Advertising on social networking websites has had a lot of attention recently, in particular on Facebook and to a lesser extent MySpace. Why do people want to advertise on these sites? It’s because they have such huge reach. Each day millions of people access Facebook and MySpace, which makes them the online equivalent of a large television station or newspaper. Many companies advertise blindly on these websites without taking into consideration the differences in demographic to the offline equivalents. Advertising the right product to the right audience is essential to make a profit, and understanding who the social networking demographic is will help you to know which products will sell.

I have done demographic research on social networks with a data set of all Facebook members living in the United States which is a total of 22,000,000 people. Other countries and other social networking websites will most likely have similar demographics so this research will pertain to social networking in general.

Demographic - Age

Shown above is the age distribution of social networking members. 84% of members are between the ages of 14 and 26, so to achieve the highest possible ROI you should tailor your product to this age group. What products would be most suitable for this age group? Brand name clothing, games and sports equipment to name a few. If your product was for example home loans, social networking websites are not the place to advertise.

Demographic - Gender

Shown above is the gender distribution of social networking members. 55% of members are female and 45% are male, this proportion is very normal so shouldn’t significantly affect any advertising decisions.

Demographic - Education

Shown above is the education distribution of social networking members. 47% of members are currently studying at high school or college and the remaining 53% have finished studying. The majority are partially or fully college educated, which will once again affect which advertisements will achieve the best ROI.

Facebook’s Ground-Breaking Advertising Model

Since there are advertisers looking to advertise products to members outside of the main demographic Facebook has implemented an impressive ad serving system. Since Facebook have the age, gender, race, location and even interests of their members they can display targeted advertisements customized for each member. Facebook allow advertisers to choose which demographic to display their advertisement to, which in turn can lead to a great ROI for the advertiser and Facebook can therefore charge a premium on the ad space.

Without such an ad serving system, advertising is limited to products targeted to the primary demographic. Facebook have set a high benchmark and I hope their competitors can keep up.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Clickbank is an appealing monetization method for website owners for one good reason, they pay high commissions on sales you refer. Clickbank only deal with digital products, so the publishers have very little expenses to cover and can therefore pay commissions as high as 75%. The products tend to cost on average about $40 and with an average commission of 50% or 75% the average commission is $25. To make $25 through the Adsense program you will need anywhere from 25 clicks to 1000 clicks, with Clickbank you can make $25 in as little as 1 click although it could also take 1000 clicks to make a conversion if you have not optimized well.

How to Make Money with Clickbank

1. Find a category of products to promote.

   When deciding which category of products to promote you should start at the Clickbank Marketplace. On this page is a search form, we will only be using the category and sub-category drop-downs for now. How you choose your category depends on your circumstances; if you have a website and want to monetize the traffic choose the category your visitors would most likely purchase from, and if you have NO existing website but want to break into affiliate sales choose the category you would enjoy writing about.

2. Decide on a single product to promote.

   In the sub-category you decided on there might be 40 products to choose from, choosing a good one to promote is very important (although you can always change later). The best product can be found by the following factors:
   • Suitability - The most important factor in choosing a product is how suitable it is to your visitors. Put yourself in your visitors shoes and think “would I buy this product?”.
   • Commission (total and percentage) - The second most important factor after suitability is how much you will be payed per sale, the commission. Under each product is a $/sale and Future $ figure, the $/sale is the lump sum you will receive for each sale you make and Future $ is any extra recurring money you will receive from selling products with ongoing payment plans such as web hosting. When deciding on the product higher commissions are generally better for the obvious reason of receiving more money, but be careful not to choose a product with such a high commission that the sale price is too expensive for your visitors to purchase.
   • Grav - The grav (aka gravity) of a product signifies the amount of affiliates who have earned a commission from the product, having a decent gravity means that their sales page is probably good and if you send the visitors quite a lot will convert into sales. You should look for a product with at least 5 gravity but this is not mandatory.

3. Display your affiliate link.

   You have 4 options for where you display your affiliate link; on an existing website with traffic, on a brand new website, in an opt-in email, or on other people’s websites. Each have advantages and disadvantages so I will discuss each.
   • Existing Website - Adding a Clickbank product to an existing website is an easy to make a sale here and there. Some examples of how you could place the product are; a sub-page selling the product, a blog post advertising the product, or a banner ad (example). This method tends to not convert well, but it is very easy to get started if you have a website with traffic.
   • New Website / Sales Page - A sales page is a website for the sole purpose of selling a product (example). The hops tend to convert very well since most visitors who click through have already decided to purchase, but gaining traffic to a sales page is not easy. Most websites are unwilling to link to a sales page so you will have to be creative in your traffic generation to a page such as this.
   • Opt-In Email - You can build a list of opt-in email subscribers and advertise your products to them (example). How well this method converts depends a lot on how you created your opt-in email list, for example if you collect emails while giving out freebies they will likely not convert to sales as they are more interested in freebies that purchasing.
   • Other People’s Websites - You can purchase private advertising space on other people’s websites, this could be a text link or banner ad. Because this method requires financial investment to be profitable you will need to track your conversions and hop sources to find out which websites advertising on is profitable. Rather than pay for private ads you can also add your affiliate link to your signature at any forums you participate in.

4. Build Traffic to Your Pages

   The amount of hops and conversions you make depends mainly on the amount of people who see your advertisement, so building traffic is a very important step. Sales pages tend not to accumulate backlinks naturally so other traffic generation and link building techniques must be implemented. Here is some of the techniques you can use -
   • StumbleUpon and Stumble Exchanges (and other social bookmarking)
   • Forum Signatures
   • Private Ad Purchases
   • Adwords
   • Article Marketing
   For any other website I would focus on SEO but as sales pages tend not to get backlinks ranking highly in the search engines is not easy.

