Humble beginnings with Facebook Flyers Pro

As I mentioned in my post below (Cashing In With Facebook Flyers), as soon as I saw Facebook Flyers Pro, I really wanted to try something with it. I didn't have enough time to follow up on the initial thought, but today I decided to sit down and try a couple of little experiments, just to see if the well had really dried up already - or was it still possible to make a little money through this monolithic site.

For those who haven't had a chance to investigate it yet, Facebook Flyers come in two flavours:

Facebook Flyers Basic - uses a CPM model, i.e. you pay for a certain number of impressions for your flyer. Prices start from $5 for 2,500 impressions and goes up to $200 for 100,000 impressions.

Facebook Flyers Pro - a CPC model, i.e. you pay a certain amount per click on your flyer. The minimum bid is $0.01 and the minimum daily budget is $1.00. The system is not as complex as Google Adwords, but I guess it will develop over time as popularity grows and the advertiser management options improve.

I didn't even bother with the basic version, mainly because I didn't have any existing campaigns with a proven click through rate that I wanted to run on Facebook - and I'm glad I didn't.

So far I've set up 4 pro flyers that are based on pay per lead offers from Commission Junction. Two of the flyers are a split test of the same offer but with different targetting, the other two are separate offers with rather loose targetting.

I was really surprised to see the impressions counting up within 5 minutes of creating a flyer. My first flyer had almost 10,000 impressions within the first 1.5 hours and the others are showing healthy numbers of impressions. This is the reason why I'm glad I didn't go for the CPM version. The click through rates have been really low, so for example the flyer with 10,000+ impressions would have already cost me $20+ and so far it has resulted in a single lead!

It's still early days, the impressions seem to have stabilised from the initial rush and are still going up, but not as fast. I'm looking forward to seeing how the results look at the end of the day. If things look good, I might boost the cost per click a bit and see what happens.

Who else is trying out some Facebook Flyers Pro campaigns? I'd be interested to hear your results so far.

Cashing In With Facebook Flyers

Perhaps a more appropriate title for this post could be "If You Snooze, You Lose".

Hands up all the people that only just noticed Facebook Flyers.

My hand is up. After staying away from Facebook for a couple of days, I logged in yesterday and immediately noticed the "flyers" down the left hand side (mainly because it was one of those "Get paid to type from home" offers - and whoops, I actually clicked it!).

My first thought was "I wonder who else has started hitting this already?". Surely everyone was all over it? But that didn't stop my brain from racing with ways to put Facebook Flyers Pro to good use. In the end, I ran out of time yesterday to sit down and plot how I was going to make my first million from Facebook. Ironically, running out of time may have actually saved me a lot of time (wasted), because this morning on my first daily visit to ShoeMoney I read this post by Paul from uberaffiliate.com.

Damn! looks like someone's been all over it already. Paul didn't just make some chump change using Facebook Flyers Pro - he pretty much did a smash'n'grab! In his ShoeMoney post (and others on his own site) he details his approach fairly throroughly and goes on to mention the measures Facebook have taken to prevent others from taking the same approach. All in all I'd say he took full advantage of the opportunity, so props to Paul!

Still, I don't think all is lost. The Facebook Flyers Pro PPC program is brand new and I think it's starting to stabilise. Perhaps the initial opportunity to make ridiculous amounts of money very fast have been and gone, but just like Adwords, people will start developing solid strategies and practices to use it just as effectively as any other PPC service. It also proves that there are new opportunities arising all the time, you just have to be able to see them, and act when you do (note to self).

So who do you reckon will be first to release an ebook, or special report on Facebook Flyers Pro? (Someone's probably already finished one before I finished that sentence!).