Discover How to Finally Drive Huge Traffic from Facebook and Profit (P-3)
How to Find Pages and Groups to Share Your Content To
As we mentioned briefly in the last chapter, one of the best ways to get your posts seen by a targeted audience is to post to existing Facebook pages and groups. This way, you can choose who sees your content based on their interests and you can benefit from all the hard work that the creator of that page or group has already done.
You’ll find that most Facebook pages are built for promotional purposes by their creators. As such, you often won’t be able to add your own content there unless you first become an administrator – which requires permission from the owner.
Instead then, look for and join groups. This way, you’ll be able to take part in the discussion and this will often include the ability to post links if you so wish.
Finding Facebook Groups
The question then is how do you go about finding new groups? One way to do this is with the simple search tool in Facebook. Just click on the search bar at the top (which says ‘Search for people, places and things’) and then start typing the name of a group you might want to take part in. Normally this can just mean typing in the name of your niche. Have a website/business in the fitness niche? Then just search ‘fitness’ and see what comes up. Likewise, you can also pick topics that are within your niche, for instance if your topic is ‘fitness’ then you might pick ‘the gym’ or ‘running’. If your niche is writing, then you might pick ‘fantasy writing’.
Big groups have the advantage of having a wider reach and helping your content to get seen by more people but smaller ones have the advantage of keeping your content at the top longer. The best call is to try some of both.
And don’t be afraid to try out groups that are only distantly related to your topic – this is a great way to branch out and attract new audiences. For instance, if your topic is ‘parkour’ or ‘free running’ then you can also promote that in a group about martial arts as the two have similar roots. You could even write an article specifically on ‘parkour as a martial art’ or ‘the influence of martial arts in parkour’. Melding two vaguely related topics together also happens to be a great way to come up with ideas for new, original content.
If you find yourself struggling for inspiration when picking Facebook groups though, then another method you can use is to try Facebook’s grid search. This allows you to see groups that have friends as members and to see suggested groups. Just look along the left hand menu of your newsfeed and then scroll down to ‘New Groups’. Click this and you’ll be given several tabs. New groups are groups you’ve been recently added to but you can also see local groups (useful for local businesses), you can see ‘suggested groups’ (useful for finding things within your niche) and you can find ‘friends’ groups’. Friends’ groups is surprisingly useful because it lets you see groups your friends are in. As such, you’ll be able to find places where you can likely post without getting deleted. If you’re University alumni for instance, you may be able to find clubs and societies you once belonged to – and this gives you an excellent platform for promoting your stuff. Don’t be afraid to promote to your friends!
Finally, one more trick is to consider looking at the existing fans and members of your current page or group and then seeing which groups they are members of. This is a powerful strategy because it shows you where interests cross over. In other words, if you’re already seeing people migrate from those groups, chances are you may be able to find more recruits there.
Posting to Groups
So, find a Facebook group that is somewhat relevant to your niche or industry, come up with some somewhat relevant content and post it there. Simple! If you create an article on Bruce Lee and share it to a martial arts group, then in theory you can get thousands of new visitors… instantly.
The only problem is that you’ll probably get deleted…
So instead of being purely promotional and out for yourself – think of ways you can give back to these communities. Use this as an opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge, your expertise and your value. Only once you have built up trust should you post your very best content there. Don’t overdo it and make sure you give more than you take. Business is all about offering value and Facebook is no different!
Outreaching to Other Facebook Pages and Cross Promoting
One of the most popular concepts in digital marketing at the moment is something called ‘influencer marketing’. The way this works is simple: instead of building a huge audience over time that you will be able to share your content to in the future, the aim is instead to simply find an existing large audience and then to share with them. This way, you leapfrog all the time and effort spent building and get straight to the profiting! The person who can give you that route to the market is called the ‘influencer’, hence influencer marketing.
On Facebook, this largely means finding the owner of successful Facebook pages and groups and getting them to promote you on your behalf. The good news is that it’s relatively easy to start this process seeing as Facebook lets you find the group owners quickly and message them. The hard part is convincing them to post for you.
So then, make sure that you have something to offer! Often that will mean offering some money but it can also mean offering to post to your network in exchange for them posting to theirs. This is essentially the same thing as an ‘ad swap’ and it should benefit you both.
