El Cinco De Fincho Premiumo.

So you see this Finch character posting Premium Reading products, and you’re wondering “Should I buy that?” The short answer is Yes. Warning! Affiliate links located inside this post.

In a sea of shitty affiliate marketing products, 98% provide absolutely zero value. The other 1.9% actually provide value, and there’s about .1% left over for really high quality material.

The problem is sorting out the shit from the gold. Luckily for you, barman, semi-world famous blogger extraordinaire, usually gets free review copies plz of many affiliate marketing products. I give honest reviews, so if it’s something is shit, I will say its shit, even if I got it free. If something is good, I will praise its goodness. I don’t gas up shit just because I get it free or at a discount. Finch’s Premium Posts are one of the few such product that I like a lot and consider worth your monies.

Volume 5 Maximum ROI Marketing

The main reason why I like Finch’s Premium posts is that they’re written by an affiliate, for affiliates. If you’re just starting out, you will get a ton of value from Finch’s Premium Posts. If you’re a seasoned marketer, you will still pick up some great tips and tricks.

Volume 5 is 100+ pages of quality reading material. Sure, it’s double-spaced and the font is kind of big, but that never stopped you when you were in high school writing English papers trying to reach that 6 page minimum.

I think this Volume 5 is especially good for new or struggling affiliates. There are a lot of low-cost marketing ideas in this volume that you can put to use right away.

With Finch’s writing style, you’ll laugh (If I were running a ‘Work at Home Mom’ blog [Note: I’m not. My tits are too hairy.]), you’ll cry ( “Why didn’t I think of that!”) and most importantly, you’ll make money. So let’s have a looksie at the highlights from Volume 5.

Testing Profitability on a Budget – How can you tell the bad offers from the good before you even test them? Finch drops some quality tips on how to spot trouble before you’re scrubbed and shaved to the bone. Why is this offer paying so high? Why is this offer paying so low but converting so well? And how to spot a brokered brokered and more brokered offer, and what it means for conversions.

Brainstorming and Testing Angles and Landing Pages – Honestly I don’t know how Finch comes up with some of the angle and copy ideas he writes about. Truly, this is a gentlemen that either mastered knowing what people want, or has some William Shakespeare in his bloodline. Either or, you will have some ‘ah ha!’ moments throughout Volume 5.

One of the strongest parts of this Volume is how Finch lays out his landing page plan. Landing pages are excellent for shoe-string budgets because you’re not playing a ‘spend money then optimize’ game.

“You can’t rely on a one-size-fits-all concept.”

Your landing pages should be optimized for your ‘angle’ from the start. The goal here is to not “lose the scent” (I forget which book it was where I picked up that analogy.) If you have a creative ad that gets really specific, you’re going to kill conversions if your landing page is not directly related to that creative, or if you’re direct linking. Like a bloodhound (in this case, an obese single mom), the customer clicked your ad for a reason. If you don’t elaborate on that initial click in your landing page, you’re going to lose. If you don’t pre-sell the offer on your landing page correctly, you’re going to lose again because the person will either not click thru to the offer at all, or not be sold completely and leave when they get to the offer page.

“But, this is more work!” you whine. Well, no shit! The affiliate space just keeps getting more and more competitive, so if you do what everyone else is doing, then no fucking shit you keep losing money.

“Set and Forget” Campaigns on Plenty of Fish – I’m not going to go into details on this part, but it’s pretty amazing insight on using various demographic data to generate long-lasting highly-targeted campaigns.

And More – The rest of Volume 5 covers some really good stuff, including advertising on Facebook successfully (and unsuccessfully), How to promote gaming offers, how to get into international markets the right way (and the wrong way), and a slew of more “pockets of gold” on the internets. Also I enjoy the section on monetizing trends because there are a few trend sites I have never even heard of before.

Overall, I can’t recommend the work Finch is doing enough. His writing style is awesome and the information he provides is invaluable. If only… there were some sort of legitimate rating system for affiliate marketing products, then Finch Sells Premium Posts would deserve nothing less than 5 fish heads.

Oh shit it’s May. That means there’s probably some interesting news that happened since the last wrap-up post. I started this post a few days ago… finishing it up on a Monday, which is rather difficult because blogs keep updating with new posts.

In “This Makes Me Feel Old News,” Wolfenstien turns 20. Some of you were barely a glint in your father’s nutsack when that game came out.

Online and Affiliate Marketing News

Some of the biggest non-news last month and this month, has been the recent updates to the Google algorithm. SEO is dead and Google killed some pandas or something. I don’t know, I don’t follow this shit. Although I used to care back in the day, the idea of building your whole ‘business model’ around trying to outsmart Google with spam and crap is no longer appealing, and it’s no longer a viable business model. Shoemoney has a laugh at these fools in this post. You can also get more LOLz by visiting the WickedFire forum SEO section, where countless retards are complaining that their entire livelihood vanished into thin air.

The bottom line is that you’re going to have to get off your ass and build an actual, long-term business. This is nothing new. Even if it’s SEO, the days of spamming your way to the top are gone (unless they’re not gone, in which case you’re probably smart enough to not spill the beans), so commit your time to something that isn’t dependent on Google. Something worth sharing so you can actually take advantage of all that social media goodness, so people drive your traffic and not a search engine.

Now read this massive shit of a post from ViperChill. It’s huge. It set a world record for the longest blog post in recorded history. There is a lot of good information there. A LOT.

