My live campaign

05:57 in Facebook

By now you must surely have guessed which campaign I'm going to talk about. Yes it's the Napster free trial promotion. To reiterate in case you forgot from the previous sections or you decided to skip directly to this section,

Napster is an advertiser with Commission Junction. The offer is a $10 commission for every new user that downloads a 7 day trial of Napster or Napster To Go. Basically during those 7 days the user has access to all of Napster's millions of songs and can cancel at any time during those 7 days. There is one thing that I need to mention about this offer; the user needs to have a credit card or a paypal account. The reason for that is because they are required to create a recurring payment plan which they can cancel before the 7 days is over. As a result you'll need to target users who are 18+.

I've been running this campaign for two days now and so far I've made $400 with $75.97 spent on advertising which gives me a profit of $324.03. Not bad for 5 mins work if you ask me.

* Another note about Napster's affiliate program: I don't know who's in charge of submitting leads received butthey can take a really long time to appear in your CJ account. It's kind of a pain in the a** because it can make tracking your conversions very difficult.

Below is a screenshot of my Facebook advertising account displaying stats for my campaign.

And below is a screenshot of my Commission Junction account for those two days running this campaign

Now here's the reason why I'm not too afraid of sharing every detail with you; in addition to targeting a general audience who likes "music", I also target users who are fans of a particular group. 

For example:

Free Metallica Songs
Unlimited access to every Metallica songs
and thousands of other artists. Download
Napster for your free 7 day trial.

My target market here is people who's interests include "Metallica". I'm targeting a much smaller market but now my campaign is much more focused and my CTR improves drastically because I'm giving these people what they want.

Depending on the artist I choose I also target men or women. For example if I'm promoting Avril Lavigne I'm going to target girls between 18-25 whereas if I'm promoting Iron Maiden would target men in 18-35. I'm sure there's a lot of guy Avril Lavigne fans just as there are plenty of girl Metallica fans but that's the great thing about Facebook it tells you exactly how people you're targeting with "men+metallica" vs. "women+metallica".

There are thousands of artists you can promote, so get creative. If you want to know what's hot right now go check out MTV's top charts, or Billboard's top 100 singles chart.

Final Thoughts

The Napster offer is one of the best affiliate offers I've seen in a long time, and I'm already thinking of new ways to promote this. Here's my next strategy:

Create a video for a popular song using images. I'm sure you've seen these on Youtube, it's just a slideshow with images of the artist and the song playing in the background. It'll take you about 10 minutes to create this with Windows Movie Maker.

Create an image with the words "Get this Jack Johnson song and millions of other songs absolutely free for 7 days. Visit www.YourDomainRedirectToTheNapsterAffiliateLink.com for more details".

Insert the image at the beginning and end of your video and set it to run for 3 seconds. Upload the video to Youtube/MySpace e.t.c. and promote the video using social bookmarking.

It might seem like a lot of work, but this once you get started you'll see it takes just a few minutes to assemble these videos. Create a few of them for different artists and let the money roll in.

I hope you enjoyed this guide and I wish you success with your Facebook campaigns.

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Tips & Tricks

05:12 in Facebook

Reducing your CPC

I've mentioned several time throughout this guide that the basis for determining your starting CPC is absolutely ridiculous. If I was promoting "shrunken midget heads" I would need to start off my ads at $0.35 the same as I would for "DUI lawyer". Ridiculous no? Well if you try starting it off at $0.05 you just won't get any impressions.

So how do you get your CPC to go down? You have to improve your CTR. That's the same basic logic as with any other CPC program. The only problem is that your ad is still being displayed to hundreds of thousands of people who are not actively looking for what you're advertising, they just have it listed as an interest.

The key is to target very small niches. I mentioned in the "testing and tracking" section that you should experiment with different demographics to see what brings the best conversion, well let me emphasize the point again because it will also be crucial to improving your CTR and in turn lowering your CPC.

In the end it all comes down to testing, whether it's targeting a smaller market or creating a more eye catching graphic.

After a few days, you should lower your bid amount by $0.05 and gauge how it affects your impressions. If you see that your impressions drop dramatically then bring them back up $0.01-$0.02. Do this gradually over the next week and within two weeks  depending on what niche you're catering to you can easily have your bids as low as $0.05.

Getting your ad approved

There's a lot of debate regarding whether or not Facebook actually reviews every single ad manually. It's more likely that they have filters in place which makes it much easier to get away with some slight deviation from the guidelines. There is one factor that will trigger a manual review and that's if you're advertising to people under 18. If your ad is borderline do not advertise to people less than 18 years old. This will result in a flag on your account, and if it happens again your account may be suspended.

Landing page or direct linking

I've played with the two a lot, and from my experience landing pages are not effective with lead campaigns. Your purpose is to get your visitor to enter their personal information to get something free. There's no need to pre-sell them, they clicked on your ad because they want that "free trial" or they're interested in "applying for a credit card". Take advantage of Facebook's loose policy on affiliate links because it may not be long that they're going to enforce it.

