David Schloss — Promoting Affiliate Offers On Facebook (Without Getting Banned)

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. My name is Matthew Hustle. No, Matthew Flowchart Wolf.

Matt doesn't know himself. My name is Joseph Fear.

Joseph Hustle.

That I am the Hustle. He is the Flowing of the church. Yes. So today we are chatting with our main man for Facebook ads, David Schloss.

Yeah, this is actually a round two.

For him, Round two, part two. So if you haven't actually listened to round one, which came out prior to this, maybe a couple weeks before, go listen to that one first. That'll give you a good, I would say, foundation of where this call is going to go. Right, Right now.

Yeah. So in the first episode, you kind of get David's backstory. We dive really deep in how to use Facebook's. The Facebooks specifically for webinars. This one, we asked him to come back and do a round two because we had a lot of questions about affiliate marketing and how to actually promote products as an affiliate on Facebook. You know, the. Is it against Facebook terms of service? How do I do it ethically, all that kind of stuff. So that's what we're going to really dive in with David today on is how do we drive traffic to affiliate offers using Facebook? And David's got some really killer strategies. So let's go ahead and dive right in.

See you there.

Hey, David, thanks for joining us once again. How are you doing today?

Doing fantastic. Appreciate you guys having me on again.

Yeah, no, the last one was really, really good. We got some great info. If you're listening now and you don't know who David is or how he got into Facebook ads or any of that kind of stuff, definitely go check out our previous episode with David from a few weeks ago. We'll link to it in the show notes and you can get his whole background story.

Yeah, and that was pretty much like a little mini masterclass to get started with Facebook ads and what's working, you know, webinar, specifically webinars. Yeah, we talk a lot about that stuff, so check it out for sure. But this episode, instead of webinars and any general Facebook talk, it's a little bit more focused on affiliate marketing, which is what we like to do. And we write a lot about it in the EGP letter as well.

So, yeah, it's a topic that's near and dear to our heart. We do a Ton of affiliate marketing ourselves. So we're gonna use this opportunity to pick David's brain a little bit on using Facebook ads for affiliate marketing. So let's first of all, let's dig right in on the sort of compliance type topics. I'm curious, what can we do and what can't we do with affiliate marketing? Because I know there's been a lot of talk about, well, you can't direct a link to an affiliate link. Facebook doesn't like that. They might kick you off. You know, there's been mixed things. There's obviously certain niches you can't promote. Niches you can promote. So from a sort of compliance standpoint, let's start there. What can we do and what can't we do with Facebook ads?

Yeah, so that's going to be a loaded answer, right? Because here's the thing, there's always a way around something that may not be within the compliance. For example, dating is typically not allowed. Dating offers are not allowed on Facebook. Yet I've helped three people promote a dating offer on Facebook. So the reason that is possible is because what's allowed is this. You could promote a video or a pre sell or some sort of advertorial page that can collect an email or even just send people to an article to read that links out to the offer if it's not breaking the guidelines of the copy. Meaning if you're doing a dating related pre sale page or advertorial, you could do something like the top five reasons men attract women Easily. Right. That's a very catchy subject that people are like, wait a minute, how's that possible? Right? It gets a lot of attention. It's clickbait style, it drives a lot of traffic. But you're not collecting anything, you're not collecting an email and you're not direct linking to an offer. So Facebook will let it go if it's within the compliance with the copy. And because of that and you're driving all this traffic, if anyone decides to land on this page and click on the button to go to your offer, you're okay. Now if you ever got a manual review from Facebook, which does happen once you start to spend quite a bit of money, it is possible that that representative could click on that link to go look at your offer. And if your offer page is not within compliance, your account will still get shut down. So there's more to it than just the front end that people see when it comes to affiliate marketing as to whether or not Facebook allows it, they allow it in the beginning. Right. If your lead page or your, your advertorial page surpasses that usual automatic bot search of whether or not you're within their compliance, you're good for about 15 to 30 days before someone looks at your stuff. So it's more of, yes, you can get by with that first page, but is your funnel completely compliant? And so with affiliate marketing, a lot of people have that problem because they only focus on that one page instead of the whole funnel.

So with the Facebook manual review, they will actually dig deeper than just the page you're driving the traffic to.

Yes, and that's where a lot of people end up getting in trouble. And there's a lot of mixed reviews as to whether or not Facebook actually goes through your funnel. I have proof that they do because I've gone through conversations with dedicated representatives and support reps that have told me to the t, what was the reason why the account got shut down. And it's always something in the back end of the funnel that you would forget about. For example, let's say you have a four page funnel, and on the fourth page is your cart. And on the cart page, you have five video testimonials. And all these people are talking about how much money they're making with you, right? Oh, you know, we worked with David. We're making $50,000 a month. Now, that's a claim that Facebook cannot verify. So they're going to consider that not within their compliance. And that's your cart page. That's a page you would think they'd never look at, but they do. And so if you have no way of them getting there, meaning, for example, let's say they have to buy something before seeing the, the true back end of your funnel. They won't go that far, at least not that I'm aware of at this moment. Right. So if you have a $997 product, they're not going to buy it to see what's on the rest of your funnel.