If you’re lucky and you find the right page owner, you may even find they’re willing to post your content for free. Make something tailor made for them and they will often agree to share it if it’s genuinely good and interesting.
Monetizing Your Efforts
Many people reading this book will already have a functioning online business and thus won’t need help with monetization. For those of you who don’t know how to make money online, this brief primer should open your mind up to some options…
Selling Products
The most obvious way to make money with any business is to sell a product. You can sell a product from your own website (using an ecommerce store for instance) or you can try and sell it directly by sending users to eBay or to PayPal. Products can be crafts you’ve made, things you’ve bought wholesale to sell for more, or even ‘digital products’. There’s a lot to be made by selling eBooks, software and online courses and you can do this by creating a ‘landing page’ for yourself, which is a web page entirely dedicated to selling that one single product.
Affiliate Sales
Don’t have a product? Don’t want to invest by buying inventory wholesale? Then you can always try selling someone else’s product instead. This way you will sell an e-book, a physical product or anything in between and you’ll get commission from every sale you make. Sites like JVZoo and ClickBank can earn you as much as 60% from selling a wide variety of products – often meaning you’ll get as much as $100 a sale in some cases!
Affiliate sales work particularly well via e-mail, so if you can use your Facebook page to capture e-mails and leads, this is the best route to making money this way.
Advertising
If you can build up a website to the point where you’re getting thousands of visitors a day, then you can start to advertise on it. This might mean simply adding AdSense, which is a form of CPC advertising similar to Facebook Ads. The only difference is that this time you’re the publisher who’s earning the money!
Being a Social Media Marketer
If you can build up a big enough Facebook following, then this can be a valuable asset in itself. As a social media marketer you can use this as proof of your skills (to offer to others) or you can offer to promote products for money by finding sponsors. Either way, Facebook can sometimes be a job without even needing any other aspect to your business!
Optimizing, Testing and Using Tools
By this point in the book you should have all the basic skills to start thriving on social media. What’s more, you now know the basics of how you can start profiting from that know-how.
All that’s left then is to hone that craft and optimize your approach until you’re maximizing your profit.
How do you go about doing that?
An Introduction to Split Testing
The basic idea behind split testing is that you are running ‘experiments’. Specifically, you are comparing two versions of the same ad, the same post or the same comment and then you’re seeing which one performs best. Normally the two versions will be the same, save for one or two details and this way you will know whether or not to keep that change. Over time, split testing allows you to ‘evolve’ your campaign to the point where it’s almost flawless.
Facebook ads are relatively easy to split test using the tools presented by Facebook itself. As for your landing pages (where you’re selling your eBook's etc.) the best tool is to try using ‘Optimizable’ (optimizely.com). Of course you can also just make changes yourself as long as you’re carefully recording the data. Recording data is the secret to success in practically every aspects of digital marketing by the way…
Powerful Facebook Tools for Optimization
Other than split testing, there are other ways you can optimize and analyze the performance of your Facebook page. One example is to use LikeAlyzer (likealyzer.com) which shows you specifically which of your posts are performing best and where your likes are coming from. This way, you know what’s working and you know to do more of that. Fanpage Karma (fanpagekarma.com) is a similar tool that lets you see the performance of your Facebook page overall.
Another aspect of efficiency is streamlining the way you are posting and what you are posting. We’ve already seen how you can use IFTTT, Hootsuite and Buffer to essentially automate the process and save yourself a lot of time. We also looked at Buzzsumo very briefly, which is a large repository of the top trending content in certain niches. This works very well because it lets you see what’s performing well in your industry and then just post it to your own page. That way, the success of another Facebook marketer instantly becomes your success! Shareaholic as we’ve seen is powerful for letting your readers and visitors share your content on your behalf.
Other than that, it’s also worth setting up apps on your mobile device that can help you to post on the move. If you have your phone set up so that you can easily snap a picture of what you’re doing and share it to Facebook, you’ll find it’s much easier to keep the page active and to keep adding new things. Think about streamlining every aspect because the more you do, the more consistent you’re likely to be.
Finally, just make sure that you keep posting, keep tweaking, keep analyzing the data and keep trying! Like anything, amazing Facebook marketing is a skill that takes time, patience and practice. So get started right now and don’t stop until you have a million likes!
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