The FB Community Report Page 1 of 80 The FB Community Report Page 2 of 80 The FB Community Report - Reloaded Updated February 2017 Second Edition February 2016 First Edition June 2015 Written and Published by Mathias @ ProfitChampion.com © Copyright 2017 All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, without prior written consent from the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. You may store the pdf on your computer and backups. You may print copies of this book for your own personal use. Limit of Liability and Disclaimer. This consumer report is based on personal experience and is designed to provide information about the subject matter covered. Every effort has been made to make it as accurate and complete as possible at the time of its writing. However, you are advised to perform your own due diligence and rely on your own judgment about your individual circumstances and act accordingly. This report is not intended for use as a source of legal, business, accounting, or financial advice. Any earnings or income statements, or earnings or income examples, are only estimates of what we believe you could earn. As with any business endeavor, there is a degree of risk that must be assumed, and the author provides no guarantees of your income or earnings. The author shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any person or entity in respect to any loss or damage caused directly or indirectly by the information covered in this report. Trademarks. Any trademarks, service marks, product names or named features are assumed to be the property of their respective owners, and are used here for reference only. The FB Community Report Page 3 of 80 Second Edition The 2017 FB Community Report Thank you so much for reading my report. A lot of time has been invested in refining the idea behind this report from its first form. And then remaking it completely to reflect Facebook’s many updates. I hope the result will give you a solid foundation for your venture into the land of Facebook… or at least a few golden nuggets that you can take with you. Facebook has changed a lot since I wrote the first Facebook guide in 2013. The newsfeed is generally a much more competitive place and organic reach has dropped for many pages. However, Facebook is still the #1 social platform and one of the most visited websites worldwide. Using Facebook Pages is how we as marketers can tap into this massive traffic source. With the increasingly competitive landscape, you need to know how to gain an edge over other pages. Which is exactly what you will learn in this report. Just one thing before we start: Promise me that you will apply what I am about to share with you. The information is worth nothing if you are not ready to do something about it. I love the hear success stories, and I will be waiting for yours. If you have any problems or questions regarding this report, you can get support at www.members.profitchampion.com/support/ Stay Awesome, Mathias @ ProfitChampion.com The FB Community Report Page 4 of 80 (Original Introduction from the First Edition) Introduction My Journey into The Land of Facebook I’m a huge fan of simple and quick traffic generation methods that doesn’t always involve Google. I’ve tried a bunch of different platforms and methods. Tumblr, reddit, viral blogging, YouTube… The list goes on. But for a long time I didn’t really ‘get’ Facebook. My first attempt was back in 2011, but as I didn’t really understand how to attack the platform I gave up after a few months. Fast forward to late 2012 I took a look at Facebook again and I was quite amazed by what I saw. Pages with 10k+, 200k+ and even millions of fans – Run by regular Facebook users. In fact, some of the most viral pages on Facebook right now look very much like they are managed by people with no knowledge about social marketing whatsoever. And when I saw that these pages grew virally with thousands of fans every single day I was hooked. Right in front of me I saw pages grow and I knew that it was something I could tap into. Thousands of fans later I’m ready to share my findings with you in this report. So let’s get going. The FB Community Report Page 5 of 80 Step #1 Understand Facebook and Why Most People Fail Before They Even Start If you want to build a successful Facebook page, you must first understand how the platform works. It is amazing how many people dive right in without any knowledge about the mechanics behind Facebook whatsoever. This is also why you may have heard people complain that “Facebook doesn’t work” or “Facebook fans aren’t worth anything” … What a lot of hooey! When you are done with this report, you will see why. First things first, if you are completely new to Facebook then I strongly advise you to read this quick introduction to Facebook pages. It will give you the very basics to move on. The News Feed Algorithm As a Facebook page admin, you need to know about the News Feed Algorithm, also formerly known as ‘EdgeRank’ to some marketers. (News Feed Algorithm is the official name from Facebook and I will continue to use this notion throughout the rest of the report.) Why is this algorithm important? If you have been in the internet-marketing world for about 5 minutes, it is very likely that you know about “SEO”: Search Engine Optimization. SEO is essentially about optimizing your website for Google’s search engine algorithm to rank your pages higher and thereby get more traffic. The News Feed Algorithm is the equivalent algorithm on Facebook. The FB Community Report Page 6 of 80 If you know what it likes, you will be able to play nice, rank your Facebook posts higher in the news feed, and thereby improve your post reach. Call if NFO if you want. (News Feed Optimization) The News Feed Algorithm determines what content to show in the news feed for each individual Facebook user. Only a very little portion of all the stories available to you are shown in your news feed. According to this news post in 2013, the algorithm has to consider on average 1500 potential stories when a user visits the news feed. (And that was in 2013!) The news feed has become even more competitive since 2013. So in order to get our posts to reach as many people as possible, we need to know how this algorithm works. Facebook obviously keep their algorithm secret so we will have to settle for as much information as we can find. Let us first look at what Facebook Help say about their own algorithm: A rather vague explanation. Luckily, by scouring Facebook’s news updates and best business practices, it is possible to piece together a more detailed overview of the algorithm. Over the last couple of years, Facebook has put a lot of focus on removing lowquality posts and spam. In 2012/13, exploiting the algorithm was simple: Post as many images as you can and get people to like and share them. Usually by a “Like this…” call to action. Today that is not a variable strategy. But a tweaked version of it is. The FB Community Report Page 7 of 80 Most of the News Feed Optimization stuff is covered in the Content To Post section of this report. A quick introduction to NFO is given below. Here are some of the most important points as of 2017: Engagement Engagement is still key. Facebook is a built around likes, shares and comments. This still one of the bigger factors when it comes to good post reach and rankings. Consistency When people engage with a post from your page, they are more likely to see future posts from your page. The reverse also applies if you do not post often: your reach will drop passively. This means that consistency is a requirement if you want to see any ongoing results from Facebook. Freshness In the war on spam, Facebook has decided that reused content will generally get a lower score. Freshness seems to apply to all kinds of content. Text, images and video. Quality According to Facebook, they have developed a special machine learning system that uses over a thousand factors to detect “high quality content”. Furthermore, memes and click-bait is not something Facebook wants to show in the news feed. Page and Post Trust Building trust and credibility with your audience is something Facebook looks at. Complaints will hurt individual posts as well as the entire page, so posting relevant and good content is important. The FB Community Report Page 8 of 80 This was a very quick overview of some of the most critical things to pay attention to. But knowing these things is just a starting point, and that is why this overview was so brief. Instead of writing page up and down about the algorithm, I have decided to simply incorporate it into the rest of the report. You now know that NFO is a thing. And that you should pay attention to it. If you were looking to spam affiliate links and CPA offers all day long then I hope you have changed your mind now that you know how it would negatively affect your page. Instead, in the rest of the report you will learn how to design your page and content to get a high score in the News Feed Algorithm. The NFO begins. How FB Pages Grow Virally Another important part you need to understand about Facebook is how pages grow. After all, you are looking to use Facebook to expand your reach and get more traffic to whatever monetization you have. Page can of course grow with help from active promotions. But with the right angle, pages will also grow with viral posts. Whenever someone shares, likes or comments