Hey all! I wanted to touch on some ideas related to managing and growing a Facebook Fan Page. If you haven’t created your Facebook Fan Page you can do so here. Maintaining a Fan Page is great idea for any business, club, organization, cause, personality, or anyone that is looking to gain fans for a group. The nice thing about a Fan Page is it grows over time and can be “worked” to make sure it’s a fun and exciting place people want to check out frequently and put in their opinions and ideas. The point of build a Fan base is so you have people you can interact with that can become passionate fans and representatives and tell everyone they know! Here are some tips to make sure you are leveraging Facebook Fan Pages to the utmost:

1. Welcome Screen – Having a customized Welcome tab is a great idea to dress up your Facebook Fan Page to new visitors. It’s nice to have because you can add functionality to it as well as instruct your potential new fans to “Like” your page. There is a nice free tool for adding a Welcome screen to your fan page here.

2. Left Side Graphic – Another area that you can customize is your left side graphic of the Fan Page. Most companies will make a nice tall graphic that is customized to advertise their current promotion or to be a seasonal graphic of some kind. You can play around with your left side graphic and keep it timely which tends to work best.

3. Discussions Area – The Discussions area of your fan page should really be a primary focus of building out your Fan Page with more content and topics. The really nice thing is the Discussions area tends to rank well in Google, so any topics you put up there will get into the the search results and can lead to traffic to those discussions and eventual new fans or even business. Make sure to encourage your fans to participate in your discussions by messaging them to do so and also running contests and promotions, like “whoever makes the best response wins a gift card.”

4. Email Messaging Your Fans – Messaging your Facebook Fans is a great way to keep them engaged with your current content and promotions. In order to email message all of your fans at once you have to go into your Fan Page under: Edit Page (under left graphic) > Marketing > Send Update. You can then write your subject and content and email all your fans. Make sure not to email fans too much and send them good info or they leave your fan page.

5. Fan Page Advertising – Probably the best way to build your Facebook Fans is to advertise on Facebook itself for more fans. The nice thing is you can target who will see your ads by people’s Like and Interests. So for example if you are advertising your Flower Shop’s fan page you may want to run ads to people in your store’s zip code that are Liked to Flowers or 1800flowers, so you know the people seeing your ad are interested in what you offer. There are many things you can target so you have to try different Likes and Interests and see which creates more fans for you at the least cost. I have found that fan page advertising is a tremendous way to build your targeted fans. Facebook fan page ads are on a cost-per-click or cost-per-thousands impressions (CPM). You have to see which “backs-out” to the lowest average cost-per-click (CPC) and then run with that.

6. Posting Status Updates – Once you have some fans you can post your status updates which will keep your fans informed about all the current happenings you want to share with them. You can post links, webpage urls, photos, videos, and any other media that you want to share with your fans. The nice thing is when your fans Like, Comment, or Share your status updates their friends see that and it can go viral if it’s compelling enough. Don’t hammer your fans with too many status updates or they will leave your fan page. Posting links in your status updates can put it into the News area of people’s status updates which can get more views and action. I recommend no more than 2-5 status updates per day, if that.

7. Contests and Promotions – the best part about running a Facebook Fan Page is that you can run fun and exciting contests and promotions to your fans and get them moving into action. Many companies will do free giveaways, special coupon promotions, and survey contests to engage with their fans and increase overall interaction and sharing. Companies like Rita’s Italian Ice have been able to leverage free promotions to build their fans into the hundreds of thousands. Every company or group will be different but everyone should be running contests and promotions to try to motivate their fans into action and create excitement.

8. Mass Friend Invites – If you know me, you know I love mass friend invites. It’s the best way to auto-select and blast all your Facebook friends about your fan page. The cool thing is all your new fans and do the same thing and it can really increase exposure if you are able to get your fans to invite all of their friends to your fan page. There is a little piece of code that should be pasted into the main browser window after you have selected to invite your friends, then you just write a little message and blast way! Here is a great article that explains how the process works.

9. Interacting with Fans – whether you mange 10 fans or 100,000 you should be seeking to interact with them as much as possible. Make sure whoever is managing your Fan Page is really friendly and proactive. Also because they are representing your company or organization they should be really competent at writing and responding. Make sure to be as friendly and outgoing as possible because that approach is always well-received. Every opportunity to interact with a fan should be maximized and taken seriously, as they could become a vocal representative for your Fan Page.

