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This post was dramatically updated September 18, 2017. The updates include additional ways to make money from Facebook, specifically Facebook pages.
This post originally focused on option #3 below, which is my NUMBER 1 method for making money on Facebook. However, that’s not the only way. In fact, Facebook is still relevant for blogs, niche sites, small business websites, e-commerce sites. .. pretty much any digital asset except for certain niches that are not social media friendly (i.e. embarrassing niches).
1. Promote new blog posts (i.e. drive traffic to your site)
There’s not much to say here. When you publish a post on your website or any new content. post a link to it on Facebook. This is FB 101 stuff.
You earn money from however you monetize your website, whether it’s display ads, affiliate offers, email marketing. The key is that Facebook sends traffic to your site.
2. Boost popular Facebook posts
When you get high engagement for a particular post or piece of content, throw some money at it and boost it. This could get the content much more traction, optins, ad revenue and even attract links.
The money materializes in the same way as posting. Boosting sends traffic to your site. In some cases you may opt to boost to attract more fans so that you can drive more traffic to your website in the future.
3. Promote other websites and get paid per 1,000 clicks
This Facebook monetization strategy inspired this post in the first place. I love this strategy because the entire process can be outsourced for very little cost and easily generate hundreds or even thousands of dollars every month.
Here’s the deal. There are websites that will pay you to post links/images etc. that link to their site. They typically pay a set rate per 1,000 visitors you send them.
The beauty of this is that these websites provide all the content, usually suggest proven content and they are very good at producing highly engaging content.
Also, many of this content works in many niches because it’s generic, broad interest stuff a lot of people simply can’t resist to click.
Here’s a recent screenshot of my earnings:
That’s not bad additional revenue for 30 minutes of work each week. In fact, I outsource all of it for a cost of about $30 to $40 per month.
Please keep in mind that I have quite a few fans (385,000) and while my FB page isn’t the most engaging, I do have fans and they do click, like, comment and share.
Revenue depends on number of fans, engagement and the amount the partner is willing to pay per 1,000 visitors.
Here are the best parts of this simple revenue source:
- My FB audience likes the content. The posts are highly engaging and interesting. I do focus on posts relevant to the niche, but not always. Some posts have universal appeal.
- It takes about 2 to 4 minutes per day. I use MeetEdgar and load it up in there so I have a nice bank of these posts to repost in the event I forget or can’t add new posts. And yes, reposting still generates good revenue.
- This is additional revenue to that generated by promoting your own website(s) from Facebook.
- You get paid to expand the domains to which you send traffic (i.e. you don’t always have to just promote your website).
- You don’t even need to have a website. All you need is an engaged Facebook page.
What is this revenue source?
What I do is I partner with other websites who are active on Facebook. We agree on a price per 1,000 visitors I send to their website from my Facebook page. They provide me their best performing FB posts along with a tracking link. In other words, I don’t have to come up with the Facebook post content. They provide their best performing posts to me. This way I post proven posts.
I just copy and paste those posts to my FB page, sending them traffic which earns me revenue. Because I use Viraltag, these posts end up in my bank so they can easily be reposted either manually or automatically (when I don’t have new posts to add). In the long run it turns into an amazing source of income.
FAQ
Does it work in any niche?
Yes and no.
There are definitely more opportunities in some niches than others.
However, 2 services I work with provide universal viral posts that pretty much anyone will like.
I think regardless which niche you’re in, this is worth trying if you have a Facebook page for you niche website(s).
Topics for which posts are provided are:
- Animals
- Crime
- DIY
- Food
- Health
- Home
- Humor
- Inspire
- OMG
- Politics
- Quiz
- Talented
- Tragedy
- Travel
As you can see, that’s a pretty good variety and that’s from just one partner I work with.
Another partner covers the following:
- Food (recipes and food hacks)
- DIY
- Life (broad topic including beauty, marriage, relationships and more)
- Parenting
- Pets
The partners email me popular posts every morning or a couple times per week with tracking links provided. I can also get popular posts for each niche so I can focus on posting topics related to my niche.
It’s literally copy and paste directly from my email into MeetEdgar (you can also just post directly to your Facebook page).
How many Facebook fans do you need?
It’s all about fan engagement.
I don’t have a terrifically high engagement Facebook page. It’s okay, but there are others with much more engagement.
If you have 50,000 engaged fans, these posts can make a lot of money.
How many posts per day?
You don’t want to be too annoying. I post 3 for each partner which is 6 in total each day (that’s probably getting close to annoying)… but annoying is a harsh word. The fact is these aren’t ads or product promotions. This is legitimate content that’s already been proven to be popular.
How much can you earn per 1,000 visitors you send to partner websites?
It varies from partner to partner, but my range is $5 to $8 per 1,000 visitors sent to their website.
