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.
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!
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.
Okay, so this site is really a reviews site. But sometimes I come across a method that is so good, that I need to share it (especially when it relates to my favorite Internet marketing application ever – FPTraffic).
If you’re trying to build up big Facebook pages with targeted audiences, then you’ll know that one of the biggest challenges is finding good content that gets a high level of engagement. The more engagement your content drives, the more people will see your page in their timeline and hopefully hit that all-important like button.
So how do you find good, high-engagement content?
Take “inspiration” from competing/existing pages in your niche!
This doesn’t mean you need to manually scroll through hundreds, potentially thousands of posts on many different pages to find top performers. Instead, there’s a much easier way to do this using the magic of Python and a pre-written script.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to make this happen. I’ve tried to illustrate this as best as possible with a big focus on screenshots rather than
What You’ll Need:
Windows or Mac computer (you can use Linux too I believe). NB that I am a Windows and ChromeOS user, so screenshots and instructions are based on Windows only.
Python – FINISH
Python “posts.py” script – available here
Spreadsheet software, preferably Excel
Facebook Graph Explorer API access token (NB – these expire after a set amount of time, so get this just before it’s needed as per instructions below).
Now let’s get down to business:
Step X – Sorting The Posts
Click to open the exported file in your preferred spreadsheet application (I use Excel – the patrician’s choice).
You’ll be greeted with something that looks a bit like this:
Now all you need to do is sort by the “num likes” column (or you could sort on reactions, comments, publishing date or anything else) and you get a full list of their top performing content.
You can now go through this list, open up the post links (EXPLANATION) and then grab those sweet, glorious, high-engagement posts to share on your own page.
Of course you need to be aware of copyright issues etc (this is especially the case if you’re copying videos) but for meme-type posts I think you’re pretty much always safe. I am not a lawyer, however, so do your own due diligence.
Important Update (November 12th, 2017) – Bad news everyone. Pagez has had its access to the Instant Articles Platform blocked/revoked. Luke (Pagez owner) filed an appeal but this was shot down and there is a 90-day stand down before another appeal can be filed. So basically there is no point in using Pagez until a successful appeal can be made – and to be honest there is a high chance that it is “game over” for Pagez as Facebook are notoriously unreasonable and difficult to deal with. The cause of this problem is probably due to certain users sharing copyright content, or the proliferation of low quality articles/content on the platform. I’ll update as news comes through.
Pagez is now available to join! Go here to sign up and get started. You can even earn $$$ by sharing other people’s content using the “Discover” tool. Review will be updated ASAP!
As any reader of this site will have discerned fairly quickly, I’m a huge fan of the Internet marketing products made by a guy called Luke Kling.
Luke is a known name in the affiliate business, having been the affiliate manager for a company called Peerfly for a number of years. He also blogs semi-regularly at lukepeerfly.com.
FPTraffic is probably Luke’s biggest product. It’s hands-down one of my favourite applications for affiliate and Internet marketing, and using FPTraffic makes it simple to build, grow and manage viral Facebook pages (and make money from them).
Recently Luke reached out to me and asked if I would be interested in having a go with his latest product – actually still in development – called Pagez.
What Is Pagez?
Have you heard of Facebook Instant Articles? Basically, this is Facebook’s own system for making reading articles and content (that you have clicked on from the timeline on your Facebook mobile app) easier, faster and better.
When you click on a normal article link on Facebook – whether from your mobile app, m.facebook.com or desktop – you are taken to a browser tab that navigates to that site.
Facebook Instant Articles is different. On supported mobile devices (and on the official Facebook mobile app) it effectively loads the article within the Facebook app using a pre-selected styling.
Normally, setting up Instant Articles requires a bit of configuration work between your website and Facebook, as well as setting up of Audience Network ads for monetization. I’m not going to bore you with the technical details at this stage, suffice it to say that it can be a hassle to set up.
Pagez is being developed as a solution to this problem. Instead of having to get approval and configuration between your website and Facebook, as well as set up templating and monetization, you just:
Set up your monetization settings (with help provided)
Publish content
Share it to your Facebook pages
The whole point of Pagez is to speed up the process of creating and monetizing with Facebook Instant Articles and viral content by acting as an intermediary “publishing platform”.
What Does This Mean For Me?
If you’re in to building up Facebook pages and monetizing them through content and display-type ads, such as Adsense, then Facebook Instant Articles has a lot of potential.
