Facebook Advertising…A Powerful Engine For Your Online Business

There is a big mistake made by a lot of online entrepreneurs in their marketing which results in them making little or no money on the internet. The big mistake is to believe that making money online is all about getting more traffic. This belief is not only held by so-called newbies, but applies across the board, as I am sure a lot of seasoned Marketers will testify. They work hard to get traffic, using various techniques to get people to click on links to their websites, but still they do not get the sales.

This is not entirely the fault of Marketers. Part of the problem is that nowadays websites simply do not convert visitors to customers as well as they used to. There is just so much completion and, in this age of Social Media and the smart phone, people are distracted by so many things.

The good news is there is a solution, which I will reveal in this blog post. However, before I share this with you, I want to turn the clock back to the turn of the last century and the birth of something we all take so much for granted today…the airplane. The significance of this tale of aviation history to making money online will become apparent later.

The Birth of the Airplane

Most people will be familiar with the fact that the Wright Brothers are credited with inventing the first airplane to be piloted by man. But what people are not aware of is that this was in fact a triumph of private enterprise over Government subsidy. I mention this not to make some political point about the virtues of private enterprise over Government inspired projects, but merely to highlight a key principle that is at the heart of the solution to making money online.

In 1896, after several successful attempts at producing unmanned aircraft, Samuel Pierpont Langley, an American Professor, was awarded $50,000 by the US Government to develop a piloted airplane, which he called the Aerodrone. A lot of work went into developing a state of the art engine to power the aircraft but unfortunately Langley’s work ended in failure when he abandoned his project after two crashes on take-off, on October 7 and December 8, 1903. The structure of the aircraft had failed due to the stresses induced on take-off and by the powerful engine.

At the same time that Langley was working on the first manned aircraft, Orville and Wilber Wright, commonly known as the Wright Brothers, were busy developing their own version of a controlled aircraft, with no funding from the Government. Nine days after Langley’s spectacular failure, the Wright Brothers launched their aircraft, which cost a fraction of the $50,000 Langley had been awarded by the US Government, and it successfully flew over the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, making it the first aircraft to fly with man at the controls.

What did the Wright Brothers do differently? They focused almost entirely on the aircraft’s design – not the engine. After many prototypes and many-a-wrecked structures, their breakthrough came with their invention of three axis control, which enabled the pilot to steer the aircraft effectively and maintain equilibrium. The Wright Brothers turned their minds to building the engine ONLY after they had built a structure that could glide easily.

The Number One Marketing Mistake and How to Avoid It

You may be wondering what all this has to do with the number one mistake made by online Marketers. Well, the point is that most Marketers make the same mistake as that made by Langley in our tale of aviation history. Langley made the mistake of thinking that flight would be achieved primarily by having a powerful engine. In a similar fashion, believing that making money online is all about traffic, most Marketers spend their time and energy sending traffic to poorly designed websites that have little chance of converting visitors into customers. By chasing traffic, they are in a sense focusing on the engine and not the structure of their aircraft.

Your website or sales funnel is like the airplane structure. It will only fly (convert visitors efficiently) if it is well designed for the task.  If it is poorly designed, you could send a million visitors to the site and it will not convert them to customers. You can learn more about how to design a sales funnel that is streamlined for high conversions by clicking this link to my Free eBook Anatomy of a Sales Funnel – How to Create a High Converting Sales Funnel From Start to Finish.

The Power of Facebook Marketing

Staying with our airplane analogy, once you have a sales funnel that is designed to convert visitors effectively, then the traffic you send to it is like the engine. Facebook Pay Per Click (PCC) is an example of such an engine and the amount of traffic it can send to your sales funnel can be likened to the power of the engine. Facebook PCC is a very powerful engine in that you can use it to send large amounts of traffic to your sales funnel in a very short time, provided you can afford to pay for it, and if your selling machine is streamlined to convert visitors to customers, then it will surely fly high.

For obvious reasons, some readers may balk at the suggestion that they should spend their hard earned money to acquire traffic. What about all the free traffic methods that are available, like SEO, Blogging, Forum Marketing, Guest posts, to name but a few? Well, my simple answer to this question is that there is no such thing as free traffic. The subject of free versus paid traffic is covered in a little more detail in my article The Truth About Traffic – How to Get More Targeted Visitors to Your Website.

Facebook marketing is fast becoming the go-to advertising platform for online businesses, because of its lower cost and unprecedented targeting abilities. Facebook’s targeting features allow you to design a target group according to various criteria, meaning that you can target people that are more likely to have a strong preference for your products or services. If you want to reach a broader demographic, you can tailor your ads to each segment of your chosen demographic, and if you have a smaller target market, you can laser target your ads to that group. Highly targeted advertising leads to higher profits by reducing advertising to people whose preferences may not be matched to your products or services.