Facebook Advertising prodigy Brain Moran just announced a Black Friday sale of his 5-Minute Fan Page product, which is, honestly, the best product of it’s kind.

We really want you to have it, and we think that it’s important for your success, so we’ve decided to give our extensive Facebook Ads Guide 100% FREE to anyone who buys Brian’s product. That’s a $197-value gift ($67 if you consider our BF sale, but still super generous I think!)

All you have to do is buy NOW through {{ THIS LINK }} (and only this link!), and send your invoice to Josh. We’ll send you access right away. Only invoices dated to Black Friday weekend will be valid for this offer.

If you’re worried about us going bankrupt giving all those eBooks for free – don’t be. Brian will compensate us for every free copy with a small fee which should almost cover our cost, and the rest we’ll make up by having more happy customers, and we are pretty confident that you will remember us after we hooked you up with this awesome Thanksgivings gift. Right?

This is a Black Friday Only Sale. When the countdown’s over, the deal is over. So get it while you can!

This is the first of a series of articles, so make sure to follow us so you can enjoy the rest of them. It’s also highly recommended that you sign up for (free) updates, as we’ll be updating with more ideas you can quickly implement during the week.

We all know that Black Friday & Cyber Monday are great for business, but while big brands has made an art of holiday-season marketing tricks, many smaller businesses are left behind.

We’ve talked to a couple of experts to compile a list of tip, techniques and ideas you can use to make sure you get a piece of the cake too this year, and make this holiday season the most profitable you’ve ever seen. Here’s what they came up with:

Last Moment Advertising + Free Facebook Ads!

Chris Knollmeyer, Online Marketing Expert for Carolina Rustica says:
For PPC ads this holiday season, companies should focus on mobile and local ads to help drive business. As many people go out and forget one last thing, they’re more often turning to their phones to find that one last thing they need while they’re already out rather than going home to look it up, only to go back out again.

Couple that with free advertising from American Express on Facebook for Small Business Saturday and merchants can expect a boost in holiday sales.

Stand Out

Cari Shane, Principal at sasseagency.com says you should Standout by NOT sending out flurries of e-mail blasts on the same day as all the other on-line shops.

“Yes, Monday is Cyber Monday, however it is our belief at sasse agency, a firm that specializes in PR and marketing within the social media matrix, that differentiation sells”. For example, we have a client with a web-based business whose signature product is a tourquoise handbag.

“We have created for them, “Tourquoise Tuesday,” a post-Cyber Monday event with sales incentives that will enable them to capture e-mail addresses as well as sell product.”

Power Tips

Justin Palmer from palmerwebmarketing.com, has some powerful tips that would surely help you end 2011 with blast.

“If you doing something really noteworthy, you may want to highlight it on CyberMonday.com, a deal site run by Shop.org. Many prominent brands feature promotion there all year round, not just Cyber Monday.”

He goes on to explaing why you should recommends creating Product Bundles, and more importantly why you should give store credit, not Discounts and more powerful tips in his “10 Cyber Monday Marketing Ideas” article.

The Holiday Marketing Checklist You Can’t Afford to Miss

Justin Palmer keeps providing information you can’t afford to miss with his
The Ultimate Holiday Checklist for E-Commerce. Your business is not prepared for the holidays without it.

Know your audience

“My best advice for advertising and marketing during the holidays is to know your audience, what stresses them during that holiday”, says Tiffany Silverberg, one of the best Marketing Writers out there.

“Speak directly to that concern in your promises. So if your clients need a hostess gift their mother in law won’t scoff at, mention off the bat how well-received your items are by such people. If they stay awake at night worrying about getting their gifts out in time, elaborate on your free wrapping and shipping options. When they see your ad, answering their gut concerns, they will be happy to pay you to relieve their stress”.

AdWords Tip: Accommodate Holiday Volumes

Important tip from Cara Thielvoldt, Marketing Manager at couponcodes.com: “You must remember ad costs during holiday seasons (specifically Cyber Monday) go up at least 25%. Not only do you need to pay attention to the total budget but you also you need to make sure your CPCs are increased by at least 25% to ensure you are in ideal positions for the height of the season/sales”.

“Most people increase CPCs during the holiday and this should ensure you are in ideal positions when the sales start. You can also automate this, by setting up an automated rule to increase your keyword bids by 25% as soon as the sales start, and then have the bids set to lower again to normal levels once the sale is over”.