Early impressions seem to be that Instant Articles get more clicks, better engagement, and more shares than “conventional” content.
With Pagez you are able to get in on this potential goldmine much faster and easier.
Of course there are limitations, such as:
Your content is published on a platform over which you have little control
Less template options
Pagez takes a revenue cut
But the flip side of the coin is that it is super fast to get set up and start monetizing. I made my first $10, reusing old articles from one of my viral media sites, with no more than 5 minutes work once I had set up my Pagez account.
When Will Pagez Be Available To The Public?
Pagez is now available for anyone to join. Membership is free, so go here to join now. Even if you don’t yet have much of a Facebook audience, it’s well worth joining ASAP so that you can get a feel for how the platform works. You’ll also get membership to the Pagez private Facebook group, where there are some really clever people sharing their case studies, strategies, and some frankly incredible earnings screenshots.
Hey, what’s up? It’s Sam Frost here from reviewsboss.com. In this really short video, I’m going to give you my initial impressions of Group Funnels. So this isn’t a full in depth review, that’s going to be coming soon, but I have been using Group Funnels for a couple of weeks now and I just want to, I guess, share a few thoughts about what I think of the product so far. So basically what Group Funnels does is it makes the management of a Facebook groups easier from the perspective of collecting information. So if you’ve worked with Facebook groups before and if you’re interested in Group Funnels, you probably already have a Facebook group. You’ll know that when people join your group, there’s a few different settings you can have and one of those settings is that you can basically set questions for membership. So you can say, specify up to three questions and people have to respond to those questions, and depending on their responses, you can approve or disapprove their request.
Most Facebook groups, especially business or sort of, yeah, more specialist ones don’t just allow anyone to join. You can make a group to just allow anyone to join it when they click the join button, but generally that’s not a good idea because you’ll get a lot of spam requests. So basically where Group Funnels sort of comes from as a lot of people will run groups, I guess half as an education resource and half as a lead generation resource. So for example, I run a group, a digital marketing for Kiwi businesses, so it’s a digital marketing group specifically for New Zealand based businesses. It’s got only a few hundred members in it, but a great little community in there. When people join, I ask them a few questions basically, are you going to accept the rules of the group? What is your business? So I can confirm that they actually have a business. Then the other question I ask is do you want to get our newsletter and if so, what’s your email address? That’s an optional question, but if people do want to join the newsletter list, they can fill out their email address and click submit and I’ll get that response and I can add that to my autoresponder.
There’s a massive problem here and that’s when you approve someone’s request in Facebook groups. So, you open up your group and there’s a moderation queue of people who are looking to join, you can review all those answers and you can filter on people who answered and people who didn’t and so on and so forth. But when you click approve the request, what happens? Basically that person is approved into your group and their answer’s disappear forever. So if you didn’t catch their answer at the time, if you didn’t grab their email address at the time, if that’s what you’re looking to do, or didn’t grab the name of their business or whatever information you’re trying to collect, that’s it. You can’t get it again without just reaching out to them really and asking them directly.
So what’s the solution? Well, the solution or one solution is Group Funnels. So basically what Group Funnels allows you to do is set up a Google Sheet, so you use Google Sheets, a free product. Most of us are probably familiar with it. You add a basic template so each column becomes a specific field and then when you ask questions, you set up your Group Funnels’ system using a Chrome extension and plug in your group, Group Funnels sheet and do a few little things on the back end. Basically when you click to approve members, either individually or generally, you’ll be doing it as a bulk approval process. So you filter for every unanswered questions and you then hit approve for those ones. What happens is those people’s details are pushed the Group Funnels. Then from there you can push those people’s details to the specific sheet for that group. So if you run multiple groups, you’ll have multiple different sheets.
Yeah, basically that’s all Group Funnels really does. It just allows you to capture that information at the time of approval and that’s really useful if you’re trying to gather things like email addresses, for example. So Group Funnels is proving pretty popular with people who run those coaching Facebook groups or how to run Facebook ads or SEO agency secrets or the kind of thing. Probably if you’re watching this video, you know exactly the conduct group that’s popular with Group Funnels.
I’m doing things a little bit differently. Apart from my digital marketing group, all the other groups I use it for, like entertainment groups around, so I have the world’s largest Futurama fan group for example. One of the questions when you join that group is, do you want to receive our newsletter? I get people, not huge numbers, but decent numbers saying, “Yes, I’d like to receive it.” Well, I can grab their email details and I’ve got evidence then as well and time, date, name, written proof that they wanted to receive those emails. So if I ever had any issues with spam requests, I can go back to that group sheet and say, “Well, actually, look, here you go, you did request that content. So yeah, basically, that’s what Group Funnels does.