on something they create a ‘story’. These stories are what the News Feed Algorithm processes, and if they are scoring well they will be published in people’s news feeds. Your stories (page updates) do not just appear for people who have liked your page. They also have the potential to show up in the feeds at friends of your fans. Here is an example: The FB Community Report Page 9 of 80 One of my friends liked Tuborg and this showed up in my news feed. With consistent viral exposure like that, a page can grow into the millions without any other promotion strategies. Here is a post from one of my pages that clearly shows the viral part: This viral growth is why Facebook is such a powerful traffic tool. Once you have an established page, it will continue to grow exponentially without much work. The FB Community Report Page 10 of 80 Step #2 An Overview of The FB Strategy That Works Now that you know much more about Facebook than most people, it is time to move on to the actual strategy. The system is built around just three simple steps: 1. Lay the Foundation 2. Facilitate Viral Growth 3. Monetize Facilitating viral growth + monetization are both ongoing tasks. But it takes less than a few hours a week to keep a page running once the foundation is laid. This will give you the big picture: As you can see, the first step is to get your initial fans and kick-start the viral growth from Facebook. Once the growth is going, it is just about keeping an active page with a lot of viral and engaging posts. …and once you add monetization, you have the complete $$$ system! The FB Community Report Page 11 of 80 Step #3 Find The Best Pages In Your Niche (And Your Angle) Your very first task is competition research. Find 5 – 10 of the best pages in your market. You can also find a couple of pages on your own level if you want. The more research you do, the better. For now, simply note down the Facebook URLs to these pages. We will use them later. Finding Pages in Your Industry Big Brand Pages First up you may already know some of the top pages in your industry. Add them to the list first. Facebook Search Next, you should use Facebook’s “Pages liked by…” search function to find similar pages. You start by typing “Pages liked by people who like PAGENAME” in the Facebook search bar. Replace PAGENAME with one of the pages you found earlier. Here is an example: This will give you page suggestions that are liked by the people who also like the page you are searching for. Social Research Tools Lastly, you can use some online tools to see if you have missed something. The FB Community Report Page 12 of 80 Socialbakers and PageData can show you some of top performing pages, but their reach may be limited for your niche. Fastest-Growing Blogs on Facebook according to Socialbakers.com Successful Facebook Pages Let us back up for a moment and let me show you something most successful pages have in common. Looking at the most liked pages, you will naturally find big brands as Coca-Cola, Disney, Redbull and superstars like Eminem, The Simpsons and Lady Gaga. Most of their fans do not come from clever use of Facebook; they come because of their fame. However, these brands are still very successful on Facebook and it is always good to look at some of the big guys. What we are really looking for is pages that are not run by big corporations or famous people. Pages like these: Jesus Daily (29m likes) Nail Art Club (7m likes) Best Vines (21m likes) … and there are thousands of pages likes these out there. The question is, what makes these pages so successful that they can achieve fan-counts in the millions? Here is what I have found: The FB Community Report Page 13 of 80 Build It Like a Community These pages are built as a community around a popular topic with viral potential. A community is something people will LOVE to like. It is something they will LOVE to share with their friends. And it’s something they will LOVE to interact with! (Please re-read that and let it sink in!) A community covers all the important Facebook criteria. Instead of looking like an annoying marketer or company trying to sell something, you will stand out as something nice. You will be likeable. That is how to treat social media! Do not sell directly. (However, that does not mean you cannot monetize.) Finding a Community Angle You need to find a community angle to build a viral page. Luckily, if you get the right angle, you will be able to fit almost any niche into Facebook. A good example is facebook.com/gymmeme. They have built a community with fun pictures of the stereotypes in the fitness niche. And as we know, the fitness niche is a very competitive and highly profitable market to be in. If you have your own website, this is the way to go on Facebook. Find a community angle and build you page around it. When I am brainstorming a potential angle, I follow a few guidelines: 1. Something people will share their friends 2. A lot of material for daily updates 3. Can be monetized Here are some examples for inspiration: The FB Community Report Page 14 of 80 Fitness Examples: Gym Memes and Doyoueven.com Internet Marketing / Business Examples: Boom Social with Kim Garst and Social Media Examiner Humor Examples: ViralNova and 9gag Hobbies Examples: Nail Art Club and Tattoos by myttoss.com Pets Examples: The German Shepherd Dog Community and PitBullsArea.com Celebrities (Music, Movies, TV) Examples: the-big-bang-theory.com E-commerce Examples: Amazon (Amazon is a huge corporation, but their Facebook marketing is so good that it is worth following if you are in any e-commerce related niche) Quotes Examples: Motivational Quotes and Words To Inspire the Soul Interesting Facts Examples: I fucking love science and 8fact All these niches work well on Facebook. The examples above are living proof. But that doesn’t mean you have to limit yourself to my ideas. As long as you stay within the “community” mindset and build something that makes sense to like and share, then you are very likely to succeed. The FB Community Report Page 15 of 80 There are so many angles you can take and get your own unique page. And standing out is a good way to make sure people will pay attention to your page. Step #4 Setup Your Page Once you know your angle, it is finally time to create your Facebook page. I will explain how to actually manage and run your page later. Right now, it is just about the setup. Before you do anything, I urge you to read the Facebook Page Terms. I’m serious. I know most of you will not, but I will give it a try anyways. You are building an asset on their platform and it would be stupid not to take a look at their rules. Once you have read their terms, you can create your Facebook Page here. Pick a Category Pick the category that fits your page. There is not much more to say about it. If you have a website tied to your page, you can take the ‘Brand or Product -> Website’. The FB Community Report Page 16 of 80 Page Name Your page name is the most important part of the page setup as this is what your fans will see when they have liked your page - or when they are just about to! Two very critical events where a great name can make all the difference! You have two choices: Your own imagination or my ‘fill-in-the-blank’ name ideas. I will leave option number one to you and then show the name templates I use: _____ With NAME (Use your own name or your website’s, depending on what you are branding) _____ Lovers _____ Fans I Love _____ _____ Community _____ Fanpage _____ Fan Club _____ Daily _____ Club _____ By NAME (Use your own name or your website’s, depending on what you are branding) Examples: ‘I Love Cute Puppies’ or ‘Cute Puppy Lovers’ All the above can build some great names, but if you are creating a page directly for a website, you may simply want to use the same name on your Facebook Page. I opted for this option with the ProfitChampion page: Extra Links: Changing Page Name Page Name Rules The FB Community Report Page 17 of 80 Profile + Cover Picture Your profile picture is what people will see when you post: It is also what people will see on your page along with your cover picture. It is quite important that your profile picture is square, or at least close to. The profile picture displays in 170x170 pixels on computers and 128x128 on smartphones. For your cover, it is just important to follow these guidelines and make sure it is a high-quality image as the display is wide at 820x312 pixels on computers and 640x360 on smartphones. If you upload a smaller image, it will be stretched to fit. Tip: Set your profile picture and look at your posts to see it in small scale. This is how people will see it so that is where it should be effective and recognizable. Extra Links: Profile picture and cover dimensions 35 Funny and smart profile/cover combinations About Us Depending on your category, you will have a range of ‘Page Info’ fields to fill out. It can be as extensive as this: The FB Community Report Page 18 of 80 … or it can just be an “About Us” section. Now it is time for a NFO tip: Fill out as much information you can. Part of building a trusted page is completing the page setup. Facebook has written openly that their quality algorithm factors page completion, so you may as well do it right away. You may not have something for all the fields, and that is fine. Just add as much relevant information as you can and check that your ‘About’ page looks good. The most important