The FAQ

In recent months I’ve been asked this question a lot:

“You say pop traffic has become more saturated, so what kind of traffic should I run after finishing the 40-day tutorial?”

(BTW, some affiliates are still succeeding with pop in spite of the increased competition and saturation.)



Push Traffic

My first suggestion? Push notifications.

It’s similar to pop, is newbie-friendly, doesn’t require a huge budget, and lots of affiliates are banking with it after a relatively short time.

However, new browsers are about to limit the effectiveness of push traffic:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea…-February-2020

Still, I believe networks and affiliates will continue to find ways to run push profitably for some time yet.

Just like how affiliates are still running pop in spite of all the google chrome updates.

(BTW, a little birdie told me that someone is secretly working on a push tutorial here on STM – no ETA yet but do keep an eye out if you’re interested.)



Facebook

Having said that, it would still be good to have another option besides push – one that will continue to be around in the conceivable future.

Another traffic type I’m always recommending, is Facebook. Reasons:

-It’s great in terms of longevity (will be around for a while as was mentioned). Unlike pop/push, FB won’t likely get regulated or restricted by browsers, or mobile carriers, or the law.

-The traffic volume is there (although how much of that we can get will depend on specifics).

-It has pretty good audience targeting options available. Plus, its algo has gotten quite good at identifying the right audience for us.

The only snag is that FB has a bit of a learning curve for newbie affiliates.

Unlike for pop, running on FB isn’t as easy as ripping some landers from a spy tool and mass-testing low-payout offers.

-We need to do marketing research to know what kinds of advertising angles to use, what audiences to target, etc.

-We need to understand – at least a little bit – how the FB algo works, so we can help it to identify the best audiences to show our ads to, and to get results at the best value.

-We need to know what FB likes and doesn’t like, in order to both get good results AND delay/avoid the ban hammer.

Etc. etc. There are just a lot more moving parts in general compared to something like pop/push.



Facebook Guide?

So it would only be appropriate for STM to have some sort of beginner’s guide for FB.

Unfortunately, @zeno‘s Entry-Level FB guide, as great as it was when he wrote it a few years back, is outdated. @stickupkid‘s FB Newbie Tutorial is da bomb, and he has shared a ton of of knowledge that has helped many people succeed (including @itzpeter – see this thread), but he’s very busy as well and is still trying to find the time to finish that guide.

In the meantime, I’ve decided to take it upon myself to write a beginner’s guide on how to run on FB. Moreover, I want to:

1)Show how to run 100% whitehat (more on that below), and

2)Make the first module of the guide a step-by-step, like what I did in the 40-day pop tutorial.



Whitehat vs. Blackhat

Everybody’s definition of what whitehat/blackhat means is a bit different.

In general though:

Blackhat involves running against FB’s policies, making cloaking and burning through accounts a necessity. Conversion rates are typically higher due to the opportunity to use misleading landing page copy to promote shady offers.

Whitehat involves running ads in a manner that is compliant with FB’s policies. No cloaking. Landing pages and offers need to be (or at least appear to be) genuine and legit. Conversion rates are typically lower due to – well – not being able to lie/cheat. Account bans occur at a much lower frequency (or not at all, depending on the situation).

Blackhat used to be where the money was. The freedom of running whatever landing pages and offers one wishes to (with the help of a cloaker) can massively help conversion rates.

However, as FB’s algorithm became smarter over the last few years (particularly over the past year or two), accounts were banned sooner and sooner – until they no longer lasted long enough to make back what they cost (to buy/farm). And the low spending limits don’t help either.

Also, competition has risen as more affiliates started running blackhat at scale. The barrier to entry lowered – as it became easier to find information on how to farm/rent/buy accounts, and as more services such as spy tools and cloakers became accessible and affordable.

Moreover, regulatory bodies such as the FTC have tightened their regulations when it comes to misleading advertising:

https://www.thestreet.com/personal-f…views-12787988

And you know those fake celebrity endorsements that convert so well? Well – with so many blackhatters running them, it was only a matter of time before the celebs started fighting back:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/th…ements-1252832

As a direct result of all this grief – increased risks and decreased ROI – many of the blackhatters have transitioned to running whitehat.

And I’m predicting that this trend will continue this year.

Running whitehat doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t get accounts banned ever again, but the frequency will be much lower, and you’ll have the option to appeal when you DO get banned.

But running whitehat will require a bigger test budget, more testing and more optimization to see profits.

And, God forbid, we’d actually need to be better marketers – because we can’t as easily achieve the same conversion rates as when we were telling people “Oprah endorsed this”.

Which is part of what I’ll be covering in the tutorial.

Going forward, whitehat is the way. And my tutorial will ensure that beginners run clean from the very start.



FB Compliance

So the next question is, how to run whitehat?

It comes down to this obvious fact:

Give FB what it wants, and we stand a chance of getting the best-converting traffic at the lowest cost.

And what exactly DOES FB want? 3 words: Positive User Experience.

Users are FB’s bread and butter. If enough users leave, FB will go under – like what happened to MySpace, and Friendster.

And this goal takes priority over the short-term gains of money from blackhat campaigns.

So then, how to provide a positive user experience?

Facebook has figure this out, and has written the guidelines into their advertising policies:

https://www.facebook.com/policies/ads/

So that would be for ads. In addition, the landing page and the offer page also need to look legit and relevant to the ad and the audience. No misleading/fake info.

