Pwning Facebook : How To Think Like An Uber Affiliate
This is a guest post by Paul from uberaffiliate.com. He shared this story with me privately and after I verified everything he said he was doing I asked him to post a summary for shoemoney.com
If you’re truly an uber affiliate marketer, you’ll have the ability to see a new opportunity, exploit it as much you can, and walk away a lot richer in a short period of time. About a week ago, I blogged about Facebook opening up their CPC advertising via Facebook Flyers Pro. Aside from my stupidity of posting about it and letting the world know, I started thinking about how I could take advantage of this new system and use it to profit. I’m going to walk through my entire process of thinking, testing, and exactly how I used Facebook to profit pretty well for working on it for a few days. I was peaking out initially at around $10,000-$15,000/day, and then that rapidly declined as Facebook started catching on (as I’ll post about). If you have the ability to realize and properly exploit a new market, you can make some nice coinage before saturation and rules set in.
Step 1: How Does The Network Work?
I had no idea how the Flyers Pro network worked, so I did the best thing to do: tested it out. I put up an ad for ringtones I think it was and looked at all the targeting options I had :
I chose to target all people in the United States ages 16-28 I think, used no keywords, bid $0.05, and set the max budget of $50. I refreshed the stats after about 5 minutes, and I had already gotten about 20k impressions…crazy! My CTR was horrible but that didn’t matter because I was getting really cheap clicks and a lot of impressions. This campaign ended up profiting nicely. Although I noticed that after about an hour or two, my impressions just completely died. I also realized when I tried to create another flyer, it wouldn’t let me because the maximum daily budget for the account is only $50 (weak). So I had to stop and think for a minute, because my traffic died and I couldn’t spend any more money.
Step 2 : How to Get Around the System
After thinking for a few minutes, there were two possible ways to get around this obstacle :
1) Create another Facebook account and make a flyer for it.
2) Delete that flyer and make a new one.
I found out that you can delete the flyer and re-publish it, and you’ll be able to spend over your daily limit as well as get that initial surge of insane traffic.
Step 3 : What Would Really Convert?
Ok so at this point I had a system that gave me crazy amounts of traffic for a really low cost, but I wanted to think of something that would convert really well and was targeted to my audience. Facebook used to be a college-only network, and is now for the most part a younger age network. So that got me thinking education offers. Next, college kids like a few things, including booze and free things. I’m not sure if there’s a beer affiliate network out there (hmm maybe wine would have worked well…), but there are plenty of “free” offers out there. So I have to find an educational product that offers something free. College scholarships? Ding ding ding. These offers give college kids a chance to sign up (for free) to win a college scholarship. They pay out on the first page submit, and were just what I was looking for. So I deleted and recreated some scholarship ads, and I was doing really well with it.
How to Make it Convert?
So now I had an offer that was targeted and converted well. When I first started running the offer heavy, I had no targeting at all on (hence my bad overall conversion rate in the stats I’m going to post). Once I changed targeted to match kids only in college, and ages 18-24, conversion rate tripled. Here’s some stats for just the scholarship offer at it’s peak day :
That was just my biggest offer with a couple networks, not total earnings. I had about 6-7 offers running with different networks. Now you know what I made with it, now we’ll get into the real juice on how I really exploited it.
How to Act Like an Uber Affiliate
This all happened in a matter of a few hours. By this point I had
-found out that Facebook was rocking
-found how to continually get high traffic surges and beat the $50/day limit
-found a niche that was targeted and converting
Now I had to really exploit it. I’m not a programmer or anything, and I did this all without any programming knowledge. There’s a FireFox plugin called iMacros, and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen at that point in time. This really goes to show how networking can help a lot, as it was a friend who told me about it. What iMacros does is, records an action that you do inside FireFox, and then can replay those actions whenever you want it to. If it sounds confusing, you’ll understand 100% in a minute.
So from my thoughts on how to initially take advantage of Facebook, one of the things was making multiple accounts. More accounts = more flyers = more money. It would take a while to go to Facebook.com, click the signup link, fill out the info, confirm the email, go to Flyers Pro, create the flyer, submit the flyer, enter the billing information, and then logout. Here’s a screenshot of what iMacros looks like :
Here’s what I did :
-signed up for an account manually and was taken to the welcome screen.
