If you’re truly an uber affiliate marketer, you’ll have the ability to see a new opportunity, exploit it as much you can, and walk away a lot richer in a short period of time. About a week ago, I blogged about Facebook opening up their CPC advertising via Facebook Flyers Pro. Aside from my stupidity of posting about it and letting the world know, I started thinking about how I could take advantage of this new system and use it to profit. I’m going to walk through my entire process of thinking, testing, and exactly how I used Facebook to profit pretty well for working on it for a few days. I was peaking out initially at around $10,000-$15,000/day, and then that rapidly declined as Facebook started catching on (as I’ll post about). If you have the ability to realize and properly exploit a new market, you can make some nice coinage before saturation and rules set in.
Step 1: How Does The Network Work?
I had no idea how the Flyers Pro network worked, so I did the best thing to do: tested it out. I put up an ad for ringtones I think it was and looked at all the targeting options I had :
I chose to target all people in the United States ages 16-28 I think, used no keywords, bid $0.05, and set the max budget of $50. I refreshed the stats after about 5 minutes, and I had already gotten about 20k impressions…crazy! My CTR was horrible but that didn’t matter because I was getting really cheap clicks and a lot of impressions. This campaign ended up profiting nicely. Although I noticed that after about an hour or two, my impressions just completely died. I also realized when I tried to create another flyer, it wouldn’t let me because the maximum daily budget for the account is only $50 (weak). So I had to stop and think for a minute, because my traffic died and I couldn’t spend any more money.
Step 2 : How to Get Around the System
After thinking for a few minutes, there were two possible ways to get around this obstacle :
1) Create another Facebook account and make a flyer for it.
2) Delete that flyer and make a new one.
I found out that you can delete the flyer and re-publish it, and you’ll be able to spend over your daily limit as well as get that initial surge of insane traffic.
Step 3 : What Would Really Convert?
Ok so at this point I had a system that gave me crazy amounts of traffic for a really low cost, but I wanted to think of something that would convert really well and was targeted to my audience. Facebook used to be a college-only network, and is now for the most part a younger age network. So that got me thinking education offers. Next, college kids like a few things, including booze and free things. I’m not sure if there’s a beer affiliate network out there (hmm maybe wine would have worked well…), but there are plenty of “free” offers out there. So I have to find an educational product that offers something free. College scholarships? Ding ding ding. These offers give college kids a chance to sign up (for free) to win a college scholarship. They pay out on the first page submit, and were just what I was looking for. So I deleted and recreated some scholarship ads, and I was doing really well with it.
How to Make it Convert?
So now I had an offer that was targeted and converted well. When I first started running the offer heavy, I had no targeting at all on (hence my bad overall conversion rate in the stats I’m going to post). Once I changed targeted to match kids only in college, and ages 18-24, conversion rate tripled. Here’s some stats for just the scholarship offer at it’s peak day :
That was just my biggest offer with a couple networks, not total earnings. I had about 6-7 offers running with different networks. Now you know what I made with it, now we’ll get into the real juice on how I really exploited it.
How to Act Like an Uber Affiliate
This all happened in a matter of a few hours. By this point I had
-found out that Facebook was rocking
-found how to continually get high traffic surges and beat the $50/day limit
-found a niche that was targeted and converting
Now I had to really exploit it. I’m not a programmer or anything, and I did this all without any programming knowledge. There’s a FireFox plugin called iMacros, and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen at that point in time. This really goes to show how networking can help a lot, as it was a friend who told me about it. What iMacros does is, records an action that you do inside FireFox, and then can replay those actions whenever you want it to. If it sounds confusing, you’ll understand 100% in a minute.
So from my thoughts on how to initially take advantage of Facebook, one of the things was making multiple accounts. More accounts = more flyers = more money. It would take a while to go to Facebook.com, click the signup link, fill out the info, confirm the email, go to Flyers Pro, create the flyer, submit the flyer, enter the billing information, and then logout. Here’s a screenshot of what iMacros looks like :
Here’s what I did :
-signed up for an account manually and was taken to the welcome screen.
