Full show notes for this episode can be found at https://podcast.jakehower.com/episode/using-facebook-ads-to-drive-traffic-with-justin-brooke

This is episode 24 of the multimedia marketing show.

Today's episode, we're speaking with Justin Brooke from Pixel

Track and I Am Scalable.

Let's get stuck into that interview.

Right away.

Justin, how are you?

I'm good,

man.

How are

you?

Oh, fantastic.

Now I must say, Justin, I think I come across you through somebody in my

network and I found you on Facebook.

And I have to say that I needed to get you on this show because every single post

that I saw on Facebook that you popped out there was just absolutely awesome.

So there's so much information in there.

Thanks.

Thanks.

So for our listeners, your main focus of course, is around traffic generation.

How about you give our listeners a little bit of a history about you and what has

brought you to where you are right now?

Yeah, so there's a couple of stories you know that

make up my whole past or my career getting started in this industry the

short version Is that back in 2005?

I got started didn't make any money at all for two years 2007 I landed an internship

with russell brunson And went out there worked with him for 30 days for free and

my job out there was to He, he has this.

This marketing library he spent over a quarter million dollars buying like

every course there is every book and video Just everything and my job was

to go through these courses and write reviews so that he could Create an

affiliate review website out of them and he called it zubi the newbie.

I Technically was zubi the newbie even though it was modeled after him and

everything But I was the one writing those reviews going through those courses and

I was the newbie Practicing them all.

So anyways, I got like an education of a lifetime and When I came out of that,

I was still broke I mean I had a website I took what I learned in there I only

had 60 to my name and I took that from half of my electric bill I paid half

the electric bill took 60 started a pathetic little Google AdWords campaign

2 a day selling a 35 video course.

And my first month I made 150 bucks, paid back the electric bill, rolled the

money back in long story short, doubled my money every single month for 12 for

11 or 12 months or something like that.

I had a six figure business at the end of the year.

For me, it was learning from a mentor, from a millionaire who'd already done

it, but really traffic, buying traffic changed my life, and so that's why,

that's my focus, that's what I teach, it's what I do it's what I Thank you.

I live like I read and watch and do this stuff all day, every day.

Yeah, cool.

I think what was interesting for me is that you have, I guess you

could say a hand in a lot of different markets, but it seems to be that you were

initially almost like a blogger of types.

I'd imagine.

Yeah,

I would definitely call myself a blogger.

It's one of my main I do a lot of paid traffic for my clients

and that's like what I sell.

It's also what I teach, but how I make the most money is actually

through content marketing, through my blogging and social media.

Yeah, cool.

All right.

So your focus now is mainly around traffic.

How about you just give us some perspective of your company now and

how it's broken up and how most of your money is made for your clients.

Yeah.

So what I realized, I had A real hard time in 2010.

I just made a couple of bad decisions in a row and then, they didn't pan out

I took some risks and they didn't pan out and ended up not having anything.

I had no income stream I was making six figures for three years before

that and had no income stream And then had to rebuild it on what I really

realized was that One the information marketing industry had changed And

because now there was youtube and there was a blog post about everything.

There's a tutorial about everything.

There's wiki how so the information marketing industry had changed and

I had put all my eggs into that basket I said that was never going

to happen again So services was easy for me to get some money going again.

And then I said, I've got to have a software because I believe that

tools are, everybody, there's plenty of information out there, but now

everybody needs something to do with this information, so they need tools.

And then they also, some people just don't want to do it

themselves, so they need services.

So I said, all right, I'm going to service the traffic industry.

Cause that's what I know best.

I'm going to have a tool.

I'm going to have a training.

And I'm going to have a service that way, like these decisions that I made

in the past will never hurt me again.

And it's taken me a long time to manage all three parts of

that and get them all going.

And some of them are still coming online, but that's how our business works.

We have a tool, a training and a service.

The service right now pays like 80% of the

bills.

Yeah, cool.

Now with the traffic buying that you're doing for a lot of your

customers, what is generally the goal?

Is the goal most cases sales?

Are you trying to help with lead generation for them?

Yeah, everybody always wants sales.

It's all about ROI.

I believe that there's a lot more out there.

There's a lot more than just ROI and sales.