Type of campaigns

While I'm not going to reveal the details of every lead campaign I'm running on Facebook I'll give you an idea of what I found converts extremely well:

• Contests. It doesn't even matter what the prize is, if you tell people they can enter a contest to win something just by entering their e-mails they won't hesitate for a second. The  payouts are generally small, around $1.00-$1.50 per lead but if you're getting a 100 leads per day at $0.05/click you're looking at a $95 profit. 
• Free games. You'll see these often especially on Neverblue Ads. They payout can be as much as $2.50 just for the user downloading a game. 
• Columbia House. As of writing this they were no longer associated with any of the affiliate networks, but I'm positive they'll come back soon. Their offer was $25 per subscription. With their new policy that the user only needs to buy 3 dvd within a 2 year period, it was an easy sell.

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Testing & Tracking

05:07 in Facebook

Unfortunately Facebook's advertising platform is nowhere near where as sophisticated and functional as Google Adwords or Yahoo. This can make testing and tracking a little more complicated.

With so many different demographics on Facebook you could spend an eternity testing out different combinations to see what converts best and this is where tracking would come in handy. So we'll have to rely on our judgment to see what converts.

The kind of testing you should do from the start:

Geographical location: If the offer you are promoting is applicable to different countries, create a different ad for at least two of those countries. Don't automatically assume that US impressions will convert better, I've had several campaigns where Canadian impressions converted almost 30% more than US impressions.

Sex & Age: Depending on the offer, males or females of a certain age may be more prone to convert. Again create a different campaign for males and females of certain age groups.

Of course none of these tests mean anything if you have no way of tracking. For this you'll have to read your affiliate program's help section to figure out how to add a tracking code to your affiliate URL. 

These are the basic tests that you should perform when you have found a successful campaign. The test should be done over a period of a day or two to get some basic information. Once you've successfully identified which demographics are converting and which are just costing you money, it's time to test even more.

After you have enough information, you can test even further by testing if there's a difference in conversions between college freshmans and high school seniors.

Hopefully someday Facebook will implement a system that can display stats on who's clicking your ads, but until then it's all manual.

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Step 4 - Set Budget

05:04 in Facebook

Daily Budget: To start set your daily budget to a minimum, along the lines of $10-$20. It'll give you enough wiggle room to see if your offer converts at a profit. If your conversion rate is positive (you are making more than you are spending) consider upping your daily budget and see how well the offer performs.

Pay Per Clicks vs. Pay Per Views: ALWAYS set it to PPC. Because of the inordinate amount of traffic on Facebook you'll easily gather up hundreds of thousands of impressions in a very  short time but have a CTR of under 1%.

Confirm

The next step asks you to confirm the details. Make sure that  everything is in order because once you submit your ads you can not make any modifications (except for the bid amount).

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Step 3 - Create Ad

05:01 in Facebook

If you have any experience with Google Adwords or any other PPC program you will find this very similar.

Title can only contain 20 characters and unlike Adwords you can not capitalize the first letter of every word. Your title should be catchy, but do not place too much stress on it as it's your photo that's going to do most of the talking. If you are promoting a free offer be sure to include the word "Free" as the first word of your title.

Body again you can only capitalize the first letter of a sentence. Keep it short and only list the benefits.

Photo your photo will be resized to 110px x 80px. Depending on your original photo you may want to edit it otherwise it might come out squished if it wasn't in a 4:3 aspect ratio. Your photo is the first thing that a visitor will look at, make sure to use something flashy to attract attention.

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Step 2 - Choose Audience

04:57 in Facebook

This is going to be the most important part of your Facebook  campaign.

Location: Based on the offer that you are promoting select the  country accordingly. Be sure to have read the description of the  offer, you do not want to waste $20 in UK clicks when the offer is  only open to US visitors. If you are promoting a general offer such as Napster's music trial leave the Location to Everywhere.

Male/Female: Depending on the offer.

Keywords: This is the power of Facebook and why it's a marketer's wet dream. Basically by entering a keyword such as "music" you can target everyone who has "music" listed in their their list of  interests. Better yet you can also dig deeper and find people that are interested in a particular artist, say Metallica. The only downside is that Facebook doesn't cross-reference these keywords, instead it shows your ads to anyone who matches one of those keywords.

So if you're promoting Napster, and your ad has Green Day in the title do not choose the keywords "music" and "Green Day" just choose "Green Day".

Education: This is a fantastic feature and a great way to get clicks. Let me explain by using an example:

Say we're promoting a Citibank credit card offer that pays a lead for every new application. A great way to get clicks would be to target to university students who the vast majority are struggling with tuition fees and book fees. Create ads targeted directly at specific schools or universities.