Aaron Wall of SEOBook takes a look at the penguin update too. This is one guy who’s opinion on the subject you want to read. Also, on Negative SEO and outing.

And if you’re wondering, here are the “official” changes to improve Google’s Search quality the past few weeks.

When you’re done with that, Microsite Masters has a huge write up on what to do about that Penguin update. SEO is dead. Long live SEO.

To add insult to injury, Google is now putting some value into something called AuthorRank. Finch takes a look at what it means for affiliates. If you do decide to come out of hiding and author something, KissMetrics shows you how to really take advantage of Authorship markup. 150% increase in CTR you say? Better hit the portrait studio.

Fuck it. Let’s just fire Matt Cutts. The celebrity has gone to his head.

Back to the non-SEO news…

Plenty of Fish getting sued for someone using an image they weren’t supposed to in a true.com ad. Ben links to a legitimate case study that looks at the CPM vs Volume relationship on pof ads. Also some more pof advertising stats.

This concludes our PlentyofFish news for the day.

MIT nerd builds a $10 Million “Sugar Daddy” empire from BusinessInsider.com. Compete Blog investigates where people are looking for love online. In other trend news, people are trying to get that body ready for the beach.

What is affiliate marketing? This infographic from Pepperjam explains in a racist way. Andy runs a Hate Store. He sells cross burning materials and KKK masks. Not an affiliate program I want to be a part of!

Yahoo explains how to market effectively to African American consumers with a link to a new AdAge report.

Decent post from DirectResponse on monopolizing a vertical. Apparently, you’re going to need a lot of indians.

Finch drops on knowledge – Read this and improve your conversion rates. Some solid (but known) tips on improving conversions for brands.

Negbox writes a post about a video talking about bounded rationality… whatever that is. KissMetrics analyzes some “power words” ( imagine, you, because … not so powerful out of context.) Uber Affiliate comes out of hibernation and writes Researching Affiliate Niches in 2012.

What’s the state of online marketing in 2012? This infographic bears all!

Yo Dawg I heard you like infographics so here’s the Top 6 Infographics of the Week from econsultancy. And other about mobile email stats.

Ogilvy’s Rory Sutherland on human behavior and innovation.

ConversionXL takes a look at what to call your call-to-action button. Also, ridiculously effective techniques for offline lead generation. And if you’re on twitter – here are 30 conversion rate experts you can follow.

Prelaunch tricks to boost your ad revenue. A slide deck on How to convert free users in to paid users.

Ask yourself, Do questions work in headlines? What about 1 word copywriting?

How to track Youtube plays as conversions from hasOffers. Google wants people to use Adwords to push video: How every business can play big on Youtube.

Another interesting read from hasOffers – How to make an affiliate marketing calendar.

Some Facebook-ness

FBAdsLab looks at common landing page mistakes with Facebook. Also a short post on a winning CTR ad in Facebook. Mashable has a good writeup on how to drive engagement within Facebook ads.

Facebook merges the “publish_stream” with “publish_action”. Relevant if you’re messing around with the Open Graph.

Check out how Weather.com is integrating Open Graph. Notice the “Love” and “Ugh!” buttons on the left? Just another unique implementation of the Open Graph to get those gears turning.

Why moms are a hot market on a Facebook. MILC = Mom I’d Like to Convert.

IMGrind has this good writeup on How to Dominate Facebook Ads. Also, have you noticed “Trending Articles” showing up in your Facebook feed? InsideFacebook explains those Trending Articles. It looks like Facebook is doing everything it can to load the news feed with commercial intent, rather than a stream of musings from your friends.

And now back to online marketing…

Getting 80,000 some clicks to a blog post with a bunch of twitter tools.

Interesting tidbits from Certified Knowledge about Google’s new Near Match settings. Blackhat PPC also has an opinion on the “near match” change.

Really good write-up on the free analytics tools out there, by KissMetrics. Market research 101. Know them and use them daily.

A thorough guide on how to do trademarked bidding in Adwords. From PPCHero – How does Adwords assign a Quality Score even before a campaign is live?

An hour of your time well spent: Best Practices from 30,000 A/B and multivariate split tests.

Good data from Royal Pingdom: No US City is in the top 50 worldwide when it comes to internet. No shit, when you have monopolies like Comcast. I fucking hate you Comcast. Rot in a fire. [ this rant removed for another blog post ]

Speaking of monopolies, mobile carriers are killing it by overselling data plans.

Also, how does that $1 Billion buyout of Pinterest stack up to other asinine buyouts? It looks like Mark Cuban is still the king. Props for getting filthy rich before that tech bubble burst.

JP Morgan buys a 7% stake in the toolbar company Conduit. Got eight figures chillin in JP Morgan Chase…

And finally, Ad:Tech gets some harsh words from Hitler. “I thought RTB was the future!!!” “Mein Fuher….”

Mobile Web and Apps

Mobile affiliate tracking sucks for many merchants. High-end devices like Android and iThings are cookie-capable, but if the merchant’s website sucks on a device it will kill conversions.

Some mobile facts and stats from 2011 in infographic form. A collection of links about the future of mobile from BD Conference.

IMGrind takes a look at the sad state of Mobile App development. Those are some seriously depressing stats. In my experience, if you’re going to spend time building an app, you better make it good. Make it unique. Make it useful. It’s a huge time investment, so if you’re going to do it, go balls-to-the-wall and build something that actually provides value. Especially true since you’re competing against established companies.

