How To Monetize A Facebook Fan Page – 5 Hot Methods (This STILL WORKS And Has HUGE Potential)

Photo – pixabay.com (PD)

Social media is alive and kicking – and even though Facebook has scaled back the amount of traffic that they send via fan pages [UPDATE Jan 2020, we just had a post that got 275,000+ shares and sent server-melting amounts of traffic. It still works], there is still a viable business model here. Combine the strategies outlined below to make a decent income. Facebook fan pages are still one of my top revenue sources and will continue to be in the future.

As you can see from the above chart, it seems that FB’s astonishing growth is only going to slow down when everyone in the world is on board…

So let’s get into it. This is an intermediate tutorial – I will assume that you already know the basics and are building up a decent sized audience. Now you need to turn that visibility into cash. Otherwise, what’s the point right? 🙂

FIRST STEP – The first thing you have to do is to continue to build up the numbers on that fan page – and accelerate the growth if possible. We are talking not only the number of fans, but the engagement – how many people are responding to your content rather than just scrolling past.

Over 5 years of doing this on multiple FB fan pages, I have noticed that in addition to the individual “reach” that is assigned to a post based on its early performance in the first few minutes after posting, Facebook will assign your page an overall “page score” – which is a modifier for how many people will see the post. This “page score” definitely runs in “gears”. If you have a top quality page, everything you post will have this positive modifier and will go berserk as soon as it is posted. However, if you get too bland, or too infrequent, you will get knocked down a gear and everything will be seen by less people.

Another effect of this modifier is that if you can get the page into a high gear, Facebook will put your page into “recommended pages” – the ones that pop up when you click “like” on a page – and suddenly you will get a flood of new fans. This can get crazy. I remember getting a page into this top gear one time and gaining over 20,000 NEW fans EACH DAY for a while. I built up 2 million fans in one year this way and it was my best ever year online. At that time, the amount of traffic I received from FB was astronomical. I had to upgrade my web server twice because FB killed it with too much traffic. These pages were so hot that I couldn’t run content from other blogs unless they had upgraded hosting, because we would kill their website with traffic! What a nice problem to have!

This sort of traffic was routine back in the day. The highest I ever saw “real time” was over 2000 – sadly I don’t have a screenshot of that one.

Ah, the days of glory. FB has seriously modified their algorithm these days. Well, why wouldn’t they? They want you to stay on FB looking at THEIR ads, rather than sending you off to click someone else’s! What this means in general is that medium or even ‘quite good’ content is barely worth publishing. Sam-dunk viral content is where the gold is and if FB picks up on this it will assign it to an entirely different category of visibility and give it massive reach.

It’s tougher than it used to be – but it is still doable and when you nail it, you better have everything ready. Building engagement means posting consistent, frequent, super engaging content. The biggest pages often post every hour or even more often sometimes. 24 posts a day is not outrageous. But test it – you will notice that the more you post, the higher your overall reach will go. And the higher you build your engagement, the more people FB will show your posts to.

Push it up as high as you can before diminishing returns kick in, then scale back a bit. Damn, that’s a lot of content. You’ll need a VA just to manage the posting schedule otherwise it will consume too much of your time. To start with, you can data mine a lot of the big pages in your niche and hit share on their most engaging content. Free visibility for them and higher reach for you! Again, have a VA data mine the page and put the best posts in a Google sheets database. Note the calls to action that the top posts use. You can borrow these ideas later.

It’s also worth observing the stats on the biggest pages. If you see a page that is growing fast, take a note of their tactics. How many posts are they making per day? How many of those are posts videos / images / link posts? FB measures everything and in general you are going to have the best chance by emulating strategies that are beating the algorithm, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.

I tend to divide posts into two types – post that build the popularity of the page (usually viral videos / infographics / memes) and posts that make money (usually link posts, which send better traffic). You need both. The money-making posts don’t always get as much engagement as viral videos etc – and so you need to keep on posting the viral stuff to keep the page strong (remember what I said about your overall page “score”. ) But then you can start slipping your “money posts” in there and sending traffic where you want it. So link posts generally pay you better, but don’t be tempted to run link posts all day, otherwise you will find your engagement tanks relative to other viral meme pages – and then FB just throttles the hell out of how many people see your content.

Example of a high-engagement post. This was one of our in-house created posts. Look at that freakin’ reach! We often used to see these kind of numbers. I think the highest we ever got was 375,000+ shares on one post. Rarely see this kind of thing these days but there is still money to be made.

The Methods

Ok so you have built (or have access to) a sizable page, which gets good numbers of likes and shares on the posts (has an engaged audience). Now what?

Method 1) Create your own posts and drive the traffic to your own ad-enabled blog/website.

Again, I would counsel against reinventing the wheel. Data mine the most popular blogs in your niche to see what the slam dunk headlines are. You can run the same or very slightly altered headline with a completely fresh article and either licensing the same images or using new ones… and you can do this all day long. Every other media channel does it. Outsource the article creation, but resist the temptation to go for cheap garbage articles though – you have a reputation to uphold here. The best blogs build their audience through quality. But you can fairly reliably predict what topics/headlines will work well based on what has already worked well for others. Just make sure that people are glad they clicked, because they will make a mental note. And remember that even if an article got 100,000 shares, then 99% of the world’s population has probably never seen it.

Owing to the fact that FB only shows the average post to about 1% of the fan base, you will find that you can run the same post on Facebook several more times – not every day but say a couple of months apart. We created a 40-day “loop” and run our content in a continuum, always adding fresh content and culling out the weakest performers. The best posts have very long legs… I have a few posts from 2013 that still get engagement every time and have made thousands of dollars in total.

