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Try these 25 tactics to start closing more sales online:

When it comes to social media advertising, Facebook reigns supreme. That’s whyrunning successful Facebook ads is vital to the success of any business.

Facebook ads are generally the cheapest and most easily trackable form of online advertising. Plus, they’re totally optimizable! This gives you a lot of control over your ads, but you have to know what you’re doing if you want successful Facebook ads. Otherwise, you may be wasting your money.

In fact, small businesses are using Facebook to increase sales. Below is a screenshot of a Facebook advertising campaign for an eCommerce store that generated 152 purchases through Facebook ads. And, the best part is, they only spent $3.42 to acquire each new customer.

Here’s a screenshot from another client who made $24,804.73 in revenue:

If this gets you excited, you must first learn the fundamentals of Facebook advertising. Here are 10 must-know essentials for running successful Facebook ads:

1. Have a goal in mind

In order to run successful Facebook ads, you must first answer this question: what do you want your ads to do?

Do you want more followers? More sales? More engagement? No matter what your goal is, Facebook has a marketing objective for you!

The first page you see when to start to set up a Facebook ad is this:

These are the different marketing objectives you can choose from. They each correspond to different end goals. If you want more people to click on your website, you’ll run a traffic campaign. Likewise, if you want to generate sales, you’ll run a conversion campaign.

Some objectives contain sub-objectives. For example, when you click on the engagement objective, here’s what you’ll see next:

There are three different types of engagement campaigns. The one you choose will depend on your overarching goal. If you want more followers, run a page like ad. If you want more likes, comments, and shares on your posts, run a post engagement as. If you want more people to go to an event you’re promoting, run an event response ad.

Even if you have a specific goal in mind, Facebook likely has an objective perfect for you. You can run Facebook ads that optimize for everything from conference registrations to app downloads!

Having a particular goal in mind will help you determine the success of your ads.

2. Target your audience

Facebook has 1.28 billion daily users who you could be converting into customers! Everyone is on Facebook, whether they’re a CEO or a high-schooler. So no matter who your ideal audience is, they’re on Facebook!

That being said, merely posting on Facebook won’t be enough to convert users into customers. You have to run Facebook ads, and they have to be successful Facebook ads at that, to generate sales.

What if you’re not sure who your target audience is? There are a few different places you can start!

Your three most basic audience options are a cold audience of everyone on Facebook (which you can narrow down from there) or warmer audiences of either people connected to your page or a custom audience.

If you already have a decent number of page likes and you want to turn your followers into customers, you can select people already connected to your page as a target audience. This ensures the people you advertise to are familiar with your company and interested in what you’re selling.

If you don’t have that many followers, but you do have a customer list, a custom audience may be a good option. You can upload your customer list directly to Facebook and Facebook can generate a lookalike audience consisting of users similar to the ones you’ve provided.

But what if you don’t have a lot of followers or a customer list? This is a common problem for many startups and small businesses. To start building your audience from scratch, you’ll want to click the “Everyone on Facebook” option.

Narrowing a useful audience out of everyone on Facebook can be daunting, but Facebook’s Audience Insights is a phenomenal tool to help you out. First, you’ll want to set any specific parameters you know you want. For example, you may want to advertise only to people in the U.S. or people eighteen or older. You can set these parameters first before you start delving into data from Audience Insights.

Once your parameters are set, you can begin searching for data about the followers of your competitors. This will give you a great starting point to form your own target audience. For example, let’s say you own a convenience store. Under the “Interests” parameter, you can select people who like the pages of your competitors. For a convenience store, a potential competitor might be 7-Eleven. Once you’ve selected these interests, the Audience Insights tool will provide you with demographic information for the followers of those companies.

Here is what some of the demographic information for people who like 7-Eleven:

From this information, you can deduce that most of 7-Eleven’s Facebook fans are married, college-educated women.

The data is gathered from self-reported information provided to Facebook as well as third party data partners. You can use the information gathered from Audience Insights to set up a few potential audiences and use A/B split testing to determine the best one for you. There will be more information about A/B split testing later in this article.

If need be, you can make different ads for different segments of your audience. Just make sure your target audience is decently large but as specific as possible.

3. Use Eye-catching images

A picture is worth a thousand words. When you’re confined to a limited number of characters, a thousand words is a lot!

A potential customer might scroll right past your ad without reading it if the image doesn’t catch their eye. To prevent losing valuable customers, you need to select bright, clean, high-quality images for successful Facebook ads. Just make sure the image contains less than 20% text, or else Facebook will show your ad to fewer people.

