[Journey] Growing 100,000 Page Likes

[NullFoobar]

Hello BHW!

This is the beginning of my second journey attempt to making some coin via IM. This journey is different from my last in that I am straying away from eCom and will be pursuing CPA offers and similar things later down the line. This journey will also be different in the sense that I am really starting with smaller goals and will work my way up as I gain experience and continue on the journey.

I eventually plan to get on other platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, etc. and I will also have my own website eventually. But for now, I seriously focusing on Facebook!

My pre-end game goal, before really trying to monetize or anything like this, is to grow my page to 100,000 likes.

I plan on growing my account 2 ways:
1. Posting high-quality content to groups
2. Facebook Ads for Page Likes & Post Engagement

The two KPIs I will be watching, and hope to see rising in order for this part of my journey to be considered successful, are the page likes and weekly impressions from posts.

I literally started this page last night and as of now I currently have 27 page likes.

My Page Like Milestones are as followed:
100 Likes
1,000 Likes
5,000 Likes
10,000 Likes
25,000 Likes
50,000 Likes
100,000 Likes

The overall idea is to grow a strong Facebook page first, and then use the page to try and grow my other channels, such as YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and the traffic of the website once it's up and running.

I hope to complete this journey by the end of 2017 so I can start the new year strong when I start to try and monetize this page and grow my other channels.

Going to try the group posting for a few days. If the likes are slowly growing, I will be buying some ads.

 

[DentalMidget]

Good luck with the journey. You need a lot
Keep updated regularly

 

[NullFoobar]

Set up a small page like ad with very broad targeting. Going to let it optimize itself for week. Going to post 4+ times a day during this time and will provide an update once the campaign ends. Hopefully, we see some significant growth in page likes and some decent reach for the pages first week.

 

[NullFoobar]

#1 Update
Here is the first small update for this journey.

I am pleased to say that I have reached my first goal of acquiring 100 likes. I have also been able to have some pretty good reach the past week considering a number of likes I have.

I am very proud of these stats so far, especially since I wasn't really able to post at all these past few weeks, which is why you see the big dip in reach and post engagement. I have been traveling in Europe but will be back home tomorrow night so starting Friday I will be able to regularly manage the page throughout the day.

All posts are done by hand directly through Facebook. I have noticed that using automatic tools really reduces my reach and I would like to take an extremely hands-on approach building this page as I hope it will be a very long-term project (niche is evergreen).

Next goal.... 1000 Likes.

 

[NullFoobar]

Updated #2
It's been a week since the last update and I still haven't reached the next milestone of 1000 likes but I thought I'd give an update anyways. As of now, I am at 713 page likes, gaining more than 400 from last week (mostly paid through FB ads). I plan to invest a relatively large amount of money in this page over the long haul since this project is and can be a very long-term money maker. Right now I am getting all US likes for about $0.10-$0.15 per like. Not the cheapest price but I will take it. Although I am not getting likes for the price I want nor nearly as quick as I'd like, I am extremely happy with the amount of reach I had this week.

I had a 3,120% increase in reach from last week, reaching a total of 110,319 people as of the time I am writing this. That is pretty freaking awesome for me, especially considering the last project I tried, I could barely reach 10,000 people with 10,000 page likes. Makes me very excited for when this page is seriously grown.

Since I really liked the traction I am getting early on, I have gone ahead and started building a website for this page, investing in content and have just about completed it. Right now I have about 70 articles on it. I have it linked on the FB page but I have not posted any links to the website yet or any articles written. I don't want to start posting links to articles from the actual page until I either reach the 5000 or 10,000 page like milestone. Will likely do some testing at 5k, and if the results are lackluster, I will shelve till 10k. In the meantime, I am going to keep adding content to it, purchase a few link building packages from BHW, and let it age and try to build some small organic traffic as I do eventually want to diversify my traffic sources, but still have social traffic being the bulk of everything.

Most of what I have been doing is posting images and sharing them to groups. To make my job easier I have written a small script in python that crawls all my competitors' pages, finds all their photos and sorts them based on engagement so I can go through and pick out the best-performing ones. I try to post 3-4 images a day and share all of them to different groups.