-from here, I pressed the “record” button on iMacros.
-went up to the browser bar and typed in http://www.facebook.com/flyers and loaded it.
-created my flyer, clicked to continue, filled out my billing information, placed the order.
-clicked logout, then once logged out clicked “sign up”.
-filled out the information to create a new account. for email I just had it type “@mydomain.com” (which was one of my domains).
-hit STOP on the iMacro. the signup screen now looks like this :
Ok now we can reflect on what I just did. I’ll clear a couple of points first. The iMacro can’t do two of the things in the signup process: dynamically insert an email address, and break the captcha code. You need to enter a different email address for every account. Instead of setting up 1,500 gmail accounts, let’s think smart and simple instead. Just take one of your domains, and redirect all emails to that domain to your gmail account. Then you can enter 1@yourdomain.com, 2@yourdomain.com, 3@yourdomain.com, etc and they’ll all work, and all the confirmation letters are sent to 1 email.
So all I had to do when the signup screen loaded was enter a number before the @ sign in email, enter the captcha, and click signup. I had gmail in the other tab, and I’d just click on the confirmation URL, and that takes you to the welcome screen. Click to play the iMacro and watch it do it’s thang. I had account creation down to about 30 seconds which isn’t bad.
Exploiting Step 2
New account creation was doing fine, I made 50 accounts in about 30 minutes. But I also knew that deleting and re-uploading a flyer gave it that initial surge of traffic. Here’s how I used iMacros to get on top of that and make things even easier then creating accounts :
-start at the Facebook.com homepage, logged out. hit RECORD on the iMacro.
-login with my information.
-go to http://www.facebook.com/flyers
-click on “my flyers”
-click on my flyer, and then delete it.
-click “create flyer”
-make the exact same flyer, continue, place the order.
-logout - STOP the iMacro.
What I just had the macro do is login to one of my accounts, delete my old flyer, reupload it, and then logout. Sweet, so I have this thing refreshing my account with new flyers, now let’s have it refresh all 50 accounts. Ok, I’ll just have to record myself going in and deleting and creating new ads for every account…WRONG. That would be a waste of a couple hours. Instead, click on the “Edit” tab in iMacros, and click to edit the re-uploading macro you just made. It’ll open up in Notepad or something. Copy the code starting from logging in, ending with logging out. Paste that 49 more times. Now every single email will say “1@yourdomain.com”. The only work you have to do is go and change them to go from 1 to 50. Save the macro.
With 1 click of a button, the iMacro will cycle through all 50 of your accounts, login, reupload the ad, and logout. You can now refresh every 30 minutes-hour and get that initial traffic surge over…and over…and over.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat
So I now had a system that would semi-auto create me accounts, and fully auto upload ads. What did I do now? Exploited the hell out of it! I was bidding $0.50 in the beginning and getting my clicks only at $0.10. I tested different offers, ads, targeting options, anything I wanted to. If I wanted to change my bids, all I’d do is edit the iMacro, and do a simple find/replace. I’d replace “0.25″ with “0.50″, and all 50 accounts would be updated with the snap of my fingers.
Facebook Starts to Realize
All good things must come to an end. Facebook started to catch on to all this, and started doing many things. They started disabling ads, and then turning off all accounts. Now even if you create 1 account and reupload an ad, they’ll disable it all. They’ve also started banning keywords like “ringtones”..and “scholarships” hehe :-). It’s still possible to make money with it, but they also started banning affiliate URLs, so direct linking is even hard. In the end I had about 500 Facebook accounts all banned.
My Mistakes
Although I was able to make a nice quick buck, I did make a couple mistakes in the process :
1) HUGE mistake - blogging about it and forum posting about it. When I first heard the news about Facebook flyers, I just thought it would make a good blog post on recent news. I also posted about it at Wickedfire and asked if anybody had messed with flyers. That turned into a pretty big thread and got a lot of people working with them. Learn this lesson : if you discover something that you can exploit : keep your damn mouth shut until it dies.