In marketing and that's a whole nother conversation and we can talk about that if

you want, but Yeah, most people at sales some people it's leads but at the end of

the day You know if they're paying for traffic and i'm not making them more than

they're paying Then they're not happy.

So my job is to make sure that they're making more

Cool.

All right.

No worries.

Justin, most of our listeners out there.

So luckily our listener listening in right now is always asking

about how can I get more leads?

How can I generate more customers for my business?

So what I'd love to do in this interview is to run through a couple of different

strategies that you are currently seeing that are working really well

for yourself and also for your clients.

How does that sound?

All right, cool.

Let's start briefly with a look at some of the free traffic sources.

So what are the top free traffic sources that you see

for me?

I think the top free traffic source is guest blogging and not just guest

blogging, but content syndication period.

So I believe that guest blogging is just a form of content syndication.

Your content is being syndicated on somebody else's blog, but you could also.

Put it up on SlideShare, you could put it up on was it Scribd or DocStock?

You can put it up on YouTube.

So just taking what your content is, and I think a lot of people focus on

content all on their own website because it's I made this, I want to hoard it.

But really, the way you get people to your website is by having

content all over the web that brings people back to your website.

I don't focus a lot on creating content for my website.

I focus a lot on creating content that's out there in the world that

drives people back to my website.

Yeah, that's really interesting.

I think one of the best examples of this in action to me is the music industry.

Now you look at records and iTunes and people consuming music, that's

essentially traffic generation for what most artists these days make their most

money from, and that's their touring.

So that's their live events.

And I think that's a really good example of this strategy in action.

Absolutely.

There's tons and tons of marketplaces and there's tons of content channels

out there and there's just gobs and gobs of traffic at these places.

If you look up the traffic for SlideShare and YouTube and, all these other content

places, their traffic is astronomical.

And it's free for you to dive in there and start corralling these

people back over to your website.

Yeah, now a couple of episodes ago, we had clay

Collins on from lead pages and we

spoke about a genius.

He is.

Oh, absolutely.

And I guess, would that be then?

Therefore, what you say landing pages is how you capture the traffic once

you've driven them back to your site.

That's one use of a landing page.

Probably one of the most popular uses of a landing page is to capture that

traffic so that you can follow up with them to me a landing page is just you

know the page that the person lands on after they click your ad and your

ad could be a blog post or a podcast or whatever it may be where they land.

Yeah

Okay I'm just thinking of the questions that are no doubt our

listeners has in their mind right now.

And one of them around guest posting to me, guest posting or

writing in general is hard to do.

Do you have some sort of system that you use to actually produce content

like that?

Yeah, I'm going to steal Marcus Sheridan's.

System.

It's great.

It's simple.

It's easy.

It's I've been doing something like it for years, but he just,

wrapped it up in a better package.

What I would, what I used to do is I would go and scour like Yahoo

answers or any of the answer sites.

And I would look for what questions people are asking about my topic.

So if I'm in, the, root beer niche, and I'm talking about root beer.

I'm going to go and look up what are all the questions people have about root beer?

Because I can guarantee you people are typing the question, the full question

into Google, trying to look for an answer.

And it's so much easier to rank.

For a full question than it is for a one or two word keyword.

And you could just start ranking for a lot of these questions

over and over again, easy.

And then you'll pull those people into your website, and it'll go to other pages.

Marcus Sheridan system is come up with 52 questions that your market has.

Now you have an entire year's worth of weekly blog posts, just answering the

question, Do your research about that question, find out what the good answer

is, and then create a blog post that answers that question, provides resources

to it, links, tools, whatever, and just, make sure that blog post is the best

answer on the web for that question.

Yeah, that's excellent.

And that's really fantastic.

Listen Justin doesn't actually know, but Marcus was on episode.

23 here.

So you can go back and listen in detail to that particular strategy he uses.

Oh yeah,

he probably already

talked about it.

Oh, I absolutely agree with you, Justin, it's a great strategy and it's so

easy to come up with content that way.

Now let's look at a couple of other forms of free traffic.

On a previous episode of Marketing Concaso with Michelle McPherson, you detailed

a number of different strategies that you see are working well for you now.

Let's have a look at one in particular, membership sites.

