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Andy Skraga, also known as The Facebook Traffic Guy, has had massive success driving traffic to his websites.
He currently manages 9 Facebook pages and 5 websites, driving millions in traffic to those sites.
According to Andy, the learning curve on this side hustle is relatively short, reducing the barrier to entry considerably.
In this interview, he shares a ton of strategies, offers advice on how to get started, and explains his exact approach to getting page likes, creating content, going viral, and much more.
Watch the Interview
Andy starts by talking about his extensive experience online, with more than a decade of experience in SEO, but it’s clear that once he discovered the possibilities with Facebook traffic, there was no going back.
His interest was originally inspired by a site called ViralNova. He was intrigued at how the site’s strategy worked, so he got to work backwards engineering it.
He shares with Jared the initial strategies he used to get traffic, which involved finding viral videos on YouTube and even led to crashing servers.
He eventually shifted his focus to quizzes, and that has been in this niche on Facebook for the last eight years.
Andy shares his main strategy, which is creating a niche website and a niche Facebook page for that website, then buying the initial 10,000 followers, and then growing the page organically using viral content.
He says that once you nail down the content and your strategy, which is different from SEO content and strategies, you should start to see a consistent stream of traffic.
Andy talks about the best and most profitable niches on Facebook and how to evaluate niches to see if they’re worth getting into.
He talks extensively about creating content, and the importance of it resonating with your audience and having an audience that’s aligned with that content.
Andy details the four main aspects to focus on, how much content you should have on your site for sharing on Facebook, how to come up with viral Facebook post ideas, titles, and thumbnails, and how to use YouTube as part of the strategy.
When it comes to followers, he explains why 10,000 is a good number to aim for and shares tips on making ads and cost guidelines.
This strategy can be scaled and automated, and he explains exactly how he does this.
He also shares important rules to follow and measures to take to keep your page from being banned, and gives a timeline for people who are getting started so they can understand how to evaluate their progress and success.
All in all, Andy offers an absolute ton of value in this interview and it’s a must-listen to anyone looking for an alternative traffic strategy and a lucrative side hustle.
Topics Andy Skraga Covers
- His initial Facebook traffic strategies
- His shift to focus on quizzes
- Compounding Facebook traffic
- His current projects
- The best niches on Facebook
- What’s working right now on Facebook
- The main mistake people make with this strategy
- What kind of content Facebook wants
- How to evaluate niches on Facebook
- Buying likes to get started
- Preparing the creatives
- Why engagement is the most important metric
- How to create Facebook content
- Why arguments in the comments are positive
- How to generate content ideas
- Data vs. intuition
- Pages vs. groups
- Other tips for beginners
- RPMs for Facebook traffic
- Using Pinterest
Links & Resources
Transcription
Jared: All right, welcome back to the niche pursuits podcast. My name is Jared Bauman. And today we are joined by Andy Skraga. Andy, welcome on board.
Andy: Oh yeah. Yeah. It’s great to be on the podcast. I’ve been a fan for quite a while, so it’s, it’s really good to be here. I’m
Jared: really excited to have you today. You were, um, you joined a call in the niche pursuits community.
Not too long ago, actually talking all about, Your Facebook strategies. And, um, I mean, that’s what we’re talking about today. Uh, and cat’s out of the bag on that one. It’s going to be a full, a full hour of Facebook and how you’ve achieved a ton of success with it. But, you know, before we get into that, or as we lead into that, maybe, can you tell us about yourself and, Maybe give us a little backstory.
Andy: Yeah. I mean, I’ve been building websites since I’ve been on the internet, you know, it’s, uh, me and my brother used to code up websites on front page, if anybody remembers that. And yeah, we’d be, we used to make comedy websites, uh, kind of, um, kind of cartoon style stuff. And we’d sort of start getting some traffic.
And yeah, I went on to kind of sell a few SEO sites. I sold a camping directory back in the day and yeah, I, the thing about SEO, it’s kind of, you know, for me, it was a little bit kind of slow, even back then. So that, that’s kind of what led me into doing Facebook, Facebook stuff, which is a heck of a lot faster to get traffic.
Jared: So you’ve been, you know, to, to kind of just set the stage here, you’ve been having success using Facebook to send traffic to websites for quite a while now, um, maybe give us a little bit of an overview of what that looks like. And I mean, whether it’s how much traffic you send, whether it’s the type of traffic you send, like, just give us some perspective on what.
You’re doing so we can use that to lead into our conversation today.
Andy: Yeah. Well, we’ll start around about 10 years ago. Um, there was a site called viral Nova, which I’m sure loads of people have have heard of, and they were having amazing success and I got, [00:02:00] I got really fascinated by it and. Wanted to sort of backwards engineer what was going on with that site.
So, and because with the SEO stuff, I’ve been in it for kind of 10 years at that point, maybe 15 years, and I would, I’m so impatient and I was really intrigued at how, how quickly it works as well. So yeah, you know, I just kind of backwards engineered it and started having some success quite quickly and got hooked on it, you know, such a.
Such a buzz get, get going viral. Um, And yeah, my first success is really, uh, going onto YouTube and finding viral videos. And what we would do is basically embed those videos into a webpage, write about 500 words about that video, put a few sharing buttons on the page on WordPress. And post it to Facebook, and it was really good, it was really successful.
I mean, my first viral video, it went so viral, it actually crashed the server. And I phoned up the hosting company, and, and they didn’t know what was going on. They said, are you running ads, or? I said, no, it’s, it’s from Facebook traffic. And I, I think I had probably, four or five kind of mega viral hits at that point.
And, and that made, that made some good money back then. But I ended up doing quizzes. So, that’s kind of, I’ve been doing the, the, I’ve been in the quiz niche on Facebook. For about kind of eight years. And it’s been, it’s been really good. It’s been really, you know, quite, quite successful.
Jared: I imagine it’s swung over the years as the Facebook algorithm has gone different directions and stuff to, to just kind of draw a line in the sand.
Are we talking about, uh, when we say virality and traffic, are we talking about purely organic traffic from Facebook or is there any ad traffic or boosted traffic mixed in there?
Andy: Yeah, I mean, you can, you can do that. Click arbitrage is a, is quite a good way. But I’m talking about completely organic traffic, where you’re basically building up a page.
You buy the initial followers. So you buy the first 10, 000 followers, for example. And after that, you’re just growing the page organically, using, using viral content. And, you know, some of the content you’re going to post, like images, they’re actually going to grow the page, and you’re going to get more followers.
But some of the content, like post links, when you put links to your website, they’re actually going to get you traffic. Okay. And that traffic, when something goes viral, the traffic can be huge to your website. And it’s, yeah, I mean, it’s just, uh, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s kind of about scaling. So, you get to a certain point where you’ve got lots of Facebook pages and, and quite a few websites that are designed for Facebook.
