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TOOLS
Upgrade your social game with these tools.
Great social media tools are like those special weapons that every marketer likes to have in their armoury, to sprinkle that extra little fairy dust onto your social media accounts and make them perfect!
Here are some of the tools for 2019 that you may want to look out for.
Remove.bg: Whether you are a graphic designer, photographer or selfie lover, removing backgrounds has never been easier. An almost magical tool that’s been doing the rounds in almost all FB groups over the last 24 hours.
You can upload an image or paste an URL and it can remove the image background in seconds and it’s completely free.
Typito: Typito is like the “Canva for Videos”. The drag-drop ability allows you to create beautiful looking videos with typography, images or even existing videos. Just upload your clips and images and you can then add text, music or icons to it. It has a free version as well as a $5 version to take that Typito logo off.
Unplash: Don’t have the resources to go for regular professional photoshoots? No problem! Unsplash is your free stock photo library keeping your creatives fresh and away from ad fatigue, without having to spend a fortune.
Promo Image Resizer: Got a great pic and want to use it as a Profile/Cover/Story pic on various social media platforms but re-sizing it for each platform is proving to be a pain? PIR is a perfect tool for that!
Got any other tools that you ladies and gents are nuts about? Sharing is caring they say. And if you share with us, we’ll share with everyone else reading this newsletter!
E-COMMERCE
How Chinese scammers illegally manipulate Amazon to be in pole position
This really reminded us of the Bloomberg piece with Rob Gryn…
Your factory produces thousands of products but you aren’t able to sell them all on Amazon.
What can you do to gain a better product placement on Amazon and empty your warehouse more efficiently?
Easy! You hire an Amazon “guru” who knows some unorthodox tactics that will drive your sales to the moon. Right?
Well, it looks that Chinese sellers are willing to do everything to place their products on Amazon. Even if it means crossing over the line. And they are also willing to pay a fat fee in order to get these results.
The name of this so-called strategy is Amazon Listing Manipulation and Mr Thai is one of the guys who helps Chinese sellers to scale their Amazon business.
In this video, he explains all the Machiavellian strategies he uses to boost his clients’ sales.
Bribes, kicking down competitors, fake reviews and artificial sales. It looks like Amazon is a jungle for sellers.
It’s extremely easy to do that for them. Do you want to shoot your competitors down? Start ordering their products. Then, ask for a refund saying the product doesn’t correspond to the description and send the product back to Amazon.
If you do this many times, the Amazon algorithm will push down their products in the listing or even ban them if they experience too many refunds.
But what if you want positive reviews? You commision a third party that buys your products from random locations. The trick? You send them empty boxes while getting several 5-star fake reviews that will push up your listing!
Now let’s talk about corruption.
Amazon is investigating among its employees to catch the ones who accept these bribes to give an unfair advantage to such sellers. The bribes range from $80 to $2k to delete bad reviews and restore banned accounts.
Not even Facebook went so far… At least not in the news.
But what is Amazon doing about all this? They say that they are constantly monitoring for suspicious activity.
However, Mr Thai says that as long as there will be automation and algorithms monitoring the systems, there will always be humans tricking Amazon!
Human diabolical creativity 1, Amazon 0!
But on a serious note, even if you don’t have automation… Humans can make mistakes and in this case, humans are one of the weak points because they can be corrupted. Anyway, go watch the whole short documentary. It’s fascinating!
Going through a funnel with Mo Ali Aguel
Do you need some inspiration for your funnel copy? Mo shares a nice 25 mins video analyzing a funnel from Jim Smith, in his Momentum Marketing FB group. He tells us the critical working and not-working points of a converting funnel.
We’ll focus on the most important points, and you can watch the full breakdown if you feel like it.
First off, the long copy of the FB ad explains the benefits on three different levels and it contains effective sentences that push people to comment on the ad and start a conversation.
This makes a lot of sense. Why? Cause Facebook’s mission is to have people engaging on the platform, not just buying. If your ad aligns with Facebook’s goals, then Facebook will give you what you want!
Mo talks even about the weakness of the copy, which is missing the storytelling factor.
After clicking the ad, we jump into the landing page, where Mo Ali shows us all the things he doesn’t like and would have done differently: benefits should be above the fold, too long copy and few colours.
The thing that Mo insisted on using is video, video and video! Unboxing videos, founder videos, whatever! Use them. Because they sell!
What did Mo like about the landing page? Humour! He says it converts. Have you tried?
You can take inspiration from this newsletter! You know we are the funniest Crew, right?