Good notes regarding WiFi usage. iPad users stay connected. More fun data: Emerging mobile markets worldwide. Also, an infographic called How Mobile Customers are different.

An infographic on the mobile apps economy. An infographic of Android developers.

Can you build the next Instagram? 4 Hour Work Week thinks its possible. Although, its not all fun and games. The popularity of Draw Something has been dropping since Zynga bought out OMGPOP.

So if you wanted to do that … If you need a mobile developer here is a giant list of mobile developers from all countries. If you have an app, here is a good readup on how to promote Android and iOS apps. Some overlap here, but even more mobile app promotion networks and agencies. This article explains how to do ASO, the new SEO?, aka App Store Optimization. All very handy tips.

Sure why not… one more article with tips on iOS store optimization.

Google just made it a whole lot easier to advertise mobile apps. Good news!

Removing stumbling blocks in mobile forms. Some Smashing stuff on gamification and user experience. Also, Gamification, Rewards and Dopamine marketing.

Randomness on Productivity, Design, Startups, and the Nerdy

Great read: Going from $0 to $500,000 in recurring revenue in a year with no VC money. And if you’re running a start-up, or starting a start up, you should check out this tumblr page for start-ups.

On a serious note, 10 Rules for Web Startups.

(1) Simple trick to increasing productivity. And by productivity, they mean avoiding wasting time on shit that doesn’t make $$.

Asian Efficiency has a surprisingly long writeup on pornography, masturbation, and productivity. Read it, it’s interesting. The whole series on Sex and Productivity is interesting. Goodbye, myfreecams :(

Also, a good article on Don’t Break the Chain (You know, that Jerry Sienfeld productivity tip.) This is one productivity tip I really want to implement.

Tongue-in-cheek article on How to Murder Your Productivity. Stop doing these things. NOW!

Also, Getting Things Done for hackers e-book. And How to Meditate daily. Another ritual I plan on getting into.

FreelanceSwitch does a bit on Dealing with procrastination. That morning alertness one is key. Be productive. You can also check out My Head in the Morning, a look at how that gray matter in your head functions after you wake up.

That socialist pig Obama is trying to redistribute the wealth to people who could potentially make good use of it. Why we don’t need anti-trust laws and how they actually cause monopolies.

James Altucher writes “How I Lost 100 Pounds”

Your idea is stupid. Execution is all that matters.

Removing complexity when coding is the key to being a good programmer. When you think something through before writing, instead of just typing away -> run code to see if it works, you tend to write better code. This isn’t something that you can pick up overnight, and its definitely something i have to work on all the time, but its hugely helpful to even be aware of the problem.

If you do anything related to websites, these cheat sheets could come in handy. Digging into WordPress looks at how to use Apache Bench to measure latency. Also, another way to speed up your site is with DNS pre-fetching. Useful if your media is stored on another domain or you’re sourcing files from a CDN (like Google’s jQuery CDN.) I did not know about this.

And finally, a ton of good HTML5 / CSS3 articles.

That’s all for now. READ UP!

So you want to up your A game and blow up traffic till your server catches fire? That’s what media buys are for, fool!

Almost a year to this day, I sold out a little bit and wrote this WhatRunsWhere review.

If you’re not familiar with What Runs Where, it’s a service from two internet pros. One of them is shady, slightly, and the other is a goat named mattaw. Mattaw ( or Max ) has been so kind as to do a few “ask me anything” posts on Wickedfire, so if you want a primer on media buying along with some pro tips, check out Media buying Ask me anything Part 1. I enjoy Part 2 because dullspace makes an appearance.

Also Max wrote an epic guest post on BlueHatSEO called How to Start Your Own Media Buy (Linking to cached version because BlueHatSeo is down at the moment, oh noes!!)

What Runs Where Gets All Shiny and Stuff

When I wrote about What Runs Where in the past, my main complaint was the fairly confusing and slightly ugly user interface. But just in the past week or so, the entire UI has been redesigned and streamlined, so lets take a look.

The interface has been narrowed down to 3 main parts. It’s more along the lines of MixRank, which is a competing service that focuses on scraping Google Adwords data. Although it’s only Adwords data, their interface was a lot more user-friendly than What Runs Where… BUT NO MORE!

Before diving into that, one thing I’ve noticed is that What Runs Where is significantly faster than it was before. Searches only take a second or two, which is pretty surprising based on how much data they have to sift through.

Search By Advertiser

Simple enough. Enter a domain name and find out more then you ever wanted to know about an advertiser.

Warning: a search for “domain.com” and “www.domain.com” will yield different results. I’m being told this is being worked on, but if you keep getting “No Results” then this is why.

AdStrength™ – When you search by Advertiser, you can sort ads by “Most Recent” and “AdStrength” (not sure if really trademarked… or just being clever).

The formula is simple: (Times Seen x Frequency x Days Running) = AdStrength. The higher the score, the more likely it is that this is a successful ad.

Be careful of Brand advertisers though. Some companies could give a fuck about ROI, so their media teams spend the company’s money like its their job (.. it is) If you’re a performance advertiser, or affiliate marketer, you actually care about ROI. Just because an Ad Strength score is high, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a profitable ad. If it’s a brand, chances are they’re spending money to build the brand by getting the most impressions possible. For example, Google Chrome ads are everyyyywhere.