Right.

But you know, they might go through something that's free.

So that makes sense. So going back to your sort of previous example, the best way to do it is to drive them to content, and then that content might link to a funnel. Now, when we say that Facebook does look deeper into the funnel, let's say I sent them to a blog post and it's just pure content. And at the bottom of the content, maybe there's a call to action. The call to action sends them to a funnel, which may be a dating Offer or something with claims on it. Is Facebook going to consider that part of this funnel or are they just going to look at the content?

They will consider that a part of the funnel, even if it's not your offer.

Okay.

Because you are promoting it. Right. So the one thing that most affiliate marketers leave out is looking through the whole funnel. Right. So if you're promoting someone else's offer, let's say it's even dog training. Right. How much could you possibly provide in terms of claims that can make a dog training offer page be not compliant? Well, it's actually not that hard. All it takes is the trainer getting a bunch of video testimonials or written testimonials that give timeframes as to how quickly they were able to teach this dog, you know, how to sit, how to play, how to listen to its owner. Right. Oh, I worked with this dog trainer and within two weeks, my dog was listening to all my commands. That's the same thing as saying, I worked with David and made 10 grand in two weeks. It's the same thing. They can't verify it. And so you tend to not look that deep at a sales page. Right. Especially with these clickbank style or Internet marketing offer style offer pages that are so long most people just neglect reading them. But what you may not realize is that a Facebook representative has absolutely no problem going through that whole page to find a reason to disapprove your ads or even worse, shut down your account.

Hmm.

Now, talking about shutting down accounts, like, so what happens when that occurs or if that occurs, can you get it back or is there a way to prove that you've made changes?

Yeah, it's a hit and miss opportunity with Facebook and getting your accounts back. You know, over the last couple years, it's been a lot more prevalent for you to get a hold of someone in support to possibly get your account turned back on. But there's still no guarantee because more often than not you get this automated message back. And you know, it's automated because you'll get the same response back four different times.

Right?

Right. So you'll submit information on, you know, the changes you made to the page and what you believe was the reason the page may have got hit or maybe it was something ad related. And you could talk about how you're a great advertising citizen and how you made all these changes. And, you know, you have all these clients, but they may not even bring your account back no matter what you do. And then you have people who submit one request and they get their account back, it's hit and miss. There's no foolproof strategy. And for anyone that says there is, they're full of crap. Because there is no foolproof way of getting your account back unless you have an insider in the company who can literally switch your stuff back on. And you know how rare that is.

So I want to come back to an initial question too. As far as direct linking to an affiliate link. So my sort of assumption on it is that there is nothing in the terms and conditions that says you cannot direct link to an affiliate link. I've personally read the terms and conditions. I couldn't find anything that said you couldn't direct link to an affiliate link. So my understanding of it is as long as the affiliate offer you're driving traffic to is totally in compliance with all of Facebook's rules, you, you're okay to drive there. So as long as it's not making any sort of unfounded claims that they can't verify, or it's not doing any sort of like before and after photos on a weight loss or something like that, as long as it follows all the Facebook terms and compliance things, you're allowed to direct link to an affiliate link. That's my understanding, but I'd love to hear your perspective and your understanding on it.

So this is like a two parter, right? So what you just said makes complete sense and you are right. Then there's the other side of it, which is maybe it's not the affiliate link itself that is causing the problem, meaning the landing page, but it could be the actual link where it's coming from. For example, if you have a link from a Marketplace, ZAXA, ClickBank, JVZoo even has offers, right? Which is you're creating your own affiliate network in their platform, right? You could get your link considered to be, you know, not within their trust. So for example, there's a plugin called Web of Trust that you can install in your Chrome extension or as a Chrome extension, excuse me, and it will verify whether or not the domain or a specific link is trustworthy or not. And Facebook uses this to gauge whether or not what's being promoted is possibly spammy or not. And so, for example, JVZoo is considered spammy links. That's why if someone puts out a link with the JV, you know, jvz6.com whatever, typically those ads would get disapproved and sometimes will even get your account shut down because it's a link that's been basically the whole domain has been banned by Facebook, you can't even post.

It in organic posts. It'll still say you can't share this link even if it's just organic and not an ad. Oh yeah, jvzoo for sure.

