My Experiment With Paid Advertising

Over the past few weeks things have been pretty slow with My Doggie Doodle. I had shifted my focus to two new affiliate products, and they of course, have also been slow beause I'm just starting to focus on them. So I found myself in a position to test out some paid advertising. I used three different forums:

1. :Bing Ads
2. Google Adwords
3. Promoted Facebook Posts

I won't bore you with all the gory details, but wanted to share with you the experience on my boosted Facebook post. I got concerned after reading Barry's post explaining that if your page doesn't have a lot of activity your boosts don't get you very far. Then I came up with an idea. Below is the ad I boosted on my Health and Diet product. Mind you, this got posted and boosted the day after Halloween.

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"Feeling guilty after eating all that Halloween candy? I'm not because my (product) helped curb my sugar cravings. Get started now and look and feel better in the New Year.

The no diet, no exercise, all natural way to look better, feel better and and have more energy without caffeine or stimulants."

(my affiliate link went here)

This is not the image that appeared in the ad, but I don't want to get dinged for self promotion and the name of the product in the photo, so I've replaced it with this one, which I think is kinda cool!

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This ad went viral (as compared to any other post that I've put on my fan pages since starting all of this). It was shared over 150 times, which means 150+ people shared it with all their friends and friends friends. It got over 700 likes, And a bunch of people commented, so there was a lot of activity, where previously there was very little. From Nov 1 - 4, this ad was on fire.

I have boosted other ads and while they do OK, nothing has taken off like this one. I think it was the timing of the ad, just after everyone ate too much candy, like many of us do.

Anyway, I did get a sale, but more importantly, I got over 50 leads on my affiliate site from this, which gives me the opportunity to follow up with all these people and try to convert them into sales.

Now I need to come up with my next clever ad to get people talking! So try boosting a post. You can do it for as little as $20. Experiment to see what works. You can choose your target age, country,gender, and keywords based on interests. It's worth the investment if you can hit on one that takes off.

Some advice for boosting posts:

• They do get reviewed, and they do get rejected, so read the ad guidelines
• Photos cannot contain a bunch of text. You photo needs to be 80% photo, 20% (or less) text or it will be rejected. But as you are creating your ad you will get a warning if you have too much text, and you have an opportunity to test the photo and change it if necessary. This was a challenge since I can only use company approved photos, and many of them contain a lot of text.

I hope this doesn't get dinged as promotion, I've tried to avoid using the company name, but the image is what it is. Anyway, just wanted to encourage you to try it. It took a few tries to get one that worked well, but the results were great!

Hope you can find one that works for you.