My initial impressions so far that it’s pretty functional product. It’s not exactly got the greatest interface have ever used. I mean it’s definitely a bit sort of pieced together. The interface could be better. It could have much, much better instructions for set up. But the actual process works. I mean, it would be nice if it integrated directly into autoresponders like MailChimp or AWeber or whatever you use, but I suspect that would require a lot of development work. I mean, actually putting everything into Google Sheets is pretty nice. I wish it would just push things automatically to a Google Sheet. Instead you have to go and approve your queue in Group Funnels, on the Facebook group membership panel and then you go into the Group Funnels’ Chrome extension, so you have to be using Chrome. I don’t think it supports any other browser. Then from there you push to the relevant sheets.
So for Group A, when you submit from Group Funnels’ extension that pushes everything to the relevant shape of a Group A. Then you can do things like filter out duplicates or filter people who didn’t respond to the questions you wanted. So you can grab all those email addresses and upload them into your autoresponder or do whatever you want with the data. But yeah, initial impressions of Group Funnels, it does work quite well. The pricing seems pretty reasonable for what it is. I guess it all comes down to how seriously you’re taking your groups. If you’re growing a very small niche group, you’re the only one doing approvals. You don’t get a lot of requests. It’s probably just easier to manually copy and paste the responses to each question and it’ll save you a bit of money.
But if you are doing a higher volume of approvals, maybe you’re having to approve probably 20, 30 plus people a day into any given group, it will save you quite a lot of time. Just the fact that it does it all for you, apart from having to push the data from Group Funnels to the sheet, that is really nice. I mean, the other thing I’ve found as well that is quite cool about it is Facebook groups doesn’t debug out quite badly when you try and bulk approved people into a group, so my Futurama fan group is a great example of this. I get a lot of membership request every day. If I, without Group Funnels, if I select [inaudible 00:06:43] answer to the membership questions and click approval, generally I have to sit there and keep clicking over and over again and only a small number are approved at any given time and it can be quite laggy and buggy and sometimes you have to manually approve a few and then refresh the page and it’s just a bit frustrating. With Group Funnels that actually worked really, really nicely. You just click approval and it sort of sequentially goes through and does each one and it does work well.
So what I’m basically saying at the moment is Group Funnels seems pretty good. I think the value of it will really come down to how aggressively you are trying to grow and develop groups and what you want to collect the data for. If you’re just collecting membership request information and you don’t actually have any commercial value in that, well don’t bother because it’s just a waste of time, but if you are looking to collect email addresses or want to collect business names for example, so you can follow up and do some manual outreach, might well be worth it.
I’m going to do a more in depth review of Group Funnels where I screen capture and show you through the product and show you how it all works and cover pros and cons and more detail. But for now, my initial review of Group Funnels is quite good. Like I said, I don’t love the interface. I think there’s ways it could be improved, but it doesn’t do the job it says it’s going to do and that to me is an important thing. So yeah, do stay tuned for my full review of Group Funnels. Or otherwise do check out the product. In the meantime, I’ll leave a link in the video description. Thanks.
Want to learn more about FPTraffic? Watch my video review here:
Review Update
I’m still using FPTraffic every single day, and still getting excellent results from using it. The ‘Bender Quotes’ page I refer to below in my original review has now grown to almost 500,000 likes (and rising every day) and I have a number of other up-and-coming pages that are starting to get good results too.
As far as monetization goes, I am consistently earning $500+ per month from my pages and growing. I could probably earn a lot more, but I don’t monetize too aggressively as I like to maintain a good user experience.
The best bit? Because I’m using FPTraffic my whole viral social media “business” only takes me about 5-10 minutes a day to manage; that’s in total, for all my pages.
So my recommendation remains unchanged. FPTraffic is probably the best value-for-money Internet marketing tool I have ever come across. $10 per month gets you a powerful toolkit that can help you build a fun and profitable online business with Facebook pages – why not give it a try yourself?
Once you’ve built up a decent following on your pages, don’t neglect to give Pagez (from the creator of FPTraffic) a try as well. Pagez makes monetizing Facebook pages so much easier, harnessing the power of the Facebook Audience Network. Read my preliminary review of Pagez here.
