This isn’t one of those get-rich-quick schemes tutorials or a piece that shows you how to set up a Facebook store, sell a product, and make quick money. There are hundreds of blog posts, guides, and websites dedicated to doing this. It’s more about how to build a following and trust and use them to make a living. I’ll cover the principles needed to make money on Facebook and how you can use it to support your business, product, or online store.
Let’s first analyze how and why we buy things. If we know why people spend money, we can use it to earn. We don’t spend money randomly, even though it may seem like that sometimes. We can make instant purchases, but there is still an ongoing thought process, albeit unconsciously.
When you buy something online for over a few dollars, you have a chance to check who’s selling it, whether you’ve heard of it before, whether they’re a local company and whether they’re internet-only or brick-and-mortar. You’ll also likely check out the reviews and see if anyone else has heard of them. The higher the cost, the more control you have.
All of this is to validate a seller’s authority to evaluate whether we can trust them. Trust that they are legit, that they will deliver the goods they say and will do what they say they can do. That’s why we stick to certain retailers and that’s why we go to the same stores over and over. Because they have proven that we can trust them.
It is this trust that helps you make money on Facebook.
Online marketing and sales have gone so far that most of us can’t blindly trust someone or something just because they’re telling the truth. Remember ‘screenshot or not’? We are in the age of proof, whether social or scientific. We should use this to our advantage.
What it takes to make money on Facebook
You need a few things to make money on Facebook.
You need:
- A great frequently updated Facebook profile
- Time to invest in helping
- patience and a lot
- A business or product worth promoting
A great frequently updated Facebook profile
To build trust, you need to be reliable. This starts on your Facebook profile. The profile page will need to be filled with all relevant information, lots of pictures, details and updates. You need to create an online persona that reflects your true personality while reflecting your brand in a positive way.
Your personality needs to be sincere but above all authentic. You must be honest, truthful and real. People will soon realize that you are not, and you will immediately fail.
People are supposed to find you cute and trustworthy. It starts with the profile. If you don’t encounter any of these, it doesn’t matter if you have the best product and service in the world. It doesn’t make you money on Facebook.
Time to invest in helping
Online marketing is the science of selling without selling. We’re all tired of being marketed, sold, preached, or persuaded with our money. So forget it all. Instead, try to be genuinely helpful. If you offer value to readers, they become friends. If you solve their problems, they will be admired. What makes you money is your fans.
Fans can also help you spread the word, build authority and increase sales, so it should always be developed!
The problem is that helping out doesn’t make you any money, but it is necessary to build brand authority, trust, and fans. This is where patience comes into play.
patience and a lot
Making money on Facebook does not happen instantly. Building the necessary brand personality and following can take months. Longer to build the right confidence levels. Unless you’re promoting something that costs less than $5, you’re going to have to work hard to gain that trust.
When I do social media marketing for clients, I tend to post updates 3-5 times a day, five days a week. Sometimes seven days a week, depending on the brand. Every update needs to be useful, informative, and offer value to the reader in some way. Most should not sell anything.
Less than 5 percent of your posts should be self-promotion or sales!
Facebook marketing is an investment. You need lots and lots of content, the ability to devote a lot of time to it, and the ability to interact with people on both a superficial and a deeper level. All this requires patience.
A business or product worth promoting
It goes without saying, but if you’re going to put all that effort into Facebook marketing, you need to have a business service or product worth promoting. This means you have to believe in what you’re selling and be able to show that it works. You will need other people to show that it works.
So this is all well and good but how do you put all this into practice?
Planning your Facebook monetization strategy
For the sake of this tutorial, let’s create a fake company selling a new product. Let’s say battery booster for a cell phone. Plug it in and it charges your smartphone up to 80 percent in less than a minute.
For argument’s sake, let’s imagine we have our permits, certificates, and everything we need to go to market. We also have a company website with its own blog.
How do we make money on Facebook using this product?
create facebook page
Our first job is to create the Facebook page for the company. We need to make it as professional as possible, completing all elements of the profile, especially the About Us section. Take beautiful photos of the company, you, offices, any employee and add them as well.