2) Careless mistakes. I was caught in the moment and wasn’t thinking, just wanted to do as much as possible. For a day I was promoting scholarships to the entire network, not thinking that you have to 18 and in college to actually complete the offer.
Overall
Overall, the experience was well worth it. I stayed up until 5am every night and set my alarm to go off in a few hours so I could get up and refresh all my accounts. I looked like a complete bum, stubble, unclean, that whole deal…I was in my office dungeon for many many hours with no rest. But hey, I made a pretty nice chunk of change from it and learned a lot.
I hope you guys enjoyed the article, maybe sparked your mind for some ideas. The point of the whole thing is that if you’re on top of the industry and a smart thinker, you can have some pretty nice success in the affiliate field. I did all of this myself, no programmer, just some thinking and turning those thoughts into actions
Take care and good luck,
UberAffiliate - Paul Bourque
- 176 Comments. What say you?
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Cool post. There are several lessons here including
- be careful sharing tricks that work with too many people until you have exploited completely first
- There are always new opportunities online. You just have to find them and then go for it.
Great post… it’s too bad that you shared this before it had come to an end for you…
Rich
that cracked me up — i definitely think we’ll see Paul waiting a bit longer before the next how-to post. We’ll get the full wrap up — how I found the cash machine, how long it lasted and how to buy your own private island.
Great post… Much better then posting about getting off your ass and doing it.
Great post… I’d be curious how long he managed to get it to work; sounds like a week?
yea I agree. We (rss readers) read sites to mostly learn and experience what the writer (Jeremy and guests) have to say. We should take it with a grain of salt but I gotta admit a post like this makes me think more about bookmarking this for digestion later.
BrrrrIIiiiLlLiiANT article :), the power of macros to automate repetitive stuff
WOW, that’s awesome! I have not made dime one in the game, but this has got my wheels turning. I have a few thousand to spend on my web site idea(s), but I am not sure where to start. I don’t understand PPC or afliate ads or anything else really, but after reading this story it makes me want to even more. I think just doing something also is the key. Many people watch, few do.
That’s a great post, bet you really wish you hadn’t told everyone about it so early? That’s always my mistake. I know I should keep quiet, I just somehow can’t help myself.
You won’t see me at all, lol.
Guys, if you have any questions or anything visit my most recent blog post and ask any and all questions there.
Thanks.
That was freakin’ insane stuff. Well done!
Yeah this has given me a whole new view of the new opportunities online thing
Search this blog for a post about the PPC experiment.
Well, damn that was long and very detailed. There are always open opportunities to exploit stuff like this. Great report written.
wow, you are evil. lol. good stuff.
Ya, it’s really hard to keep quiet sometimes when you discover something sweet like this!
Great post Paul. Thanks. 2 Quick very amateurish questions. 1) why did the initial surge of traffic die after an hour or two? I dont conceptually understand why deleting the ad and recreating the same ad would get you to repeat that initial surge in traffic. 2) were you just putting up ads that advertisers were offering? in other words, how did you find these offers to make ads for?
paul how much did you clear on the whole deal before they shut it down?
Great article. I learnt quite a few things from it. Thanks for sharing. Smart of you to cash in on the oppurtunity.
Nice…very nice
I’ll post again guys, ask all questions on my most recent blog post so I don’t have to be checking back here all the time, thanks.
Paul, stop kicking yourself so hard. Word would have got out anyway. I beleive it was thurs/Fri when they initially rolled it out and by Tuesday it was dead. All the wicked fire cronies hopped aboard around Sun/Mon? if I remember right. Word was spreading like wild fire anyway.
The lesson here is to MOVE FAST which you clearly did well.
Have credit on hand to run up a few thousand in CC bills to float until your affiliate payments come in.
I think where most n00b affiliates miss out is in spending to much time asking questions and doing research instead of getting their asses in there and DOING it.
Treat it like school. If you spend a fun hundred dollars on adwords and get little return, you are going to learn WAY MORE than you will in weeks of trolling forums, reading blogs and being a nervous nelly.
