in the palm of your hand.

Now, lets put it together, it would read like this:
“In this video I’m going to show you why, the Flip HD Video Camera will revolutionize the way you capture your personal videos. The Flip HD Video Camera puts the power of a professional broadcast quality camera in the palm of your hands.  The Flip HD Video Camera might be the only camera you will need, to capture those once in lifetime events of your love ones - this year. This camera makes it simple and easy to capture true 720p HD video.”

You see how the features, advantages & benefits come together?

Now ever story needs a beginning, a middle and an end, our videos use the same structure.

The beginning would be a few slides talking about the biggest benefits of the product. You only have less then 30 seconds to get their attention, so you got to hookem quick. Use the F.A.B. formula above to really make this pop.

The next step is to create the middle. I like to state the biggest obstacle or problem this product solves.
Then I have a few slides that state each feature in writing. On the slide write the feature but in the audio of the video talk about the advantage & the benefit. Also in the graphics on the slide show the outcome of what will be, if they use this product. Pick the top three features and that should be good enough.

The end of the video should focus on… “Why this will help them?”. Tell  a story of a person who does not have this product. Then tell them how much better of their life will be after they have this product. Then tell them how to get it.

Here are a few more tips. On screen movement is very important, every time a graphic moves or type is introduced on the screen, it re-captures the viewers attention. So the more movement you show on screen the more attention your video will get.

Secondly, do not talk like a sales person, but just an average person. Pretend you are having a conversation with your best friend.

Thirdly, add background music elements. This sets the tone and emotion of what is on the screen.

In summary, I hope you take this information and turn it into videos that help you sell more products and services. Take it one step at a time and you will do well.

Amazon.com is the top ecommerce site on the internet. Millions of dollars of merchandise are sold via their website everyday. On average their web site is visited by 4 million people a day.

They idea of an internet based affiliate program was first introduced by them in early 90’s.

One thing you should know about them is that, they a test their web site - like mad men. It’s not the number of visitors that count, but the experience of each visitor. If you spend time studying the unique features of Amazon.com design, you will find that it is simple, but very powerful in getting the visitor to take action.

As affiliate marketers, we need to take notes and borrow elements of design from them. You will notice that they are starting to use more video and are putting it in the hot zones in their sites. Why? I bet they figured out that it sells better them image or even text.

Another thing you will find customer loyalty and incentive program , increase repeat sales. What happens after and during the buying process? They give you suggestions, on what else you should buy. Up selling and cross selling is very powerful method to create more sales.

If you sign up for their affiliate program you will find a lot of tools and resources to help you make money. In fact they provide data feeds that can automatically be imported into wordpress blogs.

They have thousands of images and product reviews that you can use to promote their web site on your blog as well.

In summary, watch what Amazon is doing and incorporate some of these ideas into your own websites and cpa marketing campaigns.

Personal Development

Return on Investment (ROI). In other words, they need to make more than they spend.

Four factors equate to profits in this business model…
Total clicks X conversion rate X commission rate - pay per click cost = (+-)ROI.

Commission agreements come in two forms, pay per sale agreements & pay per lead agreements.

In a pay per sale agreement, the advertiser only pays for sales generated by the destination site based on an agreed upon commission rate.

In a pay per lead agreement, the advertiser only pays for leads generated at their destination site. No payment is made for visitors who don’t sign up.

Conversion… Conversion… Conversion…

It all boils down to conversion. Would you rather have 10 conversions at $3 or 1 conversion at $30? The answer is, they are both equal. But, if I were a betting man I would put my money on pay per leads, due to the fact it is possible to get conversions as high as 20% - 50% with pay per leads.

With a proper pre-selling campaign or framing you can get high pay per lead conversions.

Pay Per Lead Vs. Pay Per Sale Comparison

Why It’s easier to make money with Pay Per Lead than Pay Per Sale (Affiliate Sale)

Pay Per Sale: Visitor is required to make a purchase in order for you to make money.

Pay Per Lead: Visitor is not required to make any purchase in order for you to make commissions.

Pay Per Sale: Since there is something to buy, the conversion ratio is lower than Pay Per Lead.

Pay Per Lead: Since there is nothing to buy, the conversion ratio is higher than Pay Per Sale.

Fact: It is easier to make people take some form of action when you give away something for free! The resistance threshold is much lower.

Pay Per Lead programs generally pay lower commissions than Pay Per Sale programs, however, the higher conversion ratios often translate into higher overall profits.