Keep your Ad Copy Relevant

Another great AdWords/PPC tip from Cara Thielvoldt: “Check that Your Ad Copy is Up to Date using Google Adwords Automated Rules. You can make sure you have up to date ad copy by using Google Adwords automated rules. If you are unfamiliar with automated rules you can find out all about them here“.

Be prepared – Schedule Ahead!

Cara Thielvoldt keeps hitting us with parctical AdWords tips: “You can upload ad copy with the upcoming holiday deals and schedule them unpause them as soon as the sale is expected to start. You can also automate pausing them once the sale is over”.

Update: Twitter #Boost

When tweeting about your special black Friday sales, use the hashtag #bfAds. It will cause your tweet to appear in the #bfads stream and get you more exposure. Use Twitter Adder to have it automatically repeat your tweets for you, so they appear for more people.

Update: Black Friday Seminar

Ryan Diess just announced his Black Friday Bootcamp. His elevator pitch? “How to get a real $10k/month Online Business between now and January 1, 2012“. It’s a free webinar, and I expect Ryan to then do a quick sales pitch, but from my experience the free info you will get is worth it in any case. Sign up here.

And look out for our extensive Twitter guide which is coming soon to help you sell like never before on this amazing platform. Sign up for updates to be notified!

Update: Don’t Miss this!

Facebook Ads prodigy Brain Moran is having a Black Friday Sale of his 5-Minute Fan Page product, which is honestly the best product of it’s kind. Also, we’ve decided to join in and give you a little thanksgiving bonus of our own if you buy anything from Brian.

Examples & Case Studies: What Are Other Businesses Doing?

Make sure you sign up for updates, because we’re going to update with more awesome tips, including actual case studies, live examples, and more!

Keep our blog open this holiday to get easy to execute tips that will make your PayPal account overflow!

Hey mom bloggers! We have a great offer for you today.

We find that a sure way to increase sales of your advertising spots is to give away a free gift to anyone who buys one. And how about giving them something they would really find useful, that won’t cost you any money?

Well, we have the solution for you.

We’ll give a free copy of our “Facebook Ads for Moms” guide to anyone who buys an ad from you, which is likely to be interested in advertising to moms, right? Our eBook was originally valued at over $250, but even after a major discount it is still sold for $37.97, which makes it a pretty generous gift.

…and that’s not all!

If you enroll in this program (100% free obviously!), we will also include you in our list of mom blogs to advertise on, which we are giving away to our advertisers. In other words, we’ll send over some more clients.

Even if you’re already booked solid…

You might want to consider enrolling in this program for two other reasons:

1. Give more value to your advertisers. Why not? After happy advertisers are loyal advertisers, and they tell their friends!
2. You can use this gift to convince advertisers to stick around longer. Give it away on the condition they buy 3 months (or six!) in advance, or as a bonus for renewing their ad spot

Spend less time dealing with advertisers

You can use our gift to convince advertisers to commit to longer periods – sell once, enjoy a monthly fee for 6-12 months.

If you still feel this takes too much of your time, or you can’t sell ad spots even by “bribing” advertisers, talk to us today, and we’ll do our best to help. We can send business your way, and in some cases manage your advertising sales for you completely for a small fee.

How to get started

Email us NOW to get started with this product. We can only offer this service to a limited number of blogs, so please hurry!

Just a quick note about our upcoming product launch – Facebook Ads for Moms. The guide was created with mompreneurs, mom-owned businesses & mom-oriented brands in mind, and, well, is pretty awesome, really.

That’s all we can say right now, but if you’d like to secure a copy, get a sneak peak, offer a few free copy to your blog readers, or promote this product as an affiliate, please get in touch.

The more we read about landing page optimization and their huge effect on sales, sign-ups and other goals, the more overwhelming it seems. There’s just so much you can do to improve your pages, and so much you SHOULD be doing in order to not miss out on sales that were otherwise in your pocket.

This is why I was delighted to see Unbounce’s comprehensive checklists that cover almost everything you need to think about when working on your landing page. I got used to having their checklists open while I write the copy for my landing page, when I work on the design, and before I launch any of them.

Here’s The 5-Minute Conversion Health-Check Scorecard, and here’s the longer list which I prefer.

A lot of people have been asking us recently where we get all these amazing pictures for our Facebook campaigns. I wish I had some fancy secret, but the truth is I’m surprised by how many people don’t know these two amazing sources for pictures.

I won’t keep you waiting, my two favorite sources for images are iStockPhoto and Pixmac.