Original Review
How’s it going? Reviews Boss back again with another great product review. Today we are looking at an online tool targeted at Facebook marketers and anyone who wants to improve their reach on Facebook while making managing pages easier. It’s called FPTraffic and it is a tool that I use every single day. There’s a fair bit of interest out there for FPTraffic, so I decided I had better do a review.
Click here to visit the official FPTraffic website.
What Is It?
There are a load of different features in FPTraffic, but if I had to summarize the product I would say it is a tool for managing, growing, and monetising Facebook pages.
Here’s an example of a Facebook page I’ve been building up with FPTraffic. It’s called “Bender Quotes“, and is all about Bender from the hit TV show Futurama. Go check out the page, and maybe even give it a like.
See all those posts on my timeline? They are getting genuine interactions; likes, shares, and comments. In case you haven’t checked out the page, here is an example post:
My biggest page is regularly getting 2k + likes on posts, and dozens of shares and comments. The people doing this activity are a real-life audience that can be monetised!
July 2017 Update – My “Bender Quotes” page is now getting close to 400,000 likes, and is growing rapidly each week and making me several hundred dollars a month (and counting). All this just from using FPTraffic!
Managing one or two Facebook pages like that manually isn’t too much of a hassle, you just log in and post when you need to. But what if you want to manage multiple pages, or run different schedules for each page? What if you want to be posting content while you’re at work, and you can’t use your work computer or company time for your own business purposes.
Wouldn’t it be so much better to be able to schedule content days or weeks in advance? You could sit down for a few hours on a Sunday night and schedule all your content for the coming week for all your pages, saving you a huge amount of time and stress.
And wouldn’t it be even better if you could find content to post to your pages without having to leave the same tool you use to schedule everything? Imagine scraping truck loads of quality images, YouTube clips, and even Amazon products (with your affiliate link included) to post to your page timelines and keep your fans happy and your pages growing organically.
Enter FPTraffic … and let the fun begin!
How Much Does FPTraffic Cost?
FPTraffic costs $10 per month, payable through Paypal subscription. There are no additional joining fees, nor are there any service tiers (i.e. you can use the tool as much or as little as you want, and you don’t have to pay extra for more managed pages or scheduled posts over a certain level).
Although I’m not the biggest fan of monthly rebill products, I think that the low price point here compensates. I would not be so comfortable if the price was up at $30-50 per month like many rebill tools are.
Please note that there is now an FPTraffic ‘Pro’ addon, which I will review in a separate article.
Who Makes It?
FPTraffic is the brainchild of a guy called Luke Kling. Luke is a well-known guy in the affiliate marketing realm, especially so on the CPA side of things. He is an affiliate manager for the Peerfly network, which is a popular CPA platform. Luke also runs a great blog at lukepeerfly.com about affiliate marketing, which has some useful content that is well worth taking the time to read (especially if you are interested in learning about CPA, Facebook Ads, or Teespring).
Who Is It For?
FPTraffic is ideal for anyone who manages Facebook pages, or who wants to use Facebook pages to generate affiliate commissions, grow their brand, or drive traffic to a website or offer.
I use it by creating niche targeted Facebook pages (think about popular TV shows, characters, brands, types of jokes etc) and then scheduling lots of great content to get interaction on these pages and grow likes organically. I also use Facebook ads to get an initial base of likes, as well as boost better performing posts to attract a wider audience.
Once I’ve got a decent audience for the page, then I start dropping Amazon affiliate links to targeted products every so often. You can also monetize with Teespring, Adsense by building a related website and driving traffic, or just about any other type of offer you can imagine!
You don’t just have to be into affiliate marketing or Adsense site building to use FPTraffic. It also has great applications for anyone who manages any type of Facebook page and who wants to boost their audience and engagement levels.
How Does It Work?
The best way to show you the ins and outs of FPTraffic is to walk you through how I use it on a daily basis. I’ve done this by taking a whole load of screen shots, and then adding a caption to each image to help explain what you’re seeing.
Registering
In order to register for FPTraffic, you will need a Facebook account. Your Facebook account should also have at least one page you intend on managing.
If you fit that criteria, then head over to FPTraffic.com and you’ll see a page like this:
From there, scroll down and sign up. You basically set up a $10 per month Paypal subscription, and you’re good to go. Neat.
