How to Make Money on Facebook

Most entrepreneurs and small businesses have a Facebook presence, but few of them understand how to actually monetize their social media efforts on Facebook. In this episode, we'll explore three simple components that can turn your Facebook time from feeling like you're endlessly creating content for nothing into effective email list building and revenue generating. I'll even show you how I made six figures a year with as little as 3,000 followers on Facebook. From one business page, you're listening to the Universe has yous Business. It's the podcast for rising entrepreneurs, coaches, and change makers who are here to achieve more while letting the universe do the heavy lifting. I'm your host, Andrew Donovan, and if you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so that you don't miss another episode. Now, like I said in the introduction, most businesses, most small businesses, most entrepreneurs have some kind of presence on Facebook, but so few of them know how to properly monetize their efforts. Or what I see a lot of people doing is mostly just being busy on Facebook. So they're spending a lot of time curating content, responding to comments, getting people to like posts, playing around on canva, exploring different social media strategies. But there's not a lot of strategy to how they actually turn all of that effort on Facebook into money for their business. And if you're not generating revenue from your social media efforts, then why are you even on social media? And. And ironically, a lot of entrepreneurs have a hard time answering that question as well. So let me tell you how social media should serve your business in a really basic format. Social media at its fundament is exposure to your mission and your brand. It's a source of what we call earned traffic. So it's not free traffic, because while social media is free, your time isn't free. And you spend your time creating content, engaging with your audience in order to be build out that brand reputation, gain visibility, and ultimately turn traffic from random places on the social media web into traffic that you own. In other words, your email list. And I basically just gave away the heart of this episode, but I'm gonna break this down for you. So in this episode, we're gonna cover three specific steps that you can follow in order to turn whatever you're doing on Facebook into actual trackable revenue for your business. So. Sound good? Now, I'm also gonna tell you how I generated six figures annually from as few as 3,000 followers on Facebook. And I started at zero. Just so you know, like, everybody starts at zero. And I really like Facebook for my business. So Facebook is A great place to generate traffic, to create presence, to build an audience. If your audience is naturally on Facebook. Now, if you've got a business that caters to Gen Z or younger and it's people who have a 2 second att, Facebook might actually not be the right arena for you. That's where you turn to TikTok and Snapchat. But if you work with people who are millennial, Gen X, maybe even baby boomers or older, well, those people tend to be on Facebook a lot more. And so for those of you who are on Facebook, which is most businesses, like I said, this is going to be really valuable for you to follow this simple framework. So the way that I got started with Facebook is my very first audience for my first online business was of course the geared toward network marketers, specifically women in network marketing company who do health and wellness. And those people are naturally already on Facebook. So that was easy for me to choose Facebook as my first social media platform. Now what I did really well is actually these three steps. But I want to point out a few things. I started with zero followers on Facebook. Everybody starts with zero followers. I think it's really easy to look at someone who's making six or seven or eight figures and to say, oh yeah, of course she's making tons of Money, she's got 100,000 Facebook followers. But if someone has 100,000 Facebook followers, they started with zero and built up there. The funny thing about social media, including Facebook, is that when you're making money doing social media, when you're doing it in a way that generates revenue, that's also the easiest way to grow a following. People get it backwards. They think that if you spend a lot of time doing growing a following, then later you can monetize it. But it's completely reverse of how profitable businesses actually treat social media. The way that profitable businesses do it is they figure out a system that generates revenue on social media and they leverage that system to simultaneously grow their following. And then you create this awesome monster so that as your following grows, well, it was already generating revenue to begin with. And so your revenue grows too. And as your revenue grows, then your following grows. And as your following grows, then your revenue grows. You see how this is very appealing to tap into this kind of plan. So what I did is I started with Xero, of course, and I created a system that would allow me to profitably grow my audience. And what this really means is that I never spent money, I never took money out of my pocket to invest in social media. Growth in the hopes that later on I could monetize it. I was making money simultaneously while I grew my following. And so actually, in the first 365 days, the first year of me