I still have a handful of live FB accounts that I am afraid to even log into for fear of them being axed. But a couple hun a day is still rolling in. =). Can’t complain, pays for my pedicures.
And here I ignored Facebook because I thought that college kids don’t convert.
Grrr. Nicely done though!
Paul that was dope! Seems like business post-Click Consultants is good.
great post! I did a couple things with facebook flyers a couple months ago, but didnt go over $50… nice job
Thanks for the great article, Paul! Even though the technique is no longer usable, it’s fantastic for a beginner like myself to be able to read about how “real world” affiliate stuff is done. I learn much better by example so reading an actual step-by-step account like this is awesome.
I’ve been doing this for a while now. Good post!
I’m pretty sure they’ll add a captcha or something soon - they won’t want you having thousands of accounts!
Check out my blog - the whole thing is focused on using Amazon Associates with AdWords to turn a profit
I guess I was naive to think ringtones and scholarship type offers wouldnt convert for college kids. I run a few affiliates through facebook and they work decent enough to make a profit.
Ugh. Stuff like this is why MySpace is such a toilet these days. Its nice to go out and make money, but another thing to just completely inundate a great website with worthless adspam.
The best part of the advice “if you discover something that you can exploit : keep your damn mouth shut until it dies ”
Currently i know a trick basically a back door to G, lol so difficult to keep my mouth shut
Don’t you think you can still make things work
just need to use some BH stuff to fool FB … Very much possible ..
For each discovery like this there are phases .. i guess the first phase has just ended … now its the time for 2nd tire people to come in, use their brains and again exploit FB
Friggin Awesome.
haha that’s crazy. Great information! Thanks!
I doth my Internet Marketing cap in your direction. Good Work - and there was me thinking Facebook was a waste of time.
Thats awesome, and a great well-written post
This feels really blackhat to me. Facebook clearly states in it’s terms and conditions that you can’t have more than one account per person. I guess my position is moral one. Clearly, by playing outside the rules, you’ve managed to make a nice little profit, that you couldn’t have made playing by the rules.
I’m just curious how other people feel about having a total disregard for website rules just to make a buck?
Mind you it’s probably that attitude that is the difference between the rich and the poor.
I was wondering how you got so many accounts banned. Nice post man
So what kind of stuff CAN you promote on FB Flyers without getting banned/disabled?
What a nice story! Wonderfull he how thought about this, easy is hell, but just think of it..
Yup… it now takes facebook all of twenty minutes to disable my ringtone and other affiliate advertisements. I wish companies like google, yahoo, and everyone else that sells advertising would realize that a truly open market benefits them as well. I guess they’ve gotta make trade offs between a quality experience for their users and ad revenue though.
Arbitrage makes the market efficient.
Great walkthrough article - fantastic! definitely foing to check out the iMacros plugin got a few tasks - Thank you
Jeje, Were you able to get your profit? I know that I was blogging about Adsense and that’s how I was banned from Adsense (It was really dumb to blog about it). Does anyone know if they [Adsense] ever forgive people? (I still can’t get over it) Oh, well, nice post I liked the rhythm of the post.
This social network websites can really be a great tool for making money online. This guest post is really interesting.
I’ve seen people all over digital point forum selling out accounts with 50k-75k friends. There are millions of potential users, and the pay per lead offers are perfect for them. For example the dating affiliate programs could work out great for this kind of audience.
Paul… You’re an idiot. If this guest blogger were done in 4-5 weeks from now, then fine, I’d feel better about it. But you’re only bringing more people into it that may get into serious shit, especially with the whole FB threats. You better hope no one blames shit on Jeremy for it either. Whatever. If this thing would have lasted longer, it would have been Myspace Gold Rush 90.0. Except in this case there is no spam, and affiliates were actually paying for traffic and not committing any type of fraud. It’s just against their TOS.
My takeaway from this post was to figure out a system that works, but in order to make it work even better you have to know how to use the automation tools that are out there, am busy downloading iMacros right now, thanx for the tip.
Most Dumb & Idiot person i have ever seen.. lolzz..
