Really caught the the the the online World by storm right now and that's kind of this the success that you and some other people are having with the Facebook is one of the easiest ways to make money online right now my earnings are Way Beyond what I expected Facebook ruses and The Meta monetization program are here and I'm actually teaching my 77-year-old dad how to do Facebook and he just started going virals that is Crazy quick fraction and a lot of money to earn from something so brand new so I think my first month I
made about 4,000 from my main Facebook page by the second month I think my main page made over $9,000 and my almost brand new P earned like $111,000 what are some tips to try to accelerate their ability to get invited into this program I found that like testing and measuring and trying different things is probably one of the Most important things to do are you leaning on vas or other types of sources to help you with this I have two pages that are completely run by vas and the one is the one that made $112,000
how many hours a day should someone realistically carve out hour maybe 2 hours um per day what are some things to to to look at to get unstuck some you know some different things to try to figure out like why isn't it working it's a great great question Um there's a little there's a few things you can do and one I all right all right welcome back to the niche Pursuits podcast my name is Jared bomman today we are joined by Brian Nagel with social buddy Brian welcome on board yeah great to be here big
fan of your podcast I've been watching and listening for a long time so I've learned a lot so hoping I can uh help share some learnings on mine as well I can't wait to have you here I was tell I was surprised to learn I kind Of feel like a talk show host right now it's like a long time longtime listener first time caller sort of scenario here definitely yeah uh I know for for you you were saying you haven't been on many podcasts before really excited to have you today we're talking about something that
is really caught the the the online World by storm right now and uh and and that's kind of this this the success that you and some other people are having with the Facebook bonus program So I hope you uh I hope you're rolling up your sleeves today because we we could be here for several hours we'll try to keep it to under an hour but uh I really on board yeah absolutely buckle up it's going to be a good one uh excited to share so you and I were joking before we hit recorded like um
you you have a lot of other online experience before you started dabbling in in this program I mean catch us up on on on your history your backstory you Know and kind of get us up to the point where where we start talking about the Facebook bonus program yeah I guess I'm a little OG I I started my career in uh 1999 so looking at like 25 years I don't feel that old but some days I do yeah um but yeah my brother and I started our first website in 1999 2000 era um it was
a local website called Philly tonight had um like where to go what to do in Philadelphia we had a local newsletter like one of your last guests we had the Local thing going and uh built it up to a pretty big company for us it was took about like five six years we got about $4 million a year in revenue and I mean I've been doing this so long there's I've seen a lot of successes a lot of adversity you know first start out with the do com bubble right so everybody was getting their websites
going and then all of a sudden they crashed and then we um we built up our site through all that had some success with The the local things we branched out to all these different cities and turned it into a cities tonight which was like Philly tonight and Denver tonight all these different tonights and uh we had some major brands as clients and then the financial crisis happens and we lost our biggest uh client which was probably three million of the $4 million a year so that devastated the business I'm like all right I'm not
putting my eggs in that basket like one basket anymore you Know um um so I took some time off I did I open a restaurant and bar if anybody watching this ever feels like they want to get out of digital marketing and open a restaurant or bar call me and I'm gonna talk you out of it is one of the hardest jobs in the world so I don't recommend it but um I've always loved digital marketing and but that background really helped me in the restaurant and bar industry and made it successful so I got
out that for like After like five years um jump back into digital marketing open an SEO agency manage clients uh started a social media agency called social buddy which is still a little active today and then uh and then Co hit so we lost all of our clients uh when Co hit for the SEO stuff most of them all the like the local businesses and things like that yeah so we just Dove like head first into Niche publishing like Niche website publishing we had some sites and then we just used Our SEO skills and just
grew it to like millions of visitors a month for most of the sites had a lot of success and uh we just kept uh you know dialing in on on our our strength and unfortunately put all of our uh our eggs in the Google basket and you know helpful content hit so then we got nailed there in September and you know kind of forced us to scale back our team and and then all of a sudden I'm like I really need to diversify all of our our channels we Already started investing a little in Social
but not as desperate I guess you would say and uh so finally rolled up my sleeves and jumped in there and I I started figuring out you Pinterest and and Facebook and started having a lot of success with it and it's kind of where we are now there's a lot going on I feel like a lot of people in the same boat uh I made all the Facebook groups and the forums so many people got devastated by Health content update so uh we're all Looking for you know ways to either either we quit and get
another job um working for someone else or you know we try to find ways to to you know save the hey everyone Spencer here founder of the niche Pursuits podcast last year the traffic to Niche pursuit. comom more than tripled with most of those gains coming from from Google in fact I finally hit the 1 million page views per month milestone in order to achieve this growth my team and I publish over 100 Articles a month the final step for each of those articles we build at least one new internal link to that article using
link whisper this helps index it faster and helps it rank better in Google this also helps us avoid having any orphaned posts in the future if you want to give your new articles the best chance possible you need to build a process around inter internal linking when you publish it only takes a few seconds with link whisper to get suggestions and Check the box next to the internal links you want they are all built automatically once you've made your selections no need to go into each article find a relevant sentence highlight the anchor text and
add the internal Link Link whisper does all this automatically once you've made your selection if you want to try out link whisper just head over to link whisper.com and use coupon code podcast at checkout in order to get $15 off so We're GNA get into all your Facebook successes um but I wanted to pause and ask you just one question about your your backstory because I I I think it would be helpful for a lot of people to hear the answer to this like especially for those people who this helpful content update is kind of
their first foray into you know having a business totally devastated you know there's certainly stories about people who had a great successful website and then got Crushed by the hcu and that's really demoralizing right but you've kind of had these sorts of things happen to you many many times in your career I just hearing about the dotc bust uh the losing your biggest client uh the restaurant uh you know process covid hcu like that's five I'm in one hand and you just continuously re regrew something new or doubled down on what was working um like