having my business page on Facebook, which now a retired page, but that page made me six figures. I made over $100,000 in my first year. And I had one thing that I was selling. I had one very simple way of turning those Facebook followers into contacts on my email list. And then I would market to those people with the one thing that I was selling. Okay, so let's start with a simple framework, and you're gonna wanna take some notes here. And then especially ask yourself how you can implement the simplified framework. Number one, you need a regular traffic pattern. What I mean by traffic pattern is you need to know where followers are going when you're not actively promoting or launching something specific. So if you've got a product launch or if you've got a specific time sensitive promotion, you're obviously going to be sharing a link for that on Facebook, and that's where you want the traffic to go. But what about in between those product launches or promotions? And that's where people are frequently lacking what I like to call a regular traffic pattern. I think of social media traffic patterns the same way that I think of traffic patterns when I'm driving my car. In fact, right now, in downtown Salt Lake City, where I live, it seems like 60% of the roads are under construction. For some reason, they decided to do all the roads simultaneously, it seems like. So you can't really drive anywhere, but there's always a traffic pattern. And so I've got detours that I get to follow. And as I'm driving down the road, I can tell that engineers specifically mapped out where they want the cars to go. And your Facebook traffic should not be an exception to this. So whether you're posting funny things or educational things, or heartfelt inspirational things, it doesn't matter. All of it should be driving traffic in a specific direction. So where does that traffic go? That's number two in our framework. Number two is have a lead magnet. A lead magnet is an ethical bribe. It's something that you dangle in front of followers, random people on the Internet in order to get them to go from random people on the Internet into leads that you now own on your email list. And this is an imperative step to monetizing Facebook, and it's one that I see almost everybody missing. You know what's really funny about social media and Facebook in particular, Is I've mentioned in past episodes, I've got quite a few influencer friends, people who have really big Instagram, really big Facebook, really big TikTok followings. And I can out earn all of them, all of my close friends, even the ones that have hundreds of thousands of followers, because I know how to monetize my social media a lot more strategically. So one year, I remember I had built my Facebook business page up to 5,000 followers and. And I had a friend who had over 200,000 followers on Instagram. And I was making more money than this friend with way less effort too, because I was so strategic in how I did this. My friend had hundreds of thousands of followers on their social media platform, but they didn't do the first or second steps in this framework that I'm talking about. They didn't have a regular traffic pattern. And so people would just randomly find this account on Instagram. They'd comment sometimes, they'd like things sometimes. But if there was no converting this traffic into traffic that my friend owned, and so there was no regular traffic pattern, and there was definitely no lead magnet. The only way that my friend made money is if third parties happen to reach out to say, will you please sponsor our product? We'll pay you. And everyone thinks that's so cool. But you don't control any of that. You don't control the traffic, you don't control the revenue, you don't control the offers. And if you do it the way that I'm describing to you, you do control all those things, which is why you can also control how much revenue you create. All right, so a lead magnet, again, is like what I like to call an ethical bribe. So a lead magnet can be a free video series, a free webinar. A lead magnet can be a paid lead magnet. Most lead magnets are free. I don't necessarily think that free ones are correct. It's just easier to get someone to give you your email list when it's a free offer. Keep in mind, however, that a paid lead magnet, even one that's a dollar or seven dollars, the fact that someone whipped out their credit card in order to gain access to your offer, your lead magnet, that makes them much more qualified traffic. So if you've got a free lead magnet, you'll get more people signing up, but that's not necessarily better because it's going to be less qualified traffic versus if you have a $1 lead magnet, you're gonna get fewer signups for sure. But the people who do sign up are gonna be people who are more invested because they took the time to actually whip out their credit card and buy something from you, even if it was super inexpensive. Okay, so the lead magnet can be, like I said, a webinar, a video series, a PDF download, it can be an ebook. It can be a compilation of content that you've already curated on your social media. You just organize it and repackage it into something that people can easily download and watch or read or listen to. It could also be audio recordings. They're basically any type of digital content that you've already produced. You could repackage that up, put a cool cover photo on it and have that be your downloadable lead magnet. Alright, I've