And that's why you have to verify these links before you launch them. Now, if it's your own domain, right, and let's say you have it connected through pretty link on a WordPress site and then it auto redirects somewhere else. And let's say it once again is a jvzoo link. You know, Facebook could see past that. They look at redirects all the time because they're having to analyze links whenever they launch. The bot system itself has to double check. So it's not often that redirects get through. That's why some people use Bitly. They'll use the Google URL shortener, they'll use any other solution to see if they can bypass that, you know, banned domain situation. And what I typically find is it doesn't quite work that easily. And so the main thing is you have to double check whether or not the link you're promoting, the end link, the domain is still being approved by Facebook or is it being banned. And what you find is that these heavily promoted offers from affiliates, you know, let's say it's something from ClickBank, like a supplement, you could promote supplements on Facebook. But if it's a domain that has been heavily bombarded by affiliates and sometimes to the point where it comes off as spammy, you'll notice that the Web of Trust score isn't like a red circle. That means Facebook or any property does not trust this domain. So you put that through a Facebook ad, you could still get approved. Don't get me wrong, you can still get approved, but you're basically opening yourself up to someone to review to your account.

Right, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, so now that we sort of scared people out of doing affiliate marketing on Facebook, let's talk about what's working well for affiliate marketing on Facebook. What can you do?

Yeah, right.

Like what, what sort of, what sort of things have you seen are best practices that work, that sort of keep you a good citizen on Facebook and all that kind of stuff?

Yeah, so I have actually done ads for quite a few affiliates and what we have found to be the best solution is you could still collect leads with a traditional opt page and a thank you page. Right. And what we'll do is focus a lot of our efforts on email marketing. And then on the thank you page after someone Opts in, let's say it's a gift. And I'll get. I'll go back in a second with what we're giving away and how we structure it for affiliate offers. Is that on the thank you page? It's a video. It's you in the video. You know, thank you so much for, you know, opting in for our gift. It's going to be sent to your email shortly. And just so you know, I have three more steps for you to go through. Now, at the very bottom of this video, you'll have three steps. Step number one, check your email, right? And you'll have a screenshot of what that subject line and email is gonna look like. Right? So that way people, when they go to their Gmail or Yahoo or wherever they go, they'll see what the subject line is, right? So you're giving them an identifier. The second step is you're telling them by clicking this link here, we're gonna take you directly to. And then you're gonna basically create like a headline, right? It's very much a headline that teases people on what the next offer is gonna be. But to make it even better, that third step that you're gonna put could be a completely separate offer. So you could use the thank you page to promote two different offers and see which of those links get clicks the most.

That's interesting. Now, would Facebook opt in, Go to the next page, click on one of those links in step two or three and say, oh, this is a JVZoo link. Nuh. We're gonna shut this thing down.

Right? And that's where with certain affiliates that I'm working with, we don't promote certain marketplaces. And JVZoo is one of them. We don't promote that marketplace just because of the history they have with Facebook. But there are plenty of clickbank offers that are completely greenlit by Facebook to go ahead and promote.

Right?

So once again, like anything else, it depends on what it is you're promoting, what niche, and. And is this sales page itself within compliance, or at least 95% within compliance.

Got it. So go ahead.

I was just going to say the only other way you can get around that is if you made your own customized or revised version of the sales page with permission from the owner of the original product.

We know that strategy.

Well, yes, it works, but get permission, obviously.

So just to sort of recap what you were just saying a second ago, the best way to drive affiliate sales through Facebook ads is, is to step one, create the ad that drives traffic to an opt in page that's on your own server. So on your own domain name, not on an affiliate domain or anything like that. So an opt in page for a freebie that you created or that maybe the affiliate provided for you, but some sort of freebie that you'd give them, they opt in for that on the follow up page, a thank you video with you on it, not the product creator, but you want it. And then three steps. So step one, check your email. Step two, here's some sort of special offer. Step three, here's another special offer. And then those two special offers could be affiliate links. You could sort of, it's kind of a way of split testing to see which of those two calls to action gets the best response. And then maybe you test them and flip the order and test things like that to get the page optimized. So that's sort of the first way to do it. The second way to do it, find a product that you really like and that you want to promote. Contact the product creator and say, hey, do you mind if I create a complete clone of your page? I'm not going to change any of the copy or any of the messaging or any of the wording or anything. It's still going to be your exact sales message. I just want it on my server. Is that okay? Then you build it out and click funnels or lead pages or whatever and you drive traffic to that.

Exactly.

Go back really quick to the opt in page. Like what you would suggest to have on that opt in page.