what how do you keep doing that how do you keep having the capacity to Bounce back and not get super bummed out or you know or kind of just give up on it yeah that's a that's a a great Point um even my parents are like man you're really resilient especially through all this adversity you know you've gone through really successful stuff you've got knocked down and I think that's the important part you know it's like you as an entrepreneur not everything's going to be perfect and you're going to get hit with you know some
issues whether It's legal troubles or you know competition or AI comes out and changes the game you know or Google updates I've seen so many Google updates I think it's just really important and for me I when helpful content hit I got obviously bummed you're making like the business is making like six figures a month and you have all these employees and everything um but you just can't Panic you know there's always you don't know what you don't know and I found that I've come out stronger after like a tragic event like losing a $3
million client uh the.com bubble Google updates Instagram updates whatever it might be it kind of you have to change your mentality a little bit to be like all right well there's probably stuff I haven't been doing that now I'm going to be forced to do and check out and for me it's just kind of like the stock market you know things go up they crash a little bit then they get stronger you Know a few months later a year later if you stick with it and you really care you know so I think don't give
up you know this is why hopefully some of the stuff you learn here extra money can come in help save the ship a little bit or keep the lights on and uh yeah just just don't give up amen love it absolutely love it um let's let's get into Facebook here so you have been experimenting with a lot of stuff maybe set the stage on what we're talking About today because I know the Facebook bonus program is you know for those of you listening who are kind of new to this like it's one of many ways
you can get traffic and get um earning you can get earning money from Facebook um and then I'd love to hear just maybe where you're at in terms of the results you're getting right now just to help set the stage for people so they can kind of get um an idea of the scope yeah absolutely so I think people are familiar with some Of the social platforms paying creators so you have like um YouTube is probably the most like knowledgeable for most people iar you post your videos they have AdSense share um Facebook has a
program called the performance bonus program they also have ways you can earn money from other things like videos on reals um so if you upload reals and they run some ads on it you can make some money out of that they have instream ads I believe if you have if you do live Videos but then they have this whole separate program called the performance bonus program which is based on like images and text and things like that so you don't have to do the silly Tik Tock dances to to earn some money and you all
have to have a video production crew go through all that so this is for like normal posting of like you know memes or just your food photos or anything you can post on Facebook it's really about um rewarding people who do that with Their Facebook pages you have to have a Facebook page and it's about reach and engagement so the more engagement the more reach you get with your post the more you can earn now the the thing about this and by the way again going back to like you don't know what you don't know
like I didn't know about this program and apparently it's been going on for since like I saw some screenshots from people I'm friends with like 2022 they've been doing this for 2023 Interesting yeah you I feel like I mean not to not to interrupt but I I feel it's exactly like the Amazon influencer program last year when Spencer and I were getting going on it it felt like such a new program that people starting to talk about but apparently it's been around for years so it feels the same with with this Facebook bonus program yeah
until something forces your hand to kind of figure this stuff out I think it's really important though I figured I Found it because I'm in some online communities and I also think I saw someone post on Facebook or maybe even Instagram of like a screenshot of like their bonus earnings you know they kind of hey here's where I made this month from Facebook I'm like what do you mean made Facebook I'm like now it's started to click I was like okay there's all these like pages on Facebook that have no links to websites so they
don't look like like Publishers like most of us That have a website and you know affiliate site whether or it's a Content site and you're trying to drive traffic to those sites I've seen all these like meeting pages that are look like they're getting tens of thousands of likes and shares like what's their motivation like why what makes them want to go on Facebook and just keep posting and post now it makes sense right so that I figured that out so once you start doing your research you realize that there's This Facebook bonus program they're
paying pages to um just post and but there's a there's a little catch there you have to meet a criteria to get in so that you have to be in certain countries and then there's uh you have to meet their monetization policies which they kind of vague and then you also um you know they're invited so you have to get invited to this thing and the the the invite criteria is kind of like a mystery box I no one can really explain If if they really a couple of things like instream ads they have criteria
you 10,000 followers you need to have like x amount of millions of views on your videos those things are pretty easy to understand with this performance bonus program it's like you're not eligible yet or you haven't been invited and there used to be a page you could click and say you're interested but that went away in the last month um but now I know people are randomly getting invited so We used to think it was like all right you had to have 10,000 followers and but then I know people are getting invited to this thing
that have 2,000 followers and you know they just started the page two weeks ago and some people have their page for four years and have 100,000 followers are not getting invites so it's kind of all over the place but I've kind of narrate down to a few things to get invited you have to be very active on it um you have to have some sort of Reach in engagement so if you're just posting every day and maybe once a day you're probably not going to get invited but if you're posting multiple times and there's some
engagement from your audience like there's a lot of likes and shares and activity all of a sudden you'll get this email that says hey you've been invited to participate um which is pretty cool so it took me a little while for my first one to figure it out and then once I got Into the program I started checking it every day I'm like I did I earn any money today oh how you know this is kind of cool and then all a sudden like one of my post went viral and I was like wow okay
let's see how much I earned on it and I was shocked it was like I think it had like 30,000 shares and likes on on the Facebook post and I looked in the the it tells you by post how much you can make your top forers it was like $1,000 this one post me wow wow so then I'm like all right then you get the itch you're like I want to start posting like crazy and I'm G to come up with all these ideas I was already focused on Facebook and trying to drive traffic to