fields are About and Website as you can see these on the timeline page (The timeline page is your Page front page.) The FB Community Report Page 19 of 80 Use the about to write an exciting ‘about us’ with a call-to-action to encourage likes and/or website visits. Here are some great examples of smart About sections: Digital Marketer Digital Marketer have included their very enticing vision as their about. Social Media Examiner Social Media Examiner have added a call-to-action for their social media marketing world. The FB Community Report Page 20 of 80 I fucking love science IFLS is a very popular science page with an interesting and very viral angle on science. As you can see, they use their About to get more twitter followers. Additional Tabs If you already have other social profiles, you can show these on your Facebook page with the Additional Tabs feature. You can also list products, create landing pages and more. Here is an example of how the additional tabs can look like on your timeline page: You can also customize them more as Digital Marker or Boom Social with Kim Garst: The FB Community Report Page 21 of 80 To add tabs like these you can use Woobox or fnmaker. Woobox has a couple of free apps you can add as well as some paid ones. The fnmaker apps are all free. You may have to play around with some of the tabs to see which ones you prefer. There are tons of different things you can add to your page with these services. Here are some examples: Custom Tabs Twitter Instagram Pinterest YouTube … and more. Call-To-Action Button The page CTA button is where you can get people to take action. This button is always visible on your page which means you should present your very best call-toaction here. The FB Community Report Page 22 of 80 An e-commerce store? Pick the Shop Now button. You have a new and awesome free course? Pick the Sign Up button. Your website in general is the best CTA? Pick the Learn More button. … and so on. There are a lot of different CTA buttons to pick from and what you need will depend entirely on your site and niche. Simply click the Edit Button and you can change your CTA: The FB Community Report Page 23 of 80 Pages to Watch Pages to Watch is a neat feature added to the Page Insights. It allows you to easily track what other pages are doing in your niche. You can use this to get inspiration, see how well you are doing compared to others, and what is working in your niche. You may as well add the Pages To Watch as part of your setup. You will see how to use the information later in the Analyze and Improve chapter. You can find the Pages to Watch by clicking Insights at the top of your page and then scrolling down. Then simply click Add Pages and find the pages you noted down during your competition research. Pages to Watch The FB Community Report Page 24 of 80 Step #5.1 Lay the Foundation with Your First Fans (Free Methods) It is time to populate your new and awesome Facebook page. But first, you should understand ‘The Snowball Effect’: The first fans are the hardest. To get these you will have to either work manually or pay for them. But once you get going you will start to see the viral power kick in and that’s when you can scale down or even completely stop working on the strategies I’m about to share. This snowball growth will continue almost exponentially as long as you keep an active fan base. The more fans you have, the more you can attract. So do not give up if it seems hard at first. Again – the first fans are the hardest. With that out of the way, I will show my three best methods. The FB Community Report Page 25 of 80 1. Existing Assets One thing to always look for is existing assets. Even if you are entering a completely new niche, you may be able to get some fans right off the bat by looking around. The fans you can get here are some of the best ones as they already know you and therefore have some kind of relationship with you. I will just give you a few examples that I have used to boost some of my pages: Email List – An obvious one. Send an email to your subscribers telling them about your new page. However, that is not the only option. You can also use your email list to create a ‘custom audience’ and target it with promoted posts and ads. I will show how in the paid foundation section later. Subscribers – If you have any subscribers from a RSS-feed, YouTube, Twitter or anywhere else: Invite them! Invite Friends – Invite your friends to join your page or just post about it on your personal profile. Facebook has a feature to invite friends – just look at your page dashboard. The FB Community Report Page 26 of 80 Offline – If your niche is related to anything offline you can tell people about it. It is easier to do once you have a Facebook username, which requires 25 fans, as you will be able to refer people to facebook.com/USERNAME. Website – Add some of the Social Plugins to your website. Signature – Link to the page from your signature in forums, emails and other places where you can. Here is an example from our email footer: ProfitChampion Email Footer with links to social profiles and our blog. Starting out you want to get every fan possible. The above should get you started with some easy and loyal fans. Even if it just enough to make your page look alive. 2. Posting on Other Pages or Groups The idea is simple: You find other pages or groups in your niche and post in them to get some awareness around your new page. However, where many people mess up is with the implementation. There is a right and a wrong way to post on other pages. I will show you both: Let us first take the wrong one: SPAM. This is where you go to as many pages as you can and simply spam “LIKE MY PAGE, PLEASE”… or something similar. And you know what? It does not work. That is not how you build anything sustainable. At most, it is how you get reported and possibly even banned. The FB Community Report Page 27 of 80 The post above was even marked as spam by Facebook’s filters. Now let me show you the right one: Interaction. Established pages in your niche are goldmines filled with new potential followers and they should be treated as such. Instead of spamming your links, you should look to contribute to these pages. It is not that difficult: Step #1: Go to established pages related to yours. Step #2: Look at the comments for some of the latest post by the page. Step #3: Make sure you are posting as your page before you do anything. Step #4: Like, reply and comment to some of the good comments. That is really it. Here is why it works: When you like or reply to a comment, the user behind it will be notified by Facebook. And as you are commenting as your page they’ll see something like “‘XXXX Fan Club’ liked your comment”. The FB Community Report Page 28 of 80 If they really are interested in XXXX (which they are as they have commented on another post in the niche) they are very likely to check out your page -> and hopefully like it too if your content is good. Replying or commenting as your page also puts your page’s name in front of everybody else who looks at the comments. A great additional bonus. Occasionally you can also post some of your best content to their page wall. Just do not overdo it. Do it casually rather than making it a hyped promotion. 3. Reach Out! Simply reaching out to established pages can actually get you a post on their wall and a wave of new followers. Again, it is about how you reach out. You can attempt to reach out to the page owner after you have been active with the strategy from above about posting, commenting and liking their page. If you have been active a few times, there is a chance they have noticed you. Remember: Many of these people are not marketers at all. They are just passionate about the topic and that is why they run their pages. So, if you establish yourself as an excited fan too you will get a response from most people. The only downside to this method is that a portion of your messages will go unnoticed. The inbox fills up quite quickly once a page reaches the thousands and some page owners do not check messages simply because they cannot keep up with the number of messages they receive. Do not let ‘failed’ attempts discourage you. It is a numbers game. Even if you only get one response from five attempts, it can still be a wave of new fans to your page. A boost that will surely make up for the four unnoticed messages. Here is what your reach-out message may look like: (feel free to copy what you like) The FB Community Report Page 29 of 80 I offer to return the favor with a cross promotion as this is often the last push needed to secure a promotion. Even if your page is small, it is still worth something. As your page grows, you can turn these messages into more of a cross-promotion deal as your fan base will have more value the larger it is. If you do not know how to send a message, you can look at the illustration on the next page. Hey there, I really like you page and the content you share on it. I found it a few weeks ago and I love XXXX so much that I find myself posting about it all the time. You may have seen some of my posts on your page – I try to add my very best high quality photos and contribute to the great community you have built. My own page: www.facebook.com/USERNAME is about XXXX too and I’m trying to develop it. It would be amazing if you could share one of my posts to your fans, or invite them to visit my page. Without