These are some suggestion for building out and improving your Facebook Fan Page. It takes a lot of work to do it properly but will pay big dividends in the end. Make sure whoever is managing your Fan Page is a competent, pro-active, passionate, and super friendly person that takes it very seriously and does a great job. Check out what your competitors are doing with their Fan Pages and then emulate and improve upon that. I hope you enjoyed this little article…feel free to leave me your comments and suggestions…and of course share it! thx!

Hey all..I hope your November is going well! I wanted to put together some useful tips for generating more traffic and affiliate commissions during the busy Holiday shopping season so you can maximize your earnings. Here are some online marketing tips you can use to maximize your efforts:

1. Post about hot gift items – posting about the hottest holiday gift items is a great way to build your site or blog with content people are actually searching for during the Holidays, ex. “10 hottest gift ideas for 2011″ or “What are the top gifts for 2011.” Do your research and depending on your niche there will be a set of hot products that are in-demand this holiday season. Then create pages on your site or blog with good content write-ups about these hot products and use “lists” as well because they tend to be read, such as: Top 11 Tech Gadget Gifts for 2011, 5 Must-have Corporate Gifts Ideas to Impress Your Clients, 8 Innovated Gifts for Your Children. Titles like that can really pull in the traffic. Remember, the more content you post the more search rankings you can garner with each page of your site, so post a lot of pages and fill them with great, keyword-rich content to maximize your SEO benefits.

2. Ask for Special Coupons or Promos – asking your affiliate managers and Advertisers for special deals, coupon promotions, or vanity coupon codes (coupon word matching your site)  for your site is a great way to leverage your site’s branding to market exclusive deals to your traffic, subscribers, fans, and followers. Not all affiliate Advertisers will be able to provide this because they can’t do it for everyone or may not at all due to lack of resources, but you can get lucky with a great promotion sometimes and really kill it. Make sure to get the current month’s deals from the Advertisers you are promoting so the offers in the posts will be compelling and convert higher with your visitors.

3. Ramp-Up Your Social Networking – Make sure you are adding Facebook friends, Facebook fans, and Twitter followers on a constant basis so you have more people to expose your offers, promotions, and pages to. However, don’t crush people with too many offers in a short span or they may get turned off from your suggestions. Don’t recommend something you haven’t tried yourself, however you can make product suggestions and promote really good deals and coupons from merchants you are affiliated with.

4. Post Your Butt Off – Posting tons of original articles to your site or blog (then sharing it all socially)  is the best way to ramp up your traffic in advance of the holidays because by adding frequent posts to your site you can really expand the number of pages you have indexed in Google, Yahoo, ann MSN/Bing which increases the chances your site will rank under various search phrases and bring in more free traffic. Make sure to submit your new posts to Digg, Delicious, and other bookmarking sites to maximize your exposure. Post to 3rd party article directories, link ezinearticles.com, with rewrites of your articles to maximize your organic rankings. I recommend 1-10 posts a day to your site to increase your frequency and page count. Over time, you can build your page count into the thousands of pages which will bring your site more traffic.

5. Ask for Higher Commissions – asking your affiliate Advertisers for greater commissions during the Holidays is a great way to ensure you will maximize your earnings. Some Advertisers may only do this if you have produced a good amount of sales volume in the past, but it never hurts to ask…they can only say no. Most affiliate Advertisers have some room to increase affiliate commissions so you need to ask for a higher payout whenever possible. If they say no or are rude, tell them you will go promote their competitor, which will change their attitude quickly. You can also offer paid placement on your website, blog, newsletter, or social networks. If you have a decent amount of traffic, fans and followers, there are Advertisers that will pay an additional paid placement fee in addition to your affiliate commissions, so that’s a great reason to try to exand what you are doing steadily over time and build the relationship with your Advertisers.

6. Email your list – if you maintain a database of email address, make sure you are messaging your database at least weekly with the newest offers from your affiliate Advertisers. Make sure you are growing your list with email opt-in plug-ins on your site. Take growing your list seriously as it will pay dividends the larger a list it is. You can use services like icontact, constantcontact, or mailchimp to blast your email list. Make the investment in Dreamveaver to edit your HTML, and have a nice HTML newsletter designed which you can use as a template for all your future blasts.