my website but once you can see you can start making some significant dollars then you're like okay so I think my first month I made about 4,000 from my main Facebook page at the same time this whole thing started I realized you could have multiple Pages earning in this Program each one has to get invited so I went through the same program started up a second page I had some other pages that were part of my Niche site portfolio I checked them they were invited so I I I started them up but I didn't really
do a lot of posting on them but I started new pages and by the second month I think my main page made over $9,000 and my almost brand new page I started within 60 days it got accepted Into the or 30 days I got accepted into the program and with two month within two months the first month I I think it earned like $1,000 a brand new Facebook page so you know this is something that whether you have a a page that's been around for years in a niche site um you can spark that up
and get it going and start making some money if you get invited to this thing or you can just start a brand new page you don't even have to have a website by the way so That's kind of the most amazing thing you can just start a page right now so that is crazy quick traction and a lot of money to earn from something so brand new and um and so that's why this is such an enticing topic to have you to talk about like cats out of the bag on that one this is really
interesting and you know you're not the only one I I have a many friends and colleagues that are are are able to earn on this bonus program Spencer's Talked over the past month about almost exactly to your point Brian like an old Facebook page that he was posting to for other reasons got asked to be a part of the program and then he had a couple of posts go viral and that's when he was like oh my goodness I can see exactly how much I'm making it was thousands of dollars per viral post and that's
when he doubled down and started posting a lot more so very similar story there and so I just kind of want to validate that I mean maybe let's let's if we can let's let's start to kind of go through this program here and learn more from you in terms of what you've what you've learned let's um let's start by just focusing a bit on getting accepted so you talked about how it's kind of like a combination of followers and we'll call it engagement metrics um what are some tips that you have like very practical tips
for people who are sitting on a Facebook page maybe from an old Niche Site or maybe they are just going to start a brand new page like what are some tips to try to accelerate their ability to get invited into this program yeah sure um I have I have a little system whether some of these actually are working or not working I don't know it just works for me so I've done this probably six seven times now so one of the things I first do is you obviously have to have a have a page so
if you have an old page it's fine if you have a Lot of content on there great if you have if you want to start a new page start it up get your branding together whatever the niche might be put a bunch of posts on there for both old old and new pages I suggest running a page like campaign so you have the old school um Facebook you can invite people to follow your page and those are pretty effective it seems like everyone that's doing this right now that's that's like the number one one thing
that everybody across the Board is doing spending a little bit of money with Facebook and trying to get people to like their page because you do need a certain number of followers you do once you start yeah yeah once you start get like getting moving with your your engagement your Reach people start following you organically but to really give it a Kickstart to get to that certain point you should run a a face uh or page like campaign and I think how much you want to run it really depends I'm usually around like $5 to
$10 a day but if you really want to scale it up fast um you could spend $100 a day on this stuff and get a lot of followers the key is you want to make sure that your campaigns are probably generating under like 10 cents or less I hear a lot of people getting like some people getting like one cent per page like and obviously you can put a lot of budget behind that but realistically five to 10 cents is good if you're looking at like 20 30 cents a like it's probably your your ad
or your targeting is off so we could go into like an show just about the the targeting and try to optimize ads but run a page like campaign and that's the first thing I would definitely do the other things would be pumping out content so not just one post a day you know you should be doing at least six posts per day so schedule them out during normal business times or when you think your audience would be online But try to get some volume on your post the most important thing about that is because you
need to start testing what works with your audience and I found that like testing and measuring and trying different things is probably one of the most important things to do how do you know what's going to work well the first thing you should do is probably research so like look at other pages in your Niche and see who's successful right now I was blown away by Looking at some of the because we're we're in SEO most people that I know started this with SEO and then they jumped into Facebook so with SEO you look at
like the biggest players in your Niche and you'd be surprised to see some of these like giant companies like owned by Dash Meredith you know like some of these big Publications are really doing poorly on Facebook they they just don't really have the the platform figured out and then like yeah and then there's Someone in their basement you know in some part of the world that has a a niche page no website and they're crushing it on Facebook so I think you have to really look at a whole bunch of different pages see who's getting
thousands of likes thousands of shares start going through it and figure out what it is is it the size of the image what type of post so there's there's all those kind of things and then um I also noticed it was weird I wasn't getting Invited to the program and I'm like let me just post some videos to see what happens and my main page is in the cocktails Niche so I just made a cocktail video of me like poured a drink and I just put it up on on the page and um and then
within like a day or two we got invited I thought it was weird so I did it with another page of mine and the same thing happened again so I'm like oh wait I mean there I'm not really trying to do the video thing but just adding The video might have sparked something in the algorithm to get us the invite I have no idea but that's just one thing I noticed I put a couple like even if it's like stock videos up there just to see what happens um they also have like with your pages
you can do this like weekly challenge or like levels that you can know unlock badges I started playing that game a lot just to unlock badges like post five times a week and oh you know uh do like a certain amount of Comments and all the and I noticed once I started doing that with a few of my pages they got invited right away so maybe there's they it's like they want you to be engaged with the page and there's certain things you need to unlock in order to get into this program there's probably people
will tell you they don't do any of that stuff and get invited anyway but these are just some things that I do well I yeah I'm glad you're Shar like I'm glad you're sharing it and people can you know take it for what it's worth like Brian's on here he's got a bunch Pages uh accepted and he's just sharing things he's done doesn't necessarily mean they're causal or corollary but these are things you've done that have kind of created some traction for you absolutely yeah so uh let's see got to have a page got to