Placement Suggestions – A really neat feature when searching by advertisers. This tab will show you potential placements you can try for your campaigns. DEAR GOD, WHY IS IT SO SIMPLE?!

Search By Publisher

Let’s say you build a media plan with something like Google Adplanner. You can use the “Search By Publisher” feature to look up specific domains and see what kinds of ads are working for that Publisher. Are their more leaderboards than square? Then spend more time on leaderboard ads, lest you wonder why your 300×250 ads are getting no impressions.

On the other hand, if you’re just fishing for campaign ideas, you can look up a popular website for a demographic you’re familiar with to see what companies are advertising there. You can then find some related affiliate campaigns to promote. Better yet, you’d build up your own lead gen funnel so you can collect that juicy user data and promote several types of offers to them.

Search By Keyword

Self-explanatory when you search for Text ads. It’s gets a little trickier when searching for banner ads. Either way, you can get a little clever here and search for random stuff – “HDTV” yields results where Quibids is absolutely dominating.

Useful Ideas and Tips

Let me preface this by saying I’m not an expert media buyer by any means. I dabble, but most stuff has been in the ‘self-serve’ category, versus signing insertion orders and shit like that. They are basically the same thing apart from how the money is spent.

PPV Targets Galore – One of the best uses for What Runs Where and other ad spying tools is the ability to generate a huge list of relevant PPV targets. If you’re running some dating on PPV, you can look up a bunch a of dating advertisers, see where they’re advertising, and pop those placements into your PPV target list. Simple as that. This applies to any niche.

This is far more efficient and effective than something like Google Ad Planner (although, you can never have too many targets) because you already know that this type of offer is already working on these publishers.

We Goin’ International Baby – What Runs Where added a few more international countries to its data. International markets are far less competitive then the US and other English-speaking countries. It is what it is because 95% of marketers won’t take the time to translate ads to another language, despite how easy it is.

The obvious thing to do is find popular Advertisers or Publishers in other countries then look-up what kinds of ads are being served there. Also, you can search by Keyword with a foreign word. For example, even though France is not listed as a country in their database, you can do a keyword search for “rencontre” to bring up a ton of French dating ads.

Hybrid Ads – Some companies like AdSonar and Pulse 360 have creatives known as hybrid ads, which is a text+image combo. Sound familiar? That’s basically what many social media ads are.

You can use the hybrid ad data from What Runs Where in a number of ways (hint: Copy pasting the ads then running them on the same ad network is not one of them). Since we know image accounts for roughly 70% of the CTR, you can easily see what kinds of images are grabbing attention.

You can port these hybrid ads to other traffic sources that support hybrid ads. Facebook and Plenty of Fish come to mind. Of course, some preliminary demographic research is needed here.

You can use the similar images and copy (or be a dick and rip them 100%) to create banner ads that look just like hybrid ads. Make IAB banners that look like hybrid ads, but run them on a banner display network where hybrid ads aren’t supported.

Or you can use the hybrid copy+image to use as a base for catchy PPV landers. Just expand that bit of text and image to a ~700×500 px window and you got yourself a landing page that’s likely to work.

What’s Really Working – You hear about those $10,000+ media buy days that people brag about. Are they bullshitting you or what? For the most part, no. ( Unless you’re selling $50,000 media buy coaching, then yeah, probably bullshitting. )

If you spend enough time digging around What Runs Where, you find little golden nuggets of valuable information. “Why are these Warren Buffet ads showing up on every financial website?” “Why does Quibids have a 50,000+ Ad Strength Rank?” “I thought flogs and farticles were dead?! Why are they all over the sites like MSBNC and Fox News?”

When you start seeing patterns of certain advertisers and types of advertisements showing up on some of the biggest websites in the world, you really get an understanding of where those $50,000 Fridays come from.

Where can What Runs Where Improve?

Export Domains – Right now I don’t see any feature for exporting a CSV of domains when you’re on a “Traffic Sources” tab. Copy and pasting the list, then cleaning it up in Excel is kind of a pain compared to exporting a ready-made CSV.

AdStrength in Keyword Search – It would be nice if doing keyword searches could be sorted by AdStrength or some other factors. I’m just nitpicking here really..

WHY U NO TRY FOR A $1

Do you have $1? Then you can try What Runs Where for 7 days.

Overall, I have to say that WRW stepped its game up. The user interface is a lot better then what it was before. The searches don’t hang like they used to. This really is a tool you want to have in your arsenal if you know the value of competitive research.

As I finish writing this post, Finch beats me to the punch with his own What Runs Where re-review. No need to go there, my review is better. SUCK IT BRITAIN!

You prolly heard about Holographic Tupac at Coachella, but even before that, he was rappin about shit that didn’t happen yet.

Chappelle’s Show – Tupac is Alive from Dundy on Vimeo.

There is no rhyme or reason to how and when I write these wrap up posts, so lets call this the Ad:Tech SF Edition, because Ad:Tech happened since the last time I posted a wrap up (even though I didn’t go.) I could’ve called it the April Fools edition because of how much foolish shit is going on, but whatever.

Oh hey, there are banner spots available if you want to advertise something.

I’m going to try to make this post more useful then usual with more trends and how-to’s when I find them. I seriously wade through a lot of shit to pick out these tidbits. So much “content” on the web is just written for the sake of having content. Tip after tip after tip of shit that you’ve read 50 times before. My conversion rate of considering something useful is like 1%. 100 headlines, 7 worth clicking open, 1 worth posting.

