A Day in the Life of Me
Ah, the day in the shoes of an affiliate marketer isn’t always the most exciting, but when you are in Bangkok it can be. I live a dream of many at the fresh age of 20, living in Thailand, a tropical paradise to the millions of foreigners that live here and to many that wish they could. My days are mostly spent in front of the computer, checking stats, creating new ads, and filling in on research. Saturday was a bit more exciting, though, letting me get out of my apartment and explore the city a little. The idea for this post was brought on by Jelf, so I’d like to thank him and say Happy Birthday! He’s 20. Now, to the pics and shit.
Like every other day, I get up at 6 AM. Early for a weekend, but it keeps me on a routine that I need when I have classes in the morning on weekdays. I’ll immediately check my stats to make sure things didn’t go sour overnight. I usually go through some blogs, hit up the #cakes chat on irc, and then I’ll continue to file through my day with a shower, getting dressed and breathing in some of the wonderful Bangkok air outside my balcony.
That’s my view with the “fresh air.” It’s an interesting area for a pretty nice apartment. In the lower corner, you can see the rickshaw houses. Then there’s the obvious highway (I’ve witnessed some sick crashes there… sadistic…). To the left of the picture is the port. Boats are always honking their goddamn air horns at 3 AM. Distracting and annoying.
That Saturday, I had to go buy some books, and wanted an S-Video cable to hook my computer up to my TV. The best place for all of this is in an area of Bangkok called Siam (The old name for Thailand, actually). Siam is for the hip crowd, surrounded with gigantic shopping malls and hip shops fo’ da’ cool kids, yo! Fo’ shizzle.
Here’s a shot of my apartment. Not bad, considering it is surrounded by hand-fashioned wooden and metal rust houses. It is only 5 minutes from my school, so it isn’t a bad deal for less than 300 dollars a month (with electricity).
I’ll continue my walk until I get to a motorcycle taxi. These guys got skills. Zig-zagging between cars at 30+ mph is fun if you don’t mind the thought that you might die. The motorcycle takes me to the BTS – the elevated sky train. Check the pic out, yo.
From there, I get out at Siam. I decided to get my books first, since I am an idiot and like to carry heavy ass books everywhere. Chulalongkorn is the most recognized university in Thailand, and it is also the location of one of the biggest deposit of International college textbooks. If it weren’t for them I’d be paying $100 dollars shipping with Amazon (vs. the few dollars it cost me to go to Siam and back home) + the extreme costs of textbooks in America . Text books here are printed in Thailand, so I can get 1000 page text books for less than $30. I ended up finding the 3 books I needed and it all cost around 60 dollars.
Here are some pics of Siam and Chulalongkorn University Bookstore:
I decided it was time to get some games for my sexy new PC, too. The place for that is definitely MBK. The fourth floor of MBK Shopping Complex is jam packed with technology from cell phones, gaming consoles, as well pirated games and movies. The cops say it’s illegal to copy the games in the mall, so they all just run orders from right outside the mall where their copiers are. There have been some crackdowns, but not enough for people to simply stop manufacturing them. This means sexy for me, because I was able to get 200 dollars in games for about 20 bucks.
I still didn’t have my S-Video cable, so I crossed across the road to get to Siam Paragon. Check out the hot traffic here.
Saturday, it isn’t as busy, but it still gets congested in some places. I used to rent an apartment just down the road in the second picture. It had a great location close to Siam. Siam’s got a lot of chicks to pick up! :p
I worked through the mall, Siam Discovery, where I met my friend working as a DJ for one of the more popular radio stations here. His name is P’Big, and he is an actor in a shit load of daytime television shows. I like to tease him because all of the characters he plays are assholes. Haha. He had to get back to work, so I stopped at Dairy Queen to eat breakfast. That was a great Oreo Blizzard.
This would be Siam Paragon. It is one of the more expensive malls featuring all that lash Gucci shit that is overpriced for tourists. It is also one of the only places that require shops to take American Express. I’m drained of fresh cash so I’ve got to use it. I hit up one of the electronic stores here, Power Buy and found my S-Video Cable. I also found some nice Logitech 5.1 surround sound speakers on sale. Uh oh says my American Express. $250 spent.