have a certain number of page likes or followers uh two questions there if I could uh if I could Ask about that there's likes and there's followers is there a difference and doesn't matter and then when it comes to creating a campaign to generate likes are you concerned at all with any targeting I know you said you could do an entire Hour podcast on that fair enough but just if someone's going to go press the the generate likes uh you know kind of button and set that up like do they need to Target us traffic
or do they need to Target um interests in Their specific Niche their Facebook page is about that's a great question so I Target us traffic just that's always been my audience but maybe you're in a uh approved country like uh UK Australia I I don't even know Spain or something like that so it really depends on your Niche but I would Target what you think your Niche is um what you've always been targeting but us seems to always pay better for RPMs on ads and other things so maybe there's better earning Potential in one of
those you know in the US versus somewhere else um so I I would definitely Target us if you C if you can and then I would also experiment with the rest of the ads like there's been ads that I run that I Target the spe like the interest the niche interest and then I also don't T Target anything and I just say like 18 to 65 plus us and so I I think you that there is some there's some metrics there that I could probably say one works better than the Other maybe slightly but I
really think it comes down to your your your ad so keep it short simple have an image that matches your Niche that entices people to like wait what is that and then they want to follow your page um the other thing you can do and I don't know if a lot of people people know this if you look at a Facebook page that's doing really well and you click on the about there's a little thing that says page transparency so you go to the page Transparency part and you can see if that page is running
currently running ads and under that there is a ad library that you can see the ads that they're running right now so if you see a page in your Niche that's doing really well they might be running these page like ads and you can just see the ad they're running and maybe some what copy it or or know something just like it you know obviously use your own images and copyrights and things like that but you Know use it as like a kind of template for yours and test it out but I always think test
run like five different ads test everything um but as long as you're under like five you know 10 cents per per page like you're good to go and to answer your other question about likes versus follows I don't know why Facebook has both of them it's kind of weird like it's like the weirdest thing I had the conversation the other day I'm like What's the difference between why do you Have likes and why do you have followers I think people who like your page also follow but followers aren't likers because I think what happened is
once they did the feed where they put the little Link in your feed if you're like because a lot of your um your content might be shown to non-followers and when they suggest a post to you there's a little follow link next to that post I guess that's how you get a lot more followers than the likes and likes are Usually I've only see mostly likes through the like campaigns okay yeah doesn't sound like it matters anyways I think I've just always wed I figured I have expert here I'll ask him I think proog gamers
are like we're not touching it we're just going to leave it as is code too messy it's too Legacy we're just gonna leave it exactly um and just for clarity like you said hey through you know as a as an example you're like you were talking about $5 a day as a Good amount maybe to throw it at a likes campaign if you're getting five cents that's a hundred likes per day I mean you'll be at a th in 10 days you'll be at 3,000 in a month like that's a very reasonable amount of time
for people to get their head around in terms of for a $5 a day you can be at least within the range of requirements there within call maybe a month or less yeah and I think if for me I'm going to test a new page and I want to ramp it up like $100 a day And see how fast I can get this thing invited um or not right so it might have 10,000 um follows and not get any invites we used to think there was a 30-day period like that the page had to be
at least 30 old I still think that might hold true but again there's probably outliers that say I started the page last week and I got invited so right um so no matter what you're doing I and I around like three to five and around that 10,000 Mark somewhere you'll Get the invite if you're doing all this stuff we're talking about today well let's talk about the second component of it which is engagement and I guess my first question on engagement is it feels like Niche Niche selection is really important here um you talked about
the DOT mer sites the type of content they post not getting nearly as much engagement but how much of Engagement is dependent on picking a niche that actually has the potential for virality For the type of stuff that will work well on this bonus progr I think there's two two ways to look at it there's two types of people that might be interested in doing this the the first type of person is someone who already has a website they have a niche so your Niche is basically already decided for you if you want to help
your current business so obviously folk if you're in the weddings and n or the you know uh food blogger Niche you know stick stay in Your lane and focus on that um it really I think it does help to have like a an affinity group that really likes something all the time all year round um I have a wedding website that we were working on for a long time affiliate content things like that um I have not done a Facebook page for that I just don't know if it's the right Niche for Facebook it is
amazing on Pinterest it does extremely well on Pinterest but I I don't know if there's an audience that Is really into weddings all year round except for like wedding planners and things like that um but most of the time for like weddings people are searching for what are the best fall wedding colors right and so they're planning a wedding they're probably in that mode right now I don't know if it's someone you would Target on Facebook have a Facebook follower for a while BR the wedding Niche I haven't tested or even researched and I should
the like um Financial niches you know so how is like do Meredith like they have Investopedia and there's like nerd wallet and the points guys and like those type of websites I wonder they might be doing well on Facebook Maybe not maybe it's something that people want financial information or tips and things like that but I find the the food Niche is incredible so if you're a food blogger um the Facebook Niche is great for you uh we have cocktail websites so those do Really well um I have a a fishing website was a an
affiliate site uh my dad and I started like 10 years ago um and I'm actually teaching my 77y old Dad how to do Facebook and he just started going viral so um I taught him everything he's doing it and his pages are getting like tens of thousands of likes on each post now so um so it can work across a lot of niches I think like most of the niches if you already got into like affiliate marketing or Niche Websites you know publishing you probably already have it figured out do you ever get stuck in
your business and wish you had someone you could turn to for Solutions well I think you should consider joining the niche Pursuits Community you'll get weekly calls with experts on growing a successful online business and you'll also get assigned a small Mastermind group where you can solve your business problems as well as share your wins for a limited time I'll Let you try out the niche Pursuits Community for just $1 go ahead and use coupon code podcast at checkout in order to get your first month for just $1 again that's coupon on code podcast go
