Today I share a lesson on how to promote an affiliate product and not get slapped by Facebook’s Terms of Service.
During 2015 I helped my good friend, Russell Brunson, promote his book, DotCom Secrets (which, by the way is a GREAT book. If you don’t have it yet, you should click here and get it today).
When Russell first came out with the book, we decided to go all in as affiliates and used a variety of tactics to promote it. It was a “Free+Shipping” type of offer. You get the book for free if you pay for shipping.
The problem for us was that when we first tried running ads for the promotion, Facebook flagged our account because it was supposedly about “making money”, which goes against their terms of service. So we had to come up with other ways to promote the product.
Here is a two-part series about how to promote products without going against Facebook’s Terms of Service.
Method #1 – Run ads to a waitlist page
To begin the process, we started running ads on Facebook to a waiting list page for when the book would be released. We actually generated opt-ins, and we created a sub-list for when the book was available for free plus shipping. This gave us a dedicated sub-list that we were able to leverage.
We treated it almost like a little pre-launch. We got about 400 people to the pre-launch waiting list, and then the moment the book was available, we emailed those people and told them to go grab their free book.
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Method #2 – Facebook ads going to your own landing page.
As I said, when we started running some ads to test out the conversion rate on the offer, Facebook flagged it; they said it falls under the category of “make money online”, which is not allowed.
Because we were not able to run those ads to Russell’s page, I had to go back to the drawing board and begin to rethink how to leverage the Facebook advertising platform, but without doing anything that would get the account flagged or break their terms of service.
So we started running traffic to a dedicated landing page that we created, and then sending from that dedicated landing page over to Russell’s page.
For example we included a video of Russell where he was talking about the book and what went into creating it. We ran traffic to a dedicated page that we created with that video, and then there was a button underneath the video that led to a place where the viewer could get the book.
Of course, the button underneath the video was our referral link and then we sent them over to Russell’s page.
Method #3 – Follow the book’s endorsers.
Tony Robbins gave a great endorsement of the book. He works very closely with Russell, because Russell has been a client of Tony’s.
We created an ad about Tony Robbins, and the book that he recommends. It was a picture of Tony and it said something like “Tony Robbins recommends this book for you. If you’re an entrepreneur or do any kind of online marketing, click here to learn about the book and get a free copy.”
On that dedicated page about Tony, we included Tony’s endorsement as well as Russell’s video explaining the book and again, underneath the video, a button that folks could click on to get the book.
When that started getting traction, we were able to locate all of the folks that follow Tony and what other pages and what other authorities they follow.
I have talked before about the idea of “going where your market is; finding the other locations where your market congregates.” Not just the primary, obvious, common location, but any other places that you might be able to identify. That’s where you could put an ad out in front of them. We were able to do that very simply by using the graph search on Facebook.
We searched in Facebook for pages liked by people who like Tony Robbins. We were able to spread out the ad’s reach to multiple audiences by doing this. This generated around 1200 to 1400 clicks a day. Not cheap by any means, but you can always generate the traffic when you’ve got a high conversion offer.
Come back tomorrow to find out how else we promoted Russell’s book!