These are a few Affiliate Marketing Tips you can use to maximize your traffic and commissions during the Holiday Season. I hope it was helpful and let me know if there is anything you want to discuss more in-depth. Thanks!

Hi all! Today I wanted to discuss some easy ways you can increase how effective you are as an affiliate marketer. As some of you may know I’m primarily into free methods for traffic generation, so nothing here costs money…usually just your time and effort. Let me know if you have any feedback on these ways to make your affiliate marketing efforts more productive.

1. Writing Articles, Posts, Content – Probably the best way to increase your affiliate earnings is to produce a lot of content on the topic or niche your are promoting. Writing frequent articles or blog posts can really ramp your traffic because the search engines like Google really value frequent, original content posting. Another great reason is the more physical pages you have on your site, the more “indexed” pages you will gain in the search results thereby increasing your overall traffic. It’s also a good idea to post unique version of those articles on sites like ezinearticles.com which can rank well in Google and add an inbound link to your site, which helps your site rank better. Over time, these are very effective ways to increase your free traffic and hence your affiliate earnings.

2. Social Bookmarking – Once you have posted articles or blog posts, you can then “bookmark” your posts to the top social bookmarking sites. This is important because it allows you to syndicate your content more broadly and get it shared and bookmarked by others. Please refer to my social bookmarking article for more detailed instructions on social book marketing techniques.

3. Social Networking – I’m sure you are already on Facebook and Twitter, so you need to leverage these sites to get your content shared, liked, commented on, and retweeted. By sharing your article pages and blog posts on Facebook and Twitter you can increase their syndication and possibly even make that content go viral if it’s compelling enough. Make sure to spend a great deal of time liking, sharing, commenting, and retweeting other people’s content so they will be more likely to share yours to others. Otherwise they won’t or just a little and that won’t get it done. When people share, like, comment on Facebook, their friends see that and it gets more traffic. Some of the top social networking sites you should be joined to are: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and FourSquare.

4. Forum Posting – a great free way to increase your traffic is to join relevant online forums to your site’s niche and set-up your forum signature with links to your sites. Most forums allow a few links in your forum signature which people see and could click, not to mention it helps build up inbound links to your website which is good for your organic rankings. Being an active forum member can be great because you can build links quickly and easily if you comment a lot and start a lot of topics on the forum. Make sure to add valuable comments and topics or you will be banned. To find forums search “your niche forums” like pet forums and then join a bunch, set-up your signature in your Control Panel and start getting active!

5. Blog Commenting – Every niche has a ton of related blogs that you can post comments on to build your inbound links and traffic. Frequent blog commenting can really ramp your links and traffic because you are continually being pulled back to the blog by other’s comments and reminded to reply back by email. So you are always a click away from adding another comment. You can use Google Blog Search to find high ranking blogs that you can post comments to and link to your site. Make sure to leave really good comments or they won’t be posted to the site by the blog owner.

6. Build Your List – You should always be building a list of email address on your sites that can be messaged later with specials and promotions from your Affiliate Advertisers. There are many free plug-ins to handle the subscribing process, there are even pop-overs that launch when your site loads to prompt the visitor to join your list for valuable updates. There are some great WordPress blog plugins you can use to facilitate this here.

7. Learn to Type Faster – Typing speed can’t be under-valued in Affiliate Marketing because the faster you type the more content you can produce. Work on your typing speed by practicing typing articles and going as fast as possible on the keyboard. Also reading a lot can improve your ability to write easier and you will be better and busting out content and articles.

8. Learn from Others – a great way to make yourself a more effective Affiliate Marketer is to look at what other successful affiliates and bloggers are doing and emulate them. You can always find affiliate sites ranking in Google for various search phrases is you just run some search and see who is ranking. You can usually spot affiliate sites because they have affiliate banners on them, although not all sites run affiliate banners. Make sure to check out real affiliates and not those guys that claim to be able to teach you how they got rich with affiliate marketing because more of them are full of crap. So be careful of that.