While that may not seem like much, one viral post per day can earn $20 to $50 quickly. It’s a win/win because the partners get very low cost traffic and I’m able to generate another revenue stream.
Which leads to another point and that is you can ask other pages to promote your site for $5 to $8 per 1,000 visitors. That works out to one-half cent to 4/5ths cent per visitor. Traffic doesn’t get cheaper than that.
Put another way, if you earn $10 RPM and you get 1.5 page views per visitor, you can profit $7 to $10 per 1,000 visitors. That’s doubling or tripling your money. However, it takes effort since you must provide excellent FB posts to your partners every single day. It’s a big job, but if you can get it up and running, the potential profits are huge. I wouldn’t go in this direction unless you have a knack at posting viral content over and over. Other Facebook pages will only want to post these types of posts if the engagement is really, really high.
What if your fans hate these posts?
Some may not like it, but then some won’t like content you post promoting your site either.
If you get a massive backlash, this may not work for you.
All I can say is to give it a shot. Start with 1 post per day or every few days and choose posts very relevant to your niche. Then test more frequency and different topics to see what happens.
Which partners do I work with?
I work with 2. I’ve worked with 3 in total that have simple sign up procedures and a full backend dashboard to track earnings and performance. In other words, it’s a proper set up. Because there is a limit to how many of these posts I can post each day, I work with the 2 best performing partners.
I reveal these 3 partners which are available to most publishers with some Facebook fans in Niche Tycoon course (Lesson 88).
Seriously, if you have a FB page with a decent number of fans, partnering with just one website makes the course worth getting.
Please note that I can’t guarantee this will work with your FB page. There are many variables involved including number of fans, whether these types of posts liked by your audience, engagement, etc.
Also, I can’t guarantee you’ll be accepted with any of these partners. As far as I know they welcome many partners, but I don’t know if they have any minimum thresholds or if they don’t accept certain FB pages for any reason at all (i.e. subject matter, etc.).
The point is that this has worked well for me and I know it works for other FB page owners. It’s a win/win between me and the partner because they get low cost traffic and I can earn pretty good revenue that I otherwise wouldn’t earn with very little effort.
4. Build your email list
If you generate revenue from your email list, Facebook can help you make money by being a source of new subscribers.
This can happen in a number of ways:
- Optins via an optin form on your FB page as a tab;
- Optins via traffic sent from FB to your website or blog;
- Optins via Facebook ads to a landing page or simply use Facebook Leads ads.
5. Run paid traffic to popular blog posts
I do this, not for direct profits, but instead to help get important posts/content more traffic resulting in more shares and attracting links from the exposure.
Basically you create “website traffic” focused ads and promote select pieces of content. You wouldn’t want to do this for 300 posts; however, it can help by promoting 3 to 5 important posts/pages on your site.
Traffic begets traffic. Facebook visitors will share you content which drives more exposure and if the content is good can even attract links.
If you can profit right off the bat (ad arbitrage), that’s awesome. However, ad arb is not that easy these days given the cost of FB ads, landing page restrictions such as extreme pagination and of course display ad restrictions. I’m not saying it can’t be done; it can. It’s just much more difficult than it was 2 years ago.
6. Promote quizzes with affiliate offers at the end
If you use outcome-based affiliate marketing quizzes, you can promote these on your page, via FB ads or just have them on your site for your run-of-the-mill Facebook traffic from posting to your page.
If you target the right audience who is interested in the quiz, you could enjoy some decent returns.
However, running paid traffic to anything usually requires plenty of testing and investment with no guarantee of generating a profit. If you do reach profitability, the potential for scaling profits can be tremendous.
Why quizzes?
Quizzes offer a way to bridge clickbait interest with commercial promotion. People aren’t usually on Facebook with their credit card in hand.
However, people are interested in being entertained, learning things and having fun.
Quizzes offer interest, education and fun. But more importantly for you, they can take someone who has no intention to buy anything from that state to “that’s cool, I think I’ll get it.”
Example:
Suppose you publish a running blog.
Now suppose there’s a brand new, super awesome running shoe that just hit the market.
You can create a quiz helping people determine whether they should get this new super running shoe. The key is in how you frame the quiz. The key is understanding that many passionate runners are always on the look out for the latest and greatest running shoes. Therefore, you’ll want to introduce the quiz in such a way as to hype this “new super duper running shoe” in a way that passionate runners will be like “oh, there’s a new shoe that’s awesome? I should check it out.”
This approach works in many niches. It works on me all the time with blogging and website publishing tools. I’m always on the lookout for new tools to help build my biz.
7. Operate a Facebook Group (or participate in Groups)
Facebook Groups can be a very powerful tool to make money, whether you charge for access or use as a subtle promotional tool.
You don’t want to blatantly promote to your (or other groups you join), but if you contribute in a meaningful way, other group members will investigate you further and ultimately discover a course you may sell.