NYU students credit card offer A special offer for NYU students. Get a zero % interest rate credit card with 2% cash back.

Now when our NYU student logs on to her facebook account you  can be sure this ad will catch her attention a lot more than a generic "get a 0% interest credit card" type ad. 

It doesn't matter if the program you are promoting has any offers specifically for that particular school, it's just a way to increase your CTR and your conversion rate.

Workplace: Similar to Education you can target specific workplaces (Browse the networks and find the largest workplace networks to advertise to.

Relationship status: This is mostly useful if you're going to be  promoting affiliate dating leads. Needless to say, choose "singles" to advertise to.

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Creating Your Ad

04:53 in Facebook

Now that you have a few lead campaigns selected it's time to create your ad.

Step 1 - Getting Started

The URL address. As of writing this Facebook does not disapprove direct linking. So you can enter your affiliate link in the address bar. The URL does not appear below an ad when it is shown in the social pages on Facebook so do not worry about having a long ugly URL.

You can also use Tinyurl.com to shorten the link and avoid  commission theft. Better yet if you have a website and domain (check the first page of this guide for information on how to get a free domain+hosting) you can use a simple PHP redirect. Open notepad and type in the following

<?php
header("Location: youraffiliatelink.com/");
?>

Save the file as index.php and upload it to your hosting account.  Visitors will automatically be redirected to the merchant's site with your affiliate ID attached.

Next steps will be discussed further.

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What To Promote

04:49 in Facebook

In case you’re not familiar with leads, it is basically a company that will pay you when you refer a visitor that performs a specific action. It could be anything from filling out a short survey, to entering their zip code, or requesting more information on a loan. There are hundreds of leads to choose from and that is why I suggested you sign up for the affiliate programs above.

Let's browse through Commission Junction and find a good lead offer.

Click on Napster to find out exactly what the action criteria is. From the description: "User signs up for a free trial of Napster or Napster To Go". How easier could this be? You're essentially offering a free 7 day access to millions of songs and unlimited downloads.

The characteristics for a good lead offer are:

1) It has to be free.
2) It has to offer something of value to the user. In this case we're offering 'free music', it has value because everyone loves music. If we were to offer a 'free coupon for $2 off a box of Tide detergent" it doesn't offer the same value and it doesn't appeal to everyone.
3) The form has to be short and simple. Put yourself in the user's shoes and fill out the form, is it painfully long, does it ask questions that you need to think about? The simpler and shorter the form, the greater your conversions will be.
4) The payout should be minimum $2.00. Anything below this and you're dealing with a very small profit margin that doesn't give you much room for testing.

"Free iPod" type website leads:

You will also come across a lot of "free ipod" websites that offer you $1.00-$1.50 per e-mail submit. My advice is to stayaway from these offers. The profit margin on these is too low to promote using CPC and you'll end up losing money. Ifyou choose to advertise these types of leads be careful when writing your ad description not to write anything about theuser having to enter an e-mail address as your ad will be disapproved immediately.

Credit cards and other financial leads: 

A lot of people are tempted to advertise credit card offers because of the huge payout which can often be as much as $100 for an application. The problem with these types of leads is that

1) There's a lot of competition which means the starting CPC to get your ad displayed can be  very expensive.
2) The conversion rate is significantly low. Most of the clicks are "tire kickers" that just want to have a look at what you're offering but will not fill out the application.

If you focus your campaigns narrowly and do a lot of testing it's possible to make a decent ROI. In the next section I'll show you what I mean by this.

What you can NOT promote:

Unfortunately there are a lot of restrictions with Facebook advertising. While the application manager will tell you if you are not allowed to have a certain word in your title or description they have not posted a specific list of products and services that can not be advertised on Facebook. The only way to find out is to wait until one of your ads gets flagged. Here's a recent collection of what's not approved by Facebook:

1) Ringtones - Facebook also blocks any derivative such as "ringer", "cellphone music", e.t.c.
2) Gambling - This includes everything from poker to bingo.
3) Tobacco, Alcohol, Firearms
4) Drugs, pharmaceutical products (even herbal products)
5) Adult content

There are several other regulations that are just common sense such as "Hate speech" or "Illegal activity", but I'll trust that you can use your own logic to know what's acceptable.

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Facebook Advertising Secrets

04:39 in Facebook

Getting Started

Because we are going to be dealing with leads you'll need to apply to some of the major affiliate networks if you have not already done so. Apply for an account with the following affiliate programs:

Commission Junction
Azoogle Ads
Rocket Profit
Never blue Ads

You need to have a website set up in order to be approved with these programs. If you don’t have a website, sign up for a free blog at Blogger or Word press, write up a few posts about anything (you can also use articles from ezinearticles.com just make sure you credit the source).

Your application can sometimes take a few days to process, so be patient. If you have an account with any other affiliate network you should review their offers for any lead affiliate campaigns.

