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Contrary to what many think, easy social media marketing does not mean expensive banner ads.

There's a term in the advertising world used to refer to someone who's learned to ignore ads on websites and social media to the point where their brain refuses to see, acknowledge or process information in banner ads.

The term is "banner blindness."

It's the one type of blindness we are all grateful to develop, even those of us who are growing an online business. After all, marketers are people too, and we don't want to be distracted or interrupted either.

With that said, the uphill battle that people using social media for network marketing have to deal with is pretty interesting…,

For example, on this heat map study tracking eye movement of Facebook users, you'll notice that the majority of users pretty much ignore the "Right Hand Side" ads:

Another eye-tracking study tracked eye movement for a news site (similar to a blog) and noticed how the banner on the left is wholly ignored relative to the content in the middle:

Over the years, mentors of mine taught us about 'banner blindness' and conveyed the importance of doing whatever you could to snap website visitors out of that state of 'blindness' and notice your ad.

Even if you had good ad copy, it wouldn't matter unless you could 'break the blindness' issue and attract eyeballs.

For that reason, we experimented with the most obnoxiously colourful and seizure-inducing flashing ads a couple of years ago. Still, the effort always seemed futile because even if you got someone to notice your ad…, it was only a matter of time before the audience of a website, as a collective, added your annoying ad to the brain file of 'things to ignore.'

And so we'd restart the "creative process" and produce an even more annoying ad.

With this type of traffic generation, I wasn't too excited about growing an online business, believe it or not, because the game was less about influence and more about being the "loudest" ad on the website. If you know my personality, I'm not a loud guy.

So for years, I went on a traffic hiatus and let my business partner and team handle the traffic part of our business while I focused on conversions, copywriting and offers.

Now fast forward to today…,

How I Turned $20 Into $141,246.00 in Sales by Pushing This Little Blue Button.

As many of our members know, I purchased 100% of my No Excuses & SEO Networker business last year from my former partner. I merged all my business assets with Elite Marketing Pro to benefit our community.

Having the opportunity to be a significant shareholder of THE marketing system and community, where I got my start as an Internet marketer in 2006, was a dream come true. But this dream also came with responsibility, and as Chief Marketing Officer of EMP, I needed to re-engage with the world of traffic, as it is the life's blood of any online business.

So as I did my research into all viable traffic sources, I found many remarkable traffic strategies, including PPV, YouTube (free & paid), Instagram, Twitter PPC, and many others.

However, the one traffic source most dominant in the minds and businesses of the most successful marketers today was, in fact, Facebook, but I didn't know how to approach it.

For years, while growing an online business, I had spent $20 here and there boosting the occasional post on my Fanpage but had no idea what to do beyond that.

However, earlier this year, I wrote a blog post about my experience at a network marketing event in Vegas and boosted it by $20 on February 28th, targeting an MLM audience. That day, I also landed in Orlando for one of our EMP Acceleration Mentorship Workshops.

I didn't think I would make much money from it, even though I did offer an opportunity to join my AMF Bootcamp newsletter at the end of the post. But I thought the message was too long and didn't think people would be likely to read that far — especially if they read on their smartphones. (Boy, was I wrong!)

All I wanted to do, was to share the content with as many people as possible, provide value to people in the network marketing space and maybe a couple of folks would opt into the AMF Bootcamp newsletter.

The first day, I got some pretty good interaction on it and said to myself, "Wow! People seem to be digging the content," so I boosted it repeatedly every 24 hours. I had previously never made a sale (or at least not that I knew of or could track) from a boosted post, so I didn't expect things to be any different.

It was merely a vanity thing for me, seeing people enjoy, share and comment on what I had written.

Fortunately, the EMP system allows our affiliates to share any page on our domain, including EMP blog posts, using affiliate tracking, so I did that just in case. However, I still was not expecting any sales.

However, I started noticing more frequent commission notifications on my EMP account. I was like, "Well, that's kinda cool. The EMP system must be closing some old leads," which happens all the time, so I didn't think anything of it.

(HELLO!!! McFly!!! Anyone home!?!)