All of my posting is still done 100% manually. No tools like SNAP, Buffer, etc. I am not 100% sure, but I seem to get more reach doing everything manually.

Action Plan Moving Forward:
I have started posting some video content and I plan to do some more experimenting with it. Going to run an engagement ad on a "viral"-ish video and then invite everyone who likes the video to like my page and see how much the likes cost going that route. Hopefully, I can get them for cheaper than $0.10-$0.15 per like.

I plan to find more groups to post in, and purchase some other PVA Facebook accounts that I can share my page posts with. I want to do this in order to scale the number of posts I can make to various different groups and the transition away from using my personal account to share to groups. I have never used PVA accounts, proxies, etc. so that should be an experience getting it to work.

I need to find a good content locker for my website articles and put the last finishing touches on the website. Might just write one up myself.

Once the website is 100% complete, I might also start using these PVA accounts to share links to some articles I have written to start driving some initial traffic to the website to try and gain some likes via the content locker.

 

[NullFoobar]

Small Update:

So I posted my first original video yesterday on both YouTube and Facebook. Needless to say, the video sucks but it's not bad for my first one. Has only got like 10 views on YouTube, but have gotten 3.1k on FB and have reached 10k people with it.

It seems like Facebook has really slapped down my accounts reach. A few days ago I was able to reach 1,500-3,000 people per post by just sharing to one or two groups. Now, I can barely reach 100 people sharing in a group.

Not sure if Facebook is ghosting my posts to the groups, or if this is just some side-effect to a small algorithm change, that will hopefully resolve itself.

I know it's a coincidence but I hate the fact that once I actually boost a post, my organic reach goes in the toilet...

Going to work on my next video. Going to use a different format for this one to see what kind of results it will get.

Since nearly all of my views are coming off of FB, I am hoping to funnel these viewers over to my YouTube with a CTA to subscribe. Hopefully, I can slowly build some subscribers this way.

Also posted a link to an article I wrote from my personal account to a group. Got about 10 clicks and some good post engagement. Might post an article every 2-3 days like this until I have a much larger following.

 

[YosuaWM]

what method you use to increase the pages likes dude?

 

[NullFoobar]

what method you use to increase the pages likes dude?

I am running ads for page likes. I also boost and share posts and invite the people who like the post to like my page.

 

[NullFoobar]

Update #3

So it's been another week. A few days last week were slow because I was switching some things around with the page and website. Because of this I really didn't get that many page likes this week. Only about 200.

Overall my reach was still really good for only having 900 page likes (was hoping to hit the 1k milestone before this post ). My post engagement has really gone up which is nice, and same for my video views. When I initially started this page, I didn't plan to do anything shopify related and was looking to monetize with CPA offers or something similar. But my audience was very engaged and I had some extra time on my hands so I created a shopify store and installed it on a subdomain for my main website.

To my surprise, and for the first time ever, a shopify store I created has made me some money, and within the first 5 days of me making it. I basically launched the store and ran some engagement ads to a few of the products. I wasn't expecting to get any sales and was really just expecting to get some page likes via inviting, but shockingly, people have shown some interest in the products I have. The margin on these products is about 40-50%.

I do have a few things I really need to improve though. My conversion rates are terrible. Well, they are better than anything I have ever produced before, but in terms of what I'd like to see, they are pretty bad. The Add to Cart rate is pretty good. I have an ad getting ATC conversions for about $0.10-$0.15 a piece. But then the reached checkout rate is not that good, and the actual purchase rate is terrible.

I believe the cause of this is my traffic just isn't that good. A bulk is coming from some low tier countries. I have basically started with all no interest ads and have let the pixel optimize for me. Hopefully, this will get me some higher quality traffic that might convert better. So far, I have been running conversion ads for view content conversions and add to cart conversions. I started first with just the VC ad, and then once it produced some add to cart conversions, I started the ATC conversion ads using the same post. Hoping to get a few more purchases on the pixel and then I will start running some purchase conversion ads using that same post.

Action Plan Moving Forward:
Now that I have a somewhat reasonable amount of data, I am going to look at the demographics and use it to try and create some more targeted ads for the products that are selling and some new products I want to introduce.