Note also that stories go in cycles. A big viral article will get syndicated by all the major channels and then after a few weeks, everyone and their dog has seen it. It’s saturated. However, assuming it is an ‘evergreen’ topic and not “news that has become old news” – run it 5 years later when the world has forgotten about it, and it will likely do just as well, all over again. There is an endless supply of this kind of content. But you know how hard it is to scroll back past a certain point on FB. So take screenshots of the best posts now (another task for a VA) and stash them in a folder with a date. Come back to them when everyone has forgotten, give them a fresh lick of paint, some original words and images to make sure there is nothing infringing copyright, and you are good as gold.

A Facebook fan page is an ever-hungry beast that is in constant need of fresh content. Build up a big blog of several hundred posts and you can run 50/50 link posts and viral posts… 10-20 links per day, all sending traffic to your blog(s) continuously. I have build up traffic streams of 10k+ visitors per day this way, with traffic well over 100k/day at the all time peaks!

Another thing to do is to keep track of the number of likes, shares and clicks a post gets. You will find that the majority of posts perform in a similar range, with some outliers that are super weak and occasional outliers that are super strong. You cannot always predict this. Cull the weak ones and re-run the strongest ones after some time has passed.

2) Post content from other pages on a revenue share basis. A lot of pages will split their ad revenue with you for posting their stuff.

This is another method that I have used to generate several thousand dollars per month. There are numerous fan pages / content agencies that will pay you, typically 50% of their ad revenue (but it varies), to run their posts on your page. The good thing about this is that it is almost zero effort. If you already have a great fan page then you can just run other people’s content all day long. They have done all the heavy lifting of building and maintaining a blog, optimizing the ads etc etc. You just send traffic and collect money. And there’s nothing stopping you having multiple of these deals going.

3) Offer other pages a share of your ad revenue to post your best content on their page!

Yet another winner. It’s the previous method, only in reverse 😉 Most of the big fan pages are eager to find new revenue streams. If you have proven posts that get good likes and shares, and make money by driving traffic to your blog already, then offer the other page owners a 50% cut for running the post on their page.
To do this you will need to be able to insert a tracking code into your link, so that you can break down the statistics and figure out who actually sent the traffic. The real pros in this system have a built in platform that enables their publishers to track their earning stats daily.

4) Drive traffic to an email list with a freebie offer and then run a mix of free content and other product offers to the list.

Depending on the niche, you can create tutorials or other free content that will entice people to sign up for an email list via a landing page. You can then promote this frequently on your FB page. Once people are signed up for your list, you can run affiliate offers, interspersed with “value content” i.e. other tutorials and helpful information. For this to work well you will might benefit from being in a “how to” or ‘self help” type genre.

5) Funnel more traffic into your blog and FB fan page through expanding your ‘social media net’.

A couple of things to observe here. a) content that is popular on one social media site will likely be popular on another. Make your best posts into youtube videos and post them there. Create tall versions of the images and run them on Pinterest. And so on. Use these methods to pull greater numbers of people into your funnel. Each social media site reaches a new untapped audience and you channel them all where you want them to go.

6) Bonus – Drive traffic to affiliate offers.

You will need to handle this with care. FB is a bit particular about what they allow here. Weight loss and dating offers often get punished, hard. But you can sometimes spin weight loss using clever angles such as “metabolism boosting”. You also have to avoid ‘before and after’ pictures and photos of overweight persons. It may also be risky to do direct linking. I learned that the successful body text I was using for emails to my list, would work fine for articles on the blog, so I posted several blog posts which were essentially landing pages for affiliate offers, then drove the traffic to the post on my own blog. No problems with that so far. Another you could try is Amazon. But come up with creative ways to spin it. Let’s say your blog is about dogs. Why not a blog post “Top 10 Books That Dog Lovers Have to Own” and then post your Amazon links on there. There is endless possibility here.

Final point: Don’t get banned. This is actually more difficult than it sounds. FB is trigger happy and bans pages for the slightest reasons, which are nebulous and require some sort of psychic ability to determine. FB is so heavily embedded in PC culture that it seems you can offend them without the least clue what you have “done wrong”; and there seems to be some sort of attitude that you are ‘just supposed to know’ I often have absolutely no clue. The continual walking on eggshells as more and more things are deemed inappropriate, gets wearing after a while but it is the nature of the game.

There is of course genuine fake news. One thing you will realize about Facebook quite quickly, is that the most ridiculous stories are often the ones that perform the best. A really good lie is especially profitable. I do not say this because I endorse it, I say it because it is true. Many a bullshit story has made its owners bank on FB.

The temptation will thus strike you to become ever more exaggerated, because it works. However – it also creates opposition and complaints. FB also has (too many) rules about what can be in images – for example “before and after” pics of weight loss typically lead to the post being blocked – and too many infringements can lead to the page being banned.

I have managed to salvage banned pages before, even when told that the decision was irreversible. Bear in mind that the person writing that message was just another underpaid grunt worker. I figured my chances of reaching the same agent again were 1/100 so I just wrote another letter, pretending that I had not even dealt with the other agent.. was sugar sweet and got my page back 😉

It’s a love-hate relationship with FB. They have annoying rules, and to be honest the whole climate of the news feed is jarring and often toxic. But with over a billion users, it’s not to be ignored if you are a content creator.

Check out also our post 18 Awesome Ways To Make Money With Youtube. AN.

Image For Pinterest:

Graphic – Makingwealth.info. Image src – Pixabay (PD)

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