One major item of shit that I will not be discussing is the Facebook Timelime. Hundreds of lame-ass Facebook Timeline posts have plagued my reader- what to do, what not to do, and how to do it, blah blah blah. Whatever. It’s a fucking picture. Get over yourselves, social media experts.

Also don’t be offended if i don’t include your post here if you’re an affiliate blogger. For one, it’s probably not that earth-shattering, and dos, if you have any popularity then people have probably already read it.

lol. Remember Kony? I guess the luster died down after this happened.

The biggest news of the past few weeks is the Facebook buyout of Instagram. ONE BILLION DOLLARS for a photo sharing service that makes your pictures look like they were taking in 1960. I do find it inspiring that the coder of Instagram taught himself to program without formal training.

I highly recommend you watch this clip from the Daily Show for some insight into the purchase.

Shark Tank meets Mad Men. This is what “The Pitch” is about. If working in an ad agency is exciting to you, then this show is right up your alley. For me, it’s cringe-worthy.

Affiliate Marketing News

Remember those tax laws that passed a few months ago? You know, since most state governments are broke due to gross incompetence, they figured they’d get some of that internet money? Well as it turns out, those laws haven’t raised a single fucking penny for those states. Online retailers said “Fuck You” and killed their affiliate programs. In Colorado, said law has been deemed unconstitutional. There is hope for us yet, internet.

But then again, maybe not.

Leads 202 goes open source. Wait no it doesn’t. It did!

Finch sells, then asks, Is it worth cloaking on Facebook? Then, a good read on being committed to a single thing while avoiding the graceless art of ping pong marketing. And finally, a non-nonsense How to Monetize a website post.

What happens after the click? A lot, apparently. Test Everything!

Good tips from PlentyofFish Ben – Some tips for gaming offers. No, not gaming the offers, but offers related to gaming. Then there is this piece about hideous ad design. Also, there is a really nice marketing cheatsheat highlighted by Ben.

Here’s a post from Certified Knowledge on how to product video content that converts. And if you’re using that video in a squeeze page, read this article.

Examining an $1,000,000 ad fraud scheme from Behind the Enemy Lines.

InsideFacebook provides some CTR data from Facebook based on the day of the week

Social Fresh has a post on Facebook Advertising. I didn’t read it but it’s an infographic. Speaking of which, here’s one about Pinterest.

Hate Google? Here’s an infographic outlining lawsuits against Google. While we’re on the subject of hating Google, check out this awful story of Google completely fucking over a startup called Hatchlings.com.

Let’s continue the infographic orgy.
EConsultancy’s infographic about “tags”. Here’s another Pinterest infographic. And finally, a Twitter marketing infographic.

Comparing online dating and online gaming via pixels.

Protip: Those mothafuckin iPad users convert. Yahoo says so too.

Unbounce critiques 35 different landing pages. I love these types posts from them.

Also, a slide deck of Landing Page Success Stories.

The Law of Shitty Click Thru Rates. People not filling out your sign-up form? Here are 8 reasons why.

Also protip: Campaigns almost never work the first time.

Summers coming up. Are you going to hit on the summer trends?

Those Hispanics online mang….

Mobile News

The rate of growth in mobile can’t be measured in decades or years any more. In fact, months are too long of a time frame. Now, it’s a matter of weeks or days.

Mobile has changed the way we consume information, as shown in this video-info-graphic.

Android is catching up to Apple in impression share, thus iADs (the Apple ad platform) lowers its minimum to $100,000 from $500,000. To be honest I had no idea it was that high in the first place.

Trying to go mobile? Then you probably want to use HTML5. Royal Pingdom has a good round up of HTML5 articles. And if you’re using WordPress, you probably want some responsive themes so you’re not forced to create multiple versions of your website. Copyblogger explains. Also, a nice guide from Starbucks on how they made their design responsive.

Here’s a cool infographic about mobile e-commerce.

Good post from MobyAffiliates about the End of the UDID. Imagine, we can no longer identify a phone by using a unique number…. THE HORROR!

Also another good post from them- Avoiding ad decay on mobile. In fact, a few of these tips apply to many types of display advertising. For example, you can squeeze longevity out of PPV campaigns by giving them a break when you notice CTR / conversions drop from fatigue.

Interesting survey regarding QR code marketing. It’s Asia, but the Japanese are years ahead of us in QR code marketing and mobile stuff. So the data will eventually apply here in the US.

A thorough read called The Art of Launching an App from Smashing Magazine.

Maximizing mobile search, straight from Google. Also, Google takes something from Facebook by adding zip code targeting. Although I’m positive they could have done this a while ago.

And in typical ’4th Place’ fashion, Bing, everyone’s favorite red-headed stepchild, adds mobile targeting. Beta…

If you are on Android this is how to change your User agent. Interesting, an A-to-Z Guide on sending SMS with PHP.

If you are building an app that includes search, this is a good article to read on best practices for mobile search.

Can you recommend a mobile ad network? mobithinking is updating that neat list of theirs.

LeadsMob takes a look at what people buy with their mobile devices.

In App purchases will be kind of a big deal. Millennial Media reaches 300 Million users.

Mobile Groove takes a look at Millennial Media and other mobile trends. In another article, Finance and Health are highlighted.