fans it’s difficult to stay motivated. Thank you for reading this, NAME P.S. I will of course return the favor if you decide to share any of my posts. Just send me a message! The FB Community Report Page 30 of 80 The FB Community Report Page 31 of 80 Step #5.2 Lay the Foundation with Your First Fans (Paid Methods) For this second part of the foundation, I will talk about how to pay for your fist fans. Facebook Ads have worked really well for me as I often do want to wait for results from the manual work the free options require. However, that does not mean you have to use ads. It just speeds up the process, especially early on. Facebook Ads is the only paid traffic source I recommend for building a page. Buying fans anywhere else is a waste. The secret to great ads is stupidly simple: Testing, testing and more testing. I will show you my systematic method to cheap ads, but remember that if there is something you can change, there is something you can (and should) test. You can create Facebook Ads here: https://www.facebook.com/ads/create/ Note: If you have never tried Facebook Ads before, you may get a coupon to start out with. This will give you a nice budget-boost and allow you to advertise even if you are not interested in spending a lot of money. I will not recommend any websites or sellers as the market changes all the time. Ask on the forums. You can see more about Advertising Coupons here. The Three Main Ad Types Worth Your Time And Money As of right now, Facebook has no less than 15 different advertising types. The FB Community Report Page 32 of 80 At first, this may make ad creation a jungle, but in most cases you will only have to consider three types: Boost your posts Promote your Page Increase conversions on your website In some special cases, you may also want to use some of the other options such as videos views, offer claims or website visits. However, the ad process is much the same for most of the ad types so once you learn about the three main types, you will more or less be set for the rest. I will now go through the three most common ad types and explain how they work and what you should use them for. Extra links: - Advertising Objectives (Facebook Help) Boost a Post / Promoted Posts Booting a post is, in its simplest form, paying Facebook to show your post to more people. This can be used for a number of different things. You can boost a good blog post you want your audience to see. You can boost a link to a landing page. Or you can even boost links directly to an offer. One of the advantages of boosting a post is that the process is simple. You can boost a post directly from your page wall: Here you have three different targeting options: People who like your page The FB Community Report Page 33 of 80 People who like your page and their friends People you choose through targeting (You will learn about this later) If you want to control even more, you can also create a promoted post campaign from your ad manager. Boosting a post and a promoted post is the same. Create an ad and pick the Boost your posts type. Next you will be able to create the ad with all the targeting, spending and placement options. You will learn about these in a second. A ‘Promote Your Page’ Ad A promote your page type ad will let Facebook optimize your campaign for page likes. You can use this to boost your likes and get over the workload it is to get your first few hundred likes. This kind of like ad has been very popular, but today you are sometimes better off with other campaigns once you have established your ‘like-base’. The reason is that the other campaigns will allow you to use your ad spend on more specific goals. E.g. getting people to your landing page or visiting your blog. And at the same time, most other campaigns will also get likes to your page in addition to the other goals. Promote your page ads are not dead however. If you are in a very viral niche and can get cheap likes then this is a great way to build your page quickly. You create a promote your page ad by creating a new ad and picking ‘Promote your Page’. A ‘Conversion’ Ad An increase conversions on your website ad is one of the more advanced types of ads. But it can also be a very powerful type as it allows you to optimize ads for conversions. The FB Community Report Page 34 of 80 With a Conversion Ad you can easily see how much you are paying for leads, sales or whatever you are tracking. A “conversion” is usually an email signup. It can also be a sale or essentially whatever you deem important. The way this ad type works is by using what is called a ‘conversion pixel’. It is a script you insert on the page a lead lands on just after signing up. For example, if you want to create an ad optimized for email signups then you want to place the pixel on the thank-you page just after a subscriber has joined your list. The conversion pixel allows Facebook to monitor who sign up for your list and thereby optimize your ad towards these people. You create a conversion ad by creating a new ad and picking ‘Increase conversions on your website’. Creating An Ad You now know about the three most used ad types. This means it is time to learn how to create an ad. Much of the setup is the same for different ads. Generally, the process is broken down into four steps: 1. Pick Campaign Objective (This is where you pick the type of ad) 2. Targeting 3. Ad Spend 4. Images and Placement First, pick a campaign objective and enter what you want to promote. The FB Community Report Page 35 of 80 Targeting Next is targeting. The first settings are locations, age, gender, languages and more: The FB Community Report Page 36 of 80 I will go through each of the options below. Custom Audience: Leave this for now. I will show you how to create custom audiences in a bit. Locations: If you know where your audience lives, enter it here. Often you should go with something like in the example: a couple of countries where you know most of your buyers or visitors are from. Age: If your ad only applies to a specific age range, then narrow it down here. Gender: Again, specify gender if it applies. Languages: If you have used location targeting then language will more or less take care of itself. In special cases you may want to specify a language. The FB Community Report Page 37 of 80 Detailed Targeting The next step is Detailed Targeting. Here’s how it works: In the first box you specify your ‘main targeting’ criteria. If you specify more than one criteria, your campaign will show to people who match at least ONE of them. (In the example below, if someone likes Frank Kern they will qualify for this campaign. They do not have to like all of the interests targeted.) After adding your main criteria, you have the option to Exclude People or Narrow Audience. Exclude People gives to a box where you can set up criteria for people you do not want to target. Narrow Audience will allow you to specific additional criteria that your audience must match. (In our example this means that the audience must like one of the pages from the first box AND they should be a Facebook Page Admin.) This combination of targeting options gives you a lot of room to target very specific campaigns. For each of the targeting boxes you can add Demographics, interests or behaviors. I’ll quickly explain what you can do with these. The FB Community Report Page 38 of 80 Demographics: Here you can target stuff like education, relationship status, job titles and much more related to demographics. You can click the Browse button to see all the options. Interests: Here you can target interests. You can use the pages you found earlier or find new pages in your niche that have an audience you would like to target. You simply type in the related pages in the interest section. You can also target broader interests such as “Social Media”. Behaviors: If Facebook did not creep you out with how much information they had in the interests section, then they most likely will when you start going through some of the behavior options. You can target all kinds of behaviors here. It is quite amazing how well you can target people. You should use the behavior targeting if something applies to your campaign. E.g. Say you have a campaign where you want to help people get more traffic to their Facebook page. With the behavior, you can choose only to target people who are page admins of at least one page. The last targeting step is Connections. Here you can target people based on connections to your Page, App or Event. Most of the time you should just leave it as is or take Exclude people who like your Page if you only want to target a new audience. Placement Facebook seems to be expanding their ad placements all the time. You can have your ad placed in several positions on several platforms on several device types. The FB Community Report Page 39 of 80 What ad placement to pick will depend on your offer, audience and ad. However, the recommended option is to take Automatic Placements unless you have some placements that you really can’t use. This will allow Facebook to place your ad where it performs best. Note: To really test properly you can create a separate campaign for each of the placements you want. This will allow you to see which placement performs best. For Automatic Placement or campaigns with several placements you will also be able to see how the ad perform in different locations in the ad manager. Budget & Schedule The FB