Main Screen
Once you are paid up and logged in, here is the screen you should first see. I have blurred out some of my pages for privacy (although I mentioned Bender Quotes earlier if you want to see one of my pages)
Setting Schedules
When managing a page using FPTraffic, the first thing you’re going to want to do is set a page schedule. This tells the tool when to post the next item in that page’s queue. You can post every hour if you want, but that isn’t recommended. I’ve had my best results posting twice a day from the scheduler (and then occasionally adding in manual posts to suit).
Adding Images
At the heart of FPTraffic are the images you will be posting to your page(s). The fundamental premise of this product is scheduling lots of images and rich content to boost your engagement and social media presence.
Lucky for you, there are a number of ways to get quality images into your page queue without even having to leave FPTraffic:
Tumblr Search
The first method available is a Tumblr search. You simply add your keyword, such as “dog memes” and then a list of results appears. Any image you like can be added to your queue by clicking on it.
How easy is this?
I don’t really like using the Tumblr feature much as a lot of what you will see in the search results are GIFs. These don’t display properly on Facebook; whatever the first frame is will become the image itself when posted to your page.
But there are some good images on Tumblr, and this is a nice functionality to have.
Bing Search
A similar functionality is provided for keyword searching images from Bing. It works almost exactly the same as Tumblr. Surely I don’t need to explain this any further?
Uploading From PC
As you would expect, there is of course an option to upload one or more images from your computer into the FPTraffic queue. If you’ve used any file uploader before, then this will be a doddle for you.
URL Import
The final option available (and perhaps the most powerful) is the ability to import en masse images from URLs. Let’s say you’ve got 100 image source URLs of great pics for your page. Rather than having to download them all to your PC, only to have to upload them again, you can just chuck those URLs into FPTraffic and all the corresponding images will be added to the queue. How awesome is that?
Page Queue
Once you’ve got some images added, you can now check out your page queue. Each thumbnail represents a single post on your page. You can see at what time and date each post is going to be made.
You can re-order posts by dragging them around the queue, which is invaluable if you are going to be recycling posts in order to help keep things a bit fresher. As you would also expect, hitting the red cross deletes that post.
If you click the edit symbol (not the wrench symbol) then you can quick add a text description to the post:
However, I recommend using the advanced edit feature for altering the description.
When you edit the description from within the advanced editor you can add these symbols, which seem to boost engagement greatly when used. Don’t spam them in every post, but a well placed heart or start symbol works wonders for boosting reach. I don’t know why, but it does work.
Back in the main queue view, you can also trigger an image editor by clicking on any image in the queue. You can do all sorts of things like crop, resize, rotate, and add filters, text and shapes. This means you don’t need to pass your images through another editor before uploading to FPTraffic.
Links Feature
Another great aspect of FPTraffic is the links feature. This is a section of the dashboard where you can schedule links to websites, as well as find and schedule YouTube and Amazon products. Let’s look at the different tools available:
Schedule Link
This option allows you to schedule a link to any web page on the Internet. It’s very basic and easy to use. Once you add the link, it will move to your queue. When the link posts to your page Facebook should automatically pull an image.
I personally prefer to post an image and then link from the image description, as this gives more control over what viewers see.
Schedule YouTube
We all know that YouTube is home to loads of great videos. No matter what niche you’re in, there will probably be some great YouTube clips to share. Your audience can play these clips directly from the page timeline. And we all know that videos can have massive engagement, which is great.
With this functionality you can search YouTube and then add any video you want as a queued post for your page. Cool, huh?
The only problem I’ve found with this is that the search results aren’t very good. Compared to what I find from keyword-based searches on YouTube.com itself, I keep finding a lot of irrelevant results. The way I have found to get around this is by finding a video I want to post on YouTube, and then searching its exact title in the FPTraffic search box – that seems to work fine.
Schedule Amazon Products
All the reach in the world is meaningless if you aren’t making squat from your Facebook pages. Lucky for you, FPTraffic has a neato little feature built in that allows you to find and schedule Amazon products. You need an Amazon Associates ID, which should be easy enough to get. Amazon has a ludicrous number of products, and if your page is based around anything that is not totally obscure, then there are probably going to be some great products you can promote to earn a commission.
You can use Amazon Associates tracking IDs with this particular tool, which means you can track the earnings from your pages more efficiently. This is useful if you want to know the break down of earnings from each individual page, especially if you ever plan on selling your pages.