-from here, I pressed the “record” button on iMacros.
-went up to the browser bar and typed in http://www.facebook.com/flyers and loaded it.
-created my flyer, clicked to continue, filled out my billing information, placed the order.
-clicked logout, then once logged out clicked “sign up”.
-filled out the information to create a new account. for email I just had it type “@mydomain.com” (which was one of my domains).
-hit STOP on the iMacro. the signup screen now looks like this :
Ok now we can reflect on what I just did. I’ll clear a couple of points first. The iMacro can’t do two of the things in the signup process: dynamically insert an email address, and break the captcha code. You need to enter a different email address for every account. Instead of setting up 1,500 gmail accounts, let’s think smart and simple instead. Just take one of your domains, and redirect all emails to that domain to your gmail account. Then you can enter 1@yourdomain.com, 2@yourdomain.com, 3@yourdomain.com, etc and they’ll all work, and all the confirmation letters are sent to 1 email.
So all I had to do when the signup screen loaded was enter a number before the @ sign in email, enter the captcha, and click signup. I had gmail in the other tab, and I’d just click on the confirmation URL, and that takes you to the welcome screen. Click to play the iMacro and watch it do it’s thang. I had account creation down to about 30 seconds which isn’t bad.
Exploiting Step 2
New account creation was doing fine, I made 50 accounts in about 30 minutes. But I also knew that deleting and re-uploading a flyer gave it that initial surge of traffic. Here’s how I used iMacros to get on top of that and make things even easier then creating accounts :
-start at the Facebook.com homepage, logged out. hit RECORD on the iMacro.
-login with my information.
-go to http://www.facebook.com/flyers
-click on “my flyers”
-click on my flyer, and then delete it.
-click “create flyer”
-make the exact same flyer, continue, place the order.
-logout - STOP the iMacro.
What I just had the macro do is login to one of my accounts, delete my old flyer, reupload it, and then logout. Sweet, so I have this thing refreshing my account with new flyers, now let’s have it refresh all 50 accounts. Ok, I’ll just have to record myself going in and deleting and creating new ads for every account…WRONG. That would be a waste of a couple hours. Instead, click on the “Edit” tab in iMacros, and click to edit the re-uploading macro you just made. It’ll open up in Notepad or something. Copy the code starting from logging in, ending with logging out. Paste that 49 more times. Now every single email will say “1@yourdomain.com”. The only work you have to do is go and change them to go from 1 to 50. Save the macro.
With 1 click of a button, the iMacro will cycle through all 50 of your accounts, login, reupload the ad, and logout. You can now refresh every 30 minutes-hour and get that initial traffic surge over…and over…and over.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat
So I now had a system that would semi-auto create me accounts, and fully auto upload ads. What did I do now? Exploited the hell out of it! I was bidding $0.50 in the beginning and getting my clicks only at $0.10. I tested different offers, ads, targeting options, anything I wanted to. If I wanted to change my bids, all I’d do is edit the iMacro, and do a simple find/replace. I’d replace “0.25″ with “0.50″, and all 50 accounts would be updated with the snap of my fingers.
Facebook Starts to Realize
All good things must come to an end. Facebook started to catch on to all this, and started doing many things. They started disabling ads, and then turning off all accounts. Now even if you create 1 account and reupload an ad, they’ll disable it all. They’ve also started banning keywords like “ringtones”..and “scholarships” hehe :-). It’s still possible to make money with it, but they also started banning affiliate URLs, so direct linking is even hard. In the end I had about 500 Facebook accounts all banned.
My Mistakes
Although I was able to make a nice quick buck, I did make a couple mistakes in the process :
1) HUGE mistake - blogging about it and forum posting about it. When I first heard the news about Facebook flyers, I just thought it would make a good blog post on recent news. I also posted about it at Wickedfire and asked if anybody had messed with flyers. That turned into a pretty big thread and got a lot of people working with them. Learn this lesson : if you discover something that you can exploit : keep your damn mouth shut until it dies.