Community Report Page 40 of 80 I usually start with a $5-$10 per day budget. You can opt for more or less if you want. Just pick a Daily Budget and do not change any of the advanced options. Facebook optimization is much better than trying to play around with CPC yourself. This section also allows you to play around with a lot of advanced options. If you have a special goal for your campaign you may want to look at these. For most campaigns the standard options will be enough though. Ad Images and Copy The last step is the actual ad. Here you can see a preview of your ad in the different placements. In this example, I have already picked a post to promote so I do not have to add image, headline and copy. For other ad types, this is where you would do that. The biggest obstacle with Ad Images is the 20% rule. Only 20% of your image may contain text. The FB Community Report Page 41 of 80 Advanced: Audiences Facebook Audience allows you can create more advanced targeting. Using audiences is a bit more advanced than normal ads, but it also gives you the opportunity to target your own email leads, retarget website visitors and much more… You can access your Audience Manager here. The FB Community Report Page 42 of 80 There are three different audience types: - Lookalike Audience - Saved Audience - Custom Audience I will go through each of them below. Lookalike Audience Lookalike audiences are mainly for scaling up campaigns. You pick a source and a country and Facebook will find people similar to the source you picked and create a lookalike audience that you can target with your adverting. Lookalike audiences are most likely not something you are going to play around with as a new to intermediate Facebook user. You should be able to create sufficiently large audiences with the other methods. Saved Target Group The saved target group function is simply there to make ad creation easier. If you use the same target group often, you can save it here and easily target it with new ads. Custom Audiences The custom audience function is by far the most interesting audience function. There are three ways to build a custom audience: The FB Community Report Page 43 of 80 The App Activity is most likely not relevant so I will go through the other two: Customer List If you have any customers or leads already, then you can create a custom audience from their emails, phone numbers, Facebook IDs or mobile advertiser IDs. E.g. if you have email leads in a GetResponse account or some other email service provider, you will be able to export these emails, import them to Facebook and create campaigns targeting these leads. This opens for many opportunities. As these people already know you, they are much more likely to respond to advertisements from you. The FB Community Report Page 44 of 80 Website Traffic The second option is creating a custom audience from website traffic. Just as with conversion ads, you install a pixel on your website and Facebook will track all website visitors you have. You can then create ad campaigns targeting these website visitors for up to 180 days after they have visited your site. Here is a tip: Install a website pixel on your site ASAP. Even if you do not want to use it right now, you may want it sometime in the future. Therefore, you should start building your custom audience right away with a website pixel. Website Custom Audiences can also be used for specific pages or for excluding pages. E.g., you can target websites visitors who have visited your landing page, but not yet signed up for your email list – in this scenario you do not want to keep advertising to those who have already signed up. The option ‘People visiting specific web pages but not others’ allows you to do exactly that. This is what is called remarketing or just retargeting, and it opens for some very interesting and profitable opportunities. However, it is starting to get rather advanced so do not worry if some of it seems a bit confusing or technical. You do not need this when you are just starting out. The FB Community Report Page 45 of 80 Further use of remarking is beyond the scope of this report and we will now dive into the last important part of advertising. How to Test and Improve Okay, so you know the different ad methods and you may already have an idea of how your first ad should look. However, it is just an idea until we actually test it. Nobody can predict how well an ad will do. Nobody. And that’s why ‘test and improve’ is the only way you will be able to create a successful ad. Sure, you can guess, but I am sure you will be surprised when you see the results. Here is a challenge for you: Which one of these images do you think has the highest CTR? My bet was on the first one. But as it turned out it was the worst image of the four. It actually performed poorly compared to the rest. Here are the results after one day of testing: #1 Image CTR: 0.172% Reach: 7436 Clicks: 22 Cost Per Like: $0.12 #2 Image CTR: 0.216% Reach: 11,213 Clicks: 85 Cost Per Like: $0.03 #3 Image CTR: 0.184% Reach: 7680 Clicks: 35 Cost Per Like: $0.05 #4 Image CTR: 0.117% Reach: 7857 Clicks: 24 Cost Per Like: $0.08 As you can see, image nr. 2 was a clear winner for me. With some improvements I was able to keep it at $0.02 per like for quite some time. The FB Community Report Page 46 of 80 I hope you have realized that advertising is all about testing. If I had just stuck with my prediction, I would have paid 4 times as much as I did! I have guessed wrong many times, but that does not mean I cannot create winning ads. I can create successful ads because I follow a system where my guesswork does not matter. The system is simple: Test one element at a time and move on with the winner. Following the system, I usually take 1 day for each test and then set the budget low so I can just let it run for the day and cap the budget. Doing this I do not have to sit at my computer and refresh my stats constantly. The ‘Winners-Only’ System Step #1: Create five campaigns where one element is different across the campaigns. (E.g. five different images) Step #2: Let everything else be the exactly the same. Step #3: Set the budget for each campaign at ~ $2-5. Step #4: Let the campaigns run until they reach the budget. Step #5: Look at the results and pick the best performing ad. Step #6: Go back to #1 with the winner and test something new. As I said earlier, I usually take one day to complete a cycle from 1-6. Then I test something new the next day. And here is the really cool thing: You constantly improve the ad as you always pick the best performing one when you move on to a new cycle. You can of course make more or less than five campaigns if you want to. If you want to use more than a few hundred dollars on a single page, you may want to do more than five. But if you are just looking to get started it will do with 3 to 5. The FB Community Report Page 47 of 80 If your budget is small, you will end up spending most of it on testing if you take more than five campaigns and then you will not have anything to spend on the winner. Campaign Elements to Test I usually test my campaign elements in the following order: 1. Image 2. Targeting 3. Headline 4. Text 5. Other If I have something specific I want to look at, I usually do it after the image test. This can be interests (if more than one applies), country or something else. So on day one I test five different images. Day two I pick the image with the highest CTR and I test it across five age groups. On day three, I take the best ad from day two and test it with different headlines… and so on until I am satisfied with the ad and my CPC. When to stop testing When to stop testing really depends on how well the ad is doing and how much you are looking to spend on ads. In theory, you should always be testing new variances of the ad. But as you may have a limited ad budget, at some point it is no longer worth it to optimize the ad. When you are satisfied with your results you can keep the ad running. However, it is important that you always keep an eye on your ads. At some point it will decrease in performance as more and more people have seen the ad. You can pause the ad for some time and reactivate it later or create a new campaign with different images. The FB Community Report Page 48 of 80 Step #6 Content to Post It’s time to talk content. Engaging content is critical for an active and viral page. Generally, there are three big questions when it comes to content: What to post? When to post it? How often? I will start backwards and go through each of these topics. Frequency When it comes to how often to post, the most important thing is consistency. Posting frequency is a topic studied a lot for most social platforms. The same goes for Facebook. However, the results often vary and it can be tricky see what advice to follow and what not to. According to this post, posting twice a day is the maximum you can post on Facebook. After two posts a day, comments and likes begin to drop. Twice a day is a good starting point. However, ultimately you should do your own experimenting and see what works for you and your page. At least if you want to maximize your results. Some of the most viral pages consistently post 3-5 times a day. Sometimes even more. Maybe they could get more likes and shares pr. post if they lowered the volume, but they would still get lower overall engagement and reach fewer people. Therefore, frequency may