And how do you use membership sites to build your list?

Okay.

I think I know what you're talking about here.

We have, I call this the invisible squeeze page and what it is a lot of

times, and there's a lot of markets out there where asking for an email

address actually doesn't work very well.

If you look at the survival prepper market, They don't want to be

giving out their information.

They don't want to be letting people know that they are a prepper hoarding

all this food and gold and whatever.

There's other markets out there as well where they're really sensitive.

So what we do instead is we just say, here, this is a free membership site.

And all you have to do is enter your email, create a

password, and you'll have access.

What did they do?

They just entered their email address and now you have them to

be able to follow up with them.

So it's just, it's basically a squeeze page.

I mean on a squeeze page, you're offering a piece of content

in exchange for their email.

The only real difference in a membership site is you call it something

different and you add a password.

Yeah, and why do you think that works?

It's just positioned differently.

It sounds different.

It's less gimmicky.

I think it's less about hanging a carrot in front of somebody's

face Forcing them to give you the email where I think the membership

site for the perspective Is that?

That it has more value, it's you know, you're gonna get all this

stuff inside And all you have to do is become a member for free

Yeah, and how much information do you think you'd

need to put in a membership site?

I can probably answer that myself.

In fact, really you've just got to answer your value proposition on your sales page

Yeah, that's it really but I mean i've done one with

as little as four videos in there.

It was about a An hour's worth of content and then there was just a bunch of links

and resources and you got to make sure that when they get in there, they're

not, they're happy, they like what they

see.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now, and these, I guess they sound complicated, but they're

actually very easy to set up.

WordPress natively allows you to password protect pages, and

that would be the simplest.

Version of a membership site, just having someone sign up to

your email list and have the first autoresponder email going back to

them with the password for that page.

I've even done it simpler than that.

I don't want to say that I, like I manipulate people, but people in general

sometimes they can be a little clueless.

So I've created forms in Aweber.

Where it says, email, password, confirm password and, name, and then,

hit enter to submit, and then it just takes them to the page, but there was

actually no membership or whatever.

They just filled out my opt in form, and now I've taken them to the page.

Now, every email they get after that, it's Send them back to that thing that

looks like a membership site, but it's really just, page out there on the web.

Yeah, cool.

Cool.

I think that's important to understand that because we don't want to complicate

it for at least that we want them to know that it is actually easy to

do.

Yeah.

And they are a member of something, they're a member of this.

This group of people.

Oh, no doubt.

Absolutely.

And as you say, I think this is the key.

As long as you're delivering value, in my opinion, above and beyond what you

actually promise, that's all you need to

do.

Yeah.

If you're collecting their emails and sell them off to some spammer and then

you're only delivering half a piece of content and trying to force them

into a sale, then like this whole technique doesn't work, but if you're

trying to provide value to people's lives and you're doing everything.

Ethically and legally, then this is all good stuff.

It just helps you do it easier.

Cool.

Cool.

All right.

I want to look at one more source of free traffic before we look

at some of the paid sources.

So this one is another one that you spoke on this same

episode of Marketing Conqueso.

And it's using software to build a list.

Now we've seen this done, Clay did this fantastically well with the welcome gates.

And I believe you're doing something similar with

PixelTrack?

No, not anymore.

We used to have a free trial.

But we're not doing the free trial anymore just because it

was getting abused too often.

But what I think that people can do a lot easier is there is a ton Of free

software out there on the web that people don't know about I know guys who have

built a hundred thousand subscriber lists just Saying, enter your email to

get this plug in for your blog, and they just went and found a plug in that was

out there in the WordPress, extensions or whatever that thing is called, where

there's all the plug ins that you can search for, but they just went and found

a cool plug in that was, not really talked about very often, but did a cool

little feature, and they just said, enter your name and email, and I'll give you

this plug in, they just link over to the plug in directory, And yeah, these

guys have built huge lists off of that.

Or you can develop your own plugin.

It only costs you a couple hundred dollars to get a plugin developed.

You don't need something that is WP wishlist to develop a plugin.

You can develop a very simple plugin like Michelle McPherson.

She created one that just, whenever you would roll over an image, it would

give you the option to pin that image.