Yeah. So very much like you would put together an opt in page to give away your own PDF. Right. Let's say you're giving away a report on, you know, 10 strategies that can help you grow your business today. Right. Very simple. You just put a lead generation page together where it's, you're capturing an email. You don't even need the phone, not the phone number, but their first name. You could just say, give me your email. Right. One line, leave your email here. We'll send you the report through your email. Now the thing is, most people who are affiliates are trying to do this in non business related spaces, right. They're doing it in fitness, they're doing it with health, they're doing it with wealth, they're doing it with, you know, you name it, dating and all sorts of different industries. Right. So you're having to come up with these separate reports or cheat sheets or checklists or whatever it is that you can create in order to achieve that you know, notoriety you want from that visitor or that audience to come into that page, like leave their email and go through those other steps we just talked about. And so a lot of the guys that I work with, they're creating these reports, no more than 10 pages, sometimes 15 pages at the most. And their affiliate links are sprinkled in the PDF. Don't get me wrong, there's promotion going on in the PDF because if you can't get someone to click on any of those links on the thank you page, if they are gonna read that report, at least drop your links in there too, right? But in these short reports or these checklists or anything they're creating, they're not having to do it all themselves because what they're doing is they're hiring, you know, writers on Odesk or Upwork as it's called now, or they're simply going to Fiverr and having someone curate the best content around the web and then having another Fiverr gig create a nice looking report cover. And it's curated content with sources, right? They're putting all the references and footnotes and everything in there to let you know where this all came from and then to back up all these pieces of information they've gathered to create this curated report. Basically the next step would be if you want to further your education or you want to further understand how you can optimize your body or whatever it may be, that's when they start hotlinking out to their offers that they want to promote.

Sounds a lot like our 10 content hacks report that we've got running right now.

Exactly. So here's the thing that works in a variety of different industries, but it's just putting in that work. Because once you commit to doing that, let's say you do it with the, you know, organic food space, right? And you want to promote an offer that's relating to organic health protocols or any sort of raw vegan diets or anything like that, right? Once you commit to that report, you can reframe it in a variety of different ways for different industries, but you only have to do it once. So you put in that effort to create it and then you just redo the covers for different industries. That makes sense. And then you can rotate the offers in that PDF. If you find that one offer is performing really well and the other one's not, based on the amount of traffic or leads you're getting, you can keep swapping out those links with whomever you're sending out the PDF to. And then over Time you can naturally decide like, oh, this one offer crushes it every time. So I'm just going to link it all over this PDF and it's only going to be one offer. Yeah, Right. So it's creating the asset is your pages, it's your report. And if something decides to disappear one day, you just got to swap it out and you rinse and repeat.

And that's the beauty of, you know, for the listeners here, like if you're not in affiliate marketing or don't really know the power of it, that's really the power right there. Obviously you don't have a lot of power in terms of if the product's gonna be around forever or whatever their sales message is, but you have the power to swap links. You don't have to have your own products. You can put in that intro kind of that input to that whole ecosystem of affiliate offers, but it gives you the ability to obviously cancel out any costs on the Facebook ad as well. So that's kind of the beauty of that. And then from there they're on a list. You can upsell them into whatever else from there.

Exactly.

Yeah. So now one thing too that we haven't even touched on yet that is hugely powerful when it comes to using your own pages. So, you know, your own opt in page or sort of a cloned version of the sales page is the fact that you can drop your own damn pixels on it and then retarget people. Right. So that's another huge benefit that we haven't even touched on yet. So let me sort of break down our affiliate flow real quick. You already kind of know it because you run our Facebook ads for us, but I'm gonna go ahead and break it down for the audience and then you could kind of go ahead and talk into it for a moment. But the way that we do affiliate offers is we like to either a direct link to a cloned sales page, a page that looks identical to the original sales page, but it's on our server, or we direct link them to an opt in page and then after they opt in, then we start making the affiliate offer to them. Now when they land on our cloned page or our opt in page, they're getting added into our Facebook pixel. And now we're also going to retarget them on Facebook with links to our bonus page or links back to that cloned sales page. And typically that first sort of click over to the page isn't what generates the sale. Typically it's that retarget ad that starts to follow them around everywhere after they've clicked on that initial link that finally cleans them up and makes that sale. So that's sort of our flow. Do you have any sort of critique or anything you would add to that flow or any sort of advice to even improve it?

Well, I mean the one thing that I find most people do is they just do the bare bones minimum, which is what I talked about. Right. They just have something they give away and then they're linking out to the offer. You guys have sort of gone above and beyond what the average affiliate would do because you've created content and giveaways that revolve around specific problems and you're providing the solution and then giving them a better solution for it. It's like, oh, hey, go buy this thing. Right. But you basically created a site around answering commonly asked questions and then here's the solution to it and you're linking to what it is they can go buy to solve this problem. And most people don't do that. Right. So you've, but you've really committed to not only selling the product, that's the obvious part, but the content that you've created around this product, it sort of blows everyone else away that's promoting it because they can't compete.

And that's the point.

Right, but you're right though. No, that's. And to talk about then retargeting, because that's to tell everybody else. I mean, that's where we get the majority of our sales. I mean, besides email marketing, we kind of layer all these different things into it. But retargeting is massive. And we could do that because of every piece of content we have, you know, has that pixel, the sales page has the pixel, all that stuff. We can see the success, you know, after a purchase has been made. So then we can start building, you know, lookalike audiences and stuff like that.