The best type of image is one that’s relevant to your business as well as to your target audience. For example, let’s say you sell kitchen supplies to married couples living in the suburbs. A photo of a cute baby may grab the attention of the right people, but it won’t do anything to make them want to buy your kitchen supplies. A photo of a precious baby playing with pots and pans might do the trick though!

Better yet, use a video! Videos can convey a lot more information than a single image. Plus, with Facebook’s autoplay feature, you may be able to snag the attention of someone who otherwise would have scrolled right past your ad. Just make sure your video doesn’t rely on sound. 85% of Facebook videos are watched on mute!

Whether you opt for an image or a video, the most successful Facebook ads include bright, clear colors and people’s faces. People’s brains are hardwired to recognize faces, so including a face will make your ad more eye catching. Plus, depicting people using your products can make them seem more relatable!

4. Know what to say (and what not to say)

Now you know what kinds of images are necessary for successful Facebook ads, but what about the copy?

The most successful Facebook ads have copy that includes three elements: an attention grabber, a phrase or sentence to add value, and a call to action. The attention grabbed is the hook that generates interest in your ad. If the first phrase or sentence of your copy doesn’t spark the reader’s interest, they’ll stop reading. Some examples of attention grabbers are questions and surprising statistics.

The attention grabber in the above example is effective because it lists a stat that’s relevant to the target audience.

Once you’ve gotten their attention, you need to add value to your copy. Explain to the user why they benefit from clicking on your ad. This sentence also serves to link your attention grabber and call to action.

The call to action is what you want the reader to do. Do you want them to purchase your product? Click onto your website? Sign up for your newsletter? Be sure to make your call to action clear, or your add will not be effective. The most popular calls to action are “learn more,” and “shop now”.

The above ad is designed to send people to a company blog. The call to action is effective because it lets the reader know they need to click onto the blog to learn all the reasons they should invest in SEO. It’s clear, succinct, and generates interest.

Whether or not you use the three sentence model, be sure to keep your text short and clear. People won’t read a large block of text that looks overwhelming or time-consuming to read.

Successful Facebook ads often contain buzzwords like “promo code,” “free,” or “sale”. When running deals, always create a sense of urgency by using phrases like “act fast,” or “this deal won’t last long!” People are more likely to react in the moment when they’re afraid they might miss out on something. If you’re not running a deal, action verbs like “test,” “see,” and “try” work well to create some urgency as well.

Now that you know what to say, you need to know what NOT to say. Facebook isn’t too keen on running ads with the word “you” in them and often will not allow those ads to run. However, you can circumvent this rule by using “your,” “you’re,” or “yourself” instead. There are also certain types of products that cannot be advertised on Facebook like firearms and supplements. Any copy that seems like it could be advertising those products will be flagged.

5. Don’t sound like an ad

People don’t like being advertised to. Study after study has proven that people reject what they perceive as an attempt to persuade them. This may sound counter-intuitive, but the most successful Facebook ads don’t sound like ads.

The goal is to make users understand that it benefits them to click on your ad rather than just telling them to. This is why adding value is such a vital step to copywriting. Successful Facebook ads make consumers aware of why they should follow the call to action. That being said, people don’t like being told what to do. You have to make them understand why it’s beneficial for them to follow your call to action.

Here’s a good example of an ad that is persuasive without sounding too much like an ad:

This copy sets a great example for successful Facebook ads. It advertises the company’s services in a way that makes it seem beneficial to the user through the use of buzzwords like “free” and “no strings attached”. It doesn’t feel like the ad is trying to sell you something, it just looks like a free offer.

6. Leverage A/B split testing

It’s rare to get something right on the first try. That’s why A/B split testing is vital to running successful Facebook ads!

A/B split testing is when you run several slightly different variations of the same ads to find out what works and what doesn’t. It’s used to single out the most effective elements which can then be combined into one optimal ad.

To start, figure out which elements you want to test for. The two most common things to test are images and copy. Once enough people have seen the ads (100 people is a good rule of thumb), you can begin turning off the ads that have high costs per click. Continue this process until the single most effective ad is the only one remaining.

In the above example, you can see how different variations of the same ad have been created in a single ad set. These ads have already been optimized, so only the most successful one remains running.