These are a few suggestions to make you a more effective Affiliate Marketer. I hope you can employ these techniques to increase your website traffic and thereby increase your affiliate earnings. Please let me know if you have any questions at all. Thanks and have a great day. Now go out and build out the web with content!

Hello, I wanted to share another case study of one of our Affiliate Management clients. This merchant is a retailer in the gift niche and has experienced excellent sales growth and affiliate sign-up rates since launching on Commission Junction Affiliate Network (CJ). Here is the sales performance since launching in May 2010:

This graphic is through 11/10/2010

We a combination of the following methods to ramp up sales quickly in a traditionally non-gift giving time period:
- Affiliate recruiting from our super-affiliate database
- Offering good commission amounts and no performance tiers
- Affiliate recruiting via targeted email campaigns to select categories on Commission Junction
- Personally following-up with all the affiliate/publishers offering to work with them and providing current promotions
- Designing custom banner ads for affiliates
- Providing unique merchant descriptions to affiliates promoting the Advertisers making it easier for them
- Bringing in new affiliate partnerships by going out and contacting companies and sites that would be a good fit.

These are some of the methods we have used to achieve explosive sales growth and affiliate recruiting. We are very excited to have a strong and explosive holiday season with this client…should be great all around! Let us know if you have any questions about how affiliate program works or how you can hire Experience Advertising to explode the growth of your affiliate program. Thanks and have a great day!

Hey everyone! Another great Affiliate Sales Contest from our client DealYard.com!

1st Prize: Apple iPad – One winner selected from the list of Producing Publishers during the contest period. The more sales you make, the more entries you get into the drawing. Anyone that produces a sale has a chance to win the iPad!
2nd Prize: $50 Visa Gift Cards – 6 Most Improved or Best New Publishers – 6 most improved publishers and new publishers will win a $50 Gift Card.
Disclaimer: Not everyone producing a sale will win a prize. Contest runs from November 10th-December 25th, 2010.

We hope you will check out this cool affiliate sales contest from DealYard! Please let us know if you have any affiliate marketing questions or need to know how to effectively promote the DealYard affiliate program on Commission Junction.

Sign-up for the DealYard affiliate program here!

Hey all! I wanted to post about something I’m passionate about which is called “social bookmarking.” Social bookmarking has been around for several years now and should be utilized to spread your content, articles, and posts around the Internet to high-ranking websites. Social bookmarking, in my opinion, is a fairly under-utilized by most Internet Marketers and Bloggers. Social bookmarking will allow you to get your content more exposure and better rankings over time if you go it about it properly with a good strategy. Another aspect of social bookmarking is the ability to add “tags” to each submission which categorizes the content and allows other people to find it easier. Tagging also gets the post listed on the page with similar tagged posts which is just another inbound link to that page on your site. It’s never bad to have have inbound links to interior pages of your site from high ranking bookmarking sites.

Here is my Social Bookmarking and Social Networking process I like to use after posting articles to my sites:
1. Post article or blog post to my site.
2. Share Title and article url on Facebook to my friends. When friends Like, Comment, or Share your post their friends see it and they can do the same, which brings in more traffic and it can go viral.
3. Share Title and article url to my Facebook Fan Page. Posting to your Fan Page will allow your fans to Like, comment, and share your content which leads to more fan interaction. Make sure to respond to all your fan’s comments and keep the conversation going as long as possible.
4. Post Title and article url to Twitter account. Tweeting your post can get it retweeted and commented on which gets it more exposure. Make sure to retweet other peoples Twitter posts so they will retweet yours.
5. Submit Title and article url to Digg.com, Delicious.com, Reddit.com, StumbleUpon.com, Diigo.com, Google Buzz, and my LinkedIn Group. You need to be joined to all of these sites to make a submission. Once logged in on your computer, you can just go to each site and submit. These are my favorite social bookmarking sites and tend to rank really well in Google which benefits your site when you have them linking to you through the bookmarking submissions.
6. Post my Digg submission to Facebook and Twitter asking my friends and followers to Digg it for me, which can get it more traffic. The more you Digg, retweet, and bookmark your friends’ posts the more they will do it for you can help it go viral.

