Facebook Advertising Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide

Facebook is probably the most neglected online advertising channel of them all.

How often do you hear things like:

“Facebook has been dead since everybody’s parents started using it.”

“Instagram has 10x the engagement rate!”

“Email crushes Facebook.”

Yeah yeah, we get it, Facebook is lame.

So, how come their revenue is growing so fast?


Not only do they have the biggest user base, with over 2 billion monthly active users, but they also seem to make plenty of money with their advertising system.

I think there’s a whole bunch of hypocrites out there.

If one out of every $10 in advertising is spent on Facebook ads, how come everybody shuns the platform, except for a few?

You know what I think?

I think every business tries Facebook ads, fails at it and then blames the platform.

People just suck at making Facebook ads work for them.  They don’t truly understand their target audience, so they place ads in the news feed of the wrong people, etc.

Today, I’ll help you out with that.

I’m going to show you a few examples of people who’ve been successful with Facebook ads and then walk you through setting up your first campaign without breaking a sweat.

Even if you’re a complete newbie, after reading this guide, you’ll have a good grasp of Facebook ads.

I mean it.

I’ll start from the very beginning, but you can skip to any section below

Top Reasons To Advertise on Facebook
Facebook Advertising Definition
Facebook Advertising Overview
3 case studies from successful Facebook advertisers
How to Setup Your First Facebook Ad Campaign
How To Fail-Proof Your Facebook Ad Campaigns
Step 1: How to Create a Realistic Budget
Step 2: Create a fan page
Step 3: Create your first campaign
Step 4: Create your ad set
Step 5: Create your first ad
Step 6: Create 2 more ads for A/B testing
Step 7: Wait for 24 hours
Step 8: Kill the ads that don’t work
Step 9 [Optional]: Increase your budget
Step 10 [Advanced]: Expand your reach with custom audiences; lookalike audiences


Top Reasons To Advertise on Facebook
You can’t argue with results.

Which means you can’t deny Facebook ads.

They’re super profitable. (If, and that’s a big IF, you know what you’re doing.)

Nearly all social media marketers (96%) consider Facebook advertising the most effective paid option out of all social networks, according to an eMarketer study.

One reason is Facebook’s size.

Billions of people see ads on their platform each month. People spend almost an hour on it each day.

And despite what the haters say, Facebook is still growing, too.


That’s why budgets have been doubling (up to $31 billion and counting).

Another reason is Facebook Advertising gives smaller companies a competitive advantage, if used correctly.

For example, ecommerce startup Barbell Apparel used Facebook ads to surpass their Kickstarter product launch goal of $15,000 by $735,000!

Listen:

You want to reach people online? Facebook is the single best alternative to Google AdWords.

Don’t get me wrong, AdWords is awesome. But it’s also expensive. I’ve personally worked on client accounts where every single click cost anywhere from $50 – 100. Per click!

Then only a tiny percentage of those people ever became a lead. Most of them bounced from the site.

Now guess how much that ad campaign was? This company literally spent thousands of dollars each day just to bring in a few decent leads.

It’s different with Facebook. You get access to the same number of people. But for far less.

And once you’ve got a few tricks up your sleeves (after reading the rest of this article), you’ll be able to get website clicks for pennies and new sales for just a few bucks each.

Let’s see how it works.

Facebook Advertising Definition
“Wait, you can advertise on Facebook?”

If that was your initial reaction to this post’s headline, then you’re a little late to the party. But, no worries, I’ll get you up to speed.

Since Facebook gets tons of data from their users, who enter it voluntarily on their profile (things like age, location, and interests), they have a good idea of who users are and what they like.

Therefore, they can serve them targeted ads that show them products that they are likely to buy, sites they tend to like or events they’d love to attend.

For example, I recently joined a Facebook group about Udemy, the online course platform.

Naturally, Facebook jumps on my choice and starts showing me ads that prompt me to sign up for a course (they thought I might like to learn about creating video games).

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You might say: “Wait Neil, are you sure this isn’t just a news feed post from Udemy? Did you maybe like their page? How do you know this is an ad?”

Good question!

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Affiliate Marketing Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide

Ever since the 4-Hour Workweek was released, everyone seems to have the same goal.

To wake up in the morning, open their laptop, and look at something like this:

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(Image source: Top 5 SEO)

Passive income.

That’s the dream, right?

Make money while you sleep.

For 99% of people, affiliate marketing is how they get started.

The idea behind it is that you promote other people’s products, often through an affiliate network, earning a commission if people actually end up buying thanks to your marketing.

It’s based on revenue sharing. If you have a product and want to sell more, you can offer promoters a financial incentive through an affiliate program. If you have no product and want to make money, then you can promote a product that you feel has value and earn an income from it as an affiliate marketer.

I’ve talked a little about it before, but today I want to dive deeper into what affiliate marketing actually is, what sides there are to it, and how to get started.  So, let’s dive into my affiliate marketing guide.  Ready?