And that traffic can really sort of compound and build up to the point where you’re getting traffic in the, uh, I think my best month was, was 2 million visitors, so it kind of really can build up and that’s purely Facebook organic. You’re not paying for those, for those, for that traffic. You’re just paying for the initial likes.
Jared: What kind of scale are you at right now? So people understand the magnitude of what you’re working with.
Andy: Well, the stuff doesn’t go, what used to happen about 10 years ago, you’d get something going really massively viral for about. Two weeks, and then it would just go dead for quite a while, and then you’d maybe get another one.
But over the years, I’ve noticed it’s become more consistent. And the last five years have been really consistent. I mean, you can almost, you can see what you’re going to make each month, which never used to be the case. So, so whereas you don’t get the kind of, kind of, you know, blowing up the server levels of traffic, although I have seen some pretty amazing stats just lately.
Um, it’s really consistent and, and, and you get a really steady, predictable stream of traffic from Facebook once you’ve narrowed down the content.
Jared: Nice. Okay, good. So what kind of, how many websites are you working with to do this? How many Facebook pages are you working on at a time?
Andy: Just in the quiz niche alone, I’ve got nine different Facebook pages, which are all quiz based and five quiz websites at the moment, which I’m running and I’ve got other different niches and stuff that I run, but the quiz stuff, it’s, it’s so easy for me to make content for, but, and I just enjoy it.
It’s actually not the best niche to use on Facebook at all. I can talk about niches but, uh, the low RPMs are a bit of a problem. Which means you can’t, you can’t do click arbitrage and that kind of thing. But there’s some amazing niches for Facebook out there. You know, health and fitness, DIY, uh, cooking, cooking niche.
Um, and there’s some crazy niches. I saw a niche the other day which was just houses of the rich and famous. And the person with that site made a million pounds last year from Facebook traffic. So, you know, about 80 percent of niches that work for Facebook.
Jared: Well, let’s, let’s get into the meat and potatoes today.
And man, I could, um, I could ask you a lot of questions as it relates to the algorithm of old for Facebook and what used to work versus what works now and, um, and the changes, but in order to make this as practical as possible, I would just love to center our conversation today around what’s, what’s working today in your Facebook strategy.
Um, like maybe set the stage for someone listening who, and you said it best yourself, someone who understands maybe traffic from a different source, SEO, a different social media platform, and wants to understand what it looks like to build a Facebook page and then create content that drives traffic to their website.
Andy: Well, there’s a lot of people coming, coming over to Facebook traffic from SEO because of the HCEU. So, I mean, you’re basically talking about a way to make money from Facebook, where you’re, you’re off boarding visitors to your website from Facebook, rather than making money on Facebook yourself, because there is a performance bonus and that kind of thing, where you can actually make Facebook, uh, make content and make money on Facebook itself, which people are having some really good success with.
But my method is more, and this is, this is a method most people use, is to create a niche website and then create a niche Facebook page for that website and grow it. And then you’re essentially creating content that’s designed for Facebook, which is not the same content that works for SEO, not by long mark.
And the number one mistake people make is that they post the same content that works for SEO onto their Facebook page. It doesn’t work. And they wonder why the stuff that works on Facebook and Facebook are being quite vocal about the kind of content they want. It’s light hearted, it’s entertainment based.
It’s quizzes. It’s definitely not heavy subjects or news, news subjects or political subjects, unless that’s political humor. You know, it’s, it’s all about crafting the kind of content that’s actually people are willing to click off of Facebook. They don’t really want to click off of Facebook and go and visit, uh, and go and visit your site.
So if you’ve already got an SEO based site, which a lot of my consultation clients have got, and you want to pivot onto, Facebook that the number one task really is, it’s not so much building up the page. That’s quite a straightforward process is actually creating the kind of content resonates with your audience and gets it to go viral because if they love the content they’re going to share it and you’re going to go viral.
And to be honest, most of the traffic comes from the viral content. It’s not the kind of drip drip kind of a kind of thing. So with a, with a standard niche website, You’re probably going to have to look at creating a new page template and a new style of article that’s going to work for Facebook. And that’s typically listical, so it’s things like the 10 best, the 10 worst, this versus this, so this brand Coke versus Pepsi.
Or it’s emotional stories, it’s things that trigger people’s emotions, so that’s kind of the animal rescue stuff that you see. So if they’ve sort of rescued a deer from a frozen lake, it’s typically a YouTube viral video that’s just been uploaded. Basically, um, repurpose for the web page, but it makes a great Facebook content and you can create so much this content because it’s, you could create for Facebook optimized articles for the time you spend on one SEO article.
So you can create hundreds of these articles and just schedule them on, um, So it, I mean, if you start from scratch, it niches everything. And the niche level is everything as well. It’s a bit like SEO where if you go, if you go too broad, it’s not gonna work. And if you go too niche, it’s not gonna work. So you gotta, you gotta kind of think, well, I, I’m gonna do, if, if you wanna do a page about dogs, you might wanna go to the level of breed.
And then gender, so you’d say, um, German Shepard Mums. Or you could, or you could go Geo, so you could, you could have, um, you could have USA German Shepard fans or something like that. So, so you’re kind of creating a niche, almost like a club of people. It’s not so much a thing, this page. It’s a group of people that identify with this page.
So, and then if you’ve got, if you’ve got a dog page with dog affiliate products on, you would create content that’s actually, Fits fits the kind of content that works on Facebook, or you will, you will struggle if you don’t actually understand that the contents are a bit different to SEO.
Jared: You said at the outset that niche selection is incredibly important.
Some niches have high RPM. Some niches have low RPMs. Some niches do better on Facebook. Some niches do worse. Again, thinking from a classic SEO standpoint, there’s ways to. Research and validate a niche before you go into it. You see the competition, you look at things like conversion rates and RPMs and this sort of thing.
What does it look like to evaluate a niche if you’re building for Facebook traffic? And what are the pitfalls people need to be aware of so they don’t put all this time and money into it and then realize they picked the wrong niche? I
Andy: mean, I’ve spoken to people in, in, for example, the banking niche and the B2B niches and they don’t work so well.
I mean, the best way to evaluate is, is to basically search on Facebook. So if there’s a search bar at the top. And you can just type in a niche. So if you want to type in, um, maybe, maybe lawn care and then, and then if you look down, you’ll see pages and just look at the pages and see if there’s any pages that have over say 40, 000 likes, and they’re going to look at the content and see, see if they’re getting considerable engagement, which would be over, uh, 50 reactions or a hundred reactions.
That means it’s working because a hundred reactions can generate a fair amount of traffic on each post. So, yeah, I mean, typically, I mean, there is tools like Stravio, which can actually really streamline the process of finding if a niche is working for you or not. Um, So, so yeah, doing your research first, I think is really makes life easier on Facebook and, and if, if you’re in it for the money, if you’re not passionate about the niche, then go for a niche that works on Facebook, it just greases the wheels and makes everything so much easier from, from buying the followers to creating the content, come up with the, with the titles and the thumbnails and that kind of thing.