I need to continue to create some video content for the page and the youtube channel. The youtube page still is complete garbage but the facebook videos actually get some views. Hopefully, the youtube channel will start getting a tiny bit of traction soon.

Because of the changes I made, I basically have to re-arrange a significant amount of content on my website and how it is laid out. I still haven't done this since I have been really focusing on the store this week, but I hope to knock this out next week.

I'm also still interested in trying some automated facebook stuff with some PVA accounts but the more I look into it, the more of a headache it seems to be with everyone getting banned and always having to worry about proxies and cookies, etc. I might try it, but mostly like, this idea will get shelved unless I find a way that looks relatively simple.

 

[mastereymard]

Woah. Your killing it man. You have a system. Follow it and bank. I have a 4K page liked page but I don't make money from it. I really wonder how you do it but I won't ask. Good luck and God bless. More power man..

 

[NullFoobar]

Woah. Your killing it man. You have a system. Follow it and bank. I have a 4K page liked page but I don't make money from it. I really wonder how you do it but I won't ask. Good luck and God bless. More power man..

Thanks, man. Just trying to slowly build momentum and watch it snowball.

 

[NullFoobar]

Small Update:

The likes have continued to trickle in while I experiment with a few things and I have finally reached the next milestone in my journey, 1000 page likes!

I'm glad to be able to cross this milestone off the list. Just 5 more milestones to go...

 

[NullFoobar]

Small Update:
Just wanted to provide another small update, really for my own sake in order to log some information.

Sales are continuing to trickle in. Right now, my ad that is converting is just starting to become profitable. Once it improves it's performance a bit more, I will try to scale it out. To create this ad, I used a bit of a process starting with VC conversions and moving down the line to a purchase conversion ad. I think this process has really helped the current conversion ad get to the performance level it is now. All of these ads were run on the same initial post, so the likes, comments, and shares from the previous conversion ads, rolled over to the newer conversion ads. Got a sale this morning for $40+, that cost $3.25 for the conversion. Haven't gotten another once since, but as long as my purchase conversions remain under $15.00/conversion consistently, I will try to really scale this ad up.

I am starting this process over again with a new product collection I just introduced. This time, the process is a bit more methodical than when I first moved through it with my last collection.

Still working on growing likes and organic reach using the methods I have previously touched upon here. I am going to start posting my articles more regularly on facebook now to start trying to drive some traffic to my website(not Shopify store installed on the subdomain). Likes are growing slower than I'd like but most of them are US likes so that is good.

Some other things I want to start doing is building my Instagram following/page and my overall brand image, colors, and logo. Right now have just been using some terrible text logo that is just awful. I also want to code up my own custom theme on Shopify that really represents the brand image/look as well. In-line with enhancing the store's design and image, I am also going to start working with some really high quality mock-up images for my products and their ads. This will definitely increase the cost, but I think it will be worth it.

So far, I am really enjoying this journey. I am basically just around breakeven for all the money I have spent thus far thanks to the Shopify store. I didn't plan on making any money for a long and expected to just bleed money for a couple months, but I can honestly say I am relieved that this hasn't been the case thus far. I am just going to keep experimenting with new ideas, and investing in my business.

As I previously mentioned, this has been my first journey that is actually going well and producing some revenue for me not even 30 days in. I have started probably 6-7 different Shopify stores in the past and never made a single sale. What I have noticed being very different about this journey compared to my failed ones, are the following:
1. I am not as rigid with myself in regards to my own pre-conceived notions as to what the store/page/brand "should be". This time around, I have been extremely flexible regarding this, and have actually adjusted my niche and website only a week or two in, as I previously wrote about. Previously, I would honestly be scared to change niches, or do anything so drastic, and thought, I might as well start a new store. This time I have just said F. IT and went for it, and it paid off. It allowed me to make my first sales ever, and I really enjoy the niche/direction I am heading in now, much more than the direction I had initially set out in.

2. I am mostly focusing on one social media channel. Previously, I tried to start with FB, IG, Twitter, YT, etc. and you honestly burn-out, and lose focus on the initial vision of everything. I am still putting some attention towards other channels, but until I reach my 100,000 page likes, FB is going to be my main interest and tool used to grow the other aspects of my business(website, store, other social channels).