A good recommendation is to start with three images and three copies, every variation of which should create 9 ads total to test against one another. Once you’ve determined the best image/copy combo, you can begin testing other features like headlines, audiences, placements, and buttons.

Ads won’t be optimized overnight. You should let your ads run for at least a few days before you begin the optimization process. A/B split testing can be a time-consuming process, but it’s worth it in the end!

7. Install Conversion Pixels

One of the most useful tools for running successful Facebook ads is a tracking pixel.

A pixel is a piece of code that you can embed on your website. It allows you to track conversions and re-market your leads. The data it collects can also be used to fine-tune your target audience and optimize your ads.

Facebook pixels allow you to track how people interact with your ads and your website. You can see which ads people clicked on to get to your website, which pages of the website they clicked on, and even what type of device they were using. This can help you learn which of your ads are the most effective and whether mobile or desktop users click on your ads more. They also allow you to get a clear picture of the types of people who click onto your website so you know who else to include in your target audience.

So how do you create a Facebook pixel? It’s simple! Start by clicking the ≡ icon in Ads Manager and choosing “Pixels” on the drop-down list.

Next, click the green button that says “create a pixel.”

Then name your pixel, accept the terms, and click the “Next” button.

Once your pixel code has been generated, you can copy and paste it into the header of the page you want to track. If you are unfamiliar with coding language, you may want to enlist the help of a web developer.

The best pages to track are shopping cart, check out, and purchase confirmation pages. This way you can track which people are turning into conversions and which people should be re-targeted.

8. Start Re-targeting

Re-targeting is when you use the data from your tracking pixel to run special ads for the people who clicked onto your website but didn’t make a purchase.

Have you ever clicked on a website and then seen ads for that same website the following day? If so, you’ve been re-targeted! It’s a fantastic strategy for successful Facebook ads.

Only 2% of shoppers make a purchase on their first visit to an online store. Re-targeting allows you to generate specific ads for the 98% who showed an interest in your website but haven’t converted yet.

Re-targeting creates a warm audience of people who are already aware of your brand and have interacted with it. You can entice them to purchase a product they almost passed up by running a special sale or promotion. This is extra effective since you don’t have to run the promotion for your full audience, just a specific warm audience.

It may seem creepy, but retargeting ads should make the user aware you know they’re interested in the product already. Be straightforward and you may be able to turn valuable leads into conversions.

9. Develop Landing Pages

Landing pages are one of the most underutilized marketing strategies for lead campaigns. This is a shame because they’re a necessity for successful Facebook ads!

A landing page is a web page with a lead capture form that collects visitors’ information. This allows you to convert more of your visitors into leads while simultaneously capturing information about who your target audience is. When someone clicks on your Facebook ad, it’s better to have it send them to a landing page than directly to your website.

So how do you get people to click onto your landing page? If your ad copy is tempting on its own, a simple “learn more” call to action may be enough. Otherwise, a special offer may be necessary to make people decide it’s worth it to provide their information in your lead capture form. Some examples of effective offers are discounts, free e-book downloads, or free consultations. By offering your audience something of value, you have a better chance of converting visitors into leads. Plus, even if those leads don’t turn into conversions, you’ve gathered valuable information about your target audience from them.

So what types of information should you request on a lead capture form? You shouldn’t ask too many questions, because it turns potential leads off when they feel like they’re being interrogated. The more questions that are asked on a landing page, the higher the cost per lead tends to be.

Common pieces of information to request include name, phone number, email, and job title. At least one piece of contact information is necessary to ensure you can follow up with your leads.

When people personally supply you with their contact information, they’re more likely to be qualified leads. They’ve already expressed a clear interest in your product or service and want to learn more.

Landing pages should always lead to a thank you page. This page serves as a confirmation that the information has been received and can provide an offer if one was promised. The offer can also be sent in the form of an automated email.

Make sure your landing page is mobile friendly. Over half the people who click onto your landing page will do so from a mobile device. Also, remember that consistency is key! Similar design elements should be used in your ad and landing page.

10. Have a Healthy Budget

Facebook is a very money-motivated platform. In other words, the more ad dollars you’re willing to spend, the more people will see your ads. If you want successful Facebook ads, you have to put a healthy budget behind them.

Social media has become an integral part of business growth today. If a business does not have a presence on social media, it may lose out on customers. This is why you find even the smallest of brands trying to leverage social advertisements and engagement to boost their reach and conversions — especially on Facebook.