2) Careless mistakes. I was caught in the moment and wasn’t thinking, just wanted to do as much as possible. For a day I was promoting scholarships to the entire network, not thinking that you have to 18 and in college to actually complete the offer.
Overall
Overall, the experience was well worth it. I stayed up until 5am every night and set my alarm to go off in a few hours so I could get up and refresh all my accounts. I looked like a complete bum, stubble, unclean, that whole deal…I was in my office dungeon for many many hours with no rest. But hey, I made a pretty nice chunk of change from it and learned a lot.
I hope you guys enjoyed the article, maybe sparked your mind for some ideas. The point of the whole thing is that if you’re on top of the industry and a smart thinker, you can have some pretty nice success in the affiliate field. I did all of this myself, no programmer, just some thinking and turning those thoughts into actions
译文:
10000美元/天是这样炼成的
现在，无数的人依靠网络来赚钱，精明的人，总是能够领先一步发现赚钱机会，并且在别人进入这一领域之前，大赚一笔。一个星期前，我在我的博客中提到，facebook通过他们的flyer pro平台提供CPC的广告。写完那篇文章之后，我就开始思考：怎么利用这个新的平台去赚钱。在这篇文章中，我会向大家介绍我用facebook赚钱的全过程，包括：思考，测试以及赚钱的详细细节。我的收入一度达到了10000-15000美元／天。如果你能够找到一个全新的赚钱领域，同样，你也可以从中大赚一笔。
第一步：发现
开始的时候，我对Flyer pro的运行并不了解，于是，我做了一个测试。首先，我放了一个手机彩铃的广告上去，如下图：
我选择广告的投放范围是美国16-28岁的青少年，没有设定关键词，每个点击的单价是0.05美元，每日的最高投放金额是50美元。几分钟之后，当我再次查看账户的时候，发现我的广告已经有了2万次的展示。太棒了，广告的点击率十分高，不过并没有关系，因为点击的单价十分低（google adwords手机彩铃的单价是每个点击1-2美元）。由于只有50美元的预算，我的这个广告项目二个小时之后就结束了，我也小赚了一笔。但是，当我试图继续投放广告时，却始终不成功，因为facebook预设每天最高的广告投放金额是50美元，而我已经用尽了这50美元，不能再继续投放广告了。于是，我不得不停下来想想该怎么办。
第二步：思考
经过思考之后，我认为可以通过以下二个方法来解决：
方法一、建立另一个facebook账号，重新建立广告项目。
方法二、删除原来账号中的广告项目，发布一个新的广告项目。
经过测试我发现，只要将原来的广告项目删除，重新发布一个广告，就可以突破系统每天50美元广告投放金额的限制，这样，我又可以0.05美元每个单价的点击，从Facebooke获得巨大的流量。
第三步：探索