Um, it’s more of a, more of a, a sort of stroll in the park rather than, rather than an uphill battle. I
Jared: have a million, I have a lot of questions about content, but while we’re on this niche selection game and you pick the niche, you talked about the need to get that, you know, you mentioned first 10, 000 followers and going after it from a buying like standpoint.
Talk about that. Talk about its importance. Why 10, 000? Why go with buying likes out of the, out of the gate? Um, how you go about doing that, et cetera.
Andy: With Facebook traffic, it’s very different to SEO and it helps kind of lead the SEO mindset because it’s SEO you’re, you’re kind of, um, creating a, a website.
You, you’re pushing out on search and kind of hoping people like it. And, but with Facebook it’s more like email marketing, where you are actually generating your yourself an audience that’s, that’s aligned with, with your content. So, uh, the other thing is with, with the reach on Facebook’s always been low.
I mean, for as long as I’ve been doing this, the reach is low. And that’s what we have to work with. So, so buying 100 followers isn’t going to cut it. I mean, you could go viral, but it’s going to take you a long time. So buying 10, 000 followers to start with really speeds things up. You, I mean, you can go viral in two days if you’ve got 10, 000 followers and you put the right kind of content out and you can be getting traffic very quickly as well, which is what this is all about because it’s, it’s so much quicker than SEO.
So it’s a very straightforward process buying the page likes. Um, it, what seems to work for everyone is, is a simple. But it’s literally called, it’s literally called a page like ad on the Facebook ads platform. And by the way, don’t ever buy page likes from third party websites because they’re garbage.
They’re just bots and, and stuff and they’re not gonna do anything for your page. I mean, you need a really good quality audience for this to actually work, you know. So they need to be tier one. You need to be interested in, in the niche that you’re going to be creating content for. Um, so yeah, I mean, if you take the example of German Shepherds, you would just say, love German Shepherds and follow my page.
But the real trick is to, is to have the creative. The creative is the thing that really drives the ad cost down. It’s the thing that people see and it stops the scroll and it gets people to like your page. And I recommend trying 10 different creatives. So you’ve got three creatives you might think are quite obvious.
So it’d be pictures of cute German shepherds, but then you might try three ones, uh, AI images, maybe look a bit freaky and they look a bit kind of unworldly and maybe try for the, maybe some are just texts. I’ve had great success with, with just text, really sketchy looking text on a white background can work better than any photo.
I mean, stock photos on Facebook just don’t seem to work. I think it’s because it’s a user generated platform. And when they see a stock photo, it kind of snaps people out of the whole Facebook mindset. So anything that looks like a real camera photo, um, is, I mean, you can literally take your camera out and take a photo of a neighbor’s German shepherd dog and that would work way better than any stock photo.
Um, and people are having a great success with arrows. So you can put an arrow pointing down to the top, to the bottom right where people can follow the page. And they say they, they’ve been, I mean, the thing is you’re, you’re aiming for a light cost of around five cents per followup. I mean, some people, it depends on the niche.
And if we’re talking us traffic, which most people are, you can get it between four and eight cents or you’re in a good area, but people sort of trying arrows and stuff and got it down to about two cents sometimes. So it’s a fun game of, um, of trying to get, get the cost down. Um, and, and for that kind of price, you can build a really good audience for about 400.
And then once that audience is there, you’ve got that audience for life. Assuming you don’t. Do something that makes them all leave your Facebook page, but it’s probably
Jared: It’s a it’s a good distinction because I think some people might come from the vantage point of like, oh I need 10 000 likes as a vanity metric.
So people show up and see that I have 10 000 It’s not that you need 10 000 people to like the page As much as it’s you need 10 000 people that will go on to be engaged with the page And then help the content to go viral, which is why it’s so important. You get tier one quality likes.
Andy: Yeah, there’s literally a ratio between how engaged that quantity of audiences to, to your content.
So you can have a page of 3 million, but if, if they’re not aligned with the content, it means nothing. You’re not going to get, you’re not going to, you reach fat fat. It’d be worse. In fact, these big pages 3 million people go, Oh, it’s so easy for them to go viral. But it’s not because. From what I’ve seen, once you get to about 100, 000 likes, it slides, the reach slides down.
Because they’re not going to give all of the content to all of the big pages. You’d only see content from a few pages on Facebook, and you don’t. You see it from tiny pages to big pages. Because it’s on a ratio basis. So you can do very well with a page with, you know, 30, 40, 000 likes.
Jared: Now, is there any other audience targeting that you need to do in that?
Or does the algorithm of Facebook kind of self select? So if I’m in a German shepherd niche, do I need to try to go target German shepherd owners or anything like that? Or I just target for, and again, we’re talking likes here, target a broad area and, and Facebook will kind of find the good audience inside of that.
Andy: Yes, they can. But for a beginner, I’d recommend interest targeting first. So you literally go in there and there’s interest targeting within Facebook ads platform. And you just type in, I mean, it will have things like dog training, you know, have German shepherd related products and things like that. So you can, you want to try and build up an audience of millions of people, but by layering up these interests, so you’ve got all these different interests, you might, you might select about 10, and you’ll get to millions of people you can potentially reach.
That’s the best way to start the trick is not not to run those ads more than 10 a day per ad set or 20 a day per ad set once you get going, because that increases the light cost, once you once you’ve got going, then actually try with no interest targeting, because the Facebook ad algorithm is insanely good.
And it will find those people. That follow that page and the more you use the ads, the more clever it gets. It gets really smart about the kind of people that work, work well with your page. So, so beginners definitely interest targeting, but also A B test, no interest or A B test, just one interest. And just, just keep trying to get an ad cost down because the lower you get the follow cost down, the bigger the audience you can build with your budget.
Jared: So for 500 ish, gets you to around 10, 000 likes. Um, before we move, yeah, roughly of course, niche dependent and, um, ad dependent and targeting dependent and how much you’re willing to test dependent. But with that being said, trying to give people a little bit of a framework, um, Uh, why, before we move on from it, why the 10, 000 mark?
Is there some secret there? Is it just a nice round number?
Andy: Nah, it’s just a figure I came up with. I just found, I mean, I’ve seen pages go viral with two and a half thousand followers, like massively viral, but I think 10, 000 gets, gets, gets your skin in the game with this because ultimately what we want is lots of traffic.
And we’re not so much interested if all you want to do is go viral on facebook with memes You could do it with 1000 followers But what we want is traffic and the thing is with with any sort of link on facebook mainly we’re talking about Um, link posts where you’re posting a link into Facebook, it scrapes out the thumbnail and the title and presents it there and people click on it.