As of June 2017, Facebook has more than 2 billion monthly active users. It is clearly THE most popular social networking site in the world. Be it for professional or personal use, the social media channel is widely accepted by a wide range of demographics in the consumer market.

The above graph should give your business a strong reason to run a Facebook ad and expand your brand’s reach.

But the Question is … Do Facebook Ads Really Work?

Understanding how to leverage Facebook ads effectively is now more important than ever. Since it is a part of almost every successful social media strategy, it is vital to know how your posts can be seen by the right consumers at the right time.

While the platform gives businesses the opportunity to reach a mass audience, almost62% of marketers say the channel is simply ‘pay to play’, and ends up actually missing their target market.

Do we agree? Absolutely not.

Here’s strong proof that Facebook ads work when executed properly. A campaign that we ran recently generated $103,510 gross sales for the business in just 8 months.

We did it by consistently optimizing the ad campaigns as per the changing market trends.

The first thing that is most likely to come to your mind upon seeing the above graph is that we had a big advertising budget. And that’s what made the campaign work.

Wrong.

Here’s a screenshot of the sales generated from the purchases made on the website and the cost per conversion…

Since we had different ad campaigns for different segments of the target market, the results weren’t so surprising.

What worked for us that we focused on understanding our ideal customer. The more we knew about them, the easier it got to launch the right campaign.

In order to increase the chances of getting a higher return on your investment, always know where your customer comes from, what they engage with the most and what triggered their purchase.

Apart from the general demographics, aim at designing campaigns that offer micro and macro conversions based on where the customer is in the sales cycle.

When you make the effort to understand their needs, without being pushy for a sale, you automatically focus on creating campaigns that deliver value to the customer.

This results in a higher growth slash engagement rate on the campaigns. These campaigns might just be about boosting a post your customers are engaging with the most — or about simply promoting your page in their circles.

Simply put, the answer to whether Facebook ads work or not, is a resounding YES.

However, before we dig into the different type of Facebook ads that your business should experiment with, let’s first understand…

How Do Facebook Ads Work?

Many businesses new to social media marketing doubt the power of Facebook ads. They continually debate on whether they would work for their market or product. Which is why you need to test the waters yourself before executing an ad campaign. It’s always good to take education decisons, so why not?

Almost 30% of the marketers fail to define the difference between paid search and paid social campaigns. Now, that’s a big number.

The explanation is quite simple: while paid search helps your target market find your business, paid social campaigns help your business find potential customers.

Facebook advertising does the latter. It lets you reach out to targeted prospects and customers. It helps you target specific user segments that are more likely to be interested in the products and services offered by your brand. In the process, get more sales.

With immense user data about their day-to-day activities, the level of targeting offered by Facebook rivals no other platform.

The number one step that you as an advertiser should take is to identify the goal of your ad campaign.

Do you want to…

Drive relevant traffic to your site?

Generate more leads?

Encourage users to interact with your page?

Secure more sales?

Expand your brand’s reach?

The clearer you are about your goal, the better results you will see. You may want to stick to running one ad at a time or experiment with multiple goals to understand what is fetching you the highest return on investment.

The audience segmentation on Facebook lets you define what your ideal customer looks like. Their robust system then displays your ads to users who fall under the demographics you defined. In other words, these users exhibit the type of behavior you have identified.

It all depends on how well you understand your customers, and how effectively you’re able to incorporate the data into the ads. Also, the type of format you choose for your campaigns tend to influence the results you get. You may also want to consider using our professional social media advertising services.

What Facebook Ad Type Is Best for You?

When it comes to making Facebook ads work, there is no one-size-fits-all. Your ads are based on factors such as:

What your business has to offer

The industry you are in

The niche you are targeting

The campaign goals you have

Let’s take a look at the different types of Facebook ads you can run for your business and what objective they can serve.

Page Likes

The very first ad type is the one that will boost your page’s organic reach. The goal of this campaign is to spread awareness about your brand and what you offer. It is to encourage your target audience to follow you on Facebook with a ‘like’ for further updates.

Since it is a micro conversion, most users are happy to interact with this ad type. The high engagement gives marketers a chance to target these prospects the right way. They can run lead nurturing campaigns with relevant content and more.

Engagement Ads

These ads help target existing users. They help to generate an activity on your business website or within an app. You could use these ads to highlight new features, new products or simply run an offer that encourages them to engage with your app or website once again.

This type of advertising campaigns are best suited to keep your existing customers engaged. These help them stay connected with the brand and also maintain a loyal community.