Obviously: Staying away from the types of offers that people usually run blackhat – e.g. nutra, crypto, adult – is of course recommended.

Also: Having a great-looking FB Page that looks genuine and has lots of content and engagement is important, and is one of the most-overlooked aspects that can help our campaigns.

Enough on compliance for now – I’ll be sure to talk more about this topic in the tutorial.



Affiliate Links – and the Risks Hierarchy

As for the use of affiliate links – here’s a risks hierarchy based on a mix of common knowledge and my personal speculations.

In order of risk levels, from Riskiest to Safest:

–Putting affiliate links in ads is generally frowned upon. I made it work back in 2014 when I was running FB briefly, but haven’t bothered to test this since I started running FB again over a year ago. There’s enough feedback from enough affiliates that tells me it’s a bad idea. So, let’s just don’t?

–Using a landing page with outgoing affiliate links is doable, but I suspect that FB will probably still track the ad to the landing page to the outgoing link and evaluate how “safe” the link is. WOT may be one way FB uses to evaluate this. Another possible way is FB may track the number of ad accounts that have run affiliate links with the same domain, that were flagged as non-compliant accounts.

So, if a few affiliates from the same network were caught by FB as running non-compliant, then the affiliate link domain may be “tainted” and FB would somehow treat your campaigns differently – either assign less traffic or lower-quality traffic or increase the likelihood of a manual review etc. (Again, this is my speculation.)

–Running offers that allow you to run without an affiliate link, that track conversions by putting your FB pixel on their site, would be a safer way to go. Still, if my suspicions above were true, then it would only take a few affiliates running aggressive or cloaking to spoil the fun for everyone. One thing that would help is if the affiliate network limits the number of affiliates they allow to run each offer – Jumbleberry does this for example.

–Staying away from running affiliate offers altogether would be the safest method. Either selling physical goods (dropshipping, or buying and fulfilling), or capturing leads and selling them or monetizing them yourself, or running FB camps for small businesses to promote their products/services.


In addition: Running exclusive offers with exclusive offer domains (i.e. vortexs-iphone-giveaway.com), without the need for redirects, would be safe. But networks don’t tend to do that for new affiliates without a great track record that proves their ability to bring sufficient profits to justify the added effort of setting up such offers.

In general: If my speculations regarding affiliate links are correct, then the fewer affiliates that promote the same offer domain and affiliate link domain, the safer it would be.



What the Tutorial Will Cover

The current plant is to stick with the 2 safest options in the risks hierarchy above.

The tutorial will include multiple modules. I haven’t decided yet what they will be for sure, but tentatively:

1)Lead Generation module, which involves creating a website to capture leads and sending them to an affiliate network.

2)Ecom CPA Offers module, on how to promote ecom offers from affiliate networks.

After these 2 modules are done, I MAY build more modules based on these first two. For example:

3)Creating a Shopify

site for testing products first, then for each promising product, building out a dedicated site, and using a fulfillment centre to fulfill orders.

4)Approaching businesses to negotiate lead generation deals, then capturing and delivering leads automatically.


Ultimately, I want the tutorial to introduce beginners to the most common business models that can be run on FB, in order to offer them a good number of options to choose from, e.g.:

-Promoting affiliate offers.

-Capturing leads and selling them, or monetizing them with affiliate offers or own offers.

-Selling one’s own products (physical or digital) or services. (I may do a case study on this sometime this year, as I set up my part-time energy healing practice.)

-Starting an agency and promoting other people’s products and services.


And of course, no matter which business model we choose to go with, we would need to know these basics:

-How to do research on a vertical/offer

-How to set up campaign

-How to target the right audience

-How to create effective ads

-How to do testing, optimization, and scaling.

And I’ll aim to cover each component in the tutorial.


FB is constantly evolving, so the tutorial may be outdated as soon as I write it. However, I will strive to keep it up to date, with the help of other mods.

Also, I’m not trying to write a be-all-end-all guide here. I only aim to do 2 things:

1)Create a step-by-step to help new affiliates launch their first campaign on FB, to get over that big initial barrier by taking action first, understanding later.

2)List various methods, tips and tricks that have either worked for me or someone else in recent months, so you’ll have lots of ideas to test when running your own campaigns.



ETA

I don’t claim to know everything about FB (far from it!) – I know there are a lot of veteran affiliates on this forum that have more FB experience than I do.

I just want to help beginners get started, and to introduce whitehat opportunities as an option to some of the members that are currently running blackhat, and want a refreshing change.

I hope that this tutorial will spark lots of discussions, where experienced FB marketers will chime in with their valuable experience and insight. Looking at everyone’s recent experiences will be the best way to get a more complete picture of how FB currently works.

This tutorial is a huge undertaking for me. It’s one thing to know how to run campaigns, but writing a tutorial is another thing altogether.

In addition to drawing on the FB experience I already have, I’m spending time on more testing and further education to better equip myself to write this beast of a guide.

All this will take time, and I won’t post anything I’m not confident will benefit members.

I don’t have an ETA on when this tutorial will be finished, but I’m planning on starting posting as soon as a few weeks from now, and completing the first module in the next 2-3 months.

I hereby ask for your patience in the meantime.

And if you have any suggestions on what should be included in this tutorial, please don’t hesitate to let me know below! All suggestions will be seriously considered.

Thanks for reading!





Amy

FB Beginner Tutorial: Index