Get Instant Demographically-Targeted Traffic From Facebook.com

By: Don Crowther

(If you’re an AdWords advertiser, you’re going to love this one.)
Have you ever wished there was a way that you could target very specific audiences with online
promotions?

For example, college graduates. Or knitters, or runners, or people who are engaged, or people who like hip hop music?

Or, to even get more granular than that, how about graduates from Ohio State University?
I can tell you, it’s hard to do.

And even if you succeed, the targeting is dubious at best (how do they know that person actually fits that demographic, or are they just modeling it, and the cost to get such an audience is incredibly expensive.

You can target search behavior, by running pay per click on the search engines. But that only works if they are actively searching for that specific topic area at the time that you are

• Running your ad

• Have a high enough budget set for that day so that your ad actually shows up (remember that if your daily budget is less than the amount they forecast you should be budgeting, your ad only
shows up a fraction of the times it could that day.)

• Are bidding a high enough amount for that click that they actually SEE your ad because it's not
buried deep on another page

• Choose the right keywords so your ad CAN appear

And all of that still doesn’t give you any kind of demographic targeting!
So, is there a solution to this problem?

Actually, there is. It’s Facebook.

Now we could talk about creating a Facebook Page, which you should do, and joining Facebook groups, which you should also do. And you should probably start a group yourself.

But all of those take time to really pan out. In the meantime, we want instant traffic and sales.

Here’s what I do. I run Facebook Ads. Facebook ads run on the user’s profile when they come to their page. So they see your ad when they log in to check their Facebook profile.

But what’s better than that is that you can buy very tight demographics. And those demographics aren’t created by guessing or computer modeling (the way these things are normally done), but they’re defined by the member themselves!

The member says where they graduated from, their age, marital status. Then the member defines their interests, their favorite books, music, and movies. So, now Facebook gives you the ability to advertise in a way that simply isn’t available anywhere else.

And best of all, it’s affordable. You don’t have to spend tens of thousands of dollars per month, and you don’t have to spend tons per click.

Technically, you can buy the ads for just a few cents apiece, but I’ve found that a minimum bid of 20 cents is really necessary to get your ad shown. Your ads can appear either in the context of the page or on the left side.

And another thing that gives them power is that you can also include an image in your ad, drawing more attention to it, and giving you yet another copy opportunity.


An excerpt from: Smarts Strategy Guide: Life and Death 2.0: A Quick and Easy Plan for Surviving [ And Thriving ] In A Social Media World

Incorporate video into your actual sales process

By: Don Crowther

Many people think of online video as an entertainment and possibly a lead generation tool. And it’s great for that.

But never forget what it’s best at – selling stuff.
Come on, nobody ever does that, right?

Actually that’s not true. Video gets used thousands of times EVERY DAY to sell stuff. We call them “commercials” and they show up every 8 minutes on your TV. So why aren’t more people using video commercials as part of their selling process?

I don’t know, I’m clueless. That’s why I’m including this in this report. We’re seeing some amazing results when people include video on their sales pages. We’ve seen 15%, even 40% increases in sales simply by including a video on the sales page.

Now, I have to also state that we’ve also seen video decrease sales, especially when the video loads slowly, and/or replaces the image of the actual product on the sales page. So, video in and of itself is not the magic button. You still have to do it correctly. Testing is vital. But when you get all of the pieces correctly into place, it rocks!


An excerpt from: Smarts Strategy Guide: Life and Death 2.0: A Quick and Easy Plan for Surviving [ And Thriving ] In A Social Media World

Utilize the Power of StumbleUpon to Drive Traffic to Your Site

By: Don Crowther

StumbleUpon is an amazing site in terms of driving traffic. Basically, people sign up for StumbleUpon, they indicate which topic areas they are interested in, then load a toolbar and vote on which sites they like and which ones they don’t.

But where it really gets interesting is that members can, at any time, click on a Stumble button and be taken to a page that fits their areas of interest. In fact, so many people do that StumbleUpon has become a major traffic source for many sites, especially those that have some kind of interesting or entertaining linkbait associated with them.

For example our data for www.StomperBlog.com shows that, other than direct and internal traffic, the number 2 source of traffic for that site is StumbleUpon!

And that we actually get more traffic to that site from StumbleUpon than from Google!!!

Hmmm... maybe this IS worth paying attention to.

And that traffic isn’t worthless either. Our research has shown that it buys and clicks on ads at levels at rates that are usually at least equal and sometimes higher than other sites.