Yeah, when we do affiliate marketing, we actually have a three phase process. We actually just released a course on our three phase process. But phase three is if a product converts really well, we do what's called, we go all in on it. Phase three is the all in phase. And, and that basically means we're going to take this product and pretend we built this product and we're going to do every marketing strategy we can think of that we would do if this was our own product that we were selling. So that includes creating a blog that answers questions for people, creating additional bonuses for the offer, creating a chatbot sequence, creating an email follow up sequence, getting people on our list and following up with them to sell them on it. Actually having a salesperson get on the phone or on a chat messenger with people and close the sales. So we only do that for like two or three products. But when we do promote affiliate products like that, we literally go all in and treat it like it was our own product. And I don't think most affiliates are willing to go that far.

Did you have a question, sir?

I did, but was gonna change the subject. So did you have.

I kind of was too. So.

Okay, so the next sort of place I want to go. And we touched on this in the last episode, but I did want to kind of touch on it again because I do think it's the most difficult part of advertising is the actual targeting. Now, when it comes to affiliate offers, I know this is gonna be a really hard question to answer, so I'm not quite sure how to tackle it yet. But when it comes to affiliate offers, do you have any pieces of advice on the targeting and how to find the right targets?

Yeah, that is the tough part. Right. And when you're promoting something that's broad market, it's actually a lot easier. And what I mean by that is broad market would be health and fitness. A specific or really strong target market would be Internet marketers who are looking for a solution to their cart abandonment issues. Right. That's very specific. And we all know that in our industry, a lot of tools are made for that sort of specific end user. Whereas if you look at something like ClickBank offers, a lot of them are trying to cater to a large audience of people. Right. A lot of people who want to get in shape, or a lot of people who want to get stronger, or a lot of people who want to be more into their own self mastery. Like that's a personal development product. Those are broad market appeal items that you could sell. And so when you are targeting or putting together your targeting, if you know that you're selling, let's say like a software that primarily business owners would be using, you could at least start with finding the targets of people who have, you know, job titles of self employed, maybe they work from home. That's the, that's the beginner levels. Then you want to go intermediate where it's someone might identify by a specific job title. You know, they're the cmo, the CEO, the cfo. And then you can go as far as just anyone who identifies as a business owner. Right. There's a behavior in Facebook for that. And there's also a field of study and employer. Because some people as their employer put business owner. Right? So you just layer each of these different identifications together. And now you have all the different variations of a business owner on Facebook. But then you might want to layer it with what are they interested in? What could they possibly be following in terms of a publication or some form of a guru or an individual that they follow? Because that would be the individual who might talk about a product like this. So for example, you can have business owner as one layer and then your second layer could be that they follow, let's say Frank Kern. Right. And maybe it's a product revolving around copywriting and promoting a high ticket offer. Right. So having those two elements layered together, you have a more defined audience of someone who may be interested in what it is you're gonna sell. Whereas if you sold a product around, you know how to get in shape and eat organic for the rest of your life. That's a gigantic market you can advertise to because basically the majority of the US needs to lose weight. So you can go ahead and promote to the entire United States. And then you could decide on the gender. Maybe this is a product more towards men versus women. Then you just gotta decide on are they gonna be following people who talk about health and fitness or are they just looking at magazines, publications, or popular websites that talk about fitness? Or you can go even further than that and target the companies of the people who are producing this sort of product too and just going after their followers. Cause fun fact, just cause I might have a Blendtec or a Vitamix doesn't mean I use it every day. And maybe I need to learn how to use this with healthy foods before I go ahead and use it all the time. Right. So I could sell an organic protocol meal plan to these people and integrate using their Blendtec or Vitamix into their life. Right. So that's a way that you would be able to go broad market and still have that smaller audience in there of people who might be using a specific product or read a publication all the time around that subject, but just may not be applying what it is that they're reading.

Got it. Now.

I'm going to put you on the spot here for a second because I want to give you sort of a. I was going to say a hypothetical example, but it's not really hypothetical. It's an example of something that I was actually creating a case study on. Joe doesn't even know I'm creating a case study on it, but I am.

So here's an example niche people who want to learn how to play guitar. I was actually building a case study on promoting a course on how to learn guitar as an affiliate. And I'm not totally sure what I would target for that yet. So I'm curious how you would approach that. Somebody who's interested in learning to play guitar.

Sure. So most people who would do this sort of targeting would most often than not go after, like any sort of store or popular brand that may sell guitars or. Or maybe it's like trying to remember the name of the company. But there's a very popular guitar store that most people go to to go buy their first guitar. Right. And that's the initiation process of going to learn it. What I would end up doing is actually looking after the most popular guitarists that guitar enthusiasts are following. So, for example, there's a comedian that I listen to. This is more relating to drummers, but he is a drumming fanatic. He follows these drummers in various bands, very popular bands. And because of that, he decided to get his own drum set and eventually start learning drums. So he didn't follow a store. He didn't follow a famous teacher who's like, here's how you could play drums. It was. He followed the acts that he loves to listen to and got hyped to go learn how to play drums. And so if I was going to be promoting something around, you know, learning how to play guitar, I would look at who the famous guitar players are in various bands and see if they come up as an interest target and bundle them together to see how large that group can be maybe segmented by men as well, because primarily mostly men are going to buy into this offer, maybe have a segmented audience for women as well, to see who they might. They might be looking into this offer as well, and then just have it segmented out to see who performs better. And from there you can gauge. That's a broad market right there, by the way, because you can get deeper with going by placement. Maybe it's desktop versus mobile or desktop mobile combined. And what you really could do is just see how responsive are these people to wanting to learn guitar, just like their most popular guitars that they follow. Would you like to play guitar like blank name person? Right. And by doing that, you'll be able to gauge how many people are clicking, how many people are actually interested in this audience to learn how to play guitar. Because then from there you can refine.