Jesus, Google Play makes no money. The Apple counterpart is doing 8x as much. I wonder what the difference is between Admob and iAds though?

Want to build a mobile app but don’t know where to start? Take a look at these mobile APIs and see what you can come up with.

Too dumb to work with an API? It’s cool, you can always come up with an App that looks like it does something and troll what you would call the ‘lowest common denominator.’

And Then Some Random Tidbits

Business lessons from a wise, old man. He’s not actually old in real life, but it internet time he should have a long grey beard.

Always a starter, but never a finisher.

Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself… Then, read this article by James Altucher on how to be less stupid. Subscribe to his blog because James write a lot of funny articles. This one about brainstorming is pretty good.

A story of building an actual business. 3 years of progress… get’s a little pitchey though towards the end.

Rand Fishkin has a hot girlfriend.

Now, get your suit game proper. That way you’re fly even if you don’t know what to do on a first date.

And this is only being posted for the picture.

I posted this to the IMGrind Forum a couple of days ago. You should join up for more exclusive content such as this, need pro-tips from internet marketing experts, or just want to see entire threads dedicated to IMGrind tattoos.

This is basically an intro to Facebook’s Open Graph and some ideas on how you can integrate it into your ventures. My goal here is to try to explain Open Graph in a much shorter space then the maze know as Facebook’s Documentation.

What is Facebook Open Graph?

The best way to think of it is: Facebook is "open-sourcing" the ‘Like’ action, which has been a staple of the Facebook experience since the dawn of internet time. Except, with the Open Graph, you create your own "Actions" – so people can "listen" "dance" "titty-fuck" whatever – ACTION = VERB- as long as it follows these guidelines.

Basically – keep it simple and non-offensive. So a "Fuck, Marry, Kill" game would be out of the question.

But useful for Affiliates?
Sure. You definitely have to think outside the box to take full advantage, but you can integrate it into existing properties as well with simpler “Actions”. If you are friends with Ruck or Ryan on Facebook, you’ll see them "Reading" articles on IMGrind. This shows up in my Feed because Facebook thinks, "hey 2 or more friends of Barman’s do stuff with that IMGrind App- show it in his Feed" I haven’t even allowed the IMGrind FB App ( no offense ) but it shows up in my Feed. If i allowed the App, or any other app using Open Graph, it would show up in my Timeline and show up to my friends. That’s how powerful Open Graph is.

These "Actions" will show up in
- User’s Timeline.
- User’s Wall and Friends will see it on their Walls too.
- Ticker – that thing on the right side always updating you with what friends are doing.

The whole point is Frictionless Sharing.

Asking for the "publish_actions" (needed for Open Graph) permission does not even show an extra page during the Auth process. Asking for any other extended permission brings up a 2nd step, which lowers rate at which people install the app. But "publish_actions" makes it frictionless.

Anyway, the whole point is that Facebook is letting developers take advantage of their giant massive user base with an easy API. Here is a success story. Notice how the “Actions” the Foodspotting App has are kind of unique and fun. Have you ever ‘nommed‘ something?

I’m not even going to get into Facebook Mobile’s growth but I’m sure the Open Graph will be integrated on there too, if not already.

Definition of an “Application”

There’s probably a little confusion still on what exactly is an “App”? You can think of Facebook as a very powerful Plugin (since there is so much you can do, it explains why the documentation is in such disarray).

So you can build something that leverages only some of the features ( just get a user’s information for a Signup) or you can base your entire “App” around Facebook, like My Friends Secrets, which grabs a User’s Friends list and their info, and creates a game out of that data.

Inside Facebook, you have to create an "Application" ( developers.facebook.com ). Doesn’t matter if you are connecting a blog or creating the next Zynga. The API keys and stuff it gives you allows you Auth users, hit the Open API, etc.

Under App Settings … "Select how your app integrates with Facebook"
1. Website – Simple enough, eh? Say you add Like buttons and stuff..
2. App on Facebook (desktop) – This is where Facebook Iframes one of your URLs and users access the page via http://apps.facebook.com/myappsname. Facebook does this Iframe so they can make money off the ads on the right side of the screen.
3. Mobile Web (mobile) – Same as above, but setting this URL just redirects any Mobile users to the URL you set here (since they haven’t figured out how to make the mobile monies yet, and can’t Iframe like above).
4. Native Android – When you create an Android application (via android SDK ), you need to create a unique certificate ( part of the release process ) With that cert, you create a key hash which you enter in this line.
5. Native iOS – Same process, not sure on the details.
6. Page Tab - Not entirely sure but i think this is for creating page plugins and stuff.

Can you technically create a single "app" that works on the Desktop, Mobile Devices, Android, and iOS? Sure you can- I did ( Android version with a Lite Mobile Web version so users can share stuff with non-Android users).

Easy-pickings

These are fast ways to increase exposure for existing properties. I don’t think any one is going to get rich by adding Open Graph WordPress plugins to their blogs, but it will most definitely increase the amount of people that see you ( free referral traffic from Facebook essentially ).

WordPress – There are plugins, tutorials, that will make your blog Open Graph friendly.

Forum – For example, IMGrind “posts” that you see on Facebook. I’m not sure if the guys used a forum plugin, or had it build up from scratch. Either way, it allows them to get referral traffic from Facebook much easier then forcing users to “Post this to Facebook!”