So, here’s what’s happening for your site right now, whether you’re a member of this service or not
• StumbleUpon members who come to your site are seeing it, and rating it either up or down
• They’re also adding reviews
• Some may be sharing your site with friends
• If your site is getting good ratings, StumbleUpon is including it in their list of sites that they feed out to people who click the StumbleUpon button. So you’re getting free traffic, with no effort on your part!


An excerpt from: Smarts Strategy Guide: Life and Death 2.0: A Quick and Easy Plan for Surviving [ And Thriving ] In A Social Media World

Place content on HubPages.com

By: Don Crowther

Hubpages.com is another great example of a site where you can post content, get it read by others, and get people to visit your site.

HubPages is basically an article publishing site, where you can set up an account, post articles or other content (hey, there’s even some poems up on this site!) and get great, quick search engine exposure for your pages.

But there are some other factors that make HubPages particularly interesting.

First, at least at this moment, it doesn’t nofollow links. So links, carefully and judiciously embedded, pass link value to your site.

Second, HubPages allows you to post sidebars above the fold and in other locations on your article.



One advantage that HubPages has over Squidoo is that could take less effort to build out a HubPage than a Squidoo lens, so you get a better ROI.

Another is that, while HubPages allows you to monetize your site like Squidoo, HubPages gives you a much bigger percentage of the revenues than Squidoo (60% of all the revenues you generate – they do this by showing your ad 60% of the time, and theirs 40%). That means that HubPages could result in a nice little check arriving in your account each month, in addition to the revenues you earn from getting more people to come to your site.

So, you can just do quick and dirty pages, or you can take things another step further, by putting a little more work into your pages to both add interest, and to try to become one of HubPages “featured pages” which will drive even more traffic to your pages.


An excerpt from: Smarts Strategy Guide: Life and Death 2.0: A Quick and Easy Plan for Surviving [ And Thriving ] In A Social Media World

Big Direct Traffic

By: Don Crowther

Your social marketing campaign will also drive big traffic DIRECTLY to your site from the social media sites, and that's huge. After all, that's really the holy grail, isn't it? We all want more traffic to our site, right?

Well, remember... these social media sites have more traffic than Google. And if you use the right strategies and tactics to put yourself in front of that traffic, then you don't have rely on Google to get traffic to your sites. And you don't have to worry about expensive AdWords campaigns, or other advertising.

Of course, let's be real... just because you start getting big traffic directly from the social media sites doesn't mean you will abandon your Google rankings and stop all advertising. What it means is that you will be getting a lot more traffic, and the average cost of that traffic will plummet down to levels that are more like 1998... there's that “back to the future” stuff I've been talking about.

And here's why we're so excited about social marketing (and our SMARTS technologies)... in this new frontier, Social MARKETING can spike your traffic FAST, and if you do it right, you get LONG TERM Search Engine traffic too. It's really the best of both worlds.

I mentioned this example in the video... Photobucket generates 55% of their traffic from their Widgets and applications on MySpace and Bebo, and it's now replaced Flickr as the largest photo sharing site in the UK. Why? Because for a variety of reasons Flickr didn't properly use social media and only gets 2.4% of its traffic from social media sites. What a great example of "you snooze you lose!"


An excerpt from: Smarts Strategy Guide: Life and Death 2.0: A Quick and Easy Plan for Surviving [ And Thriving ] In A Social Media World

Is It Too Late?

By: Don Crowther

This is the weird thing... lots of people actually think that it's too late to get the jump on those big name social media sites. They think that you needed to get onboard months or years ago to have first mover advantage. Well, the truth is, most marketers haven't even BEGUN to understand how to use them, let alone hit their true potential.

This is the bottom line: we're talking about a HUGE flood of Internet traffic AND attention... and it's all sitting there, waiting for you to tap into it.

So the real question is how do you market to that starving crowd? How do you put yourself and your business in front of that traffic and that attention?

Well here is the SUPER KEY POINT... and this is why this is one of those once in a lifetime defining moments for you and your business...

It's just like back in 1996 when you could submit your site to Inktomi and get listed that same day...

TODAY if you know the correct strategies and tactics for Social Marketing, you can grab nearly INSTANT traction on these social media sites... the very sites that are collectively getting MILLIONS of new users every month.

As I mentioned earlier, this opportunity won't last forever. It's easy pickings now... but that window will start to close in the next 12 to 18 months. But if you get there now you will have a HUGE first starter advantage.