There is also a feature that allows you to add non-US Amazon Associates IDs (e.g. UK). I’m not sure if this particular function is for automatic geo-redirection, so that if a UK-based person clicks an Amazon link on your page they get sent through your UK ID so you can make a commission. It might just be there to allow you to target different countries with your pages.
If you don’t like the way this tool works, then there is nothing stopping you uploading a photo of the product you want to promote and then adding your affiliate link (preferably cloaked to make it look nice) into the description area. This is what I do when I’m feeling lazy.
There is also another option for getting your affiliate links in front of your audience in the nicest format possible:
Link Masking Tool
Ugly affiliate links suck, right? Luckily there is a link masking tool built right into FPTraffic. I haven’t actually used it myself yet as I direct my traffic from my posts to pages on various websites I own. However, it is easy to use and I was able to create a redirect in a couple of minutes for testing purposes.
I’ve got a feeling this would be an invaluable feature if you are running CPA offers that tend to have ugly links, or any type of tracking tool.
Because I haven’t used the link masker much, I can’t really add any further comment. If I play around with it more in the future then I will revisit this point.
Other Features
Giveaways
There is a feature built in to FPTraffic to help you run giveaways that comply with Facebook’s rules. Giveaways – when run properly and targeted to the right audience – can be a great way to boost your engagement, get more likes, and draw more attention to your page. The way this tool is built, you also wind up grabbing entrants email addresses in the process; and if you use Aweber then you can automatically add your entrants into your list of choice.
If you don’t have Aweber, and use a service like Mailchimp or Constant Contact, then you can still copy/paste the entrants details into a CSV file or something similar and upload to your email service provider. You would need to consider the possibility that your ESP could get shirty about the manner you generated those leads, but it should probably be fine.
From the perspective of monetization, one of the coolest features of the giveaway tool is that you can require entrants to complete a “sponsored offer” form – like a classic name/email/zip CPA offer – before their entry is counted. In order to do this your offer must allow incentive traffic. Luke has provided instructions for setting up the postback etc so that entries are counted correctly and everything tracks as it should. This is not something I have played around with, but I can see a great deal of potential if you combine the right giveaway with the right affiliate offer.
If this doesn’t make sense, then think about it this way:
You create your giveaway and find a CPA offer that allows incentive traffic (think that you are incentivizing the traffic to complete the offer by dangling the carrot of a free t shirt, DVD box set, whatever).
You set up the postback, which basically tells FPTraffic to count the entry as valid when someone completes the offer.
You start promoting your giveaway, and hopefully start earning.
You can also have an entry counted when the entrant clicks a sponsor link. This means you can redirect to any web page you want, like a squeeze page or sales page etc … YUGE possibilities there.
Unfortunately, when I first tried using this feature to create a giveaway I actually got a bug that prevented it from working correctly. When you went through the entry process, you hit a random coding error screen and couldn’t progress any further. I haven’t really tried again with the giveaway feature (I don’t run a lot of giveaways as I’d rather spend the value of the prizes on more ads).
At some stage I will revisit this aspect of FP Traffic and try it again. It definitely seems like to most confusing element of the product … the instructions could do with being a bit clearer, ideally with a video. I think that there is huge potential to monetise this particular functionality, especially with CPA offers that allow incentive traffic.
FP Inbox
This is a cool little functionality that I haven’t yet had the chance to roll out properly, but I’m actively working on it at the time of writing this review.
You know how Facebook just kills your organic reach, right? Well this is bad news for getting your page and its promotions out there. It is especially bad if you’re paying for likes via Facebook Ads, because you have these great looking page stats but only a percentage of those likes are seeing your content.
With the FP Inbox function you can create a custom URL where you can direct people to sign up for a daily email that recaps all the new posts from that day. This is a great idea because it’s effectively giving you another channel to grow your reach (in fact the whole point of FP Inbox seems to be helping you to get around Facebook’s appalling organic reach).
The only downside to this functionality, as far as I can see, is that you can’t export all your leads to a CSV or TXT file so you can then upload them into your email service provider. This would be a KILLER functionality for anyone looking to grow a list – if you’re reading Luke, then please consider adding this. The only risk would be that you might run into spam/approval issues, which could be why there is no export function available.
Pros
Great Price. It’s 10 bucks a month. What more do I need to say? It’s so affordable it’s not even funny. Facebook pages are free to run, so you could literally build a profitable business for just $10 per month with this tool. You don’t need to run ads to get page likes; you can grind away organically and see growth this way. With FPTraffic you really can build a cost effective social media business.
