If you’ve been doing Facebook marketing for a while now (either for your business or for affiliate sites) then you’ll know the importance of Facebook organic reach.
Remember that Facebook doesn’t show your content to all of your audience, all of the time.
In fact, they only show it (on average) to a tiny slice of that audience these days.
So you might be sitting there feeling smug about the number of likes on your page … only to find that a minuscule fraction of that audience is actually seeing your content.
Organic reach has been declining for years now – for a variety of reasons – and this has caused a great deal of consternation and frustration for Facebook page owners.
Believe it or not, but there are a number of effective things you can do (most of them free) to fight back against Facebook’s increasing throttling of organic reach.
I recently put together a video outlining exactly how you can do this.
Do you want to get more likes for your business Facebook page(s)?
I know that focusing on likes for the sake of likes isn’t ideal business practice (primarily because of how weak organic reach is these days). However, there are still a few good reasons to consider trying to grow a big Facebook audience:
It’s a nice ‘feel good’ metric – seeing your audience grow makes you feel great. And there’s nothing wrong with feeling great.
Provided you can keep engagement/reach strong, then a bigger audience is better. More people following your page then equals more people seeing and interacting with your content, hopefully meaning more sales.
A large organic audience can lend credibility to your business, meaning people are more likely to take you seriously.
As luck would have it, I’ve just released a new video showing exactly how you can do this:
In case you’d rather read than watch, the three key points of this strategy are as follows:
Make sure that you frequently post non-promotional content. Most businesses make the mistake of always posting highly-promotional content, which destroys the reach of your Facebook page (making it harder to get more likes).
Use your existing channels (such as your website and email list) to more ‘aggressively’ ask for people to like your Facebook page. Don’t be passive about it. Far too many businesses leave this to chance.
Judiciously use the ‘invite’ feature on Facebook to ask people who like your content but not your page to actually follow you. Just be careful of potential blowback here if you do too much of it.
In this post, I’m going to give you a basic overview of how YOU can make money with Facebook pages.
There’s no up-sell or funnel for you at the end of this video that actually contains the value.
This is totally free information.
Now, before I begin, I want to make something very clear …
This is just an overview video on how to make money with Facebook pages.
I’ll be releasing the “step-by-step” guides on this YouTube channel in the near future, and will make sure the video description is updated with links to everything you need.
I also want to make clear that this isn’t the only way to make money with Facebook. However, what I am going to teach is the method I use to make semi-passive profit from Facebook … and have a lot of fun in the process.
In fact, when I run this “business” it never feels like work.
My day job is consulting with leading B2B businesses who want to generate leads online. You can find out more about what I do at samfrost.co.nz
You’d think after a hard day’s work in front of the computer, I’d be dreading doing more work.
However, the method I’m going to be teaching is so much fun it feels like a lucrative hobby, rather than a boring grind.
Now, let’s get down to business.
How do you actually make money with Facebook pages?
The overall concept is actually rather simple.
Firstly, you need a theme, or “niche” (I think Americans call this a niche … you’ll have to excuse my Kiwi accent).
A niche could be something like dog training, or car detailing, or tennis.
It could be a particular video game, or genre of games, or genre of movies.
I personally do most of my work in the broader entertainment space, looking at popular TV shows and entertainment franchises. However, I also have niche interests in cars, transport, pets and video games, and am looking to diversify even further.
At the most basic level, what you are looking to do is find a community of people with a common passion or problem. That’s what a niche is.
In future videos I will cover how to research and pick niches, but suffice it for now to say that you’ll need one. And we will use the pets niche as an example, drilling down to dogs, and then even further to a specific breed of dogs.
I’ll use labradors as an example, as my family has two beautiful labradors – Winston and Daisy – and I know there is a huge community of people out there who are crazy about labradors.
Once you’ve got a niche sorted, you need to create your Facebook page.
It’s free to make a page, and Facebook have made the process easy and relatively step-by-step.
Once again, I’m not going to go into the specifics of exactly how to create a page in this video … that will come soon.
Once your page is created (and populated with some initial content) you need to actually build an audience.
You want a big audience, but you also want an audience that is engaged.
There are lots of concepts like organic reach and engagement that I will explain in future videos.
However, for now let’s touch on a few ways you can grow your audience.
Facebook Ads
Shoutout swapping
Inviting friends and family
Participating in groups
Let’s say you’ve got a decent audience built up.
Where do you go from here?
What you want to do is continue to grow that audience (and its engagement and reach) organically.
All things being equal, a larger audience is going to enable you to reach more people and therefore make more money from your Facebook pages.