Definitions
The best definition of what affiliate marketing is can be found on Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income:

Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other people’s (or company’s) products. You find a product you like, promote it to others and earn a piece of the profit for each sale that you make.

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SEO Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide

SEO Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide
what is seo
Guess how many blog posts people publish each day.

Any ideas?

Well, WordPress users alone publish over 2 million posts every day. That comes out to 24 blog posts every second.

That means that users published around 216 blog posts while you were reading these five sentences.

And that’s only counting WordPress users. If we were to count all blog posts, that number would surely be higher.

This makes it kind of tough to stand out. But you have to if you want to make your blog a successful one.

While I often spend 4-5 hours writing my blog posts, the ten minutes I spend optimizing each post are easily the most important.

No wonder millions of people Google the term “SEO” each month.

On any given day, people conduct more than 2.2 million searches. And that’s just on Google — to say nothing of the other search engines.

Therefore, showing up on the front page of Google can be the deciding factor between a business that’s thriving and one that’s, well, bankrupt.

But what does SEO even mean?

You probably know that it stands for search engine optimization, but what do you need to optimize?

Is it the design? Or is it the writing? Or maybe it’s the links.

Yes, yes, and yes — it’s all of that and more.

But let’s start this SEO guide at the beginning.

Definition: According to Wikipedia, SEO is “the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s unpaid results.”

Alright, let’s translate that to English. Here’s my go at it:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your online content so that a search engine likes to show it as a top result for searches of a certain keyword.

Let me break that down even further:

When it comes to SEO, there’s you, the search engine, and the searcher. If you have an article about how to make vegan lasagna, you want the search engine (which, in 90% of all cases, is Google) to show it as a top result to anyone who searches for the phrase “vegan lasagna.”

SEO is the magic you have to work on your article in order to make Google very likely to include your post as one of the top results whenever someone searches for that keyword.

We’re going to dig deep into SEO, but feel free to jump to any section that interests you:

Overview
White hat vs. black hat
Cleaning inside your house and outside: on-page SEO vs. off-page SEO
On-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO


Overview
Now what does that magic look like, and why does it even matter?

Like I said earlier, the vast majority of online experiences begin with a search engine, and nearly 75% of searchers start their searches on Google.

Combine that with the fact that the first five results on Google get 67% of all clicks, and you get an idea of why search engine optimization is so important.

There’s a joke going around the web that highlights how crucial it is to hit the first page of Google:

If you ever need to hide a dead body, you should place it on the second page of Google search results.

If your blog post, article, or product is on any other page of the Google search results than the first, then it’s the equivalent of it not ranking at all.

But to understand how to show up first in the search engine results, you first need to know how search even works.

How Search Works:

Now that you have an idea of the basics of SEO, I’ll take a look at some of its components in detail.

While Google guards their search algorithm pretty well and not all of the over 200 determining factors are public, Backlinko did a great job of compiling as many of them as possible into one big list.

But first, I need to get one thing straight. There are two sides of the SEO force, and you need to choose yours right now.

White hat vs. black hat
As you know, I’m playing the long-term entrepreneurial game instead of just trying to get a quick buck out of it.

It’s the same with search engine optimization. Some people are in it to make a few grand really quickly while others are in it for the long haul.

If you want to work SEO like a get-rich-quick scheme, you’ll probably end up doing black hat SEO.

This type of SEO focuses on optimizing your content only for the search engine, not considering humans at all. Since there are lots of ways to bend and break the rules to get your sites to rank high, these are a prime way for black hat SEOs to make a few thousand dollars fast.

Ultimately, this approach results in spammy, crappy pages that often get banned very fast. It will often lead to severe punishment for the marketer, ruining their chance of building something sustainable in the future.

You might make a few grand this way, but you’ll continuously have to be on the lookout for search engine updates and come up with new ways to dodge the rules.

White hat SEO, on the other hand, is the way to build a sustainable online business. If you do SEO this way, you’ll focus on your human audience.

You’ll try to give them the best content possible and make it easily accessible to them by playing according to the search engine’s rules.

Inbound Marketing Inc. does a great job of explaining the difference.

Black vs White Hat SEO
Needless to say, you’ll only hear and see me talking about white hat SEO.

Choose your side of the force wisely, young Padawan.

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Unfortunately, it’s not always that easy.

As you know, life’s not always black or white.

The same holds true for SEO. There’s actually something in the middle of the ‘white vs. black hat debate’ that I need to address.

Gray hat SEO, like its name implies, is a little white and a little black.

That means it’s not quite as pure or innocent as the whitest of white hats. But it isn’t quite as egregiously manipulative as black hat can be.

You’re not trying to trick anyone or intentionally game the system with gray hat. However, you are trying to get a distinct advantage.

See, Google’s standards aren’t as clear-cut as they’d like you to believe. Many times, they might even say contradictory things.

For example, Google has said they’re not a fan of guest blogging to build links.

But what about guest blogging to grow your brand? What if you do it to build awareness, generate high-quality traffic back to your site, and become a household name in the industry?

Those are all legitimate reasons to guest post and why I still recommend it.

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