If you’re in the blogging world, you would know that Google is completely unreliable when it comes to traffic. Because of this, it’s completely necessary to diversify your traffic sources. You could do this through Pinterest, Instagram. Newsletter, and notably, through Facebook.
With 2 billion monthly active users, Facebook is one of the largest social media platforms in the world. It’s a powerful tool for bloggers and businesses alike to reach larger audiences and generate income.
However, the method of generating traffic through Facebook is entirely different than generating traffic through SEO (search engine optimization). One expert on this topic is Andy Skraga, a successful entrepreneur and social media strategist who has achieved a lot of success through his websites and Facebook pages.
With that being said, I was lucky enough to have a conversation with Andy and pick his brain on how he has successfully built a blog and Facebook page that generates income. Let’s get into it.
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Tell Us About Yourself And How You Got Into Making Money Through Facebook
I started out as an SEO and website creator more than 20 years ago, made some side hustle money, and sold some small sites. But I’m very impatient by nature and the many months and years it takes for SEO to happen just never got me excited about this as a traffic source.
Fast forward a few years to when Facebook became popular, around the early 2010s I started noticing sites posting links to webpages on their Facebook fan pages (as they were known back then) and getting some serious likes and shares! I figured they must be getting some traffic from Facebook so I set about backward engineering what they were doing.
I got heavily into Facebook traffic primarily due to the speed of the traffic turnaround – no more waiting around months for SEO to start kicking in, you can get traffic in minutes from Facebook posts!
Now this was more like it I thought – a traffic channel for the chronically impatient. In my opinion, way easier than crafting long-form content for SEO, Facebook content tends to work better when it is short, loosely written and easy to read.
Around 2014 I read some articles relating to how well sites like Vira Nova and Bored Panda were doing from Facebook traffic alone, and I went all in on it. Within 6 months my viral sites blew up and I was finally able to live full-time off my website earnings, something I was never able to do with my snail-like SEO sites.
Facebook traffic was also an absolute blast, fun, exciting, and addictive and I became an avid stats-watcher. I got so much traffic from one simple post based on a viral YouTube video one time, that I crashed the server! The web hosting company kept asking me how I managed to achieve this number of visitors to my site in one go.
I didn’t think there was any way to achieve this level of traffic with SEO tactics and so kept at it.
How Much Have You Been Able To Earn Through Facebook?
I’ve made over half a million dollars just from organic Facebook traffic since 2014, and that was all pretty much passive income. I once spent a year renovating my house and barely touched the sites except for spending a few minutes each week scheduling up the posts.
My best month was over $20k and my best day was a couple of thousand. The last few years have been excellent for traffic so Facebook did not die out years ago, as I hear so often!
Based on your successful experience, what key steps would you recommend to someone just starting with their blog and Facebook page? Additionally, how would you advise them to select their niche?
Everyone makes the mistake of using their SEO-optimized content for Facebook and that just doesn’t work well. Facebook content needs to be short-form, quick to read and digest, and provoke some sort of reaction, be it emotional, humorous, or just entertaining.
Short listicles of say 10-15 images or paragraphs work well, as do emotional stories which can be found via YouTube or Instagram.
Also, you’ll need to add social sharing buttons and craft your titles and thumbnails to provoke a click from Facebook users, which is a whole art and science in itself.
Niches are pretty similar to what works with SEO except for very dry topics like legal and tools like calculators and lists.
Niches that work very well for Facebook are pets, animals, human interest, history, movie celebrities, food, cooking, travel, auto, hobbies, sports, spiritual, mystical, DIY, and quizzes – my favorite!
How Does Getting Traffic Through Facebook Differ From Getting Traffic Through Google?
A Facebook post that hasn’t gone viral has a half-life of around 3 hours, so you need to be posting very often. Most people post once or twice a day and expect huge traffic, but it doesn’t work that way.
You need to aim to create a lot of content and then schedule that content on to Facebook at least every 3 hours, to get any volume of traffic. And then cycle that same content back onto Facebook a month or so later.
So whereas with SEO you create content, submit it to Google and just wait around for traffic, Facebook requires you be post content constantly onto its feed. While this might sound like a lot of work, it’s very quick and simple using a scheduling app like Post Planner and a CSV file, which is exactly how I schedule loads of content across multiple Facebook pages for a week and that takes me all of 5 minutes.
If you want to get millions of visitors a month from Facebook like I do, you’ll need to scale up to multiple websites posting to multiple Facebook pages every hour, every day of the year.
Is There An Example Of A Facebook Page You Could Give Us That Is Successful With This Method?
The Dodo is a well-established player in the viral content market and you could do worse than model their methods and site content.
How Does One Begin To Grow Their Audience To Start Getting Traffic To Their Site?
The Facebook ads platform is the ONLY place to buy followers for a new page, never buy likes from 3rd party sources, even if it seems like a great deal.
You should be able to get page followers for around $0.07 in almost niche these days, US-based.
What’s The Biggest Struggle You See People Having With This Method? (And How Could They Avoid It)
Creating hundreds of pieces of Facebook content to post and crafting thumbnails and post titles that effectively draw people from Facebook onto their websites.
The best way to avoid these mistakes is to buy a course like my Facebook Traffic Blueprint and save yourself all the mistakes I made in the beginning!
With my courses and resources, you’ll learn the under-the-radar tactics I and other successful Facebook site owners use to make this method work so well for them.
Are There Any Tools You Recommend People Use To Improve Their Chances Of Success?
Research successful Facebook pages and public groups in their niche, and study which posts get the most engagement as these will get the most traffic as link posts.
You can do this just by using the search functionality in Facebook and looking through Pages, or with a dedicated Facebook research tool like Strevio.
What Are The Ways To Make Money Via Facebook Traffic? Is It Mainly Ad Revenue Or Do You Monetize In Different Ways?
I focus on the Facebook-to-website traffic model which has monetization methods similar to SEO sites, that is display ads like Adsense or Mediavine, or affiliate links and product sales from that traffic. I find this easy to understand and easy to pivot to other traffic sources like Pinterest as a bonus.
You can also monetize through Facebook’s new creator programs or sell products directly through your page such as apparel. These can both work well for certain niches and are certainly worth exploring as an alternative to the niche website model if that’s not your bag.
Tell Us How People Could Find You & Also Tell Us About Your Course
I started a website called hikeyourlikes.com way back in 2013 to talk about this Facebook traffic model and no one much was interested back then, so I put it on the back burner until last year when the HCU hit so many website owners started asking me about this method!
So that’s the place to go now for all things Facebook traffic-related; tutorials, resources, free viral content, and courses including my free 101 taster course and in-depth premium training The Facebook Traffic Blueprint, which covers every aspect of this exciting and powerful traffic channel!