Submitted by: Steve Laba
With the proliferation of social websites also come new arenas to advertise to your potential customers. While search engines like Google, Bing and ASK are still good ways to reach your customers, social networks are offering better ways to target your customers with demographics like age, gender, location, religion and many more attributes that search engines just can t do.
Social networks are places where hundreds of millions of people gather and spend hours a day socializing on. Because of all the time people are spending online it give s you that much more exposure of your products and business.
I have chosen three social networks where you can place your ads in front of millions of people who fit your product s or business s customer profile. For example if you are selling ladies handbags you can have your ads displayed only to women so you don t waste time trying to solicit to men.
You will now learn about three very popular social networks where you can market your products or services.
By now just about everyone on the earth has heard of Facebook. But did you know that you can advertise on it to over 500 million people? That is quite the audience.
When you advertise on Facebook you set up a campaign and then place your ads within the campaign. The ads are text-based with the option to have an image. I would highly recommend using an image so to attract more attention. To create your ad you add the url of your website or you can send people to your fan page if you have one. The title can be up to 25 characters and your description 69 characters.
There are many ways to target your customers. Not only can you target by country, but there are dozens of other options.
You can have your ad be seen by men only, women only or both. Age is another demographic you can target by, even their birthday.
Here is a list of other ways to pick you audience: married or single, level of education, where they work, likes and dislikes and more.
Facebook offers two options for pricing. You can Pay Per Click (PPC) or use the Pay for Impressions (CPM) method. With PPC you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. For CPM you will pay a share of your budget every time your ad is shown. CPM is the best choice if you d like to increase brand awareness by users simply seeing your ad. The cost of this is based on the competition that is also advertising on Facebook.
Currently, you can pay for ads using credit cards and co-branded debit cards (Visa or Mastercard and American Express, Discover or JCB for certain currencies) as well as PayPal.
There is no set cost that you have to start with so you can start small with about $10.
Friendste
Freindster is not as well known as Facebook but it does have a respectable number of registered user s. As of this writing they have over 100 million registered users worldwide. They are a top 20 global website, serving 16 billion pages a month. They are also top 5 in user engagement among global social networks.
Settings up your ads are easy. Choose between creating a text based ad or an image ad.
For a text-based ad you write a title (up to 25 characters in length including spaces) and content for the body of your ad (up to 90 characters in length including spaces). Image type ads should have your message within the image since you can t add a description.
Of course you also add your URL (website address).
Friendster has something called Flight Dates. This is simply when you would like your ad to start and finish. They also have a good number of demographics that you can target your audience: There are country, age, gender and marital status.
Here are the countries you can display your ad in.
US
Canada
Singapore
Indonesia
Malaysia
Philippines
Like Facebook they also offer two different advertising models. There is a pay for impressions (CPM) and Cost Per Click (CPC) models. For CPM a single impression is when your Ad appears on a Friendster page someone is viewing. CPM is one thousand impressions the cost of showing your ad 1,000 times. If your ad is $5 CPM and your budget is $100, your ad will appear 20,000 times over the span of your campaign. Cost Per Click (CPC) is where you pay for each click of your ad.
Plenty of Fish (POF)
Plenty Of Fish, I bet you are wondering what is this? Well for those who have never heard of POF it s a free dating site. You can sign up for free and find people like yourself by searching on a person s profile.
You set up your ads on POF basically the same way you would on FaceBook or Friendster by entering a title, description, url and image. What s nice about POF is they are more generous with the amount of characters that can be used when creating your ad. You can uses up to 32 for the title and 128 for the description. You can also include an image with your ads. The size of your ad s image dictates how much money you will have to start your campaign with. The 110 80?s sized imaged ads are available with our minimum $25 deposit, The 300 250?s, 160 600?s and 120 600?s are available with a minimum $1000 deposit. I would start with the smaller ads when first testing them out.
One of the best things about POF is the vast number of demographics you can target by. Here is a list of some.
Country
State/Province
Zip Code
Age
Gende
Education
Body Type
Ethnicity
Parental Status
Smoking Status
Drinking Status
Car Status
Religion
Income
POF only uses the Pay for Impressions (CPM) model of advertising. For CPM you will pay a share of your budget every time your ad is shown. This may seem a little scare but you pay a small amount like $.10 for every 1,000 times your ad is displayed.
Well there you have it. I hope this article has helped make you aware of other platforms for PPC type advertising.
About the Author: Steve Laba is an experienced internet marketer and eBay PowerSeller with over 10 year of experience making money online. To learn more about internet marketing to drive more traffic to your online business? Then you are invited you to check out my blog at
themoneymakingmentor.com
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