You achieve this through great content that your current audience members share with their friends, family, and networks.
If you’re a frequent Facebook user, then you’ll be familiar with this concept.
A friend tags you in something that a page has posted. You think it’s funny or interesting or valuable, and then you choose to like that page.
From there, you will start to see that page’s content in your newsfeed. You then share it with friends and family, and the cycle repeats.
Now how do you actually grow an audience organically through this social or ‘virality’ approach.
You need great content. Basically, you need to keep your audience “fed” with a consistent stream of content that is likely to be engaged with and shared.
In future videos I’ll be showing you how to find content, how to post it, and some simple and affordable tools you can use to save massive amounts of time on the whole process – making growing and monetising your Facebook page empire so much faster.
Now we are at the point where we:
Have a niche
Have a Facebook page created
Have an audience
Are engaging and growing that audience through great content
This means it’s time to start looking at making money.
The ways you can do this are numerous:
You can promote affiliate products, selling other people’s products for a commission. For example, that Labrador page could be used to promote dog toys, dog food, dog training books and more.
You can look into print on demand and other such merchandise options. For example, making a shirt that Labrador fans would be proud to wear and then sell it.
You can create a niche website and then funnel traffic from your Facebook page to your site, building a true brand around your community, and generating advertising revenues (or selling your own or affiliate products)
You could sell shout-outs and other advertising on your page.
The list goes on.
Once again, all of these topics I will be covering in future videos in this series.
At this stage, you’re probably thinking “how much money can I make from Facebook pages?” – and that’s a great question.
I’m not going to promise that this method will make you rich. I do know of people who have had extraordinary success from building Facebook pages. However, I also know of people who have struggled to turn a penny, despite the effort they put in.
Me personally? Facebook pages provide me with a steady, growing source of income each month that feels like ‘free money’ because I so greatly enjoy the process.
What I do want you to know is that the concept and process work. Exactly how much you will make depends on so many factors, such as:
The amount of time you can put in
Your initial investment in ads to grow pages
The niches you choose
Changes to Facebook’s algorithm and system
The products you choose to promote
Once you’re underway with monetisation, it’s all about scaling up by:
Creating more pages
Growing your existing ones
Automating parts of the process where possible.
As you’ve probably guessed, I’m here to help you with all of those points too.
So, let’s recap what we’ve learned in this overview lesson:
To make money from Facebook pages, you need to:
Find a community of people on Facebook who have a unifying passion, problem, or interest.
Build a page that speaks to that common characteristic.
Get people from that audience to like and follow your page.
Build credibility and reach with great content.
Work promotions into your content flow, allowing you to make money.
Rinse and repeat the process.
I hope this video has been helpful.
I’ll be releasing many more videos on this topic, so stay tuned for that.
In the meantime, please consider subscribing to my channel so you don’t miss the next video in the sequence.
I welcome all comments and questions and will do my best to reply to each and every one (both good and bad). So feel free to leave a comment in the video description.
A couple of years, almost three years have passed since I first started using FPTraffic. Long story short, I’m still loving it. It’s still one of my favorite little tools out there. If you’re looking to run Facebook pages, probably not so much for clients because the scheduling and sort of collaboration element isn’t there, but if you’re looking to run Facebook pages for the purpose of building them up, driving traffic to affiliate offers or to an opt-in page or something like that … Basically if you’re doing more affiliate marketing approach with Facebook pages or building them up for personal interest, FPTraffic is a great tool.
There’s still a bit of development work going on with it. It could probably do with some refreshing, and I do believe there was supposed to be a professional version of FPTraffic being released at some stage, but that doesn’t seem to have come to fruition. The base tool for $10 U.S. a month. Not very expensive at all. It really is very helpful. When I think about a few Facebook pages I run, and I run quite a few of them, I’ve got a total audience of a billion, million likes across all the pages I manage now. It takes me no more than about five minutes a day to manage those pages using FPTraffic.
I don’t think I could have grown those pages the way I did without that tool. I’ve made some great commissions as an affiliate marketer, promoting products through those Facebook pages. Even despite the fact that Facebook organic reach, especially when you’re promoting things, is pretty poor these days. If you can get the numbers up and you can boost your engagement a bit … I’ll release some videos on how to do this on this channel. You can still have a fair crack at things. It’s probably not going to be a millionaire-maker as it were compared to some affiliate marketing methods, but if you’re looking for a way … A fun way that’s almost like a hobby that makes you some side money, building up niche Facebook pages is still a good way to go in my opinion.
