As a part in my endless experiment with the workings of the Internet, I pondered ways to increase the RSS subscribers to Consumer Whore, a little side project I have.  Consumer Whore features something cool to buy everyday.  On the surface, if CW were to refer waves of people to purchase an item there could be a potential for money via affiliate ads, sponsored posts, and display advertising.  So far, the growth of the blog is on par with its age.  After a month of being live, there are 8 RSS subscribers (5 of which I personally know).  The daily stats:

CW posts every weekday, so the stats dip a bit every weekend.

The Plan

I set off to take an ad out in Facebook.  I have had limited (but successful) experience with this, and wanted to try again.   On the days I was going to have the ad display, I wanted to make the item of the day an affiliate link.

An affiliate link is a link to a retailer’s product.  If you refer them a user that eventually results in a sucessful sale, you receive a percentage of that sale.

Theoretically, this would drive more traffic than usual to the blog on a day where the most prominent item could make me some money.  I still had a Commission Junction account from my College v2 days, and signed up to be a part of the Love Sac affiliate program.

I chose Love Sac, because a few of my friends have them and all love their … um … sac.

Placing the Ad

Since the last time I tried to advertise on Facebook, they have upped their advertising system so your target demographic can be extremely narrow.  I choose people between 18 and 28 years old in the United States who have listed “shopping” among their interests.

However I failed to note an obvious flaw with Consumer Whore: It has the word “whore” in the title putting up a red flag in any profanity filter.   My first ad I submitted was this one:

In my infinite genius, not only did it have the word “whore”, but also “sucks”, “sexy”, and “love sac”.   After receiving Facebook’s rejection letter (“The text may not contain, facilitate or promote offensive, profane, vulgar, obscene, adult or inappropriate language.” –Whoops) , I created a new ad … that got rejected for “excessive or incorrect capitalization.”

Finally I settled on the ad below:

The numbers

I paid 62 cents per clickthrough for a max of $25 per day.  The ad ended up running for one and a half days.   The stats for Facebook are below:

As you can see, the ad had a terrible click through rate (CTR).  I’m still new to the online ad game, but my hope was for 1%.  In my mind, this means my ad copy stunk.

However, it’s not necessarily the CTR rate that affects me.  The CTR more affects Facebook as they could have had an ad with a higher bid in place of mine, and made more money than they did from me.  What matters to me is how many people click through to my site and then (hopefully) to my affiliate link.  As you saw from the stats in the first picture, there was not a noticeable spike on the days the ad ran.  Granted, traffic did increase, but it was just as high as any other “random” spike in the days past.

The affiliate link traffic was absolutely terrible with only ONE person clicking on the link.

So to recap:

Money spent: $32.42
Increase in traffic: negligible
Affiliate link clicks: 1
Revenue IF that one person purchased the product: ~$20 (10% of a $200 sale).

After having a few days to stew think about this, I think the following rules should apply to my next ad buy:

1. Don’t mention the name of the site.  No one cares.  If they click, they are interested in the product
2. I should research the most likely demographic to purchase items under $200 on the Web.  Just assuming people who had “shopping” as an interest would be ideal was lazy.
3. Pick a product with a less unfortunate name.

I hope to have a better story to tell next time!

SimplyRSS has solved that problem by adding page functionality, and I am currently using SimplyRSS for The Temple News. I suggest adding your paper’s blog and site feeds to get some more pageviews as well as spreading awareness of your content.

Thanks to Scott Stewart of the Gateway for giving me the heads up.

I know what you might be thinking: “If I hear anything more about college and Facebook I’m going to chop my ears off and go into PR.”

Reality is, Facebook is the new beer. Actually that is an understatement. I’m pretty sure that the top two things that would piss my generation off the most would be the reinstitution of the draft and if someone took away our Facebook.

Hyperbole aside, college newspapers have a built in marketing system in place that ALL of their readers are already a part of, so why not take advantage of it? Here is how:

Create a “business” page.

Although currently limited in its use, the “business” page of Facebook allows “fans” to rate and upload media related to your product. Facebook even gives you a discussion board. I recently just created a page for The Temple News, and am fooling around with ways to use it.

How do I do this?

Well, first go to the “create a business page” erm… page. The rest is filling out fields and uploading pictures. The business page as it stands now is currently a crippled version of the personal profile page. You can rearrange boxes and add applications, however not every application works with the business page.