Post Promotion

We all know how a few posts do better than the others on social media. When you’re driving people to your page, you will notice that they interact with some content more than what you have been posting so far. That’s your opportunity to target more customers from that segment.

Using post engagement ads to boost the reach of your content on Facebook will also get you more likes on the page – a double whammy!

Acquisition Ads

One of the primary goals for most businesses and apps is to acquire more users or customers. While engagement ads are targeted at re-engaging existing users, acquisition ads are focused on bringing new users/ customers to your business.

These could be…

App install ads

Lead generation ads

Product/service promotion ads.

Brand awareness

Sometimes the best way to get more conversions it to let people know more about your brand. Using Facebook ads you can boost the exposure your brand name gets. But this can only be done when you share remarkable content that establishes you as an industry authority.

These campaigns should not be focused on what your brand is all about. Instead, they should highlight why a customer should engage with it.

Localized ads

While some businesses focus on global brand awareness, there are some that have location specific goals. These campaigns are set using the geographic location of your customers. And target them with tailored offers for high relevance. It could be to encourage a store visit or to avail an offer on product purchase in a specific area.

With localization becoming an integral part of personalized marketing, these ad campaigns are a great way to boost brand recall value as well as conversions.

Website Conversions

Even though most brand awareness campaigns result in driving traffic to the website, the website conversion ads are a different ball game. They are super-targeted and specific in nature. In short: they take visitors towards a defined call to action on a particular page of your business website.

In order to get maximum results from these ads, try experimenting with different call-to-actions. Instead of using ‘learn more’, direct your users to a page where they need to sign up for a newsletter or a free trial of a product.

Website Clicks

If you’re new to the industry and are just starting reach out to your customers, website click campaigns are your best bet.

These campaigns focus on one thing: driving traffic to your website. You could direct this traffic to your blog, product page, sales page, etc. The idea is to let the customer discover what you’re offering instead of pushing them towards a conversion right away.

For businesses that have different things to offer, you can make use of carousel ads to send traffic to different links. Similarly, you can also experiment with canvas ads that share the story of your brand with customers and nudges them to visit your website to know more.

Event promotions

Interactive content is what performs the best on Facebook. Promoting events and encouraging your target audience to participate is a great way to put forward your value proposition and get a chance to start a conversation without sounding too salesy.

But remember to not to club all your segments into one event promotion. The more targeted you remain, the higher attendance you generate.

Offer Promotions

Every business wants a chance to interact with their customer and highlight the value they can give deliver. This is why you see many brands running promo offers or special discounts designed to appeal to their target market.

Whether you’re offering something for free, a content upgrade (such as an ebook) or a simple discount coupon for first time purchases, these ad types will work for you. They will help you stand out from the vast volume of content being shared on a user’s feed. The only thing you need to ensure is the look of your ad: it has to be appealing to your ideal customer.

Lead Generation Ads

The general approach to online lead generation is to drive users to a landing page via a digital advertisement. And have them fill out a form with their contact details. But things change with the new Facebook leads ads. Now, marketers have the opportunity to decrease the drop off from an ad to a landing page. Which is huge. If you are still wondering “Do Facebook Ads Work?” then take a look at the screenshot below.

If you are still wondering “Do Facebook Ads Work?” then take a look at the screenshot below.

Facebook lead ad campaigns allow you to collect a prospect’s information without forcing them to leave the platform. This has resulted in a boost in lead generation results for both B2B and B2C businesses.

Once you have chosen the goal of your campaign and the ad type you would be running, it is time to focus on how you can maximize the results.

Making Facebook Ads Work

Having run campaigns that have performed well in both the B2B and B2C markets, and experimented with different formats, here are some of the best practices we stand by. Steal these if you want to optimize your ads for maximum results on shoestring budget.

First, Target Your Existing Audience

Acquiring a new customer is 10X more costly than engaging an existing one. So why waste your advertising budget on getting clicks from cold traffic? When you can use the same to nurture the luke-warm ones already following you on Facebook?

Your existing customers and followers are more likely to respond to an ad positively. Since they already know what you offer, the engagement and participation rates are much higher. Which is much better than targeting new users who don’t know much about you or your product. So aim at getting shares and spreading awareness with the help of word of mouth promotions by leveraging your existing audience.

Conduct Split Testing on Ads

No two people from your audience segment will respond to the same ad in the way you want. While one might instantly engage with it, the other might just like the post. The rest might share it in their circles. Which is why split testing your ads is important.