Incredibly, for the first 48 hours, it hadn't occurred to me that the sales in my EMP account were a result of my boosted post. Then on the 3rd & last day of the Acceleration Workshop, after watching Kate McShea do some FB F.B.s training for our workshop attendees, the light bulb went off in my head!

"Could it be?!?"

"THIS boosted post…,

was making me money!"

But I wanted to verify, so I went into my back office under the "My Prospects" area and noticed a flood of new leads that had come in over the past three days into my EMP account. The data showed they had all opted into the AMF list after visiting my boosted blog post.

(BTW, another cool thing about EMP is that the 'My Prospects' section shows you the URL of the page your leads opted in through, in case you need to go back and check that manually.)

Now realizing what was happening, I continued to boost the blog post without formal Facebook Ads training so it could be shared with as many people as possible.

After about five days, I spent $200 generating up to 100 leads per day. And had already made over $2,000 in commissions,

with my EMP account.

Damn! Let's Pour Some Gasoline on It!

While still not knowing quite how I did it, I didn't want to let this "honey hole" pass me by, so I just ramped up my ad spend on the boosted posts from $20 per day to $100 per day and then at one point to $300 per day. (I don't recommend you be quite this aggressive with a new FB F.B.count.)

From February 28th thru March 31st, I spent a total of $2,997.99, and I generated over $21,212.50 in sales! That's an ROI of 607% in just 1 Month.

All because of this little blue button:

But that's not all!

Over the next six months, through continued advertising of about $50 per day (total ad spend of $9,524.90) and the compounding effect of the EMP Follow-Up system, including 1-on-1 mentorship provided by our Ignition Coaches and the support from our community. The new customers I generated through that ad would pretty soon upgrade into our higher ticket coaching programs resulting in $141,246.00 in total sales.

Let me say that again…,

$9,524.90 in ad spend over six months, resulting in $141,246.00 in sales! An ROI of 1381%.

But Enough About My Results! It's Your Turn!

It's safe to say that once again, I was pretty stoked about traffic, and I made it my mission to dissect what I had done here, not only for myself but for the betterment of our community.

I want to break down the principles which made my boosted post work and how you can experiment with your versions of these ads to sell whatever you want while growing an online business.

Remember what I said about "banner blindness" earlier? Well, principle #1 is all about NOT having your ads placed in the traditional banner locations on ANY website. Instead, your calls to action should be in the middle of the page – PERIOD!

Whether it's a blog, Facebook or any other site, the prime real estate is right in the middle. I'm not saying that sidebar banner ads don't work because they certainly can.

I'm saying that you'll get tons more traffic if you can put your "ads" in the middle of the page because that is where most of a reader's attention is going.

How is that done, you may ask?

In recent years, Facebook has allowed advertisers to place ads in the News Feed, to the dismay and annoyance of Facebook users!

There was a time when my former business partners used to take the obnoxious ad approach and apply it to the News Feed, driving people to a capture page. It worked for a while, but unfortunately, Facebook got some blowback. Hence, they came up with a system which allows users to complain about your ads even if you weren't necessarily doing anything wrong.

News Feed ads became a "catch-22." Facebook wanted you to buy ads but didn't want your ads to be perceived as advertising by its users.

Um…, what?! You want to sell me ads, but you don't want me to post actual ads?!?

Facebook and its users are forcing us to deploy an old ad strategy, which has existed for over 100 years in Magazines but is only now catching fire online.

It's the rebirth of the 'Advertorial.' You know, the article in the magazine isn't an article but an intelligent way of engaging you with content and leading you towards a product sale.

In the online marketing world, this refers to as 'content marketing' or 'native advertising.'

I like to use the term 'native advertising' because 'native' means it belongs there!

On Facebook, people are accustomed to having friends and business colleagues share interesting articles, videos, and other content. That type of stuff belongs in the News Feed, and your goal in using Principle #2 is to make your ad not look like an ad.

All principles of traditional ad copy go out the window in this case.

