Famous Bloggers and Internet Marketers Facebook Timeline Images

With the latest Facebook Timeline changes now in effect, I thought it would be a cool idea to feature some of the top names in the industry and see what pictures they are using for their Facebook accounts. As you will see, the majority of images are quite personable, while some are used for branding and marketing of their companies, brands and web sites. You can also visit any of their Facebook pages by clicking on the Facebook link next to their respective names.

Darren Rowse of Problogger.net – Facebook

Jeremy Schoemaker of ShoeMoney.com – Facebook

John Chow of JohnChow.com – Facebook

Yaro Starak of Entrepreneurs-Journey.com – Facebook

Guy Kawasaki of AllTop.com – Facebook

Jim Kukral of JimKukral.com – Facebook

Mark Cuban of HDNET.com – Facebook

Ryan Eagle of EWANetwork.com – Facebook

Ted Murphy of IZEA.com – Facebook

Lorenzo Green of MrGreen.am – Facebook

Gary Vaynerchuck of GaryVaynerchuk.com – Facebook

Garin Kilpatrick of GarinKilpatrick.com – Facebook

Tim Ash of SiteTuners.com – Facebook

Ian Fernando of IanFernando.com – Facebook

Ralph Ruckman of IMGrind.com – Facebook

Shawn Collins of AffiliateSummit.com – Facebook

Neil Patel of QuickSprout.com – Facebook

Zac Johnson of ZacJohnson.com – Facebook

09 April, 2012 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Facebook 23 Comments

FTC Settles with Facebook

Facebook is quickly approaching the 1 billion members mark, and it’s also growing daily as a new revenue source for affiliate and online marketers. Through Facebook Ads, advertisers can target nearly all members of Facebook based on their demographics and interests. There has been a lot of discussion on Facebook and their privacy settings lately. This article will discuss the latest FTC settlement with Facebook. It seems like Facebook is always in the news for something, but they just keep growing and chugging along… is Facebook too big to fail?

On November 29, 2011, the Federal Trade Commission settled allegations that Facebook violated Section 5 of the FTC Act by virtue of its privacy practices. The FTC’s enforcement action against Facebook is a clear example of the FTC’s efforts to ensure that websites live up to the privacy promises they make to consumers and that Facebook’s innovations will not come at the expense of consumer privacy.

The FTC’s complaint alleges that Facebook engaged in unfair trade practices by repeatedly failing to conform to its own promises regarding privacy to its hundreds of millions of users. Specifically, the FTC alleges that although Facebook informed customers that they could “control who can see” their profile information by using privacy settings to restrict access to their profiles, these settings did not prevent certain third party applications from accessing their profile information.

The Commission also alleges that Facebook:

Made changes to its website that made public, information that users previously designated as private, without adequate notice;
Represented that third party applications would only be able to access profile information that was necessary to operate the application, but were oftentimes given unlimited access to consumer’s profile information;
Provided advertisers with information about users despite promises that it would not do so; and
Represented that users profile information, including photos and videos, would be in accessible upon deletion of accounts. However, Facebook continued to allow third parties to access such content after accounts were deactivated or deleted.

The alleged violations of Section 5 of the FTC Act also include a failure to comply with the substantive privacy requirements of the United States-European Union Safe Harbor Framework, a voluntary framework that allows companies to transfer personal data from the European Union to the United States in compliance with European Union law. Since at least 2009, Facebook has maintained self-certification with the Department of Commerce under the Safe Harbor program, under which it has declared its compliance with the seven Safe Harbor privacy principles in its public Privacy Policy and on the U.S. Department of Commerce website. In its complaint, the FTC alleged that Facebook failed to comply with the Safe Harbor principles of Notice and Choice that required it to inform individuals about all the purposes for which it collected their data and to give those individuals a choice about how their information would be used.

Pursuant to the terms of the proposed settlement, Facebook is barred from further misrepresenting its privacy practices and is required to obtain opt-in consent from users prior to making changes that override their privacy preferences. Facebook must also ensure that a user’s information cannot be accessed by anyone after a reasonable period of time, not to exceed 30 days, following the user’s deletion of his or her account, and implement a comprehensive program that protects the privacy and confidentiality of users’ information. Lastly, Facebook must obtain independent privacy compliance audits every two years for the next twenty years, certifying that it has a privacy program in place that satisfies the requirements of the FTC consent decree.

According to Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, the company will create two new corporate officer position, Chief Privacy Policy Officer and Chief Privacy Products Officer.

