In 'The Sizz Method' I cover a paid advertising method for building a community and social synergy around a niche site which consists of (one part) sending targetted traffic to your affiliate site. In my experience this has increased actual organic rankings.
What if we could take it a level deeper, and target users that are likely to click our affiliate links? This might pull in a better audience, AND earn us a little more revenue on our affiliate links. To do this we would need to send a conversion event to Facebook when someone clicked our affiliate links.
I set out to give it a try!
Tools Required:
This is a an affiliate link plugin which can do a refresh redirect thereby allowing us to place a Facebook Pixel (or other code on the redirecting url)... this is necessary to trigger the conversion event in Facebook.
(we have a full review of Pretty links here, which covers other cool things you can do with it).
Here we go…
Choose Your Content
Choose one of your existing pieces, that genuinely has a high level of interest among your audience. Run of the mill content will flop on Facebook.
You could do this using insight from your popular content if it has been online for a while, or use your own insight.
Most importantly the content MUST be drive users to a affiliate product. Notice the use of the word ‘a’ there. It should drive users to a single affiliate offering. By doing this you are eliminating the paradox of choice and providing less information for the Facebook algo to have to contend with.
Optimize The Headline (Test With Facebook Ads)
When we create headlines for our blog posts, there’s really no way of know what will perform well. Yes, there are some ‘headline analyzers’, but those are hardly better than 50/50.
To figure out what really gets clicks, we need to test it with real humans.
Possibly if your blog is high traffic you could use a headline tester, but in my case, my blog isn’t high traffic.
So I’ll spends a few dollars to test with Facebook Ads to figure out what the audience LOVES.
Getting the headline right will ultimately lead to lower costs in the long term… and possibly better organic rankings.
I simply create a campaign using the traffic objective.
From there I would come up with a few possible headlines to use in the Facebook Ad.
Examples…
Current blog post title: 5 Easy Mods To Make Your Tacoma AWESOME On Your Daily Commute
Test: 5 Step Guide To Modifying Your Tacoma For Commuting (with less than $500)
Test: 5 Easy Mods To Make Your Tacoma The ULTIMATE Commuter Vehicle.
Then set up a all the ads using those headlines… LEAVE EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE AD THE SAME. The image. The Body. The Everything. The same.
The only variable should be the headline. Our aim is to find the best headline.
Regarding the audience, we could go into a one million mile worm hole on this but I like to keep it simple. I narrow my audience by age, and then use one or two layers of interest targeting. I believe in large audiences, with a measurable conversion objective, and then letting Facebook do the lifting.
Turn your ads on for a few days with a $5/day budget and see what gets the most clicks!
Improve The Content To Match The Headline
Nothing will kill conversions harder than a deliverable that doesn’t match the offer.
After letting your ads run for a few days and figuring out what content headline performs best, it is time to refine the content to match the headline.
Rename your blog post, and edit the content so that it is truly what someone clicking from the add would expect.
Then edit your calls-to-action.
You’re sending paid traffic here so make sure they are following conversion optimization principles (ie. buttons, tables, and color contrast).
Set Up Conversion Event
At this point you’ve identified a great headline, and tweaked your content to match it. It is time to set up a conversion event in Facebook Ads for everyone that clicks the affiliate link. By doing this you can set Facebook to use their algo to optimize for that conversion event!
To pull this off we’ll need Pretty Links.
Pretty links allows you to set a refresh redirect, so it effectively loads the link as a page, and refreshes onward to the destination. The process of loading the link initially as a page within your site allows the use of the Facebook Pixel on that link.
First set the ‘global settings’ in Pretty links.
(once you have the pretty links pugin installed and have upgraded to the pro version)
I like to set universal settings up first to get it out of the way since. This means setting the default redirection to a meta refresh, and putting in the pixel code.
Second, set your affiliate link.
You should notice the ‘Redirection*’ reflects what you set in global settings
I like to keep the ‘Pretty Link’ unique in some way to be certain no other links are made on the site that could trigger the conversion event.
Third, create the conversion event in ‘Events Manager’ (of Facebook Ads).
Now it is time to get those clicks in Facebook as a conversion event.
To do this, set up a conversion event for anytime someone matches a part of the URL in the affiliate link.
Follow the steps in the picture above to get it done!
Set Up a Conversion Campaign
After you’ve put the affiliate link in place in your content, you can go ahead and create a ‘conversion campaign’ to set traffic to your content piece.
Set a daily budget and let it ride.
Facebook will optimize for clicks on your link, which should get you a little revenue, all while driving traffic to the content and build social synergy.
My Experiment
Currently in progress as of 10/10/2020.