While I operate a FB Group, it’s via Coaching which paid access. I’m not terribly active in other FB groups and don’t promote in them, but I know it’s done and when done well, can be very effective.
Things I don’t do, but can make plenty of money
8. Promote niche products on your e-commerce store
If you’re plugged into the internet marketing community, you’ve no doubt been exposed to promoting niche products to targeted audiences that you sell on an ecommerce store you publish.
This business model started with t-shirts and then expanded into all kinds of niche products.
It’s smart and some folks are absolutely making a killing doing it.
Testing is intensive. Lots of stuff doesn’t work, but it only takes one or a few profitable products to generate enormous profits.
The concept is simple.
Here’s an example (unproven):
The key is finding low cost products that appeal to a very specific group. Suppose you discover that there’s a large group of people who are wild about dolphins. You need a low-cost dolphin product to sell to this rapid dolphin audience. A popular place to source cheap trinkets and such is AliExpress. You go there and find low-cost dolphin necklace that costs $2.16 each with an additional 5% off with bulk orders.
To help conversions, you advertise it as “free” but require $4.95 or more shipping and handling. The profit is in shipping and handling as well as building a customer email list. At $4.95 for S&H, you more than double your money less the cost of FB ads. The key then is to keep your FB cost per sale below the $2.79 in gross margin (i.e. S&H revenue less cost of goods sold).
Two issues I have with this are as follows (I’m not judging, it’s just my issues with this model):
- Shipping takes forever: by sourcing from AliExpress, shipping to customer can take weeks. I’d worry about angry customers accustomed to 3 day shipping from most other ecommerce sites.
- Ethical aspect of “free” and then charging S&H. It’s a gray area really. It’s not really free, but this is common practice and let’s face it, $4.95 for a trinket you like is hardly a financial risk.
The same concept applies to t-shirts.
You find a passionate audience. Design a t-shirt that resonates with them. Promote the t-shirt via Facebook ads. Hope your advertising cost per t-shirt sold is less than your t-shirt profit. Pocket the difference.
9. Run paid traffic to affiliate promotion landing pages
This is a lot more difficult than it sounds. I’ve never done this successfully but haven’t tried much either.
Basically you create a landing page that promotes a product with affiliate links. You buy Facebook ad traffic to it and hope the affiliate profits exceed the cost of ads.
This, like all paid traffic requires quite a bit of testing. Your landing page copy must be outstanding and be able to convert people with no intention to buy anything to buyers.
10. Pay other pages to promote your site on a CPM basis
This is the inverse of strategy #3 above. In strategy #3 above you get paid to promote various websites from you FB page. This strategy involves you paying other FB pages to promote your website.
Given the CPM you pay is much lower than you would with FB ads, there’s a solid chance you can profit with this traffic.
The hard work lies in you developing highly engaging content and posts and then getting other pages to actually promote your content.
Example:
I get paid $8 CPM, which is pretty high but given the volume I send, I’m paid a touch extra. Others pay $6 CPM. Let’s say you’re prepared to pay $8 CPM to other FB page owners to post the content you provide them.
If your website earns an RPM higher than $8 from Facebook traffic, then you can make a nice profit. In fact, in my experience, Facebook traffic is the highest paying traffic for display ads and $15 to $25 RPM is not out of the question. Therefore, this is a viable paid traffic option if going the more traditional routes don’t work for you.
11. Leverage your page for links and other opportunities
This is a more indirect method to make money with your Facebook page.
I’ve been propositioned with this method.
What this method involves is offering a website free traffic from your FB page in exchange of a link to your site. It’s a quid pro quo link building method with the hopes that the links will rank your site higher in the search engines and make more money.
This approach only works if you can drive meaningful traffic from your FB page.
You also need some very strong content to which your linking partner can link to. Just because you promise some traffic isn’t necessarily a good enough offer. They’ll want to link to excellent content.
If you have a large fanbase for one FB page, you can leverage that audience for new sites which can help you grow your new page fast for no cost.
This works best if the niches are related. If the niches are totally unrelated it can backfire because you’ll annoy your audience trying to jam something down their throats that they’re not interested in.
13. Promote products with affiliate links
You can post affiliate links directly on FB posts. I don’t think it’s a particularly effective way to monetize a FB page, but it can work for some pages and audiences.
Also, when done occasionally promoting something new or very, very cool, it can work.
I think a better method is sending your audience to a well written piece of content about the product on your website first… or a quiz.
However, we all don’t always have time for that and so the best you can do to bring new products to your audience’s attention is to post an affiliate link directly on your page.
14. Leverage your ninja Facebook skills by selling Facebook services/consulting
If you get very good at using Facebook for any particular task or promotion, be it buying ads, posting highly engaging posts, etc. you can sell your ninja skills or offer consulting that helps other businesses learn your skills. You can also create and sell a course.
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