But the reach on that is very low. I mean it’s always been very low. But the thing is, it’s so low that you need at least 10, 000 people to kind of get some traffic and get some data back about what people are clicking on. Once you understand what people are clicking on, And you can start to grow the page.
If you’ve got the funds, then, then, then start with 000, it’ll cost you more money, but you’ll get going quicker. And you, you know, that means in two weeks, you’d be getting thousands of people on your site. If you know what you’re doing. So, so yeah, it’s just a good starting point. And I, I’ve, you know, I’ve talked to a lot of frustrated people that say, no, I’m not getting any traffic.
My, so you’ve only got a thousand likes. It’s not going to work.
Jared: So yeah. Okay. Makes sense. Good. So we understand the 10, 000 number now let’s turn our attention. If you think it’s a good time to talk about content. And again, I’m talking, you already hit it on the head. A lot of people listening here are going to approach this from a more classic SEO, uh, mindset and are probably.
Either going to be banging their heads against the wall or already have banged their head against the wall because what they’re used to doing that works well with organic search, as you said, isn’t the same. So where do we start with creating content on Facebook? I have a lot of questions, but I don’t want to, I don’t want to get too in the weeds at the outset on that topic.
Andy: Yeah. I mean, the thing about Facebook content is it’s way simpler than SEO. You don’t have to worry about a lot of stuff that you worry about. There’s hundreds of components to SEO. I mean, I do SEO myself and it’s, it’s quite complicated. It’s quite a fine balancing act. But with Facebook, you’re kind of really only worried about four things.
One is the audience quality and alignment on your Facebook page. The other thing is your content, um, that the content of your web page, um, the page title and, and the thumbnail that’s on that page, those are kind of four main ingredients to stuff go, you know, getting traffic going viral. And people have come back to me and said, once I kind of nailed down that thumbnail and that page title, Um, things really started to work and click.
So the quality of the writing actually doesn’t need to be anywhere near as good with SEO. You don’t need to worry about thumbnails. You don’t have to worry about internal linking except if you want to promote other articles or you want to promote affiliate products. Um, the monetization, by the way, is very similar to what you did SEO, so I’m, I monetize with AdSense.
Mediavine is a great fit, um, for Facebook. Uh, as far as I know, they, they don’t have any problem with Facebook traffic and affiliate marketing works really well as you’ve already got that niche audience coming from Facebook. So, so you, if you’re in the dog niche and you’ve got niche affiliate products and, and that niche is gonna work really well.
Um, so yeah, I mean the, the, the content you, you can, you can, it’s more the scale of content is a problem because. You’re going to have to be posting a lot of content on Facebook to reach the kind of traffic levels that you might have known with SEO. So I recommend having about 400 articles on your site that are dedicated to Facebook content.
You can cycle over a 30 to 40 day period. So you’d kind of post maybe 3 or 4 of those a day. In between some viral memes and stuff like that. And then once you get to sort of maybe day 35, you cycle back and start posting from the beginning again. And, and you can do that for quite a long time. I mean, you could probably do that for over a year without changing the content.
Um, so, so actually it makes it very passive at that point. So, so yeah, I mean the content, like I said, it, listicles work great. Um, it has to be entertainment based. It has to really kind of, you know, stimulate people’s emotions, whether that’s, um, a positive or a negative positive tends to work better. So, I mean, I mean, humor stuff works great.
Um, stuff that gives people a little tear to their eye, like an animal rescue works really great. The other trick is to do a kind of, a kind of, uh, brand loyalty thing where people really get obsessed about Harley Davidsons or a certain type of car. And if you can kind of say, you know, why, why Harley Davidsons are better than sports bikes.
You can really sort of create some great content and what the good thing about that is it gets people arguing in the comments and so many articles go viral because people are just arguing in the comments and if you post it again it doesn’t go viral because you don’t get the same arguments going. So anything you can do is kind of within obviously terms of service on Facebook to get people having a little disagreement in the comments is going to be brilliant for your post reach and traffic.
Jared: What recommendations do you have for people who are stuck brainstorming about these sorts of things? I mean, hearing. Yeah. Okay. I was going to ask you like, can I help? I’m almost thinking in my head like for those people like perhaps myself who can. Think through an SEO article like we’re drinking water, you know, just, it’s so natural.
I hear you talking about content on Facebook in the same way. And so for you, it sounds like you could probably just take German Shepherds and just come up with a hundred article topics right now that have a chance of doing well. But for those people who aren’t in that world, like chat GPT, but like how do we brainstorm out of what we know into something like this?
Andy: Well, do you know what you do? You find, you find a Facebook page that’s in your niche and you look at their titles. I mean, I would copy out about 25 of those, go and paste those into ChatTDP and literally prompt, give me 50 more ideas for viral Facebook posts I can create. So, uh, ChatTDP has just transformed my whole business.
It saves me so much time and I did, I did a test actually. I took my most viral quiz titles and obviously I spent a lot of time just doing that. Trying to figure out how to make titles that people click on. It’s very important part of this whole thing. And I tested it against one chat GDP gave me and they worked two to three times better than ones I could think up.
So it’s a very valuable tool and I’ve used it for so many things like coming up with, I’ve got on my site, I’ve got thousands of, of captions. I got made from chat GP. So I, I fed in. 10 years worth of data I’ve got on on viral captions and I said, right, make this for every niche and it works so well. So then I made images for those which I give away on my website and they just work incredibly well.
So, I mean, ChatGP is just a game changer for this kind of content. Uh, I mean, that’s the thing, you know, if you get ChatGP, write you an SEO article. I mean, it’s not going to work that well, but you get it to write you a, a 10 step listicle for a Facebook article. You, you’re going to do minimal editing. You, you get a VA to make you a hundred of those in a couple of days.
And they’re just perfect Facebook content. So yeah, I mean, brainstorming with ChatGP is something I do pretty much every week.
Jared: The title sounds massively important. How important is the image that you use with it? And is it, is it, is it something you need to use in conjunction? So they both are on point for something to work well?
Andy: Yeah, totally. Those are pretty much two most important, important things apart. You know, I mean, the, the, the thumbnail is the thing that stops the scroll. And the title is the thing that entices people to click on the article. So there’s lots of techniques you can use. Um, one is the Uncanny Valley kind of thing.
So AI is working really well. I mean there’s, there’s, you can use, you can use AI for thumbnails. And that works really well. Also using YouTube, if you’re doing the whole YouTube thing, or embedding YouTube videos, what we used to do, in fact people do now to great effect, is you take a screenshot of the video at a point where you can’t quite make out what’s going on.
And then you, you just simply use that as the 1200 by 630 pixel thumbnail with nothing else on it. And, and the page title can be, I mean, you, you, you have to go pretty clickbait to be classed as clickbait. So you just need to leave a little bit of information out. So, so, um, Um, the, the moment, uh, this, this deer rescue shocks a small town, you know, that, that kind of, that’s a bit too quick, Bobo, you get the idea.