What you should be doing when advertising on Facebook is leading/sharing valuable content that your target audience would likely be interested in and letting the content do the selling for you. That's why my blog post earlier this year performed so well – people didn't perceive it as an advertisement.

It was just great content. They enjoyed reading and learning it.

In terms of medium, some folks use video, but I'll leave it to the Kate McSheas and Michelle Pescosolidos of the world to teach you about that type of native ad.

The medium that's worked for me has been a written blog post.

Now just because you got someone to click on your News Feed ad doesn't mean it's time to hammer them with a sales pitch. Just because they left Facebook and are on your website doesn't mean they won't go back and file a complaint against your ad.

That is why, for the most part, we don't recommend leading people to capture pages from your News Feed ads unless you know what you're doing.

We recommend leading with content, as I did with my blog post. And your goal in writing that content is to OVER DELIVER with value!

That's Principle #3 – if your content rocks, people will want more, which leads us to…,

You'll notice that we have banner ads in the sidebar of the EMP blog, but that's there to cover our bases. The majority of people that opt into our newsletter on our blog do so through the blog post itself.

What I do, is I make an offer for more in-depth training and provide a link for them to opt into my AMF or EMP newsletter.

Essentially, it's merely a continuation of what people already want to do when you provide them value. They'll naturally want more weight, and now that you've gotten their trust and established your credibility, asking for their name and email is no big deal, and they happily hand it over!

So all you need to do is BE A LEADER and tell them what you want them to do next and what benefit they can reap from that action.

The rest of the process involves what we've always taught at Elite Marketing Pro:

1. Offer value in exchange for their information
2. Make an Offer after opting for something even more valuable
3. Automatically follow-up via email to deliver more value and make and make the offer again
4. When they buy your request, OVER DELIVER on the product and, if possible, make another irresistible offer
5. If they purchase 2nd offer, OVER DELIVER on that and, if possible, make another offer
6. well …, you get the idea!

O.H…O.Hnd retarget people who didn't opt-in to your newsletter so you can bring them back!

If you are new to online marketing and advertising, then I've got good news:

You don't have to worry about the VAST majority of this process because here at Elite Marketing Pro, we provide instant promotional offers, so you can earn while you learn. We also handle the follow-up and continuous over-delivery of value to maximize your conversions and ROI.

And, if at any point you want to create your offers and graduate from our system, we'll help you do that too! But we've got you covered in the meantime.

So we handle steps 2 through 6 of the above process.

All YOU need to be concerned with is step 1:

Offer value in exchange for contact information!

As you learned, the best way to collect contact information isn't through annoying ads, sleazy capture pages, or banners that everyone's blind to, but through leading with valuable content using native-style advertising (much like this blog post you're reading now).

Now…,

Yes, this does mean you'll do some writing while growing an online business.

No, you don't need to be a "natural" writer or have impeccable grammar (…far from it, in fact).

But the question you need to ask is…,

"Is writing valuable, content-based advertising worth the extra effort?"

Remember the post I mentioned earlier, where I wrote about my experience at a network marketing event? It took around four dedicated hours to write, and I recall that it generated a 1,381% ROI over the next six months—undoubtedly better than any mutual fund, interest rate, or even Ponzi scheme promise. ;-)

Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying you'll necessarily hit it out of the park on your first swing.

But if you're ready to start learning the strategies we teach at Elite Marketing Pro…,

The same strategies that helped me build my online network marketing empire…,

The very same strategies that are so simple a cave dweller could do them…,

Then sign-up for our FREE Online Recruiting Bootcamp!

I'll show you precisely what to do and how to position yourself, so you'll never have to chase, annoy, pester, or beg anybody,  ever, to take a look at your products, services, and business.

These methods allow you to build your business automatically—where prospects reach out to you (instead of you having to reach out to them).

The bottom line is that, in today's age, you don't need to be pushy, obnoxious, or overly aggressive to build a successful business!

So if you're ready to get started…,

Just click this link to get immediate access to my FREE 10-Day Online Recruiting Bootcamp and start generating leads this week!

I wish you all a good day,
and a good life,

Maikel Andres
New-Age Affiliate Marketer