Long-Term Success

My personal opinion, if you want to blow up, "Pinterest"-style…. Actually, a quick aside: Pinterest took what, 5-6 years to pop-off? They created an awesome UI, and based their whole site around the Action of "Pinning" I don’t know if their idea of "Pinning" came before, after, or during the Open Graph, but they use the shit out of Facebook Open Graph for growth.

It’s certainly no overnight success, but that doesn’t mean you can’t see massive growth in a few months. Or few weeks, for that matter. Note that Draw Something also had the power of the Apple App Store pushing new users, not sure on their Facebook integration. People certainly shared regardless, because screenshots from the app were entertaining.

Zynga is the best company at taking advantage of Facebook. They steal other peoples ideas, improve some shit, and make sure their Facebook game is on point (Invite a Facebook friend to play a Game!) Now that they’ve been ousted as thieves, they are just buying the companies – like OMGPOP (which was around for 6 years mind you, before Draw Something happened)

Anyway, If you really want to take advantage, you need to develop something long-term. I don’t see a lot of spamming dirty-work opportunities here (especially with the submission process. Actions need approval before going “live”), so a project that really takes advantage of the Open Graph would require some thought and work on your part.

That doesn’t mean you have to build a complex game with amazing graphics though. There are perfectly good ways to add Facebook Open Graph inside a utility app, and plenty of ways to create fun Apps that are text-based and light on the graphics.

But first, Objects

OBJECT = NOUN – An Object is a URL, plain and simple. As long as the URL represents some unique thing, you should be good to go.

If you passed English 101, you recognize that a grammatically correct sentence in the English languages requires a Noun ( Object ) and a Verb ( Action ). Are you getting this yet…?

Read this page for a quick intro to Open Graph Protocol. Notice that Google uses this protocol too for their +1. Defining Open Graph properties for your URLs is nothing more than Meta Tags.

There are "built-in" objects – Articles, Videos, Websites, TV Shows, etc… For example, any IMDB movie has a unique URL to represent it.

And there are Custom Objects. It doesn’t matter what your objects are, as long as it can be reached with a URL. It just needs to be something (a restaurant on Yelp), or a representation of something (a users High Score)

Custom Object and Action Ideas?

Enough jibber-jabber Barman, give me some practical examples!

Wallpapers – You have a site with wallpapers. Create a custom "apply" Action and hit the API when people "apply" that image to their Desktop. (I just came up with that on the spot but it is a pretty good idea)

When you absolutely, positively, need to hate something…
Bad Review – I had this brainfart one day to for an App that lets people leave a bad review for anything, on the spot. "Oh that movie sucked!" "This restaurant had horrible service!" The Place for Leaving 1 Star Reviews Only!.

It would be a process to integrate APIs to load in movies, restaurants, service centers, etc – but its definitely doable. Plus i don’t think Facebook would like a "absolutely hated" Action, but “regret” or “despise” might work.

In my personal ventures, I have submitted a "Rate" action so when people rate stuff in my app, it hits the API and Facebook shows that shit every where. I’ve also created "Believe" and "Doubt" actions, so people can agree/disagree with shit in my App. So you can create an obvious Action (rate) or come up with new shit like i did (believe). The English Vocabulary is your oyster!

Someone can "claim" a daily deal….
Someone can "draw" something (apply the Action after they’ve complete the drawing, which should be accessible by a unique URL)
Someone can "collect" new cars in a stupid Car Garage app…

So on and so forth. I know that I can open up to almost any page in this book and come up with an idea.

Anyway, it’s not hard to come up with ideas. Implementing them and getting them built is the hard part, but that’s a different post. Just make sure to do you market research so you’re not devoting time to an app that no one will likely ever use, like an App for Microsoft Zune Users.

Random Tips and Thoughts

First go through the Checklist before submitting an Action for approval.

Picky About Grammar – The reason Facebook is so picky about grammar when you submit actions is because the Action should show up everything (feed, ticker, timeline) so they don’t want grammatical errors everywhere.

Publishing Actions – Actions don’t show up until they are approved by Facebook. They will show up for developers of the app, so you have to Publish some actions yourself and make sure they work.

Objects in Facebook = meta data – Since Objects are just URLs, your Object information is just meta data. This is the root of all this bullshit, so once you get your head around that, Open Graph makes a lot more sense.

Understanding should be easier if you’re familiar with SEO and how unique URLs are treated. Every blog or forum post can be reached with a unique URL, every piece of data on a review website can be reached with a single URL, so on and so on….

Make sure your Objects are in check. Use the Open Graph Debugger to crawl your URL and make sure all the meta data is correct.

Built-in Vs Custom – Submitting your Custom Actions, in my experience, takes about 3 days for a review. Apparently, if you use a build-in Action / Object (read, book), it takes longer.

Aggregations – Essentially these are what shows up in a User’s Timeline. You have to create one for every Action. I know this can be confusing… and what you create depends on your Action. But if you have a ‘rate’ Action, your Aggregation can just sort those ‘ratings’ lowest to highest.

Action Properties – So how do you record a property with an Action? If you had a "rate" Action and wanted to record what they Score rated?
1. add a Custom Property when you create your Action in Facebook. For example, an Integer called "Score"
2. when you publish your action, add that property to the parameters when you hit the API.
3. profit?

And Finally…

Open Graph is a great way to increase exposure to your properties, but it definitely takes some reading to understand how it works. Hopefully this post helped get the ball rolling.