You just have to kind of find a balance between describing what’s in the video and leaving some stuff out. And that’s, that’s a really good combination. You can have whole websites, not just animals, human interest stuff, stuff about music. This is a great niche for music. There’s so many amazing music busking videos.
You could do whole sites with those. I mean, I just used to do sites with any old video I found, and it worked really well. Drone shows and, and stuff like that. So it’s just about finding it. It’s anything. I mean, think about the Facebook, you got to think about people on Facebook. They’re just really bored.
You know, they’re waiting, they’re waiting at the bus station, or they’re just, they’re trying not to pay attention to their kids running right. And they want to be distracted. They want to have dopamine here and they want to know that the thing that they’re into is the best thing. So if you can provide that kind of content to them, I mean I do quizzes just because it’s easy for me to make them and people always love them any time of the year, 24 7, and all I need to figure out is just the type of quiz that they like.
And, you know, you just go into the metrics, you see what’s going viral and you double down on that kind of content. And that’s how you sort of start to scale.
Jared: How are you making these quizzes? Are they quizzes you’re teasing on Facebook, get people to your website and they’re embedded in there. Like what’s the process look like for a quiz for someone who has never made one?
Andy: Well, I do programming. So I program most of them. I actually did. I used to use Photoshop, but you can use it. You can just use Canva, make them in Canva. Uh, it’s easy enough to make them, but like I said, I don’t recommend the quiz niche. I don’t think it’s a great niche for Facebook. I think you’re way better going into, into pretty much any other niche.
Um, it’s just easy for me cause I’ve got all this stuff to, to, to make the quizzes. But yeah, I mean, um, graphically wise, Canva is great. Photoshop’s great. Just, just anything you can do to kind of create some, some user generated style graphics works.
Jared: Okay. So when you say quizzes, you were talking about a niche, not per se making quizzes about German shepherds for your German shepherd page.
Andy: Yeah, and people get confused about quiz on Facebook because you can have quiz plugins are actually designed for lead generation for affiliate marketing. So it kind of leads people down that kind of sales funnel. But this is not I’m literally talking about entertainment quizzes you see in a magazine.
You know, they’re literally old ones out, you know, they literally spot the difference and that kind of thing And and it’s not a very sophisticated audience on facebook by and large so people love that kind of stuff
Jared: So you talk about youtube a couple times walk through that process of videos I assume you’re not talking about creating video content putting it on youtube and then using facebook to drive traffic Or if you are could you add clarity like what is what is?
Using a video component through YouTube look like with, with your model?
Andy: Well, this is a good thing to do if you’re just starting out and you just want to experiment with a niche and it’s quite, you know, it’s quite niche agnostic because there’s so many videos on, on YouTube. So say if you’re doing one, uh, a kind of music based one, you find some amazing viral video, some saxophone player on the New York subway.
And if you go down to share, you’ll see a thing that says embed and you can literally copy a code. Go, go, I do recommend WordPress because it’s just so easy. Fire up a WordPress site, open the post, and you embed that, you embed that video into that, and you just write about the video. You just say, you say, watch the moment that this guy inspires all these people, and, you know, you can get a VA to do it, you know, uh, AI can actually transcribe YouTube videos now.
The most important thing you need to do is put sharing buttons at the top and at the bottom of the article that that says share to Facebook, because that’s how stuff gets viral. I mean, there’s a thing at the moment you can do called link in first comment where basically if you post a viral image or a viral meme or a quiz or anything like that, if you put a link in status post your reach gets really suppressed, which means that it’s not seen by many people and you, and you don’t get much traffic.
I mean, you can make it work, but generally it’s a bit of a struggle. But if you put a link in the first comments, you get nowhere near the reach suppression in. I’ve done some testing last week and I found that if you post a bunch of images, I was just using quizzes. If you put a link in first comments, I actually got more reach than not having a link.
That’s awesome. So yeah, I actually recommend putting links in comments now just because it increases reach. But yeah, ultimately when it goes viral and people start showing your web page, which is what you want because people just share the post, you’re going to pick up more followers and you’re going to pick up more engagement, but you’re not going to pick up more traffic.
Generally, you want people to actually click that share button. Thank you. And share the webpage, and then you’re going to get loads of traffic. It’s going to go all over the, you know, go all over Facebook. Um, so yeah, I mean, that, that, that’s literally it. I mean, it’s really a trick about finding good content, because it’s a no brainer just embedding the video and writing a bit of content about it.
Um, and, and the thumbnail is just a screenshot. Literally just take a screenshot at a place where it looks a bit strange. There’s a site called the dodo. com, which people must have heard about. It’s about 12 years old, I think. And they’ve been doing this for literally a decade. And they never change their tactics because it works so well.
There’s a whole history of videos on there that you can go for inspiration. You can go to the Wayback Machine and go to Upworthy and the Dodo and get loads of ideas for this sort of stuff. I mean, it doesn’t work as well as it did 10 years ago, but if you do it consistently every day and you post loads of videos, you can get an amazing amount of traffic from this.
And it’s really easy to do it. You can just get a VA to do almost all of it as well.
Jared: I’m going to ask the question, That as a podcast host, I’ve been around long enough to know that the answer is so many factors and it depends, but I’ve got at least to ask it. And maybe, um, you can help work with me. The idea of getting a post to go viral.
Um, and obviously there’s no, no real exact formula from having been in this seat for a long time, but it still begs the question, what other things can you do? What are there? Things are part of the equation that at least help nudge it towards virality. And you’ve shared a lot of tips already, by the way, just to be clear.
I’m not, I’m not trying to discount what you share, but any other things that you’ve noticed from all the pages you’ve managed that kind of help a post or seem to correlate when a post or when an article or when a video or something goes viral,
Andy: well, it’s not the time of day. It’s not, it’s generally not stuff that’s, that you can correlate that way.
Um, if you try and make a post go viral, it won’t go viral. If you, if you put ads behind a post you think will go viral, it will not go viral. If it was that easy, it’s not. Um, I mean, you look for patterns. So, so the trick is you, in the first three months of doing this, and, and even people have had amazing success straight away, have had, the first three or four months have been experiments.
And you experiment with different kinds of content. So you spend a couple of days posting a certain kind of, image or a certain kind of content. Maybe it, maybe it’s an image with a load of text in with bright background. Maybe it’s some use generated content. Maybe it’s like an AI type thing that you’re doing.
Um, and you, you go into Facebook, uh, you, you log in as the page and you’ll see a button called insights and you look at insights, you look at content, you go through all of your posts and you look at anything that’s starting to pop off and go viral. Some stuff may have gone quite viral. That means anything over maybe 10, 000, um, 10, 000 reach.