depend on what you are trying to achieve. Use your own Facebook insights and watch your competitor’s in the Pages to Watch section to see what works in your niche. The FB Community Report Page 49 of 80 Time to Post As a starting point, you want to post when your audience is online. Facebook’s awesome Insights will allow you to see exactly when that is as soon as you get some fans. Just take a look: From this information, you should be able to determine when your fans are online and try to post at these times. Until you get a good fan sample size, here are some recommendations based on research from Quicksprout. Post at… 1 PM for shares 3 PM for clicks Broader suggestion: Anytime between 9 AM – 7 PM. (Simply avoid posting when people are asleep…) Content Break Down Your content should be a fairly even mix of images, links and text. My posts consist of: The FB Community Report Page 50 of 80 - ~ 80% - 90% image and link mix. - ~ 10% text. - Occasional videos Visually appealing content is simply more engaging and that is why most posts are images or links. (Links can have a quite big image in the news feed so they can be visual too.) Videos are also worth a try, but they are more production heavy and take more time to make. Links should be links When posting content you should use the appropriate type. A big trend earlier was to post images with a link in the text area. This was simply due to the fact that Facebook used to value images way more than links and so images would get a bigger reach. That is not the case anymore. The algorithm prioritizes showing links in the linkformat instead of links in other status updates. Click-bait headlines are also taking hits so avoid these. See more about this here. Quality is a thing now As I have said earlier, Facebook wants to improve the quality of posts in the news feed. They have done a lot already, and there is no doubt they will continue to tweak their algorithm to keep spammers away. The solution from our side is simple: Post great content and do not try to trick people. One important tip that may not be so apparent: You should not ask for likes or shares in your posts anymore. This is called ‘Like-baiting’ and you should avoid it. It is completely fine to encourage discussion, but posting “Like this if…” to an image is not. See more about this here. The FB Community Report Page 51 of 80 The Three Content Types Okay, I have talked about what to do and what not to do. But what about the actual content? What should you post to your site to keep it active and to facilitate viral growth? To keep things organized I have defined three different types of content: 1. Value Content 2. Trigger Content 3. Monetization I will go through these one by one below. Value Content The definition of value content is simple: Content that is valuable to your audience. This can be guides, tips, tutorial, resources etc. Just something that will help your audience with whatever problems they struggle with. If you have your own blog, then value content would be a link to a blog post. Trigger Content This is where you really want to get viral traffic. Trigger Content is all about trying to get likes, shares, comments and thereby viral traffic. A ProfitChampion we have developed a resource with 11 social trigger content ideas. We refer this this type of content as ‘social triggers’ as they trigger social interaction. Hitting social triggers can help you build posts that often get 3-5 times as many viral views as organic. The FB Community Report Page 52 of 80 Download The 11 Social Trigger Templates Here Monetization Content Sometimes you may want to post promotional content. However, it is almost always best if you try to keep the promotion aspect low and instead incorporate promotions in your other content. I will show you how to do this later in the monetization chapter. The FB Community Report Page 53 of 80 Step #7 How to Find and Post Your Content The technical side of posting content is simple: go to Facebook and make a ‘Status Update’ for your page with the right type of content. However, there is more to it than just hitting Publish. Below I will show you how to easily find and create content for your Facebook page. Value Content If you are creating any content yourself, then this is obviously the first place you look. Post a link on your Facebook page whenever you publish something new. However, for most people that is not enough to keep a page active. So let me show you an awesome tool: How would you like to be able to post valuable content from other sources on your page, and still be able to benefit from it? With snip.ly you can do exactly that. Snip.ly allows you to add a call-to-action on any page. Just take a look at this link: http://snip.ly/Wmoa#http://gizmodo.com/ That is how you want to post value content that is not from your own website. Interaction Content About 90% of the interaction content is delivered through images. Like this quote: The FB Community Report Page 54 of 80 I have already given you a resource to come up with interaction content ideas. But what about creating the images? Here are some online tools that will help you do it in no time: - Quotescover - Behappy.me - Recite - Canva I personally prefer Quotescover for quick quotes. Recite has some awesome quote backgrounds too. Unfortunately, they also add a quite big watermark on the image. Canva is the most advanced of them all. So if you want control, use that tool. I also sometimes use Canva for Facebook Ads and other graphics. (The trigger template resource was created using just Canva.) The FB Community Report Page 55 of 80 Step #8 How To Manage and Run Your Page “Posting interesting content 2 times a day… Every day? Exactly when my fans are online? How am I ever going to keep up with such a schedule?!” If your thoughts are anything like this then do not worry. In this chapter, I will show you how to ease the workload. As it turns out, you do not have to sit at your computer all day. You will see why in a second: Schedule Your Posts Facebook has a built in scheduling feature where you can schedule your post and then have them automatically published. Right now, I schedule most of my post one week ahead. This means that I only spend around 1-2 hours/week on content for each of my pages. Pretty sweet, huh? Trigger content is the easiest to schedule ahead of time. Value content may be a bit more difficult and usually requires some ongoing work. Just schedule what you can and leave room for timely content. The schedule function is quite easy to use. Just click the small arrow next to Publish and set the time. You can read more about scheduling here. The schedule post feature is definitely the most important management feature Facebook offers, but there are also a few more tricks I want to share with you: The FB Community Report Page 56 of 80 Pin to Top You can pin a post to the top of your page where it will stay for 7 days after you have pinned it. This is a very smart feature you can use to get some extra exposure on important posts. Here’s how to pin a post: Just hover your mouse over the post you want and click Pin to Top. You should usually have an important post pinned at the top of your page at all times. Audience Optimization (The New Targeting) Audience optimization replaced the old post targeting with new and more advanced features. You can target your audience using one of the two functions: - Preferred Audience - Audience Restrictions If your page has more than 5k fans, Audience Optimization should be enabled. If your page is smaller you can follow this guide to enable it. Once you have enabled Audience Optimization you can use it by clicking the small scope below your post. The FB Community Report Page 57 of 80 Preferred Audience The preferred audience function allows you to choose the people you’d like to reach with your post. Facebook will then prioritize people in the group you specify. The tags you can use are like the interest you use to create Facebook Ads. An important aspect of the Preferred Audience is that it does not limit reach. So if you have an interest group you want to prioritize with a specific post you should use this function. It won’t hurt your overall reach. Audience Restrictions The FB Community Report Page 58 of 80 This function can be used to limit visibility for a post. You are most likely not going to use this much, but for special posts it can be useful. You can read more about Audience Optimization here. Responding to Comments Part of managing a trusted page is reposing to comments in a timely manner. You can use page notifications to be notified whenever something happens on your page. As your page grows, you will most likely have to change and adapt these settings. (Getting a notification each time your page has a new like may be exciting when you are just starting out, but later it becomes less fun.) You can change your notification settings under Settings -> Notifications. The FB Community Report Page 59 of 80 Responding to Messages Lately, Facebook has started focusing more on how pages can respond to private messages from users. This is resulted in a several changes and tools that I will go over below. Responsive Badge So why is it important to respond to messages? First of all, it’s a good sign towards Facebook – your page is active and you care about your fans. It is also a great way to build a better relationship with your audience. However, there’s