I’ve used those Facebook pages I’ve built with FPTraffic to build really big Facebook groups. I’m seeing some real good results from groups, something else I’m going to discuss more on this channel as I start to launch more educational content focused on affiliate marketing as well as product reviews. Even the lessons I’ve learned from building up big pages with FPTraffic, I’ve applied to my client work on my consulting side and seen some very good results from it. Basically if you’re still considering FPTraffic in 2019, I think it’s worth it. $10 a month is a small price to pay for the fact that you can schedule with so many pages and so much content.
I use other tools like Buffer with my clients. They’re better if you want to collaborate and share across multiple platforms and all kinds of things, but for the purpose of simply building up some basic Facebook pages, FPTraffic is really good. You can then fall back on other direct integrations, like Facebook to Twitter. Post your Facebook page posts to Twitter, build up a Twitter following there. When you buy FPTraffic, there’s some guides around this stuff that are thrown in. I think it’s a great product still. It’s showing its age a little bit, but for the price you pay and the time and effort you save, it’s worth it.
Check out the link in the description below. That’ll take you to my full FPTraffic review, where I show you all the features of the product and talk about it in more detail. If you’re just looking for a high-level review, I can safely say that FPTraffic is worth the money. You don’t have to pay too much. It works well. It’s easy to use. You can do a lot of great things for your websites or Facebook pages, I should say. Yeah. If you want to check out more product reviews and learn more about how you can make money online from affiliate marketing or selling your own services, go to my website, reviewsboss.com. You can also check out my consulting website, samfrost.co.nz.
I know this is mean to be a reviews website, but someone in the private Pagez Facebook group recently asked me to elaborate on what I mean by the term “leeching” when it comes to dominating a particular niche with Facebook Pages and Groups.
I’m going to try and explain this quickly and effectively.
For arguments’ sake, lets imagine that your Facebook page is a page all about Family Guy. There are millions of fans of this show worldwide, and there is plenty of merch and news about the show to justify building up an audience and monetizing. Your page shares quotes, memes, news, pictures & more all about the show.
What many people will do is focus on building up that one Family Guy fan page. Trying hard (and probably spending many $ on boosted posts, page like campaigns etc) to get it to grow.
Let’s imagine that 6 months after you started your Family Guy page, you’ve got a respectable audience of 50k likes, with good engagement. Obviously, you want to keep growing that page and making it bigger and better – so keep posting engaging content, doing boosts on top posts, and running page like ads.
But another way to grow is to try and dominate that niche through the creation of “sub pages” and groups, and then leech off the success of your main page to grow those other ones.
Think about the Family Guy example. You’ve got your main page, which covers the show in general, but what about setting up individual sub-pages for characters like:
Peter Griffin quotes
Meg Griffin memes
Stewie Griffin laughs
Also consider setting up groups, as I believe Facebook is going to reward groups and penalize pages in the future. Groups seem to get far better engagement, and it’s also worth considering that a well-moderated group can basically grow itself. All that is missing to make groups better than pages, IMHO, is the ability for a group admin to boost posts both within the group and in terms of their appearance on members’ timelines.
You can then promote these new pages and groups to your existing audience, and grow them much faster than you otherwise could. Then as they grow, you
Fundamentally, you are growing both vertically and horizontally (if that makes sense). Growing vertically by making your existing pages bigger. Growing horizontally by adding more to your empire.
For example, I’ve been able to use a page of mine with 450k likes to grow a group with 15k members (and growing around 200-300 every day consistently) in under 2 months. Now I can cross-post between the group and the page – and other sub-pages I have set up – and really do some effective leeching!
Basically, it’s all about creating a spider web of interconnected Facebook pages and groups – some will be big, some will be small, some will grow quickly, some will grow slowly – and then using this structure to maximise your reach and get more opportunities to hit the timelines of your audience.
Of course you’ll want to use an automation tool like FPTraffic to make this process as easy as possible.
Here’s a diagram I created quickly to explain the concept (imagine all those arrows as being multi directional, rather than flowing one way)
And if you’re wondering why I’ve branched out underneath the Family Guy section to feature American Dad, the answer is simple: Once you’ve got a good leeching network going in one niche, you can use it to grow pages and groups in a totally new niche – provided that new niche has a strong affinity with your existing one.
Now I know that American Dad and Family Guy are made by the same creator, and there is a great affinity between the two shows. However, if I didn’t know what other niches might have affinity, then I could always open the Facebook Audience Insights tool and use that to find other related niches!
Hopefully this helps you to understand the concept of leeching. Basically, it’s all about picking a niche on Facebook, and then trying to dominate it like a boss.