If you do not have a domain and hosting you can get a free one at http://www.freehostia.com

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YouTube will Develop in Some Predictable Ways

02:24 in Youtube

Thanks to academic studies of the way consumers adopt innovations, we have a good idea of how YouTube will develop over the next few years. We think that YouTube will follow the patterns and timelines of the consumer adoption of technological innovations such as the internet and television. The basic trails are well-blazed.


Consumer adoption of technological innovation moves from younger to older people. Young people adopt or grow up with innovations. As they age, the proportion of older people in the total population using the innovation increases. You can count on the user base for YouTube to get older until it is more like the total population.


Consumer adoption of technological innovation moves from urban to rural locations. In the case of YouTube, that is likely to be an infrastructure issue. The number of broadband connections will need to increase in rural areas before the number of YouTube users will increase but you can count on the YouTube user base to become more evenly distributed geographically.


Consumer adoption of technological innovation move from more affluent to less affluent households. In countries where broadband is not subsidized that means that YouTube use is likely to move down-market as more broadband connections become affordable. You can count on the YouTube user base in the future to more accurately reflect the income distribution of the countries where you do business.


Consumer adoption of technological innovation moves toward the mainstream at a predictable pace. It takes most technological innovations about fifteen years to move from first public trials to a saturation point. If YouTube follows a similar pattern, saturation will come around 2020. But there's a more important point to pay attention to for marketing purposes.


The adoption curve for most innovations is an S shaped, or Sigmoid, curve. The log phase of the curve, the part with the most rapid growth, usually begins around two years in and lasts until the midpoint is reached.


Using our dates from YouTube history, the upturn should have been around early 2007. But the YouTube curve turned up earlier.


If we use videos viewed as a guide, the fast-growth phase for YouTube began in the first quarter of 2006 when usage was almost doubling every month. That early turn was the result of two things. First, YouTube was an elegant service, a simple solution to a mass market problem. Second, the enabling technology, broadband connectivity, was already in place for many affluent households.


If you're a marketer, what's most important is that the time from the introduction of YouTube to the midpoint on the adoption curve is likely to be seven years. That means that by 2012 at the latest the mainstream adopters will be onboard in the US and the UK. In other countries, that date may move slightly in either direction depending primarily on the prevalence of broadband connections.


That gives you a window of less than two years to gain some early-mover advantage.

Action Ideas

Act now to gain a presence on YouTube and position your company so you're established by the time the mid-point of adoption is reached. Mine the video you already have. Just be sure to edit your clips for a length and tempo so they fit YouTube.

Key Points

However, be careful, just because you have video doesn‟t mean it‟s good or meaningful to the people in your market. Either modify it so it is, or don‟t use it. Key Points: Just because it‟s easy to do, doesn‟t mean it‟s the right thing to do. Check everything you intend to post on YouTube to make sure it represents your brand and moves your mission forward.

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YouTube is Part of Three Key Trends

02:23 in Youtube

YouTube is at the center and at the forefront of some key trends that affect the world of marketing. The three most important are increasing bandwidth, user-generated content and social networking.

1. Increasing bandwidth in developed countries is what makes video viewing on the web and video sharing possible. According to a study by Gartner, published in July 2008, "Consumer broadband penetration worldwide will grow from an estimated 323 million in 2007 to 499 million in 2012."
   
   As a practical matter, Gartner's projections contend that broadband penetration of the consumer market will be above two thirds of households in almost all developed countries by 2012. For YouTube this means substantially bigger audiences, increased sharing and a substantially higher level of user-generated content.
2.  User-Generated Content (UGC). This is an area where YouTube is at the forefront. Not only is the vast majority of the video on YouTube generated by users (29 percent of them have uploaded a video within the last three months) but commenting and rating are key activities that constitute content and simultaneously help determine the viewing performance of the associated videos.
3. Social networking sites are obviously amongst the hottest internet properties today. YouTube is a part of it in a unique way. The purpose of social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook is to help people connect with their friends and to find others with whom they have something in common. But YouTube is not a social networking site.
   Jon Gibs, senior director of media for the market research firm Nielsen/NetRatings follows the social networking sector. He says of YouTube: "You don't create a buddy list and share your buddy list, but you do have consumer generated (or at least consumer-added) content. You have tagging around that, and you have conversation around that, and you have association between elements. To me that's social networking." Even so, Gibs describes YouTube as "a video-sharing site with social networking tacked on." That's a good way to consider the marketing power of YouTube and it's an important one. The true social networking sites are the converse – users can add video but the video (typically user-generated snippets of films, TV shows and comedy clips) is generally secondary to the "friends" motif.

YouTube will increasingly become a more hospitable environment for marketers. If you have a good video, like the Sephora videos, they can carry your brand message without conflicting with the purpose of the site.

Key Point 

Because of its video focus, YouTube should offer more marketing possibilities and flexibility than the social networking sites.

