Eight years ago, when I was the SEO and social media manager for a travel agency, I went to my boss with an idea.
“Can I try Facebook ads?”
“Okay”, he said. “Take £200 and see how many leads you can get.”
And off I went, with zero knowledge of how it would work, but the curiosity to try.
The next week, I went back to his office…
He said: “How many leads did you get with the £200?”
I told him – 20.
His next question…
“How much money can I give you for this?”
At the time, he was paying £50 per lead with Google PPC ads.
So if I could bring in leads for £10, this would be huge.
And so, my love of Facebook ads was born.
Of course, we soon discovered that as you increase the spend, the cost per lead rises too!
So it wasn’t some new miracle channel,
But it was lucrative, and it still is.
Not much has changed over the past 8 years when it comes to Facebook ads.
They still work great, and I still find managing them to be as much fun as a trip to the casino (with less risk and more profit!)
When normal people are playing Angry Birds and Football Manager on their phones, I’m playing Facebook Ads with real money.
I guess that if you’re reading this you’re considering new ways to make money aside from Google.
So today, I’m going to discuss 4 ways you can use Facebook ads to grow your business…
1. Growing a Facebook page
This is the one I see people talk about the most.
And it’s one that I’m not currently doing.
The idea is that you ‘buy Facebook fans’, who then see your organic content and click on it.
It’s a solid plan.
The word on the street is that these fans cost about 5 cents each.
For me, they’ve always cost about 10 cents. Still worth it.
I’ve spent $1,906 and got 17,864 followers from it.
Could I buy more? Sure.
But I’m not doing, because I think there are better ways to spend my Facebook ad money right now…
2. Growing an email list
Instead of using ads to get people to like my Facebook page, I recently started using ads to get people to join my email list.
For me, the cost is around 10x higher, at around $1 each (I’m working to bring that down to 50c)
But, once someone is on my email list I can also ask them to like my Facebook page, subscribe to my YouTube channel, follow me on Instagram, click my affiliate links, and much more.
So it’s worth the higher cost, in my opinion.
Why did I switch from growing my Facebook page to growing my email list?
Well, the bigger your Facebook page gets, the less valuable each follower is.
A page with 500k followers doesn’t get 100 times the traffic of a page with 5k followers. Nowhere near.
But the bigger your email list gets, the more valuable each follower is.
With an email list of 500k, I could negotiate sponsorship deals with brands that would have no interest in working with someone with a list of 5k.
3. Sending traffic to a website
Facebook ad arbitrage is basically free money.
I love it.
I won’t go into detail here because I have this tweet that explains it.
Bookmark this one for later…
4. Selling products
If you have something to sell, Facebook ads are a fantastic way to do that.
And you don’t need anything fancy, a simple $5 digital download is enough.
If you can spend $5 on ads to get one person to buy your $5 product, you’re winning.
You didn’t make money… yet.
But you got an email subscriber (for free)
And you can then go on to sell them your more expensive products further down the line.
Miles Beckler is the king of this method.
Be sure to follow him on YouTube if you haven’t already.
If you don’t yet have a digital product but want to make and sell one…
Then my friend Sammie just launched a guide to starting a digital product business.
He mainly uses Instagram, but much of what he teaches can be applied to Facebook too.
Please – do it the right way…
Whichever of these four options you choose
(And I suggest trying them all)
There’s a right way and a wrong way to go about it.
I have a few friends with small businesses – hairdressers, party planners, dog groomers etc.
When they do Facebook ads, they post whatever offer they would post organically (e.g £30 haircuts on Mondays)
Then they hit the boost button, spend £20 and hope for the best.
They have no idea if it’s working.
While that’s not a terrible strategy for a hairdresser, it is actually a terrible strategy if you’re a marketer and want to generate a serious ROI on your ad spend.
You need to be using Facebook Ads Manager, and you need to get all the settings optimised right.
One slider switched the wrong way can mean the difference between success and wasting a ton of money.
I figured all this out with trial and error over many years.
I’m lucky that much of that was with my old boss’s money, not mine!
If you’re new to Facebook ads, it’s worth following a step-by-step guide that tells you the pitfalls to avoid.
The best one out of all of the ones I’ve tested is this one.
It costs money, but then so does running ads.
And if you have $10 per day to invest into ads, then it’s worth investing in your education to make sure you’re getting the best possible ROI from your ad spend.
Right?
– NSL
P.S. Some useful links are here…