Or even less. I mean, maybe a thousand reaches is enough to tell that something’s working and you have a look at that You say what is it about that the word now typically what I find is that it’s the simple stuff It’s the black and white the monochrome stuff the stuff that looks I remember once I did a quiz where I, it was so terrible, I nearly chucked it in the bin.
And that was my, one of my most viral quizzes. I really screwed up the graphics and stuff and actually worked incredibly well. So it is, it’s really unintuitive. If you use your intuition, you’re going to fail. You need to use the data. It’s exactly the same. I mean, I’ve done lots of work in Facebook ads.
I’ve, I’ve worked in big clients with Facebook ads. We came across exactly the same thing. Is that the user generate, more user generated and I’d say more sketchy it looks. But it needs to have a certain sketchiness about it. And it works really well. If you make it all glossy and corporate, I mean, it just tanks.
And that’s the thing. I mean, it’s, I mean, that’s one thing. It can be the other thing. I mean, if you’ve got multiple Facebook pages, which I recommend, by the way, so say you’re in the German shepherd niche, what you want to do is have three different pages and sub niches. So German shepherd moms, USA, German shepherd owners, maybe German shepherd owners for English speaking Germans.
And you, you post the same content from the same website, but to the three different pages. And then what you can do is cross promote. Cross promote the same post, which increases the chance of that post going viral. And I’ve noticed a definite correlation between the same post being posted across the multiple sites that I’ve got, multiple pages that I’ve got, and the thing going viral.
So, so there are things you can do to help, but literally the main thing is finding what’s working, and then doubling down. So, what you’ll find is that a lot of your content, a thumbnails, might end up being quite similar, but that’s because that’s what people want. And if you try and, I mean, I’ve made, I’ve spent so long making what I think are really clever quizzes and they just tank, but when I actually go and look at the simple stuff that works and give them more of that, then I get more traffic.
That’s, that’s basically what it is.
Jared: You’ve talked about Facebook pages. I thought it would be a good time to ask about groups and the difference between pages, why you focus on pages, and if you’ve ever kind of worked in groups and you see any value there.
Andy: Groups can work incredibly well, but personally I think they’re better for high ticket stuff and for promoting courses and things.
I could be completely wrong. I mean I’ve got groups and I posted them, but the problem with groups is they’re very more like a community you need to interact with. And I don’t have time, I’ve got lots of Facebook pages and I don’t want to spend much time on Facebook. So I’m all about automation and scale.
Now the big advantage to Facebook traffic is you can literally automate the hell out of it. I mean, you can use a post schedule, uh, post scheduler, and you can schedule a week’s worth of content in about 20 minutes. And that’s exactly what I do. I mean, my last house, I took about a year off to renovate, and the whole thing was running in the background.
My neighbours didn’t know where I was making money, because I was always in the garden and the house working. But I was actually, actually just scheduling loads of content onto Facebook. So it is literally, it can be passive income to some extent. What happens is it gets burnt out though, because if you keep posting the same content, Um, Facebook keeps a ticker of the number of times you post the same thing and it suppresses the reach as you post.
So once you get back to seven, eight, nine times, it won’t get any reach anymore. So, so, so that’s one thing I mean, it’s, it’s, yeah, I mean, it, groups just don’t have that kind of hands off thing I’m looking for. Um, the audience wants to interact with you and that kind of thing. So, so for me, I literally just find pages are the easiest way to go about.
Posting content to a website for this purpose. I do not micromanage the pages at all. I do not read the comments. I don’t answer comments. I don’t look at any messages. I literally schedule, I check, double check everything, make sure all the thumbnails are working and everything, and then I just walk away for the week and just leave it.
And then every three days I’ll go and check the metrics and I look for any, any golden nuggets of anything that’s working really well. And then I’ll go and create more content like, you know, brainstorm with ChatGDP, come up with some more articles. I mean, you don’t need to create massive amounts of content, because if you create 400 articles, that’s good for a year.
And the other thing is, it’s not SEO, so you can actually change the thumbnail and the title, repost it to Facebook, and as far as Facebook is concerned, it’s a brand new article. So as long as the people like the content, there’s no reason not to do that.
Jared: Well, you literally are reading what I would want to ask about next.
So perfect transition, how to scale, how to automate the process. A lot of people at this point are probably going to be a little bit overwhelmed, um, by all that goes into this, especially if you’re new, but it does sound like there’s a lot of ways to scale this. You kind of went through it right now, using a post planner, schedule in advance, come up with the stuff.
Uh, recycle, reuse, adjust, repeat, look for trends, do more of that, do less of the stuff that’s not working. What are the tips you have for scaling this? Because it sounds like the devil’s in the details.
Andy: Well, not really. I mean, it’s, keeping it simple is actually a really good idea. I mean, the, the, the learning curve is quite, It is quite short and the people have been coming back saying, Oh, yeah, I get the Facebook ads now and Oh, yeah, I get the kind of content that’s working.
I mean, the difficulty people have is the scale of content. That’s what they say to me. How am I going to create 400 articles about embroidery and that kind of thing? Um, or log cabins. Um, but the content you can literally, you can literally have just 10 images of log cabins and that’s your article. So, so, so that tends to be the big problem people have is scaling the content on the website.
Um, finding memes is actually not a big deal. You can, you can use post planner or, or many other tools to find viral memes in your niche. They’re really easy to do and they’re really easy to go viral. Um, so, so I say that the biggest automation is a no brainer. I mean, the post planner and, uh, other tools do this well, post cron.
Um, there may be some new tools that do it. But what I do is, is a CSV upload. So I get a Google sheet and I put all of the URLs of all of my websites into Google sheet in the order that I want them to appear. And then if I want, uh, titles, you know, status titles above it, I’ll put those in. And, yeah, I just do, run those every hour and, and up, upload the CSV.
It literally takes me about five minutes to, to, to schedule. A week’s worth of content and once you figure that out, yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s really straightforward. It’s, it’s kind of hard to imagine it being so simple, but, but it is once you, once you figure out the kind of content people want and then you just move on to the next Facebook page and, and create, and maybe you want to do something slightly different or just a whole new niche.
And that, that’s how the big people do it. They’ve got loads of Facebook pages. People that make big money with this have. Some have got a hundred Facebook pages and maybe 25 websites. My competitor has about, I reckon he’s got 40 quiz websites now. And they all use exactly the same theme, the same quizzes.
They just use a different logo and a different title and a different Facebook page. But it works really well because they make loads of money consistently for years.
Jared: You mentioned the difference between posting on Facebook and including the link versus posting the link in the first comment. What other, and the dramatic change in reach that that gets, are there any other tips that a beginner would need to know or should know to be aware of in, um, kind of going about this?