And what a good converting lander should never miss? Many CTAs and many reviews. Don’t be shy to use them!
Mo went very deep in analyzing the funnel, explaining all his points of view and critique on how to write good copy. Go check it out!
Facebook info you have to know for the holiday!
The holiday season is already here and like every other mortal being, FB reps will be taking some days off too! FB offices will be closed on 24th, 25th and 31st December.
To make sure your campaigns are running uninterrupted during these last 2 weeks of the year, we put down some pointers, to ensure exactly that. This information comes directly from Schloss’s FB Rep and is applicable to just about everybody.
Under-Delivery or Delivery issues:
– Avoid under-delivery of campaigns by adding more placements manually or switch to automatic placements.
– Use Campaign Budget Optimization for auto-optimization.
Bidding:
– Increase your bids by at least 30% to stay competitive.
– Switch from “lowest cost” to “Bid Cap”. Bid cap has to be set higher than average CPA.
Targeting:
– Switch to “Expanded Interests” especially if your current audience size is narrow.
– Consolidate similar audiences/ad-sets for better reach and delivery.
Creatives:
– Add a lot of creatives to avoid ad-fatigue.
– Add variations of working creatives.
Support:
It’s advised to appeal for disapproved ads via the “Get in touch link” or drop in an email for any technical issues over an email. However, we are really uncertain if that will really help anything when the offices are closed.
Funding Issues:
Make sure to have a look at your available account credit at Business Manager > Payments > Credit available.
For issues related to invoicing and payment-processing topics, including wire confirmations, invoicing, etc, drop an email to [email protected]
If you have a dedicated rep assigned to you, nothing better than that. Get in touch with them before the off-days to get any specific concerns of yours answered beforehand and try to stay in touch with them.
Dedicated reps might be available to an extent over their specific email addresses. We wish you the best of luck!
Runnings FB campaigns to untested markets
Have you yet tested traffic from countries you never thought of targeting before? No? Well, you may want to give it a thought if you want to leverage the most of the holiday season, says Depesh Mandalia.
Now, this is not an open-ended strategy that will work broadly for everyone at all times, but more of a low volume retargeting strategy. We’re talking about retargeting those who might not be in the same geos as when they first engaged with your funnel.
Bulgaria, for example, came up as one of those countries that worked for Depesh. While testing worldwide traffic for one of his retargeting campaigns, it made him a few sales at a very low CPA, of around $0.05.
Again, low volume traffic and sales, but hey, each penny counts!
Use automated bids, avoid any kind of duplications and keep it as simple as possible.
SPONSORED
The tool that does some Facebook magic, making sure you get a head start in 2019!
What Facebook magic are we talking about? Well, the sort that uncovers the secret ads and landers your competition uses.
That’s MagicAdz – the tool that can show you what affiliates are really running on Facebook. You can see details like:
- Affiliate ads only – exclude all branding ads you might not care about
- Download the real landing page, not the one affiliates show *wink wink*
- Ads from 49 countries
- Very powerful search that includes:
- Searching by ads, user comments and redirect path
- Landing page search includes specific HTML code
You can see it in action in this 1-minute video. Careful! There are some NSFW ads in there – true story!
OK, talk is cheap – here’s what the MagicAdz team has for you.
You get a 14 day trial for $1 to explore everything the tool has to offer.
Afterwards, it costs $299/month. Pays for itself within a few days usually!
But you already know that as a WHAT THE AFF reader, you can get it for a special price – $249/month. Keep in mind though, the discount is valid as long as you keep your subscription active.
And the timing couldn’t be better. New Year’s Resolutions are coming, with certain verticals converting more than usual. Gotta get those ads and landers ready!
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Cockroach-milk, the new superfood? Ugh…
It looks that in the future we won’t have enough cow-milk, given our ever-expanding population. But it looks that there is a new kind of milk. One that is 4 times more nutritious than cow-milk, gives 3 times the energy of buffalo-milk and could be the key in feeding our growing population.
It’s cockroach milk and it’s going to be the superfood of the future. Probably, you’ll feed your nephews with cockroach milk. What a sweet picture!
Disgusting? Yeah, we think so too. But, it’s exactly the food that an international team of scientists is banking on to become the new superfood.
Here’s the step by step guide on how to milk a cockroach! Okay, nope, we’re not doing that! That’s not gonna happen! It’s too far, even for us!
The scientists have also dismissed such an option and instead are sequencing the genes responsible for the production of milk protein crystals. They’re going to cook crystal milk!
Hey, it’s crystal milk, not crystal meth! And this is not Breaking Bad but Breaking Food!
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