YouTube today is uniquely positioned as a marketing channel on the net. And we have a good idea of how it will develop in the months and years ahead.

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YouTube is Already a Market

01:07 in Youtube

Marketers using YouTube benefit from the commercial infrastructure that is already in place on the internet and the extent to which people around the world have become accustomed to shopping online. According to Nielsen Global, as of February 2008, 875 million people worldwide have bought something online. Buying is strong across many countries.

"Among Internet users, the highest percentage shopping online is found in South Korea, where 99 percent of those with Internet access have used it to shop, followed by the UK (97 percent), Germany (97 percent), Japan (97 percent) with the U.S. eighth, at 94 percent. Additionally, in South Korea, 79 percent of these Internet users have shopped in the past month, followed by the UK (76 percent) and Switzerland (67 percent) with the U.S. at 57 percent."

This matches up with the numbers we see on YouTube. 91 percent of YouTube users have purchased something online. 63 percent have done so within the last three months.

When it comes to direct buying influence, the numbers are lower but remember we're considering the influence of a single site so the statistics are impressive. 35 percent of YouTube users have purchased something online that they saw advertised on YouTube and 30 percent have followed a YouTube link to make a purchase. These figures are almost certainly depressed since users include a sizeable proportion of teenagers who do not have a credit card to make online purchases.

Online purchases are only the tip of the iceberg. Many people who shop online are likely to buy offline. According to a 2007 study by eMarketer: "for every $1 in online sales, the Internet influenced $3.45 of store sales." Our survey found that 37 percent of YouTube users have purchased something offline that they saw advertised on YouTube.

In general, the purchasing demographics of YouTube follow those for the internet as a whole. With the exception of teenagers, younger people are more likely to purchase online than older people. Men are more likely to purchase online than women. The commercial action on YouTube isn't limited to consumers. 25 percent of visitors to YouTube have used the site for business. About half of them do so regularly or at least occasionally. From our research we identify that YouTube‟s commercial usage breaks down into three main categories. Almost half of business users are looking for more information about a subject that will help them commercially. 45 percent are seeking information about products or services to purchase and 28 percent are checking out the competition. YouTube is already a market that you can exploit. There are some key trends that YouTube is part of and that will define what YouTube will become.

Action Idea

Make YouTube a part of your e-commerce strategy. Links from YouTube can drive traffic to your web site.

Action Idea

Mine your own experience and research to identify topics that your customers want more information about. Identify the questions they ask about your product or service. Then create a simple YouTube video that can answer their questions.

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YouTube Now and in the Future

00:52 in Youtube

In some ways it's the classic Silicon Valley success story, complete with garage. Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen became friends when they worked for PayPal where Karim was one of the founders. In early 2005 they were at a dinner party to which many people had brought their camcorders. Conversation turned to how hard it was to share videos with others using the internet. That inspired the friends to set off to Hurley's garage to write some code that would make online video sharing easy.

By February they were testing their system online and receiving a great response. The response was strong enough that in November YouTube received $3.5 million in venture capital funding from Sequoia Capital. Millions of people seem to have been waiting for YouTube. When the site launched officially, in December 2005, it already had more than a million short video clips. Later that month visitors were uploading 8000 clips a day and viewing 3 million.

By April 2006 visitors were watching 35 million videos a day. The company received another round of funding from Sequoia Capital: $8 million to expand sales and marketing efforts and build-out the data centers. In October, Google agreed to buy YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock. At that point YouTube visitors were downloading over 100 million videos a day. The purchase was finalized in February 2007.

Speaking at the Library of Congress in June 2008, Professor Michael Wesch of Kansas State University described the impact of YouTube. "YouTube produced more hours of video in the past six months than the three major networks have produced since 1948."

Clearly, YouTube is an important force on the internet and in digital media but as Professor Wesch also noted, the vast majority of videos on YouTube today are short, amateur videos of three minutes or less. YouTube today is not what YouTube will be in a year or three years. The changes are driven by some powerful trends and will follow predictable patterns; Understanding them will help you get out in front of the curve.

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Youtube for Business-Introduction

00:50 in Youtube

Forbes magazine says that YouTube generates over a billion views per day. To put that in perspective, in the time it takes you to finish reading this page YouTube users will view around a quarter of a million videos.

An audience this size is hard to ignore. In our work with clients we searched for studies about this audience and what one can do to reach it as part of a marketing program. When we established there was little that has been published we decided to create it. After all, Entertainment Media Research was founded over a decade ago by the former head of music information for MTV Europe with the belief that the coming digital revolution would bring together the worlds of entertainment and marketing.