Feel free to leave a question in the comments section below and I’ll do my best to help!
LinkedIn Premium – in my humble opinion – is actually one of the most confusing products I’ve ever come across. There are many variations, sub-products, pricing tiers and other options. Getting your brain around this can be tricky. Maximising the value you can get from LinkedIn Premium and it’s sub-products (such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator) can be even harder.
That being said, I want to share one of my favorite aspects of LinkedIn Premium. In fact, this particular feature alone makes it worth the investment for me.
With a regular LinkedIn profile, your access to key insights/information is often cut off at the knees. Most importantly, you get very little insight into who has viewed your profile.
This is a big problem.
Why? Because one of the BEST ways to grow your LinkedIn connections is by inviting people who have viewed your profile to connect with you.
If someone views your LinkedIn profile (especially if they are a 2nd, or possibly even 3rd degree connection) they are far more likely to be receptive to you reaching out and asking for that all-important connection. After all, they checked your profile out, so they must have at least some interest in you.
The problem with regular/free LinkedIn is that you can hardly see any information about the people who view your profile. You might be lucky to see 10% of the profiles of your viewers.
LinkedIn Premium solves this problem. It allows you to see the profile details of people who’ve viewed you.
You can keep a regular eye on this list, and then swoop in and strike while the iron is hot in order to make a connection.
It’s super-effective!
I’ve used this tactic to grow my LinkedIn network by almost 750 connections in the space of a year. And I’m showing no signs of slowing down either.
I’ll do a full review of LinkedIn Premium in the future. But for now, suffice it to say that it is essential if you want to grow your connection account quickly and efficiently.
At the heart of this audience-building, traffic-generating, money-making system is the content you post to your Facebook pages.
Video is king, but coming up with original video that doesn’t violate strict copyright rules (and doing it on a mass scale) is almost impossible.
Text-only posts on Facebook generally get poor engagement, so that leaves images.
Let’s say you’re building a Facebook page about The Simpsons (I’m actually doing this at the moment). Where can you find picture content, such as memes, quotes, or merchandise to repost?
Some sources include:
Google Images (search “Simpsons memes, Homer Simpson quotes” etc)
Bing
Other Facebook pages
Amazon
Twitter
But the holy grail of images these days is Instagram.
Searches like #thesimpsons yield thousands upon thousands of great images that could be kryptonite for your social audiences!
The problem with Instagram is that it has never been easy to nab a whole bunch of images in one go. For example, you can’t use the FPTraffic Chrome extension to grab a year’s worth of images for your Simpsons page from an Instagram profile or hashtag search. You can’t even right click to save as on desktop … the only real way to nab images from Insta is to sit there and screencap on your phone and then crop. Fine for one or two images, but not suitable for mass memeing!
As luck would have it, there’s a solution. This is a quick tutorial that will teach you what you need to do in order to get loads of images from an Instagram search or profile with a few mouse clicks (and potentially a whole lot of hard drive space).
All you need is Chrome browser – I’ve only tested this on Windows but should work as well on Mac – and an Instagram profile or hashtag results page from which you wish to download the images.
How To Do It
For this example I’m going to use my own personal Instagram profile.
The first step is to open up the search page or profile you want to download from.
The second step is to scroll as far down the page as you want (if you don’t scroll, you’ll only get the images that are visible within your screen area AFAIK) to get more images. This is especially relevant on hashtag results pages.
The third step is to right click on blank space on the webpage and select “Save As”. In the popup window choose to save as complete webpage, as per below:
Now open your downloads folder and there should be an HTML page as well as a folder:
Open up the folder, and voila you’ve got all the images you had visible on that Instagram profile (or hashtag search page – the process is the same):
You can now upload these into your FPTraffic queue using the bulk upload option, and then sort through and eliminate the images you don’t want to post.
How easy is that?
Just a word of warning – downloading heaps of images at once (e.g. from a hashtag search) can use lots of bandwith and also lots of hard drive space. Be wary if you’re using a capped data connection or a computer with a small hard drive.
NB: Use this method at your own discretion and be aware of copyright rules etc. I can’t take any responsibility for the manner in which you use this image collection technique.
LinkedIn is an amazing resource for job-hunters, business owners, sales reps and basically anyone who is into “businessesy” stuff.
If you use LinkedIn the right way, it can be an absolute gold mine for:
• Getting recruiters or hiring managers interested in you
• Finding relevant candidates for jobs you need to fill
• Finding leads and potential clients for products you’re looking to sell
There are zillions of different LinkedIn software suites, training guides and applications that all claim to help you get more out of the “gold standard” social network for businesspeople and employees. So which ones are good and which ones are rubbish?