Overall, it was quite an expensive day for me as I spent nearly 400 dollars in Siam. It was time to head home, and so I did, taking the BTS to a taxi with all the crap I had to my apartment. I checked my stats to make sure I was making enough to pay for the day (which I didn’t, but I still profited). I then got everything set up. In the end, using my TV looked like shit as a monitor, so I’ve got to fix the output resolution as it limits it to a smaller resolution than my 22” Samsung LCD monitor. The speakers are hot as fuck, though. The bass is great at closing my neighbor’s mouths as they are partying at 1 AM. Just take bass speaker and place it against the wall for optimal effects. Anyways, here is a shot of my workspace. My room doesn’t get much larger than this, but it is cozy and clean and within walking distance of my school. Saves me a lot of cash.
I had some personal info in the image that I professionally edited out with my favorite Cakes chat quotes.
I’ll usually spend my evenings as I did that one, dicking around on Facebook ads, researching, chatting, tapping your mother, and watching boobs on the boob-tube. I think I forgot to eat on Saturday, except for that Blizzard and a Coke. I’m a skinny bitch. I hit the sack around midnight.
Yup, a day in the life of me. Are you bored yet? I am. Peace.
Cryin’ Like Babies
So I guess my post yesterday upset some people. That came about due to the fact that I suggested reporting ads that might compete with yours. I don’t always think when I blog, so I just threw out some tips to you noobs not realizing that the big guys might be a bit angered by this. I guess I’d end up taking out some of their ads if I did this.
I was talking to some of the guys, and some said I should delete the post and some said I should keep it up. Well, I took it down, but then I was going to put it back up. I guess the text got wiped out when I unpublished it, because there is nothing in the edit post page. Unfortunate as I would have liked to look at it and make some new points.
Let’s take a look at what reporting on Facebook is used for. Reporting is an annonymous system to report ads that are negative as they are either pronographic, misleading, or it is offensive. I can only imagine the only people using this crap are 40+ year old soccer moms and, well, other marketers just like you and me.
I don’t know how much weight FB actually puts into each time an ad is reported. However, let’s just be safe and say they actually do look at the ad. When I suggested reporting ads, random reporting probably wouldn’t do much. If an ad is FB-grade, then FB wouldn’t shut it down. Reporting, I think, is more successful if you are reporting an ad that actually breaks Facebooks Ads ToS and that shit.
I actually don’t copy many ads. I’ve found success doing things my own way, and don’t always need to copy ads. If I do it, reporting the ad that I copied wouldn’t do much for my favor. If they pause their ad, what happens if that intern sees my ad that I copied from them? Denied, right? Right!
But, we know most of you who play Facebook game it as much as you can. Some still report, and yes I have done it, but I will think more thoroughly about it the next time if I see something that catches my eye. Reporting too much may lead to more strictly enforced Ad Guidelines, and we already know how much of a bitch Facebook is about that.
I am tired of seeing these 20 and Still Single? ads. Breaking the guidelines. Musta been a new intern, because I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten similar ads shot down.
If I found out that someone reported my ads, which lead to paused campaigns, I can understand how you might be upset. Which is why you should never “put all your eggs in 1 basket.” Run a shit load of ads, k? They can’t see and report them all, so you shouldn’t be crying too much over a few paused ads.
If you want to hate me, then hate me. I don’t randomly go around reporting ads, though. And I will certainly think about what I’m writing a bit more, but don’t expect me to always go light. I’m emotional, and I’ll fight against anything until you understand I’m better than you. Haha.
Run it down again. Reporting might lead to less competition, however, it is kinda sour, can lead to stricter rules, and might not actually carry any weight at all. It’s up to you whether or not you want to do it.
Get Your Offers With Reverse Marketing
Most people market using things they know and things they think will perform well. Running through the list of offers your affiliate network provides you, you can generally find some interesting offers to push that you think you’ll know the perfect keywords, images and demographics that that offer will perform for.
If you are stuck on what kind of offer you are going to run, why not try a little experiment. Reverse marketing can bring about some exellent ideas and provide you with the demographic information you need to push an offer that makes money.
What reverse marketing is, is basically looking at what people want before examining the product you have in your hands or are thinking about pushing. By performing with reverse marketing, you take an examination at the people that will buy and figure out what it is they want to buy and how they want to be sold to.
Let’s take for example my father. My father is a big guy in his mid-40s. He is in to technology, loves his projector in the cinema, and screams at the television when the Minnesota Vikings miss an opportunity for a touchdown.
From this I can jot down that he likes football, and likes to buy expensive shit. So what kind of offers do we have for something like this? Why not try an online football live streaming thinger or something. I’m making this extremely fucking basic. You should obviously follow through with some more extensive research.