Andy: Yeah, in terms of service, the biggest problem with Facebook is, um, that they’re really trigger happy about banning people. So I advocate being super white hat about everything. Don’t try and game the system. You know, don’t do clickbait if they say they don’t like it. You don’t need to do it anyway, because you can get really good success by actually not doing that.
Um, so you have to be very careful if you’re in the supplement niche or, or even, you know, some, some, I remember we had problems once running ads for a client because we said they could save money and Facebook rep actually told us you can’t say you can save money. I mean, a bit strict on ads and the other content, but they do actually look at the content.
With human evaluators and they do look at your website. So you have to be very careful. You can’t go putting content on for kind of CBD products and stuff and expect Facebook not to actually ban your page. And there’s no comebacks. It’s all run by bots. There’s no human at the end of the line to restore your Facebook account.
So you’d be super white hat. If you’re doing this as a business, And you, you’re, you’re investing in Facebook pages. You need to have your business partner become an admin of those pages, because if you get any problems, the page still exists, you still have that asset. So it’s just taking that kind of things quite seriously.
You have to study the community guidelines, what you can and can’t say. I mean, I know you’ll see stuff on Facebook that you think, wow, that’s pretty, how did they get away with that? But that you don’t need to be that person. You need to be super white hat because they take that page away from you. That’s your, you literally pull the plug.
There’s no comeback on that. So, so just be really careful of that, especially if you’re in a slightly, um, kind of, kind of dodgy niche.
Jared: Have you had that ever get caught up with you before? Have you ever had a page get shut down or something?
Andy: I, I, I, I swear I might be paranoid about this, but I had a quiz. I was doing a fruit machine type quiz and I did some graphics.
They looked like it was two cherries, you know, fruit machine cherries. And, uh, and it got on the page got, um, basically suspended and I just think they looked a bit rude. And I literally, I think that’s how prudish they are. So I, I never did that kind of graphic again. And the other one that got me paranoid, I did a Batman logo quiz.
And I don’t think they like copyright stuff. So I would never touch anything that’s like a Marvel logo or a Disney stuff. I’m sure they have algorithms that detect that kind of image. Um, you can, you can say click on this image as much as you like, even though they say terms of service. You can’t say click on this.
I do it all the time and there’s no problems at all. But I think you have to be very careful with copyright. The biggest gotcha for people Is actually video, because the background music on video, I mean Facebook is so hot. And the only time I really got slapped by Facebook was for my background music.
And I got so paranoid about it, because you know, obviously this is paying my mortgage. I actually hired a friend of mine who is a musician, a guitar player, and they got him to do me 30 tracks. And I just use those, and then obviously there’s no worries about background music. But I don’t do videos anymore, because they don’t have, they don’t have as good reach as images, I don’t think.
Plus they’re way easier to schedule images and videos. So I’d recommend not getting too caught up in videos. Reels are really good. I haven’t quite figured out how, how to actually transition that into traffic yet, but they’re good for kind of audience building. But images are just so good, and so easy to schedule, and so easy to get, and so easy to make.
Just stick with images. The other trick is status posts. So that’s literally just, um, some text, and you, you, you put a native background on with Facebook. And, and Post Planner and Strevio have a function, you can, you can bulk automate that. And they work incredibly well. I’ve done some tests last week, and the reach is absolutely off the charts with those things.
And what you do is you put a link in the comments. So you basically just got a status post saying, saying, um, what’s your favorite German shepherd moment? And then you put a link to a German shepherd to go underneath and people get massive amounts of traffic just in that it’s like the best technique at the moment.
Jared: Okay. Let’s pause on content creation and let’s say that we’ve now been doing this at scale, uh, for a couple of months. Um, let’s talk about how to evaluate the success of it. Um, I’m just. Thinking, what should people be expecting? Like, what is good in terms of the number of, um, uh, times one of your post goes viral?
What’s good in terms of traffic? What expectations should people have? When should people start to say like, ah, I don’t know if I’m doing this right. You know, I, I just maybe, how do you evaluate where the page is at and the traffic levels are at after a couple months?
Andy: Yeah, I’ve kind of come up with at least kind of time scale in that the first, say, if you’re starting the page from scratch, the first kind of three months, you may only want to be posting just engaging content.
So that’s kind of memes and status posts that get people to like your page. Because the page actually have a health score now that really affects your reach. So you want to build up your page health and you want to build up a number of followers. Because what you start seeing on Facebook now is if you see a viral meme, it’ll say at the top, follow, follow this page, essentially.
And that gets you loads of free followers. And there’s other techniques you can, you can actually do in the beginning stages to increase your follower count. So really in the first three months, don’t worry too much about outbound traffic. You’re really just kind of, you’re kind of, um, kind of bringing up the kind of fledgling page and feeding it some, some good, some good engagement.
And then you want to start sort of posting one or two links a day from your website. So you’ve actually got time there to create some, some content in months, kind of three to six. Thanks. You’re going to start to see that you’re going to start to see some traffic. So if you’re if you’re up to posting maybe three post links a day in amongst those images, which is quite a good way to do it, you’re going to start to see some traffic.
Um, it’s you really want to be posting about six to six to eight of those links a day. Ultimately, I mean, that’s generally up round about month six. Then you’re going to start to see some serious traffic. And you’re going to, if you get to about 40, 000, Followers that then people start to see some see some money coming in and some followers So, um, I say it’s faster than SEO, but it’s not instant.
It’s not next week I mean by month 6 to 12 you could be seeing some some really good traffic and income and by month 12 typically Your pages are over 50, 000. You’ve typically maybe up to 12 posts some maybe in 24 Post a day like I do on my pages, you really, I mean, if you want to optimize for traffic, you need to be posting a lot of post links or a lot of linking comments.
Um, obviously the main thing there is to be consistent about what you’re doing. So if you are doing linking comments, just do linking comments for months or just do post links. If you keep mixing it up, [00:49:00] it’s just confuses the algorithm. It confuses people. Um, so, so yeah, realistically you’re, you’re going to start seeing good success around.
Months four to six and then you’re going to get a really good idea About what to post by around about month three and four people have said to me around about month three and four I really understood then what people wanted for content wise And then I hired my vas and I got them to to bulk create that kind of content And then you’ll be you’ll be running by month 12 and then you’ll be one of me making the next facebook site Making the next Facebook page.
Jared: Have you found the RPMs that ad revenue can generate from Facebook traffic to be maybe on the higher side, on the lower side, about the same as other forms of traffic?
Andy: That’s a really interesting question because I’ve had reports. You would think it would be lower because there’s a lack of buyer intent.
People aren’t on Facebook looking to buy an air fryer. They’re looking to be entertained and [00:50:00] distracted. I mean, and I’ve always assumed that there is, but I’m in, I mean, my main, my main niche is quizzes and it’s low RPM anyway. Whether you get traffic from search, some of my sites are search, search based trivia quiz sites.
