How to Make 100k per Month with Facebook Ads

Facebook ads are an incredibly powerful platform to use to make money, but they’re just a tool in the end.  You need a lot of support, a lot of knowledge, an initial investment and a foundation to build up in order to succeed.  The good news is, it’s entirely possible to make $100k per month with Facebook ads alone.  The bad news is, it takes a lot of work to achieve.  Of course, if you make $100k but you spent $98k to do it, it’s not a worthwhile investment.

The Product

In order to make any significant amount of money from Facebook ads, you need something to sell.  This could be a piece of software you developed, a webinar you’re hosting or an affiliate marketer you’re working through.  The good news here is that you don’t need to invest an incredible amount of money into developing your product.  It doesn’t matter what you sell, so long as you sell it.

The type of product you’re selling will have some impact on various numbers and measurements you need to see later in the process.  For example, if you’re trying to make $100k per month through these Facebook ads, you would only need to sell 10 copies of a $10,000 consulting gig.  On the other hand, you would need to sell 200,000 products that earn you a meager $0.50 per sale.  You will need to strike the right balance, looking for an audience of suitable size to buy enough copies of the product you’re selling.

The type of product you sell will have some other effects as well.  It informs your choice of audience targeting, imagery, text and other factors you pick up and choose along the way.  You can’t find success selling sand in the desert, after all.

The Landing Page

When you have a product to sell, you then need a place to sell it.  For Facebook ads, this is generally going to mean an off-site landing page.  You can also target Facebook ads to direct traffic to your Facebook page, but that’s putting an additional step between your customers and the conversion funnel.  You will have to run tests yourself to determine if the intermediary step is worth the setup.

Sooner or later, it all comes down to a landing page. The page users arrive on when they click your ad, your Facebook page link or any other form of marketing you use.  This landing page is going to be your high pressure sales pitch, telling the user why they need to purchase and how they can do so.

Optimizing a landing page is a deep enough topic that it could fill an entire blog.  A few scant paragraphs here can only get you pointed in the right direction.

The Ads Themselves

The ads are the bread and butter of your marketing here.  All you really need is a Facebook advertising account and the Facebook Power Editor extension for Chrome.  Power Editor is simply too valuable to ignore, so you’re going to need to adopt Google’s browser to reach your goals.

With your goal of funneling users to your landing page, you will have some decisions made for you.  For example, you already know your ads will target an off-site link rather than a “like” action or fan page follow.

You have a few more choices to make.  What sort of ad do you want to run?  Your options are:

• News feed ads; these ads look like normal Facebook posts, but they carry the “sponsored” label.  They tend to have higher visibility but are more subject to the user’s natural avoidance of advertising language.
• Sidebar ads; these are the smaller ads that show up in the sidebar along with Facebook’s trends, suggested people and other boxes.  They are often ignored, but can get away with more as a consequence.
• Mobile ads; these are essentially news feed ads that only show up for mobile users.  Mobile is a massive demographic that’s well worth targeting if you can.

You will need to determine your advertising budget.  When you’re first starting out, you will want to keep your budgets small.  Remember, this is pay per click advertising; you have to spend money to make money.  You need to be cautious so you aren’t spending more than you make, directing users to your page only to have them bounce away.  As you find strategies and ads that work, you can increase your ad budget to increase your profits.

The Targeted Audience

Whenever a user puts a piece of information into their Facebook profile, Facebook takes that information and uses it as part of their audience segmentation system.  You, as an advertiser, can take advantage of that segmentation.  What can you use to divide up your audience?

• Geographic location
• Age, gender, ethnicity
• Political affiliation
• Relationship status
• Education
• Languages known
• Interests
• Connection to your page

And much more.  What you need to do is determine what qualities are shared by the people most likely to purchase your product.  Sure, you could run a broad ad targeting every female on Facebook, but a huge number of those people won’t care to click your ads.

Typically you’re going to want to specify a country or countries to target.  This helps you avoid clickfarms in developing nations who might burn through your budget with no conversions.

Every bit of specification you add to your ads will narrow the number of people who will see them.  It will – ideally – increase the percentage of people willing to buy, however.  Facebook will even give you an indicator of how wide your potential reach is and whether it’s too broad or too narrow.

Once you have run a few ads, you’ll be able to gather more data about the people you want to reach and what qualities they share.  You can then tell Facebook to create lookalike audiences to target more people sharing those qualities.

Tracking Performance and Measuring Success

Google Analytics and Facebook’s own analytics will help you track the people who click on your ads, what they do once they’re on your landing page and how they act before and after they convert.  All of this is valuable information that helps you iterate your ads and landing page.

Experiment.  Try new configurations, new images, new text, new landing pages.  Find out what works and what doesn’t.  Iterate.  Expand on what works, drop what doesn’t.  Retarget users who bounce.  All of this helps you increase your profits as you go.  You won’t be able to dive in and make $100k next month, but you can work your way to that point by this time next year.