more. Facebook recently added a very responsive to messages badge that you can get for your page: The FB Community Report Page 60 of 80 This badge will appear on your page if you have a track record of fast message responses. You can see more about the badge here. To get the badge you need a response rate of 90% and response time of 15 minutes. It is not confirmed whether or not this badge will affect your post reach, but it definitely can’t hurt. The ‘Away’-option A response time of just 15 minutes may sound impossible, especially if you are just one person running a Facebook page. How are you ever going to keep that up if you also want to sleep at night? A solution is the Away option which allows you to turn on away status for up to 12 hours at a time. In this mode, you do not need to respond to messages. The timer for responses starts as soon as you turn off the away mode. To turn on the Away status simply go to the Messages dashboard (click on Messages in the top bar) and you’ll then find the Away option in the lower left corner: Instant Replies Another new message tool is the instant replies. The FB Community Report Page 61 of 80 You can enable Instant Replies to immediately reply with a standard message when someone writes to your page. You can use this to direct people to your website and/or let them know you’ll get back to them soon. (Instant Replies does not count towards your responsiveness badge, so you can’t cheat the system like this. You will still have to respond yourself.) You can learn more about Instant Replies here. The FB Community Report Page 62 of 80 Step #8 Monetizing Social When it comes to monetization, there are a few things to note: 1. The less action the user has to take, the better results you will get. People on Facebook are not in buying-mode. They are there to chill out with friends, so a complicated 3-page CPA survey will not work nearly as well as a simple email submit. Even if the payout looks promising. The same goes with other monetization methods. A general rule of thumb: the easier, the better. 2. Don’t hype, sell or advertise untargeted products… Seriously. Just don’t Here is what will happen if you try to push your products or advertising: This is not my page, but it clearly shows what will happen. People do not like being sold to, and as we are operating on a social platform, we cannot just push our stuff down their throats. 3. Remember to add value Facebook is not the place to spam advertising for a quick buck. Your need to keep a good relationship with your page, and you can only do so if you add value with your monetization. Ask yourself: “Would I send this even if I didn’t get paid?” The FB Community Report Page 63 of 80 The Best Way To Monetize The best way to monetize any Facebook pages is with an actual business behind it. With products, funnels, free content, etc… the whole nine yards. You may not have one yet, but it may be a goal of yours at some point. How to build a business or even just a single funnel is beyond the scope of this report. However, I have created an intro page on how to get started. This should give you a nudge in the right direction: Learn How To Build An Unstoppable Business Here. A complete business is not something you will build overnight. Luckily, there are also other very profitable monetization strategies that can be used on Facebook. You can either use these until you have your own funnel, or as a permanent solution if that is what you prefer. Here are the other monetization methods I have found to be successful: 1. Email Marketing Email Marketing is the first step towards building a funnel, and I therefore strongly encourage you to try it. Once you get people to opt-in for an email list, you can start selling to them. Remember that selling directly on any social platform is often not a smart idea, but as soon as you get them somewhere else, you can start presenting offers. There are tons of tools and apps that will allow you to create a landing page inside Facebook, but honesty I have not seen any increase in performance from these. Instead, if you have a regular landing page, just keep it and send people there with link updates. Here is a landing page example: The FB Community Report Page 64 of 80 If you do not have a website, you can use the Woobox HTML fangate to create a landing page inside Facebook. Special Offer for ProfitChampion Members: You can get a free funnel with lead magnet, optimized landing page, follow-up emails and more. Click here to learn more. 2. CPA Offers CPA offers can work well with Facebook pages if you have a targeted audience and an offer to fit it. If the offer does not fit, it will shine through that you are just trying to make money, and that is not something your fans will like. You can use Offervault.com to find CPA offers. The advanced search feature allows you to filter campaigns suited to your needs. I have promoted CPA offers with different techniques to my fan pages: #1 Custom Tab Creating a custom tab as a landing page for your CPA offers has worked well for me. Again, you can use the HTML custom tab from Woobox. Here is a quick custom tab example for the sake of illustration: The FB Community Report Page 65 of 80 Each of the buttons leads to an email submit CPA offer. Here is a super easy way to do this: Step 1: Create an image. Step 2: Go to http://www.image-maps.com and map out where you want links. Step 3: Get the html code and copy it into your Woobox custom tab. Done. You then have a custom Facebook CPA landing page where you can direct your fans to. The example above is not really the best as the offer is not 100% targeted at the audience. I have used a ‘support the page’ angle to make it work though. A CPA offer that aligns with the audience will always outperform the genetic “Win an iPhone/iPad” offers. The FB Community Report Page 66 of 80 #2 ‘Take Your Pick’ Script My second CPA method is a small ´Take Your Pick´ script where your fans will be able to vote between two images. The awesome thing about this method is that it engages people without looking like advertising. So even those who are not interested in the CPA will feel like they have received what they expected when they clicked the link. Here is how the script works: (The user can click on the image he or she wants to vote for.) …and on the last slide, you can promote the CPA offer: The FB Community Report Page 67 of 80 You can actually promote whatever you want. The method does not just apply to CPA offers. I have developed this script for myself, but you can download it below: Download the ‘Take-Your-Pick’ Script Here (.zip file with HTML and instructions) #3 Use Snip.ly to share content with CPA offers. You can add CPA call-to-action links to any value content you share using snip.ly. 3. Amazon Amazon has an affiliate program called Amazon Associates where you can get paid when people buy through your link. The commission lies between 4% - 10%, but the real gold is in the fact that you will be paid for ALL the products a visitor buys. Not just the product you sent them to. As many people buy regularly from amazon, you will see commissions for very different products than what you would expect. The FB Community Report Page 68 of 80 My approach to amazon with a fan page is quite simple: I want people to click my links. Once they click my links they are tagged as ‘my customers’ with a cookie and I will get paid if the buy something – Doesn’t matter if it is what I sent them to or not. So when scouting for products I do not go for high priced products. They may seem attractive as your commissions will of course be bigger, but it is not worth it. How many people are really going to make a $500 impulse buying decision? Not a lot. Instead, go for something cool, funny or interesting. Something that will get your audience’s attention and could encourage impulsive clicks and purchases. And if it is really awesome you will also see people sharing your affiliate link. How To Get Started with Amazon: You can sign up for the Amazon Associates program here and after that; it is just about scouting for interesting products. When you are logged in with your associates account, you will see a toolbar where you can share directly to your Facebook page: The link you share from the toolbar will have your affiliate code in it so you will get paid when somebody clicks your link and decides to buy something. Note: If you need some inspiration, you can look at the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” section below the products. Thisiswhyimbroke.com also has some fun and interesting products that may give you some inspiration. Moreover, you may also want to follow Amazon on Facebook. They are good (really good!) at selling items without being “salesy”. You can get plenty of ideas from them. The FB Community Report Page 69 of 80 4. Affiliate Products You can of course also promote affiliate products to your page. If you want to sell products, I still recommend that you get people on a list or at least to your website. Then sell from there. However, in some cases it can work directly. Especially if you work in into your value content. Therefore, you may have to experiment with it just to see how your audience reacts. There are many affiliate platforms out there. Some of the biggest and best are: - Clickbank - JVZoo - CJ Affiliate (formerly Commision Junction) - LinkShare / Rakuten Affiliate Network - ShareASale Clickbank is probably