Facebook is the hottest thing on the Internet and is making waves in the world of social media. If you aren’t taking advantage of this platform as a way to attract readers and drive them to your blog, then you are definitely missing out on some inexpensive, quality traffic.
This article assumes that you already know the basics of setting up your Facebook ad campaign and moves into some of the advanced methods for generating traffic.
Choose Your Demographic Appropriately
One of the mistakes a lot of people make when setting up a Facebook ad campaign is to choose the wrong demographic. You need to know who your target reader is. So how do you find out what these people are interested in?
By using Facebook! If you start with one thing that you know a reader of your blog is going to be interested in, you can start clicking around Facebook, finding people that like those things and going to see more of their likes. This won’t be easy and will take some time and effort.
Not everyone has everything available for public review. So you will need to find the lists that are public. Take this information and put it into a spreadsheet.
Collect as much of it as you can, and then cross reference each list. Make a new list of all of the things they have in common. That will help you ensure that you are focusing on the right demographics for advertising on Facebook.
Write A Great Title
It’s important to pick a title that is going to draw people into your ad. You don’t want to simply tell them what you are offering. They won’t pay attention. Write the headline of your ad in a way that leads the reader to believe that there is something important that they need to find, which they will.
But avoid the clichés, such as “One secret to…” as people already know this is a trick. You want to come up with more interesting headlines that are specifically tied to the type of content that you are going to be offering the reader.
Go back to the list of interests you collected and see what sort of inspiration you find there. Drawing people into your blog using a good teaser is easy.
Use Pictures To Get Their Attention
Did you ever see those pictures that don’t seem to be related to the Facebook ad in any way? Those are pictures that are there simply to attract people’s attention. You can use any number of different types of pictures, but you should aim for one of a few different kinds: sexy, shocking, funny.
Those three will get the most attention and also keep the reader focused long enough to read your text. If you have a good title, the whole ad will start to come together, and you will be pulling readers into your blog before you know it.
You can find pictures at a number of different places. There are many stock image sites on the Internet and the Wikimedia commons has plenty that are totally free for you to use.
Just always check the terms of use before you commit to using any specific image for your Facebook ads.
Writing The Body Of The Ad
This is an important step. You need to bring out some sense of urgency here. You can do this if you are offering something as a prize or gift.
But for many blogs this just might not work. So what are you going to do to instill a sense of urgency in your potential reader? Think about offering something that they might be interested in reading or watching.
Offer that to them in the body copy and then tell them that it is free for a limited time.
For instance, if you are writing a blog about video games and you know that most of your potential readers are interested in a specific game, then you could put together an ad that uses the following body copy: “Get a free guide to dominate GAME X. It’s free for now, but retails at $35. Limited offer!”
If this doesn’t get you a lot of clicks to your site, then you did your research incorrectly and should go back to that step. You are probably targeting the wrong group.
Putting It All Together And Split Testing
The most important element of this entire process is the initial demographic research. If you get that wrong, the Facebook ads won’t get the right attention and draw traffic into your site. But assuming that you got the right stuff in the research step, how are you going to make sure that you get the best possible click-through rate?
Well, that’s easy! Use split testing. But how do you do it?
You have three elements in your ad that you can mix and match. The first is the picture, the second is the headline, and the third is the body copy. You can’t possibly know how any one of those is impacting the success of the ad, but you can verify the power of a specific combination.
Come up with at least three different pictures, three different headlines and three different body copies. They don’t need to all make sense when you mix and match them. You just need to be able to come up with nine distinct Facebook ads.
Run each one of these Facebook ads with an identical budget and then use the Facebook system to track their effectiveness. You will quickly learn which one works the best.
With this combination of Facebook ads, you can also cross reference and determine which picture is drawing the best attention. You can do the same for each headline and body copy. Just make sure that you are keeping good track of conversion rates.
When you finish with the first set ads, you can do another round, focusing on the elements that work the best. With these tips you can draw tons of traffic to your blog using the Facebook advertising platform.