Yeah. So this is like a discovery phase, more or less. And you're just kind of so you wouldn't actually layer in, say has an interest in guitar as well yet?

Not yet. Okay, not yet.

Yeah, that makes sense too. And I mean, I suppose let's say we're doing the offer that you were talking about where I am driving traffic to an opt in page for let's say like 10 easy songs to learn on guitar. Right? That's what I'm opting in for. And then on the next page I'm sort of gonna sell them on whatever the affiliate offer is.

I guess what we could do is target to a broad audience. Probably have a fairly low conversion rate on the opt in page. But once I've collected quite a few opt ins, I could a change my conversion goal to optimize for conversions. So now it's optimizing for the people that have opted in and I can also export the list of everybody who's opted in to that list, create a lookalike audience of everybody that's opted into that list and that's a new audience that I can target as well.

Right. And then you could refine that one even further because now you know who's clicking the most. What are they most engaged with? Headline wise, image wise, copy wise. I start very broad in the beginning because I want to see what Facebook is going to give me in terms of is Facebook's pixel finding my ideal visitor and eventually ideal lead or buyer from the very beginning with what I'm delivering to their network. Because that type of offer has the potential of being in front of hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Because there's all sorts of people around the world who want to learn how to play guitar.

Right?

So what you're really having to do is just look at what audiences offer the best probability of finding that person. Because a lead magnet on learning 10 easy songs that you could play on guitar actually would work with existing people who already play guitar.

Right? It would work on me and I already play guitar, so.

Right, exactly. You already play. But your offer that you want to promote might be for people who want to learn how to play guitar. So you could say in that same lead magnet, maybe on the landing page you could say that this is not only for people who already play guitar, but. But these songs are broken down for people who want to learn how to play guitar. Right. And now you get the best of both worlds because you can have an offer. And I know there's offers out there, there's an offer for all the beginners and hey, you already play guitar. I have something for you. Too. And you could send them to a different offer. So now you're promoting two different things in the same funnel.

Nice.

Right?

Yeah. I mean, actually, what I would do, just kind of thinking out loud here, this, actually, this is probably gonna get too technical, but I'm gonna say it anyway. So thinking out loud, what I would do is use your example of the two links below the video on the page after they opt in. Right.

Beginners in advanced.

One link is for beginners, one link is for advanced. And because they just opted into my list, I would probably tag them in my list, beginner and advanced, and send them different follow ups based on which link they clicked.

Exactly.

Anyway, that's a little technical, but yeah.

I mean, it's technical, but it's necessary because in order for you to best optimize your audience, you're going to need to know their level of expertise. The same thing is applied with one of my clients who promotes golf offers. And so what we do is when we present a lead magnet, we have all sorts of different lead magnets. How to drive the ball further, how to putt for a better score, how to hit with all sorts of different irons. Right. So it's all the different clubs, all different lead magnets around these clubs. Right. But on the thank you page, once they download this offer, this lead magnet, that's where we're giving them the option of, are you a beginner, Are you just learning how to play golf or are you more advanced and you've been playing golf for years? Because then we can say for people who've opted into the lead magnet funnel for putting, getting a better score through putting, we can have a are you learning to play golf? This is for you. And for anyone who's advanced, this is for you.

It's like a choose your own adventure.

Kind of choose your destination.

Yeah.

And the same thing could be applied for fitness offers too. It's like, are you just starting to work out? Here you go. You're already working out every day but not seeing the results you want. Click over here.

Anybody can apply this.

Yeah, yeah. You kind of had your golf example a second ago, and I think we're about to wrap up here. But before we did, I wanted to ask if you had any sort of other examples of Facebook ads to an affiliate offer that have worked really well. You don't have to like name any products or any customers or anything. I'm just curious about one or two case studies that have worked really, really well just to give the audience something to think about and Say, okay, this would be the flow. I'd want to go set up.