the best-known place to go if you are looking for products to promote in your niche. Once you have signed up you can go to their marketplace and search for products to promote. Most big platforms will have a similar system with a marketplace where you can search for products to promote. Another option is to look for private affiliate programs. The FB Community Report Page 70 of 80 Look at some established products in your niche and you will most likely find that some of them have affiliate programs where you can sign up and promote their products. You will often find an “Affiliates” link at the button of their page where you can learn more about their program. If not you can try a Google search for “Product + affiliate program”. Extra: Teespring.com Teespring has been a very popular topic amongst internet marketers as a monetization strategy. Especially together with Facebook. Teespring is a service where you can design t-shirts with no upfront cost. You can then sell the t-shirt and teespring will ship directly to your buyers. This means that all you have to do is sell the t-shirts and collect profits. The setup is super simple: Create a design, set your sales goal and go! The FB Community Report Page 71 of 80 Tip: If you sign up for Teespring through this link, you will earn $1 extra per shirt sold. The link is our affiliate link. I do not have any personal experience with teespring, so I do not have any special recommendations. I do however know that you can see active campaigns at teespring.com/discover. Use this for inspiration. Teespring is simply another monetization strategy you can add to your toolbox if it fits your page. How to Apply the Monetization Strategies You have seen the different monetization methods for your Facebook page, but the question is now: how to apply them? Some of the methods are built into your Facebook page with custom tabs. But these tabs won’t get much traffic if you do not make your fans aware of them. I have talked about several different strategies, but you should pretty much use the same traffic strategies no matter what method you use. In the rest of this chapter, I will simply refer to the monetization pages as moneypages. This would be your landing pages, amazon links, ‘Take-Your-Pick’ scripts, teespring campaigns and so on. Here is how to get traffic to your money-pages: #1 Make a link-type status update This is the bread-and-butter traffic method. Make a Facebook post where you tell people about your money-page. #2 Boost Promotional Posts You have already learned how to create Facebook ads to boost important posts. Use it to get more reach for your promotion posts. #3 Monetize Your Blog + Use snip.ly To Monetize Value Content The FB Community Report Page 72 of 80 You should monetize your value content too. If you have a blog that means having call-to-actions in the blog post, signup forms, banners, affiliate links, etc… Snip.ly will also allow you to add call-to-actions to value content on other blogs. Use this to send traffic to your money-pages too. Remember: You Are Monetizing Social That is pretty much it for monetization. Just remember: Facebook is a social platform. This is not the place for hype, aggressive promotions and hard sales-pitches. Instead, apply some soft-selling and be smart about it so you bring value while doing so. With that you are set to make some nice $$$ from your page. The FB Community Report Page 73 of 80 Step #9 Analyze and Improve Learning how to analyze your page’s Insights will make you a much better Facebook marketer – and a much better marketer in general. Where to find Insights for your page I am still amazed of all the information you can learn about your audience from just going through your Insights. This is not just information you can use to improve your Facebook page, but also improve everything else you are doing. I urge you to explore your page’s Insights as soon as you have a fan-base worth analyzing. Most of the tabs are self-explanatory, but I will also give you a few examples below: (the text in italics is the tabs and sections where you will find the information in your Insights) Which type of post reaches the most people? Which has the best engagement? Posts -> Post Types. Here you will be able to see the average stats for different post types. You can also scroll down and see all your posts and go more in depth with your analysis. When are my fans online so I can reach them? Posts -> When Your Fans Are Online. Here you can see a graph over your fans online times. Hover your mouse over a day and see the stats for that particular day. Where are my fans from? How old are they? Male or Women? (Demographics) The FB Community Report Page 74 of 80 The People tab. The people tab will give you details about you fans. You can even see people reached and engaged to find your best fans and see their demographics. How are my competitors doing? And what are they doing well? Overview -> Scroll down to Pages to Watch. Here you can see how your competitors are doing. Click on a page to see this week’s top posts from that page. This can be great inspiration for your own page. This Week's Best Amazon Post Note: You can also export your insights data to Excel (.xls) or .csv files. The export data will give you a lot of metrics to look at. Try it! You can export your Insights Data The FB Community Report Page 75 of 80 Step #10 Extra: Expand Your Social Empire Once you have your first page well established, you can use it to supercharge new pages and expand your reach by building a complete social empire. Even getting the same fans to like two of your pages is worth it, as it will allow you to reach these fans more often. Expand by Creating Related Pages The hardest part about the system is laying the foundation. But with an established page you can completely skip that step if you want to start at new page. As long as you can draw some kind of logic connection between two pages, you will be able to funnel your fans over to the new page and let them become your first fans. There are a couple of ways you can do this passively and actively: #1 Add the Page as a Featured Like (Passive) You can like other pages with your own page. When you do this, the page will appear on your timeline, which can give you a steady flow of fans to the new page. Go to the page you want to like and click the button with the three dots: Here you have to option of liking the page as your page. Next, go to your page settings and click Featured in the left column. Click Add Featured Likes and choose the Pages you want to feature. The FB Community Report Page 76 of 80 And here is what it looks like on your timeline page: You can feature a maximum of 5 pages and after that you will have to choose which pages to feature on your timeline. You can do this from the page settings. #2 Link to the page (Active) You can of course create a post with a link to the page and ask people to like it. It works if the niches are really closely related, but otherwise I would stay away from this very direct promotion approach and instead go for something similar: #3 Share posts (Active) You can actually share another page’s posts with your page. 9gag.com did this some time ago and built new fan pages from 0 to 100k+ fans in a few days. Here is what they did: The FB Community Report Page 77 of 80 As you can see, the page 9gag shared 8fact’s photo and added a description + tagged the page. This is super awesome way of doing cross promotion and it is really easy to do. Just make sure you are ‘Using Facebook As Your Page’ when you share a post and then it’s just like sharing a regular post. The FB Community Report Page 78 of 80 You can also add @USERNAME tagging so people easily can see where to photo is from. (This method can also be used to cross-promote with other pages that are not yours.) Expand to Other Platforms “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” Expanding to other social platforms should be a priority if you are scared of losing your fans on Facebook. I have not had any problems, and as long as you follow their rules you should be safe. But we have all heard the horror stories about people losing their pages or even getting their accounts banned. The FB Community Report Page 79 of 80 So as any marketer would say: Do not put all your eggs in one basket! Moreover, even if this is not a concern, expanding to other platforms will expand your reach and allow you to market to your audience even more. Some good social platforms to consider are: Twitter the second largest social network and is in many cases the obvious choice for expansion. Pinterest or Instagram if your niche is visual as these platforms are image based. Tumblr is a bit of both, but mostly visual too. Most of these platforms have tabs you can add to your Facebook page, or you can link to them in your posts. The FB Community Report Page 80 of 80 The End Closing Thoughts This has been a blast! To recap my strategy: it is about building Facebook Pages like communities with viral potential. Once your foundation is laid, you can almost run these pages with 1-2 hours a week and add a nice stream of traffic, fans, subscribers and cash. I have enjoyed writing this guide and I hope you will use what you have learned. If you want to learn more, you can always check our blog or join The ProfitChampion Success Club. Stay Awesome, Mathias R Click the icon to claim your invitation…
4/
5
Oleh
Bon Gi Nguyen