Lots Of Features. Post scheduling, image scraping, YouTube embeds, Amazon embeds, giveaways with lead gen functionality, Facebook inbox tools … it’s all here. I can’t really think of any main feature or functionality that is missing from FPTraffic, except perhaps an app to allow you to drive newsletter signups from your page itself (without having to run a giveaway or send traffic to an external landing page).
Easy-To-Use. You should be able to get the hang of what this powerful tool can do in a short space of time. It is simple and intuitive to use, and there are good instructions provided for each particular functionality.
Included Guides & Private Group. From within your FPTraffic member dashboard you can access a bunch of guides that Luke has written on making the most of the tool. The most interesting of these are his case studies about monetizing your pages, or growing page size through the use of Facebook ads. There is also a private Facebook group that is useful for getting support or asking questions about how others profit from the tool. Luke is active in the group, and responds to most user posts which is nice. It would be good to see more guides added, but hopefully these will come at a later date.
Recycle Posts Is Great. Once you’ve built up a good collection of posts on your page, you can recycle previously posted content. Hitting the recycle posts option will put all that older content back in your queue. Dive back in to that queue, change up the order and reword your descriptions a bit, and you’ve now got a whole heap more content to post on your page (especially if you’re mixing in newer images and links at the same time). The attention span of people on social media is appalling, so unless you’re posting the same stuff on a very regular basis, then your fans will probably forget they have seen an image in the past and like it/share it all over again.
Helps To Increase Organic Reach. This is probably the biggest benefit of all for serious Facebook marketing. If you have any knowledge at all of Facebook, then you know how much organic news feed reach tends to suck. And Facebook always seem to be making it worse on a regular basis. This is done in order to drive more marketers and businesses to use Facebook Ads, and it just sucks from the perspective of anyone trying to make a dime off of Facebook. By using FPTraffic I’ve been able to build some great organic reach (at least by current FB standards). I don’t know exactly what the benchmarks are, but by posting relevant promotion-free content each day with the scheduler tool I get my page out and about on fans’ news feeds much more than I would only posting ads or website links. And because I’ve got this higher level of reach, when I do post a link to my website or to an Amazon product, it gets better reach as well resulting in more clicks and profits for me.
If you’re running a Facebook page for a business like an eCommerce store or bricks and mortar outlet, then consider using FPTraffic with non promotional content on a regular basis to grow audience interaction and get greater reach. This tool isn’t only for affiliate marketers. I’ve been doing this for my work, and seeing great results. In fact, I would say that it is even more important for a traditional brand or eCommerce retailer to grow their engagement, because of how Facebook throttles reach.
Bundled Chrome Extension Is Handy. There is a companion Chrome extension for FPTraffic that is useful indeed. When it’s installed in your browser, you can quickly select images from any web page you are browsing and grab the URLs of those images by using the extension. Copy and paste those URLs into a Notepad file, and then you can use the Image URLs option in FPTraffic to import those images you found. You can import up to 500 at once, which is enough content to last weeks. Can it get any easier than that?
Massive Time Saver. The biggest benefit of using FPTraffic is that it is so much more efficient than manually managing Facebook pages. This means you can grow and monetize more pages than you would normally be able to do, resulting in more profit at the end of the day. Saving time is one of the best things you can do!
Do you manage Facebook pages for your employer, or for clients you work with? You could add a lot of extra value with little time investment by using FPTraffic. I actually use it on one of the pages I manage for my dreaded day job, and I have seen a huge increase in reach and engagement since I started posting informative and/or funny content that is non-promotional on a regular basis.
Cons
No Google Images Scraper. As outlined earlier in my FPTraffic review, there is a built-in feature to scrape images based on keywords from Tumblr or Bing. However, the Mac Daddy of image search engines – Google Images – is unfortunately missing. This means that you aren’t going to necessarily be getting widest spread of relevant images that you possibly could if. In many of the pages I manage, I find my best images for re-posting always come from Google. The best way to get around this is searching Google Images and using the FPTraffic Chrome extension to grab the URLs of those images. Or you can just manually download each one from Google Images and then put it through the bulk uploader. However, it would be nice to search Google Images from within the FPTraffic interface itself. I suspect there is some kind of restriction on Google’s API that prevents this from happening … or doing so might cause the price to rise.
