Hi!
I’ve started working on my new brand niche site and I’m mega excited about it.
Doing things without SEO is SO much more fun!
I used to think that a website was everything.
But in this project, the website is only a third of it.
The Facebook page and the email newsletters are equally as important – a third each.
And the three will work together beautifully.
So let me tell you what I’ve been doing
I did say that this will be a public case study and it will.
As soon as the website is live and I have something to show you, I’ll share the URL here.
Here’s what I’ve done so far…
I bought the domain name and the hosting.
I came up with the first 50 blog post titles and handed it over to this content agency to write them.
These titles are all designed to attract clicks from Facebook.
I used 3 methods to come up with them:
1 – Things that I know from previous experience work well
For example – “The 7 Worst X If You’re X”
I have more examples of these here.
2 – Reddit threads
Niche-specific subreddits can be a good source of inspiration for articles.
For example, if people on Reddit are talking about the most unfriendly countries they ever visited, you could make their opinions into a listicle.
3 – What competitors are posting on Facebook
I like to let another site write an article and post it on Facebook. If it performs well, I can write something similar.
I use Strevio for competitor analysis.
It looks at other Facebook pages in the niche and shows what’s performing the best – so I can write similar articles.
While I’m waiting for the site to be built and the articles to be written, I’m working on the Facebook page.
Of course, I don’t have any articles to link to yet, but I can work on the engagement.
So for the first week, I posted memes and funny status posts.
The kind of stuff that people go wild for on an established page.
And nothing happened.
Which honestly, is good.
Because posting your best content for a week and still having zero followers is a nice little barrier to entry that will make some people stop right there.
But not me 😎
I set up some ads.
A $100 investment should be enough to attract the first couple of thousand followers and get the ball rolling.
Setting up a new ad account from scratch made me realise how tricky it is if you don’t know what you’re doing!
For example, it asked me to pick a campaign objective.
I want followers.
I couldn’t remember which of these options I was meant to choose…
The right answer is ‘engagement’, but it’s not obvious.
What you must know about Facebook ads – is that they want you to spend more than you need to.
The whole system is designed to suggest options that make Facebook more money – with a higher cost per result for you.
Sometimes, the best options are so hidden, that you need two or three extra clicks to uncover them.
For example, look at this…
The blue background, lightning bolt, star, colourful magic wand and use of positive words like ‘recommended’ and ‘meet your goals’ are all there to get you to click the first option.
But, most people will pay less per follower if they choose the second option.
Why?
Well, the manual setup allows you to turn off (and therefore not pay for) a load of useless placements like inside Messenger or between IG Reels.
Of course, Facebook wants to sell these, so they make it really hard to opt-out.
But it’s worth doing, or at least testing the ones that work for you rather than blindly believing that Meta has your best interests at heart, rather than their revenue.
I do hope you enjoy following along with this case study. I think it will be fun.
I’ll be sharing a lot about how I’m using Facebook to send traffic to the website (where I can monetise it with ads) and generate email signups (where I can monetise with affiliates).
I won’t be doing step-by-step instructions here when it comes to the best way to set up ads though, sorry.
That would be just too much work for me.
However, everything is detailed in this Facebook course, complete with screenshares.
Two things to know about the Facebook course –
1 – Dan has just reduced the price to $99.
This is ridiculously low given that the course is better (in my opinion) than other courses that cost more than 3X that.
He’s a really nice guy and wants to make it accessible to anyone who doesn’t have much of an income any more thanks to Google.
2 – New modules are being added all the time.
So if you already did the course, go back and make sure you look at the new modules on the Facebook Bonus program, ad arbitrage and growing a newsletter with Facebook ads, amongst others.
Can you do Facebook ads without following a course?
Yes.
Knowing which boxes to tick will be a guess though, so you’ll have to budget for testing.
It makes better financial sense to invest $99 to copy the results of someone who has already tested all of this for you.
Plus, following tutorial videos is just so much easier.
I’m LOVING creating this new project without SEO.
It’s so refreshing.
I hope that you feel the same about any new projects that you start, or the ways in which you can adjust your existing business model for 2024.
– NSL