Yep. So just gave the Golf one. That one's working incredibly well. Another one being in the supplement space, that one is far trickier. When you're dealing with Facebook, they do not like supplements. Yet you see companies like Onnit and BSN and any of these big supplement companies promoting their stuff with no problems. Right. But they have brand recognition. So you go ahead and try to create your own supplement and see how long it takes you to get to a point where they trust you. But with the company that I'm helping with their supplements, we present it just like what we just talked about. Right. With that Golf offer or the Guitar offer, we're giving away something where we can then refer to the supplement as being an aid to helping you reach a certain goal. So the whole supplement is built around being more of like a. It's like a thermogenic. It helps you with fat burning. Right. It speeds up your metabolism, it helps you with your workouts, and essentially, in essence, at the end of the day, helps you lose weight. Right. It's based on getting people who need to lose weight to buy this item. But what we found is that when we focused all of our attention on just going to buy the supplement, we were not as effective as when we did the. Do you have this or do you want that? Right. When we gave them two options or even three, because we've tested as far as going like a third option. So with this company, they have for beginners, there's no supplements involved whatsoever. It's more of just getting them to understand they need to change their eating habits and they need to start exercising. So they actually have an info product that's already built out that only costs 27 bucks. That's for all the beginners. Then in the middle, their second offer is for people who are already exercising, but they haven't quite gotten their diet together. Or maybe they have gotten their diet together, but they don't quite understand how to exercise more efficiently. That's the second offer. Another info product. Right. Both of these are cheap. First one's 27 bucks. The next one's 37 bucks.

And these are their products. These aren't affiliate products.

They created it themselves. Okay, Then the third offer is if you really want to take all this information to the next level, then the third offer is going to buy the supplement. And what people don't realize is that if they buy the supplement, they get the info products for free.

Interesting.

They get it as a Bonus.

And it's not marketed at all. It's like an unannounced bonus.

It's. It's unannounced. So when you land on the page, they're like, oh, I could have just bought the supplement and got these for free already. Because most people will assume they're not ready yet. So they'll go buy the other two products.

Sure, yeah.

Because the last one is not involved until you're already exercising.

Got it. And the other two products, I'm assuming, eventually funnel them into the main product they want to sell in the first place.

The supplement.

Yeah, exactly. Which is promoted within the products themselves.

Got it. Okay. That makes sense.

I love it. Those are good examples, man.

Yeah, no, that's great. Joe, did you have anything else you wanted to cover on this topic?

We actually covered more than we thought we would, which is amazing because there's so much to do. Dig into, I guess, wrapping it up. What's like your go to style of ad? Let's just kind of, you know, if someone's saying like, should I do video, Should I do an image? I know we kind of touched on this with the webinars, but for affiliates. So if you're driving to an opt.

In page, I think you guys know where I'm going to go with this one. But I definitely am going to say video. And the reason for that is because at least these days, and I'll say this, with the Golf offer, we've tried video and we've tried banners, but banner ads seem to perform better. And the reason for that is because the ideal audience is 65 and over.

That makes sense.

They're not watching videos, they're clicking ads. But when I started to target that same offer to people who are 35 to 55, they were consuming video like crazy. Right. So once again, depending on your target. But I like video ads more because of the capabilities I have with, you know, what percentage of the video did you watch? And then I can create lookalike audiences based on those percentages. It just allows me to do more with my advertising dollar long term than just a banner ad. Now, don't get me wrong, you get 10,000 clicks from a banner. I can create a ton of audiences from that too. But we're talking about the immediate impact of having a video ad versus a banner. It's a lot quicker to turn an audience of people who've watched your video into. Into a lookalike audience or another type of engagement audience versus a banner, which you're waiting specifically on. Click data on page views.

That makes sense.

Yeah. And I mean, just with our own tests, it's crazy because it's a lot cheaper clicks in the overall scheme of things, and you can see results very fast.

Oh, yeah. I mean, just the one example that you're running for us, David, we were driving traffic to an opt in page with a banner ad you recently switched out to a video, and it cut our cost per click more than in half. Yeah, I think it cut our cost and click cost per click by like 60% by just switching out the actual creative from an image to a video. That was the only difference, right?

Exactly.

So that was pretty.

And here, I'll even throw this in. Is that with that same video ad, you're creating a Persona for your affiliate brand. Right? Because think about that. If all of a sudden you start promoting your affiliate offers pretty heavily, right? Because you own these assets and you can rotate the offers however you want on the back end.

Right.

But wouldn't it be great if you had a. An actor, even if it's just you, but you're using, like an alternate. An alternate name, right? Because maybe you haven't really promoted yourself in video in any other niche, but then you decide in this one, you're just gonna do voiceover, right? You could change your name. No one's staring at you.

Sure.

You could just use a voiceover and have a different name. And so you're creating this branding around this person, this Persona. And every time you launch something on this page, they think they're following this person. And so all of a sudden, you build up this fan page to 3, 4, 5,000 likes, 10,000 likes, and they think they're following someone completely different than who you really are, but they're associating this type of information to that Persona. And so now every time you launch something new or you mail your list and you're using that alter ego and you're just delivering everything, they already have that trust established with you.

And that bond is much thicker than just some images or ads they're seeing out there.