Inasmuch as the FTC has recently agreed to consent decrees with both Google and Twitter involving record keeping obligations, the FTC now appears to possess regulatory oversight over the privacy and data security practices of the big three social networking companies in the United States.

This guest post was written by Richard B. Newman, an Internet attorney that specializes in performance marketing and regulatory compliance at Hinch Newman LLP in New York, New York.

30 November, 2011 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Facebook

Ten Most “Liked” Music Artists on Facebook

The ability to target an audience based on their demographic data, but also their “interests“, makes Facebook Ads still one of the best ad platforms out there, if not the best. Through “interest” targeting, you can build campaigns that are focused on exactly what the user is interested in, which leads to a higher click through rate and more conversions.

Focusing on music artists, I’ve compiled a list of the top 10 music artists on Facebook and listed them below.

1. Eminem – 43,597,895

2. Rihanna – 40,970,115

3. Lady Gaga – 40,845,124

4. Shakira – 37,267,475

5. Justin Bieber – 33,219,214

6. Linkin Park – 32,525,479

7. Katy Perry – 32,218,637

8. Lil Wayne – 29,169,770

9. Bob Marley – 28,719,894

10. Akon – 27,966,380

So now that you have this information, what can you do with it?

The easy answer is to build an ad campaign which targets to each of these Facebook groups. Select an affiliate offer (such as free iPod/iPhone) and build a landing page that is built specifically for each target audience.

If you are lucky enough, you might be able to find an ad campaign that was already built specifically for your celebrity of choice. While looking through oDigger, I was able to pull up the following Zip Submit offer for Lady Gaga.

Get creative and see what you can do to build campaigns around celebrities, movies and music artists. Facebook just makes it too easy to target these audiences. Your job is to make sure the campaigns convert and back out into a profit.

21 July, 2011 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Facebook

The Business of Facebook – Infographic

When it comes to the users of Facebook, average users and internet marketers both see the social network in two completely different lights. The average user can’t wait to see the latest status updates and photos from their “friends”. While the internet marketer can’t wait to tap into the latest set of demographics and targets for new users and to create a new stream of ad campaigns to flow through the hundreds of millions of users currently on Facebook.

No matter if you are just an addicted user of Facebook, or currently mastering their Facebook Ads platform as a revenue source, you should find the following stats and information quite amazing.

With Facebook planning to launch their IPO stock later in the year, will the growth and success of Facebook keep jumping higher and higher. Does Facebook deserve a $50 BILLION evaluation? Only time will tell, but I’d like to think so… and these astounding numbers don’t lie.

The following infographic is from the latest issue of FastCompany, in an article called “The Business of Facebook“. One of my favorite points in the infographics is “Analysts estimate that Facebook pulled in $1.86 BILLION in advertising in 2010. That’s expected to grow 118% this year, to $4 billion.“… how much of this is due to affiliate marketing, and how will Facebook Ads continue to change their ad platform, advertising policies and feelings towards affiliate marketing?

Other key statistics from the Facebook infographic include:

Facebook has 610,736,920 MEMBER PROFILES. That’s once for every ELEVEN people on the planet.

Based on page views and users, Facebook is the NO. 2 site in the U.S., behind Google and ahead of YouTube and Yahoo.

EVERY 60 SECONDS ON FACEBOOK, USERS send 230,000 messages, update 95,000 statuses, write 80,000 wall posts, tag 65,000 photos, share 50,000 links—and affirm or disparage them all with half a million comments.

Zynga, Facebook’s biggest app developer, has 19 games that attract 275 MILLION users a month, sabotaging about a kajillion hours of productivity. (Damn you, CityVille!)

Facebook takes a 30% cut of all revenue generated through its virtual currency, Facebook Credits. Virtual goods for sale on the site make up an estimated $835 MILLION market.

AMERICANS make up 24% of users, followed by Indonesians (6%), Brits (5%), and Turks (4$).

Brands with the MOST fans on Facebook: Coca-Cola (21.6 million),Starbucks (19 million), Oreo (16.2 million), Disney (15.6 million), and Red Bull (14.7 million).

26 March, 2011 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Facebook

How to Get Facebook Ads for Free… Almost

It seems like everyone has been talking about Facebook Ads for the past several years now, yet so many people are still on the sidelines or got scared away. Yes, Facebook Ads can be extremely tough to master and very frustrating with the ad approval process. Not to mention you can actually blow through a lot of money fast if you don’t know what you are doing. However, how can you turn your back on a ad platform that allows you to target over 600 million people all over the world based on their demographics and interests.