even done lead magnets that are physical things. Like we've done lots of free plus shipping offers for books that I've written and I love those because if someone is willing to do the pay $7.95 for shipping and I send them the book for free, that is highly qualified traffic. And I've made, I mean, we've sold millions of dollars of product that way, so I love that. But not everybody has physical books to sell or a fulfillment system set up for those books. But everybody can do digital lead magnets because technology just makes it so easy to automate that. Okay, so number two is have a lead magnet. And basically what's gonna happen with just these first two steps in the framework I'm giving you here is that if you've got a regular traffic pattern, meaning when you're not doing an active product launch or promotion all the time in between that you direct attention to your lead magnet. So if you do a funny video, you tie the caption of that funny video back to your lead magnet and you say link in the bio. Or if it's Facebook, you can actually promote the link right there in the post itself. And so you promote the link to your lead magnet frequently and you just let people know, here's something awesome that I give away for free. It's my gift to you. It's the first step on this incredible journey. That's the theme of my Facebook business presence. And you promote that often and you really position it as a value add that you are giving to your audience. If you make it sound like an ask, well, now it's not a value add, it's an ask. And that's a completely different energy and it's a different part of your social media strategy. But when you position a lead magnet really well, it's you doing your audience a favor. It's you being generous, it's you being gracious, it's you having done the research and you having paid attention to what their needs are, what their problems are. And then you create a cool lead magnet, whatever it is for you. That's the first step to them being able to start to solve their big need or their big problem, or their first step in working toward the desired outcome that they really want, which is why they follow you and your business page. Is this making sense to you? Okay, so that's the traffic pattern. The lead magnet is what you drive the traffic toward. The lead magnet is what the pattern should direct traffic toward. Okay, and then number three, and finally is plan regular launches. If you're a business, that means you sell something. You might be selling physical products, other people's physical products, digital products. You might be selling your knowledge, you might be selling live events, you might be selling books, you might be selling whatever it is, you might be selling services. Maybe you're an accountant or a massage therapist, it doesn't matter. Maybe you're a life coach and you sell sessions. Whatever it is, if you're a business, you sell things and you need to plan your launches. What I mean by a launch is a launch is a designated period of time where you actively promote an offer. So it might be a two week period where you've got your eight session life coaching package at 40% off and for those eight weeks only, you're going to launch that offer to your audience and you'll have promotional posts and maybe videos or Facebook lives or graphics or testimonial reels, testimonial posts, whatever you do during that launch period to promote your offer. So you're launching the offer. That's why we call it a launch. A launch can also be a relaunch. Just so you know, maybe you've got a digital course that you're selling, or maybe you've got a kit of products that you're selling and you've already launched it. But that was three months ago. So now you're going to relaunch the same thing and maybe twist it up a bit, maybe add different content or try different ways of promoting the offer. Okay, but you want to calendar your launches. So my rule of thumb for business is every quarter I like to have one significant revenue generating activity. That means that I'm launching a new course or I'm relaunching an old course, or I'm launching someone else's product as an affiliate. But once a quarter, and this is just my way That I like to do it. I like to have one significant revenue generating launch. That doesn't mean that once a quarter I promote a link. Okay, that's completely different. And that's what most people do on Facebook, just so you know, they just randomly will throw in links all over the place that says, by the way, buy this. By the way, Click this to buy by the way. And it's messy. It's not strategic. It just looks like kind of chaotic and it feels that way. And people respond as if it's chaotic, meaning they stay away. Cause nobody likes chaos, right? So what I did when I first created my very first business page for Facebook is I would have calendar launches. Actually, I'll tell you, when I first started on Facebook, I did a launch every two months, not every quarter. So I did it more frequently back then. Now that my audience has grown a lot more. And I just changed my strategy, which is why I do it once a quarter now. But back then, I did it once every other month, every two months, and I had calendar launches. So my lead magnet then and still is to this day, one of my favorite lead magnets is a webinar. I love webinars. And as a lead magnet, because if people take the time to sign up, that's cool. I now have their email address and I can keep marketing to them. But if they