Matt Marcin - Incentive Marketing

Co-Winning the Nickycakes.com Contest

The goal of the contest was to join Advaliant and be the first to earn $1,000 in commissions. Winner getting an Xbox 360.

I started the contest about a week late so I had to catch up and once I got rolling was able to hit $1k on a campaign in under 24hours. Apparently it came down to two of us so Nickycakes has declared that we both won. I thought I’d take a post and talk a bit about what I did to win the contest in around 12 hours.

How I made $1,000 in revenue in 24 hours
After looking through Advaliant’s offers, I picked out a couple that I knew might perform well on social networks like Facebook, Bebo and MySpace. As much as I’d love to tell you how to pick out a good offer for social networks… that will be for another time!

Traffic Sources

There are a bunch of ways to get traffic on social networks besides just Facebook SocialAds.

Facebook SocialAds is a no brainer. They are strict but the quality is high.

My personal favorite is SocialMedia.com. I got the majority of my traffic from them when winning this contest. They have banner ads on nearly 80% of all the Facebook apps aswell as placement on Bebo and MySpace.

There is also a bunch of other small ad networks on Facebook. Some of the top ones are Zohark Ads and AdChap. Zohark is the best of the smaller networks on facebook because they’ll actually talk to you on the phone or IM.

Testing Offers

Once I have a few offers, I test them just like any other good affiliate marketer. I personally use tracking202.com for doing all PPC stat tracking. It’s a system that they host that lets you track all your activity and its really high quality. Since it is hosted by them, I know many people worry that they watch your stats. I know this is not btrue but if you are really scared about that you can build your own system.

So, to test them I usually create 3-4 text ads for each offer and throw them up via direct linking. This will probably not make me any money of but I can get an idea if an offer has any potential very quickly.

Once I find an offer with promise, I make up a Landing Page to basically presell the potential customer and get him ready for what is coming. Basically, if they hit your landing page and click through, they should convert because they know what is coming and are ready to do the required action.

Once I had a profitable campaign, I scaled it up and did the $1,000 in commissions I needed to win. I am actually still running the main campaign that I used in this contest because it is quite profitable!

Thanks again to Nickycakes and Advaliant for making this contest a success and thanks for the Xbox 360 :) Thanks also goes out to Amin for competing neck and neck with me until the end! I’ll post a pic when it arrives and then you guys can see my ugly face haha.