With entertainment expertise and quantitative research skills we serve entertainment, media and consumer businesses around the world from our base in London and are therefore ideally positioned to study the impact and opportunities that YouTube has come to offer. We started by undertaking a comprehensive audit of usage, attitudes, and preferences of YouTube users in a robust online survey of 1,758 US residents. The sample was then weighted to the demographic representation of the US online population. We then applied the findings from this proprietary research to inform our YouTube User Guide and in doing so, remove wherever possible assumption from the marketing process. YouTube Revealed: a marketer's guide to understanding and making the most out of YouTube.

Our primary objective in writing this report is to help marketers sharpen their understanding of the YouTube phenomenon, grasp the marketing implications and flatten the learning curve to putting this knowledge to highly effective use. The User Guide therefore combines detailed practical advice at the functional How To level, with strategic thinking and background information. Here's a brief overview of what you'll find in the User's Guide.

YouTube is already a place where many kinds of businesses are starting to promote their wares so we begin with a review of how YouTube was founded and developed. But YouTube is developing fast, as changing demographics and evolving possibilities make it a place that is even more attractive to marketers of all kinds. Of course, teenagers and young adults are the dominant users right now but they're far from the whole story. We fully expect YouTube to change to such a degree that over the next three years its demographics will more closely match the online population as a whole. Every marketing-driven business needs to understand this market-place and how best to exploit it before its competitors.

The key marketing objective is to achieve a viral impact through user recommendation or "word of mouse." This is much easier said than done so we detail why and how people come to YouTube today, what are their primary reasons and how this is changing as the demographic usage mix inevitably changes. We identify the most popular types of video by demographic and we review the controllable and non-controllable factors that affect viewing of a particular video.

We move on to review the patterns of typical YouTube sessions. We cover what the "Watch Page" looks like along with advertising possibilities to ensure you get the most out of the available feedback. We analyze what happens after a YouTube visitor has watched a video and then recommend how you should structure your content to exploit this trend and optimize your opportunities for engagement and branding.

Much has been made in the mainstream media about the YouTube community. We cover some of the ways that marketing into this community is uniquely different. We will suggest to you that brand channels are an effective way to concentrate your marketing efforts on YouTube. In our chapter on channels we look at the place of channels on YouTube today and how to make your brand channels work most effectively. We review what YouTube users think of advertising on YouTube and what some of your options are today. Those options are bound to change as YouTube seeks more ways to make the site profitable.

Throughout the report we share key insights on how best to apply your marketing skills to YouTube whilst pointing out where the fundamental principles still apply. People or businesses who buy your product or service will still buy for the same reasons they always have. The marketing research you've done about important benefits and messages will still be relevant; only the environment of YouTube will be different.

On YouTube, video is central. You will therefore discover ways to use video to build awareness, convey benefits, and support sales and service. On YouTube, word of mouse is crucial and the community is in control. We know that integrated marketing programs that tie YouTube marketing efforts to other marketing and branding efforts are generally the most successful so we‟ll show how best to facilitate the process.

YouTube offers marketing challenges and opportunities for everyone. Giant companies like 3M, Nestle, and IBM are already using it as part of their marketing and so are individual service firms. Whether it's the mass market or the farthest end of a long tail, you have the opportunity to derive important marketing benefits from YouTube. As there are special challenges for different markets and companies, we offer suggestions about how to adapt your use of YouTube for different kinds of businesses. There are chapters for B2B marketers and small businesses as well as chapters on ways to use YouTube to improve your relationship with existing customers and ways to use YouTube for marketing research.

We close the User's Guide with a look at the future of YouTube and recommendations about what you should consider implementing. Now, let's get started with "YouTube Now and in the Future."

There's one more thing before we go on. If you aren't yet familiar with YouTube, just reading about it won't be nearly enough. You need to spend time familiarizing yourself with what it is and how it‟s changing. You'll also pick up ideas from other marketers who are already using the site.

Action Idea

Set up your own YouTube account. Then set aside fifteen minutes a day to explore the site and become familiar with it. 

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#14 Playing on people’s emotions

22:05 in CPA

This is just a quick overview of something you can try out if you like if you’re going to crawl and extract people’s e-mails from CL.

     Hi There,


I was just looking at your post on Craigslist. I'm an Advertising Student, and as part of an assignment we have to show our skills in marketing something which is free.
(We aren't allowed to make money from this assignment unfortunately, lol)


So, what I'm going to do is to show you where to get some *blah blah blah for Free.


Yes, they really are free! If you get them
from the link below, I will get the "credit" for a lead, and I just might pass this course Thanks in advance for at least checking this out.


AFF Link Here

You could also say, and I just might win this contest if you play the contest route/spin.

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#13 Freebie Forums

21:59 in CPA

There’s freebie forums out there you can post on.These forums are places people are looking to get free stuff, free deals, the kfc offer, if you've seen it is on damn near every free forum there at the moment.

Most of these freebie forums want moderator approval first on your posts, and some will ban you at the slightest attempt to post an affiliate link, or cpa offer, so my idea is simple

create your own freebie forum in which you can go into and spam it all you want, it's your forum after all.