actually show up to my webinar or if they watch the replay of my webinar, that's really cool because now they're showing that they're invested because they took the time, okay? And during those webinars, I would use the webinars to do my scheduled product launches. So remember I told you I had one thing that I was selling, it was a digital course and it was cheap. It was just under $200. So it wasn't a lot of money back then. But that's the one thing that I sold to make my first hundred thousand dollars on Facebook exclusively. Not through Instagram, not through Google Ads, just through one Facebook page. So you see, I did these three things that we're talking about here. I did, number one, I had a regular traffic pattern. I knew that my goal was to convert as many people on Facebook as I could into traffic that I owned, meaning an email address on my email list. Two, the way that I did that is I had lead magnets. I would use webinars as my lead magnet. And if I wasn't doing an active launch, then I would have other digital downloads that would be the lead magnet that were, you know, it Was like in my about section, click here to get my free PDF download or whatever. And then three, I planned regular launches. Back then I did it every other month. Now I do it once a quarter. And I would launch using webinars. I would have a two week promotional period where I'm like, sign up for my brand new masterclass. You'll learn XYZ and you'll avoid this pain. Point and click here to sign up. And that's how I grew my Facebook page. It's also how I grew my email list very quickly. And just doing these three things that I'm talking about is what allowed me to create six figures. My very first year as a Facebook business page and I started at zero. And by the end of the year I had actually by the end of the first year I probably only had maybe 2,000 followers or so. So there you go. I wrote 3,000 in the description of this episode, but it was really somewhere around, somewhere two to three thousand followers, but six figures from such a small following. Whereas there's other people on social media who have tens or hundreds of thousands of followers and they can't figure out how to consistently generate their own, own revenue stream in the way that we've just talked about here. But now you know. So some of the concerns that people have at this point in the conversation is what about the technology? Because I've said a few things like webinar registration or email marketing. Once you're building your email list and people wonder where is my list housed? How do I send the emails out? How do people actually sign up for a webinar? Where's the webinar? All of this is answered in my free Tech Quickie Startup Guide. You can download that for free at donovanrising.comtech T E C H again, that's donovanrising.com tech and in this little guide I show you the technology that you need to get your business set up really simply and to be able to do the things that we've described here. Another concern that people have is they say, wait, what exactly am I selling? Like you mentioned, Andrew, that you need to have an offer. But what does that offer exactly? Maybe you've got lots of things that you have sold in the past. Maybe you've sold different variants in your coaching service, or maybe you've got different affiliate products that you've packaged up in different ways, or someone else has packaged up for you and you're not quite sure what things you should be selling during your scheduled launches. And if you need help with this, then go to donovanrising.com plan P L A N Again, that's dawnofanrising.com plan. And there you can download my free monetize what you know workbook. And that teaches you how to creatively package things up in a cohesive order so that you know what things to launch periodically and scheduled in your social media on your Facebook. All right, so, my friend, is this making sense to you? I hope that this has given you some valuable insights about how to monetize your Facebook page. What I've described here, the having a regular traffic pattern, having a lead magnet, and then having scheduled product launches or promotions, that's so simple. But as you watch other people, other businesses on Facebook, you'll notice that hardly anybody is doing that in a strategic way. And if you'll implement this into your strategy, it's not really a lot of extra work. It's just more strategy behind the work you're already doing. And, and you've seen the potential here. I mean, if you can follow this and start generating consistent revenue, then you just scale what you're doing and you'll find yourself growing a lot more influence, having more impact, and experiencing more revenue in your business. All right, well, my friend, that is our episode for today. If you found something valuable in this experience with me today, please do me a favor. Spend 30 seconds to write a review on Apple Podcasts. Just share in a quick note what you gained from this. And as always, if you've got friends or colleagues that could benefit from this, hit that share button, too. And please do me a favor, Share this with people who would benefit from it. That's how we get the word out. That's how we spread the message through this podcast. And I want to keep creating amazing content for you in future episodes and the people that you care about. So thank you for joining me in this episode and good luck with your Facebook page. I will see you next time. Bye for now. It.