So, find someone you know and examine what it is that makes their life tick. If they fall within a group of people, you can target all those mo-fos with an offer that makes them all happy. The information obtained from them can be used for demographic targeting, keywords, landing page design (different ages and cultures like different colors), copies, and all those other fun shitty things we have to do to roll in some moola.
Who Wants Dat Shit? Get Into Their Heads
When you finally have an offer you are ready to promote, you can start writing out ad copys, sales pages, and designing landing/squeeze pages for your offer. Should that be step one though? Absolutely not. You need to know who wants to buy into that offer.
Research into getting good demographics for your offer needs to be at the top of your to-do list. You can target everyone, but you’ll get a shit load of clicks from people that don’t neccessarily care about the offer. That costs you money off of your ROI and CTR rates.
Ask yourself what kind of people want your offer? Who will be the buyer? Who will be the skeptips? And what words will further a clickers want to purchase whatever you are pushing?
You want to know how to do this? Get into the heads of your demographics. Become that person that will buy it. How do they want to be sold, and how can you sell the product by answering as many questions they will have about it. Find a way to encorporate this into your copy and you should be gold.
For further and more profitable campaigns, you will really want to put in a shit load of research. Talk to who could be a potential customer, find out what makes them tick, how can you push their buy button, and what would they not be so sure about. Drive around areas your demographics live, what do they chat about in their freetime. If you find them talking about golf when they are meeting, put a golfing reference in your ad.
Get in their head, bro. That’s all. Take a lot of time to brainstorm and get to know who you are selling to. Once you’re on top of this, you’ll be good to get some good clicks and should be able to atleast drag even on your investment. If not, you suck and did something wrong. Go back and start again, tardo. D’ end!
Optimize Your Facebook Ad Headlines
CTR is what it is all about when it comes down to Facebook marketing. I’m sure most of you already on there are just running simple redirects to the offers landing page, which isn’t a bad idea. You get them there quick and easy, and normally, those pages are already well designed so that they convert well. In some cases, building a separate landing page that then directs users to the offer might be better. Like always, you gotta split test this shit to make the most out of it.
Anyways, back to CTR. Everyone talks about pictures which is good and dandy. You should have an image that pops out, but you should also have a sexy title. People will normally read the headline after noticing the image, and some ignore the ad description all together. It is important that you get a headline that nails the offer to the user and write one that makes that 18 year-old, single college student from the University of Florida click through.
Let’s go back to 9th grade English class. What did Mrs. Crabapple always tell you when writing introductions? Never use a basic, stupid simple intro in presentations or papers. That would be crap like “Hi my name is Poopie and I’m going to be talking about ding-dongs today.” Mrs. Crabapple would be sad to see this kinda shiat on your Facebook ads.
So what did she want us to write? An awesome ass introduction. Hell, it can be simple, but it has to be gripping. My favorite introductions and headlines always use a question mark. Writing a simple question related to your offer is ussually enough to drag people in. For example, if the D-student was pushing the $30 a lead paying Acai Berry - Oprah offer on Ads4Dough (if you haven’t already joined A4D, join under my referal link to join my PPC Consulting program) the D-student might write something like “Acai Berries.”
That’s effing boring and doesn’t capture anyones attention except for the people on Facebook already looking for Acai Berries. No one on Facebook is looking for Acai Berries, let me tell you now. You could make that into a much better headline with a question like “Want some acai berries?” Yup, that headline is much better, but once again, it still sucks. No one knows what Acai Berries are and what the hell they do. Let’s make it into something that more people are interested in and much more likely to click on.
Want to lose weight?
Tired of being overweight?
Want to shed pounds?
Dieting to difficult?
Wow, yeah I’m pretty sure you guys all owe me $1000392 gajillion dollars for those headlines. They aren’t anything special, but they are simple and they hit a larger audience than the D-students examples. Many more people are looking to lose weight than those looking for acai berries.
That took way too long to explain you should write questions rather than be so stupidely direct with your headlines. The next tip is much easier to explain. Which one looks lie a more desirable headline?
Do you want a big puppy?
Do You Want A Big Puppy?
More people will click on the lower example because it just sticks out more. Sometimes Facebook might bitch about this, but for the most case they are more worried about the giant amount of cleavage you are trying to skip past them.
For most ads, I aim for a .08% or higher click-through rate. My best ads do .2 - .3%. If you aren’t able to get somewhere near that, it might be because your headline is A) Shit; B) Not correctly capitalized; C) you aren’t targeting the right demographics. More people lose money on that last point, so work on getting that down. Better targeted demographics, even with a shit headline, will get you higher CTRs, lower click prices, and more leads and sales.