Very interesting, it’s unfortunate it lately came to an end…
Paul, why post this publicly after the crap that you caused through posting at WF? Now FB’s massively changing the system to PREVENT US from doing this. Trying to ruin it even more since you already took a bullet? They clearly don’t like multiple accounts per BrianFB & Jon’s postings at WF.
Awesome post Paul!
I only noticed the Facebook flyers yesterday and immediately started frothing at the mouth with the possibilities. I was quite surprised that Facebook started with PPC, but it makes sense - it’s a win-win for them.
lol. you really can’t do anything. I think they only allow for students to post ads. I ran 3 ads and got banned.
Awesome… love the exploitation involved.. another way to bring down the giants!!!!
Congrats on making $10-15k/day.
why am I not that smart???
Awesome post. Nice exploitation. Well done.
I just took another look at the facebook flyers and there are quite afew affiliate offers, also they have a per click option which I think Im going to try.
Great article!….Now what im i gona promote on facebook…hmmmmmmmm
This is a great article and my blog carried one that’s similar.
A tshirt company who’s sales jumped 80% in 60 days. It’s a how I did it story.
Check it
http://www.siliconcaribe.com/2007/09/17/sprawl-tees-my-facebook-success-story-drove-sales-up-80/
In other words : don’t sell the e-book before you earned all you can earn from your idea
Everyone converts.
well that was a piece of genus!
lol
That was a piece of genus
awesome post man, interesting topic and in depth descriptions and walk thru’s!!! Thanx
Some years back some guy carried out a similar freak on my space, But now think its almost impossible..
This is really great post, i always try to discover some thing new and make little money on it.
gtfo he’s not making anyone do anything. he better hope nothing. no one has a gun to your head making you hack facebook.
I appreciate those of us that have such an idea before the rest of us. It makes me think that there are always way to make money out of thin air.
Nice read. What I learnt from this post is that you should be always prepared to watch for new opportunities and moreover be quick enough to exploit them.
Great article. Keep it going !
good article and good way to make money… too bad facebook has already started blocking certain words and banning people…
I read they have been threatening to sue affiliates?
Yeah that’s what has got me flipping out. That’s seriously insane!
makes you wonder what the logic is behind the threats. they built the platform that’s being abused here. if they have to sue you to make you stop, the system is
shitbeyond their controlWow he is very clever. I need to check out facebook. I have heard about it but yet went over and found out what every one has been talking about. Thanks for the post.
ummm… so you didn’t actually read the article then? Cause the ‘ per click option which i think Im going to try’ is what the whole article was about. But thanks for tuning in.
As for the naysayers that say it is all over… It is far from it.
facilitating or promoting the following will get you banned (from FB Support):
•Liquor, beer, wine
•Tobacco products
•Ammunition or firearms
•Gambling (poker, online casino, sports books)
•Ringtones
•Smiley downloads
•Scams, illegal activity and/or illegal contests, pyramid
schemes, or chain letters
•Uncertified pharmaceutical products
•Adult friend finders or dating sites with a sexual emphasis
•Web cams or surveillance equipment
Also - in my experience, Email/Zip subs offering ‘Free’ Products that aren’t really free…
Just for fun, I’d like to see a screenshot of a $15000 dollar day.
I’d be more like 5 or 6 screenshots, as I didn’t do that much with just a single network or offer.
Genius, beautiful, perfect, amazing example! Although sadly few and far between :S
Very inspiring post and lessons learned. In this industry, maybe if we discovered something amazing we might as well heed the Chinese proverb “See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil”
Regards,
Lito Montala
The Filipino Entrepreneur Blog
more screenshots will be heplful I think. )
Simply brilliant. I’ve never heard of the iMacro plugin. It will make my life so much easier.
Another great new thing to try….
I’m running out of time.
hmm.
Funny you mention dungeon and macros. I’m going to break your rule of keeping quiet by saying that this is old news AND happening daily.
#1 - the macro - uoassist.com
#2 - the target - uo.com
#3 - the affiliate - uotreasures.com
Happy macroing since 1998.
Brilliant article ….. started a flyer myself as an experiment.
I did this couple of times and got scared
FBook isn’t small company, now worth couple of billions according to Microsoft .