They both offer a huge selection of images, at about $1.5 per image in most cases (some images on iStock are more expensive), and even as low as $1.00 on pixmac. Note that as long as you use your images for Facebook Ads, you onlyneed to buy the smallest size available, as the quality is sufficient (excellent actually), and Facebook only uses 110×80 sized images in any case.

On both sites it’s easy to search, navigate through, and find images by keywords, tags, colours and more. If you’d like more tips about picking the best images for your campaigns, please sign up here, or say hello!

Why it’s important that you buy images from a trusted source

Well, the reason is copyright laws. While on sites like the ones I recommended you get a license to use the images you buy freely and legaly, a lot of people I know just use pictures they find on Google Images, which often are owned by stock photo sites. The owners are usualy using advanced technology to locate stolen images, and threaten the violators with lawsuits.

As it turns out the law is usually on their site, and without proving any damages they can ask for thousands of dollars per image and if they take you to court they will probably win. Not to mention lawyer fees, etc.

So don’t take that risk – buy any image you use, or make sure you have a written authorization to use it.

Twitter is a powerful tool for business owners wether their business is online or offline. But too many people are too lazy to understand what’s really going on or how to really use Twitter the right way.

Use the following guidelines to check yourself and understand if you’re doing Twitter right or if you need some help (don’t be shy to ask for it!)

Let’s start with the don’ts as they are more fun:

Don’ts:

1. Don’t talk to yourself.
I’ve seen businesses open a Twitter account, and start posting every day, not realizing that there’s no one to read their updates, as they have no followers. True story.

2. Don’t Auto-Follow Blindly.
Auto-following isn’t necessarily bad, it’s one of the most effective way to get a lot of followers. But if you just auto-follow irrelevant users blindly, you will just have a list of zombie followers who won’t ever buy from you.

3. Don’t shout.
Twitter is about conversation. Many businesses on Twitter just post updates with no interactions. This is not necessarily a bad thing – sometimes it’s the right thing to do. But for a lot of businesses this is just not the most effective way to use Twitter.

4. Don’t Spam.
There a lot of things that fall under this category, but as a rule of thumb, remember that Twitter is a two-way street – don’t do things that are just in your interest, make sure to always provide value to others.

Do’s:

1. Post relevant updates.
That’s the best way to get relevant followers and keep them around. If you’re only going to post personal updates or updates about your own business, in most cases (depending on your business) your followers get bored and will unfollow you.

2. Get relevant followers.
How do you get people to know about your awesome, relevant updates? The best way is to follow people who might be interested in your product or niche. Read our Twitter Adder tutorial to learn how to do that.

3. Interact with your followers.
So you have followers, they like what you post, what’s next? Interacting with them will get you exposed to their followers and help you sell more, as Twitter is the ultimate tool for pre-sale questions, basic customer support, and more.

Twitter is about conversation, remember?

4. Set goals.
What are you on Twitter for? Are you trying to get traffic to your site or online stores? Sell to your followers? Viral traffic? Email subscribers? Brand awareness? Cut down on customer support costs?

Makes sure you set your goals and stick to them. If you’re not sure what your goals should be, or feel like you’re not reaching them to your satisfaction, drop us a note, we may be able to help.

Have you given up on your Facebook campaign too early? If you’re not advertising on Facebook right now, chances are you did.

It’s true, Facebook Advertising is not for everyone. But most of the people I talked to who tried advertising on Facebook and stopped, gave up too early without giving it a chance, or just did wrong.

Apparently this mistake is not done only by small business owners. I ran into a post where a big credit card processing company revealed their not-so-successful campaign, stating that Facebook just isn’t working for them.

I decided to write a post outlining everything they did wrong, and if you ever gave up on a Facebook campaign or on Facebook as an advertising platform, you should read it. It’s here.

If you’d like me to take a look at your Facebook campaign and tell you what I think you can do better, please don’t hesitate to contact me personally and if your ads are interesting we’ll post them here with our notes and a link to your site (if you’d just like me to give you advice privately please mention it – I’ll be happy to, but can’t promise anything).

We’ve seen it happen already with Google, and then with Facebook. Facebook prices increased by 22% in the past 3 months, and by 74% (!) since last year.

We were there to make a killing when Facebook prices were as low as $0.05 per click (unheard of these days where you pay up to $3.00 per click in the Bay Area for example), and we’re here to tell you: get on the gravy train now.