I’m here today to give a review of Protop, which a LinkedIn application that I use every day.
Video Review
What Is Protop
At its most basic level, Protop is a Google Chrome browser extension. It does one key thing, which is enabling you to automatically visit other people’s LinkedIn profiles as if you were clicking into each one yourself.
You load up a LinkedIn search, e.g. “sales managers”, then set your criteria such as location, degree of connection (1st, 2nd, 3rd), industry type and more.
And then you hit the start button, and Protop systematically works through each profile as if you were visiting it yourself.
You’re free to go do something else, like read a book, do some emails, or make dinner.
The Theory Behind Protop
Why would you want to view a whole bunch of LinkedIn profiles? The theory behind doing so (and the raison d’etre of Protop) is rather simple:
If you visit someone’s LinkedIn profile, they receive a notification that you’ve visited. This is especially the case with anyone who has LinkedIn Premium – and many people do. Humans are a highly curious bunch, so it’s only natural for someone who has just received one of these view notifications to come back and view your profile.
You could do this yourself by searching and manually viewing LinkedIn profiles that are in your target audience. But this would take time and effort. Is it worth spending 30 minutes to an hour every day just to get some views back on your LinkedIn profile?
Unless you’ve got a killer conversion system in place to turn those views into real leads and sales, it probably isn’t the best use of your time.
It’s much better to load up your desired search criteria and then let something automated like ProTop do the hard work.
How I Use ProTop
I use ProTop pretty much as described above. Depending on what my goal is, I pick who I want to target (e.g. “sales managers living in Christchurch, New Zealand, 2nd degree connections”) and then let rip.
I then check back regularly to see who has viewed my profile. If it looks like they are relevant to what I’m trying to achieve – which they should be if the targeting is right – then you can strike while the iron is hot and send a connection request with a personalized message.
There isn’t much else to it really. Within 30 minutes of running a ProTop campaign I can expect to see a spike in views of my own profile, as well as new opportunities to connect.
ProTop Free vs Paid
There are two versions of ProTop. A free one and a paid one. They work the same way, but as you can expect the paid version is a bit better.
It costs $25 USD per month, and you get to do up to 1000 views per day (as opposed to a max of 100 for the free platform).
I just recently purchased the paid version as I find I’m getting a lot more view backs, connection requests and even messages (which I can steer towards obtaining new clients etc) when using the higher volume of daily views.
Does It Actually Get Results?
I have had excellent results from using ProTop so far. In the ~1 month I have been using it I have added over 100 new connections, most of whom are in my target audience.
Conclusion
Is ProTop worth it? Hell yeah it is. If you are in any field or job where it makes sense to have a LinkedIn profile, then ProTop is a convenient way to boost up the value you get from your profile.
For casual users, the free version of ProTop is probably more than enough, especially if you get in the habit of consistently using your 100-view allocation per day.
That’s 700 views you can make each week, which should result in new connection requests and follows at the bare minimum. Of course, if you slack off and forget to use it every day, then results may vary.
Tips To Help You Get The Most Out Of ProTop
1. Ensure your LinkedIn profile is complete, and to a high standard. There is no point in using this tool if you are getting views back to your profile that is incomplete and bereft of information about you, your achievements, and what you can offer.
2. Have a call to action in your byline and first 1-2 sentences of your profile description. This is your chance to pique a viewer’s interest and get them to take a desired action, e.g. “send me a connection request”. I usually aim for connection requests at this stage, because then I can start relationship building thereafter.
3. Don’t spam. It’s not generally good commercial practice to spam the crap out of people. Now viewing their profiles so that they view back – with an aim to build meaningful contacts and relationships – there’s nothing wrong with that at all. But don’t use ProTop for nefarious purposes! Just look at it as a genuine way to “supercharge” what would otherwise be a human process.
Good news everyone – FPTraffic Pro is coming soon. Luke recently released a post in the FPTraffic group (on Facebook) indicating that Pro is almost here. I’ve been excited about this for a long time – FPTraffic has been my #1 recommended tool for quite some time for anyone looking to grow and monetize Facebook pages, and Pro promises a number of improved features.
I’ll be doing a full review as soon as it drops, but for now here’s what I would like to see from FPTraffic pro:
More image sources from within the app (Google Images, anyone)?
Ability to see top performing content and re-cycle and schedule “winners”.
Ability to copy an entire queue to another page and then recycle – this would be KILLER for owning a niche with 10,20,30+ pages.
