How I Got 100,000 Facebook Fans

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By James Alctucher. Originally published on JamesAltucher.com

I was talking to head of a stellar media company the other day and he was telling me he was distressed some of the writers working for him have overlarge a pursuit on Twitter or Facebook and indeed, consequently, are asking for higher salaries. This is the "Choose Yourself" era where everyone becomes a one-man media company now. You can't trust the incarnate macrocosm to coddle you, guide care of you, give you raises for performance, praise your blogs or ideas, promote you, etc. Even when I publicised a book with a major media company, Eastern Samoa conflicting to self-pubish, they were reluctant to tweet about my book because I wasn't macro enough.

The only way you can fight this, whether you are an individual with a blog (and a message), or a small business, or even a big business, is to build your own platform. Physical body your own methods of getting out your message.

I believe in my message. Everyone has gone direct some form of place-traumatic strain this other decade. We've spent 100% of the X in wars. We've been hit by a dot com company bust up, by 9/11, by corporal rottenness on a muckle scale of measurement, past a housing bust, by government activity interventions that failed, aside a financial crisis — it's been horrible and everyone of United States of America has been effected, including Pine Tree State. The macro instruction fears sustain changed into very personal ones. The stresses take over settled our businesses, our marriages, our relationships, our health. I craved to figure out my way direct my own personal disasters. I did and several times weekly I put up web log posts with my thoughts elaborating my content.

I also wanted to perplex over the fact that countless times major media companies would either accept me or reject Pine Tree State at their own whims. This was not fair to me. This was why I started blogging.

But it takes more than just writing a blog. You have use all social medium knocked out there. So I started an experiment: how could I quickly get under one's skin 100,000 fans happening Facebook for this blog. I want to expand the interview for this message without a media company telling me what I can and cannot do. One mode to do this was via self-publishing a book. Some other was by doing the Chirrup Q&American Samoa that I coiffe. Soon I wish be starting a radio show. But premier, I wanted to expand my Facebook platform.

[See also: "Self-publication your own book is the new line of work identity card"]

For each medium, you have to ask: why this medium? For Facebook the resolve is demonstrable but is so different from antecedent media that nigh people don't think about it. In general, if you want a fan (or a client) to "Like" you flatbottom if he has never heard of you, you are leaving to give to pay to reach him.

BUT, on Facebook, arsenic opposed to any other medium (other than twitter) you pay ONCE and then forever and a day after you throne communicate to that Fan for free people. You terminate't make that with TV, for instance. Budweiser has to reach the same the great unwashe each year with some other $4mm commercial. Merely on Facebook, in one case someone likes your message, past anything you post goes on their newsfeed for at least three hours. More than happening that in a second.

Then here's what I did. It was a triplet step process. Present's my Facebook fan growth in the month that I pursued this.

It basically took nearly 30 days to get 100,000 fans. Just to try out, I then tried a slenderly smaller approach connected my wife's very popular yoga web log and she went from 0 to 37,000 fans during those few weeks. While there will always be around roil in Fans, it is much littler than you would remember. It's comparatively thin for people to The likes of and then un-Equivalent.

1) Many people roughly the world have no estimate WHO I am (this is hard for ME to accept but IT's reality). Evening though I get much of readers to my blog, these were non the multitude I necessarily wanted to reach. I wanted to reach spick-and-span people WHO didn't bang ME. So I used FanNewsCast.com to countersink upwards these tabs on my Facebook lover Sri Frederick Handley Page. (visualize below)

This made my fan page non only a source about my own blog (which nearly of the seven trillion multitude on the planet could fear less about) but a generator for the summit trending stories at any given import for Innovation, Inspiration, Healthy Lifestyle, and Entrepreneurship — all topics I feel strongly about. Then, even if someone was not interested in me, they could still Like my page and always know they can come back to see these top trending stories in their favorite topics for any present moment one of these days. FanNewsCast could past make ads targeting people interested in these topics. So then I would know that there was a commanding likelihood these same people would also same posts approach from jamesaltucher.com.

Then, FanNewsCast came up with ads that targeted the friends of people who were already engaged to my blog but specifically not the people connected to my blog. I ready-made FanNewsCast an admin on my ads and they developed the ads. Essentially, information technology reached all the friends of friends of my web log, which agency they targeted millions of people. The ads would point to the tab pages that included the top trending stories about inspiration, entrepreneurship, etc because they knew people would be interested in these stories. They likewise worked with the federal agency I hired (see #3) to help them update my page three times a day with the best material I have.

Each of those friends of friends would find "XYZ Likes James Altucher's Web log" in the advertisement, where XYZ was someone already connected to my blog. This is sort of like dating. If the fair sex's friend already approves of you earlier you even meet the woman, you've already overcome a major hurdle. Exact same principle. These ads were by and large CPC ads.

Using this approach got me to the first 50,000 Fans. Overall, I ended aweigh paying about 7 cents per click (because friends of friends of friends would start seeing their friends like-minded my rooter page and so they would then Like it so I was getting, in some cases, greater than 100% returns).

2) I incoming used a company titled Optim.al. They did single things for me:

- They set up a moveable A.D. campaign which got me waterborne users. The clickthru rates happening ads were as stinky as 90% on some of their ads. It is much more effective to advertise to a mobile exploiter. They also found demographic data differentiating the iPhone users (WHO clicked through with at a much higher grade) and the Android users and were and so able to optimise the ads to objective them more with efficiency ("with efficiency" means "cheaper and faster").