While independent & affiliate marketers are making a fortune using this untapped, cheap-as-hell traffic source, most advertisers are waiting for an invitation to join the party. They are losing an opportunity of a life time (or perhaps an opportunity of decade?).

So what is all the fuss about?

Smartphones and internet enabled mobile phones are all over the western world, and people are using them more and more to browse the web, compare prices, make decisions and sometimes even make a purchase (very often maybe for digital products).

Since the market is still far from being saturated, and since bigger advertisers budgets are still tied up to the ‘old new media’ and since most advertisers are still trying to figure out this new world, the prices are amazingly low. We’re talking about click prices as low as %5 of what you normally pay on Facebook or Google AdWords in the united states these days.

There are many other factors that make the prices so low, but I won’t get into them since I believe I’ll be wasting your time. It doesn’t matter why prices are low, what matters is – it won’t stay this way, so you need to get in while you can.

100 unique visitors to your site for $5.00? Easy.

Is advertising on mobile devices as easy as starting a campaign on a mobile CPC platform such as AdMob? Probably not. Driving mobile traffic to a site that is not mobile-optimized both technologically and in terms of content, is a waste of your money.

But since optimizing for mobile is so cheap and so easy, and the prices are so low right now (not for long!) It’s an amazing opportunity to get new clients, subscribers, followers and more for prices that you won’t see for a long long time when the mobile marketing arena gets crowded.

If you want to learn more about how to use this opportunity to your advantage, here’s what you need to do:

1. Subscribe to our blog via newsletter or RSS to get updates when we post more about this top.

2. Read our latest blog post Monetizing Mobile Traffic: How Much Of Your Traffic Is Being Wasted?

3. Contact us now and we’ll do our best to help you come up with the best possible mobile and online advertising strategy.

I’ve been advocating mobile advertising lately as you may have heard, since I believe it’s an opportunity no business can afford to miss (a post about this is coming later this week – stay tuned). One thing I keep hearing from marketers and online stores is “We’re gettign more and more mobile traffic, but they never buy!”

Well, that makes perfect sense, but it only means you’re doing something wrong.

People are doing more and more on their phones, on the way to work, while waiting in line, on the bus, or in bed. But one thing that they are not going to do is browse your online store and buy from it, in most cases at least.

Think about it, would you browse a site that looks like this on your iPhone and make a purchase?

Probably not. It’s too much work, and in any case, waiting for the bus is not exactly the time to make an important decision about what stroller you want to buy.

Now before I explain what you should be doing with mobile traffic and how, I want to repeat the two most important reasons to make sure you have a mobile traffic strategy:

1. You are wasting traffic you’re already getting for free.
People are getting to your site on their phones & tablets, and they are bouncing off of it almost immediately because it’s not optimised for them.

2. Mobile advertising is too cheap and too effective for you to pass on it.

So what should I do with my mobile traffic?

1. Detect your mobile visitors, and show them a mobile optimizsed version of your site (one that’s designed to be used easily on a smartphone).

2. Set expectations, and acquire long-term customers.

Don’t ask your users to make decision on the spot. Give them the information they’re looking for, and do your best to make sure they come back when they’re ready to buy. Ask them to bookmark, sign them up for you newsletter, get them to download your iPhone app (if you have one), or just follow you on Facebook or Twitter.

Here’s an example that makes more sense for a smartphone user:

Personally I think the best option is using mobile traffic for list building because:

• It’s easier to get someone to opt-in for a newsletter than to make a purchase on a phone.
• Email marketing proved to be the most effective online advertising channel EVER. (link).
• It’s easy to get super-cheap traffic and build a huge targeted list for close to nothing.

How is it done?

Pretty simple, really.

Add a simple code to your website that detects if a visitor is viewing it on their computer or on their phone. If it’s a phone, the code redirects them to the mobile optimised site. that’s all.

Need more reasons to get your site mobile optimized?

• It’s easy & cheap
There’s no need to rebuild your entire site, ecommerec system, and so on. Starting with a landing page or a mobile mini-site will already improve your sotiation significantly.
It’s really easy, and very cheap to outsource.

• SEO advantage over your competitors
A mobile optimised website or mobile version is more likely to appear higher in Google search results when people are searching with their phones.
Use this to your advantage while you’re competitors are still stuck in 2005.

If you’re interested in giving your business the advantage that is mobile advertising, stay tuned as we have two posts coming this week: Are you missing out on mobile advertising? and Mobile marketing: taking full advantage of mobile pages.