A lot of people, especially Internet Marketers, tend to stay away from marketing on Facebook. They think monetizing Facebook is impossible, its hard to attract fans, and some even say the Facebook days of marketing are over. I’m here to set things straight. There’s never been a better time to make money with Facebook; their advertising network has pinpoint targeting and attracting the “right” crowd has never been easier. When people come to Facebook, they come to stay; it’s the easiest network to build a loyal fan base. Now I will admit, most people don’t come to Facebook with intentions of buying anything. That’s exactly why our monetization methods will be based on creativity and of course trust from our loyal fans. The key is to pick a specific niche that consists of people who are extremely passionate about whatever the subject may be.
I’m going to layout a step-by-step guide for you that covers everything you need to know about building a fan page from scratch and making huge amounts of money with it.
Picking your niche:
For some people, this can be one of the hardest steps of the process. You may not know it at first, but your choice can ultimately be the determining factor between failure and success. With that being said, pick a niche that you are passionate about. Keep in mind, you’re going to have to update this fan page on a daily basis; a man that is passionate about hunting won’t want to update a girl’s fashion page on the regular. You can only deliver the right content to your fans if you’re a fan yourself. Also, stay away from general niches. An example of this would be a “funny pictures” page or a “funny memes” page.
A lot of people have trouble understanding that it’s not all about sheer numbers. A fan page about cooking cupcakes with 100,000 likes is way more valuable than a “funny pics” page with over a million likes. Have fun trying to sell something to a 14-year old kid who likes looking at funny pictures. The owners of any of these pages are most likely limited to monetizing with Adsense; trust me, you don’t want to be limited to just one method of monetization.
It’s extremely important to understand the demographics of your niche. You want to pick something that is specific but yet has a large audience. For example, you probably don’t want to create a fan page about bathtub racing, an unheard of sport in Nanaimo, Canada. In addition, you want to stay away from attracting teenagers; very few of them have a form of payment readily available and even less are willing to spend money on Facebook. Try to also avoid over saturated niches; although ‘Fitness’ may have the perfect audience and be easy to monetize, it will most likely be very expensive to build up a fan base. To sum it all up: pick a specific niche that you’re passionate about with an audience that you can monetize.
Building your fan base:
If you’re creating a fan page for the very first time, it’s going to be extremely hard to build up a page without spending money. Of course, if you have another fan page or source of followers, you can always send those fans/followers to your new page. Many people try to avoid spending money on ads, and it usually causes them to fail. People try to buy thousands of fans from websites like Fiverr and end up getting a load of fake fans.
Of course this seller will deliver 1,000 likes to your page, and they will seem like real fans. The problem is they aren’t going to be active on your page, which will only hurt your page by bringing down the “talking about this” number.
The only kind of fans we want are loyal, REAL, and active fans; people that will like and share our posts. In the beginning, there are only two ways to attract fans: Facebook ads and promotion posts on other fan pages. I’ve had a lot of success in the past by reaching out to other related fan pages and paying them to post about my page. Of course, my favorite way to build up the fan base in the early stages is with Facebook ads.
The best thing about Facebook’s advertising network is its ability to target based on interest. For example, Pepsi can literally have ads show only to people who like the “Coca-cola” fan page. With Facebook ads, you’re in control of setting your page demographics. You can select the age range, gender, location, and precise interests to narrow down your targeted audience. You will have the best results by targeting people who like related pages. This feature allows you to get tons of interested, active fans for just pennies on the dollar. I’m not going to discuss how to create killer ads on Facebook because that would take me days; fortunately, the only advice you need is to keep it simple. Always mention the obvious subject in the headline, and place a call-to-action in the description. For the picture, always pick a human or animal that is looking at the camera. Here’s an example of a great ad for men’s fashion:
The above ad targeted men in the United States in the age range of 20-40 who have an interest in other fashion pages. The average price you’ll pay per like with a good ad is around $0.05, however, I’ve seen ad campaigns that were gaining fans at about $0.01 per fan.
The 30-day average cost per like for the campaign above was $0.012. Now, you should know that you don’t have to build up your whole page with ads. This technique is only for the beginning stages. Once you have a solid, active fan base, your page will feed off of the content you provide and build itself. Your fans will share, like, and comment on the posts, so new people will be exposed to your page every single day. Keep in mind, the longer you run ads for your page, the faster you’ll be able to build up the fan base. Facebook fan pages grow at an exponential rate; for example, it may take you a month to go from 10k fans to 20k fans but only a week or two to go from 20k to 30k. Niches with “shareable” content tend to grow faster than the rest.
Monetizing your page:
Everybody always wants to know when it’s time to start monetizing his or her page; there’s no simple answer for this question. In the beginning, monetizing doesn’t even cross my mind; I focus on building a very solid and active fan base before anything else. When it is time to start monetizing, don’t forget to keep posting valuable content. If your fan page is just one giant sales pitch, you’ll probably start losing fans by the minute. Keep their trust by posting niche-related content regularly. Not to mention, make sure whatever you’re trying to sell your fans has something to do with the niche; don’t just spam them with unrelated affiliate links.
In order to make the most amount of money possible from your fan page, you need to get creative and think outside the box. I’ve found that selling t-shirts is one of the most profitable monetization methods on Facebook; unfortunately, this method doesn’t work with all niches.
Chances are that this fan page owner made anywhere from 40-200 sales just from the click of a button. This specific owner is using the t-shirt method with amazon affiliate to monetize the page. Furthermore, one of the most popular monetization methods on fan pages is the use of CPA offers. There are dozens of CPA networks that have tons of niche-related offers, these offers pay per lead. Some offers pay on email submit, others on zip code submit, and some high-paying offers pay on credit card submit. There are offers for almost any niche you could possibly think of.
I found the above CPA offer by searching for the term “relationship” on a CPA network that I’m accepted to. The conversion on this specific offer occurs when a US profile is created on the website. To clarify, any time you get someone to create a profile on this site, you’ll receive $6.50 in return. In the scheme of things, both of these methods can seem like “spam” to your fans; I try to avoid posting too many t-shirts or CPA offers on my pages.
I tend to think of the two methods listed above as “quick money” methods; they aren’t long term, and they’re considered sort of spammy. There are two more ways to monetize your page that are considered more of a “long term” investment. As you may know, email lists are extremely valuable, so by converting your Facebook fan base into a “buying” email list, you can make tons of money. The best way to go about this is to set up a blog about the same niche as your fan page. Write niche-related articles on your blog and post the links to your blog posts on the fan page. Here’s an example of a blog post link:
This way you can use your fan page to send large heaps of traffic to your website. Then have your readers subscribe to your email list and send them niche-related affiliate offers by email.
The last and most appropriate way to monetize your fan page is by promoting other fan pages, but this only works if you already have a solid fan base. Depending on the size of your page, other related fan pages will pay you monthly for you to share their posts on your page. If you rack up enough clients, you’ll have a pretty nice recurring monthly profit. Don’t be afraid to reach out to other related pages and offer to promote for them. Most of the time, however, pages will reach out to you asking for help, so all you have to do is sit back and keep posting valuable content.
That’s really all there is to building up a successful Facebook fan page. Just remember to think outside the box and get creative. Don’t spend months building up your fans’ trust only to ruin it by spamming them like crazy; dilute whatever you’re selling with tons and tons of valuable content. Once you have one successful fan page running, it’s not hard to build up a second one; you can promote your new fan pages for free on your already successful, active fan page. For more tips on Facebook marketing and Internet marketing in general, visit our blog and sign up for our newsletter!