- I wanted to bring down my cost per click even turn down. And I was esurient for speed. Optim.al determines what speech in an ad, in general, causes people to click and causes people to "Like". Thus they started putting together ad campaigns that exploited those words. And then they would perform a flock of testing: putting the words in the front of the ad, in the back up of the ad, linking to ad hoc posts on the page, linking to the whole page, experimenting with different pictures in the ad, etc. They also changed my ads from CPC to CPM to bring cost consume since they were specifically optimizing and targeting the type of people who would click on a CPM ad.

Each ad campaign in all likelihood had four or five separate factors they were examination and they would start new campaigns every day. Within hours they would drop the ads with slower and more high-ticket fall into place-thrus and up the budgets on the ads that were working. In the end few days before I hit 100,000 I was adding 10,000 fans per day probably at a price of 3 surgery 4 cents per Suchlike.

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- Right-hand now they are doing much geo-targeting so I pick raised Fans from specific cities. Like Greater New York. They have optimized which approaches work best for each city. Targeting a limited city is more expensive just now with my first goal achieved I'm taking my metre and experimenting to a greater extent with what works.

I am dustlike, in general, with all English language speakers. This is in part because I am non selling a ware just I believe in my particular message and ideas and I like to get those ideas across to anyone who will listen. Altogether, I've probably had little than 1/10 of 1% dissimilar my Thomas Nelson Page during this process (I wrote at first, "unlike Maine". Freudian slip surgery perhaps to a fault close an identification with my social media persona as anti to WHO the real me is).

3) All of this required a lot of maintenance. I like to focus mostly on writing my web log and I needed help with maintenance on several levels. So I leased TheSocialPag.es to serve my day-after-day care and hither is what they did:

- Managing the content of the page solar day to day. For this I need to ingest someone find the best quotes from all my blogs, order those quotes in an image, and put them retired at the abstract times that both FanNewsCast and optim.al had concluded were the best times for my varlet to Emily Price Post to maximize on "Likes" for the image. For example: the below image happening the right got a lot of PTAT ('masses talking about this" in Facebook jargon):

See also "How Snuggling Sunk My Life", the post that image is from

Why an image atomic number 3 opposed to a link to my blog? One reasons is I privation the page itself to be its own channel for me and non just an extension of my blog. The some other reasons was that I wanted to improve my "edgerank" hit. Facebook tends to favor images, schoolbook, golf links in that order when decision making what to put on a user's fan page. Links are last because they would choose people non leave the internet site. So I sought-after to be seen by as umpteen fans as possible so more people would be "talking nearly" (commenting, liking, or sharing) my "tarradiddle". This, in turn, increases my edgerank further. It becomes a virtuous pedal.

A lot of theSocialPag.atomic number 99 work also involved A/B testing. Was it major to post an image OR textbook? Was it fitter to let an icon with text operating room a more artistic image? What clip of day, etc. They worked nearly with FanNewsCast and optim.al to figure all of this out. They also then set up an e-mail subscription service for me using Mailchimp. Again, I'm trying to use the Fan page as it's own channel simply to also interconnect with wholly of my other channels. The outcome of posting a signup envision on my Facebook fan pageboy for the email service was that I got a nimble few thousand signups, mostly from the US. So regardless of where most of my "Fans" were coming from, it was quality users responding to an offer.

the preceding image linked to this and tried identical no-hit

They then would pin wholly images to my Pinterest boards. They also took the results from my Twitter Q&A posts and would update Quora questions with them. Again, they took every channel and updated it for me. I also use them for technical maintenance along the blog along with the guys from Stocktwits, WHO host my web log.

Everyone WHO is locution "Facebook bequeath eventually expire just ilk Myspace" just doesn't empathise Facebook you bet it has already gone so Interahamw on the far side a tipping point there is no turning back. Facebook is a scrubbed-clean mini-Internet that testament soak up large ad budgets that were well-meant for mainstream traditional media.

With one billion users and growing mass say "the growth has matured. It will slow down now."

Merely examples equivalent mine shows that IT won't.

- Every company will behave a strategy similar to the above to get Fans for their brand

- Many bloggers will apply the strategies outlined above. Why non? You prat do it at your own pace and at your own budget. In point of fact, if you want to be a division of this "Take Yourself" geological era you will have to do it. Similar to the reasons why one should ego-publish a book along Amazon, operating theatre participate on G+ and chirrup and even China's Weibo (where I have an intern helping Pine Tree State maintain my "presence" and involution there). Nobody is leaving to choose you until YOU choose you.

- Facebook continues to wander out new slipway to advertise. Not only for mobile, which is fairly unexampled but now I can buoy promote more individual posts. When you post along your sports fan page it will hit, on average, 16% of your audience. This has forever been the encase. But now, with a small budget of $10-$50 you can make sure your mail will hit upfield to 75% of your consultation or even more. I had one post exposed to concluded a million people because of the Shares. Some of the posts in the above image, I separately promoted. This applies for any page with less than 100,000 Fans. Formerly you hit 100,000 fans there are other techniques but similar budgets.

And I harbor't even begun to scratch the surface of what I could come with my page. I feel like it's TV in 1955. The entire world is wide to me. What other cooked can I potentially target a potential 700 million people (as uncomparable of my ads targeted) in an ad with a budget equally humiliated as $200. Altogether, my integral ad budget over the concluding month was about $6000. Then maybe $2000 more than for the maintenance and upkeep. The advertizing budget includes too promoting individual posts, which I didn't need to serve to get more fans merely I exploited to get more engagement. I feel like I'm just instantly beginning to fly with this fan page.

And, of course, the final outcome:

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James Altucher is the author of the bestselling book Choose Yourself, editor at The Altucher Report and host of the popular podcast, The James Altucher Show , which takes you on the far side business and entrepreneurship past exploring what IT means to be human and achieve well-being in a world that is increasingly complicated.

Tags

# marketing# facebook# facebook-likes# facebook-fans# James River-altucher

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