5. Track your Hops and Conversions

   Clickbank provides a reasonably good tracking system, click My Account then Reporting then Analytics to see it.
   
   
   
   
   
   There is two sections to the analytics system, ‘Publisher Reporting’ and ‘Affiliate Reporting’, since you are an affiliate you only need to use the ‘Affiliate Reporting’ section. All three of the ‘Report By’ options are very useful, here’s a summary of each -
   • Tracking Codes - If you set up tracking codes while creating your affiliate links you can track them here, you could use tracking codes to track different websites if you have more than one.
   • Publishers - This section shows the sales you are making by product, so if you try out multiple products on your websites this section can help you to find out which converts best for you.
   • Hour of Day - This section is the least useful of the three, it lets you track your hops and conversions by hour of the day, but even if you find that you make more sales in the morning it doesn’t do you much good since you can’t use this knowledge to increase sales.

6. Any secrets?

   Sorry, but there are no big secrets. The sure-fire way to increase your Clickbank revenue is to increase traffic to your websites, and also to test out which products are most profitable for you. The one secret I do have however, is that traffic sources matter; if you are selling marketing books, search engine traffic searching for ‘Buy Marketing Books’ will convert far better than traffic from a link exchange with a games website, so if you can get search engine traffic take advantage of it.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Marketing Hub was recently redesigned, the main reason that I did so was because Marketing Hub used to use a free template and I wanted the website layout to be unique, so it will be more memorable and recognizable. Following are the previous and current designs (click for full size) -

Reasons to Redesign

To have a unique layout was not my only reason to redesign the website, following is all of my reasons -

• To have a unique layout which is more memorable and recognizable than a free template.
• I prefer the color blue over brown, hopefully the average visitor does too.
• I wanted a wider sidebar and content area so I changed from 3 columns to 2 columns.
• I wanted better on-page SEO.
• I wanted to add the tabbed javascript ‘POSTS’ box to save space and to just be cool.
• I wanted to put more focus on my ‘FREEBIES’ in the sidebar.
• I wanted better ad placement for higher CTR.

In general all of those reasons are that when you have a custom layout you have more control over how you provide your content.

How much did it cost?

It didn’t cost me anything (except time) since I designed and coded it myself, but if I was to hire a professional it would cost about $2000 according to Chris Pearson. Paying $2000 for a layout is only worth it if you have a good business reason to do so, a better reason than ‘to make it look cool’. For example, in my case my ‘FREEBIES’ pages actually make a lot of money compared to my other pages, so by putting focus on these pages which bring the most return (per 1000 impressions) I will benefit financially from the redesign. Whether that extra focus on the well converting pages will make you $2000 you’ll have to decide for yourself. Another business reason to redesign is to reduce bounce rates; if you’re website looks so terrible that visitors leave immediately a good redesign would reduce your bounce rates and in turn increase the revenue you make from your visitors.

Popularity: 4% [?]

One of my websites, Naruto Wallpaper, recently had its traffic increase from 1,000 to 10,000 uniques per day. The extra traffic encouraged me to improve the monetization on the site and now the website’s revenue has increased by 25 times! This all happened in less than a week, it was because Google image search indexed the site’s images.



Optimizing for Google image search is not difficult, it just requires good on-page optimization and including the target keywords in the image file-names and alt tags. The hard part is getting the images indexed; while the Google spider indexes pages as quickly as within hours or days, the spider only indexes images every few months. To get your images indexed all you need to do is have some quality backlinks pointing toward the site and wait a few months.

Once your images are indexed you will likely immediately see high rankings for your target keywords in Google Image Search. If you rank on the fifth page for a keyword in the normal SERPs you should rank on the first page in image search, mainly because there is less competition in image search.

The easiest way to succeed with image search is to have lots of images, the more images you have indexed and ranking the more traffic they will bring. Most of the images on Naruto Wallpaper bring 100s of uniques per day while some bring 1000+. Knowing which keywords people search for in image search is not as easy as it is for the normal SERPs so a lot of trial and error, or brute force is required. The more images you have, the more likely you will find the good keywords which bring 1000+ uniques per day.

Once you have lots of traffic coming from Google Image Search you could use the new found traffic to create new backlinks to the site, by encouraging them to hotlink with a free link to your site. Lots of image search visitors will hotlink anyway, so encouraging them to do so WITH a backlink is the way to go. Take a look at what I mean by visiting Naruto Wallpaper - Akatsuki and right click on the page - if you have javascript enabled you should see a red outlines box appear at the top of the page, if has code for people to copy and paste to hotlink this image WITH a backlink.

Each new backlink helps the entire website’s rankings, so if you have a sales page or something similar on the website each backlink will boost your SERPs and in turn, sales.

Popularity: 9% [?]

What percentage of the clicks on your ad don’t convert simply because the price is too high for them? 20%? 50%? Whatever the percentage is, it’s wasted money. Luckily for us these useless clicks can be easily avoided by one simply change to your ad copy - listing the price. Here’s an example of the change you may make to your ad copy - When you outright list the price of your product there is no chance of people clicking to find out the price, thus decreasing the amount of clicks but keeping the same amount of conversions. With less clicks you have a lower investment but with the same amount of conversions you have the usual return - this means you have a higher ROI (return on investment).

Popularity: 4% [?]