No Sub-Accounts Or VA Access Feature. This isn’t a problem when you’re first starting out, but I can see how it could quite easily become an issue if you expand your business or already use VAs/staff. Your FPTraffic account is tied to your Facebook account. Therefore, the only way you can let a VA manage your FPTraffic account is to give them access to your personal Facebook profile, as you can’t associate multiple Facebook accounts with one FPTraffic account. Hopefully a future release of the tool will allow you to have multiple Facebook profiles tied to one account (even if you had to pay a premium for this, it would be a useful feature for many more serious marketers). Here are a couple of workarounds you could try in the meantime:
Create a dummy Facebook profile that has admin rights for all your pages, and then tie FPTraffic to that page. Give your VAs the login to that Facebook account. You just need to be careful that they don’t lock you out of the Facebook profile … or that they don’t wind up removing page admin rights to your main FB profile that is tied to your pages – an admin can delete other admins. This all comes down to how much your trust your VAs/staff. I know some people don’t like to take the risk that they could be locked out of their pages.
Create a new FPTraffic membership for each page you manage. If you were making bank with Facebook pages, then you could possibly justify having an FPTraffic membership for each of those pages tied to a unique FB profile. Not very elegant and it will cost you money, but perhaps the safest method out there. I don’t really see it being practical, however.
No proper invoices. Depending on how strict the taxman is in your jurisdiction, this could just be a minor problem. However, I wish FPTraffic would offer more than just Paypal invoices.
Occasional Bugs. Every so often I encounter an annoying bug where the photo for my scheduled post is broken, so I have to delete that scheduled item and upload it again. Other times I have had the image scraper tool crash/freeze. But these bugs are fairly infrequent so I think you will be able to tolerate them in most instances. As previously mentioned, I also had trouble getting my giveaway set up correctly.
Can’t Change Timezone. Maybe I’m just a bit dumb, but I get confused by the server time when trying to tie my post schedule to the most popular times that my page fans are online. I’m used to working with GMT, but the server is run off some kind of American time zone. This is just a minor gripe from my end; it would be great to be able to have the time displayed in your timezone of choice.
No Schedule Randomizer. Your page schedule will always be the same until your manually change it. A great addition would be the ability to pick X number of posts per day, but randomize the schedule with a predefined minimum time between each post. For example, “post 3 times per day between 6am and 11pm, with a minimum of 2 hours between each post”. This would be a cool feature to have that would give a more authentic vibe to the content you post.
Giveaway Tool Is Confusing. It could definitely do with some better instructions (preferably a live case study video or something like that which you could walk through). Maybe I’m just not clever enough to use it?
Conclusion – Should You Join FPTraffic?
Are you working on a regular basis with Facebook pages, or do you intend on growing any form of business model using Facebook? If so, then you need FPTraffic. It really is as simple as that. In fact, if you have ANY interest AT ALL in driving traffic or making money from “The Book” then FPTraffic is an essential purchase.
This incredible tool costs a miserly $10 per month. That’s the price of a couple of takeaway burgers for what is possibly one of the best social media marketing tools I have ever encountered.
There are so many great ways to use FPTraffic, and a number of viable monetisation strategies can be built on the back of the functionality provided. For a little bit of inspiration, here’s a site I’ve had running for one month that generates its traffic from posts I schedule to the page:
I basically take the content I already posted on my page, package it up into list-based articles (10 best photos of the week etc), and then drive traffic from my FB page via more scheduled links back to my site. I’ve made all my money spent on promoting the content back in Adsense and Amazon revenue with a little profit on top, and am building a list at the same time. Am I going to get rich from this one site? No … in fact it probably isn’t worth the time I have spent on it so far. However, it does show me that it is possible to drive traffic from a targeted Facebook page and earn. I can now refine the site, keep growing it, and then hopefully sell both the site and the page for a profit.
And here are a couple of screenshots of the page like growth of two niche-targeted pages I’ve been building with FPTraffic:
The second one:
And all of this was possible thanks to FPTraffic and a few dollars of targeted FB ads spend. That kind of consistent growth is exactly what you want to see.
Add in to the mix that Luke seems like a totally awesome guy, and is willing to give a lot of help to his customers via the FPTraffic Facebook group, and it makes the deal even sweeter. There are a lot of d-bags out there in the Internet Marketing world … Luke is definitely the opposite; a genuine good guy.
Just go get it, right now. I honestly cannot see any scenario in which you wouldn’t be happy with FPTraffic when you consider just how well-priced it is, and the fact that it is not priced on a tiered service system or anything like that.
