Chatting with other travel bloggers is always a treat. Each one of us have carved our own path to success and what has got them where they are to day is so different. While that’s the case, that’s not to say that we can’t learn from each other and that’s why these podcasts are so powerful. In this one with Stephen Palmer of Irish Around Oz, he shares his wealth of knowledge of Facebook ads and e-mail marketing. This one’s jam packed with information so you’re going to want to take notes.
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Summary
In this episode, I ask Stephen about how he’s been able to leverage Facebook Ads to make serious cash. From his approach to these ads and his experiments you get a true appreciation and understanding of how you can leverage affiliate marketing in your travel blog to make money. The second half focuses on e-mail marketing and the genius use of segmenting his list and build follow-up series to both promote affiliate products and increase his engagement with fans.
In this particular episode, you will learn
- About Stephen Palmer
- The beginnings of Irish Around Oz
- Starting of Sunset Travellers
- Growing Irish Around Oz
- Started 2 years ago
- Things were slow for the first year (part time)
- October 2014 started working on it full time
- Facebook Groups – main source of traffic
- Making Money Blogging
- Beginnings: Making money through Google AdSense
- Money transfer affiliate program ($600-$1000 a month) – asked if they had a program and started using it
- Building Traffic
- Leveraged Facebook – started as a page and then became a group
- Created multiple groups for different cities (Melbourne, Sydney etc.)
- Has 3 million in traffic so far (roughly 90% all from Facebook)
- Facebook
- Downside is that people are very transient when someone comes from Facebook because they’ll skim through the content and then go back to continue browsing on FB
- Experiment with Facebook Ads
- Promote money transfer product (affiliate program)
- If get 100 clicks to the product and 1-2 sign up, get $60.
- Promote article on money transfer on FB
- Set retargeting campaign to show them another ad that’s related or mention they get a free transfer by signing up with you
- 5 EUR for the main campaign and 1-2 EUR for the retargeting
- Spending about 200-300 EUR
- Doesn’t scale linearly with how much you spend on ads.
- Don’t put too much emphasis on demographics. You don’t have to narrow it down that much.
- Start small, test (look at it after 12 hours) and increase slowly
- Promoting a high paying affiliate is more worth it ($50-$100 per sale)
- Always read the affiliate program rules (whether you can promote directly through FB or not)
- Growing the Site
- Worked a lot for the first 3-4 months
- Wrote a lot of small posts and larger guides that would rank well on Google
- Hired a VA
- Wrote one article that went
- Writing “sharable” content pieces
- E-mail Marketing
- Learn with Smart Passive Income
- Tools: LeadPages & AWeber
- Segment your list – Giving the information to the people that want it instead of blasting it to everyone
- 10 day free VISA course
- Follow up e-mail series for new sign ups spread out over 3 months (took 5-6 hours to set up)
- Flight affiliate – Weekly email on deals
- Competitions
- Helpful for bringing up old posts
- Write the responders like a normal email
- Make it more personal
- Ask people to reply to your email – Has added benefit of moving newsletter emails to inbox instead of going into the promotional tab
- You can always add new emails to the follow up series
- There will be some unsubscribes in the beginning but it will be a lot less than you think
- Wisdom
- Success in being niche – and a niche that you are very familiar
- Make sure you have a platform to drive traffic to your site (whether it be Facebook, Google, Pinterest etc.)
- Focusing on the blog full time is key
- Find the right kind of content for your audience
- Success in being niche – and a niche that you are very familiar
Links mentioned in this episode
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