You can do a simple Open Graph integration for your blog or forum, or you can get crazy and build an App that is entirely based around the Open Graph. Either way, you’ll have the power of Facebook to drive more users to your property.

And definitely check out the IMGrind forum for more exclusive content such as this post before you.

Y U NO LISTEN TO NEW HOT FIRE FROM YTCRACKER?

Oh shit, it’s offically Spring. So let’s do some spring cleaning on the RSS reader to see if anything interesting is going on in the world of online marketing.

Mobile News

Here would be a number of links about the growth of mobile, smartphone sales, tablets, blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda, but this kind of news is getting redundant. If you haven’t gotten it in your head yet that mobile is experiencing growth many times faster than what happened with the desktop internet, you might have brain damage. Anyway…

RoyalPingdom takes a look at mobile OS distribution. Feature phones still lead, but Android and iOS are catching up very fast.

Upper-middle class chicks bridging the spending gap on mobile.

Did you know you can use an app to detect which ad networks your mobile apps are using? I use another app too, call “Addons Detector” for Android which goes a little deeper. Very fun competitive research!

Opinion: How to track mobile downloads? Part 2. UUID? Cookies? This fellow has some options on it. Networks and tracking platforms should definitely take a look at both articles.

Mobile SEO via Bing. Takeaway – don’t create a mobile version of your website (different URL) if at all possible. Use media queries, client-side or server-side detection. Google is saying the same thing.

Smaato sees impressive growth.

The LeadsMob Blog has good daily, sometimes more, tidbits of mobile commerce and advertising news. So stay up on things and subscribe.

Setting Bejeweled Free. Fly away, little Bejeweled.

Affiliate and Online Marketing News

FBAdsToolBox is a nifty little tool to instantly create a few dozen variations of a single ad image. I gave it a run, and it’s definitely a good product for advertisers that spend their day throwing up ads on Facebook and Plenty of Fish.

FinchSells speaks the truth about Mondays. Most entrepueners love Mondays, especially if you make less with your offers during the weekend slumps. But the point is get your Monday started off right, and you’ll be better preapred for the rest of the week. Start it off by being lazy, and before you know it it’s Friday and you’re saying “Fuck it! I’ll do next Monday.”

Good interview about a PPVPlaybook.com Success Story, Dr Manhattan.

I know a lot of people, for reasons unknown to me, seem to be jumping into soiling the sancity of Pinterest with their spam and affiliate links. If that’s the case, maybe you might want to know more about the average Pinterest user. SocialFresh has had a lot of posts recently about Pinterest, so you should probably subscribe if that’s relevant to you. Like this post about a mom’s purchasing decisions being influenced by the site.

Various tips on for local SEO in Google Places. Handy if that is your thing.

While we’re on the topic of SEO, Google is shitting all over it. So here’s what you need to know before Matt Cutts shits all over your livelyhood. But if you want completely useless SEO tips directly from Google, here you go.

Gender-based marketing from Econsultancy – infographic goodness!!!111 Here be some more infographic goodness, examining consumer behaivior.

10 very useful tips from ConversionXL on how people view websites. Here is another post about grabbing attention. #3 grabbed my attention, if you know what i mean.

More copywriting stuff – Verbs beat adjectives by NeuroScienceMarketing.

I love these kinds of posts from Unbounce, where they rip apart a number of landing pages to explain what’s good, and what isn’t.

KissMetrics always has good stuff. Out of ideas for your shitty blog? Here’s an a good strategy for generating topics. Awesome stuff about choosing what graphics and images you use on your website and landers. And here’s 7 more tips on that.

How to track Likes and other Social Media sharing with Google Analytcs.

Yo dawg, heard you need an advertising API?

Long ass post from ViperChill on creating million-dollar web apps.

Shoemoney officially jumps the shark, accidently lands on it, then fucks its dead body. Why the fuck would this even be a post? The only reason this is a post is so he can rank for the term “zuckerberg penis,” which i assume has hefty volume. I know Shoe will sell out for almost anything, but I thought he had some respect for himself and his readers, but no, this is not the case.

CakesTV Episode 4 is out. I haven’t watched it yet, but I am dying to see the awkwardness between Cakes and Steve Howe, because know they exchanged some words in at a past conference.

Good shit from Mr.Green highlighting what works on Plenty of Fishies.

InforMarketingBlog is an entire blog that highlights old ass advertisements from the Mad Men days. Add it to your reader.

Possibily Important Randomness

This is your brain on dru… i mean video games.

Facebook is an addiction, so Royal Pingdom examines why people love Facebook so much.

Using Amazon’s SES Service with PHP to send bulk mail. Most interesting.

Asian Efficiency reviews Eat that Frog. Classic book. Brian Tracy is a legend.

Nontoxin is rarely updated, but the posts are always awesome. Who needs sleep? (You, idiot!) and some cool shit about optical illusions.

This motherfucker tells it like it is and I love it. It’s engrossing…

Good stuff for people interested in Zynga, how they came up, and why its still the biggest.

I remember watching this show ( Weed Wars ) but I completely forgot about this clip. Thank baby Jesus I just stumbled across it, so I may share it with the world.

When I saw it on TV the first time, I fucking lost it. He is trying so fucking hard to get it right, and when he does… sheer bliss.

It’s not a crack pipe Grandpa! GOT DAMN