This is a quick little process for social bookmarking your content and articles to social book marking sites. If you can get a bunch of your friends and followers to bookmark your articles as well you can really improve the rankings of each post, as the more bookmarks you have to each post the more inbound links you are creating to each. All of the posts I bookmark tend to rank really well in Google, so I know it’s an effective way to build the rankings to your inner pages and content. You have to be really pro-active with your bookmarking of other people articles to ensure they will bookmark yours more frequently. Social Bookmarking is still an untapped strategy for affiliate marketers and bloggers. You are working hard producing content, so make sure you utilize social bookmarking to help the whole overall process work better and get more traffic! Thanks for reading and let me know if you have any questions at all.

Hey everyone! Great news…Inkgrabber is running an affiliate sales contest that you can win an Apple iPad or $50 Gift Card.

The Inkgrabber.com Holiday Sales Contest will run from November 7th – December 25th, 2010. Anyone can win a prize that produces at least 1 sale. The more sales you produce, the more chance you have to win the iPad!

1st Prize: Apple iPad – One winner selected from the list of Producing Publishers during the contest period. The more sales you make, the more entries you get into the drawing. Anyone that produces a sale has a chance to win the iPad!

2nd Prize: $50 Visa Gift Cards – 7 Most Improved or Best New Publishers - the most improved publishers and new publishers will win a $50 Gift Card.

Disclaimer: Not everyone producing a sale will win a prize.

We hope you participate and win in the Inkgrabber affiliate sales contest. Click here to join the Inkgrabber affiliate program on Commission Junction.

Hey everyone! Another fabulous affiliate sales contest you can participate in, this time from NutsOnline. The NutsOnline.com Holiday Sales Contest will run from November 7th – December 25th, 2010. Anyone can win a prize that produces at least 1 sale. The more sales you produce, the more chance you have to win the iPad!

1st Prize: Apple iPad – 2 winners selected from the list of Producing Publishers during the contest period. The more sales you make, the more entries you get into the drawing. Anyone that produces a sale has a chance to win the iPad!

2nd Prize: $50 Visa Gift Cards – 5 Next Top Performing Publishers – the top 5 publishers will win a $50 Gift Card.

We are ready to work with you to make you an effective marketer of the NutsOnline.com brand. We can provide affiliate training, resources, custom banner sizes, and more…all free of charge. Let us know how we can assist you today.

Join the NutsOnline.com affiliate program here.

Hello there! Thanks for reading. Very excited to bring you another stupendous affiliate sales contest for the Holidays from our client Phone.com! The Phone.com Holiday Affiliate Sales Contest will run from November 7th – December 25th, 2010. Anyone can win a prize that produces at least 1 sale. The more sales you produce, the more chance you have to win the iPad!

1st Prize: Apple iPad – Two winners selected from the list of Producing Publishers during the contest period. The more sales you make, the more entries you get into the drawing. Anyone that produces a sale has a chance to win the iPad!

2nd Prize: $50 Visa Gift Cards – 5 Most Improved Publishers - the top 5 most improved publishers, from October numbers, will win a $50 Gift Card.

Disclaimer: not everyone that produces a sale will win a prize.

Let me know if you have any questions about this excite affiliate sales contest. You can join the Phone.com affiliate program here.

We have an really exciting Holiday Sales Contest for you to participate in! You can win 1 of 4 iPads or 1 of 10 $100 Gift Cards as a TheNerds.net affiliate. This contest will run across CJ, Shareasale, and Google Network. ]

TheNerds.net Holiday Sales Contest will run from November 1st – December 25th, 2010. Anyone can win a prize that produces at least 1 confirmed sale. The more sales you produce, the more chance you have to win an iPad!

1st Prize: Apple iPads – 4 winners selected from the list of Producing Publishers during the contest period. The more sales you make, the more entries you get into the drawing. Anyone that produces a sale has a chance to win an iPad!

2nd Prize: $100 Visa Gift Cards
- Top 5 Producing Publishers – the top 10 producers will win a $100 Visa Gift Card (that didn’t win an iPad).
- 5 Random Producers – 5 random publishers that produced at least 1 sale in the contest period will win $100 Gift Card.

Disclaimer: Not everyone that produces a sale will win in the contest. There is NO TRADEMARK BIDDING allowed for TheNerds or TheNerds.net. Thanks!

Anyone can win in TheNerds Holiday Sales Contest! Good luck and let me know if you have any questions!