to community. nitp pursuit. comom today and see what it's all about and maybe I'll see you on our call next week thanks a lot yeah I'm trying to think same examples like if you were on like a tax website like maybe that wouldn't go very viral but but at the same time like He said until you test it who knows um and I think your point about doing some some research is a good one like you know you can go out there and see if there are other Facebook pages that are successful in your Niche
um and go and try to you know undo some of the things that they're doing well um let's talk about the content like what type of content should people be posting you're saying got to post a lot I think you said six times a day from my notes you Know that's good range to be in that's a lot of content a lot of people listening are in the SEO heads Space six posts a day you know I think there's a big transition that has to happen from SEO to Facebook in terms of your mindset your
approach but walk through what that content looks like what that production schedule looks like any tips you can share along that line yeah abely absolutely um I'm going to relate this at first to the cocktail blog that I Have so when we were doing SEO it was all about roundups and roundups did the best in in Google search they also had higher RPM so we were very focused on like what are the top 10 pineapple vodka cocktails and then we would list out the top 10 cocktails um for us that doesn't resonate as well with
our audience on Facebook and we will put that out there get some likes and comments and stuff like that but um we found that the individual recipes of those cocktails Themselves do extremely well especially if they're like crazy ingredients or weird names um we just had one that went viral because that hu Tua girl that uh was like crazy you know that is internet famous now everybody in the world knows her um we during that whole thing when I saw it like ramping up a little bit we uh I talked to one of our bartend
we have actual bartenders that make these drinks so um my business partner is a bartender and he he um well he owns a Bar so he he made a drink called the htu whatever it had like a banana and some cream of coconut some other things pineapple juice all this stuff and it was it was pretty funny so we posted that and that got like a 100,000 shares within like four days it was crazy oh my gosh yeah so it went completely viral um but if I if we posted like an oldfashioned everybody knows what
that is you know and those don't get any track at all so we just like stop doing It but I think it's really about like you said changing your mindset you know keywords are one thing yeah people might be like hundreds of thousands of millions of people might be looking for a recipe for an oldfashioned through Google because they you know they maybe forget the the exact ingredients and stuff like that but if you put a picture of an oldfashioned on your Facebook page everybody's like I know what that is like I don't care um
but if you put Something like you know I don't know just like Not Unusual I would say um or really uh exciting for the person who wants to do something new that's where you start getting a lot of traction on things and it's really all about shares I think I feel like the more people tagging their friends in it and sharing it rather than likes um that's when things start going viral to talk about post types I think you mentioned this maybe even as well traditionally what we Would do as as seos we would and
Publishers and this is what the- merediths are doing and why they're not successful most people just do what's called a link post and again there's going to be outliers some people I know are doing wildly successful results with this stuff but for the most part link posts don't work as well in most nich niches because the link post is like you take the URL you put it in your Facebook page it pulls in the featured image and Like the the um meta description and things like that it's kind of like the the easy button for
Facebook you know you can Syndicate that for your blog and it's kind of easy to do but I've noticed that I did that for years and and nothing really worked on Facebook and that's why I was like man Facebook just doesn't really have it so we didn't pay a lot of attention to it it wasn't until one day I I accidentally I got took like one of our best pins from Pinterest and It was like the tall version against all Facebook's guidelines like if you do a Blog if you do a search on Google and
say what size image should you post on Facebook you'll get like all right you should only do squares and Landscape on Facebook post and I found that to be completely wrong like that is absolutely wrong the ones that do the best are the ones that take up more real estate on the scroll and you'll still get these images that are the the taller version So like a portrait size version doesn't really get cut off as much and I even did the pins that are like the 1500 tall by a thousand wide and they went viral
and that's where I started figuring out wait maybe it's the image size I'm listening to all like the blogs out there that you read on the first page of Google results and they're all wrong so I started testing that and then that's when I really started figuring out okay look let's look at some of the other Sites or pages that are doing well they had the tall images so I'm like oh okay and then I started saying all right do they have text on the image do they have how much text and where is the
text and what colors are doing well so I think that's the kind of mindset you need to have is like all right start looking at like the my dad always said this the devils in the details right so there's all these like little details you need to look at all the successful posts and Figure out what's working that you see your own successful post and ones that fail start taking notes and then start doing more of the ones that are successful and less of the ones that are fa right and I think it's such an
important point we we had um we had Andy scragga on um a while back a little while back and uh he talked a lot about Facebook and how to drive traffic to your website from Facebook lot of the strategies are somewhat similar have Overlap but this is the bonus programs all you don't need to drive people off of Facebook it's all about keeping people on Facebook and you get paid because of the virality literally the number of people that end up seeing your your your posts right so um I think if you're wondering if there's
some distinction between that interview and this one some similar things but the the difference here is you're not trying to Get people off of Facebook in order to make money I think it's a a bonus bonus right uh I think if you depends on where your mind is first if you're trying to drive traffic to your your website and you're able to do that but at the same time you're able to increase engagement and earn money through Facebook now it's like you get at the best of both um but you do not need a website
there are people that I know that have pages of zero links in their in their posts and They're making tens of thousands of dollars a month have millions of likes per month and they're just posting memes like I wish my like high school teacher Could See Me Now right like I I just post memes all day and I make tens of thousands of dollars you know it's like you it's crazy so um I I just feel like there there's something for everybody if if you're into stuff like if you have and I think you mentioned
this I maybe didn't answer it but you know there's a You have to post six times a day or 12 times a day how do you get all this content there's there's a lot of ways to get content I do not recommend stealing people's content right um people steal my content all the time we have custom designs we do um I use like either a VA to that does designs for me or sometimes fiber gigs or even I do a lot of Designing myself but there's all these people stealing my images and posting on their