And just a very simple little easy plugin.

And now she has something that she can offer on a squeeze page and people

will opt in for a tool a lot more often than they will opt in for a piece of

information or a free report, free video.

Everybody's doing free report, free video, but when you can say, free tool that

like actually does something for you.

It's a much higher perceived value.

Yeah, that's really interesting.

I've never actually thought of the fact that you can just be linking to free

software, but it makes a lot of sense.

And as you say, you have essentially become the curator and the quality

controller of these good plugins.

So it makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, it all comes down to like our job, whether

you're an affiliate, a blogger.

Whatever I believe that our job is to be a problem solver, you know There's

people out there on the web that have a problem and they're looking for

a solution And whether you sell a software or whether you're a blogger

or whether you're an affiliate whatever your job is to say Hey, I have I know

what problem you're going through.

I know the solution Here's how to get it You know, if you're a blogger, you're

here's how to get it is a blog post.

You're just telling them, here's how to solve this problem.

Yeah, absolutely.

All right, Justin, let's move up at you now and look at some of the

different paid traffic sources.

And now rather than confuse our listeners, I want to really hone in

on where they're going to let's really 80 20 this and let's hone in on the

number one or number two strategies for generating paid traffic at the moment.

So where are you seeing the best results at the moment?

Anyway.

I would say Facebook, but there's places, that work better for different things.

If it's a dating offer using plenty of fish, they have a great advertising

network over there at plenty of fish.

It's ads.

pof.

com.

There's certain I like to call them like ponds, you know that you would go

fishing in There's certain ponds out there where you can catch a special type of

fish, but overall Facebook has half the world's people on it and they're spending

half the day on there So it's a pretty good place to start and there's so many

targeting options today That it's just amazing, you know what you can do on there

Yeah.

Okay, cool.

Then let's look at Facebook in particular.

Now I do a little bit of Facebook advertising myself and

I can certainly generate likes and I can generate comments.

But what I struggle to really generate is clicks through on a lot of my ads.

What's your specialty with Facebook?

Are you driving clicks and sales?

Yeah, we're driving.

I have to drive sales.

If I don't drive sales, then my clients fire me.

And what we do is.

A lot of times in the very beginning, I'm trying to figure

out how to word this the right way.

So there, there's not even the greatest advertisers in history have a home

run the first time they create an ad.

It happens every once in a while.

If you're good and you know what you're doing and you're really

studying the market, it happens.

But for the most part, what you do is you create your hypothesis.

It's your best guess at what you think people will respond to.

And so what we do is we put a lot of guesses up there.

We think, this angle, these are the things that people are going to respond to.

And then we let the data.

Tell us whether or not that's true So we you know put our best guesses up

there Let the traffic run for a little while and then we go back and look at

the data and say okay Which of these ads got the most clicks which of them

got the most sales because sometimes the one that got the most clicks Just was

generating a lot of curiosity We got a lot of buyers So we go and we look at

the data and then the data tells us this is what makes people respond Then we cut

off the other stuff and just keep that

Yeah now, that to me sounds like it's pretty important, the data.

So how do you track how well your ads are going?

There's a lot of software out there.

Google Analytics, PixelTrack, HyperTracker.

There's so many things out there.

What's most important is that you think about what you

need out of a tracking tool.

Do you need something that's going to be super comprehensive, is going to

show you everything, is going to be...

You'll have lots of support and lots of plugins and stuff like that.

Or do you need something that's really fast, lightweight, and simple.

You got to think about what you need out of a tool and then go

find the tool that fits you best.

Don't like, Oh everybody says use Google analytics.

So therefore I should use Google analytics for some people.

Google analytics is like it's like using a chainsaw to shave your face.

It's just too powerful of a tool for the job where sometimes you need

something that's really easy and simple.

So there's a lot out there different sides.

That's the best advice I can give though.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Cool.

I'd like to a little bit deeper on that.

I know personally, Google analytics can get quite complex and I know for

a lot of our listeners, it's going to be, it will be a roadblock having

to track with Google analytics.

Let's look at the simple side of things.

What's the best way to keep it nice and simple, but still accurate.

