Learning how to effectively target your Facebook ads is an important part of becoming a successful marketer on their site.
Facebook Ads
Facebook has over a billion active users and believe it or not, most of them do not want to look at your ads.
You need to remember that Facebook is first and foremost a social network.
People who frequent Facebook use the site to connect with their friends and co-workers, keep in touch with family members and even look up old boyfriends or girlfriends.
They definitely do not log on to the site to get pelted with advertising.
Internet marketers who try to target Facebook advertising without keeping this in mind often realize that their intended “target” audience has become resentful toward their promotions.
It’s important that you do not use Facebook as a megaphone for your products or services.
Instead, start up a conversation with potential clients and target your Facebook ads accordingly.
Facebook offers users a great set of targeting tools, so don’t bother spending your hard earned money to show your advertisements before using the tools that Facebook so freely provides us.
Targeting Facebook ads is not rocket science. However, you do need to start thinking like the people you are trying to reach if you are to be successful with your marketing strategy.
Facebook gives the option of selecting ad viewers based on their age, gender, location, interest, existing connections and other broad range categories.
By using some or all of these options you can determine how relevant your ads are to the groups of individuals you are trying to target.
For example; if you are trying to acquire new Page “Likes” with an advertisement in the right sidebar, you should probably target individuals who are already following your competitor’s pages or target people who live in your immediate geographic area.
Experiment with your targeting, but keep a sharp eye on your ROI.
You can also try running a Promoted Post campaign for a company blog post and showing your ad only to the individuals who are already following your Facebook page.
After a while, your campaigns will provide you with the targeted groups that have the most effective ROI.
Facebook’s tools allow you to easily “weed out” people who your advertisements will never be relevant to, so use them.
You can target your Facebook ads better when you have a dedicated group of followers.
Don’t give up when your Facebook ad results do not meet up to your expectations.
With social media consistency is important, so make your posts at regular intervals preferably at the same time of the day.
If you make interesting posts and do it on a regular basis, your followers will get into the habit of expecting your posts and will react in a positive manner.
On the other hand, if you go weeks or months at a time without making a post, you can’t expect your followers to react positively to your ads regardless of how targeted they are.
Facebook is a social networking site, so remember to be sociable first and target your Facebook ads after you have engaged in conversation with your followers.
The need for speed is important to both internet marketers and webmasters who create their websites as well as to the visitors who use their sites.
Time is a valuable commodity in this day and age. When users institute a web search for something, they expect an answer to their query immediately if not sooner.
Google, Yahoo and the other search engines do their best with their algorithms to provide that service to end users who use their web browsers.
The need for speed while browsing is important, and when an end user locates your website, they expect it to load quickly. If it does not, your site will be passed over for the next ranking site in the search response.
When you are creating your web site, especially a marketing site, it pays to understand this need for speed.
The average response time for a search engine result is a fraction of a second and with each new release of a web browser, the speed records seem to consistently get broken.
The main goal for Google, Yahoo, and the other web browsers is to have their users leave their websites (browsers) as fast as possible.
On the other hand, as an internet marketer, your goal is to have visitors remain on your website as long as possible.
In order to do this, you must have a logically laid out website that loads almost instantaneously, and immediately captures and holds the attention of your visitors. This is especially true with mobile sites.
As the need for speed continues to be a major factor with the search engines, it also becomes more important to web developers and internet marketers.
The ways to tweak your website load times for the search engines vary from minimizing the size of your header file, to using CDN networks (particularly if you have a very large website), to reducing the amount of picture files used, etc.
When building smartphone optimized websites, the use of responsive web design is highly recommended for a variety of reasons.
Websites with responsive web design automatically adapt to mobile or other types of devices.
Images, navigation, content and text size automatically adapt to the screen size of the device that the user is viewing your website on.
Responsive design can also benefit the loading speed of your site when viewed in a mobile device.
Being cognizant of the need for speed will greatly improve your bottom line if your website has a clear, simple homepage interface, with pages that load instantly.
Search Engine Optimization for Donation Websites can often be easier to accomplish than on conventional sites.
What the donation is being used for makes all the difference. 
For example, if you are a clinic that provides free dental work to veterans and are looking to optimize your donation website, you could literally be sitting on a goldmine of potential SEO links.
First focus in on keywords like “charities”, “dental charities”, “charities in Atlanta”, “veterans charities” and variations of these for your site.
Then concentrate on getting quality back links to your donation website.
Any organization that could possibly be a beneficiary of free veterans dental work is a potential link to your donation website.
Some of these include obvious veteran groups like the American Legion, Amvets, VFW and others.
Contact the webmasters of these sites and ask them to link to your donation website. Most of them should jump at your request.
In addition, a Google search for .mil, .org and .gov domains pertaining to veterans benefits should also provide you with tons of quality back links.
Contact dentists who have veterans as patients to see if thy will links to your site.
Almost all dentists who have veterans as patients would like some additional help and should have no qualms about linking up to your donation website.
In this specific example, any group associated with veterans or dentists is a prime target for Search Engine Optimization.
Social media is a great way to help get the word out about your cause.
Concentrate on getting “do follow” social bookmarking links to your donation website.
Twittering goes a long way to spread information, as does Facebook.
You can get a lot of targeted traffic by just setting up a nice Facebook page using iFrames and directing it to your donation form or PayPal donation button.
Create a good looking logo with optimized anchor text, attributes, etc. and ask for links from acquaintances of members of your clinic’s dental board.
Board members are probably affiliated with the ADA, fellow dentists at other clinics, or with other alumni.
All of these are good potential sources for back links to your donation site that will attract donors to your cause.
You can always write and distribute a press release if you run out of SEO ideas and if you still need donors, look to “charity” directories like http://www.thecharitydirectory.org/.
Avoid wasting time and money chasing keywords that are hard to rank for.
Use the Google AdWords Keyword Planner tool to search for keywords and group ideas, and to get search volume and traffic estimates for your list of keywords.
You need to sign up for an AdWords account before you can access the free Keyword Planner tool. Do it at https://adwords.google.com.
Then using Google, view the pages that currently rank for each term to get more clues for additional Search Engine Optimization.
Using the example above should provide you with some ideas on how to optimize other causes for donation websites.
Search Engine Optimization for donation websites is often easier to accomplish than for conventional sites if you keep your “thinking cap” on.