Add a short line about what you’re doing, like sell the battery booster and set up a few welcome posts to keep things moving. Then add links to your company website.
Create a content plan
Online marketing is all about content, and you’re going to need it badly. Create a content plan that will offer a piece of content longer than >750-1,000 words per day, two short forms <350 words, and several shorter updates. The plan will need to deliver this content every weekday with potential for each day.
Submit the long form on your blog and have it automatically linked to your Facebook page. If you’re using a CMS, there are plugins that automatically ping Facebook, Twitter, and others so you don’t have to do it manually. Then schedule shorter posts to appear several hours apart from each other. Shorter updates and sit anywhere in between.
None of this content should sell anything. All of these should offer actionable or helpful advice to readers and people in your industry. Mix how-tos with industry analysis, ideas, humor, business tips, and anything else you can offer.
Include at least one post per week that showcases your personality. Whether you’re doing a marathon on a weekend, going to a farmer’s market, on the beach, or whatever. We build trust and build that personality we talked about earlier. It doesn’t have to be very candid, but it should show that you are a real person and also the face of the company.
Add one sales post per week to this content plan. It shouldn’t be a hard sell, but rather a highlighter of a special offer, upcoming webinar, dates of live shows, notifications about your appearance at an event, or anything else. Keep selling light and soft. We want people to participate, not turn their backs.
shipping schedule
Once we have an idea of the volume of content you will need, we must now create a schedule to publish it online. There are many theories about the best times, but I tend to go with the Quick Sprout by a small margin. People say they’re on Facebook when they don’t want to be at work. That’s true, but you also need to account for our willingness to receive regular updates from our friends.
I post every day at 08:00, 10:00, 12:00, 14:00 and 16:00. The long-form post comes first so it can be read with your first coffee of the day or throughout the day. Shorter posts come later so people can digest quickly while they work.
I use a scheduler like Buffer and create all my social posts as early in the week as possible. This gives me time to work on more content and react to people commenting.
Take action and react
Posting regularly on Facebook is an action. The next thing is to react to replies, comments, chats and likes. Many businesses see social media marketing as a one-way street. They put their messages there and forget about them. They forget the social and focus too much on the media. Both are equally important.
The reason I use a post scheduler is so I can react to anyone who comments on the page. I can respond when someone says something. Whenever someone likes, I can thank them. It takes time, but it also builds a community. By responding to and offering that personal touch, you put yourself above most businesses trying to make money on Facebook.
Answer every query, handle every criticism, and moderate every question. Do it professionally and you will build trust and authority. Once you have both, you will start selling products.
Use your audience
While your own content plan is important, if you can use your audience to create some, the better. In the context of a smartphone battery booster, you can offer a discount on another unit to anyone who posts a story about how their booster got them out of trouble or the weirdest place they had to use it.
Presenting real stories from real people will help build trust and authority, as well as social proof. Social proof is a review in another form and is extremely helpful. You can post them on your Facebook page with an image of how your battery booster helped a real person in a real situation. If that doesn’t get you more sales, I don’t know what will!
Rinse and repeat
Once you have a page, content, and a posting plan, you need to run them continuously to get results. People quickly get into the routine and start waiting for their content at a certain time and if it doesn’t show up, they’ll wonder what’s wrong. Social media audiences are incredibly indecisive, so you can’t afford to disappoint them if you want to monetize them.
Be organized, be reliable. But also toss the curveball every once in a while to avoid getting too predictable or boring. Add a special event, pop-up shop, surprise quiz with prizes, contests, special features, interviews and other interesting content. The more attention and the more value you offer, the more engagement you will experience.
It’s engagement with the audience you’re growing that helps you make money on Facebook. As I said at the top, you can have the best product in the world, but if people don’t know or trust you, it really doesn’t matter. Hopefully, a few months from now, people will start to know and trust you. Add some real-life case studies to your page and people will quickly buy what you’re selling.
Making money on Facebook isn’t easy, fast, or all that lucrative to begin with. But over time, you should start to see an increase in your audience, engagement, and then sales. Keep building on that foundation and you should start to see your efforts pay off. With billions of potential viewers, it can be very lucrative indeed!
