addictedtolearning
Regular Member
Hey everyone,
I've been on this forum for about 9 months now, and the amount of knowledge I have absorbed from the beautiful minds here has been staggering. I figured I would now give back what I can and when I can to the community. This place can make you very wealthy if you truly absorb and apply the information.
Before I found this community I was helping clients with their social media to the tune of $250/month (and I would try to only work 5 hours). I still have a few clients that I typically enjoy working with, but have since moved on to bigger and better things, and am currently working on building two long-term brands.
This is a great guide for beginners to make some cash if they know nothing else but how to successfully navigate and build on social media.
So, with no website and no paid advertising how can you do this? I just used the power of social media and Craigslist...yes, THAT Craigslist. **Note - Craigslist still works...I tried it last week just to be sure and got 3 emails and 1 client within a 2 day period for about an hour of work...we will come back to this**
Step 1: Gain some social proof for a Facebook page (or landing page)
When I first started I didn't realize I could just buy reviews or have people I knew post reviews for me - I was completely ignorant to the fact, so I helped 10 random people build their socials for free in return for a review posted to my Facebook page. Just buy some reviews or have your friends leave them to skip this step.
Step 2: Save some of your posts for proof of reach and engagement
When you're helping people grow, or if you're posting things on your own on social media that get a lot of engagement, make sure you take screenshots to use during your pitch. Here's an example:
This helps people see that I actually know what I'm talking about, as I have organic reach they can only dream of. It definitely seals the deal when they know if I help them this is the kind of engagement they'll get.
Step 3: Find clients
This is the "work" part of this. I would just use Facebook and Instagram to find people who need help. Let's say I want to try to work with as many vegan foodies as possible since it's a growing niche and I find food to be one of the easiest of niches to grow. So, on Facebook I would search something like "vegan" and then filter the results by page. I would scroll down targeting people with a couple thousand likes or less. I would scroll quickly while right click/opening in new tab for speed sake, and then I would run through them and see A. how long have they been trying to grow this page and B. are they still active. If they've only been at it for a couple of months and have thousands of followers, then they most likely no what they're doing and won't need your help), though it doesn't hurt to reach out, and obviously you want them to still be actively posting.
For Instagram I would search the most popular vegan tags, so lets pretend we search "vegansofig". and then I would quickly scroll down the results and hover my mouse over the photos as I went, looking for posts that had less than 50 likes on them. I would again right click/open in new tab so I can move quickly and check a ton of people at once, and I would look for the same thing: someone with quite a few posts (indicating they've been at it for a while) that's still actively posting. I don't like spamming via messenger on insta, as I find most people never even look at it, so I typically take the email route here and collect the emails then send a mass email. A large % of these people already have a blog setup even though they aren't getting traffic, or they will just list their email in their bio maybe praying that some company will want them to do an endorsement with their weak following.
Note** Don't go too fast with messaging pages on Facebook or you will get the temp ban. Space it out a bit...I would message 5 then wait 30 minutes or so (I don't know the actual time)**
Step 4: Selling yourself
So, I would write a nice message and then reach out to all these people quickly. On Facebook you just open up the chat with the Facebook page you're targeting and go page-by-page copying and pasting your message, and for Insta send a mass email. I would write something along the lines of "Hey I'm a social media marketer and manager. I help people grow their socials and make money from them. I think you have great content but you could use a little help with the growing process." yadda yadda yadda and then I always show them my engagement. Since I didn't have a website up and didn't look super "legit", I would typically tell them we can do the first hour for free as a show of good faith, and then they can pay me $100 for their first paid hour to make up for it. I would also let them know there's no long-term obligation - they can pay for an hour whenever they find they need me. Typically when talking to someone about this for an hour it's easy to sell that you know what you're doing and you can help them...assuming you actually know what you're doing.
So, that's really it. If you're good with the ins and outs of social media you can definitely use this to make your first internet marketing money. You can even reach out to people on Pinterest, Reddit, Twitter, etc, with the same idea in mind.
Bonus: I found Craigslist to be a hidden gem. I would write out a post and list it as "Internet marketing lessons" in the "general" section of "for sale". Then I randomly go city-to-city posting my listing and charging $50 as the price and you actually get a great amount of emails. Craigslist will eventually flag and remove your posts, but it honestly takes a while and it's so easy to just copy and paste for an hour a day. As I posted above, I tested out if it still works and it does. I posted 10 times in 10 different cities (it took about 10 minutes) and within 3 days I got 3 emails and landed a client. He signed up for 2 sessions at $50/hr and he should be a long-term client. I decided to charge $50/hr instead of what I used to do ($250/month) and I think it's better psychologically.
This is a method you can use to scale an actual business if you're actually good at helping people build their followings, and eventually you can outsource the work and just manage it. I don't enjoy it that much and am happy to be no-longer doing it, but this method should be able to help beginners with good knowledge on using social media. Good luck.