page and getting they're getting Tens of thousands of likes using my stuff and I can report them and they get their page like basically shut down U or they lose their monetization that's how you can violate the monetization policy so I don't recommend taking people's content but you can take the ideas of the content right um so see what's working for other people like if you're in the food Niche and you see that like uh garlic parmesan chicken wings worked really well for some we'll make it you Know and take a picture of it or
you might already have a picture of it I think for seos we have probably have lots of content on our websites especially if we have a Roundup if you have a Roundup on your page that has um like 15 items in the Roundup you should probably be able to use 15 images from that Roundup plus the featured image that you've had so now there's 16 pieces of content on Facebook so I you repurpose some of your old SEO stuff That you spent so much time making and now using and you can add a link in
there if you want to and drive people back to that article um or however it fits your Niche you know don't add any links so you don't want to let's talk about how you're creating the content you know uh what tools you're using um you know uh one of the first things that comes to mind for me is I'm like okay I'm not a very funny guy like I laugh at the memes but I never think Of them like how do I come up with 12 funny memes per day when I can hardly think of
one right now at the top of my head um where are you going to create this content what are you using how are you kind of coming up with it good question again I'm like looking at what else is successful on other Pages um so I saw we we started a page um about let's tequila and we noticed in the tequila Niche that people responded pretty well to like funny tequila posts And weeks we started looking at you know you can ask chat GPT give me some funny tequil quotes and stuff like that it's usually
kind of garbage unless you know really know how to use chat GPT and fine-tune the the prompts the other thing you can do is like most of these funny tequila quotes or fishing quotes or anything if you're going to do that type of post they're already been said like you're they've been used for 10 you know years 15 20 100 years whatever so We just go to all the main sources you can Google it and go to Google Images see what post are out there for these type ofula memes or fishing memes um you can
go to Pinterest it loaded with ideas over there uh look at other Facebook page pages but then put your own unique spin on it right so we would take some of these quotes and create like a um either take a original picture of ours for um like a margarita and or just have like a obvious like AI um image and then You would put like uh it's margarita degrees outside you know because it's so hot and we put that on one and it was like 50,000 shares was crazy because it was like Heatwave and 90
something degrees outfit so like you know you get those ideas and that was somewhere somehow we found that we just put it into a spreadsheet and you know we're one of our vas is just collecting this these like tequila quotes all day long and I'm sure there's whiskey quotes and Baca quotes and that's our Niche you know then there's probably you know there's definitely fishing quotes my dad's do a lot of the the fishing memes and fishing quotes so that's working out well um and just keep testing it you know test different backgrounds you know
so if you put the you on a light background or dark text dark background all all kind put an image in the background depends on what image it is you know there's there's a Lot of things just don't steal that's probably the the biggest advice it sounds like a lot of this maybe once you get a process down could really be done by someone on your team a VA somebody else like you could really process this out um how much are you leaning on vas or other types of sources to help you with this we
um I think we have a team of five right now so our team used to be 20s something before help full content update and um now we have about five People so we have research one person do a research someone doing canvas so you talk about tools we use canva a lot so canva is a great tool and if you pay for canva pro this is what is amazing they have you have access to their stock photo library so if you I'm I'm sure you can find any image in there that you want especially like
with cocktails if we didn't have a cocktail that we made ourselves or had an image up you could type type in whiskey sour there's 20 Whiskey sour um cocktails in there the images that you can use as part of canva pro pull it right into your image editor put the the name the text whatever you want on there and then just boom put it right to Facebook C is a great tool for that so vas yeah I think what's important is if you're familiar with working with vas or training anyone they're and you're the subject
matter expert like like me I figured this Facebook thing out how can I train a VA How to do this and and it's been a painful process you know like especially because vas are for me are not in the US they're based in the Philippines for me um so they're not really familiar with liquor as much as you know I might be or um some of the the the industry kind of stuff cocktails and mixers and you know what what the text should look like and all that kind of stuff so um there's going to
be a learning curve there but what I do is I just create videos and Just kind of walk them through step by step with like here's how you create an image here's how you do research here's how you create an image here's how you post here's how you track stuff and um use the tools you know for other tools we use um we use the Facebook uh planner to schedule out some stuff we also use a tool called stro which is really I love it um has Intelligence so you can load in all the competitor
pages and see what their most popular stuff is over the Last month year whatever it shows you all the data um and you can even schedule there the other big thing is they allow you to do a uh a comment the first comment so when you post we like putting the link in the first comment I heard Andy talking about this on your show too um it I find that that is getting we used to put it in the caption and we're like oh I think um Facebook throttles down you reach if you're putting too
many links in there or put a Link in the caption you're reaching your engagement slower but we find that putting the link in the first comment doesn't really have a negative effect on it and we see a lot of traction with that so um vas are only going to be probably 80% as good as you are on things but at least if you can teach them the systems and process and the most important thing is devils in the details give them constant feedback always watch their work and make sure That you're just managing it properly
but yeah AB I have two pages that are completely run by vas and the one is the one that made $112,000 or $111,000 in the month let's say someone dives into this and puts a little money towards page likes uh post six to 12 times a day does their research looks into what works looks at Pinterest looks at Google Images looks at other Facebook pages puts together six to 12 posts per day Many of them memes many of them maybe referencing individual posts or individual things on their their their website let's say after a month
or two they're haven't been invited yet to the bonus program they're not getting a ton of engagement on their posts maybe they're getting a couple likes a couple shares a few comments but nothing that would indicate a high level of Engagement what are some things to to to look at to get unstuck some you know Some different things to try to figure out like why isn't it working it's a great great question um there's a little there's a few things you can do and one I and again it's correlation right so um I've had pages