No. That's awesome. Now, is there anything related to affiliate marketing that we kind of didn't go to that you might want to touch on before we wrap this up?

Well, if you guys have the opportunity to use chatbots with your affiliate marketing similar to what yourselves are doing, do it because no one else is doing it. Right? Right. That's. That's why I was so impressed when I started working with you guys on the affiliate side. I was like, they have a chatbot Built in like that. That does not. Normally that does. That doesn't happen. That just doesn't happen. And I just. It's because most people stop at that point. Oh, I have a lead magnet. I have a website maybe. Right. They've built out something that gets the traffic going, but they don't go to that extra step. Similar to, I've built a website answering all the common problems with a solution. And I have 15 blog posts on this website. Most people don't do that. And then adding in that chatbot for people who land on the website and have questions. Most affiliates don't go that far. So for anyone who's listening, if you want to go that extra length and have a more, I wouldn't say fail proof, but a better probability of generating sales from your affiliate promotions, going that extra length with the, you know, the commonly asked questions and then answering them in posts and having some accompanying video and then possibly even throwing in a chatbot, you have a much better chance of success than just putting up a standard lead magnet and hoping for the best.

Yeah, yeah. And just for anybody listening, we actually break down our entire process in EGP letter number 10.

That's right.

But anyway, that was a little plug there. No, that's, that's awesome. I think we've, we've got like a ton of great stuff for affiliate marketing that I think even we're going to start testing some new stuff and have some new ideas from this one. I think last time we already asked you about a book. Do you have any current book that you're reading at the moment that you're really digging? And if not, we could skip over this.

Yeah, I just got a book. I think it's called Principles from Ray Dalio. It's a financials book.

Yeah.

Cool.

That guy is a genius financially. Is that a new one?

Exactly.

Or has that been around?

It hasn't been around that long.

Okay, what's that called?

A couple of weeks.

What was that name again?

Principals.

Principals. Okay. I will literally buy that now because that guy is one of the smartest guys when it comes to financial. Just how it works.

Cool.

Very cool. So last question then. Once again, where can people go learn more about you and learn from you or hire you or, you know, what do you want people to do next and where should they go?

Sure. Once again, go to my Facebook page. You can find me on my personal page. It's facebook.com S C H L O S S Y. That goes direct to me. So if you send me a message, I Do check them. You could also go to my website, convertroi.com and if you submit anything through the contact form, once again goes directly to me. I check those two platforms all the time, email and my messenger. So if you send me anything there, we can have a conversation and see if maybe there's a way that we could possibly work together. Or if you just want to connect and hear more of what's going on with me in the future, those would be the two places to follow me.

And you even check your other inbox.

You do. That's what you told us. No, David's the man. And if you. If the listeners, if you're. If you're struggling with Facebook ads, if you have some budget to use, or even if you don't have a lot, I mean, it's worth experimenting with yourself a little bit, but definitely to take it up to a whole nother level. Matt and I dragged our feet for a long time, but when we hired David, I mean, it's just. It's like a breath of fresh air.

Oh, and I need to say, too, with David's Facebook profile, definitely follow David, because he's constantly posting case studies of things that he's done for his clients. And I think we've just gotten a ton of value and learned a ton of stuff just from the case studies alone. And I believe it was after you posted a case study that we went, holy shit, Joe. Look at this case study David just posted. We need to hire this guy. And one of your case studies led to us reaching out to you and working with you. But the case studies alone are just hugely valuable.

Absolutely. And I really appreciate that. Guys like Matt mentioned, I put up case studies, usually about one a month. Sometimes I've done a second one just because we're having such a great month. Maybe there's more to share, but every month I put up a case study where we break down in depth what we did for that specific client, what we would do differently. We will tell you everything we failed at, and then we'll show you everything that worked. And so we don't hold back any information, I let you know what to change if you're doing a similar campaign, what I would do differently, what you can implement now and then even give suggestions on targeting.

Very cool. Which is the hardest part.

The hardest part?

Yes.

Very cool.

Thank you, my man. And I'm sure we'll have you on in the future for another one as we have more questions.

Absolutely. Really appreciate it, guys.

See ya.

Talk to you soon.

Hey, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast. Now, if you want to learn more and hear from us every single month, which a lot of people do, it's pretty fun. We actually write this thing called the Evergreen Prophets Letter, and that is a printed newsletter that we actually send to hundreds of people every single month to your doorstep. So you actually get it in the mail. You can read this sucker, you can highlight it, you can dog ear, you can scratch some stuff out. If you don't like that one, you say, no. Joe and Matt, that's not cool for me. But you can take a lot of different strategies, about 15 or so from every single issue, and it's really cool. So basically, these are actual actionable strategies that you can use in your business right away to test out and pretty much build on what you already have going on. So check it out. It's at www.egpletter.com. it's pretty amazing, and you should go check it out, see what it's all about.

Boom.