Many Body Theory

We’ve all run some shady ads through MyAds and Fox Interactive… but I think this takes the cake for a Marquee ad on MySpace Homepage

Run this with Eagle Web Assets to get paid

One of the most popular affiliate offers to run is dating. Everyone is running dating offers on Facebook and its only getting more and more difficult to keep ads alive unlike the past when Facebook Ads was the Wild West.

With singles on Facebook literally getting spammed by dating ads many have decided to remove their “single” setting to avoid the bombardment of ads. This only makes it more difficult for affiliates to promote the same offers… what can you do to make your ad stand out from the crowd?

One of the underutilized features of Facebook self-serve is keyword targeting. Keywords in Facebook are not like Google and Yahoo. Creating a keyword-driven campaign on Google would mean collecting a list of terms such as “dating” and “dating site”… In Facebook it is different: keywords are a combination of groups a user is part in, applications that the user might use, or words that are contained with the user’s profile. What kind of keywords would you use for targeting singles on Facebook?

A popular dating application is Zoosk. By utilizing keyword targeting and having “zoosk” as a keyword, your ad can be shown exclusively to users who have added the Zoosk dating application or a member of its fan page. This is extremely useful as you know the Facebook user is already a member of one dating site, meaning it is likely that they will join another site. What are other keywords to use? Here’s only a short list: areyouinterested, datepad, datehookup, hot or not, zoosk

Above you can see a screenshot taken from an actual Facebook account using dozens of Facebook applications, groups and pages of which users are engaged in online dating. Think of the creativity you can use in your ad headline when you know what application a user has already added to their profile, such as the ad below:

These ads are gaining huge ROI. Depending on the offer you decide to run, I’ve seen conversion rates of up to 30% and with the high CTR calling out whether a user is an online dating you’re only paying pennies a click if you decide to use CPM bidding.

… Actually this number is higher, but I can’t say how much exactly.

Has anyone gotten anything cool from Facebook? I have a few shirts and other pieces of swag from my visits to their offices over the past few years…

Seen these lately? Facebook is now letting weight-loss rebills to appear on their homepage.

I’ve spoken to one of the directors at Facebook and apparently rebills/weight-loss has never officially been banned. Facebook has just banned flogs and rebills where its not clear to the user that they will be billed ridiculous amounts of money (below the fold disclaimers, 6pt font text, etc.)

If you ask me, Facebook is just trying to boost revenues since its the end of the quarter…

Check out the screen-shots below.

Does the new homepage of Ignighter.com look familiar? They blatantly stole Singlesnet design including the text used. It looks like this is something they asked a developer to just hack up and did a really poor job trying to duplicate the look and feel. Nothing about their new homepage looks original.

On a separate note — Ignighter has an affiliate program with Neverblue and I’d be interested to hear if anyone has any success with it. According to the program’s description they are paying $7.50 for someone to enter in a free trial (credit card submission). I can’t imagine anyone making it work at these price-points (including Ignighter internally).

You need to have Adobe Air installed in order to download the new Yahoo Search Marketing Editor.

Download YSM Editor

Zoosk was recently featured in TechCrunch. A few weeks ago we hit acquired our 40 millionth user and reached a 30M/yr run-rate for revenue.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/20/zoosk-hits-40-million-members-eyes-20-million-in-revenue-this-year/

Did anyone else get this email from Yahoo?

Finish reading the article… »

Okay… so I just found out that I was not supposed to talk about a private beta that I am involved in. I thought I was allowed to talk about it but found out I couldn’t.

Sorry about that.

Ok, so Robert Cialdini is the keynote speaker at Affiliate Summit West 2010.

This is pretty exciting because I’ve written blog articles about his teachings and how they can be applied to affiliate marketing.

Previous posts:

6 Weapons of Influence

Six Weapons of Influence: Consistency

Affiliate Summit’s bio of Cialdini