Let’s continue with Michelle’s journey, showing how she built a series of popular publications generating millions of unique visitors monthly.
After speaking to dozens of publishers about their experiences in the last several weeks as a result of our first Live Case Study, we quickly learned and confirmed:
A huge amount of publishers lost the majority of their traffic from Google’s recent Helpful Content Update (HCU), despite having excellent content on their websites and investing their blood, sweat, tears, and first-born children to make these publications work and give Google what they thought it wanted;
Most of these publishers were overly exposed to Google as their main traffic source;
These publishers remain committed to making their websites work and earn money, and are sitting on a wealth of high-quality content that can be monetized.
Our team at Healthy Holistic Living (HHL), Infinity Engager and Publisher in a Box found ourselves in a very similar position following the launch of the last case study, where one of our main traffic sources to HHL dried up and traffic plummeted from the highs of 11 million unique hits a month. Thankfully, we were prepared for this by having started a strong base of new Facebook pages and email newsletters, with today’s case study focusing on what we’re doing on the Facebook side.
Despite our massive setback, ironically, this setback forced us to pivot harder, faster and smarter than before and we are now on track to doubling this mid-term goal. The main difference now is that we are spread across more platforms, more websites and more brands versus everything under one roof, which allows us to be more nimble and to also crack more partnership deals due to a larger number of assets under management. Sometimes short-term pain indeed creates beautiful longer-term growth!
If you find yourself in the same or similar position as us or these publishers, and even if you haven’t been completely wiped out by Google but still want a new traffic and income stream, we have good news for you!
Say what you want about ol’ Zuckerberg and his strange water-drinking habits and android-like mannerisms, he has built the most powerful traffic and income-producing platform in history. Let’s dive in as to why this is the case and how you can take advantage of it.
Facebook is the internet’s number one driver of referral traffic, period. There is no better platform from which to drive traffic to your website quickly and scalably;
Facebook is democratized. Unlike Google, which rewards giant publications and platforms like Forbes and Reddit but kills the little guys, Facebook has evened the playing field. You can start a new Facebook page today and be earning real money from it within a month;
Facebook works quickly. No need to sit around for months waiting to see if your Google rankings are going to climb or not; you get immediate feedback from Facebook and can drive traffic immediately;
You CAN make much more money from Facebook than from other platforms due to its speed and scalability. Yes, Facebook may have slightly lower RPMs/EPMVs than some other traffic sources, but the difference is that there are no limits with Facebook; you can create as many pages as you want, drive as much traffic as you want, and grow as fast as you want. It’s all in your control. If you’ve gotten to 100,000 unique visitors per month from Google in six months, you can get to 1,000,000 unique visitors per month from Facebook in the same period with the same level of investment;
There are many ways to earn income from Facebook. Between driving traffic to your website, making money from Facebook’s Performance Bonus revenue-sharing program, or earning money from your videos, Facebook allows you to earn in the way that works best for you and your publication.
You can re-use content from other platforms on Facebook and vice-versa. No need to start from scratch, if you’ve already built a website and have good content, you can re-use that same content on Facebook. Similarly, anything you build on Facebook, can and should re-use to help grow your other platforms. For example, if you create a video or Reel for Facebook, there’s no reason why you can’t use the same piece of content on your YouTube account or your website using Ezoic’s Humix.
You can use Facebook to grow all of your other platforms and to make more money from all your other traffic streams. Grow your Facebook audience super fast, then drive that audience to build your email list, and Pinterest following or to leverage better backlink deals for your SEO efforts. But remember, it all starts with Facebook, it’s your massive Facebook traffic that will buy you leverage in all of your business dealings as a publication!
If you don’t already have one, you will, of course, need a Facebook Page. We started a slew of new Facebook Pages in a wide variety of different niches to show you just how easy (and cheap) it is to build your following. Take a look at some of these Pages and how quickly they’re growing.
In each case, each page is producing more engagement and reach growth than other pages that are 10-100 times their size, and our team at Publisher in a Box was able to get each new follower down to $0.01 in cost and in some cases even less than that (compared to $0.10 to $0.15 per follower that many other Facebook experts are getting).
Case Study 1: Health & Wellness Facebook Page
0 followers to 21,000 in less than two weeks with an ad budget of $3 per day! This was our fastest-growing new page.
[The page has already grown to 30,000 followers since publish date]
Case Study 2: Ancient Egypt Facebook Page
0 followers to 40,000 followers in 2 months with an ad budget of $3 per day! One of our partners has a page about the Roman Empire, and that one is ultimately going to be gangbusters as well, and even more so. We’ve already had multiple posts with tens of thousands of engagements.
[The page has already grown to 45,000 followers since publish date]
Case Study 3: Christianity Facebook Pages
0 followers to 24,000 followers in 2 months with an ad budget of $3 per day! We’ve made five different pages in this niche, and they’re all growing like crazy, with engagement consistently higher than anything we’ve ever seen for a page of this size.
Case Study 4: Celebrity Facebook Pages
0 followers to 20,000 followers in 2 months with an ad budget of less than $3 per day! We’ve made ten different pages in this niche with our partner and they’re all also growing well, with some posts getting many thousands of engagements.
It doesn’t matter if your website is about fly fishing, the Royal Family, red shoes, blue dogs, green cats, or fast cars, you can find an audience for them on Facebook and can acquire that audience for a very low price.
When you set up your new Facebook page, the first thing you want to do is install Infinity Engager, our AI-powered, Meta-approved commenting application that will respond to every comment with a high-quality, personalized response. This way, once you start sharing viral content and people interact with your content, engagement and follower growth will be astronomically higher than without the app running.