I've been on this forum for about 9 months now, and the amount of knowledge I have absorbed from the beautiful minds here has been staggering. I figured I would now give back what I can and when I can to the community. This place can make you very wealthy if you truly absorb and apply the information.
Before I found this community I was helping clients with their social media to the tune of $250/month (and I would try to only work 5 hours). I still have a few clients that I typically enjoy working with, but have since moved on to bigger and better things, and am currently working on building two long-term brands.
This is a great guide for beginners to make some cash if they know nothing else but how to successfully navigate and build on social media.
So, with no website and no paid advertising how can you do this? I just used the power of social media and Craigslist...yes, THAT Craigslist. **Note - Craigslist still works...I tried it last week just to be sure and got 3 emails and 1 client within a 2 day period for about an hour of work...we will come back to this**
Step 1: Gain some social proof for a Facebook page (or landing page)
When I first started I didn't realize I could just buy reviews or have people I knew post reviews for me - I was completely ignorant to the fact, so I helped 10 random people build their socials for free in return for a review posted to my Facebook page. Just buy some reviews or have your friends leave them to skip this step.
Step 2: Save some of your posts for proof of reach and engagement
When you're helping people grow, or if you're posting things on your own on social media that get a lot of engagement, make sure you take screenshots to use during your pitch. Here's an example:
This helps people see that I actually know what I'm talking about, as I have organic reach they can only dream of. It definitely seals the deal when they know if I help them this is the kind of engagement they'll get.
Step 3: Find clients
This is the "work" part of this. I would just use Facebook and Instagram to find people who need help. Let's say I want to try to work with as many vegan foodies as possible since it's a growing niche and I find food to be one of the easiest of niches to grow. So, on Facebook I would search something like "vegan" and then filter the results by page. I would scroll down targeting people with a couple thousand likes or less. I would scroll quickly while right click/opening in new tab for speed sake, and then I would run through them and see A. how long have they been trying to grow this page and B. are they still active. If they've only been at it for a couple of months and have thousands of followers, then they most likely no what they're doing and won't need your help), though it doesn't hurt to reach out, and obviously you want them to still be actively posting.
For Instagram I would search the most popular vegan tags, so lets pretend we search "vegansofig". and then I would quickly scroll down the results and hover my mouse over the photos as I went, looking for posts that had less than 50 likes on them. I would again right click/open in new tab so I can move quickly and check a ton of people at once, and I would look for the same thing: someone with quite a few posts (indicating they've been at it for a while) that's still actively posting. I don't like spamming via messenger on insta, as I find most people never even look at it, so I typically take the email route here and collect the emails then send a mass email. A large % of these people already have a blog setup even though they aren't getting traffic, or they will just list their email in their bio maybe praying that some company will want them to do an endorsement with their weak following.
Note** Don't go too fast with messaging pages on Facebook or you will get the temp ban. Space it out a bit...I would message 5 then wait 30 minutes or so (I don't know the actual time)**
Step 4: Selling yourself
So, I would write a nice message and then reach out to all these people quickly. On Facebook you just open up the chat with the Facebook page you're targeting and go page-by-page copying and pasting your message, and for Insta send a mass email. I would write something along the lines of "Hey I'm a social media marketer and manager. I help people grow their socials and make money from them. I think you have great content but you could use a little help with the growing process." yadda yadda yadda and then I always show them my engagement. Since I didn't have a website up and didn't look super "legit", I would typically tell them we can do the first hour for free as a show of good faith, and then they can pay me $100 for their first paid hour to make up for it. I would also let them know there's no long-term obligation - they can pay for an hour whenever they find they need me. Typically when talking to someone about this for an hour it's easy to sell that you know what you're doing and you can help them...assuming you actually know what you're doing.
So, that's really it. If you're good with the ins and outs of social media you can definitely use this to make your first internet marketing money. You can even reach out to people on Pinterest, Reddit, Twitter, etc, with the same idea in mind.
Bonus: I found Craigslist to be a hidden gem. I would write out a post and list it as "Internet marketing lessons" in the "general" section of "for sale". Then I randomly go city-to-city posting my listing and charging $50 as the price and you actually get a great amount of emails. Craigslist will eventually flag and remove your posts, but it honestly takes a while and it's so easy to just copy and paste for an hour a day. As I posted above, I tested out if it still works and it does. I posted 10 times in 10 different cities (it took about 10 minutes) and within 3 days I got 3 emails and landed a client. He signed up for 2 sessions at $50/hr and he should be a long-term client. I decided to charge $50/hr instead of what I used to do ($250/month) and I think it's better psychologically.
This is a method you can use to scale an actual business if you're actually good at helping people build their followings, and eventually you can outsource the work and just manage it. I don't enjoy it that much and am happy to be no-longer doing it, but this method should be able to help beginners with good knowledge on using social media. Good luck.