现在，我从Facebook获得了大量的单价非常低的流量，接下来要做的就是：找到一个针对这些访问者的产品，并将这些流量转化成为现金。Facebook以前是一个针对大学生的网站，虽然现在用户群已经发生了变化，但是仍然是以青少年用户为主。于是，我开始考虑教育类产品的广告。再想一想，年轻人嘛，喜欢纵酒狂欢，喜欢免费的东西，我不知道是否有广告联盟提供啤酒之类的广告投放，不过我知道有许多广告联盟提供的广告，都标有“免费”的字样。我要做的就是，找一个能够提供“免费”资源的教育类的广告。奖学金？脑中突然灵光一闪，奖学金广告只需要访问者免费注册，就有可能赢得大学奖学金。这类广告能吸引青少年的注意，而且注册十分简单，访问者完成注册我就能获得佣金，这正是我所需要的。于是我将原来的广告删除，重新放上了奖学金的广告，它的表现也的确让我十分满意。
由于奖学金广告对Facebook用户的针对性十分强，所以转化率也特别高。我投放第一个广告的时候，对广告的投放范围几乎没有做什么设定，所以，转化率不理想。在我改变广告的内容，并设定广告的目标人群为18-24岁的在校青年之后，转化率一下提高了两倍。从下面这张截图可以看到，转化率一度达到了8.7%。
这只是我所有广告联盟中的一个广告而已，并不是我所有的收入。我申请了多个广告联盟，在Facebook投放了6-7个广告，我想，现在你应该知道我是怎么利用Facebook来赚钱了的吧？
以上的这些，都是在几小时之内完成的。下面来看看我是怎么做到的：
――发现Facebook每天广告投放的最高金额50美元。
――找到方法突破每天50美元的限制。
――找到一个针对访问者，具有较高转化率的产品。
我想说的是，我不是编程高手，也不是电脑奇才，我所做的这些没有运用任何的编程知识。大家知道，Firefox有一个插件名叫iMacros，它是一个非常有用的插件，在实施我的这个赚钱项目时，iMacros发挥着非常重要的作用。iMacros插件所做的就是：记录你在firefox浏览器中的动作，协助建立动作宏，以用来登入网站、论坛、登入网络信箱检查邮件等。听起来似乎难以理解，不过看完下面的例子你就会明白了。
在如何突破Facebook每天50美元广告投放金额的限制时我曾经说过，方法之一就是建立多个facebook账号。账号越多，就可以投放越多的广告，也就可以赚更多的钱。通常情况下，我们按照以下的步骤建立一个新账号：
进入Facebook.com网站，点击“注册”按钮，填写相关信息，然后登入自己邮箱，确认注册，再登入Flyer pro平台，递交广告项目，设定广告的相关信息，发布广告。
下面，我们来看看我是如何利用iMacros插件来完成的，下面为iMacros的截图。
我所做的就是：
――注册一个新的facebook帐号，进入facebook欢迎界面.
――从这一步开始，点击iMacros插件的“录制”按钮。
――在浏览器的地址栏输入：http://www.facebook.com/flyers，并进入该页面。
――建立一个广告项目，点击“继续”。输入广告的设定信息，并发布广告。
――点击“登出”退出登陆。然后点击“注册”按钮。
――填写注册新账号需要填写的信息，e-mail地址输入“@mydomain.com”（一个由你网站域名组成的邮件地址）
――点击iMacros插件“停止录制”按钮。现在，注册页面应该如下图所示：
下面，我会详细说明怎么用iMacros插件来批量新账号，不过在这之前，我想先说明一下：有两件事情，iMacros插件在注册时无法替我们完成：（一）、输入动态的email地址。（二）、输入验证码。由于每个账号注册需要不同的email地址，怎么办呢？简单的方法就是对你的某个域名进行设定，将所有发送到那个域名的邮件都转发到你的Gmail账户，这样，你就可以输入1@yourdomain.com，2@yourdomain.com，3@yourdomain.com，所有发送到这些邮件地址的邮件都自动转发到你的Gmail邮箱中。
于是，我要做的就是，当注册页面出现时，在邮件地址“@yourdomain.com”前面加上一个数字以及输入验证码，然后点击“现在注册”按钮。同时，我在Firefox浏览器的另一个窗格中打开我的Gmail邮箱，点击邮件确认注册，然后自动转向欢迎界面。再点击iMacros插件的“播放”按钮，然后就看着iMacros帮我自动完成注册。使用这种方法，我每30秒钟就可以注册一个新账号。
建立新账号的工作一帆风顺，我只花了30分钟就建立了50个账号。但是，怎么删除旧的广告项目，建立新的广告项目呢？有了iMacros插件的协助，这一工作变得更加容易。
――从Facebook.com的首页开始，点击“登出”按钮，退出登陆。点击iMacros插件的“录制”按钮。