For example, our Christianity page was chugging along with a few tens of likes and comments on each post before Infinity Engager was installed, and immediately after getting it set up, the page rocketed up to hundreds of likes and comments per post and doubled in size. We saw the same thing happen with our Celebrity pages and History pages. After seeing how much time and potential growth we missed out on, our rule now is to install Infinity Engager when we set up a new page.
[Look how our Ancient Egypt page took off after Infinity Engager was activated on it]
[One of our larger Health & Wellness pages is growing like crazy with the help of Infinity Engager]
No need to reinvent the wheel here - start by making a list of all the top most active pages in your niche and learn what they’re doing well. Chances are there are hundreds if not thousands of pages in your niche sharing viral content and, unlike Google, you can simply take or copy others’ content on Facebook and reshare it and make money from it (just make sure you’re not stepping on any toes).
Here’s what you should know and what to do when it comes to sharing and creating viral content:
The best way to grow your page is through viral content in the form of image shares (memes), posts, and videos - start by focusing on these content types, especially images, because they’re the easiest to reshare and recreate.
Research your competitors’ pages directly on Facebook or by using one of the many content curation tools out there that scour the most viral content on a page. We find the best approach is a mix, always starting with being directly on Facebook as that will give you the best insights possible as to what’s working and not working, and supplement that with one of the curation apps. We’ve used them all, including but not limited to Strevio, Buzzfeed, PostPlanner, and others, they don’t come cheap, but they’re often worth it (feel free to ask us which one is the best for you, but, again, always start with the native Facebook feed itself!).
While your page is picking up steam, post 6-12 times a day. Once you get above 10,000 followers, which shouldn’t take more than a week, bump that posting frequency up to at least 12 posts a day; the more you post, the better your chances of going viral, with posts getting hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of engagements even on very small pages. As mentioned before, you will see especially fast growth if you have Infinity Engager installed to help you supercharge the engagement growth and kickstart Facebook’s algorithm.
Here are some examples of posts we’ve put up that have done very well across many different niches, all on small pages that were started in the last few weeks or months, as well as more established ones:
Now that your page is growing nicely and you have viral content going out consistently, it’s time to start monetizing your page by driving traffic to your website! How? By taking your existing base of articles and making them Facebook-friendly.
Three types of formats do the best when driving traffic to a site, and we recommend you test out each one and mix them up:
In all the cases above, you can continue to use the exact same article that is on your website, with the main difference being you must create a viral frame, being the post format that appears on Facebook.
The secret to a viral frame that gets thousands of engagements instead of tens of or no engagements is a scroll-stopping headline (in all cases) and image (if you’re doing an Image+Comment share or Link share). All three images above are good examples of combining interesting headlines with captivating images.
You can use Chat-GPT to help you create amazing headlines, just drop your old headline into it and ask it to create a new version of the headline that is sensational, engaging, and captivating!
There are three primary ways to make money from Facebook, all based on steps 1-4 above. We recommend you combine all three options below to make the most money possible from your shiny new Facebook assets.
See step 4 above for instructions on how to do this exactly. And remember, follower count is no longer as important on Facebook as it used to be; it’s become very democratized. Some pages with 10,000 followers can earn as much or more money than pages with 1,000,000 followers, and some pages with 1,000,000 followers can earn more than pages with 100,000,000 followers!
[The earnings can add up quick with enough high-quality pages with the right viral content and the right tools boosting your engagement]
The Facebook Performance Bonus Program is Facebook’s revenue-sharing program. In this program, Facebook splits any revenue it earns from your posts with you—how nice, thank you, Mr. Zuckerberg! Whether you share images, text posts, or videos, you will get a chunk of the revenue Facebook makes, and it can add up quickly.
The Performance Bonus program is currently an invite-only program being rolled out to pages with over 2,500 followers and the highest engagement. We’ve had a few pages where, shortly after starting to boost page engagement with Infinity Engager, the pages were approved for the program shortly after.
Facebook is rolling this program out to more publishers of all sizes and more countries. Here’s what it looks like in action. The below are all just from one page, so imagine if you have several or a few dozen!
[The Performance Bonus payout already grew to $8,157.32 since first writing this days ago just from this one page]
[You can grow monthly revenue by learning from what works and doing more of that!]
It works the same way as the Performance Bonus program above the more engaging videos and reels you share, the more money they’ll split with you!
Our main focus is on expanding horizontally versus expanding vertically. Instead of growing as much traffic as possible to a single website, Facebook page, or email newsletter, we are focused on growing traffic to a broad range of online assets.
For example, it happens to be much easier to grow traffic to websites to a target of 1,000,000 visitors from 10 smaller Facebook pages versus a single giant Facebook page. The great thing about Facebook is that you can drive the traffic anywhere you want, such as to the most profitable or value-added stream you have in your arsenal like your newsletter sign-up, affiliate offers, sponsors, ad monetized website, or anything else you can think of.
We hope our little case study was helpful to you and that you can reclaim the revenue you lost from our Google overlords by switching to our tried and tested Android-owned overlord, Facebook.
Make sure to have your website properly set up to earn money from display ads like with Ezoic, and sprinkle in a few good affiliate offers while you’re at it. Then, off you go!
Infinity Engager: Automated, AI-powered comments for engagement hypergrowth
Publisher in a Box: Turn-key growth and management of Facebook and Email
Ezoic: Your ultimate partner for monetizing your website traffic
Written By: Michelle Toole
Michelle Toole is a co-founder of Publisher in a Box and Infinity Engager; companies developed to rapidly grow and monetize online publications. Her strategies, systems, and technology have generated hundreds of millions of unique visitors and millions of dollars in revenue. Contact her to learn how you can grow your publication's traffic by 1,000% to 10,000% in a matter of months just like in this case study.
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