Regardless of your advertising goals, you should run A/B tests on the following elements to see what your audience responds to the most:

Ad headline

Ad graphic

Ad copy (long form and short form)

Ad type (carousel, single image, videos, canvas)

Split testing on Facebook enables you to identify which ad is performing better in your audience segment. This way you can focus on boosting the ad campaign that is getting you maximum conversions. Which is much better than trying to run multiple failed campaigns one after the other.

Split Test Ad Targeting

Besides the format and the copy of your ads, another way to test your market is to vary the targeting – even if it’s minimal. Be it the positioning of the ad, the bid you set, the demographics/behavior you add or subtract, make sure you create as many variations as you can. Try to think of every variation there could be within your audience segment.

Focus on A/B testing the following:

Audience demographics

Sociographic and behavioral targeting

Bidding strategy

Bidding rate

Ad placement

Just like the hack above, you’ll be able to identify which ad set gets you maximum conversions and what specific demographic or strategy is making all the difference.

Set up A Custom Audience

Yes, Facebook targeting is one of the best when you’re trying to define your audience. But with billions of users, how do you pin-point those who are actually interested in what your business offers?

Installing the Facebook Pixel on your site, you can create a custom audience based on your previous website traffic. This lets you create a similar audience on Facebook. Allowing you to automatically reach out to consumers who are more likely to engage with you. In the process, increasing the number of conversions you get on an ad set.

Retarget to Generate Leads

Instead of trying to generate leads on Facebook with a fresh campaign in an all new market, try retargeting your website visitors instead. A website visit is a clear indication that a consumer is interested in what you offer. Why lose the chance to convert him into a lead?

Try offering an upgrade or a special discount to those who have visited your website. What’s more these ad campaigns also improve the brand recall value, improving your conversion and engagement rates drastically.

Create a Drip Campaign On Facebook Too

Who says a drip campaign can be set only on emails? You can actually set your retargeting ads in a manner that nurtures your website visitors. And turns them into leads with the help of valuable content.

Create different ad sets, spaced out by a defined time period. Promote different content pieces to a website visitor based on what they have already interacted with or seen. For example, offer ebooks, whitepapers and other content upgrades that are specific to your niche. This way you would avoid looking like a business trying to spam with the same ad.

More variety and higher context leads to higher conversion rates at lower costs. Period.

Use Little To No Text on Your Ad Graphic

Ever noticed how even the biggest of businesses like Shopify use high-resolution pictures contextual to their campaign? With zero text on it?

Facebook’s 20% text rule on ad graphics is a well-known rule amongst social media marketers. The lesser the text, the higher is the reach of your ad campaign. So when you’re creating A/B tests, make sure one of your ad sets is using a graphic with no text on it.

Create Layers and Layers of Data

If you’re not using custom audience on Facebook, spend time to create the right audience with layers of intelligent data. Don’t just include obvious demographics of your target market. Because that’s exactly what your competitors are doing.

Look for data similar to what they’re engaging with, their recent milestones, education, job roles, device used, purchase triggers and more.

While broadening your ad campaign targeting increases its reach, it is the narrowed down approach that brings you better conversions.

Include Social Proof

One hack that we don’t see a lot of businesses making use is, including social proof in their ad campaigns. If you want customers to believe that you will deliver what you promise, then social proof is necessary. Because there is no better advocate than an existing customer. By simply showing numbers from the results you have helped others achieve can make a big difference.

This could be a simple campaign that lets your audience know the value of using your product or service. You can also use customer testimonials that direct users to your case studies.

Emphasize On Customer Emotions

If you want real people to interact with your business, tap into their psychology and trigger emotions that nudge them to take an action. Instead of highlighting your product’s value, focus on using a copy that hits the consumer’s emotion. The closer you are to hitting the right nerve, the more likely they are to seek a solution from you!

Conclusion of Does Facebook Advertising Work

Facebook ads work and there’s absolutely no doubt about it.

If your campaigns haven’t been performing so far, it is time to go back to the whiteboard and relook your advertising strategy. Right from your objectives to who you’re targeting to the approach you’re using — dig deeper into understanding your target customer’s psychology.

But as a thumb’s rule, try to keep your advertisements simple. Be consistent in your messaging and make it easy to convert. The longer the conversion process is, the more likely people are to drop off between Facebook and your landing page.