I always find myself coming back to Facebook and running new ad campaigns. Most lose money, but when you get something that works, it’s really great. Sometimes I even surprise myself with new ad creatives and targeting groups that I come up with, and also seeing what makes people click. I wanted to share some numbers that I’ve seen in the past month while playing around with a new campaign. The greatest part about this latest campaign, was the ability to create some really phenomenal ad copy that people loved, but more importantly… almost getting clicks for free, and the majority in the .01-.o2 range.

Facebook Ads Clicks for Pennies

Below are the stats from one of my top ad campaigns based on US only traffic. Demographics range from 13-27 years old, male/female and covered various combinations of demographics and interests. You will also see that many of these ads were pulling in click through rates of .40%-.62%, which is extremely well for Facebook advertising. Some creatives were even pulling 1% click through rates at times.

A final summary of the US ad campaign stats are shown below. With nearly 10 million impressions shown, the campaign ended with 29,836 clicks and only spent $213.63 on ad costs. That comes out to less than one cent per click!

Targeting the US is one of the most expensive markets you can go after on Facebook, but in the end it all comes down to click through rates. I copied the same success I had with my US campaign and played around with the demographic and interest targeting a bit more, then had the same type of success in CANADA and the UK. You can see the full stats below.

Facebook Ads Tips for Success

I’m sure all of you are wondering what creatives, ad copy and actual web site or cpa I was promoting. Unfortunately that would just be shooting myself in the foot and killing the campaign if I was to release that type of information. Instead, I will provide the exact tips and monetization I used to create ad copy with these numbers.

Target your Facebook Ads in very small groups. Yes, this is a pain, but it’s how you will achieve the greatest click through rates. If you don’t want to do break down a campaign by every age individually, break it out within three to five years, then that the first set of stats to see if it’s worth breaking down again. (ie: males 18-21, males 22-25, males 26-29 etc…)

Target by interest. This one is a no brainer, but it’s important to keep stressing your targeted interest in the ad copy. For instance, if you are going to target “The Simpsons“, try and use something relating to The Simpsons as your image, in your title and description.

Use Great Pictures. Facebook ads are all about the headline and the image, but which of the two really grabs your eye first… the picture of course! Try to use only the highest quality pictures that are sized correctly for Facebook ads placement, which is 110×80. If you can crop or design images, there are a ton of places that will do this for a few dollars. It really makes a big difference to have a great “call to action” image on your ads. (Dating = Hot Girls, Email Submits = Exciting Products, Travel = Landmarks)

CPC vs. CPM bidding. Using the statistics from the campaign above, I was mainly using CPM as my bidding model… however I did first test with CPC. Facebook Ads runs all of their inventory based on ad spend and user click through rate. If I initially setup these ad campaigns at a CPC model and put in .01 or .02 per click, Facebook would likely have never even given me any impressions. By bidding on the CPM model, Facebook knows they are going to make money no matter what. First test with CPC, get an idea on what people are clicking on, then back it out to CPM bidding.

Limit Your Losses and Ad Spending. When I first start a new campaign through Facebook Ads, I’m always anxious to get the first set of results. Sometimes the traffic comes in slow, and some times it’s an avalanche. Fortunately Facebook allows you to set a budget for how much you want to spend on your campaign per day. If you are adding a lot of new campaigns, be sure to set a low daily limit for each. As you learn which campaigns are making you money, make sure to increase your daily limits as this will determine the amount of traffic you will receive from Facebook.

Use Social / “Likes” to your advantage. Want to create a campaign or creative that people really like? Come up with something that people are truly interested in and will want to share with your friends. How many times did you “Like” a product, fan page or ad on Facebook because you saw one of your friends listed as liking it? I’m sure it had a big influence on your decision, as it has been proven to work time and time again. Create a killer product or service that people really like, and they will share it with their friends, while being seen as a “fan” of your product/service. You can also stop your ads from being seen by people who are already “fans” of your product, which you can’t do with generic Facebook ads.

Making Facebook Ads Work for You

No matter what type of Facebook ads campaign you create, if you follow these rules, you will have more success than just throwing up as many different ads as you can, and hoping for one of them to work. While it is tough to continually make money with Facebook ads, you need to put in the necessary work on adding new campaigns, targeting new niches and demographics. Follow these tips to improve your chances of success with Facebook Ads.