You've got your free section, where people can grab free anything really in completion of a CPA offer.

Some ideas would be free e-books, free games you can find anywhere, free music d/l's. free software, free screen savers, free offers based on your ads, IE free tv, free samples, free whatever.

You could put in a free trial section, so for those trying to push acai berry, or anything else with a free-trial, people will come to this section of your forum to fill out your free-trial offers. People will also start posting stuff on your forum too, and who knows, you might find some of what they post to be useful too.

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#12 Groups

21:55 in CPA

This is the same method as above except the only difference is your getting your traffic from groups instead of forums.

Groups are the same kind of idea, it’s a bunch of people interested in a particular niche, and you can go in here and run a muck too.

Myspace and Facebook are the two big names that have groups, but they’re not the only ones, you can just as easily find other groups by doing a little searching on Google.

As always, find what you can offer these people. Be it an Ebook,or an article, or maybe a video, or more information on something you’d think they’d want to know.

Find the want/need and fill it. Even if you can’t, you canal ways say you have “whatever they want” and even if you don’t,have them complete the CPA offer to get it, even if there’s nothing to get. We’re just trying to get rich here; we don’t have to be morally correct in the process. This is why it’s called black hat if you need a reminder.

If there’s not a forum or group on what it is that you want to do, you don’t have to hesitate, you can always create one, and being at the top of a group or forum is a very good place to be if your getting members signing up.

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#11 Forums

21:51 in CPA

Forums are a great place to advertise because you can find niche forums out there on damn near anything. Be it dogs, or golf,or jewelry, or instruments. Anything you can think of there’s a forum out there related to it.

Get an ad ready that could fit a particular forum, or find out or think of what people may want within’ the forum niche itself and then write up a small e-book from some PLR articles that you can find for free on Google. Just search free PLR articles on “your niche” then make an account at the forum and give the people what they want, but in order for them to get it they have to first obviously complete your CPA offer.

Forums are great because they can be niche targeted, and anytime you can target what someone wants your ahead of the game, you’ve already gained someone with a common interest as a lead without doing anything but going to the forum and posting your link, making it sound good, and enticing. Pretty easy huh?

When using forums, don’t Spam, start up a couple conversations first, and make it look like you know what you’re talking about. Do a little research before hand first if your not sure about the niche. Stick to a couple niches you know about when you first do this method.

Most forums have an introduction spot for newcomers, say hi here and start a couple conversations. This is just like with twitter, you don’t want to come off as sound like your only there to drop your links, and if you come across as spam, the moderators will probably just delete your links anyway before you even get a chance to get any visitors from the forums to your page.

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#10 Offline Advertising

21:46 in CPA

This section is based on offline advertising, and goes really well with the last method, as you can make flyers to distribute around your local area advertising a place for people to watch a movie for free. I could imagine doing this is theater bathrooms, or movie rental parking lots would have a good success rate.

Also, anything that you want to offer to people, you can make a flyer for, it doesn’t matter what it is, it can be for anything under the sun. Make a nice looking flyer and then decide where the best place to put these flyers would be.

Example:

The Acai Berry Offer is on most networks, it’s usually around a $30 lead if you get someone to take a free trial for something like 2.99 depending on the network. Once you have a flyer ready for it with your blog and the redirection link and all,your ready to go to workout gyms, tanning salons, beauty parlors,fitness clubs, anyplace possible you think this will get people’s attention and you can generate leads. This is a very profitable method used offline. You can even work out deals with the gyms and places where you’ll pay them something like 10-20 bucks to have them hand out the flyers for you, or you could work it with them where you pay them for every lead they generate. Then if you make 10-20 leads, just pay them for 3-4 or whatever.

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#9 TV/Movie

21:17 in CPA

This next method will be best used with cpalead.com because it has the gateway script and can lock content, or you can use thecode-breaker script which would be awesome too, maybe even better. You could also use media fire to lock the content as explained above, but it will be easier with the code breaker script,plus that script rocks.

Ok, so in this method, you’re going to download a TV series,preferably something that’s Hot like “Lost” or maybe even an anime series since people like to watch these in order, something like Dragon Ball Z.

Upload the movies to your site and put up the codebreaker script or anyway you want to lock the content. The idea is simple;people that will want to watch the series will have to fill out a CPA offer each time they want to view the next episode.

This works the same for movies too. Put up popular movies that aren’t out on DVD yet, and people will be all over them.

You can either download the TV episodes and movies from torrent sites, or then upload them to video sites with the embedded code going on your site, or you can download these from places like http://www.watch-movies-links.net/

To market this, put up sample videos on youtube such as trailers, or if your good with windows movie maker, you can pick out a scene, then upload it to youtube and in the description put the link to your site where they can watch the entire movie for free.

I recommend using blogs for this method, even more,wordpress blogs as they’ll rank high.