that aren't doing what I thought they would be doing and I look back at my processes I'm like oh I left one thing out you know there's like this one one thing and or something I didn't think was a part of the process that Actually end up being a part of the process why did this page not work well well I was engaging with some of my audience right so I would when people comment or ask question I would just go to like their comments or I'm just posting and checking things I'm commenting back I
think you need to still engage you need to spend a little bit of time and engage with your audience just to show Facebook you're not just like posting posting posting And not contributing to community so that might help the other thing that I find is rather powerful for me that again people are probably say I don't do this at all but um I found my fishing page was doing okay and it wasn't really taking off it already got accepted in the program but the engagement just wasn't there and I was like man this thing should
be doing much better than it is again my dad was running it so I didn't want to like just jump in but he Went on vacation La two weeks ago last week and I had to kind of take over a little bit for him while he's away and I realized that I didn't teach him that for everybody that reacts to your posts you can invite those people to follow your page I don't know if you've seen that before but on the Meta Meta has like the business. face.com if you go to that it's the meta
suite and you can manage your page from there and you can see all your stff so you have your ads You can get from there your your inbox your comments all that stuff but there's a little thing on the homepage of that that you scroll down it's like you can invite your personal friends to follow your page but or you can invite people who have engaged with your content and there's a limit of about thousand per day but I've done this religiously every day on my most successful Pages where I just go in and I
click you know invite invite invite and you can invite up to a Thousand people per day and it sends everyone an invite saying I don't know what the actual like language is but it sends them something say you reacted with this page you you did something follow them and I feel like you get some followers back but it increases the engagement somehow um and that's what happened with the fishing page we started doing that and there's two ways to do it there's one like a that it's like an easy way to do it which if
You're not doing it at all do this there's another way to go to individual posts you can like invite people like by just ta ta um I don't know I try both and they both seem to work but my fishing page took off like I started doing it four days five days in a row and on the fifth day one of our posts got 10,000 likes and then the next day 20,000 on a different post I was like what the heck is going on here and that's the only thing I did Different so I don't
know I think just being involved like just really taking advantage of everything with the Facebook page it's not like SEO where you get an article up there and then you move on to the next one you don't have to worry about that article for a year to update it or so you need to be you need to be involved it's a lot more time consuming there's a lot more work but if you can train a VA how to just do your Likes every day for you which I have Then you don't have to worry about
how many hours a day should someone realistically carve out I'll say per page let's assume people are going after you know one page like what does this look like on a daily basis because it does sound to your point like you got to this isn't set and forget this does involve daily posting daily interaction you can schedule that those posts out but you got to create the post there's some daily interactions you just talked About that will help like what kind of time whether it's per day per week should people kind of anticipate landing on
um both with themselves or maybe if they want to use a VA yeah I think in the beginning you're going to spend a lot of time on it just because you're learning so you you need need to spend time on it figure out does this work does that work and constantly be involved um right now if I just had my one page and I was only spending time On that I think I could spend like an hour maybe two hours I really wanted to load up a calendar of stuff um per day so that's it
an hour a day and it'd be fine okay good it's a great Benchmark I don't make sense first couple months first month whatever it is it's going to take you ought to figure it out but with everything in life right um hey let's talk earnings a bit um because it is this nebulous cloud of my content goes viral I get Checks great but like what correlations have you picked up in terms of how much money people can expect to make like is it I'm trying to think in terms of what we understand about content that
generates income via ads on our websites right and like certain niches perform better in terms of RPMs than others um uh but we're used to kind of an RPM metric in terms of per thousand visitors we drive we get paid a certain amount like how do we get our minds Around um how much we're going to make from virality or is there any science that you've seen to it yeah there's kind of like a black box because there's no real metrics um you do get to see how much you've earned you can see how much
their top performing posts are earning but I've seen some stuff like where it's a posted well and let's say had 20,000 shares and made a th000 bucks and then we'll have another post that does 40,000 likes and shares and makes $800 so I'm Like what the heck's going on like why did this one outperform the other one yeah and there's probably a number of reasons for that I mean um by Niche I I'm just going to take like our RPMs and if you use medine rap if whoever you know you probably know know that like
certain niches make more money than other niches right well that probably plays into this as well uh certain countries make more than other countes so if you're your post goes viral in India that's like really low RPMs and advertisers aren't targeting it so you might get really low uh results but if it goes viral and it's a us-based audience and it's in the financial Niche you know you're probably going to make some money out of it I think I'm just making assumptions here but and there's probably fluctuations too like in May my earnings were huge
they were like I I couldn't believe how much we were making off this stuff and in June they dipped a Little bit even with like the same amount of um reach and engagement although I did go on vacation so I probably stepped back a little bit but then um now in July they're a little lower because same thing happens with like media Vine and ad rates and stuff like that like the the first month of the quarter is usually low and then July is also the first month of the half second half of the year
and advertising budgets get squashed in like the first Couple weeks while they try to ret tune their budgets and all that stuff so I'm just thinking that like it's following kind of the same pattern you know like May June or high and then July is going to be low and then fourth quarter Holly everything's really high like it it was last year so um I hope that answers your question no that does yeah well I mean all that makes sense and I hadn't even unpacked like all the Nuance behind every post you have that goes
viral well Where did it go viral what was the content about what are the ad rates at that time just generally speaking um I mean there's so many factors that Mak sense why yeah you know if you did a viral meme about soccer in Brazil it's going to pay Michael really viral because soccer's so popular in Brazil but might not pay as well because the ad rate you know it's like there's so many factors that go into it so that makes a lot of sense yeah I just know when Things go viral you make money