An excerpt from: Smarts Strategy Guide: Life and Death 2.0: A Quick and Easy Plan for Surviving [ And Thriving ] In A Social Media World

First, let's look at traffic.

By: Don Crowther

You probably already know that traffic to social media sites has exploded over the last three years. But not many people know just how explosive that traffic really is. Let's look at a few facts...

First off, let's look at some hard data from Alexa.com... I showed these charts in my “No Secrets” video, but they're important enough to take another look at – and it's easier this way when they're not flying by in a video.

Let's start with Facebook... it seemed to come out of nowhere, and now it has almost as much traffic as
Google:



Now let's look at Myspace vs Google... you can see that Myspace actually beat the mighty G during much of 2007:

And did you realize that YouTube has almost twice as many monthly page views as Google?

And look at the trends on the graphs. Remember, these social media sites are growing by leaps and bounds. In fact, they are pretty much doubling every six months. Just imagine where they're going to be in a year or two.

Here's something else that's going to make you sit up and take notice...

According to Comscore, a highly trusted global Internet research company, in a typical month:
• Just under 2/3rds of everyone who goes online worldwide, visits MySpace
• And 29% of them visited Facebook
• 35% of them visit YouTube
• And 27% of them visit Wikipedia

And like I just mentioned, this all becomes even more important when you realize that the number of active users for most of the social media sites doubles every 6 months.

Facebook is currently adding more than a million visitors every week!
And this is not just a bunch of kids. Well over half of all MySpace visitors are older than 35. And a huge percentage of the growth at Facebook is coming from adults. There are now over 100,000 Facebook users who are older than 64!

And I mentioned this in the video... it's important is to realize that social networking is much larger than the MySpace and Facebook sites that most people think about. In fact, our SMARTS database now contains over 1,920 different social media sites. And we add more nearly every day.

An excerpt from: Smarts Strategy Guide: Life and Death 2.0: A Quick and Easy Plan for Surviving [ And Thriving ] In A Social Media World

Squidoo - A Review

Squidoo is being told as a next door generation BIG social networking site apart from the well-known Myspace gigantic existence. Squidoo is said to be easy to use and, Yes!,so addictive when you get started. Because of its more appealing advance features and a wide-free of customization capability that designed for your advantage and for every members of Squidoo. A constant updates or add-ons of modules are provided for lenmasters discretion customizing their lenses.

Lensmaster is the alias for the one who created lens or webpages within Squidoo website. A Lensmaster could manage several lenses in one account, that can be accessed in a dashboard similar to any blogging provider site like blogger or wordpress.

What is the cutting-edge of Squidoo over other social networking site?

In squidoo your lenses are regularly ranked accordingly as controlled by the intelligent algorithm or formula the squidoo use in ranking lenses.The ranking number can be seen in the upper right corner of the len or webpage. This may rise or fall according to Squidoo's algorithm. They say that the ranking is based on the combination of the rating by other members, the reputation, the click-through rates, the frequency of updating the lens, the inbound and outbound links, and more top-secret elements inside the algorithm procedures.

Basically, your lense or webpage popularity is controlled of how other members view your lense at their perpective of interest. So this would poster a good and relavant content because the lensmasters are disciplined to write up or make a lense that is of interest or passion of other members in a specific category of interests or else they would get a low ranking thus give a poor traffic to your webpage.

Squidoo categorized their lenses or webpages based on the members field of interest or expertise. Some of the categories are Arts, Automative, Business and Finance, Politics, Recreation,..., and World.

Various of modules that are ready-made plug-n-play formats are available for all lensmasters for them to easily customize their lenses. Some of the modules are Amazon, ArtbyUs, BBC, BoingBoing, Buzz Machine, CafePress, Christian Science Monitor, Church of the Customer, Cool Tools, YouTube, Digg.., and Flickr Pictures.

And for some elements of Squidoo, the site would share profit with you - just like the Ads from Adsense, Ebay, Amazon, and CafePress, for instance. So, whenever, someone buys or clicks an adsense' ad, you get a commission, same thus with Squidoo. It's really a win-win approach for everybody!

In fact , a number of my Internet Marketers I know are fun of squidooing - the term they use to pronounce when they make use of squidoo lenses for the purpose of driving a targeted traffic to their websites, thus may in return give them a good profits. They best recommend squidoo as their best alternative choice in terms of an advance social networking site ever existence on the net.