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#8 E-whore Twist

21:00 in CPA

You can use this one in chat rooms, with craigslist, or with forums. I personally use this one with CL and chat rooms.

Make a website or blog completely dedicated to a webcam.More and more all the horny guys want to see a naked chick do foul stuff on cam. Might as well exploit these horn-dogs too.

So here’s the layout. Put some sexy pics up on a website,note don’t ever put extremely hot pics up, this goes for all the ewhoring methods. We gotta make it look believable; just grab a moderate looking girls pics. Also, always grab more than one. Use facebook or myspace to find some random girls pics and use those.

Once you’ve got some pics up, find a picture of the yahoo Icon that says Online Now and put it on your website. This is to let them think that your online, though this will always stay in the Online Now Mode cause it’s just a picture.

Put somewhere on the page that says click here for Icon, have it go to another page, and just shortly tell the person that in order to keep your cam free from charging fees, that you request they fill out a short survey.

Also put something on the page that says something like (12) viewing or some shit so it looks to them as if people are alreadyviewing your cam.

They complete the offer, you make the cash, and you laugh to the bank!

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#7 E-whore

19:52 in CPA

E-whoring is known as (if you’re a guy) pretending to be a girl,and lure in horny guys to fill out a cpa-offer for you. Use theirhormones against them, cause we all know, when a guy’s horny he’ll jump through a few hoops to get to just talk to a girl most of the time.

This method has lots of twists, I’ll go over a few of them in this post, but just be creative, and think of your own ideas and ways to be creative, it’ll really help you out in the long run.

Twist 1* Ok, so this first way is easy, have an offer in mind,go into an adult chat room and ask if someone can help you with something. You’ll have damn near all the guys in the chat room all over themselves to help you out. Just send them a redirection to any offer, and ask them if they’ll help you out by completing it. Tell them you made the website if you have to, and that your just checking to make sure it goes to page 2. You can entice them by telling them that you have pics you’ll send to them, but not until they do this for you first. Or send them one, and if they want a naked one, they have to help you (too many ways of handling ewhoring, and it’s not for everyone, require some creative thinking, if they won’t go for it one way, you have to have a backup way in order to convert good)

Twist 2* Ok for this method you’re going to need a dating offer. This is kind of like the first method, except tell them that you can’t send pictures for whatever reason (it’s just not working) but you have pics on a dating site. Send them the redirect that goes to the dating site. They have to sign up, tell them it’s free. Then to look for your pics under “some username” just make up a username, there’s obviously not gonna be any naked pics of you there.

Twist 3* Do the exact same thing as the 2nd twist; the only difference is your going to be using adult forums this time. They’re all over the web, just Google adult forums. When you’re on the forums, be sure to entice them with some pics first, and tell them there are more pics of you at your dating site.

For higher conversions with this method, head on to some fetish forums and tell people that you’ve got fetish pictures of yourself on this dating site, just sign up for free and then browse your username.

Twist 4* this’ll be the first mention of Craigslist, but definitely not the last. This site sees 6 million uniques a day, and is a powerhouse of traffic waiting to be exploited.

First get a gmail account along the lines of s**ycindy@gmail.com or kinkykara@gmail.com and this will be your e-mail you’ll use when your making a post on Craigslist. Now go make a post on craigslist, be sure you put you’re a female looking for a male. Then you can just put whatever you want. Say you’re a college student, or that you’re free for a weekend. Whatever you feel will get you the most responses.

For 1 ad posted you should receive 100-200 e-mails if it was posted and worded right, and in a high taffic city on CL.

Now you’ll have e-mails you can respond to one by one. This will be very time consuming unless you have an auto-responder in place, but it does give you the opportunity to be more personal and seem more real, and this is something an auto-responder can’t do.

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#6 Torrents

02:01 in CPA

People like to say that this method is out of date, but these people just aren’t using this method correctly. If you like your torrents and you have a pretty good idea of what people want, you can either

1. White hat, write an article on whatever CPA offer you want to promote, and at the end of the article, put in your redirection link to that offer so they can find it for free, get a free trial, or buy it.
2.  Incentive Method of course. Just make a torrent of what you think people want and will have a hard time getting. Or you can just lie in this method. Here’s what you do, title your torrent what you think will entice people. Now make a quick WordPad text file and in that file telling them where to get what they’re looking for. Of course they’re going to be sent to your redirection link and cpa offer. Tell them that they need to complete the offer, and once they do it’ll send them to the download page.

 Now you can either work something out to where you really send them to a download page of something you really do have, or just not worry about it and entice them with anything and just not deliver. After all, this is blackhat.

Upload your torrent to as many torrent sites as possible and there’s a good chance that if you used a really good title, that your torrent will go viral and you’ll have people completing your offer for you right and left for months to come.

To learn more about torrent files and how to create them yourself, visit http://www.tutzone.org/2009/01/how-to-createtorrent-file-and-upload.html

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