3. I am seriously investing in this business and actually making it a business. Before, whenever I launched a store, I was scared to really invest money and throw down. I would run little $5.00/day ads for a few days and get scared out when I spent like $50.00 and saw no conversions or hardly any clicks. This time around, I put in my head that I was ready to spend at least $1500 or go in the hole $1500 on this project between now and the end of 2017. So far I have spent about $300 and have made about $275 of that back, so I am down only like $20.00 bucks. Actually throwing down some serious money running $10.00 and $20.00/day ads has been HUGE in my opinion. It has really allowed me to feed the crap out of my pixel making it smart and smarter as it collects more and more conversion data. It has also really allowed me to speed up my learning as I have been able to really experiment with new ideas more rapidly, and with less fear since I don't really care if I lose $50 bucks on an ad idea, where I used to get nervous when I'd lose $25.00. Don't listen to gurus saying you will launch a shopify store with only $5.00 a day.

4. I am not doing any free+shipping crap or other gimmick marketing tactics. I am selling quality products at a quality price, just like everyone else in my space. I am also working with higher margins which has been very nice.

 

[harvey14]

good luck

 

[johnnybc]

good luck with that facebook is a bitch nowadays banning everything easy!

 

[NullFoobar]

good luck with that facebook is a bitch nowadays banning everything easy!

Yeah, I've noticed every platform is pretty strict nowadays. Thankfully I have yet to use any black hat tactics nor do I really plan on using any that can get my banned.

 

[lunapt]

hey nice I also am doing a similar journey except trying for viral and non niche + site with adsense.

Do you have a specific niche or are you targeting broad? Sharing videos to groups does well

 

[NullFoobar]

hey nice I also am doing a similar journey except trying for viral and non niche + site with adsense.

Do you have a specific niche or are you targeting broad? Sharing videos to groups does well

It's kind of an odd niche. Sort of a mix between comedy, art, and news.

 

[NullFoobar]

Small Update:

Since I have actually been having orders placed on my website, I am starting to run into a lot of problems I have never had before. Mainly regarding Fraud and AliExpress.

So far nearly 1/2 of all my orders were detected as "high risk of fraud" and one order has been pending for like 5 days now that I am sure is not going to process because it was fraud. I have also had a couple orders declined due to them coming from blacklisted IPs. I am honestly shocked to see how many orders are high-risk/being blocked for fraud. I am not sure if it's just because my traffic isn't that good or what. Before my traffic was coming from some lower tier countries and this is when a lot of these orders came in. Since then I have begun only targeting what I would consider higher tier countries. The traffic has slowed down a ton because it's more expensive, but I haven't gotten any more fraud orders so that is nice.

I am willing to take the traffic reduction by bidding for some better quality traffic as I am honestly just glad if I can break even bringing people into the store, as I really look to make money out of them in the long run by making them return customers.

Now the other issue that is killing me right now is AliExpress. A few of the products in my store are dropshipped from there, and working with them has been a headache. First complaint and obvious one is, it takes way to long for orders to processed, shipped and delivered. I was given a 10-day window just to process the order and get it shipped. Then it will be potentially 30+ days from the time it ships to when it's delivered. This isn't crucial, but it is something I definitely don't like about AliExpress.

What is really killing me about AliExpress is all the order cancel issues and appeal issues. I have been stuck in an appeal for a few days now because of my CC and the customer support has just been GOD awful. The experience has just been horrible with them getting it taken care of. And to make matters worse, I was talking with them on Chat this morning, and they were telling me because my shipping address is always changing, these appeal issues will continue to happen. He then told me that this is because AliExpress doesn't want people dropshipping from that platform, and would prefer them to use AliBaba. So that totally sucks. I am having all these issues barely getting any orders in, I don't know how it would work if you send out a ton of product through this website.

Due to the AliExpress crap going on, I am really considering just removing everything from my store that is sourced there because they have been a nightmare to deal with, and according to the guy I talked to this morning, the issues won't get any better as they don't want people dropshipping on there...

Well, the struggle continues. The life of an entrepreneur am I right? Everytime you get over one wall, there is another one waiting for you.

 

[lunapt]

are u selling epacket ali items? doesnt seem like you are