Well I have same methods for other sites
Thanks for all the kind words guys, I appreciate them a lot. Contribute back by going to my blog and submitting what you think are the top affiliate marketing blog and forum posts out there, I’m putting together a guide.
hehe thats cool! the plugin roxx
GREAT write up! Thank you
iMacro is awesome. There are some free ones available as well I think but I cant remember what they are
creative indeed
Good things like this never last
Gave it ago … very average performance for me … maybe have to try a different niche next time.
hahahah….. this is great. I really hope these tactics will help me to make more sales. Thanks for the great information.
Arrest this bastard!!
So many ideas, so little time!! Thanks for the post. I’m starting to realize all the possibilities…
simple… they check how many accounts have the same IP
It was cruising for about 2 weeks. The peak lasted about 3-4 days.
Yeah I posted many a time that it was my biggest mistake with it all.
I still dont get why facebook shut affiliates down…release a ppc platform and then kick out affilaites??
Captchas won’t stop everyone
They’ve starting blocking affiliate links, certain kws and credit cards.
There are still some people using the platform making a good buck. They are somehow getting around the improved system.
Before this was up facebook was flooded and they were lashing back. Theres money to be made other ways, Facebook apps pretty hot and myspace is going to be lauching their platform soon.
Do I smell jealousy?
internet is always fill with gold mine opportunities… even though everyone seems to say saturated or run out of idea. UberAffiliate Paul just proves that at the right time with creative exploit, you can mine gold…. although not for long but it is enough to build up some capital to fund the next few projects.
OMG, if I was in your shoes, with the sites I have, I would have made up to 50x as much.
VERY nice! Next time, just tell me your secrets, not every1
Wow, thatas awesome. I gotta try this out. Its sad that I am catching up now. Maybe there is a sincere way out of this. Thakns for the solid tips. I might try this on similar websites.
Just try to keep these things private.. or only share them with your friends.
Wow. I never knew Facebook was so influential…I spend too much time on MySpace!
Think different and good things may follow. Although the author has maybe trespassed legal borders by violating the Facebook TOS, he is following a good example as Marc Zuckerberg started out Facebook by mass-mailing the Harvard campus without permission if I remember the story correctly.
love it! the true affilaite marketer needs no sleep lol! he works in his pants, and just reaps in the money, why should any of us get a real job !
I had a similiar situation a couple years ago when i was ahead of my time with the Myspace friend requester robot. I had like 200,000 friends between 5 profiles i created that pushed my blog. It was bringing me sick traffic.
Then a month later requester robots were all over the net and myspace got flooded and eventually my profiles were banned.
Utilizing the social networks is great, but its also a lot of work. If you can manage to balance time spent developing your social profiles with your real website that is making you money, you’ve found the golden balance.
Facebook is the next big craze after MySpace, people who get in quickly are the ones who’ll profit later.
Wow! This is cool techniques. But I dont think it is still workable now
–blog for dream–
very informative, thanks!
you and you friend are smart. exploit thousand of bucks before getting caught. next time share with us early lol! so we can do make money ha..ha. 20k impression just for 5 minutes? this is crazy!!
Thanks for bolding this quote :
Learn this lesson : if you discover something that you can exploit : keep your damn mouth shut until it dies
i hope i will apply it lol , i cant shut up when i make money and tell my friend about it .. then everything is gone
I would love to learn more about how to do stuff like this. It would be nice if Shoemoney wouold get more people to give away their secrets.
Lets just hope myspace, bebo, friendster and all those other social networks open up a similar system. MySpace always seems broken, so I’m sure there system could be exploited easily!
~ Dave
myspace, facebook, digg all are easy to be used to pwn
wow. It shows two things…One that there will always be a next thing, you just have to find it, and two. Anyone that blogs about making a million by doing x is full of it…Why would you tell anyone anything!!!
Excellent Post! Bravo! I enjoyed the read it was pretty cool. I will have to get the firefox plugin now.. It seems that is quite a useful tool…
Just like any gravy train…eventually it will clog arteries!
The Mad Ape
I’m very enjoy to read this content.
Thank you for good information
I ‘m coming back to read more content.