The dream of every website and blog owner is to create high-quality content, generate massive traffic, and make sales.

We all know the role traffic plays in helping you get an interactive blog community and in earning with your site.

Needless to say that without traffic your blog is as good as living in an internet desert and in total obscurity. Even though your dream is not to earn money with your blog, you still need people to read whatever you’ve got to tell them, right?

Now, in case you don’t know, one major factor that separates your site from the popular websites on the internet like TechCrunch, Mashable, Forbes, HuffingtonPost, Buzzfeed, and the rest, is the amount of traffic they command.

Looking at their traffic stats, I bet you’ll be disappointed at yourself, and wish you could do something to be like (or a bit close) to them.

However, what if there are a few things you could do to make that happen, won’t you jump up in excitement?

Fortunately, If you are really willing and eager to turn things around and boost your website traffic, then read this post till the end.

In this post, I’m about to show you a few evergreen ideas you can implement right now that will significantly boost your website traffic beyond your wildest imagination.

But before we go to the nitty-gritty of attracting more website visitors, it would be nice for us to really understand what traffic is all about, in case you are new to blogging or internet marketing.

However, if you already know what it means, you should simply jump this section.

What is Website Traffic?

Traffic is typically the measure of the total number of people who visit your blog or website and the various channels through which they get there.

There are different sources (channels) through which people visit a site which includes:

Organic search

Direct traffic

Referral traffic

Social media

Paid traffic

“If you’re not familiar with these traffic sources, this post by Amy Winer will make it clearer.”

That being said, for the sake of clarity, this post shall focus mostly on all types of traffic except “paid traffic.”

5 Evergreen Ideas for Attracting More Website Visitors

1. Run blog contests

You may have heard about running contests or giveaways on sites. But here, we are looking at running those giveaways in a special way as to make them fetch you more traffic.

You simply need to use a tactic that makes people invite their friends, colleagues and family members to your site before they can be eligible to win the contest.

At the end of the competition, users should be picked based on the number of public votes or depending on the number of persons they were able to refer to the contest.

This will help you achieve two major feats – increase the number of readers who visit your blog and also build your email list.

Talking about blog content, Enstine is one of the few bloggers that has done this really well in the past and also benefited immensely from it. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, I bet you know what I’m talking about.

If you can do it regularly, you are sure of getting a huge spike in traffic that eventually becomes your loyal and trusted followers as long as you provide them with lots of valuable content on your blog.

Useful resources:

2. Leverage Social Sharing Communities

Social sharing sites have become a part of the traffic generating machine for smart bloggers and other website owners.

You will be missing out a great chunk of internet traffic if you are not leveraging the top sites like Reddit, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, etc.

A recent post on the Expanded Ramblings blog by Craig Smith shows that “Reddit has 250M users with 853,824 Subreddits and 50,000 communities.”

Participating in a site like that can help you tap the abundant traffic that abounds there.

Useful resources:

3. Target Long-Tail Keywords

(source)

What are long tail keywords?

Ahref defined Long tail keywords as “the search queries with very low individual search volume, but an enormous total search demand as a group. The name comes from the “long tail” of the so-called “search demand curve” – a graph, that plots all keywords by their search volumes.”

It’s true that smaller sites may not be able to compete with the big guns when it comes to targeting generic keywords but they can leverage the power of long-tail keywords to drive more targeted traffic to their sites.

According to Mike Lieberman, “Research shows us that 70% of searches conducted online use long-tail keywords. More importantly from a marketing perspective, these keywords have a 36% greater conversion rate, meaning they are more likely to result in a sale because they give consumers exactly what they’re looking for.”

Effectively targeting long tail keywords in your blog post can tremendously boost your monthly search visitors.

The long tail keywords may take you to Google’s top ten results, and even though 60 percent of all organic clicks go to the top three search results, you still have the remaining 40% at your disposal – you can still capture those extra clicks by continuously publishing high-quality, in-depth content targeting long-tail keywords.

That was the exact strategy Neil Patel used to increase his traffic by 91% generating 173,336 qualified visitors in the process.

To get more insights into what I’m are saying, check out the following posts:

Interestingly, when you’re targeting these long tail keywords most times, you don’t to build backlinks before you can rank them in Google, and even if you’ll build links, it’ll be very small. This is especially when the keyword also has low competition.

4. Interview Influential People In Your Niche

I’ll also accord Enstine Muki a lot of respect for this. When it comes to interviewing successful bloggers, he’s the king.