Um, but people are reporting some really high RPMs in certain niches. In fact, I’ve seen some screenshots of RPMs that absolutely Trashing anything on Google. I mean, literally Google was like 21 and this was like 52 for Facebook. And I can’t understand why that is, except if it’s to do with your audience alignment that they’re getting coming through their posts.
So it’s a very up in the air question. I think. Assume the RPM is going to be the same or slightly lower, but it could be much higher, but I don’t think it’s going to be really much lower than SEO. I’ve not really seen that you think it would be, but I’ve not really seen it. So, so I think you’re good to go.
I mean, just monetize as you would with SEO. That’s what I always say. It’s not that different really.
Jared: And [00:51:00] that was gonna be my next question. You, you mentioned at the very outset, just briefly, like that affiliate works just fine with Facebook traffic, kind of unpack that a little bit more, maybe help people understand how to play, how to work affiliate offers in to this style of content.
Andy: Well, ultimately what you’re trying to do, it’s ultimately just a traffic source. And I would recommend an approach where, where if you are building these kind of sites, SEO and Facebook doesn’t work well together, but Facebook and Pinterest works well together because the content is so similar and the thumbnails are quite similar.
And the kind of article length is quite similar and the nature of the content is quite similar. So, so, it’s, it’s kind of, um, yeah, I mean, um, yeah, I kind of lost my train of thought now, but yeah, I mean, it’s just. It’s just that kind of um content.
Jared: Um, I mean as we come to a close here Is there anything that we didn’t talk about that you think is really important for people to hear?
and I ask that because we we talked about a lot [00:52:00] and I want to make sure that we Don’t leave people on a cliffhanger here. Like did we go through everything or is there any other key areas we need to address?
Andy: Um, no, I think that kind of covers quite quite a lot of the basic kind of methods Um, you know, um, I do get a lot of questions on on the kind of But the thing about the whole Facebook thing, it seems to be very repeatable.
And if people kind of follow stuff that other people are doing that are successful. Um, as long as the niche is good. Um, they, they generally do see success. Um, people’s expectations of how long it takes can, can be a bit off. Uh, I get a lot of people saying that it’s not working after two weeks. And I just say, you know, stick at it for, for four months and, and, and it should work just fine.
Um, at the end of the day, if you are a bit lost with the whole Facebook thing, Just copy what a successful site is doing. I mean, literally rip them off. I mean, just copy, just look at the kind of stuff that works, the kind of thumbnails that they’re using. Look at the, look at the post titles and think what, why is that post title working?[00:53:00]
And, and, and yeah, I mean, it’s more like, like I said, it’s more like doing email marketing that is doing SEO. It’s about the audience quality. It’s about the really crafting an amazing title. And, uh, yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s a really, it’s, it’s a really fun way to get traffic and everyone that does it, that gets success.
I love it so much more than SEO, it’s so much more fun. I get this dopamine hit when it goes viral. I enjoy making the content because it’s not a drag. I, nothing gets to SEO. I’ve got some SEO sites absolutely flying at the moment and I’m not so happy about that after. Actually, and I enjoy making the book.
Man, you can’t beat that, that instant hit where you, You, you create something, you post it and it goes viral in the next day. You can’t get that with SEO, even with the best content in the world. And then if you can scale that, if you can, if you can do that across multiple sites, multiple times a day, you can hit millions of people going to your site every single month.
You know, and I’ve been doing this for 10 years and it still works really [00:54:00] well. And if people say, Oh, it doesn’t work anymore. But I said about SEO and it still works. So, so it’s just things change quite subtly and you just have to adapt and and and and maybe maybe post a bit less or post a bit more or change the way, change the type type of content and.
And that kind of thing. So yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s a lot of fun and it’s definitely worth a try. If you’re, you know, even if you’re, even if your SEO efforts are still good, then it’s a nice little side hustle to try as well.
Jared: Final question for me. You mentioned this pairs well with a Pinterest strategy. That makes sense.
Does this pair well with a strategy when you’re trying to build an email list?
Andy: Yeah. I mean, I’ve got, I’ve got consultation clients doing exactly that. I mean, I, I think that, yeah, coming back to that traffic thing. I mean, it’s. These sites that you’re building can be traffic fairly agnostic. So that’s what that’s point I was trying to make earlier is that you can have these articles come from Reddit, Pinterest.
You can have search on the back burner. I get some search [00:55:00] traffic. I just don’t bother, you know, optimizing on it. So, so yeah, that kind of gives you a kind of backup plan because if you do get kicked off of Facebook, you’ve got Pinterest using exactly the same content with a slightly different thumbnail.
You don’t have to go and build the whole thing again. Now if you do on platform only. So if you go for that performance bonus and you’re just creating viral content on Facebook, if that, if, if you, if you leave that, you know, if you get kicked off that, then, then you’re basically stuffed. But using this approach where you are, you’ve got a monetized website, you know, just as you would with SEO and you, and you maybe use Facebook as your primary traffic source and Pinterest as your secondary.
I think that’s the way to go forward and, and, and having an email list as well. I mean, I’ve got an email list of people that love quizzes and I send ’em quizzes, so, so that can work as well. I mean, just. Like I say, it’s very similar to SEO that that whole monetization thing, right? I wouldn’t I wouldn’t sweat too hard about it being any different really.
Jared: Andy. This was great. I like i’m looking at the [00:56:00] clock I cannot believe it’s been a full hour. I feel like we just got going. I could talk about this for like three hours No worries. I could too. They’ll do a part two or something Um the uh, where can people follow along with what you have going with what you’re doing?
Um, uh, maybe share where people can get in touch if they need to
Andy: yeah, i’ve got a site called hikeyourlikes. com Which, which I actually started back in 2013. And like, nobody was interested because everybody was having all this fun with SEO. Um, but I finally finished it last year. Um, so it’s a great, great site to get resources up and tons of free, free content and advice on there.
Um, there is, uh, a free 101 Facebook traffic course for anybody that’s just curious, that just sort of goes over the outline of, of, of this whole thing. Um, and there is a paid course. There’s a mastermind, which is absolutely amazing at the moment. People, people are finding some amazing stuff in the mastermind that, that works.
So, so yeah, there’s a lot, a lot going on, but it’s mainly free content. So, so head along over there and, and, you know, download some stuff and read some articles, and maybe you’ll get some [00:57:00] ideas there.
Jared: Andy, thanks for coming on. This is great. I know, you know, you, you teased it a bit, but certainly a lot of listeners coming off that HCU are looking at other traffic sources, or at the very least looking at what it looks like for to create content going forward and Facebook’s a popular one.
So you brought a lot of clarity here and gave people a lot to think about. Thanks for coming on.
Andy: Yeah, no problem. I had a really good time talking about this. Thank you, Jared. Yeah, sure
Jared: thing. Talk soon again, Andy. Bye bye. Bye.