so your your goal is to to don't overthink it make sure you just I I would say just pump out content you know is going to go viral and I think this is just me where just conspiracy theory here but I feel like each page has like a um some sort of Engagement score on your page if you're constantly putting out low quality content just to put out content I feel like Facebook knows it it kind of related to your old Authority score on On SEO right yep so if your quality score is low like
you're probably not going to get a lot of reach in their going to show you to a small batch of people and that's it it's going to kind of die out but I have my on my main cocktails page we had that htu uh uh post that had 100,000 shares a maybe even more and since then the momentum's been so high that anytime I post anything it it's getting like a thousand likes and shares almost like almost the Majority of the stuff is going viral of some some point point but like if your score if
your trust score your engagement score whatever it is is High because you put out great content that resonates with your audience and they engage with it a lot then you're constantly going to get these viral aspects to you know maybe starting to wrap things up here like what can you do beyond the bonus program with a page like this have you done more with any of The pages that you've created that are part of the bonus program and we touched on a bit earlier like you don't need to drive people off of Facebook for this
concept to work but how is how how could this layer into um other areas that you can generate income and drive traffic with this concept playing out properly yeah it's great a great question um so a few things one I'm also crating on trying to grow my newsletters so there's um There's it's interesting I found like a little just hack that when people scroll over you in your page name in the feed there's a button that you I think most people know there's like get called to action button you can put on your Facebook page
I put like I switched that to uh I think by default it's message and he uses the Facebook Messenger I switch that to sign up and I put it to my newsletter landing page and my newsletter subscriptions like tripled um So that helped out a lot there so I'm getting thousands and thousands of newsletter subscribers per month just by doing that um I am also in the Amazon influencer program but not doing the the videos yet or anything like that but we are putting so a lot of people ask like when we post pictures where
where'd you get that GL glassware and I'll put in the comments like oh here's the Amazon link for that um and we sent them to our Amazon store so using affiliate links is Great um using the uh the the newsletter subscribe I think there's a crossover between Pinterest and um and Facebook so stuff that I saw was working well on Pinterest tried it on Facebook and it worked well and then later on Pinterest started like kind of flattening out plat telling a little bit uh we were pumping out the same type of image all the
time we change things up a little different on Facebook so I said let me try some of the Facebook stuff on Pinterest right And then boom Pinterest took off again so it's like there's some you know you if you coordinate properly with all of your creatives you can really test and measure things across any final thoughts anything we didn't cover I'm looking over our agenda which was long by the way folks if you're wondering and um we got through a lot of it but anything we missed or any big highle points that you want to
kind of wrap things up for people um as we kind of start to bring This thing to a close yeah absolutely so the one thing we didn't touch on was going Beyond just one page all right so especially if you're in in a niche I'll just relate to cocktails for now because that's the big one I'm in we have our main page which our brand it's my bartender if you want to check it out um but we also decided that we have such in Affinity groups towards specific Spirits so like there's people that are really
into tequila people that are really into Bourbon and whiskey other people that are into vakas so why shouldn't we have multiple pages and set up Pages for those specific groups so Sub sub Niche basically and so we have our branded page which is our our bartender page that has everything covers all all types of liquor and spirits and stuff and then we have uh we set up a tequila page and a vodka page and a whiskey page and those are doing extremely well and we're generating bonus income on that but We're also layering in links
to our main website it's not the primary focus of those those are more set up for the bonus program but we do sneak in some you know post to try to drive traffic to my my bartender site so you know that if you're in a dog Niche you know you have your dog page maybe have a page for pug golden retrievers you know if you're in uh fishing you might have like a fishing page but then trout fishing or saltwater versus freshwat you know like so have Multiple Pages if you can scale it it's all
about scaling right so um if you're going to dedicate some time to it you're going to train some vas start testing the new pages with your training processes that's what I did with the tequila page I was like here's what worked on the main one can we do this with the tequila page and it it worked just as good or even better because it was a small Niche group makes total sense makes total sense I mean that's a Tried and true strategy a lot of people will be familiar with from website creation you know yeah
but it sounds a lot harder on websites and a lot easier to get that sort of scale here yeah um Brian what what do you where where can people kind of follow along with what you're doing as it relates to the bonus program maybe learn more you know what do you have for people to be able to take advantage of yeah so I have um I have a website called social buddy.com And I have a lot of like Facebook tips Instagram stuff going on there you can check it out um it wasn't my agency website
uh years ago we got out of the agency World um but we just launch a course to uh train people on how to do this Facebook stuff basically I took all my training materials and everything I do to teach my vas and wrapped it up into an accessible course step by step on how to do all the stuff we're doing here so you'll be able to access that if You go to social buy.com okay very good we'll include a link to that in the show notes uh I love talking about this I just you know
we've been talking about on the news section of the podcast over the last couple months just different ways people are Reinventing themselves specifically coming out of a lot of the problems that we've had with driving traffic from Google right like and the reinvention and so many different people discovering new ways of getting in front Of people and getting their stuff in front of people this is just an exciting thing that you kind of discovered and came on to share about thanks for sharing all your tips today I've learned a ton I'm sure a lot of
people are going to be really inspired by this yeah absolutely I'm very happy to share I'm glad I could sh be back well thanks Brian good to have you on after all the years of listening I appreciate you coming on and uh until we talk again Thanks so much all right thank you hey everyone thank you so much for listening to the niche Pursuits podcast I just wanted to remind you that if you are ready to start building smarter faster and easier internal links you should check out link whisper you can get $15 off link
whisper when you use the coupon code podcast at checkout head over to link whisper.com and use the code podcast in order to save $15 thanks again for listening