Interviewing the influential figures in a particular niche and publishing it on your blog could give your blog a significant boost in traffic.

People love to listen to experts for solutions because they know that those expats are knowledgeable and highly experienced in their niches.

Such interviews can provide people with insights into how things are done. But you should be sure that you interview those experts who have unique success stories – those who were able to make something out of nothing.

People would certainly want to hear their stories and see how they can emulate them in creating their own success.

You also want to interview people that have a good number of audience and are considered to be a god in their industry. This is because, after the interview, there’s a possibility that they will share it with their audience.

If their audiences are big enough, that alone can give you a lot of traffic than you can ever track.

In this era when influencer marketing has gradually taken over from traditional advertising, interviewing influencers and publishing the interview on your site is one quick way of attracting more website visitors to your site.

5. Build a community

People are interested in visiting sites that give them an opportunity to share their personal opinions on relevant topics. Everybody wants to be heard or to at least, have a sense of belonging.

If you make your site an interactive community of a sort, you attract more traffic as they would always have the chance to contribute and see themselves as being wanted.

You can make this happen by implementing third-party commenting systems like Disqus or Facebook Comments.

Another proven way of increasing interaction and building quality traffic is to create an active forum where people can share their thoughts or ask questions. One good place to achieve this is by creating your own Facebook group.

Conclusion

It is true that driving blog traffic could be difficult, but with all the strategies we listed in this post, that shouldn’t be a big challenge to you anymore.

Many websites try to make the user’s life easier by automatically redirecting her to the language/region version of their content that they infer based on IP address. But this approach is full of SEO pitfalls you should know about. In other words, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

If you do automatic redirects, make sure there is a separate page (URL) that redirects to the appropriate page. No individual country/language URL should auto-redirect. In other words, do this:

The 3 language versions are self-explanatory. But note that the x-default version of the page is a new URL, different from all the others. Only visitors to that specific URL should be automatically redirected.Based on their IP address, you can choose to redirect them to any of the 3 language-specific pages.

However, if a visitor from Ireland is trying to access your /fr/ (French) page, let her access it. Do not redirect her to English. Not only can this be frustrating for someone genuinely interested in the French page, it can also lead to all kinds of trouble with search engine bots.

Say Googlebot is crawling your site. Google tends to use a 66.249.x.x IP address, which is a U.S.-based IP. So your smart website will detect a US visitor. Now when Googlebot tries to access the French page, it will get redirected to your English page. So Googlebot will think the French page isn’t really an independent page after all; it’s just a duplicate that redirects to the English page. Google will be forced to ignore your French page, and might show you a “missing return tags” error because it couldn’t find the right French page that links back to the English page.

Mistakes to Avoid when Auto-redirecting I prefer language/country chooser pages rather than automatic redirects because redirects are easy to screw up. But if you absolutely must use redirects, here is how to do it:

Use separate redirector pages solely for redirecting. Use 1 redirector page for each set of internationalized pages. In the example above, http://www.example.com/product is the redirector page for the set of 3 pages http://www.example.com/en/product.html, /fr/product.html and /es/product.html. Similarly, you can have /product-2 auto-redirect to one of /en/product-2, /es/product-2 and /fr/product-2.

Never automatically redirect a visitor (human or bot) that is trying to access a specific language version page that has content. In our example, that means never auto-redirecting when the page requested is one of http://www.example.com/en/product.html, /fr/product.html or /es/product.html

Using Cookies: When you use an IP address to auto-redirect, the process involves a potentially time-consuming or expensive step of geolocation. Many websites store a cookie on the user’s browser to cache info about the user’s detected locale; this is done so that for all subsequent page requests, the geolocation step can be skipped. It makes the website faster, but when it’s done wrong it can create problems. It is infuriating as a user to find that a website will not let you change your locale even if you want to. Say a Spanish user is traveling and in London right now. Based on their IP address, they were auto-redirected to /en/page.htmlinstead of what they wanted i.e., /es/page.html. Not only were they redirected, they were cookied — let’s label this an English user because we know they want English! Except they don’t. Don’t make the user’s life difficult by cookie-ing them and removing all options to change their language.

Cookies are also used when there is a country-chooser page where a user manually selects their preferred language. The cookie is meant to save the user’s choice but sometimes creates problems. For example, airline websites for international travelers may save the user’s choice of a foreign country and not let them choose their home country even after they return home.