It was completely random whether an ad would get approved, and a large percentage would get denied by their vague and draconian terms of service.  People even had theories about getting ads approved late at night because the people checking the ads were “drunk college kids.”

Still, once an ad got through, if you could manage a decent click-through rate, Facebook could be very profitable.  The ads are contextual, and you can drill down by demographics like age, gender, location, and interests.  The right ad can be a gold mine.

Anyway, it seems like Facebook is actually paying attention to their advertisers lately.

Low and behold, I received an email today:

“Welcome to the first Facebook Ads newsletter.”

It had some articles on best practices, and techniques to make your ad stand out, and how to optimize your CTR.

Not much, I know, but at least they’re starting to realize that maybe if they don’t treat advertisers like crap, they might make a lot more money.

“Who Else Wants A Proven Money-Getting Blah Blah Blah…”

Seriously. Do people still need to use this headline?  There are so many other great headlines to steal.

</RANT>

Sorry. I just really dislike that particular headline.  The headline is by far the most important part of your sales page, and yes, it’s always a good idea to start by copying a proven, profitable headline.  If you don’t already have one, go to your desktop right now and create a new text file called “swipe file.”

Anytime you see a headline, or a piece of copy, or any kind of marketing that catches your eye, STEAL IT. Copy it, and paste it right into that text file, and save it.

Don’t worry.  You’re not breaking the law.  You’re creating a swipe file, and it’s something that every great copywriter has.  Why start fresh when there’s years and years of proven, profitable marketing out there?

Here are a couple of classic headlines to get your brain going:

• “They laughed when I ____________, but then I _____________”
• “[EXPERT] made $1 billion dollars doing [whatever your product is about], and he did it wrong”
• “7 Simple Steps that can skyrocket your income in 20 minutes”
  

Want some more great headlines?  Pick up a copy of the Inquirer.  As stupid as that sounds, those are some of the most compelling headlines out there, and believe it or not, they’re written by some of the highest paid copywriters in the world.

Watch the video from the last post (here) and steal my niche. The first person to make money with it wins a free case study. Watch the video above for more details.

Follow me on Twitter for updates.

Resources:

GTrends

Build a Niche Store

Take a look:

Evading the Google Slap

Update: I take it back. It was a guest post by Jonathan Volk, and that makes more sense. He always posts great content. John Chow apparently still only reviews restaurants.

From the Adwords Learning Center:

The ValueTrack tag is a simple tag that you can add to your Destination URLs. It will allow you to distinguish the clicks you receive from search and content sites in the Google Network. It can be used with both keyword-targeted and placement-targeted campaigns. For example, if your URL is www.yoursiteinfo.co.uk, you can use the following tag for your Destination URL:

www.yoursiteinfo.com?type={ifsearch:GoogleAdWordsSearch}{ifcontent:GoogleAdWordsContent}

When using this code, your third party tracking will be able to identify how many of your visitors enter your site via your Google AdWords ad. More importantly, a click on your AdWords ad from Google or a search partner would appear in your weblogs as the following:
www.yoursiteinfo.co.uk?type=GoogleAdWordsSearch

A click from one of our content partners would appear as the following: www.yoursiteinfo.co.uk?type=GoogleAdWordsContent

Nice! So for example, if you’re direct linking a clickbank product, and you want your TID to tell you where the click came from you can make your destination url something like this:

http://affiliate.publisher.hop.clickbank.net/?tid={ifcontent:c}{keyword}

That will append a "c" at the front of your TID for content clicks.