――登入账号。
――进入http://www.facebook.com/flyers页面。
――点击“我的广告”链接。
――删除原来的广告。
――点击“建立新广告”链接。
――建立一个和原来一模一样的广告，继续并发布广告。
――退出登陆，点击iMacros插件的“停止录制”按钮。
iMacros插件能自动帮我完成：登入账号，删除原来的广告项目，并重新发布，然后退出登陆。通过这种方法，就可以将原来的广告删除，发布新的广告项目。接下来的事情，当然是重新发布50个账号中的广告项目。还需要用iMacros插件来录制“登陆――删除旧广告――建立新广告”这一系列动作，然后在每一个账号中执行吗？不需要！因为这样做非常浪费时间，我找到了另一种简单的方法，只需要点击iMacros插件上的“编辑”标签，然后点击编辑刚才录制的删除旧广告并发布新广告的宏，系统会自动在记事本中打开编辑窗口，找到从登陆到退出登陆之间的代码，复制、粘贴、粘贴、一直粘贴49次。由于粘贴后的所有Email地址都是1@gmail.com，我要做的就是将Email的地址前面的数值依次改成2,3,4.....的形式。并保存这个宏。
现在，每次点击iMacros的“播放”按钮，iMacros插件就会依次处理我所有的50个账号，自动登陆、自动载入新的广告、自动退出。这样，每隔一小时左右，当原来的广告预算金额耗尽之后，我一点iMacros的按钮，iMacros就自动帮我完成50个账号广告的更新，使我的每个账号在花费每天50元的预算之后，又可以继续显示广告。
现在，在iMacros的协助下，我可以半自动的完成注册新账号，全自动地完成重新发布广告项目的工作。现在该做什么呢？尽量的赚钱吧！在最开始的时候，我设定每个点击的竞价是0.50美元，但是实际的单价只有0.10美元，我可以任意地测试各种各样的广告联盟，随意修改广告的投放范围，做一切我想做的事情。比如我想提高广告项目的竞价，只需要编辑iMacros插件中的宏，使用简单的查找/替换功能，如使用“0.50”替换“0.25”，保存之后中，再按一下iMacros的“播放”按钮，iMacros就自动地将我所有账户中的竞价由“0.25”替换成为“0.50”。
但是好景不长，Facebook开始发觉我的这一种做法，并采取了一系列的措施。他们屏蔽了广告，并封掉了许多账号。现在，即使注册一个Facebook的账号，在每天50美元的金额用完之后，删除原来的广告项目重新发布，新广告也不会显示了。同时，Facebook也开始屏蔽一些特定的关键词，比如手机彩铃，奖学金等等。现在使用Facebook仍然可以赚钱，但是已经今非昔比，他们也屏蔽了广告联盟的网址。最后的结果是，我在Facebook的500个账号全部都被封掉了。
经验总结：
虽然在这一次的Facebook广告活动中，我大赚了一笔，但是细细一想，在几个方面自己仍然做得不够好。
1） 我最大的一个错误就是，在我的博客中透露了这一消息。当我最开始听到Facebook的Flyer pro广告项目时，我想这对于广大站长来说是一个好消息，还在我的另一个网站大肆宣扬。这些使许多人知道了这一消息，并利用Flyer pro来发布广告。请记住：如果你抢先一步发现一个赚钱领域，在别人切入这一领域之前，一定要守口如瓶，低调赚钱。
2） 粗心的错误。我一心只想注册更多的账号，发布更多的广告，却从没有停下来好好思考一下。比如，在第一天发布奖学金广告的时候，我设定我的广告投放目标是所有的人，而没有作任何的设定，并没有去想只有18岁以上的大校大学生才会对我的广告感兴趣。
3） 总的说来，这一次的经验对我来说是非常宝贵的。那几天我不断的创建新账号，发布广告，每天都是凌晨5点钟才上床睡觉，早上8-9点钟又起床，继续更新我的广告项目。我几乎不洗脸，不冲凉，连续几十个小时呆在电脑面前。当然，我从中学到了不少的东西，也赚得了足够的钱。
希望你们会喜欢我的这篇文章，虽然你不能利用上面的方法去赚钱了，但是我希望它能带给一些启示，带给你思想的火花，去寻找新的赚钱领域。在此，我想说的是：赚钱的思路很重要，我并不是一个程序高手，我所做的这些依靠的只是我的大脑，不断地思考，找到一条合适的赚钱思路并付诸实践。
翻译：赚钱博客
网址：http://www.money-blog.cn
原文：http://www.uberaffiliate.com/
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