I'm going to be a little biased because, at my tool, Pixeltrack.

com that's our angle is we believe, I believe, and I built it for

myself to be honest, so whether nobody else uses it in the world,

I use it myself every single day.

We've driven over a million clicks through it.

And what I wanted was I realized that I wasn't tracking and split testing

as much as I should be because the tools that I were using We're so hard

and complicated to use that I was just like, Oh, I want to, but then it's

going to take me an hour to do this.

And I got to read this book before.

And so I never would do it.

I was like, I need something that is just quick and simple and easy.

And I can whip up a split test in two minutes, or I can just grab

a tracking link and be on my way.

And so I built that tool and I've spent probably about 12, 000 at this

point tweaking and building it and, making it just how I want it to be.

It started out like it was just going to be a couple hundred

bucks, but we're tens of thousands of dollars into this thing now.

And I do believe it's the easiest, simplest tool to use.

That sounds fantastic.

Now, can you run us through how it works?

Yeah, sure.

So when you log in, there's only one button.

I thought that was important.

And now there's other things that you can click on, but there's only

one button and it says new campaign.

And when you click new campaign, there's three options.

You can either create a quick quick tracking link, which webpage.

Creates a redirect that will start counting the clicks and then gives you a

code to place on your conversion page So if you were tracking how many opt ins you

are getting you'd put the conversion code on your opt in Confirmation page and you'd

use the link to start sending your ads and now you know the pixel track tracking link

Will start counting all the clicks and then as people go to your page and opt in

then the code says hey a person converted.

And so it starts counting how many conversions.

And if you're doing a sale, you can put in how much each sale is worth for you.

And it'll start counting your EPC.

And that's really important to me because how you make money with traffic how

profit is created, like at a scientific level is your EPC is your earnings per

click, how much you're earning on average.

Per click that you get to your website and then you pay at a cost per click CPC

So if you're paying You know 25 cent CPC And you're earning on average a 50 cent

CPC, then you're making money and your job sometimes in the beginning Your CPC

is higher than your EPC But your job is to do things on your landing page and in

your sales funnel to increase your EPC and then you're going to do things inside

the ad network like you'll create new ads and test different markets and different

pictures and that lowers your CPC and as you lower the CPC and increase the EPC.

That gap in the middle is your ROI, your profit.

As that gap expands, that's how you make more and more money.

And that's the name of the game.

Brilliant.

Brilliant.

So I've just got a couple of technical questions to satisfy my own interests.

Yeah, one

second before we get into that, I just want to finish what

the other three buttons are in there.

So there was quick tracking, which is just, a redirect

link and tracks conversions.

And then there's a funnel tracking one where if you have like upsells

and downsells, it'll track.

You know your lead your front end your upsell your down sell and so you can

put multiple tracking codes in place And then you'll see you know your conversions

across and then there's a split testing button Where it just lets you have like up

to five different links and it'll rotate those links out for you And so you can

create one page duplicate the page with a different headline Put both pages in

there and then you're off and running you can create a split test in two minutes

Okay.

So not only then tracking the source of the traffic, you're also

tracking the actual page as well.

Yes.

Yeah.

Fantastic.

That's good.

So that one thing I wanted to satisfy my own curiosity was creating a campaign.

Can you have multiple links or traffic sources for that one campaign

with that one piece of tracking

code?

Yeah, you could.

I believe that every ad should have its own link.

And and I consider everything an ad.

A different blog post, a different email.

And when you do that, then you have granular level data that

says, this email versus this email.

You can see it, I had nine conversions from here, and

three conversions from here.

Therefore, this one worked better when you start using the

same link for multiple sources.

Now you can't tell which source was actually a higher performing source.

Yeah.

So I probably wasn't as clear there.

So the tracking code for each of these links, do you get a unique

piece of tracking code for every link?

Or is it just the one piece of tracking code and you can have multiple links?

Currently it's a different piece of tracking code for

every link, but In, I think it's next month, the, we'll have a global pixel.

And that will mean you can have just one code on the page and lots of links.

Because right now, it's getting where a lot of people have to

put a lot of different codes.

And it's cumbersome, but that'll be fixed next month.

Cool.

Cool.

That sounds great.

And I don't want this to sound like an ad, but you have a 1 test

drive of PixelTrack, I believe.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a dollar trial.