To know whether an application will work when you go to add it you will see these buttons:

Be sure to hit “Add to Page”, otherwise you will do what I did and have a whole bunch of useless apps on your profile page. I am warning you that the search function for the Page applications is terrible. There is an “App for pages” section but when you try to search for anything specific it searches EVERY app making finding the right app a painful process of opening each one and checking if it has the above button.

The holy grail for the College Newspaper would be an RSS import feature like “Notes” which currently doesn’t work with profiles. So for now we are regulated to simply establishing a presence, manually (!) uploading videos, and trying to foster reader discussion. I still believe that the business page on Facebook needs a little bit more work before it is useful to newspapers though. If anything, it is another way to connect to your readers and community, and thats not bad for a few minutes of setup.

Oh and become a fan of the Temple News

Author RSS import

Speaking of RSS feeds, the most useful thing I have used facebook for is the Notes feature. Using Notes, anybody can import an RSS feed to blast their friends. If you can swing an author RSS feed, have reporters enter their author RSS feed as notes and you will start to see the clicks come poring in from their friends. I don’t have to tell you how this can drastically improve your reach as a newspaper. Plus readers can comment on the note as well as on your site so the author can get semi-private direct feedback.

How do I do this?

The following directions are good if you have a WordPress blog, which is the only CMS I can think of on the top of my head that college newspapers would use that has author feeds.

1. Find a post you have written on your blog
2. Click your name
3. Look at the URL and add “/feed” to the end. For example: “ http://domain.com/author/username/feed“
4. Copy that URL into Word/Notepad and hold on to it.
5. Go to “http://yournetwork.facebook.com/editnotes.php “
6. You’ll see a text field. Paste the link you put in word which should look like “http://domain.com/author/YOURNAMEHERE/feed “
7. Click “start importing”
8. In the upper right hand corner click “Confirm import”
9. Set it and forget it.

Advertising

Facebook ads are cheap and they work. We used them to launch our blog Broad and Cecil. But I already told you about that…

There are probably other ways to use Facebook, but for now these are the most obvious. I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t do this. The fact that this all takes about 20 minutes of work for such a long term benefit should put this high on your “to do” list tomorrow.

So we only let the outside world know about the blog by displaying it on the front page of the paper and by running Facebook flyers. I also encouraged staffers to put the links in their profiles as well as integrate their WordPress author RSS feeds to automatically add to their Facebook “Posted Items”. So where did the first two days of traffic come from?

<– See for yourself. Although it doesn’t look like much, the 1′s go on for another page. And as an added little bonus I can see what staff members have the most trafficked Facebook profiles (always worth the bragging rights).

I’ll have to do the exact math later when our ad runs off of Facebook, but I’d say so far so good.

Running on WordPress and the fabulous PressRow, Broad and Cecil is our catch-all our blog where the staff can post on anything Temple (or Philly) related. The reason the topic is so broad is to test the waters. While the whole staff has theories on what would make a good blog, we really won’t know until we check out the traffic and the comments. Most likely at the onset of next semester we will split into a few blogs. Blog content also gives us something to post on the front page of Temple-News.com everyday.

We also need to get a workflow established as well as work out some technical kinks. So we have established a one week dry run where we try to get at least 2-3 posts a day. However not many people will know the blog exists until Tuesday when we feature the blog in our print edition as well as run a heavy Facebook advertising campaign.

The goal is to add a Temple News property that is in the list of a student’s daily visited Web sites. Here at Temple University, we have one of the largest computer labs on the planet and when I stroll through and see what students are viewing, 50% of the time it is Facebook. We want to be on that list of sites that students visit went they sit down to procrastinate from doing work.

Advice for anyone else considering starting a blog for their business/news paper/organization: To keep a blog pumping with content you need the full support of the staff. People need to be engaged and excited to try something new. Otherwise they will simply think you are trying to spread them a little thinner. Luckily with the Temple News if every staff member only writes once a week, we can have a nice well of content.

So take a look!

For the first time I bet it has hit home for college papers everywhere.

But I think its also a blessing in disguise. It forces college papers not to be lazy when it comes online revenue. We need to start thinking outside the box.

Challenge accepted Facebook.

Bastards.