Cool.

All right.

Let's go back and look at Facebook.

One thing I think I struggle with is working at your audience.

What are the top things you can suggest to people in choosing

the right audience or targeting the right audience with Facebook?

With Facebook, targeting the right audience?

That's a good question.

One, I would tell you to get a book.

There's a book out there called Killer Facebook Ads by Marty...

Oh, man.

I think it's Weinstein.

God, I hope I got his name right.

But it's called killer Facebook ads.

Anyways, this book is really good.

It goes in depth.

I'm only gonna be able to tell you about five minutes worth of tricks

and tips, but that book really goes in depth on that subject.

Basically what I do is I look for a couple of categories

and some of the easy ones are.

So what is the broad category?

So if we're looking at bloggers, if i'm trying to target bloggers Okay.

What books do they read?

And that'll be one campaign and then what fan pages might they be

a fan of and that'll be another campaign What software do they use?

That'll be another campaign What celebrities or gurus do they follow?

That'll be another campaign.

And so that's how I break it up.

And sometimes in the beginning, just to like test and see if things are working,

I'll just go create one campaign that has all those targets in there, all

the books, all the media sources, fan pages, software, all that stuff in one.

And then just see, I'll drive like a hundred, 200 worth of traffic and just see

if any sales happen, if any leads happen.

And if none do, then, great, I didn't have to do all the work of creating

lots of different campaigns and lots of different tracking links.

And, I didn't have to work so hard, but if I do see that there's some sales happen

some leads happen now, I'll start breaking it down and getting really targeted with

it because the more targeted you are, the better your ads are going to work

because it's going to be more relevant.

And then the, Okay.

The more you'll be able to track the conversions and remove wasted spend.

Sure.

That sounds fantastic.

Now, with your audience size, as you reduce the audience size, do

clicks generally go up in cost?

Not really.

You're...

Yes.

There's different audiences and the more targeted you try and get, the more

Facebook makes you pay and sometimes, the less they make you pay because

it's, a really small audience or...

It's just something that's not very competitive, but for the most

part, the cost of your clicks is dependent on your CTR, how well

people are clicking on your ad.

If a lot of people are clicking your ad, then your cost per click will go down

because Facebook likes a guy who is paying 20 cents per click, but getting 100 clicks

versus somebody who's paying a dollar per click and only getting two clicks.

Sure.

Sure.

That

makes sense.

All right.

Let's look at the location.

Cause there are so many different locations.

You can have your ad appear now.

What's working right now in terms of location of the

ads, sponsored stories work really well.

And, just for anybody who's listening and, might be a little bit newer.

If you use power editor, there's two ways to create a Facebook ad.

There's the web.

Interface, which is what most people are familiar with.

You log into Facebook and do it through the Internet through that screen.

But there's also the power editor and the power editor.

You have to be using the Google Chrome browser.

When you use that, you're able to pinpoint, whether you want your ads to.

Show up on mobile devices or all devices whether you want them to show up on

the side or in the news feed If you want to be a sponsored post of this,

there's just a lot of different options But you know the premium real estate

is in the news feed and the way you get in the newsfeed is through sponsored

posts and promoted posts is another one.

And then with mobile, there is no sidebar.

So when you're targeting your ads to mobile, then You know, they're

showing up in the news feed for them.

That's fantastic.

That's all great information.

Justin, you've been so generous with your, both your time and the

information you've shared today.

Where can our listeners find out more

about you?

We've got a blog where I blog about traffic.

I call it this ain't your mama's traffic blog.

We it's over at I am scalable.

That's I M S C A L A B L E dot com forward slash blog.

And there's a bunch of articles there already.

Check it out.

There's stuff on, how to measure your ROI on Facebook and how to get

more conversions and stuff like that.

And then on Facebook, just go to facebook.com/traffic strategist

and I try to put a daily tip up

there and they're all amazing . So I do, I highly recommend same.

Thanks both the blog and certainly Facebook as well.

Alright, Justin, thank you very much for coming on today.

I really appreciate it.

I've got a lot out of it listener certainly will as

well.

Thanks for giving me the chance to reach more people, man.

Thank you.

Cheers.

Thanks